Tears in the Darkness (35 page)

“I would really like to go and join my comrades and help kill the prisoners,” he told himself, but he was still weak with chills and fever and could barely stand up. Never mind. At least he could watch, bear witness to their work.

He crawled to the trail above the ravines and “like a toad clinging to the roadside” found a place where he “could see everything.”

The killing began right after breakfast. The prisoners were gathered at a secluded spot on the trail, divided into files of fifteen to thirty men, then they were marched a mile or so to the killing site, a section of trail along a precipice above a ravine. Between the staging spot and killing ground was a ridge, so the remaining prisoners could not see or hear what was happening to each file of men after it had been marched away.

At the ravine the first file was made to sit on the ground next to the precipice, facing the void. A soldier held each prisoner tightly by the scruff of the neck. Behind stood other soldiers, the executioners, with rifles and bayonets and swords. At a signal, the soldiers released their grip and the executioners drove their blades home, aiming at a point from behind where they guessed they might skewer the heart. When they were done, they kicked the dead and dying into the ravine, and another file of prisoners was marched into place.

When the second line of prisoners saw the blood on the trail and the bodies below, they grew restive, and as soon as the soldiers loosened their grip on them, they leaped into the ravine. Some tumbled and bounced down the steep slope, breaking their bones; others crashed directly on the bed of rocks below.

“They had to give it a try,” Nagai thought, watching from a distance. “They knew they would be killed.”

After that the lines of prisoners were made to face away from the ravine, and after they were stabbed or beheaded on the trail, the soldiers picked them up by their arms and legs and
ichi, ni, san,
“one, two, three,” flung them into the gorge.

Now and then Yoshiaki Nagai noticed an American in the group; the white men were sunburned (the color of pomegranates, he thought) and easy to pick out. One of them, perhaps a young officer, Nagai guessed, had been bayonetted only once and was still alive, flailing about in agony, facedown on the trail. He looked “like a frog swimming in water,” Nagai thought. A
hohei
standing nearby, apparently seething with vengeance, stepped forward and hoisted a large rock above his head.

“Look at this!” he said.

Then, yelling his dead commander's name, he smashed the wounded American in the head, cracking the man's skull.

By late afternoon Nagai was too sick with fever to keep watching,
and he crawled back down to the company bivouac to rest. The executioners had been working in shifts—slaughter, it turned out, was hard work—and they would return to the bivouac to eat, drink, and trade stories.

“I killed seven,” one said.

“Seven? That is nothing. I killed twelve.”

The afternoon gave way to evening, the evening to night. Lying there, looking up at the moon, Nagai could hear the shouts of the executioners up on the trail (“Yaah!” they yelled with each thrust) and the screams of the captives echoing in the valley.

“It's still going on,” said the men in bivouac, sitting around their fires.

The next morning most of the regiment moved out. As they climbed the trail from the river, their line of march took them past the execution site.

The ravine was filled with the dead.

“They are piled up to the edge of the road,” Nagai noted. “If I sat on the edge and stretched out my arm, I could touch them. I think there must be a thousand.”

His head was “splitting” and he was dizzy, and his platoon commander let him ride in the back of a truck. As they passed the headquarters area, he watched a formation of
hohei
performing a ceremony to break camp and mark the victory. They stood at attention, then presented arms while a bugler sounded the call to colors.

Yoshiaki Nagai thought the trumpet had an especially “bright sound” that morning. It echoed off the mountains and through the hills.

“We won,” he told himself. “We won.”
⁷²

 

PRIVATE ISAMU MURAKAMI
thought his father—a farmer, fisherman, and logger—a most unusual man, at least for the times. Other parents seeing their sons off to war told them, “Don't come back alive” or “Go and die for your country.” But his father hated the war and blamed the military for putting the country on a path to defeat and ruin, and the day Isamu, his oldest, reported to the Fifth Light Machine Gun Company, 122nd Infantry for embarkation overseas, his father had tears in eyes.
⁷³

“Don't volunteer for anything,” his father said, sobbing. Isamu had never before seen his father cry. “Just come back.”

