Seasons of the Heart (12 page)

They passed a well, but only the guards were allowed near it. The captives were permitted to watch as the guards slaked their thirst. Phillip refused to drink the last cup of water in his canteen, wanting to save it for Bugleman. It occurred to him that the Japanese wanted to be rid of their prisoners in order to save the bother of maintaining them in a camp: perhaps the brutality was calculated, not spontaneous. In any case, the column seemed to grow larger, not smaller.

Late that afternoon there was a change of guard, and the new soldiers allowed their charges to rush to a small, slow-moving stream, drink, and fill their canteens. The dehydrated men drank until they were bloated, paying no attention to the green scum on the surface. The next day almost half of them were struck with dysentery. Since stopping in the road was punished by blows or even death, they fouled themselves and kept going.

Phillip thought that the limits of hell had been reached until the third morning, when for some reason the guards ordered the column to do double time. He looked at Bugleman: the leg was worse. He and Phillip had begun the march at the head of the column, but they had gradually dropped back and were now bringing up the rear.

Phillip’s heart sank as he recognized the guard for their section—it was the same one that had thrown Bugleman’s crutches into the ditch. The Japanese saw them hesitating at the edge of the column and shouted something. Phillip knew that if they fell back another step, the man would kill Bugleman.

“This is it,” Bugleman said. “I can’t make it.”

Phillip unscrewed the nozzle of his canteen and shoved it under Bugleman’s nose. “Drink it,” he ordered.

“No!” Bugleman protested. “It’s all we’ve got.”

Phillip tilted the canteen. “Drink it.”

Bugleman drank.

The guard was watching them closely, waiting.

“Now move it!” Phillip shouted at his friend as he propelled them both into the safety of the center of the column.

An hour later, the double-timing ceased, since even the guards couldn’t stand the pace. But it was past sunset when the prisoners were finally allowed to stop.

Some days there had been no food at all, but tonight the rice pots were going. The soldiers shuffled past the giant vats, and a cup of hot rice was slapped into their cupped hands. They crammed it into their mouths on the spot, then washed it down with weak tea.

Bugleman was so ill that he had lost interest in food, and Phillip couldn’t force him to join the rice line. Phillip checked the captain’s leg. As he opened the bandages there was a terrible stench. The flesh was an angry red and oozing with pus.

“Gangrene,” Bugleman murmured.

“No—there’s a bad infection, but it will heal.”

“I’m going to die, Phil,” Bugleman said quietly. “I’m never going to see Alicia again, or the baby.”

“Don’t say that!” Phillip cried. Abruptly he got up, fetched some water from a nearby pond, and carefully purified it with the last of his iodine tablets.

By the time he got back, Bugleman was unconscious.

Phillip knew that his friend needed fluids badly, so he dipped a corner of his shirt into the canteen and began to drip water onto Bugleman’s lips. Finally Bugleman came to and drank a little more from the canteen. Then he slept.

The next day they came to a railroad junction and were told to halt. Phillip’s heart leaped. If only Bugleman could make it to the camp, he might get some decent care, though a skeptical voice warned him not to get his hopes up.

The captain seemed a little more optimistic. “If I can just rest for a few days, I just might have a chance….”

But as they were shoved into the boxcars along with hundreds of other soldiers, Bugleman’s face took on a ghastly hue. The sun beat down remorselessly, sending the temperature well above one hundred. Those with dysentery had no control over their bowels, and the soldiers soon found themselves locked in a stinking hell.

One man, driven beyond his endurance, began to scream at the top of his lungs. Then he changed to an eerie howl, which finally subsided into inhuman gibbering. A man next to Phillip, already far gone with fever, died standing up, trying to look out between the slats of the closed car.

Several hours later the train stopped at a siding and they were allowed to pass the dead bodies out. Phillip seized the canteen of the dead man next to him and gave it to Bugleman. Not one of the prisoners could have said how much time passed before the train stopped again and the guards opened the doors and ordered the remaining prisoners to emerge.

They literally fell from the car, stiff, cramped, trembling, and filthy, and were confronted with a bare dirt compound surrounded with corrugated iron huts and an old hangar with a sign reading
MORTON AIR FIELD
, which had been daubed over with black Japanese characters.

