Ben Steele was tired and so were the others. They kept switching off on the litters, stopping to adjust their Japanese packs. No one said much. Most of them were too weary to talk, too sick. The guards, for the most part, let them be, content with the pace, tolerant of the frequent stops.
Five miles, ten, fifteen. The sky was turning from silver to steel blue then gray as banks of monsoon clouds rolled in from the south.
They had forded a number of rivers and creeks and now they came to another, spanned by a small wooden bridge. Crossing the bridge the guards turned the column left, parallel to the river, then down through the underbrush to the riverbank and downstream another two hundred yards to a large, flat point bar of rocks at a bend in the river below the bridge.
The rock bar was wide and long. It ballooned out from the shore some 30 feet into the river and stretched roughly 125 feet along the shore. Behind the rock bar was a dirt and grass embankment, the beginning of the dark green jungle. All along the river, a wall of trees leaned out ominously over the water.
The weary and bedraggled group put their loads down on the rocks and looked around. There was nothing there. No bamboo buildings, no nipa shacks, no canvas tents. Nothing but the rocks under their feet, the shallow, slow-moving river at their front, the deep green jungle at their backs.
“Is this the end of the trail?” someone said.
“Where are we going?” another man shouted. “What the hell is going on?”
Ben Steele thought, “This must be just a place to stay overnight, a campsite. We’re going to move on to another place.”
Then the gray sky turned black and it started to pour.
“There’s nowhere to get out of the rain,” Ben Steele thought. “This isn’t good.”
THE RUGGED RAIN-SWEPT BICOT PENINSUTA is really a jumble of sub-peninsulas, isthmuses, and islands—volcanic derelicts that spread out eastward from Luzon’s southern end. In every season tropical storms soak Bicol’s sharp peaks and rocky hills, and in the years leading up to the war, the tropical rain forest was tall and thick, a place Joseph Conrad would have called “a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black,” baked by a “fierce” sun that made its wild groves “glisten and drip with steam.”2
To be sure, there were towns and villages in Bicol, occupied mostly by migrants from Luzon’s crowded cities, but there weren’t many of them, and since much of the terrain was inhospitable and uninhabitable, the majority of locals lived on less than 10 percent of the land, farmers and foresters, most of them, leaving the rest of the peninsula a silent and teeming wilderness.
The Japanese had arrived on the peninsula during their second landing, coming ashore at points between Atimonan and the southern city of Legaspi, the terminus of the Manila railroad. The peninsula was important to them; there were iron mines in the area and some of the interior plains were suitable for airfields. The problem was the roads. Most were seasonal. Route 1G, for example, from Calauag north along Bicol’s westernmost shoreline, seemed to stop in the middle of the jungle a mile or so north of the Basiad River.
Most of the Japanese heavy equipment, bulldozers and earth movers, were tied up elsewhere on Luzon repairing and extending airfields, so any clearing of jungle, any taking off hills and filling depressions—the work of road building—would have to be done with pick and shovel. “Work for captives, work for prisoners of war. And so on May 21, a clerk in the Japanese military bureaucracy in Manila sent a requisition to the Japanese headquarters building at Camp O’Donnell asking for three hundred prisoner-laborers to build a section of road that would link Route 1G out of Calauag—the Old Tayabas Road—to the highway coming up from Legaspi. Three hundred men to hack at jungle roots and fill wheelbarrows with jungle mud and make a road through the wilderness.
THE MEN slept on rocks that night, and the next day guards issued picks and shovels and wheelbarrows, then marched them into the jungle to work.
It was clear they were preparing a roadbed, and some of the men thought maybe this was a temporary job, something they would finish by the end of the day and then move on to someplace else, someplace more permanent and with shelter. But that night the guards led them right back to the rocks, and they knew that this long stretch of river-bank, this point bar of rocks and stones and gravel two hundred yards below the wooden bridge, was where they were going to stay.
