A Pledge of Silence

by Flora J. Solomon

  “Girls, settle down, please. We must use this time to prepare for whatever lies ahead. Expect unusual activity. Workers are hanging blackout curtains inside. Outside, they’re sandbagging around the hospital and digging foxholes in some areas.”

  “What? Sandbagging?”

  “Foxholes?”

  “Please settle down, girls. This work is just a precaution. At the end of this meeting, you will be issued a gas mask and shown how to use it. There is the slimmest chance the Japanese could use chemical warfare, so we must be prepared. I know it’s upsetting, but again, this is just a precautionary measure.”

  The women fell silent. Margie’s mouth went dry.

  “All ambulatory patients will be discharged. Those who are confined to their beds will need extra assurance they are safe. We may get very busy later. For those nurses on duty, make sure your units are well stocked with supplies. For those not on duty, eat well and get some rest. You will need your strength. Remember, we are here to serve. Are there any questions?”

  Yes, there were questions. Would the Japanese attack Manila? Would they bomb a hospital? How could they contact their loved ones back in the States to allay their fears? The director reassured her staff that they were protected. The army and navy patrolled the island, and Manila was secure. The director dismissed the group but asked the surgical nurses to stay behind.

  “Gather around, girls.” Miss Kermit’s demeanor was grave. “We’ve received word from Fort Stotsenburg. They are overwhelmed with wounded. The situation is serious, and they’re desperate for help. I’m asking for five volunteers to go there to assist.” Two hands shot up, and a third slowly rose. “Thank you. I need two more. Anybody?” Margie furtively glanced at her coworkers, all looking ashamed of their reluctance to sign on to help. She too didn’t want to leave the safety of the city. “Don’t make me assign this duty, girls,” the director prodded. Still, no one raised her hand.

  “Why don’t we draw straws?” a nurse beside Margie suggested.

  “Excellent idea, thank you. Does anyone object?” Miss Kermit quickly fashioned straws from cotton-tipped applicator sticks, then arranged them in her hand. After each woman pulled one, Margie and Tildy discovered they held the short ones. Margie’s jaw clenched in dismay, but she nodded her assent.

  Finding Royce in the doctors’ lounge later, she told him her news. “I’ll be back before you miss me,” she tried to quip, but a tremor in her voice betrayed her true feelings.

  He hugged her with a ferocity, and she slumped into it. He whispered, “Let me talk to Miss Kermit.”

  “No! The selection was fair. I’ll do what has to be done.” She stepped back and smoothed the worry lines from his forehead, caressing his cheek and chin. “I’ll be okay. I love you.”

  As they kissed, she cried. She hated good-byes.

  Wearing her white uniform and carrying her wool cape, Margie boarded a bus with four other army nurses, fifteen Filipino nurses, two doctors, and a score of enlisted men. She took the seat next to Tildy, who was knitting a cap for her sister’s new baby. Supply trucks packed with medical equipment and food followed behind. The convoy lurched, stop-and-go, through streets busy with people stacking sandbags, taping glass, and boarding up windows. Everyone anxiously watched the sky. Margie looked upward too, and saw nothing but a few fluffy clouds. After the bus left the city, the ride smoothed to a rhythmic rock, lulling her into a restless sleep.

  She awoke with a headache. It was dark, and jungle trees formed a canopy over the narrow road. The bus engine whined noisily from the steepness of the terrain, and the lumbering supply trucks following behind growled like tired beasts.

  “Where are we?” she asked Tildy.

  “About halfway there. The going is slow.”

  The trip dragged on endlessly. Just when Margie thought her bladder would explode, the convoy stopped. The driver jumped up.

  “Stay in your seats,” he ordered, then beckoned to a group of soldiers, who put on steel helmets and bulky vests. They grabbed rifles and followed the driver out the door. Staring out the window but unable to see, Margie heard footsteps, shuffling, and muffled voices. It seemed a long time before the soldiers returned.

  The driver explained, “There’s a downed plane partially blocking the road. I think I can get around it.”