Isamu Murakami thought of himself as a good soldier who hated the army and the war, and on April 9 when the guns fell silent, he was
elated, but surveying the corpses scattered around him,
tekihei,
“enemy soldiers,” as well as
hohei,
his moment of exultation flew away like a startled bird and all that was left was simple relief.

“How,” he wondered, “did I manage to survive?”

Maybe it was his destiny, or just luck. He couldn't say. Then, looking around again, another thought occurred to him.

“Why” he asked himself, “did we have to have this war?”

He was thirsty and wandered down to the Pantingan River to get a drink. Upstream he saw some Filipino soldiers getting water. Obviously they had yet to surrender. He watched them for a moment, decided to leave them alone.

“I'm thirsty and they're thirsty too,” he told himself. “I'm not going to report that I saw them.”

The regiment bivouacked along the Pantingan and awaited new orders. One day passed, then another. They cleaned their gear and bathed in the river and cooked rice for their midday meal. On the third day, Isamu Murakami and four other men got word that the company commander wanted to see them.

The officer explained that each company had been ordered to send five men to a spot above the river for “special duty,” men who had excelled in bayonet training.

A lieutenant came to fetch the group, led them up the hill and into the jungle to a section of trail above a ravine. Assembled there were many many
horyo,
hundreds, in fact, Filipinos mostly, but a handful of Americans, too. Some of the prisoners were blindfolded and tied with rope, some with wire.

Isamu Murakami sensed that something ominous was about to take place and did not like it. Several other men there were uneasy as well.

“What are we going to do?” one of them asked.

“Shobun”
an officer said. They were going to “kill them.”

Then the officer called Murakami's name, told him to step forward.

Isamu hesitated.

“Just kill one and then you can go back to your unit,” his company sergeant said.

Isamu just stood there.

The sergeant tried again.

“There are lots of officers here from other units,” he said softly. “Their men are killing the prisoners and our company commander
wants to show them that our men can do this, too. You should do this as quickly as possible, just one and you can go back.” Then the company sergeant said, “Or you will be killed by the company commander.”

The officer was growing impatient and barked at the sergeant.

“Why don't you tell your men to do it quickly? This is the order of the emperor!”

Isamu Murakami thought, “I have no choice.”

In training he had stabbed large dolls stuffed with straw, but this—this was different.

He stepped forward with his rifle at the ready. The man in front of him was a Filipino, face pale, eyes filled with fear.

Isamu Murakami tightened his grip on the rifle, flexed his knees, and thrust the weapon forward (“Yaah!”) at a point where he imagined the man's heart was.

He heard a kind of click or snap, like a stick breaking. He guessed he'd hit a rib, so he twisted the blade, hard, finished the stroke, and yanked the bayonet free.

The Filipino sank to his knees, blood pouring from the wound.

“Owatta!”
Isamu shouted, almost defiantly. “I'm finished!”

“Kere!”
The major yelled back. “Kick him down!”

Murakami put his heel on the figure twitching in the dirt and shoved it over the side and into the ravine.

“Follow him,” the officer told the next man, and so it went, man after man down the line.

With each thrust there was a scream, then an echo in the hills. And when the ravine began to fill with bodies, it too issued a complaint, a chorus of moaning and crying.

“Why do I have to do things like this?” Isamu Murakami thought.

He toweled the blood from his clothes, wiped his weapon clean, and tossed the towel into the ravine.

“You can go,” the officer said.

He ran. He ran as fast as he could, and when he looked back over his shoulder he saw many of the others running as well, as if someone or something was chasing them from the killing ground.

Back at the bivouac he chanted a prayer for the man he had killed, for all the murdered men moaning and crying in the valley, but the prayer didn't work. That night the dead came to him in a dream, one after another.