There, the river formed an S, with the bridge in the middle. On the lower bend of the S was the rock bar bivouac of the prisoners. On the inside of the upper bend, upstream from the bridge, was the Japanese encampment. The Japanese lived in tents with wood walls and floors, while their bedraggled captives were made to sleep in the open on the rocks. Of all the shocks and jolts they’d suffered since December 8—the bombings, the invasion, the defeat, the march off Bataan, the dunghill that was O’Donnell—this stone shelf in the open at the edge of the jungle was the worst misery of all, the lowest of the legacies that had come from their losing.
Their second night on the rock bar, some of the men started to pry up stones and make a bed in the mud. At least, they reckoned, it was softer than the rocks. Ben Steele, perhaps remembering how he’d slept on the open range encircled by a lariat to keep out the snakes, gathered up loose rocks and built a low stone wall around himself. Soon others were building walls too, but these first urgent attempts to improvise a bit of shelter gave them no comfort. Their mud mattresses leached groundwater and collected rain, and the men would wake up in a puddle of muck and their own piss, stiff and sore from the early morning chill and from sleeping cramped in a circle of stone.
The mosquitoes found them right away. In the dark the insects swarmed the rocky encampment. To fight them off the men built fires of wet wood and tried to sit in the thick smoke. Then they’d get into their sleeping pits and try to hide their faces in their shirts, shove their hands in their pockets, anything to keep from exposing their skin. (The few who had mosquito nets shared them, a dozen men sleeping with their heads together in a circle, the net stretched across their faces.) In the morning, many a man awoke with a kind of second skin, a black mat of mosquitoes in his scalp, on his face, down his neck.
IT RAINED almost every day, not all day but every day, monsoon rain. Low rolling clouds like billows of smoke, lots of mist, a thick mist that clung to everything, and rain, sheets of pounding rain slapping the leaves and roiling the river. The rain turned the jungle dark, and in the perpetual gloom some men began to believe that they had been forgotten.
Their government had forgotten them, of this they were sure, and it seemed that God had forgotten them, too. He had sent them into a wilderness, into the heart of darkness, and set them down by a river on a bed of stones.
Now the jungle was their enemy too and it showed them even less pity than the Japanese. Their captors were merely indifferent to their fate. They could live or not; the guards didn’t care. Nature, however, seemed bent on destroying them—the heat, the wet, the rot and disease. And they were alone, alone and utterly exposed in a world that hissed and snapped and stirred in the dark, shadows of men sleeping on rocks by a bend in a river on a ragged peninsula at the end of the world.
All they had was one another, and as comrades often do, they buddied up, many of them, picked a partner, another man to share camp chores, nurse them through the chills and fever, break the long spells of loneliness. They hoped a partnership might preserve them, but because hope had so often lost its currency among them, and because it was clear to everyone that their chances of surviving in this wilderness were few (men were dying now, and the scent of death had started to mingle with the musty smell of the damp earth), they buddied up for another reason as well. Here at the end of the world they wanted someone to save them from oblivion, a buddy to carry their memory, if it came to it, and comfort their kin.
BEN STEELE buddied up with Dalton Russell, first sergeant to the 7th Matériel Squadron. They had met in training camp in Albuquerque, and although first sergeants and privates were never close, the
young cowboy from Montana had taken a liking to his supervisor. Most of the squadron had.
Russell was young for a first sergeant, just twenty-six years old, which made him something of a prodigy in a prewar army of hoary bootlickers. He had graduated with honors from Troy High School, Montgomery County, North Carolina, in 1934, the class valedictorian, lean, dark-haired, and handsome. In those days of Depression and want, even a top student had trouble finding a job, so he joined the Army Air Corps and married Donnie Harrison, a blond, blue-eyed nurse he’d met back home in Denton. He was a good manager of men and rose quickly in rank. Near the age of those under him, he wasn’t afraid to get close to his soldiers, or let them know him.
Ben Steele, addled with malaria, didn’t know Russell was part of the detail until they got off the train in Calauag and started walking in the moonlight. The first sergeant remembered the young cowboy right away. “You were the only soldier on base who had a horse,” Russell said.
After a couple of days and nights on the rock bar, the two started to stick together and, like some of the others, decided to move back off the rocks and build a bamboo and palm-leaf lean-to against the embankment at the edge of the jungle. Some nights the lean-to would give them comfort; other nights the wind and rain would tear their shack down, forcing them to seek shelter between the buttresses of a towering yakal tree or return to the rocks, living, as Ben Steele liked to say, “like reptiles.”
