Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  “How,” he wondered, “did I manage to survive?”

  Maybe it was his destiny, or just luck. He couldn’t say. Then, looking around again, another thought occurred to him.

  “Why” he asked himself, “did we have to have this war?”

  He was thirsty and wandered down to the Pantingan River to get a drink. Upstream he saw some Filipino soldiers getting water. Obviously they had yet to surrender. He watched them for a moment, decided to leave them alone.

  “I’m thirsty and they’re thirsty too,” he told himself. “I’m not going to report that I saw them.”

  The regiment bivouacked along the Pantingan and awaited new orders. One day passed, then another. They cleaned their gear and bathed in the river and cooked rice for their midday meal. On the third day, Isamu Murakami and four other men got word that the company commander wanted to see them.

  The officer explained that each company had been ordered to send five men to a spot above the river for “special duty,” men who had excelled in bayonet training.

  A lieutenant came to fetch the group, led them up the hill and into the jungle to a section of trail above a ravine. Assembled there were many many horyo, hundreds, in fact, Filipinos mostly, but a handful of Americans, too. Some of the prisoners were blindfolded and tied with rope, some with wire.

  Isamu Murakami sensed that something ominous was about to take place and did not like it. Several other men there were uneasy as well.

  “What are we going to do?” one of them asked.

  “Shobun” an officer said. They were going to “kill them.”

  Then the officer called Murakami’s name, told him to step forward.

  Isamu hesitated.

  “Just kill one and then you can go back to your unit,” his company sergeant said.

  Isamu just stood there.

  The sergeant tried again.

  “There are lots of officers here from other units,” he said softly. “Their men are killing the prisoners and our company commander wants to show them that our men can do this, too. You should do this as quickly as possible, just one and you can go back.” Then the company sergeant said, “Or you will be killed by the company commander.”

  The officer was growing impatient and barked at the sergeant.

  “Why don’t you tell your men to do it quickly? This is the order of the emperor!”

  Isamu Murakami thought, “I have no choice.”

  In training he had stabbed large dolls stuffed with straw, but this—this was different.

  He stepped forward with his rifle at the ready. The man in front of him was a Filipino, face pale, eyes filled with fear.

  Isamu Murakami tightened his grip on the rifle, flexed his knees, and thrust the weapon forward (“Yaah!”) at a point where he imagined the man’s heart was.

  He heard a kind of click or snap, like a stick breaking. He guessed he’d hit a rib, so he twisted the blade, hard, finished the stroke, and yanked the bayonet free.

  The Filipino sank to his knees, blood pouring from the wound.

  “Owatta!” Isamu shouted, almost defiantly. “I’m finished!”

  “Kere!” The major yelled back. “Kick him down!”

  Murakami put his heel on the figure twitching in the dirt and shoved it over the side and into the ravine.

  “Follow him,” the officer told the next man, and so it went, man after man down the line.

  With each thrust there was a scream, then an echo in the hills. And when the ravine began to fill with bodies, it too issued a complaint, a chorus of moaning and crying.

  “Why do I have to do things like this?” Isamu Murakami thought.

  He toweled the blood from his clothes, wiped his weapon clean, and tossed the towel into the ravine.

  “You can go,” the officer said.

  He ran. He ran as fast as he could, and when he looked back over his shoulder he saw many of the others running as well, as if someone or something was chasing them from the killing ground.

  Back at the bivouac he chanted a prayer for the man he had killed, for all the murdered men moaning and crying in the valley, but the prayer didn’t work. That night the dead came to him in a dream, one after another.

  “Don’t come only to me,” he told them, “but if you want, please appear in front of the emperor and ask the emperor how he would feel if he had been ordered to stab you.”

  KILL THE PRISONERS? thought Private First Class Takesada Shigeta, a machine gunner with the 1st Battalion, 122nd Infantry It didn’t make sense.74

  “Why do we have to kill those who come out of the jungle with their hands up?” he asked himself. “The battle is over. This is not a situation of kill or be killed.”

