Baa Baa Black Sheep

by Gregory Boyington

  He wanted to know which admiral that was. I said that was Admiral Halsey. His face lighted up. He was very interested. He said: “Please write down all you know about Admiral Halsey.”

  I said: “It wouldn’t use up much paper, writing down all about what I learned during my conversation with Admiral Halsey. He’s a man’s man, that’s about all I could write.”

  The intelligence officer’s face dropped in disgust and he answered: “Well, skip it, then. That we know.”

  So for the time being that sort of ended that.

  Another thing we heard from practically everyone we talked with over there was that after the war was over things would be different; we would all be allowed to go home; they really had nothing against any of us. We were all right, but there were some things that had to be done when this war was over: Roosevelt had to be hanged, MacArthur had to be hanged, and Halsey had to be hanged. And little did I realize that the reverse, as far as executions were concerned, was going to take place in time, sparing only the Emperor, whom we bowed to for diplomatic reasons.

  Today, as I continue seeing more and more evidence of the United States being sold short not only to the world but also to her own people, I keep thinking of some of our own American kids back there in the camp of Ofuna and wish they had more say in today’s matters. For those boys, ragged and starved though they were, would still do anything for a laugh or a joke, even if they were beaten afterward for the joke or for laughing. They are the types of kids who make Americans seem great people; they are such a contrast to the ambitious sourpusses who, during the war, held down so many of the bureau jobs here at home, and are still holding them down, and will want to continue holding them—even if it means the continuation of bureaus we no longer need. Even if it means the continuation of all these paid people still making the personal judgments for us—what we should eat, when and how; what foreign countries we should be good to, when and how; what we should think and when we should think it.

  But these people themselves, or at least most of them, have never been put on a physical spot for their country. And by physical spot, I mean just that, a predicament in which day by day they were hurt physically, pounded by clubs, and just simply because they were Americans. And that, after all, was the real hurting test put up to those kids. And when they came through it, or survived it, they would do what all good Americans are expected to do; they would try to save their own sanity by their own sense of humor.

  And this is certainly not something being tried today by people in a position to try it. So ambitious are they to remain Little Caesars, the same as they remained Little Caesars at home throughout World War II and Korea, that today they have forgotten how to laugh. Or never did know how to laugh. But more than that, they give nobody else credit for knowing how to laugh, or even how to make up his own mind about his own things when these things happen to be bad.

  Those starved, ragged kids back in camp had more individuality than that. And because they had it they are what Americans are supposed to be, and they are what I like to think real Americans still are: people who through the years were able to take it on the lam, laugh about it, then take it again—but always going forward on their own individual guts.

  As captives, and not prisoners of war, we were not allowed issues of clothing or anything else. I knew that the boys were going half nuts with nothing to do, just trying to talk in small groups. But every time two or three of us got together in a group, we would be broken up. We were not allowed to talk to any new prisoners who came into camp. All equipment for whittling or anything like that had been taken away from us.

  But, to show how the boys would still do anything for a joke, there was one ragged prisoner who had something that looked like a piece of shingle. He made a hole through it with a piece of glass and shoved a stick through the hole. By asking different guards the time throughout the day he had made what he called a sundial.

  Any time any of us were busy doing anything, a guard would come up and give us the famous old expression, “Nunda!” which in our language means “What the hell’s going on here?”

  The boys would then try to explain to the Japanese what was going on. This boy with the shingle explained: “When you captured us, you took all our watches. We had nothing to tell time with, so I am making a sundial.”

  He demonstrated the thing. He put it down on the ground.

  “Here are the sun signs down here. See this mark I have here? It is such and such a time.”

  The guard was a very important person, but actually he was one of the most illiterate Japanese. But the watch and the sundial he understood. And we could just hear the machinery ticking around in his mind. He asked the prisoner in Japanese: “That is well enough—but what are you going to do when the sun isn’t out?”

  This gave the kid a good idea. He was, as I said, half starved, he had been beaten and was in rags, never knew what was going to happen afterward in Japan, whether he was ever going to get home. But nevertheless he couldn’t resist what he did. He told the guard: “I am happy you brought that up, Haitison. If the sun isn’t out, all you have to do is strike a matchee, understand?”

  “Match” is approximately the same word in their language as in ours.

  “Then,” the kid continued, “you hold the matchee over the sundial and you can tell the time even in the dark.”

  The guard, a very savvy person, nodded judiciously and said: “Ah so ka [I understand].”

  The rest of us small group of prisoners, who had been watching as the boy explained, now walked off to other parts of the courtyard and left the guard staring at this sundial. He stared at it for five minutes or so while we watched to see if he would realize that he had been duped. It wasn’t difficult to read this guard’s mind when he finally had come to a conclusion. He did not come back to the prisoner. He just walked away, because it would have been loss of face, as Madame Chiang would say, if he had jumped up and charged the prisoner at that time. He let it go until three or four days later, when he accused the boy of doing something he hadn’t done, and then jumped him.