THEY ATE what they’d carried in from Calauag—mostly rice and cans of corned beef hash (a dish the Japanese disliked). The beef, however, was too rough on intestinal tracts ravaged by dysentery, and it passed right through them. So they lived on the rice, low-grade rice (unlike the polished white grains the Japanese kept for themselves) that often still had the chaff on it.
Instead of a rice pot, the Japanese gave them a rusty old wheelbarrow coated with dried concrete. They scraped off the coating as best they could, built a fire in a trench in the middle of the rock bar, and rolled the wheelbarrow over it. At first they used too much water and ended up with a watery rice slop. Even after they adjusted the recipe, the rice always tasted of rust, river water, and old concrete.
Their day began before dawn when guards came onto the rock bar and poked them awake. One man looked worse than the next, eyes rheumy, hair unshorn, face hirsute and filthy. (They could peel off the mud in strips.) Stiff and wet in the predawn chill, they sat up slowly, scraping off the mats of mosquitoes, coughing and hacking up phlegm from the damp, shaking from night sweats or swooning with fever. Every morning, one man at least was carried up the bank and into a section of jungle set aside as a graveyard. After the morning count, the men lined up at the rice wheelbarrow for their morning gruel, then they drew their picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows and marched off to work.
Even with heavy equipment, the job of reshaping the Bicol jungle would have been difficult work. Now they were using hand tools to hack the shoulders off hills, dig out massive roots, haul loads of wet fill—weak men working all day, struggling to swing eight-pound picks or push heavy wheelbarrows through a gumbo of mud that swallowed everything that touched it.
Sometimes the muck was so thick that five men were needed to move one wheelbarrow, two pushing from behind and three, trussed up in harnesses of vines and ropes, pulling like horses from the front. They worked barefoot and in loincloths, most of them, saving the rags they called clothes (which they wrapped in palm fronds and left back at the rock bar) for their nights and the mosquitoes.
Most of all they were sick. Every man jack of them was sick with something, and every day that passed, fewer and fewer were able to march off to work in the jungle. On their first day at Tayabas Road only two-thirds of the men in the detail were able to report for the morning labor call. Two weeks later, fewer than half were well enough to work.
BEN STEELE had awoken in a fever sweat, and the malaria attack had left him flushed and fuzzy all day. Breakfast had been awful too, the rice half cooked and hard raw. And now under a blazing morning sun in a clearing in the jungle, he was chopping at tree roots and lianas with a spade. Thick and hard those roots, like hacking at metal cables. His hands were bruised and tender and his shoulders ached. Worse, the sun was making him light-headed, faint. He stopped, tried to gather himself. The air was still, the clearing stifling and incendiary. “This is goddamn grueling,” he thought, then—
When he came to his senses, he was lying under a tree. Nearby, a guard was beating a slacker. When the guard noticed Ben Steele stirring, he motioned him back to work. The afternoon rain had been heavy, and he slogged through the muck until dark.
Back at the river, the lean-to was down again. He cleared away some stones on the rock bar to make a sleeping pit. Too weak to stand in line for rice, he asked Sergeant Russell to bring him his gruel. Afterward, he made his way to the river to wash himself. His hair was long, his whiskers too, full of clumps of mud, leaves, and grass.
He sat for moment on the rocks, letting the wind dry him. Then it started to rain again, a driving night rain. His body began to shake and his teeth chattered (keep that up, he told himself, and he’d grind them right down to the gums). “Damn, I’m freezing,” he thought. “I’m like to shake to death in this downpour.”
EVERY MORNING there were more bodies on the rocks. After a month at the site, the dead had filled up one jungle graveyard and the living had started another. The infirm, the men too sick to work, dug the graves. Once in a while, someone would stand at the edge of the hole and offer a sentiment. Preston Hubbard, an Air Corps signalman from Clarksville, Tennessee, occasionally acted as an unofficial chaplain. His eulogies were short and his service always included the Twenty-third Psalm, by Hubbard’s lights an apt text. In the green gloom of the Basiad River, he could easily envision “the valley of the shadow of death.”3
They buried them as they were born, naked, their filthy rags stripped for the living to wear. If they died balled up or contorted, they were put in the ground that way, sitting hunched over. Less digging, the men reckoned, too many roots to go down deep. The diggers made crosses from sticks and pounded the rough rood into the damp earth at the top of the hole, then paused for a prayer. “The Lord is my shepherd . . .”
