The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  Then I decided that perhaps I was being too harsh. I had been so young to be making such difficult moral decisions. Although I had repeatedly dared the fantasy of my conscience only to run away when confronted with reality, my strivings had been honorable. Father Garvey had tried to help me, and yet in the end I lacked what Koichi Kido called majime, the wisdom and courage to eliminate any distinctions between my actions and my inner thoughts. One was not born with majime. He gained it through years of thought and struggle.

  Someday, I thought, I might gain that perfect balance between my inner and outer self. But no matter what rewards I received I would also forever pay, every morning when I looked into the mirror and saw the ugly scar that creased my face like a jagged bolt of lightning, and every night when I turned back empty sheets to go to bed. Yes, I decided as I watched the sun glimmer over Manila for the last time. I was now twenty-five years old. A part of me had grown old in the sixteen months since I had first seen the sun scorch the eastern jungles of the Philippines. And a part of me had forever died. But finally it was all over.

  Yamashita had been hanged. Prince Konoye had committed suicide. Lord Privy Seal Kido was in jail. The emperor was now protected from the wrath of our avenging allies. Prince Asaka was free to continue his golf game. The rape of Nanking had been marginalized. The way was clear for the able and intricately prepared Shigeru Yoshida to become prime minister. The new Japan could now proceed toward its destiny. And, not incidentally, the part of Captain Jay Marsh that had survived could finally leave all of this behind and find the life that it had dealt him.

  EPILOGUE

  FEBRUARY 23, 1997

  Afternoon

  I

  And it became a good life, prosperous, challenging, rewarding not only to myself but to those who trusted me. In joining the Bergson-Forbes Group I had found the perfect venue for my gift of diplomacy and my instinct for intricate negotiation. I quickly became respected for my judgment, relied upon for my vision of East Asia’s future, and, not incidentally, rich.

  And as my career ascended ever upward, I often looked back at that crucial moment in the supreme commander’s office that so inalterably changed the direction of my life. I had faced MacArthur wanting only my freedom and my future with Divina Clara. I had left his office doomed on both counts but launched toward semigreatness. With every success I would secretly ask myself where I might have been if I had acted differently. But the answer, inevitably, was that my very speculation was moot. For I would not have acted differently.

  MacArthur was smarter than I was. And in most ways I benefited from his genius.

  How sweet is the siren of seduction, and how empty are the promises of virgins who know their time has come. To have escaped MacArthur only with the right to forever denounce his actions would have been a hollow, Pyrrhic victory. What indeed would my dignity have purchased? And when all was said and done, how could I think ill of the man who so generously rewarded my service to him by handing me over like a valuable baton to the likes of Thorpe Thomas?

  Indeed, confronting MacArthur so strongly in that final meeting had provided me the luckiest moment of my professional life. Perhaps it was because he had always known the power of my intellect and the dedication I had brought to serving him. Perhaps he had admired the fortitude that I had shown that morning, having kept it so hidden before. More likely, I had also succeeded at some level in scaring him. But no matter. MacArthur had opened the door, ushering me from one secret room into another.

  And Thorpe Thomas became my truest mentor. He taught me the business of investment banking, continued my education as a negotiator and diplomat, refined my mannerisms and even my dialect until within ten years I myself might have been born in Darien and schooled at Groton. And always at the bottom of his respect for me was the knowledge that I had given his great friend General Douglas MacArthur crucial and valuable service during the Southwest Pacific campaign, and in the all-important first months of the Occupation of Japan.

  And so as the years slipped by and my memories became leavened with the pleasures that MacArthur’s reward made possible, I would have been the last person to criticize him. And in fact, it soon became both my duty and my passion to actively defend him. In 1950, war suddenly engulfed the Korean peninsula. After his quiet partnership with Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Yoshida brought about the near miracle of Japan’s resurgence, at the age of seventy the supreme commander was pulled from his dreamlike sinecure and thrust into command of the United Nations combat forces. It was there that he demonstrated his greatest battlefield genius. And it was also there that he underwent his deepest, and final, personal defeat.

  Korea for MacArthur had all the elements of Greek tragedy. I was one of his greatest cheerleaders as he defied everyone, including a reluctant Joint Chiefs of Staff, and directed the dangerous and risk-filled amphibious invasion of Inchon. In one of the most brilliant battlefield maneuvers in American history, MacArthur cut off the North Korean army’s logistical support far to their rear and then turned south and pounded its combat units all the way to the Pusan perimeter. I was an ardent, vociferous defender after he then turned north and chased the remnants of that army not only out of South Korea but all the way to the Chinese border.

  His brilliance was even more profound when one considered that this soon-to-be seventy-one-year-old general still had the vigor and the fighting vision to have so completely destroyed an attacking army. He was dogged and on his own during those maneuverings, innovating day by day, seeking but not receiving clear directions from a Truman administration that was swept with confusion and indecision after the suddenness of the war’s outbreak. I took his side as the nation argued the consequences of the Chinese army then pouring across the Yalu River into North Korea, enlarging the war and prompting the supreme commander’s disgrace when President Truman abruptly relieved him of command.

