Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  2

  January 8. The Japanese hit us and hit us hard. We formed a line with combat teams called the Aliikai Line, which stretched across the Bataan Peninsula, but when we were hit, the 51st—a battalion made up of Filipinos—broke and ran. It went back and forth like that for two months. Then the fighting got heavier. MacArthur finally came and pulled us out of heavy fighting after the Battle of the Points, which I fought with a Springfield rifle. That might give you some idea of how ill-equipped we were. The 57th was sent in, but on Good Friday the Japanese made a push and things fell apart. We folded up pretty bad. I had been made forward observer but I lost track of my unit. Couldn’t find any of the men, except the radio man, who had been killed. In the middle of the night I heard a jeep. There was a white flag on it. A one-star general stepped out and said, “I’m going forward to surrender Bataan.” I headed out to find my unit. It took me until evening. I ate a can of abalone, because I hadn’t eaten for a day or so. I wanted to clean up before we surrendered so I bathed in a creek and put on a clean uniform. When we surrendered, the Japanese troops held guns on us and tied our hands behind our backs. They had us kneel down and started shouting. They played with us—like a cat with a mouse—all night. They got drunk. They made one soldier kneel while they swung a sword at him. Others held pistols behind our ears. In the morning we were formed in a column and marched to a big field. We stayed there all day. I don’t know why but one guard saw that I was hungry and brought me a can of milk. That night they separated us from the Filipinos and we started the march up a road. We’d had no food for 48 hours and no water. When we marched by a creek, some men broke for water. There was a dead horse upstream and the water was all bloody, but they drank it anyway. That was the beginning of the dysentery problems. They marched us to Pampanga and put us in a compound still with nothing to eat. Later, groups of us were marched to railroad cars. I had been put in a liaison group with some Filipinos and they got their hands on some rice and meat, so I was in better shape than some of the others. When we got to Capas, they let us out. Three American soldiers in our car were dead.

  3

  After the march we were put into our first camp. The barracks were made of split bamboo walls and thatched roofs. There were no screens so most of us got malaria. There was very little food—a rice gruel, that’s all—and no medicines except for the little the medics had brought. Fifty or sixty men began dying every day. The bodies were carried out slung in blankets on a bamboo pole. We heard that Corregidor surrendered. I was put in charge of medicines with the chief medical officer and assigned to the hospital unit but there was very little we could do. The men were dying of malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, pellagra, and scurvy. We had a typhoon in camp. The guards made us lie on the roof, thinking we could hold it down, but the roofs sailed out across the fields. No one got hurt. We thought it was great fun. After, we were moved by train to another camp. It was here that we put our “Yankee ingenuity” to work. Between the chemists and doctors in the group we concocted an extract from one of the grasses that grow in the Philippines. It was full of vitamins and with it, we got rid of some of the scurvy.

  November 1942. Boarded the Magato Maru—a Japanese ship, which we dubbed the “Maggot Maru”—and were moved to a camp in Japan. We prisoners were put in the hold of the ship and stacked up like cordwood. They pissed on us from above. It was very hot. My best friend died in there. At one of the stops, they cremated him and put the ashes in a box tied with a furoshi and gave him back to me. I tied the box to a beam. One of the men who had gone crazy thought I was hoarding food and during the night he stole the box. I never saw it again.

  4

  When we arrived in Shinoseki on Thanksgiving it was snowing. We sat down in the railroad yards. Six men died right there. Then we were put on a warm train and given a box with rice and a piece of fish. Never tasted anything better. Arrived Tanagawa that evening. Issued flannel blankets and pillows stuffed with rice hulls and put in new barracks with stucco and flat wood shingles. We were issued little oval tags with the name Tanagawa and a number. Mine was 57. Then they gave us tattered Japanese army uniforms to wear and a kind of tennis shoe with tabi socks. We welcomed all this, but some started dying anyway. They’d picked up diphtheria along the way. The next day we formed into work groups. The officers were assigned special tasks. We put the dead bodies on little carts with slab wood on top and hauled them to the crematorium. Buddhist ceremonies were performed. The priests scattered rice, which the prisoners caught and ate. The next day wooden boxes with the ashes were returned to us. This was regular procedure all winter, every day. One of the guards, Moto, from Nara, was quite friendly to us. He got his girlfriend pregnant and needed money for an abortion, so we lent him money in exchange for garden seeds. With those seeds we put in a huge vegetable garden. A hundred prisoners were brought in from the Dutch East Indies. As soon as they arrived we gave each one a soupbowl full of fresh tomatoes. From then on, we started saving lives.

