The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  That night I tossed unsleeping in my military bed at the transient officers’ barracks. I missed her immensely. I was trying to picture her in her own bed, praying for the answer that God might bring her. And I was struggling with another problem: my own need for expiation. For I had not been able to tell her about Yoshiko, either.

  My thoughts drifted to Father Garvey, now back in his Jesuit retreat at Manresa. Was he praying for me as he remembered his forbidden but treasured nights in Manila? Had I betrayed his trust, ignoring his final warning? God is talking to you, Jay, that was what Father Garvey had told me on the night before he sailed for home. You must have the courage to listen. How can you move forward in your life if you carry this transgression in your heart? And as dawn began to brighten my drawn window shades, I resolved that I must tell her.

  And so as we walked to church the next morning I told her the rest of it. I told her I had been weak, that at first I had been trapped by Lord Privy Seal Kido in my drunkenness and lack of sophistication, and that later I had been unable to make a clean break with Yoshiko because I had been required to continue my relationship with Kido. Coming out of my mouth it sounded cynical, horrible, and wrong. I knew immediately that there was no way I could explain what had been in my heart as I splashed in Yoshiko’s furos and nibbled food from her playful fingers. How could I justify to Divina Clara that there was no sin in Tokyo, only shame, and that part of what I did was to shield Yoshiko herself from shame?

  Watching her mortified face as we walked I knew that I had been wrong to tell her. She was horrified, speechless. She physically retreated from me, pulling her arms into herself and tucking her chin onto her chest. And for the first time I comprehended that raw honesty does not always bring unmitigated happiness, that indeed, as Lord Privy Seal Kido so easily understood, there are times when a lie can be more honest than the truth. Because I was losing her. She was vanishing before my eyes. All I could do was keep saying over and over that it had meant nothing, nothing at all. But it had meant everything.

  She hurried before me when we reached the chapel and did not look at me when we took our seats. She wept throughout the Mass and was still weeping and stumbling as she went forward to take Communion. Kneeling before the altar of Christ, shuddering with tears, she raised her head to take the Communion wafer from the priest. And as his hand neared her lips he dropped the wafer.

  Perhaps he was distracted by her weeping. Perhaps her lips moved as she sniffled and choked. But the wafer fell before her, onto the chapel floor. There it lay like a filthy, shameful omen, Christ’s body having traveled from the priest’s hand only to miss her lips, denying her its blessing, now in the dirt at her knees. The priest quickly retrieved the wafer, washing the spot where it had fallen with holy water, then took it outside, where in the Filipino Catholic custom it would later receive a formal burial.

  And so God had spoken to her, physically rejecting her, turning His flesh away just as He neared her quivering lips. She would not even look at me when she returned to our pew. For the rest of the service she remained on her knees, praying and crying. Outside the chapel a small boy was selling kasuy, the young leaves of the cashew tree. Still ignoring me, she bought a bag of leaves from the boy. Back at her house, she began slowly, obsessively eating them, dipping them one at a time into a shrimp paste that the servants had prepared for our afternoon merienda.

  Her mother watched her carefully as she ate the kasuy leaves. Finally she ventured a tentative, double-edged joke. “You are lucky you are not pregnant, Divina Clara. Many people believe that too much kasuy can cause a miscarriage, you know.”

  Divina Clara said nothing, looking down at her plate of shrimp paste. But the stunned bewilderment that flashed across my face was more telling than a scream. Her father looked from her to me, and then he did begin to scream. He screamed at me to leave his house. He screamed at her to pack a bag. He screamed at a servant to prepare the car. I stood firm, beginning to resist him. But Divina Clara herself suddenly looked up and pointed toward the door.

  “You must leave now, Jay,” she said. “I need to be with my family.”

  I was on the edge of panic. “We need to talk about this,” I said.

  “You must leave!” she said, pointing again. “Leave! We will talk about this some other time.”

  I left, but I did not go far. I drove my jeep to a nearby side street and waited, thinking I would follow them. Soon their car approached, but I had not fooled old Carlos Ramirez. The car stopped near my jeep. Carlos and the driver both stepped out, walking quickly to me. Carlos leaned casually toward my window, speaking now in soft but serious tones.

  “If you follow me, I will kill you,” he said.

  And as he spoke his driver punctured both of my front tires with two quick swings of a machete.

  It was dark when the car returned. I was still sitting in my jeep, having left it only to flag down a passing army truck and arrange for a motor-pool mechanic to drive out and fix the tires. I was dozing. The sound of the approaching car startled me suddenly awake. A servant boy magically appeared at the gate, opening it, and the car entered the inner yard.

  By now my shock had turned into anger. Something beautiful had vanished, and I wanted it back. It was mine. I may have abused it through my stupidity but I had loved it immensely, sacrificed for it, planned my life around it. I strode into the yard, brushing off the servant boy with a whisk of my hand, and walked up to the car.

  She was not inside. Carlos slowly climbed out. He now was trembling with his own unsuppressed rage. Waiting for him as he walked toward me, I had a clear sense that one or the other of us might soon die. And for the first time in my life I did not care if it was I myself.

  “Where is she?” I shouted.

