by Dean Hughes
“But he was at Tayabas. He shouldn’t have to—”
“Look, the doc gave us a list of those in the best health. He was on it. I can’t change the list now.”
“But the two of us have been through a lot together.”
“I’m sorry. I know how that is. But I can’t do anything about it.” He walked away.
Wally was numb. He told himself not to let this throw him. Cabanatuaan was okay. He would be all right.
As Wally turned to go back to his quarters, he saw Alan coming toward him. He had obviously gotten the word. The two stopped in front of each other, and each nodded, as if to say, “Yeah, I know.”
“They told me it’s a short detail,” Alan said. “Then I’ll probably end up at Cabanatuaan, the same as you.”
“Good.” But they both knew that promises of that sort meant nothing.
“We’ll be all right,” Alan said.
“I know.”
It was embarrassing to feel so much for each other, to be so terrified by the separation. Neither could say anything. Not knowing what else to do, Wally reached out and shook Alan’s hand. “Thanks,” he said. “You know . . . for everything.” But that was not enough, so Wally hugged his friend and patted him on the back.
The train ride to Cabanatuaan was hot and dirty and miserable, but at least not as crowded as the trip he had taken the year before to O’Donnell. And the march to the camp, a former Filipino training camp, was actually rather enjoyable. It had been so long since he had been out in the open country.
From the outside, the camp looked anything but inviting. Heavy wire fences surrounded the big compound, and tall lookout stations, on stilts, lined the perimeter. At the gate to the camp, a crudely printed sign, in English, read: “Anyone attempting to escape will be shot to death.” Inside, however, Wally was relieved to see long buildings, like barracks, built of bamboo and thatch. They looked solid enough to protect against the rains that were coming every day now, and the compound looked clean and orderly. He tried to tell himself this would be all right, but the numbness hadn’t left him. He saw only endless days stretching ahead, and loneliness.
Wally was standing outside the headquarters building, waiting to be directed to the air corps section of the prison, when he heard a voice behind him. “I don’t believe it. East High’s track star!”
Wally turned around. He was looking into a face he was sure he knew, but a body that was skin and bones. And then he remembered. It was Chuck Adair, the star of every sport at East. “Chuck!” Wally almost shouted.
“I can’t believe I’m happy to see you, Wally. I thought I was going to hate you forever.”
Wally knew exactly what he meant. When Wally had quit the track team, most of the guys had held him responsible for losing the city championship. “You should hate me,” Wally said, laughing. “I let you guys down.”
“For some reason, it doesn’t seem all that important at the moment,” Chuck said. He laughed, and Wally saw that his teeth had decayed badly.
“How did you end up here?” Wally asked. “I didn’t even know you were in the service.”
“I joined about a year after you did. I got shipped over here just in time for all the fun.”
“I can’t believe I’m looking at you.”
“There’s another Salt Lake guy in here. I don’t know whether you know him. Art Halverson.”
“Sure. He’s a year younger than us. He lived over by Mel. Hey, I want to see him. I want to see anything from home.”
“Are you doing okay?”
“Well . . . yeah. Not too bad now. I was on a work detail in Tayabas. I barely made it out.”
“We heard about that detail. Anyone who made it through that one had to be made of good stuff.”
“I guess I don’t quit as easy as I used to.”
“Oh, man. It’s good to see you.” Chuck took hold of both of Wally’s shoulders and gave them a good shake. “We’ll come over and see you tonight, okay? I’ll bring Art.”
Wally was led away to his section of the compound, but he felt lighter, better. He might not see these guys all that often, but just to chat with them once in a while was going to make everything easier.
Over the next couple of weeks Wally learned the crucial techniques for survival at Cabanatuaan. As he bent over to weed the garden, where he worked most days, he would harvest a vegetable for himself, move it along on the ground, knock some of the dirt off, and then spot the guard and make sure he had time to take a quick bite. One day he was so intent upon a guard nearby that he didn’t notice one coming up behind him, and he came within a breath of getting caught with a half-eaten turnip in his hand, but he managed to slip it under his shoe and press it into the dirt until the guard had passed.
