by Dean Hughes
“If we can eat a little better here–and have a cleaner place to live,” Chuck said, “we can last it out, no matter how long it takes.”
But Wally was trying not to trust in better conditions. If he built his hopes up too much, another setback might knock him down too far. It was best not to rely on those kinds of hopes.
No one knew how long the train ride would last, so the men slept as best they could in the aisles or crowded into seats. But in the middle of the night the train rolled to a stop and guards ordered the prisoners out. There, in the darkness, Wally saw a sign: “Omuta.” He had no idea where that was, but he soon found that it was a large place.
Guards lined the prisoners up and marched them through the city. The long hike lasted the rest of the night. By daylight the men were weary, but they had learned through years of experience to put one foot in front of the other and keep going even when they were dead tired. On the outskirts of the city, in an industrial area, they passed slag heaps and the entrance to a large coal mine. “We must have heard right,” Chuck whispered to Wally. “I’ll bet that’s where we’re going to work, and there’s the camp down there.”
Wally looked ahead. He could see a bay in the distance, could smell the ocean, and near the water was an area that was blocked off with high walls. It looked like a prison.
The men were marched to those walls, and then in through the front gate. It was a misty morning, bleak, and the gray walls seemed ominous. Inside were rows of barracks. They looked relatively clean, but Wally noticed there were quite a few guards and very few prisoners. It occurred to him that at this early hour, barely daylight, the men must already be at work.
What followed next was a ritual Wally had seen many times before. The guards lined the men up, made them strip, and then searched them and their clothing for anything they could steal. But the prisoners had been shaken down a hundred times before, and there was next to nothing to take from them now. The guards then ordered the men to carry their clothes to an area in the compound where fifty-gallon drums of water, over fires, were being brought to a boil. The guards motioned for them to toss their clothes in.
Don threw his clothes in and laughed. “Those body lice are finally getting what they deserve,” he told Wally.
The guards brought clippers then, handed them out to the prisoners, and motioned for the men to cut each other’s hair and beards. One of the guards said in English, “Cut very short. Then go for bath.”
Wally felt an amazing surge of joy. These were such little things: to be freed of lice, to cut his long hair and beard, to have a chance to bathe. But he couldn’t hold back the feeling any longer. Things were going to be better here. There was reason to expect an easier time through the rest of the war.
“Bath” turned out to be the wrong word, however. It was only a wash. Still, it was a wash with soap, and then the group was split in half and sent to two barracks. The buildings were clean, if crowded, with three large sleeping rooms and a small front room. Wally ended up in one of the big rooms with a total of fifteen men, his friends among them. They would sleep on the floor, on mats, but small straw pillows were supplied, and a comforter was issued to each man–which was certainly a luxury. Compared to some of the conditions Wally had experienced, this didn’t look too bad.
What followed were physical examinations, and then every prisoner was photographed. Wally was told that his identification number was 1151: “sen-hyaku go ju-ichi.”
“No names,” the guard told the men. “Must know your number.”
They were then lined up and issued new clothes: a forest-green coat and trousers made from flimsy cloth; a g-string instead of underwear; a white, short-sleeved shirt; a cap; and a pair of rubber-soled, split-toed shoes. They were also given heavier clothes and an overcoat and told to fold those and put them away in their rooms. The prisoner’s number was stenciled on each item. The men also received wooden number tags. They were told they must hang these on a peg outside their rooms when they were there. Any time they left, they had to hang the tag on a peg to indicate where they had gone: to chow, roll call, or the toilets.
All that seemed easy enough. What Wally still wondered about was the food, and, of course, the work. He hoped the guards would be decent and that working underground wouldn’t bother him too much.
When mess call came that evening, Wally was very hungry. He and the other men were called out for tenko–roll call–before they could go to the mess hall. They stood in formation and waited, but nothing happened. It was a muggy day, and the men were tired from the all-night train ride the night before. But the guards merely left the men standing at attention for the better part of an hour. Finally, an authoritative-looking man, small but powerfully built, walked to the front of the compound. He was apparently the head guard for their section of the prison. “You must count,” he shouted.
It took a moment for the men to realize what they were expected to do. When a guard pointed to a man at the end of the first row, he shouted, “One.”
“No, no. Ichi!”
During their time as prisoners the men had learned to count in Japanese. They counted off briskly at first, but at “eighteen”–ju-hachi–a man hesitated. Someone prompted him, and he shouted out the correct word, but by then a guard was rushing toward him, yelling. Wally was so accustomed to such yelling that he didn’t think much about it. He was looking down the line, trying to see what number he would have to come up with. But the guard stopped in front of the prisoner who had hesitated, and he slammed him with his rifle, sending him sprawling to the ground. By then another guard had joined him. The two kicked at the prisoner, striking him in the ribs and stomach.
Wally knew the guy–a man named Stewart. He had been a big man at one time, but he had suffered more than his share of sickness and was worn down more than most. He couldn’t take a lot of beating. But no one moved; no one spoke. To do anything that showed rebellion, even a reaction, was to bring down wrath upon themselves. That much everyone knew.