Phillip surveyed their new home. A rough wooden platform had been erected at the head of the compound. Apparently they were to hear an address from the camp commander.

After they had waited in the sun for some forty-five minutes, a diminutive figure in black, shiny riding boots strode into view. Swaggering to the exact center of the platform, he stared down at the prisoners with distaste.

“I am Captain Nakanishi, your commandant. You, the defeated, are here to await the ultimate world victory of the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces. The Japanese Empire does not recognize the so-called Geneva Convention.” His voice was filled with contempt. “You are not prisoners of war—you are guests of the Emperor!”

Captain Hideo Nakanishi had hated Westerners long before the war. In the early thirties he had won a scholarship to Oxford, where the upper-class English had laughed openly at his poverty, his race, his accent, and above all at his short stature. He was a Jap, a “wog,” an outcast. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven.

When he learned of Pearl Harbor he wept with joy. But now, months after that brilliant victory, he was assigned to this miserable POW camp in an outpost where the enemy had already been crushed. But at least he could vent his hatred on the vanquished.

After his speech, the prisoners who could walk were herded into their assigned huts, while the severely wounded and desperately ill were consigned to a primitive sick bay.

When Phillip went to visit Bugleman, an Australian doctor pulled him over to a corner of the hut and shook his head. Phillip refused to meet his eyes.

Phillip bent over the mat on which Bugleman was lying. “I’ll visit you when I can. Chin up—you’ll make it.”

But Bugleman grew worse. He shook violently with chills and was conscious for only a few hours a day. Phillip watched in despair, which was deepened by his observation that men in even worse shape than Jerry seemed to be pulling through.

He asked a medic to confirm this: “Am I just imagining it?”

“You’re right,” the medic told him. “The ones that get real mad seem to make it mote often. The gentle ones usually give up and die.” He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid your friend is one of the gentle ones.”

As Bugleman’s condition deteriorated, Phillip became increasingly angry about the almost total absence of medical supplies. There weren’t even any clean bandages, not to mention anesthetics, sulfa, or quinine. The doctors had considered amputating Bugleman’s leg, but without sulfa it wouldn’t do much good. And they wanted to spare him the pain.

Finally Phillip went to see the senior American officer, Colonel Watkins.

“Sir, I respectfully request that a request be delivered to Commander Nakanishi. We need supplies for the hospital: sulfa, quinine, whatever else he’s got.”

The colonel, a burly Southerner with a pockmarked face, drawled, “Request denied, Lieutenant.”

“But, sir! The men are dying for lack of those few simple things.”

The colonel leaned forward, his eyes hard. “Are you blind? Nakanishi doesn’t give a damn! The more of us who die, the easier his job is. If you complain, they are just going to list you as a troublemaker. They ain’t going to give you any sulfa or even any Band-Aids. No way!”

Phillip watched in impotent fury as the colonel settled back into his chair and rolled a cigarette. The next time Phillip visited his friend, Bugleman was in a deep coma. Driven to despair, Phillip decided to protest, against orders. Using an old envelope, he drafted a polite letter and walked over to the commandant’s headquarters. He gestured to a guard that the letter was to be delivered to Colonel Nakanishi.

The guard was gone for two or three agonizing minutes, while Phillip waited, fearful that his answer would be the order for his immediate execution. Then the guard returned, his face impassive.

Phillip walked back to his hut. Nakanishi could deny the request, or ignore it—but at least he, Phillip, had taken a stand. Perhaps in the long run it would have an effect.

He was standing in the food line with his men when the PA system whined into life and Nakanishi mounted the platform. The men were forced to stand at attention.

“Lieutenant Coulter. Step forward.”

Phillip managed to propel himself forward on trembling legs.

“It has come to my attention,” Nakanishi began, “that you are unhappy with the conditions provided by our glorious Emperor Hirohito.”

Phillip said nothing.

Nakanishi eyed him for a moment before descending the steps to the compound. He crossed to within two feet of where Phillip stood.