  He neared me, not slowing his pace. His head came only to my shoulders and now it was bent forward, as if he were going to butt into my stomach. My hands were balled into fists. I was bigger, stronger, younger, angrier, ready to beat him into oblivion, to pummel him until he told me where I might find her.

  He had the fastest hands I have ever seen. He brought the banana knife to my face and thrust it so hard that it went all the way through my cheek, shattering teeth and cutting the edge of my tongue. Then he pulled the knife forward, slashing my cheek open almost to my mouth. It happened so quickly that by the time I raised my hands he had already pulled the knife out and brought his hand back to his side.

  I straightened and pulled away, gagging from the shock and the sudden gush of blood, and he quickly kicked me in the groin. I was curled over, choking and spitting from the knife wound, nauseous from the blow to my groin. He stood in front of me, now looking down into my face. He was breathing heavily, his eyes glowing in the dark, beaming his hatred. Slowly, just to make the point, he reached up and wiped the blade of his banana knife on my shirt. Then he folded it and put it back into a pocket.

  “The next time you come to this house you will be dead. I am not playing a game. Eleven men who tried to prove me wrong are already waiting for you in hell.”

  Pieces of teeth and a constant stream of blood poured onto my chest as I tried to speak. “I love her! Can’t you understand that? She’s having our baby, Carlos, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

  “She is having no one’s baby, not anymore. No one’s.”

  He was taking deep breaths, glaring at me with an eternal anger. At that moment I sensed that it was all he could do to keep from taking out his knife and finishing the job. Something terrible had happened, even beyond the nightmare of a few hours before. A different knife, a wrong twist in another place, a disaster far worse than the gash that had split open my face.

  “The most beautiful object on this earth,” continued Carlos, as if his words themselves might stab me. “I created her! And now what does she have? What hope do I have for her? A lying American and a doctor that I trusted. One I have known since my childhood! And what does she have? Nothing!”

  “Where is she? What did you d
o?”

  He lowered his head as if trying to restrain himself, then wheeled and kicked me again in the groin. I fell to my knees, suddenly vomiting through the blood that kept pouring from my mouth.

  “What did I do? What did you do?” He stood over me. “I should cut your balls off. Then you would know how she feels. I should do that. But if I did that, she would forgive you. That is her purity! That is the way she thinks! No, I must simply promise you that if you come back here I will kill you as a spying, unwelcome intruder. I can justify that, not only to her but even to God.”

  He deliberately pushed two fingers into my bleeding cheek, then wiped his hand on my shirt. “This is what I think of you. A bleeding pussy on your face. You can’t run away from it. It will follow you. And wherever you go, Mister big-time banker, every morning when you wake up and shave you can look into the mirror and think of me. Because every morning she will wake up childless and think of you.”

  And thus began my years of hopelessness. The times I tried secretly to find her as my piercing injury healed and I awaited Yamashita’s hanging. The dozens of letters I sent her, none of them returned or answered. Her complete disappearance from my life, as if she had been ripped apart from me at the moment of my greatest need. If she had died I might have grieved and then resolved our tragedy. But knowing she remained alive and yet being cut away from all contact with her became my greatest punishment, renewed each morning when I looked into the mirror and shaved.

  No, I had not returned to Manila with the thought of abandoning everything and leaving the Philippines for New York by myself. To put it bluntly, I struggled to remain different from Douglas MacArthur. And regrettably I failed.

  CHAPTER 27

  So, finally it would be over. I simply could not believe that in one day I would be gone.

  I left Manila at midnight, driving south toward Cavite along the cluttered main highway. Even at that hour the city’s streets were choked with a mix of pushcarts, jeepneys, military trucks, and horse-drawn caratelas, all traveling at different speeds, cutting in and out of the traffic, mixing among one another, their drivers waving and cursing and beeping their horns, most of them packed to capacity with somnolent, thin-limbed Filipinos. Between Manila and Cavite the traffic thinned and the memories began. The wreckage of war still littered the roadside from the battles of a year before. The shell-pocked carcasses of trucks, tanks, and airplanes lay here and there, half covered with jungle vines, their innards picked clean, buzzard-like, by local scavengers.

  On the other side of Cavite the world seemed to change. In another mile the road became desolate, as if the whole countryside had suddenly gone home to sleep. It was peaceful here, quiet and redolent and warm. My mind wandered, lost in the memories, as if I were cataloging them for the final time. It seemed that I had grown into adulthood along such roads. I had even fallen in love just at the edge of the bombarded highway, thirty miles to the north. The slumbering little nipa shacks that dotted the countryside with their tiny, twisting night fires and the smell of water buffalo from the pens behind them had become the very norms of my existence. And after nearly four years in the Pacific it was difficult to comprehend that this would be my last journey into a mud-slung Asian countryside, perhaps forever.

  A blanket of evil-looking clouds began to swirl just above the trees, blotting out the moon. I shuddered as I drove, looking at the leaden sky. Typhoon season had recently passed, but in the Philippines one never knew when a wall of unremitting rain would rush in from the sea, making instant swamps and wheel-high pools of mud. If a hard rain came I might not even make it to Los Banos. Or worse still, I might reach the camp and then be stuck there in the mud and mire, unable to catch the troopship that would take me back to America.

