“Leave me alone!” Scotty would yell. “Lemme die.”5
“Aw, go on and crawl down there,” White would say. “You’re dirty. You need to wash yourself.”
“Why can’t you just leave me the fuck alone? We’re all gonna die here. Nobody gives a damn what happens.”
“Oh, yes they do,” White said one day. “Watch.”
A few minutes later, a guard appeared at the edge of the rock bar. He looked around till he spotted White, then started walking slowly and casually in their direction.
“Here he comes,” White whispered.
As the guard passed the two men on the rocks, he dropped a small bundle wrapped in a green banana leaf and wandered off as if nothing had happened. White unwrapped the package. Inside was a rice ball and a tiny white hand-folded envelope that held two pills.
“Go ahead,” White said, handing the rice and pills to Scott. “Eat them.”
“What is it?” Scott said.
“The pills are quinine.”
“Bullshit.”
“Taste it.”
Bill White was right.
“The day after I brought you into camp passed out,” White explained, “that guard came walking by like he was checking something, and when he saw you he tossed me a folded banana leaf. ‘For him,’ he said, and he pointed at you. That’s the only words he said.” Every two or three days the guard returned with another okurirnono, and White slipped the pills into the gruel he had been forcing Scott to eat, the spiked slop that had been saving his life.
One guard gave Louis Kolger a whole bottle of quinine, and another tossed Ben Steele a couple of pills. Air Corps radio operator Paul Reuter of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, noticed that even the Killer was handing out okurirnono. He was still beating his workers with his scabbard, but at night he’d sidle up to the men he’d thumped and slip them some quinine and Japanese fruit juice.
The cynics in camp said the Japanese were just looking out for their own interests, tending to their human livestock, their draft animals. But their extra attentions had no effect on the work. Every day fewer and fewer Americans were able to answer the morning call. No, the Killer and his comrades weren’t helping their captives because they wanted to get more production out of them. To some of the men it was almost as if the enemy, moved by the abject misery of the place, was starting to feel sorry for them.
TWICE IN JUNE the Japanese culled the sickest prisoners from the detail and put them on a truck and drove them 173 miles north to Manila and a hospital for prisoners of war that U.S. Navy doctors had set up in the city’s Bilibid Prison. One of those trucks rolled into the prison compound on June 19, the day Army doctor Captain Paul Ashton happened to arrive at Bilibid with some five hundred patients from one of Bataan’s captured field hospitals. Ashton had just settled his patients in their beds (straw mats on concrete floors) and was strolling around the prison compound getting the lay of the place when the truck from Tayabas Road stopped just inside the front gate.
Thirty invalids were in the back, men so emaciated, filthy, and malodorous no one moved to help them. “They were not in uniforms,” Ashton noted, “just nondescript shirts and pants, rags really, and caked with muck. They looked wizened and dehydrated . . . quite the sickest” and most “broken men” Ashton had ever seen.6
Who were these wretched derelicts? Ashton wondered. And what kind of “frightful” hell had tossed them up? When the prison medical staff learned that there were more such cases at the road-building site, they asked the prison commandant if they could send someone down, and Captain Ashton—intrepid surgeon and irritating swashbuckler—was the first to volunteer.
In 1940, living in San Francisco, Paul Ashton had almost everything he’d ever wanted—a pretty wife (Yvonne Toolen was as beautiful as a “fairy queen,” he thought) and a good job as a surgeon at Letter-man Army Hospital. All that was missing was a little “adventure.” He’d spent “a lifetime sitting in chairs studying,” and now he yearned for some “excitement,” some “color,” so he put in for a transfer to the Philippines, arriving in Manila in June 1941 and assigned to the 12th Medical Regiment, Philippine Scouts.
On Bataan Ashton had become a triage specialist, operating in the open or under a tent next to the front lines. His first job, of course, was saving lives, but he thought himself a fighting man as well as a doctor and was just as willing to take lives as save them. He kept a .45 automatic strapped to his hip and told anyone within earshot that he was ready to use it against the nearest Jap. (Riding in an ambulance once, he came under fire from a Japanese Zero, grabbed a Browning automatic rifle, and started shooting at the plane.) He could be abrupt and abrasive, but he was a steady surgeon, ready to carry his doctor’s kit into any foxhole or jungle waste.
Ashton convinced Major Charles Brown, a doctor from San Antonio, Texas, and a few army medics who’d chased around on Bataan as his assistants to accompany him to Tayabas. The medicos likely arrived at the site on Monday, June 22, almost a month to the day since the detail left O’Donnell to start working there. It was dark when the truck carrying the six men from Bilibid came up the road from Calauag, crossed the bridge, and stopped at the riverbank. Ashton, an avid memoirist, never forgot his first impression of the place.
The headlights of the truck revealed the rock-covered river bank . . . It was a warm tropical night, and as our eyes became used to the dark, we could see many people sleeping amid the rocks on the bank. Few of them had anything to lie upon.
The next morning we awakened early, and at dawn the red sun was filtering down into our clearing. Smoke from a few small fires curled straight up and many people were stirring around . . . The jungle was the first I ever saw that was truly impenetrable . . . The sun only shone on the camp when directly overhead, since we were surrounded by tall jungle trees. The place rarely had a chance to dry out, and the mosquitoes were [astonishing].
