Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 53
The original commandant was a colonel named Ito, and he seemed a decent sort, but a few days after we arrived he suddenly left. His replacement was another colonel named Sakamoto, a heavy-set son of a bitch with a permanent scowl. Sakamoto made it clear right away that he intended to run a tight ship and didn’t give a damn for his prisoners’ exalted rank. But at least he wasn’t a brutal sadist or a screaming nutcase like some of the commandants you heard about.
The real hardship for most of the prisoners at Tarlac was mental. This was a camp for colonels and generals, after all, with a handful of lower ranks—as a mere Navy commander, I was pretty close to the bottom of the totem pole—and promotion had been slow in the peacetime years. So what you had was mostly a bunch of middle-aged and even elderly men; many of them had served in the last war, in France. The physical privations were rough enough on them, but the humiliation—having to salute and bow to teenaged Japanese privates, getting slapped like unruly children for trivial offenses—was far worse.
And then there was the shame of defeat. Especially this particular defeat. “They got their asses handed to them,” Carl Norton said, “by a bunch of people they’d always looked down on as ridiculous little monkeys who couldn’t do anything right. That’s what’s really eating them.”
“But not you?” I asked him, grinning. We were good friends; we’d known each other since Corregidor.
“Not me,” Carl said. “I saw the little bastards in action in China, remember? I knew the minute the war started we were in deep shit.”
There was a lot of arguing among the Army officers, too, about the reasons for the defeat, a lot of recrimination and blame-swapping, some of it pretty bitter. All that frustration and anger had to find some sort of outlet, after all . . . and anyway, there really wasn’t much else to do. The senior officers didn’t have to pull labor details, and the supply of reading matter or writing materials was nearly nonexistent, so squabbling like a bunch of old ladies was just about all there was left. That or simply sitting around staring silently off into nowhere.
General Wainwright arrived a few days after the rest of us, in a car from Manila. As senior American officer he might have been expected to do something about the state of morale, but his own obviously wasn’t so great either. He looked and moved like a man in tremendous pain, even though they hadn’t harmed him; and it wasn’t hard to understand why. He’d been the one to surrender—not just Corregidor, but all the American forces in the Philippines. That was one of the things people talked and argued about, though not within his hearing.
Anyway, that was what things were like at Tarlac when they brought MacArthur in.
He wasn’t wearing his trademark cap; I guess he’d lost it when Bulkeley’s PT boat was sunk. He was bareheaded and his uniform was a stained and rumpled ruin, and he wasn’t wearing his stars—none of the prisoners were allowed to wear rank insignia—but it didn’t matter; he’d have been recognizable in a jockstrap. He still carried himself tall and straight—he towered over the Japanese guards like an Oregon cedar—and he still moved with that long-legged stride, so that they had to hustle to keep formation around him.
But God, he looked old . . . he wasn’t a young man, of course, but he looked ten years older than when I’d seen him last.
“He looks like hell,” Carl Norton said. We were standing maybe twenty or thirty yards away from the gate; we’d just happened to be walking across the compound when the motor convoy drove up in front of the gate. No one in the camp, even General Wainwright, had been told MacArthur was coming. Maybe the commandant didn’t want us holding some kind of parade or ceremony to welcome him. More likely it just didn’t occur to the Japs to tell us, any more than you’d bother telling the stray mutts in the pound that you’re bringing the big dog in.
“Still got that presence, though,” Carl mused.
“It’s about all he’s got left,” I said.
“Yeah. Poor devil.”
We watched as they escorted him toward the headquarters building. Colonel Sakamoto had come out onto the porch and was waiting. A Japanese lieutenant came up and saluted and handed Sakamoto some papers. Then he shouted a command and the guard detail stamped to a halt.
The commandant stood staring at MacArthur. I couldn’t see MacArthur’s face from where I was standing, but I was pretty sure he was staring back.