  There is one thing I want to emphasize: I’ve seen American prisoners tortured, but I never have heard one cry out. I’ve heard them moan when they were knocked senseless or just about senseless, but I’ve never heard one of them cry out.

  Yet if we supplied the guards with the entertainment of beating us, they in turn supplied us with some dilly entertainment of their own.

  One of the guards we had in this camp was short, even for a Japanese. The average was around five feet two inches, but he was shorter than that. Anybody could tell when he came on duty that he had been given orders from his higher-ups that, because all of us were desperadoes, he would have to watch us with an eagle eye. When he came on duty he would walk back and forth before our cell blocks, and if we were allowed out on the grounds, he would come by us and just glare at us. He had a rifle with a shiny bayonet, and at any simple request we made he immediately would say: “Domai,” which is like “no dice” in our language, in other words, that was bad. And if a prisoner persisted in his request, such as going to the toilet, this guard would stomp his foot and threaten the prisoner with that bayonet and go through the whole procedure of saying no.

  But then, as with so many of the guards, curiosity finally got the better of him. He couldn’t resist it, and on coming on guard duty the third or fourth time he started to question one or two of us. The questions he asked went something like this: “Where are you from?” We would say: “From the United States.” Then he would want to know if we had mothers and fathers, if we were married, if we had any babies.

  To the Japanese it was very intriguing if we were married or had babies. They were amazed that a lot of our boys were only nineteen, married, and had babies. In their world they are over thirty before they are able to support a wife and have a piece of ground or have any children.

  Conversations invariably ended up with our motion-picture industry. The guard would ask: “So yo
u know So-and-So?” Clark Gable, Betty Grable, and so forth. We knew some of them. Or, I should say, I knew some of them. Then the guard would mention a lot of names and ask if I knew them, and some I had not even seen on the screen or anywhere else. I bet I was knocked down on my hind end at least a dozen or more times because the guard would ask me about different movie actors and actresses I didn’t know, and he would end up by saying: “Why, you stupid major!” And haul off and clunk me on the jaw.

  I stood up and took all this stuff for many months, but finally I got wise and found out it was just as well to fall down the first time they hit you because ordinarily then they would leave you alone. They would not kick you. I guess they thought they were very powerful on one swing. As long as it made them happy to feel strong I was just as well off.

  I remember another guard who had been of the most ferocious type. If we asked to go to the toilet, he would stomp at us like a bull, point his bayonet at us, and threaten us. But after we had ceased to ask for permission to go to the toilet, or whatever we wanted to do, he would take out a pocket mirror and admire his handsomeness. Every now and then he would make a face in the mirror, then he would look at you with this ferocious face he had just put on, and then put the mirror back in his pocket.

  Another time in the prison courtyard, after one of them had shown great interest in the movies, he handed his rifle and shiny bayonet to one of our half-starved boys. We had watched this guard for hours oiling and polishing his rifle and bayonet, but now he handed the whole thing over to a prisoner and took out a handkerchief and made a mask out of it. Then he mounted a make-believe steed. The guard’s legs, which never had been astride a horse, were bowed so badly by nature as to make it appear that he had ridden the range since birth. The horse he mounted must have been two hands shorter than any Shetland pony I ever have seen. He galloped down to the end of the courtyard, some two hundred feet away from the group of prisoners, including the prisoner holding the shiny rifle and bayonet, and then came galloping back. He mercilessly spurred his imaginary steed with a pair of ill-fitting military shoes with outboard sloping heels, slid to a halt in front of us, got off the imaginary horse, took five or six quick steps away from the crowd, and spun on both of his sloping heels. Then he drew out two imaginary six-shooters from the hip and fired in Wild West fashion, then, pointing to his nose, he asked in Japanese: “Who am I?”

  He really had us. We didn’t know the vintage of the picture or anything else. We didn’t know whether he was supposed to be William S. Hart, or who the hell he was.

  So, when we couldn’t answer, he took off his mask and put it back in his hip pocket. I guess he realized he had gone plumb “beyond the call of common guard duty” and started looking around to see if anybody superior to him was witnessing this act of his.

  He went over and got his rifle and bayonet back from the prisoner, who was as weak from laughter as he was from lack of food, and then nodded curtly and thanked the prisoner for holding the rifle. With that he stomped off and left us about ten minutes of peace and quiet. And if we had been anywhere but Japan, we could have shot the poor fool with the rifle and gone over the hill.

  We had a method of getting our kicks out of characters like the ones I just mentioned. They were daredevil tricks, a bit different from the flying daredevil tricks, but nevertheless with consequences that could have proven fatal, or damn rough on us, if we had been caught up with. There were several items that enabled us to do this, but the main one was that we could understand Japanese much better than they gave us credit for, while the majority of the Nips never bothered with English. Another reason for their not catching on to English is that they were rotated all the time. And when a new one came and we figured we could have some fun with him, we spared no horses.