Wally watched, saw Stewart pull himself up, slowly, and stand again, bent forward. And now a lot of things were clear. There was no way the men could count all the way to fifty without more mistakes, so more men would be beaten. That was the immediate reality. What ran much deeper was the realization that nothing had changed. These guards were going to be as brutal as the ones he had known in the Philippines. Wally felt the air go out of him.
He felt concern for poor Stewart, but beatings had become such a part of his life that he couldn’t work up a lot of emotion over seeing one more. He wasn’t even that frightened of making a mistake and receiving his own beating. He had survived plenty, and he knew he could do it again. What he felt was disappointment. He should have known better. It had been stupid of him to think that things might be different here.
Wally stood his ground, came up with niju-roku for twenty-six when his turn came, but listened, without moving, as another man, this one behind him, was brutally beaten by the same two guards. He understood the game exactly. The guards wanted to make it clear from the beginning who was boss. The Americans needed to be humiliated, and two beatings were apparently enough, in their judgment, to establish that. If not, they would have beaten others–for any trumped-up reason.
When the men were finally marched to the mess hall, they filed through the food line, and Wally could see the others, not riled by what they had just experienced–too accustomed to it to let that happen–but more subdued, certainly feeling the same disappointment that he was. At the same time, there was the anticipation of food and maybe some lingering hope that it would be better than what they had been given in the past. The meal was a bowl of rice and a bowl of thin soup. The rice was better cooked than some they had eaten, but there was not much of it, and the soup was mostly water. It seemed unlikely, too, that the men would get much opportunity to scrounge extra food, so this would be very little to live on.
By the time the men sat down at the tables, Wally could see it in all their eyes:
the disillusionment, the sadness. No one said much. They simply ate what they had, but they were sinking into themselves, looking for strength, or maybe some state of hollowness that would keep them from feeling.
A man with a stubbly beard stepped with a limp to the table where Wally was eating with his friends. He was an American prisoner who apparently worked in the mess hall. “Hi. My name’s Chet,” he said. “It ain’t no feast, is it?” He smiled. He looked fairly healthy, with more meat on his bones than most, but men who worked in mess halls usually managed to eat more than others. He was, however, missing most of his teeth–a problem with a lot of the prisoners.
“Is this the same every time?” Chuck asked.
“Afraid so. They put a few little chunks of meat in the soup now and then. But not very often.”
“What do we get in the mornings?” Wally asked.
“Same thing. And they give you a cup of rice to put in one of them little bento boxes. You take that to the mine with you.”
“How’s the work in the mine?” Chuck asked.
“Well, it’s hard work. It’s a long hike over to the entrance, and then they run you on a train, down and way out under the bay. The train is open, and the ride is colder than an ice box, summer or winter. This here mine was condemned before the war. It’s falling in all over the place. Sometimes they’ll send you into places that are caved in and make you dig ’em back open.”
“How long is the work day?”
“Twelve hours or so, counting the walk back and forth. They get you up in the dark, and most of the year they bring you back in the dark, too. You don’t see the sunlight very often.”
Most of the men had quickly finished their food, and now they were staring at the bowl, or at the table, saying nothing.
“Do we get any days off?” Wally asked.
“Every tenth day you’re supposed to be off, but sometimes you get stuck on a special crew that day. If you do, you’re looking at twenty-one straight days before you get a rest. Everyone sleeps on that day anyway. That’s all there is here, work and sleep.”
Wally didn’t want to hear anymore, and he knew the others didn’t either. He could look at them and see what they were feeling.
“How long have you been here?” one of the men from the next table asked.
Chet turned around. “About a year. Come from the Philippines, the same as you guys. A lot of the men here come from other places, though. There’s lots of Limeys and Aussies, along with us Americans.”
“So how did you get this job, here in the mess hall?” the same man asked.
“I got hurt in the mine last winter–broke my foot real bad. I wasn’t worth nothing, so the Japs let me work in here. But this might be worse than the mine. The guy who runs this mess hall–an American Navy Lieutenant named Langston–he’s worse than any Jap.” Chet called the man a filthy name. “Watch out for the guards here, but more than anyone, watch out for Langston. He’ll catch you with your cap on in here–or some stupid thing like that–and take away your food for a day or two. Or he’ll report you to the guards, and they come and beat you. The men here are going to kill Langston someday if they get a chance. I’m surprised they haven’t gotten him before now.”
“What about–”
“I gotta get away from here. I can’t get caught standing around talking. You’ll know soon enough. This ain’t no worse than most of the camps back in the Philippines, I guess. Not so many die because there ain’t so many kinds of sickness. But you’ll never work harder in your life. Down in the third level of the mine the tunnels run with water up to your ankles sometimes, and the guards are just waiting for a chance to catch you wasting time.” He hesitated, and then he added, “I don’t mean to be the guy that brings bad news, but you might as well know what you’ve got to put up with.” He walked away.
The men at the table returned to their silence, but in a few minutes a prisoner at the next table leaned over. “We talked to a GI back at our barracks. He was down with some kind of sickness and couldn’t work. He told us pretty much the same story, but he did say we get paid a little every day. It’s supposed to be enough to buy a cigarette once in a while.”
