Tears in the Darkness (38 page)

“Here,” he said, watching closely. “Remember, fella, just a couple of swallows.”

On the third day of his thirst, Ben Steele returned to the water line. Two hours, five hours, eight hours. In the afternoon, the Japanese shut down the line and he walked away thirstier than before.

His malarial attacks were becoming more frequent. Sometimes he shook so violently he thought he could feel his brain rattling against his skull. One day, he fainted.

When he came to, he was facedown in the dirt, and men were stepping over him, walking around him.

He eased himself up on his elbows, looked around. Nearby was an officers' barracks. He crawled there on his hands and knees and propped himself up under a window.

He could hear men inside, talking. He could also hear a canteen cap clanking against the side of the flask. The officers had water! (He remembered some of the men saying they'd seen officers hoarding five-gallon cans.)

“Please, sirs!” he yelled, as loud as he could. “Please, can I have a drink?”

No one answered. Maybe they didn't hear him.

“Please, sirs! I need water!”

He passed out again, came to, passed out a third time. It was late afternoon now. He waited for the sun to set, and with great effort dragged himself back to his barracks.

“Damn, Ben, you look awful,” Q.P. said.

“I'm sick,” Ben Steele said.

From somewhere his friend fetched him a few gulps, then, glancing furtively around the barracks, Q.P. reached into his pocket and took out a small brown bottle.

“Quinine,” he whispered. “Here, take one. Found 'em in a medic's bag along the road on the march.”

At the edge of the camp was a small stream polluted by runoff from nearby barrios. American officers tried to keep their men from washing and bathing in, and drinking from, this viscous brook—only the camp kitchens were authorized to draw water there, water they boiled to cook rice—but many prisoners, Ben Steele among them, were so crazed with thirst they would volunteer to haul water for the camp mess just so they could sneak a drink from the pestilent creek.

[
Potveleit Diary, April 20
] The sick were crammed shoulder to shoulder [in the hospital] buildings. Most of them had no clothes on, nor blankets . . . Coughing, groaning and moaning were continuous.

 

[
Potveleit Diary, April 23
] Most of our cases were malaria, dysentery (bacillary and amoebic) and beriberi . . . We had all kinds of undiagnosed cases. Some are possibly dengue fever, yaws and tropical ulcers . . . Practically all the men had some type of scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency). Their gums were bleeding and their teeth were loose. Some of the dysentery patients developed corneal ulcers which perforated and collapsed the eye globe. There was nothing that could be done for these poor souls.
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THEY ATE RICE.
Rice with stones, dirt, and weevils. They steamed it, stewed it, made it into soup. Sometimes they supplemented the rice with vegetables—camotes, a poor-man's sweet potato, kangkong, a spinachlike vine commonly known in America as swamp cabbage, as well as other assorted, and often unidentifiable, leaves and weeds. Once in a while they got meat (beef or carabao), but the ration was so small—one pound twice a month for every fifty men, or a third of an ounce per prisoner—it appeared as nothing more than flecks floating in the dirty rice.

Starving men will eat anything, and much of the camp was picked
clean of weeds and cogon grass. Army Corporal Johnny Aldrich told himself, “If cows and horses can eat grass, I can eat grass, too.” He tried it raw first but couldn't get the bitter stuff down, then he took his forage to a friend in the camp kitchen, who boiled the long blades into a brown and green stew.
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They ate in the open, sitting or squatting in the dirt, spooning or fingering their food with one hand and swatting away the flies with the other. On the average they were given eighteen ounces of food a day (fifteen hundred calories and thirty grams of protein), half of what a healthy adult man (under ideal conditions and doing moderate work) needed to live. For sick men—and almost all of the Americans and Filipinos at O'Donnell suffered from something—this prison-camp “diet” was a disaster.

The lack of nutrients aggravated and accelerated their malaria, dengue fever, blackwater fever, diphtheria, and pneumonia, and left them suffering from a host of painful, and lethal, conditions: wet beriberi (with its gross edema), scurvy (which made their noses bleed and their teeth fall out), pellagra (a feeling of pins in their skin accompanied by severe diarrhea), nyctalopia (night blindness), amblyopia (day blindness or loss of vision), tinnitus (ringing in the ears), vertigo (severe disorientation), burning feet, conjunctivitis (severe itching and burning in the eyes), and gross peripheral neuropathy (their limbs went completely numb).

Far and away, however, the worst of their maladies was dysentery. So many men had come into camp with it (a third? half?) the slit trenches they dug—and they dug them regularly—filled within days. And like the foul holding pens of Balanga and Orion along the route of the march, Camp O'Donnell started to look and smell like a sewer. Men who were too weak to walk fouled themselves wherever they happened to be when the urge seized them.

Without enough sulfa drugs to stop it, dysentery was soon epidemic. The barracks became so noxious, men started sleeping outside on the ground, if they could find an unsoiled patch of dirt for a bed. Coming up the road from Capas some weeks after the camp opened, Medical Corps Captain John H. Browe of Burlington, Vermont, caught wind of O'Donnell miles before he ever set eyes on it.

“This,” he thought, “must be the smell of a charnel house.”
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Within a week of the prisoners' arrival, O'Donnell was aswarm with bluebottle or blowflies, a great buzzing mass of them, and their eerie vibrato filled the camp day and night.

[
Poweleit Diary, April 26
] Sunday morning was clear and nice. The chaplains held services but many who attended last Sunday were not there to attend this one.