  We realized that the guards went by your tone of voice or actions, and couldn’t tell from nothing if you weren’t speaking their language. So we would mix up a combination of Japanese and English that, although given in a flattering tone of voice, was the foulest uncomplimentary language we could think up.

  For example, one would say: “Ohio gazemus, Haitison,” bow to him, and be all smiles and friendliness. “Anatawa itchie bon …” This being the proper polite form of Japanese and manners, saying good morning, and that he was number-one, the best with you. A guard like the ones I have mentioned would smile in return, bow back, and say a few nice things to us in Japanese.

  Then our speaker, without changing the tone of his voice or outward attitude, would go on in English: “You ape. I’ll bet you’re the biggest Nippon — — walloper, mother — —ing bastard I ever had the pleasure of knowing,” and he would bow once again, while the guard would smile at us in an appreciative way.

  While in prison camp, and for a long time afterward, I was very much in the dark, so to speak, concerning two words. I prided my ego on both of them, although I knew, even then, that my pride in one of them was not honest. These two words seem to fit in well at this point with the rest of my thoughts.

  The first one is “bravery,” for which I took many a phony bow, and I imagine to this day that many people still believe I was mighty brave. I mention this because I was beginning to learn the difference between daredevil and brave. In looking back over the years I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have never been brave, but most of the things for which I had been given credit for bravery were nothing but daredevil stunts. I was trying to build up my own ego, trying to imitate the bravery of people I had read about or had been told about in the years gone by.

  The second word, will-power, closely allied with bravery in my mind, was a thing in which I honestly prided myself, for too many years. And, needless to say, it was quite a spiritual revelation to finally get these two bothersome, ego-feeding expressions straightened out in my mind. The reason it had taken me so long a time, even though it happened to be nobody’s fault but my own, was that my emotional maturity was very retarded.

  Can you imagine how the air went out of me when I finally found the true meaning of will-power? Will-power means that one is going to do whatever he wants to do most at any particular time. So actually one of the things I prided myself for is really no accomplishment at all.

  My definition of bravery is when a person does what he honestly believes is the best thing for him to do at any particular time. So the majority of my life can be linked up with show-off, or daredevil. The bravest man in the world would be the man who acts as he honestly thinks best more particular times than anyone else. Little wonder, then, that so many of the true acts of bravery go unheralded, while the spectacular or daredevil antics are played up.

  I’m not trying to change the world any more—people can go on writing and thinking what they damn well please—but for my own peace of mind I have to realize the truth about myself, and not what somebody writes about me—good or bad.

  * * *

  29

  * * *

  Some subjects are timeless, and I would say that food is one of them. Yet only by comparing notes this way can We of the World Who Have Known Real Hunger actually get together and form our own sort of imaginary club.

  Our members today would be from everywhere, from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, everywhere. But regardless of our assorted languages, regardless of our assorted politics, the members would have something far more in common than the members of most clubs do. We would at least know that the universal implement we all have, the stomach, usually behaves the same way under duress and causes us all to have much the same kinds of dreams.

  Now the Japanese themselves had very little food. They had a mixture of rice and barley for their main diet. This meant even the military, who got the best food in the country. But prisoners, as we know, got far less. In Rabaul our food had been supplemented by mildewed rice that had been left in Rabaul by the Australians. Now, provided this rice had been brought in as recently as the day the war was started, it nevertheless would have been some two years old by the time I was captured. This accounted for t
he rice being mildewed, full of worms, and everything else.

  To go with this were odds and ends from the officers’ mess. This would come to us in the form of a brew that was poured over the mildewed rice, and accounted for the reason we oftentimes found plum pits in the brew and rice. We knew that nobody had put a plum in there. Some Japanese had merely spat it out of his mouth into his plate or onto his table, and everything had been scraped off and put into a rusty can, brought out to our camp, warmed and poured over the rice.

  The food we later got in Japan consisted of a mixture of rice and barley, one of rice to twelve of barley. Then we got a hot watery soup with it, flavored with bean paste, a by-product of the soya bean. There were a few greens in it, and greens in that country consisted of carrot tops, potato peelings, and the like.

  Ordinarily one would think that one heaping bowl of barley and a heaping bowl of soup, larger than any bowl of soup to be had in any restaruant, would be sufficient for any man three times a day. In bulk we actually were eating more on this diet than we would have eaten at home. But the food value just was not enough to keep a man more than alive, and he gradually lost weight, went down, down, down.

  After nine months of this I weighed one hundred ten. Ordinarily I weighed one hundred eighty to ninety and had been at my normal weight when captured.

  As the prisoners were going down, down in weight, it seemed to affect the minds of most of them. I know that I put myself to sleep each night by thinking of all the iceboxes I ever had seen. I thought, or tried to think, of every meal I ever had. I would remember from my childhood, very vividly, each meal my mother cooked me that I liked. The funny part of it was that I never thought of extravagant foods, just the basic foods, anything that was simple and common. I never craved fancy desserts or anything like that, just simple food.