  On April 12 at the Pantingan River, the men of the 122nd Infantry Regiment were given an unusually large ration of sake, in fact all they could drink. Not long after the ration was issued, they were told that their unit was going to kill prisoners of war.

  “Those who want to kill the prisoners,” a noncom said, “just go ahead. Kill the ones you want. Kill as many as you want.”

  The men who volunteered for this duty tried to convince the others to join them.

  “These prisoners aren’t real prisoners,” the volunteers argued. “They’re not yet imprisoned so we can’t call them prisoners. It would be hard for us to kill the prisoners in a camp, but these men are still the enemy and we’re still in the middle of a war. We have to kill them.”

  The killing began in the late morning. All along the river and at bivouacs in the hills, working parties of executioners were assembled and marched to the spot. From all the coming and going along the river, Takesada Shigeta got the impression the executions were taking place at several spots, and several hundred hohei were taking part.

  Though it was not put to them that way, the men assumed they were acting on orders.

  “Someone must have given an order,” Takesada Shigeta thought. “The regimental commander, someone. Someone must have said something. Without an order we would not be killing the prisoners.”

  They worked through the morning and into the afternoon, worked in shifts, drinking and killing, drinking and killing.

  Takesada Shigeta stayed in camp by the river and watched the killing parties leave and return, men sweating and thirsty and covered in blood.

  “I killed only one. No more than that,” one man said,

  “I killed six,” another said.

  By early afternoon the sake barrel was half empty.

  “Drink and go!” they yelled,

  “All right, I’ll go!” a man said.

  Takesada Shigeta wanted no part of it.

  He thought, “It was good enough to have the enemy surrender.”

  And others apparently agreed.

  “I don’t want to kill them, either,” he heard more than one man say.

  As the afternoon wore on, however, some of the executioners began to resent this display of individuality, and one of them started to pester Shigeta. Soon he was nose to nose with the man, shouting and yelling. And now their sergeant was stepping between them.

  He should either go to the killing site, the sergeant told Shigeta, or take his machine gun to the hill above the ravine and make sure none of the bodies at the bottom tried to escape or crawl away.

  Takesada Shigeta asked his good friend, Kozo Hattori, who had also recused himself from the killing, to join him.

  “Let’s go up or else we have to kill them,” he said.

  When they finally reached their position on the hill, they looked down and were struck dumb.

  The ravine was filling with bodies, and issuing from the pit was a sound neither of them would soon forget, cries of agony echoing in the valley and off the hills. Neither man had ever heard anything like it—a chorus of moaning, pain, and lament that never seemed to stop.

  The day was hot and humid, and with a light wind blowing in their direction it wasn’t long before the smell of blood, a thick and frightening fragrance, reached the
two hohei sitting on the hill.

  At first they just watched. The prisoners were led forward five and six at a time to a spot on the road just above the ravine. Some wore blindfolds, rags and towels knotted behind their heads. Others just stared straight ahead, facing their executioners.

  Takesada Shigeta thought, “Imagine standing in front of the prisoner and watching his eyes at the very moment you pierce him with your bayonet.”

  After a while of looking down on all this, he went into a kind of trance.

  Again and again he told himself the same thing, “The battle is over . . . The battle is over.”

  At length the two men realized that the sergeant who had sent them up the hill would wonder why they had not yet fired their machine guns, so just before dark they loosed some short bursts at the empty slope opposite them, but the firing only made the moaning in the valley sound louder, and this unsettled them even more and they stopped.

  The killing went on till dark. By the time Takesada Shigeta and Kozo Hattori were called down from the hill, the battalion had packed up and was beginning to move out, north, to a bivouac by the Abo-Abo River.

  Sitting around their campfires that night at the new position, none of the men spoke of the slaughter.

  “They were all in high spirits a few hours ago,” Takesada Shigeta thought. “They were saying, ‘I killed this many or I killed that many.’ Now none of them are willing to talk because it wasn’t an honorable deed.”