 

[
Poweleit Diary, April 27
] A number of our doctors were sick with malaria and dysentery. Actually we have only about twelve medical officers who were able to work. The rest were sick. Each time a [new group of men arrived] with a doctor, the doctor was as sick as his men so the workload was not eased . . . I was called over to see a couple of men who were having difficulty breathing. I looked in their mouth and saw what appeared to be a large black membrane. I am sure that this was diphtheria . . . A tracheotomy was attempted using a piece of rubber tube and a safety pin, but these cases were so far gone that it was impossible to do much for them.

 

[
Poweleit Diary, April 28
] Tuesday morning we tried to get some diphtheria anti-toxin but it was a useless attempt—a waste of time. The Japanese did not care. They were busy trying to win the war.

 

[
Poweleit Diary, April 29
] Nothing much to do but try to comfort the sick without medicine, giving them guava tea which did not do much good. We attempted to enforce some sanitation rules but made little progress.
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Every man was forced to look inward. Those who saw nothing—and there were many of them—abandoned all hope of ever seeing home again. It was almost as if death itself had become contagious, and men who should have survived, men in halfway decent shape, lost their will to live.

Men of faith found themselves praying for their lives. Every night Second Lieutenant Philip Brain of Libby, Minnesota, slept outside on the ground with his canteen for a pillow (so no one would steal it), staring at the stars and thinking of “a different world” and the loving God he believed was looking down on him.
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In that miserable place, however, many a man mislaid his religion. Mormon Gene Jacobsen, an Air Corps supply sergeant from Montpelier, Indiana, lost his capacity for forgiveness. “I'm going to do everything I can to survive,” he promised himself, “and then I'm going to get even with these sons of bitches.”
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Zoeth Skinner, who had grown up relying more on his wits than on his parents, believed in himself. Lying in a camp hospital hut with malaria, he noticed that most of his ward mates were too sick to feed themselves.

“Hey, buddy,” he'd ask, “you going to eat that chow?”

“I can't eat nothin',” they'd always say, too weak even to raise themselves off the floor. “I just can't.”

So Skinner ate the food, ate it right there in front of them.

“I'm going to do what I need to do to live,” he told himself
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SOME MEN WERE SELFLESS,
buddies from the same unit looking out for one another, keeping an eye on the sick and weak, giving a bit of comfort to the dying. Empathy, however, and the altruism that sometimes accompanied it, was the exception that proved the crudest of rules: In
prison camp, more often than not, men revealed what Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [their] lowly origin.”
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When his malaria got worse, infantryman Richard Gordon dragged himself to one of the huts in the hospital compound and encountered a short man wearing a white armband with a small red cross, sitting at a wooden crate, a makeshift ward desk.

“I'm sick,” Gordon told the American medic. “I need something.”

The man could see Gordon's tremors, hear his teeth chattering.

“We don't have any quinine for you,” he said. “Sorry.”

But there in front of him on the crate Gordon could see a brown bottle of white tablets, medicine Gordon recognized from his visits to the field hospitals on Bataan.

“That's quinine, isn't it?” Gordon said.

“Yeah, that's quinine,” the medic said, “but that's my personal stock.”

“Your personal stock? What the hell—”

“Yeah, mine, pal. And you can buy it, two dollars apiece.”

Gordon thought, “You little son of a bitch!”

“I'll see you in hell first,” he told the man and dragged himself away.

He could feel himself failing and he staggered around the compound, not knowing where to go or what to do. At length he wandered into the kitchen shack, where he'd been assigned to work, and curled up in a corner. He was conscious, he could hear and see what was going on around him, but he was shaking so violently all he could do was lie there.

“What's the story with that guy?” he heard someone say.

“Don't worry about him,” someone else answered. “He's had it.”

He thought, “I'm right here next to them and they're talking about me dying.” Was he really that bad, that close to the end? Then he felt someone cover him with something, empty rice sacks. Were they trying to keep him warm or drape him with a winding sheet, a shroud?

“Dick? Dick?”

He knew that voice. It was Fred Pavia, a comrade from the 31st Infantry. Pavia was from New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan where Gordon had grown up, and fighting together the two had become close.

“I looked for you in the barracks, Dick. Figured I might find you here. You don't look good. I'll be right back.”

A while later Pavia returned and held out his hand. In his palm were two capsules. Quinine, Gordon guessed.

Next morning his fever broke, and he was back on his feet. Some weeks later, looking at a list of the dead, Richard Gordon spotted Fred Pavia's name. Cause of death: complications of malaria.
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BEN STEELE
tried not to think ahead. No daydreams, no ideas but in things. Food, water, medicine. Survive, exist. Another hour and day.
²⁰

He'd walk by a barracks hut and see a man sitting in the dirt sobbing, and he'd think to himself, “The hell with you. What a waste of goddamn energy. Where the hell is crying going to get you?”

Then, maybe that afternoon or the next, he'd be wandering the compound and hear shouting coming from a hut and see another man miserable and in despair, and he'd feel something, an impulse.

So he'd go into the hut and up to the men who were shouting at the man in despair and say, “What's going on here?” And they'd tell him, “This guy's shitting all over the place and we're going to throw him out.” And then they'd grab hold of the man, drag him from his sleeping shelf and across the rough bamboo floor, and Ben Steele would say to them, Stop! Please stop! “That's a helluva way to treat a sick man.” And now the pack would turn on him. “Keep your goddamn mouth shut,” they'd say. “And get the hell out of here.”

[
Potveleit Diary, May
7] We learned this Wednesday that Corregidor had surrendered along with all the Philippine islands . . . Corregidor's surrender had a depressing effect on everyone in camp in spite of the Japanese rumors that there would be peace. No details of the surrender could be learned.
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