And then, after what seemed like a long time, MacArthur saluted. It was an absolutely West-Point-correct salute, but it was as if he had enormous weights lashed to his arm.
Colonel Sakamoto didn’t return the salute; they never did. He just turned and walked back into the building, gesturing for MacArthur to follow. The lieutenant screamed at the soldiers again and they about-faced and headed back toward the gate.
Carl Norton let his breath out in a long ragged sigh. “Jesus,” he said.
And after a minute: “I never liked him, you know. I always figured him for a showoff and a glory hound. I still think he handled the defense of the Philippines like somebody trying to stick his dick in his ear. But you can’t help feeling for a man who’s been knocked down that hard.”
We still didn’t know, though, just how hard this particular man had been knocked down. We found out a couple of days later, when Sergeant Watanabe, the chief interpreter, told us MacArthur’s wife and son had been lost when the PT boat was sunk.
“There’s no question about it,” Watanabe said. “The bodies were found, washed up on the beach, the next day. The torpedo boat was literally blown out of the water, you know, by the destroyer’s guns. The only survivors were the general himself and an ordinary sailor who died of his wounds on the way back to Manila.”
He spoke in a clear, flawless English with only the faintest touch of an accent; four years at Princeton had left their mark, and not just on his language skills. He wasn’t happy about the war and he’d tell you privately that it was going to end catastrophically for Japan.
“I know Americans,” he would say. “You seem so easygoing, but under the surface you are a violent and vengeful people. You also think life is like your Western movies, in which the hero never draws first. An attack like the one at Pearl Harbor was the surest possible way to enrage the American people beyond all reason. You will not stop now until you have had your vengeance, no matter what it takes.”
Now Watanabe said, “It was a strange business in Colonel Sakamoto’s office. General MacArthur stood there looking straight ahead, without expression, while the commandant spoke and I translated. He only spoke in reply to direct questions, and when he did speak his voice was hoarse and indistinct, as if it hurt him to talk.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How has he been behaving, since his arrival?”
We both shook our heads. “We haven’t seen him,” I said, “except at a distance. The generals don’t mix much with us lower orders.”
Which was true, not that we’d have told Watanabe if we had known anything. The Japs made a point of not recognizing distinctions in rank among the prisoners, but even so, the generals had their own barracks, and had their meals together and so on.
And MacArthur had stayed out of sight; as far as I knew he hadn’t left the barracks except when he had to. We’d seen him at the morning roll-call formations, when we all had to bow in unison to the emperor, who was represented by a white post at the end of the parade ground. Really, I’m not making this up; you should have seen us, over a hundred middle-aged-to-elderly men lined up in ranks, bowing respectfully to a wooden post. Carl kept saying he was going to sneak out some night and piss on it, but he wasn’t suicidal enough to do it.
We’d seen MacArthur at mealtime, and a couple of times on the way to the latrine. But we hadn’t been close to him, and it wouldn’t have mattered if we had; there was a wall around him that was almost visible. It wasn’t just the traditional isolation of the man at the top; MacArthur seemed to be on another planet. One of the outer ones, cold and dark and with crushing gravity.
“They say he doesn’t talk to anyone,” Carl reported, later that evening. He was friendly with a couple of artillery colonels, and they in turn knew some of the generals, and so from time to time he heard things. “They say he just sits around, or lies on his bunk looking at the ceiling.”
MacArthur not talking? There was a thought to shake your faith in the immutable laws of the universe.
“Some people are worried he might kill himself,” Carl said.
“It’s possible.” On Corregidor it was common knowledge that MacArthur had said openly that he intended to shoot his family and then himself if capture was imminent. He probably meant it, too. “In some ways,” I said, “he thinks a lot like our beloved captors.”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “He’d have made a great samurai. Ironic as hell, huh?”