  The tragedy was that in five short years the nature of war had changed in a way so fundamental that no battlefield commander, not even MacArthur, would be able to comprehend for decades. MacArthur, who had preached repeatedly that in war there is no substitute for victory, had been hamstrung by a new modifier—the word “limited.” The battlefield itself now had limited objectives. Military forces would be subjected to limitations in their use of power. MacArthur did not know it, and indeed neither did we for many years, but President Truman had secretly assured the British, who were worried about possible Chinese retaliation in Hong Kong, that under no circumstances would we ever cross into China. A communist spy ring inside the British government had then tipped the Chinese that it was risk-free for them to send soldiers into Korea. MacArthur, whose bold move to the Chinese border had been coupled with numerous options to threaten any Chinese intervention, was in the end mousetrapped by a betrayal he never comprehended, begun unwittingly by the very president who disgraced him, relieved him of command, and brought him home.

  Yes, I was proud to come to Washington and shake his hand after his eloquent, spine-tingling “Old Soldiers Never Die” speech before a teary-eyed joint session of Congress once President Truman had humiliated him. And more than a decade after that, as he lay wasting on the edge of death at the Walter Reed Army Hospital, I, like so many others who had served him over a career that spanned nearly fifty years, paid him an emotional, nostalgic homage.

  I sat for a full hour next to his bed in my grey woolen suit and silk tie and Florsheim wing-tip shoes, listening to his frail-voiced stories that recalled exactly all the jungle-hot, rainwashed, moonlit moments of our years together. Merely sitting next to him made me feel inalterably young again. I was forty-four, on my way to Thailand, just posted as ambassador. He glowed with a father’s pride as we discussed my coming duties. His eyes were still bright with energy. Then as the hour wound down he checked his watch and reached over and gripped my arm tightly for a long time. It was the warmest gesture he had ever made to me.

  “We did great things, Jay. We moved the world.”

&nbs
p; “Yes, sir,” I answered, choking with a quiet nostalgia. “We did.”

  “I must tell you,” he said in his now-trembling, husky voice, looking carefully into my face, “that the end of life is quite educational. Illuminating, if you would. I marvel that it has not been studied more fully. As I sit here and feel it falling away from me, I can somehow see all the points of my life with the same clarity. It is an odd experience, at the same time shackling and liberating. I can feel the heat and the warm rain of Leyte and Samar as it steamed my body sixty years ago. I can smell the gas and feel my feet freezing in the mud-filled trenches of France as we stepped out for the attack on Côte de Chatillon. I can hear the Japanese artillery thumping overhead as I walk in the dank tunnels of Corregidor. The salt air of the Pacific is on my face and the wind blows and the ship tosses and rolls like an anxious tiger, and we are on our way again to Leyte! Yes, Leyte! And then Manila. And after that Japan. All rolled up together, happening to me at the same time. And the morning when I landed at Inchon just after the assault. My stomach was roiling with uncertainty, until finally I threw up. I can still feel my nerves tingling. I had sent our troops into the riskiest amphibious salient in history and they had rewarded our nation with their unbounded courage! All these moments! They are with me now, although they are so unreachably far away! And when I die they will be the country’s, to cherish and remember if it so chooses.”

  Now he gave me a warning look. There was purpose in his rasping voice. “But the other things? The private, desperate, sometimes blundering negotiations that are essential to history’s progress? The personal moments filled with loss and desire and unfathomable regret, which I don’t need to tell you tore at my heart beyond the capacity of words to explain?”

  He paused, a thin smile on his aged face. “They are mine, Jay. They belong only to me. And to those few who shared them. And so it will be with you. You don’t realize it yet. But in time you will.”

  “And how about General Yamashita?” I asked. “In what category does he fit, General?”

  His eyes grew smoky. Even at the end of his dotage MacArthur could chill a visitor with one cool look. “You’ll never forget that, will you?” He raised his chin. “I go to my God with clean hands.”

  He let go of my arm and turned his face away from me, indicating that our last meeting had ended. I rose and turned to leave.

  “Good-bye, General. You’ll be in my prayers, sir.”

  “Good-bye, Jay.” Suddenly he turned back to me, giving me a knowing, mischievous smile. He was bent on teasing me, even from the caverns of his ever-dimming retreat.

  “I forgot to ask,” he said. “How is Consuelo?”

  It was his own private joke, a final burst of incorrigibility, his little way of reminding me that at some level we both had traveled the same emotional journey.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, stunned at his recollection and suddenly hurt once again by the memory of it all. For I did not know. My only answer was an equally provocative riposte. “How is she, General?”

  He smiled and nodded, ever in control, as if I had indeed answered his question. “That’s the way it is at the end, Jay,” he answered, his eyes strong and warm behind the fading face. “We don’t know.”