  He still felt numb, felt nothing, really, neither pity nor fear. The next day the 122nd gathered the remains of its dead for cremation and shipment home. The day after that the unit prepared to move off the peninsula and take up its next assignment.

  Takesada Shigeta was sure he had put the Pantingan River behind him, but that night, unable to sleep, he “meditated deeply” on the blood-soaked trail in the jungle and the valley full of bodies below. At length he closed his eyes but could not sleep. An eerie noise began to nag at him, a chorus of moaning and crying he knew would never stop.

  * * *

  ONE LAST LOOK

  BEN STEELE hated this part of the job, sitting here in the pickup in front of Casey’s Golden Pheasant, waiting for the shepherds to stumble out of the saloon, their loyal sheepdogs lying on the sidewalk in front.

  Same thing every payday, Jug Clark’s men couldn’t wait to drink up their checks. So he’d sit there, just like Mr. Clark had ordered, sit behind the wheel watching the front door till they came rolling out into the afternoon, then he’d help them onto the mattresses in the bed of the truck, dogs jumping in after them, and haul the ossified load back to the ranch.

  Next morning Jug Clark would tell him, take a bottle out to so-and-so’s camp, just enough for one drink, some hair of the dog to straighten him out for work. Half the time the shepherds were shaking so bad when he rode up, they’d spill the cure down the front of them.

  They weren’t a bad bunch, though. Many were old cowboys who’d lost their rides and maybe a wife or live-in woman along the way. The work was lonely, that’s all, out there with the sheep night and day, week in week out. Drove most to drink. And made a few of them mean.

  BY THE FALL OF ’39, he’d graduated from high school, left Snook Art, and signed back with Jug Clark as a camp tender. The ranch was doing well and so was he, making $40 a month and still sending most of it home.

  He had grown up well, twenty-two years old now, five foot ten, a lean 150 pounds with a shock of dark hair, an open face, and an easygoing manner. He got on well with almost everyone, unless, of course, they didn’t want to get along with him.

  That summer he had a run-in with a shepherd named Blacky Halco, a new man from Wyoming country. The sheepherder started giving him a bad time as soon as Ben Steele rode into his camp.

  “I’ll bet I can outshoot you with this six-shooter and you using that rifle you got in the buckboard there,” Halco said.

  The camp tender had several stops to make that day and long rides between them.

  “I didn’t come out here to shoot a competition or anything,” he said. “I’m here to tend your camp.”

  Halco was a big, hard-looking man.

  “That so?” he said. “Well, the last outfit I worked for I killed the camp tender.”

  Ben Steele finished unloading the wagon and stacking the supplies, then got back in the buckboard and rode slowly away.

  “Next time I go to that camp,” he promised himself, “I’m going with the rifle loaded.”

  When Jug Clark got wind of what had happened, he kicked the shepherd off the place. Later word reached the ranch that Blacky Halco had walked into a bar in Hardin with a handgun, shot two men point-blank, then turned the pistol on himself.

  THE REST OP THE SUMMER was a cowboy’s dream. Clark owned ten thousand acres north of the Yellowstone and had grazing rights on another ten thousand south of the river in the massive foothills of the Pryor Mountains. The practice there was to leave the prairie unfenced, and when the wind was up, the grass looked like an ocean, one wave of green after another.

  His job in the Pryors was to search for water and good grazing, and Ben Steele traded his wagon for a saddle horse. He always rode at a walk or a trot, never a run. Too much ground to cover for that, fifty square miles of range. No point getting pounded.

  Sit back, ride the pockets, relax. Up this slope, across the ridge, down the back side to the next. Lay the reins left, right, nudge the horse along with a touch of the heel. He’ll go where he’s told. “A good horse will take you anywhere,” the Old Man used to say. And he was right.