  5

  During the long year of 1943, I read Spengler’s Decline of the West. It made a great impression on me at the time. Some of us also read about Japanese culture and learned some Kanji so we were able to follow the progress of the war on the commander’s maps. The second camp commander was a fine fellow, a very compassionate man. He had been a teacher at a school in Kobe and when he realized how starved we were, not just for food, but also food for thought, he went back to that school and returned with a whole library. After the death rate declined the worst thing about our days was boredom. We got up at five, ate a small bowl of rice and drank tea, then went to work in the garden. Cleaned the latrines and used the night soil for fertilizer. The foot soldiers were made to work helping build a dock. Soon they were allowed to operate the big steam shovel. They were very ingenious at sabotage, and before long they made the shovel inoperable. We officers weren’t allowed to do that work, so we served the workers a hot lunch every day. We’d put twenty kilos of rice and vegetable soup in buckets and balanced one at each end of what we called “yoho poles,” and took them to the work detail. The rest of the day we read or whittled out chess sets. Once in a while we were allowed to mail a letter. I wrote you during the fighting on Bataan and the letter went out with MacArthur’s escape, floating in a mail sack in the Pacific. I wonder if that sack was ever picked up.

  6

  Christmas 1944. Saw our first American B-29 fly over. Within two months navy aircraft carriers came in and the fliers bombed the dock the men had been building. So we were moved to a factory between Kobe and Osaka and given the assignment of moving big sacks of charcoal. We were moved in the afternoon. That night attack bombers came in and blew our last camp to smithereens. We had mixed emotions. “Hit everything but me,” we yelled. Then the heavy bombing began—Nagasaki, Kobe, and Osaka burned. There was so much smoke, day and night looked the same and the fires were as bright as the sun. I don’t think the Americans had any idea where we were, but the Japanese kept moving us. The next camp was the mining village of Ikuno. There were wooden barracks with tile roofs and bedbugs that rained down on us. We’d been prisoners for three years now and the big preoccupation was with food. Once in a while a Red Cross relief package got through. Men would stay up all night writing and rewriting recipe books and one MIT engineer with a slide rule spent hours computing how to cut up a can of corned beef among us all.

  7

  July 1945. American planes overhead day and night in August. Went out on a work detail and a guard came out and hustled us back into the barracks. Then an interpreter came to me with a tube sock filled with rice and said, “If you hear commotion, take this and run. Don’t look back.” The morale of the Japanese was deteriorating. Their leggings were not wrapped very tightly, so to speak. One day we officers were invited to a meeting with some Japanese officers. We cleaned up and went in. There was tea and rice cakes. These young naval officers were part of the kamikaze. They said they were going to die by “jumping down the smokestack of an American b
attleship.” They wanted to meet some American officers first because when they died they would be surrounded by Americans and they wanted to know something about us. These were men of great character. They knew they had lost the war. This was their way of atoning to the emperor.

  8

  August 6, 1945. All we could see was smoke and fires. The smoke of one bomb could not be distinguished from the smoke made by another. Things are in a terrible mess. We heard that a camp near Hiroshima burned to the ground. Later in the day the guards came in and painted POW on the roof of the barracks. After lunch we heard planes. One plane flew so low we all rushed out. It went by. A little later it came back over. We rushed out again and climbed onto the roof and waved vigorously and the plane wagged its wings at us. At that moment the camp came unglued. I saw a man who had been wounded in the leg and couldn’t walk get up and walk. I’ve never seen men behave that way in my life.