“Don't come only to me,” he told them, “but if you want, please appear in front of the emperor and ask the emperor how he would feel if he had been ordered to stab you.”

 

KILL THE PRISONERS?
thought Private First Class Takesada Shigeta, a machine gunner with the 1st Battalion, 122nd Infantry It didn't make sense.
⁷⁴

“Why do we have to kill those who come out of the jungle with their hands up?” he asked himself. “The battle is over. This is not a situation of kill or be killed.”

On April 12 at the Pantingan River, the men of the 122nd Infantry Regiment were given an unusually large ration of sake, in fact all they could drink. Not long after the ration was issued, they were told that their unit was going to kill prisoners of war.

“Those who want to kill the prisoners,” a noncom said, “just go ahead. Kill the ones you want. Kill as many as you want.”

The men who volunteered for this duty tried to convince the others to join them.

“These prisoners aren't real prisoners,” the volunteers argued. “They're not yet imprisoned so we can't call them prisoners. It would be hard for us to kill the prisoners in a camp, but these men are still the enemy and we're still in the middle of a war. We have to kill them.”

The killing began in the late morning. All along the river and at bivouacs in the hills, working parties of executioners were assembled and marched to the spot. From all the coming and going along the river, Takesada Shigeta got the impression the executions were taking place at several spots, and several hundred
hohei
were taking part.

Though it was not put to them that way, the men assumed they were acting on orders.

“Someone must have given an order,” Takesada Shigeta thought. “The regimental commander, someone. Someone must have said something. Without an order we would not be killing the prisoners.”

They worked through the morning and into the afternoon, worked in shifts, drinking and killing, drinking and killing.

Takesada Shigeta stayed in camp by the river and watched the killing parties leave and return, men sweating and thirsty and covered in blood.

“I killed only one. No more than that,” one man said,

“I killed six,” another said.

By early afternoon the sake barrel was half empty.

“Drink and go!” they yelled,

“All right, I'll go!” a man said.

Takesada Shigeta wanted no part of it.

He thought, “It was good enough to have the enemy surrender.”

And others apparently agreed.

“I don't want to kill them, either,” he heard more than one man say.

As the afternoon wore on, however, some of the executioners began to resent this display of individuality, and one of them started to pester Shigeta. Soon he was nose to nose with the man, shouting and yelling. And now their sergeant was stepping between them.

He should either go to the killing site, the sergeant told Shigeta, or take his machine gun to the hill above the ravine and make sure none of the bodies at the bottom tried to escape or crawl away.

Takesada Shigeta asked his good friend, Kozo Hattori, who had also recused himself from the killing, to join him.

“Let's go up or else we have to kill them,” he said.

When they finally reached their position on the hill, they looked down and were struck dumb.

The ravine was filling with bodies, and issuing from the pit was a sound neither of them would soon forget, cries of agony echoing in the valley and off the hills. Neither man had ever heard anything like it—a chorus of moaning, pain, and lament that never seemed to stop.

The day was hot and humid, and with a light wind blowing in their direction it wasn't long before the smell of blood, a thick and frightening fragrance, reached the two
hohei
sitting on the hill.

At first they just watched. The prisoners were led forward five and six at a time to a spot on the road just above the ravine. Some wore blindfolds, rags and towels knotted behind their heads. Others just stared straight ahead, facing their executioners.

Takesada Shigeta thought, “Imagine standing in front of the prisoner and watching his eyes at the very moment you pierce him with your bayonet.”

After a while of looking down on all this, he went into a kind of trance.

Again and again he told himself the same thing, “The battle is over . . . The battle is over.”

At length the two men realized that the sergeant who had sent them
up the hill would wonder why they had not yet fired their machine guns, so just before dark they loosed some short bursts at the empty slope opposite them, but the firing only made the moaning in the valley sound louder, and this unsettled them even more and they stopped.