  He loved riding the Pryors. Green swells in front and behind, mile after mile under a bowl of blue. No trees here, no buildings, wires, fences. Just land, so much of it a rider could go all afternoon without seeing anything but grass, mountains, sky. Open country, they called it, free range. It wasn’t free anymore, but that didn’t matter. That didn’t matter at all. On and on. The country, the horse, the rider.

  IN THE EARLY FALL OF 1940 his parents drove out to the Clark ranch for a visit. They came in a car they’d bought with his money, $400 of savings. (“The car’s yours, Bud,” they told him. “We’re just holding it for you.”)

  His mother was eager to speak with him. She’d been thinking, she said. He was twenty-two years old, time he considered his future. Back east Congress had just passed the first peacetime military draft, and the first call-up was scheduled for later that month.

  “You really ought to get in before they draft you,” she said. “Maybe if you do, you could, you know, do what you want in the army.”

  He knew she wanted something better for him. After all, how long could he work as a hired hand? Later, after his parents left, he kicked the army idea around with Jug Clark.

  The rancher was against it. His future was here, Jug Clark said, on the banks of the Yellowstone. “You know, Bud, I’ve always told you, someday I’m gonna give you your own band of sheep.”

  Someday. He began to think that maybe there was something in what his mother had said. He could travel, he could see the world, he could have an adventure. Hell, he’d never been out of Montana.

  He’d miss the ranch, no getting around that, the creak of saddle leather, the murmur of the wind. But maybe it was time.

  In mid-September he borrowed Jug Clark’s car and drove to Billings, found the enlistment center in the Stapleton Building, and signed the papers to become a private in the United States Army Air Corps.

  Three weeks later, October 9, in the company of his mother, his father, his little brother Joe, and little sister Jean, he stood on the platform of the Billings train station on Montana Avenue waiting for the westbound Northern Pacific, the train that would carry him to boot camp in California.

  His mother kept stealing looks at him. They chatted some, nervous talk. Did he have the sandwiches she’d packed? Was he excited about seeing California? Would he remember to write?

  The train rolled into the station. He hugged his mother, shook hands with th
e Old Man, said good-bye to the kids. Then he stepped up and into the coach and settled himself in a seat by the window.

  Standing on the platform, his mother tried to smile. He knew what she was thinking. She’d been reading the newspapers, reading the rumors of war. Never mind, he wanted to tell her. He’d be all right. He’d be just fine. Like always.

  The train started with a lurch. He turned in his seat and looked back, looked back as long as he could.

  * * *

  EIGHT

  AGUARD was shoving him in the back, pushing Ben Steele to get on the train. Since dawn the Japanese had been rousting prisoners from holding pens throughout San Fernando and herding them toward the railroad station.

  As they walked through the streets toward the waiting trains, many men, convinced the worst was behind them, began to say things like, “I think we’re gonna be okay” or “Things will be better now.” A few told their comrades they looked forward to riding in comfortable coaches the rest of the way.

  At the depot they found boxcars waiting, old French Mercis, “Forty and Eights,” as they used to be called, narrow-gauge boxes just big enough (about twenty feet long and roughly seven or eight feet high) to carry either forty men or eight mules and horses. Now the Japanese were shoving a hundred men and more into these ancient wood-and-metal carriages, packing them in tight, shoulder to shoulder, belly to back, and slamming the doors shut, leaving the men in the stifling dark.

  Almost immediately men began to struggle for breath. Some panicked—the Japanese, they were sure, meant to kill them, suffocate them—and they started pounding their fists on the boxcar walls.

  “I have to get out!” they screamed. “Oh God, please God, open the doors!”

  Sitting atop the cars the guards stamped their feet on the roof and screamed back.

  “Ketsu-no-ana darnare!” “Shut up, assholes!”

  Loading each train took time; men might be left for an hour or more in a closed car before the train finally started with a sudden jolt. A hundred men in two hundred square feet of space, stinking men all of them, sick men, too, standing in their own waste.