I Saw You Fell - "Angels Of Bataan"

CHAPTER 5

It was nearly a hundred degrees on a sunny day in Manila when my group stumbled through the front gate of the walled compound. This would be our new home for the near future. A surprisingly small number of Japanese guards escorted us. It's hard to be heroic when you're beaten for any indiscretion. Added to the shock of our sudden reversal of fortune, it made us all quite docile.

About four thousand persons would eventually live in Santo Tomas. But the people from the Manila hotel were among the earliest to arrive. So, the campus was still relatively open and pleasant. But more importantly, I got my pick of living quarters in the university's classroom buildings.

I staked out a nice corner spot near a window on the third floor. It gave me a slight breeze. The average space allotted for internees was twenty square feet, but I appropriated closer to twenty-five. I waited until it was pitch black the first night to cut a hidey-hole through the plaster behind my things. Then I spent the entire night stashing coins and bills between the walls.

You might have wondered about my state of mind. Well, frankly, I was energized. Astonishing, did you say? Remember that we all thought our imprisonment would last a few weeks, so this was something different, a diversion. We were all convinced that the United States would quickly defeat Japan; once they had, we would be known as the heroes of Santo Tomas.

I know ... that sounds fabulously naive in hindsight. But you have to understand we lived in a world where Anglo-American domination was unquestioned. The idea that an upstart nation populated by people not remotely like us could prevail over Western-European armies was simply unimaginable.

Nevertheless, the world had changed. Westerners might have had the advantage of technology and manufacturing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the Japanese were innovative, and they had learned.

Thus, when the rumor came down in April of '42 that American forces on Bataan had surrendered, we began to think the unthinkable. Then the fall of Corregidor sealed our fate. We realized that we would be stuck in that shithole until death-did-we-part.

It was utterly unreal. You kept expecting the ordinary world of comfort and privilege to return. But instead, you found yourself caught in a continuing nightmare of heat, bugs, deprivation, subjugation, and suffering.

Epidemics of typhoid fever, caused by abysmal sanitation in the overcrowded camp, were a regular occurrence. Then, there was also a prisoner of war's normal ration of shit, accidents, tropical diseases, and malnutrition. I particularly hated the rats. It wasn't until later that they became a delicacy.

The food was unpalatable, and there was never enough of it. We sweated and scratched and lived in filth and stink. But the worst of it was the endless boredom. The natural response was, "Why me??!!"

I'd been one of the social elites before December 8th. Then a mere two months later, I was a faceless prisoner, existing at the whim of an alien and unfathomable people. The culture shock was beyond tolerating. As far as I was concerned, my life was over. I would go to sleep every night praying I wouldn't wake up in the morning.

The unfortunate reality of my new circumstance was hard to bear. I suffered from crippling bouts of self-pity and a constant sense of abject loneliness. The thought of Margarita fucking her way across the Pacific with that reptile Giles Pemberton just put the cherry on top of a big pile of steaming, unjustified dung.

The Japanese mostly left us to fend for ourselves within the camp's walls. We were irrelevant to their plans, an inconvenient by-product of their success, to be dealt with strictly by the conventions of war. Their only requirement was that we attend a 7:30 p.m. roll call every night.

Otherwise, my life was one day-after-another of living in hell. It was stiflingly hot and humid, and it rained a lot. Thirty people crowded into my classroom; twelve hundred men shared thirteen toilets and twelve showers. Of course, the place stank to high heaven. Modesty and privacy were laughable concepts. Cleanliness was unthinkable.