Wally watched one other day as one of the prisoners, caught eating, took a terrific beating from two guards. In English, one of the guards had reprimanded the man for his “dishonor”—for stealing from the imperial government. Then, without warning, he drove the butt of his rifle into the prisoner’s sternum. When the prisoner dropped to the ground, both guards kicked him and battered him with their rifles.
Wally found only satisfaction in his hatred at such moments. But gradually Wally was beginning to understand the way the Japanese army operated. He found out that many of the guards at Cabanatuaan were Formosans who were looked down upon by the Japanese officers. One day Wally looked up from his work to hear a Japanese officer screaming at a Formosan guard. Wally had no idea what the dispute was about, but the exasperated officer finally picked up a two-by-four and slammed it over the head of the young guard. The man dropped to the dirt and didn’t move. Wally had no idea whether he had died immediately, but no one helped him, and that afternoon his body was still lying in the sun, flies buzzing around it. Wally knew that the lowliest guards wanted someone they could punish—to pass along the ill treatment they got from their superiors. But to Wally, that didn’t excuse any of them.
Each morning Wally would receive a work assignment. Most days he labored in the sun all day, out in the garden. It wasn’t terrible work, but it was tedious and tiring. He preferred the wood detail because he could get outside the camp, and that always opened up the possibility of making contact with natives. A worse detail was carrying water—because the buckets became so heavy as the day progressed. But worst of all was the “honey” detail. The work was not terribly strenuous, but the humiliation was almost more than he could stand. A work crew would carry the contents of the outhouses to the fields, and then they would spread the human waste around the plants in the garden.
All the prisoners found it enraging to spend their days nurturing the garden only to see the vegetables harvested and shipped away. They continued to live on cast-off, filthy rice. Each night, before a man could eat, he had to dig the white worms out of his rice and watch for rocks and rodent droppings. The barracks seemed almost civilized in appearance, but the bunks were constructed of bamboo, and inside that bamboo lived lice and fleas. At night they bit the men, who were usually exhausted enough that they slept anyway, but in the morning they found little bloody spots all over their bodies.
What kept Wally going now were his two friends, whom he would often see after dinner. They talked about Salt Lake and about their days at East High. Wally didn’t remember Chuck as having been active in the Church back then, but he now talked a good deal about his faith. On Sundays, even though the prisoners worked all day, the same as any other day, the three Mormon men would hold their own meeting. They prayed, and they talked about the things they believed. They couldn’t remember the exact words of the sacrament prayer, so they didn’t take the sacrament, but they did bless each other at times and called on the Lord to sustain their little group. They even wrote out the words to hymns, as best they could remember them, and then sang together. Wally had never expected to find such pleasure in singing those familiar old hymns. Over and over, they sang “Come, Come, Ye Saints.”
Wally’s old friend Don Cluff was a
lso in the camp. More often than not, he met with Wally and his friends at their little “church” meetings. He even learned the hymns, and he asked lots of questions about their beliefs.
For the first few weeks in the new camp, Wally hoped to see Alan soon. But as summer approached, and he didn’t show up, Wally turned more and more to Chuck and Art. Still, he prayed every day for Alan and hoped he was well.
One Sunday evening, Art came to the meeting with a story. One of the Japanese guards—a man everyone called “Bug Eyes”—had been trying to raise carrots, which didn’t do very well in the soil at Cabanatuaan. He had brought Art and a boy from New York City, Frank Pineda, over near his living quarters, and he had pointed to the weeds in his own little garden. “I could see the carrot tops growing among the weeds,” Art said, “and I told Frank what to look for. Then I started at one end, and Frank started at the other. I didn’t pay too much attention to what he was doing, but Bug Eyes came walking over, and he set up a howl. Poor Frank never had a garden in his life, and he just couldn’t tell the carrots from the weeds.”