  The plane went south and came back. This time it dropped leaflets about a half-mile from camp. Five of us walked right through the guards and went out across a wooden bridge and up a hill into a grove of trees to get the leaflets. Just as I picked up the first one I heard another plane and that terrible sound of bomb bay doors opening, then the whistle of bombs. We hit the dirt. I heard trees crack but no explosion. I reached up and felt something wet on my shoulder. It was shaving cream. I looked up. One of the other officers was stabbing a can of peaches with a knife and eating them. The American fliers had put food and clothes and all kinds of supplies into fifty-five-gallon drums and let them out of the bombay doors. There were parachutes on them, but they never opened. The transfer of power took place at that moment.

  9

  Most of the camp guards disappeared. We had to lock up the rations and give them out a little at a time so the men wouldn’t get sick. Someone found a radio and we heard the battleship Missouri was anchored nearby. Someone else made his way to a bombed-out naval base, found a radio plus a lot of band instruments, and brought them back. He radioed the Missouri, told them where we were and requested a food drop—with parachutes—which came almost immediately. We saved the chutes and made flags of all nations and put them up flagpoles. Maintaining discipline was very hard. One prisoner stole a Japanese truck full of rice, checked into a hotel, and paid his bill with rice. The next morning a plane flew over and the flier dropped a note. It read: “Clear the cookhouse.” Then he dropped a ham through the roof.

  The Americans sent in rescue teams accompanied by reporters. They didn’t know how to get things done in Japan, and we did. They got drunk on whiskey and we made arrangements to take a train to Yokohama, where we’d be picked up. When we got off that train, we were met by a general with the First Cavalry band. It made a hell of a racket. I lined up the guys. We were very thin, but we had fresh uniforms on and when we stood there and saluted, the general collapsed in tears.

  I have no doubt that I’ll be home soon.

  Madeleine put the letter down. She realized she had been sitting in the cab of the truck staring without seeing. Someone stopped and asked if she was broke down and she said no, thank you, then instead of going home, she drove on past her lane to McKay’s. When she reached the ranch McKay had already gone. She threw her slicker on the floor and called out for Bobby. No one answered.

  “Well, sonofabitch,” she sputtered and heated the coffee on the wood stove. Now she knew that what Henry had been through was much worse than she had imagined, worse than he knew how to describe, and she was angry at herself for not being as tough as he was.

  When the coffee was hot, she wandered around McKay’s house with the steaming cup in her hand. In the living room she looked at the photograph of McKay’s parents and at the incense burner Bobby always kept there. She walked to McKay’s screened porch. She had never walked all the way in. A pair of jeans lay crumpled in the corner and on the night table by the cot was a pistol, a can of snoose, and a book about the “Fighting Cheyenne Indians.” She sat on the cot. The wind was cold and hit her feet like a tide coming in and she wondered how he stayed warm at night. Despite the note and journals, Henry still felt distant to her and as she lay back she knew she would always be in a condition of wanting McKay—it was one of the givens in life, like the color of someone’s eyes. Perhaps he was the first person I saw when I was born, she thought.

  The phone rang in the kitchen. She hated being roused from her daydream and wondered if she should bother answering it. It rang five times, then stopped. She lay back, relaxed, then it began ringing again. She ran down the long hall in her bare feet and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  A loud noise like a hiss came through the line, then she heard an operator’s voice, not Velma’s, but a long-distance operator.

  “Hello?” Madeleine yelled into the phone.

  “Hello.… Is this McKay’s?”

  “Yes … I can barely hear you.… He’s not here.…”

  “Who’s this talking?”

  “Hello … I’m losing you.…”

  “Don’t do that, gal, I’ve been lost.…”

  “Is this Champ?”

  “Hell, no.”

  Madeleine waited. “Are you still on the line?”