  Margie appealed for a rest break. She grabbed her cape to hold it up for privacy, and several passengers left the bus for a brief visit to the side of the road. Just ahead lay the smoldering carcass of the airplane flipped on its side with one wing pointing to the sky. The pilot’s compartment gaped empty, and Margie’s first thought went to Abe. She had feared for him before, but the realities of what he might face—the twisted metal, the spiral of smoke, and the smell of fuel—had never before been so stark.

  The driver eased the bus through the tight passage between the downed plane and the trees. A glow colored the sky orange, and an acrid smell permeated the air. Outside the window Margie glimpsed a jeep nosed into a ditch and another thrown on its side. The bus hit a crater, jostling everyone inside. Slowing to a crawl, it continued to climb until it crested the hill. Sixty-three pairs of eyes witnessed the nightmarish scene below.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Christ!”

  “What the fuck?”

  “God help us.”

  Massive fires engulfed Clark Air Base. Skeletal remains of dozens of aircraft lay strewn over acres of bombed-out land. Propellers littered the road, tires hung in trees, and holes the size of swimming pools gaped all around the land ripped open by multiple strafing runs. The passengers stared in horror. Hearing wails from unknown origins, Margie shivered.

  As the bus approached Fort Stotsenburg, the source of the cries became evident. Bodies in all states of distress littered the grounds. Once inside the fort’s hospital, Margie saw injured people lying on gurneys, on tables, and on the blood-splattered floor. A few exhausted medical staff tended the wounded.

  Margie became light-headed. Her vision dimmed and the room began to spin—the dark chaos, evil smells, eerie flickering of the fires, and pleas for help came from every direction. Overwhelmed, she squatted down and tucked her head between her knees and tried to breathe slowly and deeply.

  “Move it!” She heard and felt a thump on her back. Shaking off her dizziness, she was brusquely introduced to the grim reality of trauma and triage, war’s urgent and scanty medicine.

  In a makeshift surgery cobbled together in a tent, Margie administered anesthesia to men riddled with bullets and torn by shrapnel. Wounds of the abdomen, head, and chest that in normal times warranted serious consideration were assessed hastily and patched, or not. She lost count of the number. At dawn, she slogged to an improvised mess for breakfast.

  “I was setting up my first surgery when the bombing started,” a dark-haired nurse exclaimed. “A bomb fell so close that my bones rattled. I dove under the table and almost broke my neck!”

  Tildy leaned on her elbows. “At least you had a—” She covered her bloodshot eyes with her hands.

  “Then the strafing started,” the nurse continued. “I swore those bullets were coming right through the roof. I was sure I was going to meet my maker.”

  Tildy spit, “Well, you’re still alive. What’s your problem?”

  The nurse shot Tildy a withering glance. “You weren’t here when the bombs hit!” Her quivering voice rose. “Do you know how it feels to think you’re going to die?”

  “I know how it feels to pump morphine into one dying kid after another, and that’s close enough for me.” Choking, Tildy ran from the table with her hands covering her mouth.

  Feeling sick, Margie forced herself to swallow food that stuck in her throat. A siren blasted. “Air raid!” someone shouted, and everyone dove under tables. Curling into a ball, every muscle taut, she wrapped her arms around her head. Whistling bombs searched for targets, and the ground thundered from the impacts, pounding once, then again, and again, and a hundred times more.

 
; Then, a strange quiet fell, except for a distant buzz. The sound grew to a roar, and, through the tent flap, Margie saw Japanese Zeros circling and diving, their guns hammering everything in sight. The ground vibrated under her, and she scrunched herself into a tighter ball, now understanding the other nurse’s fear of impending death.

  When the drone of the last plane died away, the survivors crawled from under the tables to wobble outside and assess the damage. A gray haze hung in the air. In every direction charred skeletons of burned-out buildings and smoldering piles of rubble confronted them. Fires that had died overnight flared again, spewing black smoke that reeked of rubber and hot steel. The injured cried in fear and pain, “Help! Over here! Help me!” Margie hurried back to the surgery while her sisters in the field sprayed burns with tannic acid and administered sedatives and morphine.