Ashton started asking questions, talking to the ambulatory, making an inventory of the sick: “everyone had diarrhea or dysentery”; most had malaria too; a handful suffered from dengue fever and couldn’t eat. Half the detail seemed to have some kind of respiratory problem, and several of these were developing pneumonia. Others were either yellow with jaundice or covered with jungle ulcers, which were suppurating and attracting flies. A number of the infirm were infested with worms, nematodes, deposited as larvae by flies and mosquitoes. (A local guerrilla, Bernabe de Leon, who sold snacks by the bridge and spied on the Japanese, one day came upon an American on a path in the jungle near the river. The man was only half conscious, sitting on the ground with his back against a tree. His head was leaning back and inch-long worms were crawling out of his closed eyes.)
The doctors did what they could to treat this catalog of disease. Ashton brought what medicine was available, morphine mostly. He ran out of paregoric, the treatment for dysentery, his second or third day on-site and tried homemade remedies: riverbank clay mixed with water and decanted into a silt the men could swallow, and spoonfuls of powdered charcoal ground from burned boxwood, a treatment that left most of the detail black faced from their noses to their chins.
The weak were too weak, “even [to] feed themselves,” and with “the flies, bugs and leeches . . . legion,” Ashton, Brown, and the corpsmen spent their days circulating among the men on the rocks and under the tarp “fanning away the bugs” that would “congregate on the skin,” inflicting “multiple bites that would cause ulcerations, especially on the cheeks and foreheads.” Their “uncontrolled diarrhea” compounded the problem, and the doctors and corpsmen were “constantly” dragging men to the river and “cleaning and bathing them.”
Watching all this, the Japanese conferred a kind of unofficial authority on the doctor. The detail’s American commander, Captain Henry Pierce, did not have Ashton’s moxie, and his second in command, Lieutenant Thomas Rhodes, had been caught stealing food from their stockpile and the men despised and shunned him. Into the void stepped Ashton. “Few of the guards on the road job
seemed hateful or vicious” to him. Instead he saw them as simply ignorant and inept. At first he tried arguing with them. Couldn’t they see that if they treated the men better, they’d get more out of them? When that didn’t work he took to haranguing them, standing on the rock bar and shouting tirades upstream toward their camp.
He also treated a few of their soldiers for diarrhea and became friendly with one of them, a hohei who apparently had been distributing okurimono. One day Ashton noticed the man missing from the site and asked after him. The soldier was byōki byōin (sick in hospital) in Calauag, and the guards asked Ashton if he would go there and look at the man.
It was a ramshackle barn where fifteen Japanese soldiers lay on the ground on rice straw, some shivering with malaria, some with diarrhea . . . A couple even had my charcoal on their chins . . . [No doctors or orderlies were around.] They prepared their own food or friends brought it to them. Otherwise they got nothing. I had occasion to ruminate on the sort of help or consideration [we could expect] from people who cared for their own in that manner.
After that, the Japanese took to calling Ashton shōsa, “Major,” instead of the captain he was, and made him a kind of honorary noncommissioned officer in their unit. Every morning at dawn, however, Ashton reverted to being their antagonist, “the fly in their rice,” as he liked to think of himself, holding back as many sick men as possible from the job site.
In the weeks that followed, the death rate increased—three, four, five men a day.
The stronger men became weaker and several startling cases of sudden death occurred even in the strongest when attacked by dysentery which we could not prevent . . . Our graveyard was growing by leaps and bounds at the edge of the clearing. Most of the men died in black face, and their hats and rags, taken to be washed as best we could without soap, were given to survivors. We had no shrouds for the emaciated corpses covered with bug bites and leech ulcers . . . I said or thought a few words for each man as his last rites.
SOME MEN WENT INSANE. The detail’s executive officer, Captain Jerry Gonzales of Magdalena, New Mexico, spent a whole day trying to put both his shoes on the same foot. (He died June 19, and his men, out of respect, buried him in uniform, the only man so interred.) Another soldier—(Hatten, some of the men called him)—developed an obsession with his mess kit. Every morning he’d become angry at his breakfast and beat his tin canteen cup into a lump, then he would spend the rest of the day banging it back into shape again.
Steve Kramerich was crazy and knew it. Sick with cerebral malaria, he’d been assigned a spot under the hospital tarp. One afternoon he dreamed he had amnesia. “This is horrible,” he said to himself in his dream, and he awoke with his heart pounding. When he looked around, he saw some dirty men in ragged clothes sitting nearby cooking something. Who were these men, he wondered, and why were they sitting in the open around a campfire? And all at once he realized that his dream was no dream at all.
Steve Kramerich, an army signal corpsman from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, could not remember who he was. He wandered over to the circle of men, asked what they were doing. (Maybe they knew him, he thought.)7
“We’re fixing a little chow,” one of them said.
He stood there for a while, hoping to hear something that would jog his memory, make him remember his name.