  She held the receiver away from her ear. The line went dead. She hung up. In a few moments, it rang again.

  “I have your party on the line, sir,” the operator said.

  “Madeleine?” the voice said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who? I can’t hear.…”

  There was a pause.

  “It’s Henry.”

  Madeleine held her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, my God …”

  “Madeleine?”

  “Is it really you?” she asked softly.

  “What? Speak up. Are you okay?”

  “Henry … where are you?”

  “San Fran … Army Hospital … they’re gonna keep us here for a few weeks.…”

  “I can’t believe it. I just got your letter today.”

  “You’ve been getting them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good …”

  “Henry? Are you really alive?”

  “Well this ain’t no ghost you’re talking to.”

  “What’s wrong … why are you in the hospital?”

  “I’ve got worms, like a damned dog. They’re delousing us. Sheep-dip …”

  “You sound good.”

  “I’m a little shaky on my feet but I’m okay. Had my first steak yesterday. Made me sicker than a dog. Just not used to it.…”

  “When can I see you?”

  “I’ll be home in about three weeks.”

  “It’ll be wonderful … everything’s good here. McKay and I ran our cattle together and it’s worked out.…”

  “Look, I’ve got to go … there’s a line of guys wanting to call home.”

  “Okay,” she said in a small voice. “Henry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. I’ll see you soon, I hope.”

  She ran outside and stood in the middle of the road between the house and the corrals.

  “McKay … where are you?” she called out. “Where is everyone?” Only McKay’s dog came out and lay between her feet.

  47

  Kai’s alarm clock went off at 4:00 A.M. He woke with a feeling of great dread, then he remembered. Abe-san was dead, and also, the Camp was closing and it was the day to leave. He thought of the morning in his parents’ bare house in Richmond, the final sweeping of already polished wood floors, the giving away of bonsai, the train ride with the blinds closed, the terrible desert, the armed guards. He had felt the same dread that morning, four years before.

  The day the announcement that the camps would be closing and they were free to go home whenever they chose—in other words, the day their democratic rights had been restored—he had been called up for his preinduction physical, and the next week the notice came that he had been inducted into the army.

  He no lo
nger felt sure he was a person who could make life change. History was not an interpretive act, but the theater in which he had been made an indentured servant. Life happened to him, to everyone—during these years, at least. He rolled with the punches.

  When he threw the blanket back there was light in the sky. He saw that it had rained during the night. He remembered being awakened by something, a loud rumble like an earthquake, but the ground had been still. The blanket, hung on nails that had partitioned his side of the room from his parents’, moved, then fell. He watched his mother fold it neatly. Behind her, his father sat on the edge of his bed. His glasses were crooked. Kai said good-morning but his father didn’t answer. He even ventured to say it in Japanese—still no response. Mrs. Nakamura bustled around the room packing the belongings they had acquired—the English language textbooks, the ikebana tools, drawings and prizes they had received at various functions. One of their friends came by to say good-bye and Kai watched as Mrs. Nakamura and the visitor bowed to one another over and over, lower and lower, until the visitor broke away.

  Kai helped pack dishes, winter clothes, and a painting from Mariko. When Mrs. Nakamura stripped her husband’s bed she had to pull the sheets and blankets from under him because he would not move. After she dressed him, she picked up his felt hat, brushed the dust from the soft brim, and plunked it down on his head. “How gray he has become,” Kai thought. “He’s like a frozen fish.”

  When it was time to leave they had to carry him. Mr. Nakamura held his body rigid, legs bent at the knees as if sitting, elbows stiffened truculently. Some of the young men carried him on a little sawed-off pallet, like a palanquin, only this was not royalty they were carrying, Kai thought, but a silly old man who would not face reality. Kai fought back the great irritation he felt. He doesn’t even know about Abe-san, Kai thought bitterly. He noticed how his father’s thick lenses looked opaque as if frosted over and even when he could see into his father’s dark eyes, there was no sign of life in them.