  She worked endless days, anesthetizing patients while doctors and nurses stitched and patched. She slept in one tent, ate in another, and did laundry and bathed using her steel combat helmet as a basin. She wore men’s heavy boots, dog tags, and size forty-four army-issue coveralls. Working in a fog of sleeplessness and fear, she felt like a zombie and imagined she looked like one too. When asked to accompany an ambulance bus back to Manila, she jumped at the chance, anxious to get away from this horrible place and excited she’d be with Royce again. Dressed in the white uniform she arrived in, she said good-bye to Tildy, who was assigned to accompany the next busload of wounded to Manila. “Take care of yourself, kiddo. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  Slated for additional surgery, eight sedated orthopedic patients lay restrained on cots by a variety of plaster casts, appliances, ropes, and pulleys on arms, legs, backs, and necks. Their destination was Sternberg. The passengers rested quietly as the bus pulled onto the main road. Margie checked each man’s color, respiration, and dressings, then took a seat. When the road smoothed out, the gentle rocking motion made her sleepy. She couldn’t doze during this important assignment, so she checked each patient again before moving up front to chat with the bus driver.

  He said, “I was nineteen when I enlisted two years ago. I’ve been in the Philippines for six months stationed in outposts. The troops live in tents out there, you know. Being transferred to Fort Stotsenburg with its barracks and good food was sweet. Until the bombing started.”

  A shout came from the back of the bus, and Margie went to investigate.

  The soldier who’d cried out was just a kid. He had one leg in a cast, and the other was a wrapped stump.

  “Hey, tiger. What can I do for you?”

  His eyes brimmed with terror. “I hear them coming! You’ve got to get me out of here!” He tried to sit up, but the cast extended over his hip, restricting his movement. “Get me out of here right now!” he insisted through his drug-induced haze.

  “I don’t hear anything, Johnny,” she told him as she glanced out the window. “I can’t see anything either. Nothing’s out there.”

  “It’s the Zeros! I hear them! Get me out of this coffin! Do you hear me? Get me out of here!” His panicked voice woke the men around him.

  Margie hastened to assure the groggy men that things were okay, but when she looked out the window again, what she saw terrified her. Overhead flew dozens of Japanese Zeros, and two broke away to target the bus. Spotting the enemy bearing down, the driver jerked the bus onto a densely treed logging trail. Veering sharply into a small opening, he crunched the bus as far down the overgrown path as he could. They could do nothing else but wait.

  Covering his head with a pillow, Johnny resigned himself to his fate. However, the men he’d awakened demanded they be released from their restraints. They clutched at Margie as she walked past them. “Jesus Christ, we’re going to die in a stinking bus!” one of them yelled as the roar of the planes swelled. She grabbed the hand of the soldier nearest her, braced her body against the steel frame of his splint, and mumbled a prayer. The Zeros zoomed overhead and their gunfire rattled the windows, but their bullets were off target. The buzz of aircraft engines faded to a drone. The soldiers quieted as they listened for the devil’s return. Once sure the danger had passed, the driver eased the bus back onto the road.

  They drove through a small village where Filipino families warily emerged from their huts. Seeing the bus, they waved and flashed the two-fingered victory sign.

  When it neared Manila, the bus slowed to a crawl in heavy traffic. A hodgepodge of vehicles blocked both north- and south-bound lanes as city people fled to the countryside and country folk sought safety in the city. The travelers had lashed as much of their household inventories as they could manage—including squealing pigs, chattering chickens, and barking dogs—onto trucks, carts, bicycles, and the backs of oxen. The bus joined this motley convoy. Despite everything they had been through, the mood of Margie’s charges was surprisingly good. “Are we there yet, Mom?” one young man whined. “How much longer, huh, Mom?” another teased.

  As they crept closer to the city, darkness descended early, heavy smoke covering the sun.

  “It’s from Cavite,” the driver said. “Dirty Nips have been bombing it all week. It’s where those Zeros we met on the road were headed, I’m sure.”

  Margie worried about Evelyn at the naval base. She suppressed her feelings by focusing on her charges instead, preparing them for the move into Sternberg. She pulled her hair back and refreshed her lipstick.

  “Do it again?” Johnny asked.

  “What?”

  “Your lipstick. I like to watch.”

  Sadness squeezed her heart as she studied the broken boy. Brushing his hair with her fingers, she kissed his cheek, leaving a smidge of red.