“Answer my question!” The diminutive commandant was working himself into a rage.

Phillip’s initial terror was replaced by a sense of inner calm. At least he would die doing what he knew was right.

The commandant stamped his foot: Phillip’s silence was an insult to him, a threat to his authority—to the authority of the Emperor himself.

He pulled his heavy service revolver out of its holster and hit Phillip hard on the right cheek with the barrel. Phillip dropped to the ground. The last words he heard before passing out were: “Be grateful for what you’ve got … pretty boy.”

Phillip lay unconscious in the middle of the compound. No one dared approach him until Nakanishi had disappeared into his quarters and slammed the door. Then Phillip’s men ran to help him. Wordlessly, they picked him up and carried him to the sick bay.

That night, Phillip lay on a mat in the hut that served as officers’ quarters. The wound was deep and somewhat painful, but no bones were broken. Worse was the fact that after regaining consciousness Colonel Watkins had stormed into the sick bay and chewed him out for disobeying orders.

In the dim light, Phillip noticed that someone was standing over him. He hoped the man would go away and let him sleep.

The voice that said his name spoke gently, with a Brooklyn accent. “How ya doin’ there, Coulter?”

“Not too bad,” Phillip managed. He opened his eyes and recognized their chaplain, Father Michael O’Connor. A blunt-spoken young Irish priest, he had a pair of world-weary blue eyes that nothing seemed to shock.

O’Connor
had
seen more in his short lifetime than most men. One of ten children of a fiercely Irish Catholic family, he had grown up in a section of Brooklyn that was largely Jewish. The little O’Connors had been isolated by their Catholicism, and by their policeman father, a basically decent man who was nonetheless uncompromisingly intolerant of the Jews around them, and liked to call them “the murderers of Our Lord” in his bad moments.

But young Michael had always been fascinated by the community and took every opportunity to learn about it. He spoke Yiddish fluently and had studied Jewish religious customs.

When he grew older, he got a job delivering suits for Abraham the tailor. His father grudgingly admitted that money was money, as long as Michael understood that he was not to mingle with “the sheenies” any more than was absolutely necessary. O’Connor had already decided that Michael was to enter the seminary, just as he had intended his oldest daughter for the convent.

By the time Michael reached adolescence, he had established a business for himself in delivery services. But he was also deeply offended by the corruption that ran just beneath the surface of life in the little community, and doubted he could really fit in. So it was with a feeling of relief that he had entered the seminary at eighteen, just as his sister Mary Agnes had dutifully entered the convent the year before.

But the austere, scholarly life of the order didn’t satisfy Michael’s desire to be needed, so immediately after taking his vows, he requested to work in one of the worst slums in Brooklyn.

The downtrodden inhabitants of the neighborhood loved O’Connor, even though he often could do nothing for them. When the pressures and frustrations became too much for him, he drank, and as time passed, he drank more. Sometimes he slept in the rear of a saloon, unable to make it home. The other priests knew that Father O’Connor had his little weakness, and would quietly help him home the next day.

O’Connor was almost glad when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. As an army chaplain he would have no time for the bottle and even less time to feel sorry for himself. From the beginning, he had been constantly in demand to console suffering men like Lieutenant Coulter. Coulter, though not badly hurt, was now staring up at him with an expression of unrelieved misery. O’Connor knew of Phillip’s friendship with Bugleman, and understood that Phillip was tortured with guilt at his failure to help the captain. He probably believed that he had made things even worse by his ill-considered action.

O’Connor cleared his throat nervously. “That was a fine thing you did, Lieutenant,” he said. When Phillip merely turned his head away he added, “It took a lot of guts to face Nakanishi—more guts than old Watkins has.”

“Thanks,” Phillip managed to say.

“How’s your buddy doing?”

“Not so good.”

O’Connor was silent for a moment. “It’s tough to see all these young guys dying. Real tough.”

Dragging himself painfully to a sitting position, Phillip asked, “Father, do you think that God has a purpose in all this?”

“Frankly, no. I don’t think God has anything to do with it.”

“You know, I’m Jewish, and even though I’m not from a very religious family, I’ve always felt God’s presence in my life.”