“How bad did Bug Eyes beat him?” Chuck asked.
Art was sitting on a bunk in Wally’s barracks. He had been a big kid at one time, but now he was a beanpole. He was bending forward with his elbows on his knees, his long bones seeming to stick out in all directions. His voice was rather high-pitched, but now it sounded almost tender as he said, “That’s the strange thing. I thought for a minute the Jap was going to cry. He bent down and showed Frank which ones were carrots and which were weeds. He hardly knew a word of English, but he kept showing ol’ Frank and jabbering away. It was almost like he was saying, ‘Oh, son, look what you’ve done to my lovely little carrots.’ I’ve never heard a guard sound like that.”
“And he never did beat him?” Wally asked.
“No. Frank kept saying, ‘Gee, I’m sorry,’ and Bug Eyes kept nodding like he understood. And then he motioned for him to go back to his weeding, and he watched, just to make sure Frank got it right.”
“Why would he do that?” Don asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Art said. “I know this sounds funny. But it hit me all at once. Bug Eyes is probably a pretty regular guy back home. These guys must get filled with all this hatred and resentment, and this whole philosophy about our being worthless cowards who don’t deserve respect, and they think they have to treat us bad. But if you could know one of them, man to man, they’re probably about like everybody else.”
“I don’t believe that,” Chuck said.
“Well, look how our guys are. They wouldn’t talk the way they do here back home. Everything changes in a war.” When neither Chuck or Wally replied, Art added, “Anyway, that’s what I want to believe. I don’t want to spend all my time hating.”
Wally was moved by that. But later that week a Japanese guard went crazy because a prisoner had stepped on some kind of plant in the garden. He ran at the prisoner, knocked him to the ground with his rifle, and then kicked the man in the stomach and chest, over and over. Wally watched, and he tried to think about the things Art had said. But it wasn’t easy.
***
Mat Nakashima had been working for a year to get his brother Ike released from internment camp. Ike was from Sugar House, the same as Mat—had grown up in the Thomases’ ward—but he had been working for his uncle in Fresno, California, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Soon after, Japanese Americans along the West Coast had been rounded up and jailed, and then shipped to hastily established “relocation camps” in inland areas. At least a dozen times Mat had sat in the offices of government officials and made his argument: “I live in Utah, and no one arrests me. I continue to work and grow fruit. I’m a productive citizen. My brother happens to spend a little time in California, and suddenly he becomes dangerous. Why can’t he just come home and work with me? How could that hurt anything?”
“We can’t get into all that,” the men would say. “We don’t know which ones might be spies and which ones not. And we can’t start letting some go and not the rest. They’re being fed well, and they’re getting along just fine. I’ve been at those camps, and the people are happy and having a good time.”
One man even suggested that Ike wouldn’t have been heading off to California if he hadn’t had some spying in mind. When Mat suggested that thousands of Utahns had gone to work in California during hard economic times, the federal official had looked Mat in the eye and said, “Yes, and most of them were white. White people didn’t attack this country. It was Japs, like you.”
Mat had stood up, hat in hand, and said, quietly, “I suppose I’m mistaken. I had the idea that Hitler was white. And Mussolini. But I guess maybe they’re Japanese, too.”
“Now don’t start all that with me,” the man had said. “Maybe you’re the one who ought to be cooling his heels in one of those camps until this war is over. You sound like a troublemaker yourself.”
And so Mat had given up. But he did want to see Ike, and so, before the cherries came on, he took a bus to Bakersfield, California, and then hitchhiked into the mountains to the internment camp at Manzanar. The long rows of wooden barracks didn’t look so bad from the outside, but the place was surrounded by barbed-wire fences, and at the gates, soldiers with rifles guarded the entrance.