This seemed very good news to some of the guys, but it meant nothing to Wally. What he hoped was that the money would add up, and maybe there would be a way to spend it on extra food.
After the men ate their rice and drank their soup, they returned to their barracks. The interpreter came around and told them they would be receiving training early in the morning, so they’d better get a good night’s sleep. Wally didn’t have to be told twice; he knew that was true. But still, when he lay down on the floor next to Chuck, he found himself unable to drift off. He was dead tired, but reality was setting in, and he found himself struggling.
“I wonder how much longer I can do this,” he said, the words almost involuntary, like a sigh.
Chuck didn’t respond for a time. Finally, he said, “That’s what I was thinking.”
“I guess we take one day at a time,” Wally said. “Like always.” He was worried he had said the wrong thing.
“What if the war keeps going for years?”
It was the worst of Wally’s fears. Whenever he thought of the distant future, he pictured himself back in Utah, eating with his family, sleeping in a nice bed. That’s what kept him going, and some period of months, not years, was always the time frame he imagined for that return to his old life. But at the first of the war, he had never thought it could last this long, and he actually knew little about what was happening now. Sometimes the guards in the Philippines, with their limited English, had made claims about great Japanese victories. On the other hand, rumors would spread that the Allies were on the verge of finishing Japan off. Wally had no way of knowing what was true, but when he felt himself getting worn down he would admit the possibility that he might have years to go, and then his confidence would vanish.
But he knew better than to admit his doubts to his friend. Chuck didn’t need that right now. “Every camp I’ve been in looked bad at first,” Wally said. “But we figure out ways to make it all right. There’s always a way to scrounge food, or get a little extra sleep. Something. We just have to learn the ropes.”
“Do you like corn on the cob?”
“What?”
“I was just thinking about sweet corn. My dad used to raise some rows of it in our backyard. That and tomatoes. Home-grown tomatoes. Sometimes I used to pick me about six cobs of corn and a couple of those huge tomatoes, right off the vine, and I’d make me a whole meal out of it. Boil up the corn, slap a lot of butter on the ears, and go after ’em. Get the butter all over my face. And eat those big tomatoes, just like eating an apple.”
“With salt?”
“Yup.”
“What got you thinking about that?”
“It’s August. That’s when the corn and the tomatoes would come on.”
“Did your mom can a lot of stuff in the fall?”
“That’s all she talked about. I had a cousin from up in Willard, by Brigham City. They had big peach orchards. We’d drive up there every year and buy a couple of bushels of those great big Elberta peaches, and Mom would bottle ’em. She’d get all of us helping her. I didn’t like that so much, but I sure liked eating the peaches all winter long.”
“My mom always put up a lot of jam. Strawberry. Raspberry. Apricot. How would you like to have a big old slice of bread, hot from the oven, with lots of butter and homemade jam?”
“I’ll take two, if you don’t mind. And could I also have a great big glass of milk?”
“Yeah. Milk. Sometimes I forget there is such a thing.”
Art was lying on the other side of Chuck. Wally hadn’t known he was awake. But now he said, “How would you like to drive in a car, stop at a hamburger joint–”
“With your girl?” someone in the room asked.
“Well, yeah. That would be nice. But right now, I’m just thinking about the food. I’m ordering me a big hambur
ger with mustard and ketchup and pickles and onion and lettuce, and a big slice of tomato. When I bite into it, the juice and ketchup and stuff get all over my hands.”
From the far end of the room another voice said, “With a chocolate milkshake and an order of fries.”
“Hey, if we’re going to eat,” Don said, “we can do better than a hamburger. Let’s order a big ol’ steak, about an inch and a half thick–nice and pink on the inside.”
A couple of the guys slept through all this, but most had something to contribute. They wanted a slice of cherry pie, with ice cream, or maybe mom’s fried chicken.
When the feast finally ended and the men fell silent, Wally knew that most of them weren’t asleep. He could hear them breathing but not yet drawing the long steady breaths of sleep. He knew they were thinking, trying to accept these new circumstances and deal with them. But they were also thinking about food, about family, about whatever it was that had kept them going for the past two years, and making sure they didn’t lose sight of it–or the smell of it–because they were going to need all their strength, all their resources, to get through this next ordeal.
Chapter 3
On that dreadful August morning when the train had carried Alex away, Anna had stood on the platform and watched his car for as long as she could see it. Only then did she realize that she had no plans, no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her day. Nor was there anything she could think to do. Finally, she made her way out of Victoria station. She didn’t feel like going home yet, so she strolled toward Buckingham Palace and into St. James Park. She had stopped crying by then, but a dull sense of gloom had set in. So many long days were ahead of her now.
It was a warm, bright day, but she felt an absence–not the anguish she had experienced as she let go of him, but a frightful emptiness. She walked the path along the lengthy pond and then continued on to Whitehall. As she passed 10 Downing Street, she wondered about Winston Churchill, perhaps in his nearby “war rooms,” perhaps making decisions that would affect Alex’s life, and hers. It seemed that a few people in the world were making all the decisions for everyone else now. She wondered what would happen if all the weary soldiers simply decided to quit fighting.