The next morning, still amnesic, he found himself walking through the camp and came upon a man in uniform, holding a long rifle. What a strange-looking fellow, Steve Kramerich thought, and he ambled up to the man and introduced himself.
“And who are you?” Kramerich asked.
The man holding the rifle looked annoyed, barked something unintelligible, and motioned for Steve Kramerich to go away.
“But I don’t know you,” Steve Kramerich said.
The man was getting irritated now, shaking his rifle at him.
Steve Kramerich said to himself, “This man has a gun. I better not do anything foolish.” And he tootled away, more befuddled than before.
BY THE MIDDLE OF JULY Ben Steele was spending all day in his lean-to at the edge of the rock bank. His malaria was so advanced he was having daily attacks. “Each one is tearing me down a little bit more,” he thought. “I’m getting weaker every day.”
The week before, digging on a hillside barefoot and in a G-string, he had stepped on a sharp stick. The point punctured the ball of his foot, and within twenty-four hours the foot became infected. The infection spread up his leg, which started to swell. Blood poisoning, Ashton told him.
On top of all this he was suffering from beriberi and the painful edema that comes with it. His ankles were swollen and grotesque, “as big as melons,” he thought. He could no longer stand and had to depend on Sergeant Russell for almost everything.
Through it all, he had struggled to keep his spirits up. A few days after they’d arrived at the rock bar and learned they’d be living without shelter, he told himself, “The type of life I’ve lived, dealing with the elements, I think that’s going to help me take care of myself here.” He thought about the year he’d worked in the Big Hole, how the crew had slept on a hillside in the rain for days that spring with nothing but their bedrolls for cover, shivering at night and working “sopping wet” during the day, making the best of it. But a rainstorm in a Montana mountain valley was like a sprinkle set against the massive monsoons that rolled in from the South China Sea and enveloped the thick jungle of the Bicol peninsula. At home on the prairie, he might best the elements, but here at the end of the world, sleeping on rocks, he was no match for nature and knew it.
At first he called on God for help. Every day he prayed for deliverance: Please, God, he would say, let this work detail be over before they all died. And he begged the Almighty to show him how to continue, how to survive. Then the beriberi crippled him and he gave up praying and looking to heaven for help.
He thought, “After going through the battle, the march, O’Donnell, now this? We’re just a bunch of guys that nobody gives a shit about. “We’ve been let down by everybody—God, our country. All those promises, nothing happened. We’ve been sacrificed.”
He didn’t believe in anything anymore. He’d lost all hope of ever leaving the river and the rock bar. He thought, “I’m about as low as you can get without being six feet under.”
Every day he could feel himself failing some more. He was so sick and wretched, he thought, “I don’t care whether I live or die. I just don’t give a damn.”
He wasn’t afraid and he wasn’t angry. He was dying. And he wondered, “How soon? How soon?”
THEY’D REACHED THE END. After eight weeks at the site, on or around July 25, Paul Ashton told the Japanese that no one was able to work.
None of the men who remained were “fit for duty” and the total census of the working party had shrunk to twenty, including the two corps-men and myself. Of the remaining seventeen, at least seven were moribund. [Everyone] was entirely depleted by the multiple diseases that consumed them. Dysentery had dehydrated them, removing essential chemicals and fluids; malaria with chills and fever had thinned their blood, turning the urine to black water. Their bellies were bloated, yet their extremities thin. Their wizened faces gave them an appearance of advanced age. The far-off lack of focus in their sunken eyes (as a myriad of flies walked drunkenly searching between the parted lips and eyelids, and upon the mosquito-ulcerated cheek bones) revealed their merciful preoccupation with the beat of some other drummer.
The Japanese told Ashton to get his men ready for transport to Manila the next day.
BEN STEELE was half gone. Maybe he heard the news, maybe he didn’t. He was delirious. All he could think about was getting a drink. Where was Russell, where was the sergeant? Never mind. He pulled himself slowly across the rock bar to the river and lowered his face into the water.
MEANWHILE the Japanese were telling Ashton that they refused to transport seven men who were lying unconscious under the hospital tarp. Space was tight, the guards said. No point carrying men who
wouldn’t make it. Ashton knew better than to argue. He knelt down among the comatose men and lingered for a long time.
The Japanese were screaming at him to “Speedo! Speedo!” but Ashton ignored them. He was going to give his patients one last treatment, and he was not going to be rushed.
As a medical student in San Francisco, he’d studied with a professor who had given large injections of morphine to patients with terminal tuberculosis. “G.O.M.,” the professor called the treatment, “God’s Own Medicine.”
Ashton reached into his medical bag and took out a syringe. He filled it with God’s Own Medicine, then went from man to man, giving each a shot. (“They were yet alive,” he noted, “but quite oblivious to what was being done to them.”) He was not going “to leave them . . . without water or help,” he told himself, and he was not going to leave them “for the ants to eat” either.8
SIXTY-THREE MEN had been buried at the site and six had disappeared during an escape. A hundred and twenty-four men had been returned to the Bilibid Prison hospital on two earlier trips; thirty of these had died en route or in the hospital. Out of the original detail of three hundred, nearly one-third, ninety-nine men, were dead.
Tears in the Darkness Page 30