  Yes, even our last meeting was filled with barbs and cant, as if it were one more opportunity to teach me. I was addled when I left him, confused by his very certainties. It had been nearly twenty years since that final moment in his Dai Ichi office, but still I had felt my blood pressure rise and my fists begin to clench when he had obliquely made reference to the compromises his generosity had brought me. He knew that since that moment I have always lived with a pit of darkness in my conscience, an echo of sorrow in my heart. For in accepting the truth of MacArthur’s vision and the favor of his eternal blessing I ceased to be the proud young spirit who believed anything was possible. And I not only lost the dream that fires youth’s less forbidding aspirations but I destroyed the very treasure I had been working so assiduously to retain.

  He knew that. And had this also been his fate? Watching his eyes twinkle at me as he lay in his old West Point bathrobe wasting slowly into his eternity, I sensed that much. He had taught me how to trade, Faust-like, and in this sense I had become his spiritual successor. We both knew the extent of that loss, because in our lives we both had chosen to trade precious things for the rewards of large ambition.

  But what he never comprehended was how hard I had tried to keep just that from happening. And at that moment, I decided that someday I would indeed find out the answer to his question.

  How was she? Where was she? What had she become? I wanted very much to know.

  And it took me more than thirty years to find out.

  II

  The Carmel of the Saint Therese of the Child Jesus convent is located on Gilmore Avenue in Quezon City. Home to perhaps a hundred nuns, the Gilmore convent is less than half a mile from the Mount Carmel church on Broadway avenue, where there also stands another, larger convent for Carmelite priests. Built in 1925, the convent grounds cover an entire city block. Inside its mildew-stained walls are a well-manicured, tree-strewn yard, a small chapel where the nuns meditate and pray, a graveyard and catacomb where they know they will someday be put to rest, and the plain-walled, two-story convent house where they eat, pray some more, do their chores, and sleep.

  Although the Gilmore convent is located in a well-kept residential area of gentle hills, redolent flowers, and sprawling trees, the modernization of metro Manila has begun creeping inexorably toward it. Across Gilmore Street on one side of the convent’s entrance is a Burger Machine fast-food franchise. On the other side is a busy Shell Oil gas station. A block away are two huge production plants, one that refines and packages dairy products and another that bottles and ships Pepsi-Cola throughout the metropolitan area. Office towers are beginning to dot the horizon. The traffic is starting to pick up on Gilmore Avenue and especially on nearby Aurora Boulevard, upon which a large shopping mall has recently been constructed.

  But for the nuns of the Carmel of the Saint Therese, life has a beatific simplicity that has not changed markedly since the Carmelite order was first founded by Pope Honorius III on October 1, 1226. The residents of the Gilmore convent are Discalced Carmelites. In the church they are known as contemplative nuns. Their diet is vegetarian. They take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and with few exceptions must observe a code of strict silence. Outside visitation is permitted only in rare circumstances.

  The single rooms in which each nun sleeps are known as cells. Each cell is by tradition about nine feet by twelve feet, and its contents are identical. Against one wall is a small, narrow bed. Next to the bed is a plain wooden night table. On top of the table is a lamp. Underneath it is an unpadded wooden pew, to be taken out for morning and evening prayers. A simple wooden cabinet stands on the wall opposite the bed. The walls themselves are barren, except for a crucifix that hangs above the bed.

  The nuns arise every morning at four-thirty. At five they meet in the chapel for an hour of meditative prayer, then after breakfast return to chapel for a full Mass. Morning chores follow, usually washing, cleaning, cooking, and gardening, after which they return again to the chapel for formal prayers before they go to lunch. Following lunch they are allowed a brief recreation period, in which they may speak quietly to one another. Then after more prayer, they return to work. Once the day’s work is finished there follows a period of private reading, more meditative prayer, dinner, further meditative prayer, a recitation of the Angelus in the chapel, always accompanied by the ringing of bells, thirty minutes of recreation, and finally more than an hour of evening formal prayers. The nuns then return to their cells and are in bed each night at nine o’clock.

  When a woman joins the Carmelite order, she must leave her given names behind, taking on instead the names of two favorite saints. It is not required that the new names even be female. Her old names are never used, just as her past is never mentioned. In fa
ct both are protected, particularly from inquisitive outsiders.

  And thus despite my wealth and my many positions of importance it took me more than twenty years to locate Sister Thaddeus Anthony of the Carmel of the Saint Therese of the Child Jesus. And once I discovered her location, it took another seven to negotiate a visit. Particularly unhelpful and often disruptive during this period were her immediate family, who had wealth and power of their own, and who of course were far more influential in both the government and church bureaucracies of the Philippines than was I. For even though Sister Thaddeus Anthony’s parents had long since died by the time I intensified my quest to see her, the decades had not lessened the vitriol and hatred among her siblings that had marked my long-ago departure for New York.

  I have never been so nervous as when I stepped out of my hired car and stared through the front gates of the Gilmore convent. I stood frozen, as if in shock, an old man leaning forward on hobbling knees, taking deep breaths to control the trembling that had overtaken my hands from a sudden rush of adrenaline. Watching the nuns in the yard before me as they glided slowly through their afternoon tasks, for the first time in nearly thirty years I questioned whether I even wanted to know what awaited me on the other side of the iron gates, inside the meticulously kept grounds.

  For is it not true that the furious intensity of searching for something is often merely a mask for our fear of actually finding it?