But then the following day, as we were walking across the parade ground, there he was, striding briskly toward us. He was wearing an old-fashioned campaign hat someone had given him—you didn’t go bareheaded in the Philippine sun if you could help it—and the brim shadowed his eyes, but there was something different about the set of his jaw and the way he held his head; or rather something more like the MacArthur I remembered. We stopped and came to something resembling attention, while Carl snapped off a salute. The stump of my right arm came up reflexively before I could stop it.
MacArthur ground to a stop in front of us and returned Carl’s salute. I suppose I looked embarrassed, because he turned to face me, still holding the salute, and said, “That’s all right, Commander. It’s fitting that I salute you, in view of the sacrifice you have made for our country.”
Then, lowering his hand, he added in a lower voice, “I too have lost my right arm . . .”
I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.
After a second he said, “Well, Commander, I haven’t seen you since Corregidor.” His voice had changed again; now it rang with a kind of strained heartiness. “How’s the arm? Healing well?”
“Yes, sir. Seems to be.”
“Good, good.” He nodded energetically. “And Major Norton, you’re looking well. I want you to know,” he said, “how much I appreciated the Marines’ contribution to the defense of these islands.”
I still couldn’t see his eyes clearly in the shadow of the hat’s brim, but there was something truly terrible in the lines around his mouth. It was as if the skin of his face had been stretched too tight.
Carl mumbled an indistinct thanks. MacArthur said, “Well, gentlemen, I’m afraid I haven’t time to stop and talk. But don’t hesitate to come to me if there’s any way I can be of help. We all have to help one another get through this time of trial.”
He turned, or rather did a parade-ground about-face, and strode away. We watched as he marched across the parade ground, somehow giving the impression of being followed by at least a division.
Carl said, “What the hell . . . ?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I’m in shock, too.”
“Well,” Carl said, “at least he’s got the line of bullshit back. Wonder what the story is?”
I said, “I doubt if we’ll ever know.”
But in fact we did find out the following day, by way of Carl’s artillery colonel buddies. “It was Bluemel,” he told us, and right away things started to make more sense.
General Bluemel was a monumentally tough old infantryman who had commanded a Philippine Army division in the Bataan campaign, and from all accounts he was absolutely fearless. His own subordinates had been terrified of him; there were rumors that he had personally shot men trying to retreat. “Son of a bitch should have been a Marine,” Carl Norton often said, bestowing his highest accolade.
“I wasn’t there,” the colonel said, “but what I heard was that Bluemel just walked up to him in the barracks, while he was sitting on his bunk staring at the wall, and laid into him. Chewed him out like an awkward recruit, right there in front of the other generals. They couldn’t hear all of it, but everybody clearly heard the phrase ‘sitting on your ass feeling sorry for yourself.’ ”
“No,” I said, and Carl said, “You’re kidding.”
The colonel shook his head, grinning. “I tell you, Bluemel’s something else. On Bataan he was up front with a rifle leading counterattacks like some young lieutenant. His men held their positions when everybody else was breaking and running, just because they were more afraid of him than the Japs.”
“So what did he say to MacArthur?” Carl prompted.
“From what I heard, he told him to pull himself together and start exercising some leadership. Said, ‘You’re not the first general to lose a campaign, or even the first man to lose his family.’ Asked him if he thought his son would want to know his father had turned out to be a quitter.”
It was like hearing that someone had gone up and kicked God in the ass. No, that would have been more believable; God, they tell us, forgives, which MacArthur never did.
“Bluemel told him he had a responsibility to the men in this camp,” the colonel went on. “And that it was time he started fulfilling it. Then he turned and walked away, without even giving MacArthur a chance to reply.”
“And?” I asked.
“And MacArthur just went on sitting there, still without speaking, the rest of the evening. But then the next morning he was up before anybody else, and he was—” The colonel spread his hands. “As you’ve seen. He’s been like that ever since. I’m not sure whether I want to thank Bluemel or kill him.”