  During her absence, Manila had mutated into a city Margie hardly recognized. Camouflage-clad, big-booted soldiers carrying rifles over their shoulders marched through the streets and assembled in parks where antiaircraft guns pointed upward. Trenches snaked through ornamental greenery, sandbags lined sidewalks and blocked padlocked doorways, and strips of tape made a mosaic of black-curtained windows. Air-raid sirens wailed, though nobody took cover. The bus carrying Margie and her wounded charges crawled along streets teeming with high-wheeled wooden carts and bicycles, now joined by jeeps filled with soldiers and vehicles mounted with machine guns. Ambulance sirens blared, and fire truck horns bleated. When the bus pulled up to the entrance of Sternberg, Margie sighed with relief. Inside the hospital, however, the chaos looked sadly familiar.

  Patients lay haphazardly on makeshift beds that lined hallways and filled the dining room, the porches, and the gardens out back. Frightened young women with squalling babies, wizened old people, and the sick and crippled waited for help, many gray-faced, dirty, and wrapped with bloody rags or bandages. No one was safe from the carnage. The hospital staff wore the same beleaguered look as Margie’s friends at Clark.

  “Hey, kid, what’s happening?” she heard. Behind her, Evelyn stood with her arms full of linens.

  Margie cried in surprise and relief. “Boy! Am I glad to see you!” She wanted to hug her friend, but the linens were in the way. “How’d you get here?”

  “Cañacao got bombed. I have stories to tell but can’t talk now. I’m in OB and don’t know when I can get away.” A corpsman handed Evelyn a chart for another new admission. “They just keep coming,” she said, glancing at the chart. Her brow furrowed. “Christ, another burn case. Those are the worst. I have to go, Margie. See you later.”

  As she started to leave the room, Margie heard a small voice say, “Help me, please?” A young woman with a bloodied child lay on a cot. “I need to go to the bathroom. Will you watch my baby?”

  When the woman returned, Margie tried to leave again, but a toothless old man grabbed her white skirt. “I need something for this pain.” His eyes were bright with fever, and she guessed from the odor that his wounds were infected.

  “Nurse, please,” patients called. “Help,” they pleaded, and she responded again and again before managing to escape to the nurses’ reside
nce. Relieved, she entered her room, breathing in its welcome familiarity. Margie was drained of energy and emotion; the decision to shower or to sleep seemed a big one. She stripped off her soiled uniform and put on a robe and slippers. From a phone in the hall, she paged Royce. The nurse on the surgical unit answered the page.

  “He’s asleep in the doctor’s lounge. Do you want me to wake him?”

  “No, don’t do that. When he wakes up, just tell him I’m here.”

  The nurse heaved a tired sigh. “We’re swamped. Could you possibly work tonight? Come in at eleven o’clock?”

  “Sure,” Margie responded, feeling disheartened. Dirty, hungry, exhausted, she needed a night off. After a shower and a light meal, she crawled into bed. Some while later, a knock on the door roused her.

  Evelyn nudged the door open with her hip and put two whiskeys on the bamboo side table. She removed her surgical cap, then flung it aside and fluffed her hair. “Did I wake you?”

  “It’s okay,” Margie said, climbing out from under the mosquito netting. When they embraced, an overwhelming feeling of despair descended—she couldn’t stop tears from flowing. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  Evelyn patted her back and let her cry. “Come on, kid. This is our chance to be noble.”

  Margie sniffed. “I don’t know why I’m blubbering now. I’ve seen more horrible things than I expected to see in ten lifetimes. I’ve been bombed and strafed, all without a whimper. You come into my room, and I fall apart.”

  “So you’re human. We’re all due for a good cry. Here, have a drink.”

  Margie dabbed at her tears and accepted the drink. They sat in chairs by the window. “You been here long?”

  “A week, almost. There’s not much left of Cañacao.”

  “Did everyone get out?”

  “I doubt it. The sky was black with Nip bombers. I hid with my patients behind sandbags underneath the hospital. The noise was so loud my ears are still ringing. Guess how many of our planes defended us. None!”

  Margie said, “The airfields up north are gone. You can’t imagine the destruction.”