“Poor guys,” thought Ken Calvit, an Air Corps mechanic from Alexandria, Louisiana. “Here they are, seven thousand miles from home, lying on the ground naked, covered with flies, covered in shit, sicker than hell, nobody to even hold their hand, nobody to comfort them, nothing. What a way to go.”4
Men dying of cerebral malaria groaned and wailed for days, their song of suffering filling the hospital grove and spilling out onto the rock bar. At the end, their wails would fall to whispers, faint cries to friends and family, then, finally, an inarticulate rattle and rasp. At that point, the worms had already started their work, and everyone was eager to get the bodies underground.
BEN STEELE and Dalton Russell were agreed.
“If they don’t get us out of here,” Ben Steele said, “neither one of us is going to make it. We gotta get out of here some way. We’re burying more dead every day and soon we’re going to be one of them.”
They were huddled in their rebuilt lean-to, staring out at the heavy rain and gray gloom. “We ought to try,” Russell said. “You’re right, we’re gonna die if we don’t get out of here.”
Many of the others, watching the boneyard fill, were also thinking of escape, and sometime in June, six men took flight. It was easy to elude the guards; there weren’t that many of them. Besides, it was the jungle, not the Japanese, that was really imprisoning them.
As soon as the missing men were discovered, the Japanese asked for “volunteers” to help search, but after several days of beating the bush, they gave up. Some in the detail were sure the escapees were holed up with friendly villagers or had found a guerrilla camp in the hills. Most men, however, suspected that the runaways had been consumed by the jungle or had waded downriver and gotten caught in the current and washed out to sea.
Aft
er that, Ben Steele and Dalton Russell talked about eventualities rather than escape.
“If one of us gets back,” the sergeant said, “we should agree to see the other one’s family.”
“Fine,” said Ben Steele. He’d heard so much about the sergeant’s blond wife, Donnie, he could almost see her pretty face. And he reminded Russell that if the sergeant was the one who ended up making the condolence call, he should make sure to get some of Bess Steele’s roast pork and applesauce.
FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS, the Japanese pushed the men to work harder, part of a bet the guards had going. The keepers had divided the kept into teams, five prisoners to each guard, the guards haggling to get the biggest and strongest men. After the teams were picked, they set the wager, so much for the one that moved the most wheelbarrows of earth. With yen to win or lose, the guards drove their charges hard, rewarding good work with a banana or coconut, a short rest or water break. Slackers were scolded with stinging strokes from a punishment stick. The sergeant of the guard was particularly pitiless. He’d been wounded and hobbled at Lingayen Gulf, he told the captives, and he seemed determined to get even. He beat three men so hard with a bolo scabbard, they damn near died. After that, the men started calling him “the Killer.”
Sometime during the second or third week in June, after roughly a month working on the road, the prisoners began to notice a change in the guards. The beatings became less frequent. And every now and then, either at the jungle work site or back at the rock bar, a guard might wander over to where a prisoner was sitting and nonchalantly toss an okuri-mono, a little “present,” on the ground.
Irwin Scott was so sick with malaria when the detail arrived at Calauag, his comrade Bill White of Albuquerque had to carry him most of the way to the Basiad River. Scott couldn’t work, of course, and in the mornings was left back at camp with the infirm. Every afternoon when White returned from digging on the road, he would try to help his friend. First he would fetch him a cup of gruel and insist he eat it. Scott always refused (he was ready to give up), but White kept pushing the rice on him until the canteen cup was empty. Then White would pull his friend to his feet (Scott screaming execrations) and drag him across the rocks to the river to cool his fever and wash off the crud. After a while Scott started to show some improvement and White made his friend crawl to the water on his own, kicking him in the backside when he balked.
Tears in the Darkness Page 29