In the days ahead there were times when I felt the same way. MacArthur was back in full force-of-nature style. He reorganized the mess and somehow persuaded Colonel Sakamoto to improve the food allowance. He instituted a series of classes in which officers lectured the rest of us on their various subjects of knowledge, from military history to Shakespeare. Christ, he even started group singing sessions in the evenings!
None of which went over all that well with the men whose morale it was supposed to restore. For one thing, they were veteran professional soldiers; they didn’t appreciate being hustled like a lot of homesick Boy Scouts. For another, a considerable number of them—probably over half the officers in camp—blamed MacArthur for the military debacle that had put them behind barbed wire to begin with.
Still, they went along, if only from boredom and because resistance would have taken too much energy. And the additional food, and the other small concessions MacArthur managed to get from Sakamoto, did a lot to improve his popularity.
Watanabe asked us a couple of times whether we knew anything about the sudden change in MacArthur’s behavior. I wouldn’t quite say he tried to pump us, but he was pretty persistent. Needless to say we didn’t admit to knowing a thing.
“Very strange,” Watanabe said. “His earlier despondency, I can understand. After all, to become a prisoner is bad enough, but to be captured while trying to flee—the humiliation must be all but unbearable.” He shook his head. “The fortunes of war, as they say. If that destroyer hadn’t happened to be where it was that night, if General MacArthur had made it to Australia, he would be a great national hero now.”
“After getting whipped the way he did?” Carl Norton snorted. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, but you forget your country’s admiration for brave losers. The Alamo, Custer’s last stand, and all that. It is one of the aspects of your culture,” Watanabe said, “that we Japanese find most baffling.”
“Something phony about that son of a bitch,” Carl said after Watanabe was gone. “Somebody that smart, that well educated, and he’s just a buck-ass sergeant at a prison camp? Bullshit. I’d bet my rapidly diminishing ass he’s with Jap intelligence. All these senior officers here, they’re a gold mine of information on the U.S. military. A man like Watanabe, with his good-guy act, could pick up all sorts of valuable information.”
“Or he’s playing some kind of private game,” I said.
“Could be,” Carl said. “In my experience most people are.”
A week or so later the camp had a visitor.
He didn’t arrive with any sort of fanfare; he just rode up in an unmarked car, unaccompanied except for the driver. I happened to be passing nearby as he got out of the car, and I got a pretty good look at him. He got a look at me, too, and his face went dark and he started to open his mouth, no doubt to yell at me for not saluting him; but then he saw the stump of my arm. While he was registering that I threw him a quick bow—I had a feeling this was somebody I better not piss off—and when I straightened up he was standing there staring at me, the way you’d look at something really disgusting you’d just stepped in.
He wasn’t much to look at; he was short and squat even by Japanese standards, with a bristling black beard and mustache and thick glasses—none of which hid nearly enough of his face; he really was an ugly little bastard. He wore an ordinary field uniform, badly rumpled and a little too big for him; his collar bore the three stars and three red stripes of a colonel.
He stood for a moment giving me that hating glare, and then suddenly he turned and headed toward the headquarters building, walking very fast, with an odd, almost loping gait. And I hauled ass away from there before he could change his mind; I didn’t know who the hell he was, but he had bad news written all over him.
Sergeant Watanabe was standing near the fence, watching the visitor as he stalked across the HQ porch and disappeared inside. “You are a lucky man,” he said to me. “I thought for a minute you were in big trouble. You don’t want to attract Colonel Tsuji’s attention.”
“Tsuji?” The name was a new one on me.
“You don’t know, do you? You should. All of you should know about Colonel Tsuji.” There was no one anywhere near us, but Watanabe’s voice was very low. “Because he wants you all dead.”
“I thought that was what you all wanted.” I held up my stump. “You sure try hard enough.”
“It’s not a joke.” Watanabe looked serious, even scared. “When Bataan fell, he tried to have the prisoners executed, and in some cases he succeeded. General Homma gave orders that the prisoners should be treated humanely, but Colonel Tsuji countermanded them.”