  But the rain did not come, and finally I saw a large olive-drab sign protruding from the far side of the road. The sign’s bright yellow letters marked the turnoff that I was to follow into the jungle. My headlights flashed across it as I eased my way onto the smaller, gravel road.

  LOS BANOS

  U.S. ARMY PRISON CAMP

  KEEP OUT!

  Once I turned onto the prison road the seething, fetid jungle swallowed me whole, as if I were driving into a long, tubular corridor toward the caverns of the dead. Moist black air clung to me in the open jeep. Gravel crunched steadily underneath my tires. Nearby tree limbs swayed slowly in the wind, drooping like shrouds across my path. My mind cleared. The nostalgia had for the moment disappeared. I was here for an unhappy reason. I became all business, searching steadily to my front, knowing that somewhere beyond the tangles of brush and trees was a field of barbed wire that would mark the outer perimeter of the prison compound.

  Finally the road took a long, slow turn. On the other side, the jungle suddenly cleared. A huge compound spread out in front of me, scraped away a few months before by teams of American military bulldozers. Vast rows of barbed wire glinted in my headlights. Their spikes reflected upward, like a million dots of snowflakes that had forgotten to fall. Behind the wire I could see the dim silhouettes of five hundred tents, slumping and flapping in the wind. Here and there among the rows of tents was the soft glow of a bare electric lightbulb. Nothing seemed to move. It was deathly quiet. I had arrived at Los Banos.

  Los Banos was the final remaining processing facility for those Japanese soldiers now under American supervision. Some had surrendered en masse after the emperor’s radio address of the previous August. Others had trickled in from their far-flung defensive positions over the six months since the war ended. Most had already been debriefed, deloused, and sent home. But thousands still remained behind, awaiting final clearance from American occupation authorities, as well as berthing spaces aboard military transport ships so that they could return to Japan.

  And here, tonight, they would hang General Tomoyuki Yamashita.

  On January 7, 1946, the Supreme Court had heard Frank Witherspoon’s appeal, and on February 4 it rendered its opinion. Despite a scathing dissent by Justices Rutledge and Murphy, the Court declined to intervene in the case. The Court began by maintaining it was “not concerned with the guilt or innocence” of the accused but could only consider the “lawful power of the commission” to try him for the offenses charged. Significantly, the Court’s majority mentioned that the Supreme Court did not have the constitutional authority to reverse military cases “merely because they have made a wrong decision on disputed facts.” As a consequence, General Yamashita’s fate turned on a narrow legal technicality: since the war would not officially be over until formal peace documents were signed, MacArthur still retained the power to convene a military commission “so long as a state of war exists.”

  The dissent of Justices Murphy and Rutledge was written in language dripping with anger. The two justices claimed that despite MacArthur’s power to convene the commission, its very makeup denied General Yamashita the most basic constitutional protections of due process of law. “No military necessity or other emergency demanded suspension of the safeguards of due process,” wrote Justice Murphy, who prior to becoming a Supreme Court justice had served as governor-general of the Philippines. “Yet General Yamashita was rushed to trial under an improper charge, given insufficient time to prepare an adequate defense, deprived of the benefits of the most elementary rules of evidence, and summarily sentenced to be hanged. In all this needless and unseemly haste there was no serious attempt to prove that he committed a recognized violation of the laws of war. He was not charged with personally participating in the acts of atrocity, or with ordering or condoning their commission. Not even knowledge of these crimes was attributed to him. This indictment in effect permitted the military commission to make the crime whatever it willed.”

  Then in words that would bedevil American military commanders during the Vietnam war, Murphy made a haunting prediction. “Such a procedure is unworthy of our people,” he wrote. “The high feelings of the moment doubtless will be satisfied. But no one in a position of command in an army, from s
ergeant to general, can escape these implications. The fate of some future president and his chiefs of staff and military advisers may well have been sealed by this decision.”

  Justice Rutledge echoed Murphy’s concerns, then finished with his own warning to the ages. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.”

  Undeterred, MacArthur scheduled General Yamashita’s execution without even reading the Supreme Court opinions. Announcing that “Yamashita’s transgressions are a blot on the military profession, a stain upon civilization, and constitute a memory of shame and dishonor that can never be forgotten,” the supreme commander ordered that the Tiger be “stripped of uniform, decorations, and other appurtenances signifying membership in the military profession” and set his hanging for 3:00 A.M. on February 23.

  And here I was, on a dark jungle road at midnight, carrying out the last and most odious assignment of my military career: to watch the Tiger die, so that I myself might be freed.

  As I neared the gate a military policeman stepped from a small sentry booth and stood in front of my jeep. His too-young face was falsely scowling underneath his white helmet. He raised an M2 carbine and pointed it directly at my windshield. I slammed the brakes, knowing that the baby-faced corporal was no doubt fresh meat, in from the States. Having missed the war by only a few months, he would be even more hungry for a reason to shoot an obstreperous intruder while on assignment in this foreign land. For how else could he bring a war story home?