Читать книгу Now Silence - Tori Warner Shepard - Страница 11

Tokyo Rose says the war is over,” Senio whispered to the POW standing on his left at the morning Tenko—part drill, part headcount as well as three hundred and sixty degrees of bullying and torment.

“Says who?”

“Scuttlebutt.” The Bamboo Telegraph was fast and heavy with rumors of the final battle, but a month later the war was still not over. One low voice said MacArthur was coming back with beef, planes and aircraft carriers. Others said he was already in the jungle with ammo, cigarettes and chocolate. Sometimes the men who went off on work details in Manila came back whispering what they had learned from the Filipinos—that the war was almost over in early 1943. They whispered that The Empire’s Zeros were being shot out of the sky faster than the Japs could build them. They heard that the Nips were being forced to relinquish the Pacific, that the Americans were new getting even.

But Tokyo Rose said it was all lies. She broadcast that the Americans had already surrendered.

More rumors passed, saying that, island by island, the Allies were strafing the Rising Sun and sinking one Japanese ship per day, every day. And that liberation was right around the corner.

But the war was not over. It would take a total of three and a half years to force Tojo’s Army to its knees and bring the POWs home. By the end, the number of surviving American and Allied prisoners was a pathetic thirty-four percent. The survival rate of POWs in German Camps was ninety-four percent.

Pfc. Senio Lujan banked on the one-in-three odds that he would make it back home with Melo Garcia, his vato, alive. Times were when he’d been beaten unconscious by some screaming guard’s rifle butt for not saluting fast enough, that he considered maybe we wasn’t going home after all. The Japanese were brutal, attacking even their own their own enlisted men when they weren’t off abusing the whites. Any reason was reason enough, Bushido, the Samurai’s code. They could do anything they wanted to their humiliated captives. By and large the guard/overseers were both sadistic and bored, so torturing POWs afforded them some small diversion in a camp where no one wanted to be. Like the POWs, any Jap seen fleeing would be shot.

The men called the overseers by their given English names. One, Pig Vomit, had his eye on Senio and clouted him with his rifle butt given any chance. He’d beaten Senio so badly one time that Senio lay mercifully unconscious on the bare dirt by his split-toed shoes while Pig Vomit continued his frenzied job, trying to break what was left of his jutting ribs.

“Pig Vomit, Pig Vomit, look over here!” Melo shrieked and other prisoners joined in the chant. The overseer stopped, confused, and looked about for the cause of the uproar. Melo with some help from the doctor was able to slink in and drag Senio away from under Pig Vomit’s squint-eye. The name stuck.

Prison Camp had been structured so that the only protection the men had from the Japanese was supposed to come from their own officers in some legal orderly manner. None of the other 3,000 (too many) officers in camp would have lifted a finger to help an enlisted man like Senio. Officers just sat on their cans playing gin or solitaire in the shade. They even refused to filch fresh vegetables for themselves by working in the vegetable garden.

But not Doc Matson. The Doc knew how to trick an overseer into letting a prisoner go. One time, he offered him a cigarette, another, he pointed to the sky. Once he started irrationally screaming and the overseer paused long enough for the victim to escape and fade into a cluster of POWs. The GIs considered Doc special, the only officer who was not totally useless.

“What happened? Qué pasó?” Senio asked Melo hours later when he regained consciousness. Senio was a bleeding mess.

“Pig Vomit hammered you from behind. No warning. Americans give warnings, first. Not these bastards.”

“Gooks say it’s Bushido to shoot a guy in the back.” Senio had been on the outside of the group of men, doing nothing, walking away from the roll call when Pig Vomit brought him to the ground. All the Japs screamed the word Bushido, meaning that the white men are expected to fall on their honorable swords—the only good prisoner is a dead prisoner. That’s Bushido, a code that glorified death.

Right now, it looked like Senio was going to pull through. “Thank the Doc for me, okay?”

“He’s a good guy.”

“If anything, I’ve got a major grudge against the other officers,” Senio started in. “First they surrendered us and they asked the Nips for taxis on the Death March for chrissakes.”

“They’ve got it made, playing gin rummy while we’re dying of starvation and dysentery thirty a day. An officer bite the dust? He’d have to be really stupid.” Melo agreed. “Tonto.”

“Yeah, for me, I got no respect for the Nips generally and the officers specifically. Samo-samo.”

Melo muttered, “Me, too,” and he was right. At Cabanatuan there were 3,000 officers who by the Geneva Convention thought they could not be made to work like the 6,000 slave grunts had to. They were assholes, first-class college-boy assholes, but they got what was coming to them because the Japs didn’t play by the Geneva Convention.

“So they’re supposed to make the rules for the Americans in camp.”

“Rank does not mean shit in fucking MacArthur’s war.”

“You hear that General Black asked General Masaharu Homma if he could have a room at the Manila Hotel?”

“So, what’d he say?” General Homma was mean, the top honcho over the 320,000 surrendered troops.

“He screamed somethin’ high and squeaky in Japanese. He’s still trying to figure how MacArthur escaped and left all his three hundred and twenty thousand men without a pot to piss in.”

“Tokyo Rose says no problem, the war is over. Japan won. Everybody’s out of rice. They won because Roosevelt’s out of rice. Everybody in Washington’s out of rice.”

“She’s full of chickenshit.”

“What happens to us if we lose the war? I mean, what will really happen?” Melo knew the answer. He didn’t have to ask.

“They save their lousy rice and just machine gun us, standing in graves we dig ourselves.”

“What happens if we win?”

“Same thing. They want us dead so we won’t rat on ‘em.”

“When do you think that’ll be?”

“Another month, maybe.”

“Shit.”

“You know it. Shit”

“Worse than shit.”