Mat knew he was breaking the law, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t supposed to travel more than twenty-five miles from home. He had worn a hat when he purchased his bus ticket, pulled it down over his eyes, and done the same in boarding the bus. In California, a man had picked him up, but once he had gotten a good look at Mat, he’d had almost nothing to say. Mat didn’t care. He wanted to see his brother—and his new sister-in-law. Ike had met a girl in the camp, and the two had gotten married a few months before.
As it turned out, when Mat got inside the camp and asked for his brother, Ike was out in a field, working. Much of the food for the interned Japanese Americans was raised within the camp. An older man took Mat out to Ike, and when Ike saw that it was Mat coming toward him, he ran across the field and threw his arms around him. “Mat,” he said, “it’s so good to see you. You said you might try to come, but I didn’t know when to expect you.”
“Well, I thought I’d better come before the cherries come on. I’ll be busy after that, for the rest of the summer.” The two backed up a little and looked at each other. “You look good,” Mat said. “Are you treated all right?”
“Oh, sure. It’s not so bad.” But Mat saw the look in his eyes, the humiliation. “It’s just that . . . it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
The two walked back to the barracks, and for the first time Mat met Betty, the girl Ike had married. Betty was a pretty girl with wonderfully bright eyes and long, rich hair. She was third-generation American and sounded like any kid from California. She and Ike lived in the same barracks with her family and some other families.
“It’s strange,” Ike said, as he sat on his narrow bunk. “This is not where we want to be. But if I hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have met Betty, so—you know—it’s funny how things work out.”
“But this is terrible, living like this—so many together.”
“I know.” Ike reached his arm around Betty. “We don’t have a lot of privacy. That’s for sure.” And then he smiled. “But we have some news.”
“What?” Mat could guess what was coming, and he could hardly believe it.
“Yup. We’re going to have a baby. We haven’t told anyone yet. We weren’t really sure until a few days ago.”
“That’s good, Ike.” Mat looked down at the floor. It struck him as sad that a child had to be born in a camp like this—a prison—and yet life was continuing. He was proud of his brother for holding up so well. “Will everything be okay?” Mat asked. “Can you manage here?”
“Sure. We’re used to how things are.”
“Aren’t you angry?”
“I try not to think about it. Nothing makes any sense at all, as far as I’m
concerned, but if you think about it, you could go crazy. We just have to be good citizens so everyone will know that we’re Americans. Some people believe they’ll let us out before too much longer—maybe before the year is over.”
“I don’t know, Ike. I’ve been talking to any government official who will listen to me, but I can’t get anyone to admit that a mistake was made, or that people could be released on a case-by-case basis—or anything else. They just keep saying they have no choice but to hold you until the end of the war.”
“Well, maybe.”
“We’ll be okay,” Betty said. “Ike’s going to build a crib, and it’s no problem to get diapers and the other things we need.”
“I know. But . . .” Mat looked around at the crowded building, the rows of bunks, with blankets hung up for partitions, or crudely built walls that didn’t even go all the way to the ceiling. He saw how hard the people were trying to make everything nice, to keep the place clean—even decorated—but there were simply far too many forced into such tight confines.
“One thing I want you to know,” Ike said. “Some of us younger men are talking about joining the service. And it looks like they’re going to let us in.”
“Why would you do that?”
“What better way to prove that we’re loyal, Mat? After this war, I don’t want anyone to doubt that I was willing to stand up for my country. I want to look people in the eye.”
“Is that how everyone in here feels?”
“No. Some guys are mad. The government sent a man here to talk to us about joining up—an AJA. And some of the boys in here tried to go after him. If some of the rest of us hadn’t stopped them, he would have gotten himself roughed up.”
“But you want to go?”
“Not exactly. But I will. I want my name—our name—to be respected.”
That was something Mat could understand. But he knew he would never do that. He would make the best of things, and when the war was over he would do all he could to show what kind of man he was, but he wasn’t going to leave his wife and children to prove something he shouldn’t have to prove.