Pete desperately wanted water, as did everyone, and eventually found his way to the water line, a long, sad assemblage of men. As he walked down the line looking for its end, he passed hundreds of men, all with the same detached and defeated eyes. No one talked as they waited and waited. The line barely moved. It took him seven hours to fill his canteen.
At dark, the men were lined up and told to sit. Dinner was served, a scoop of rice. There was no meat, bread, or fruit. After eating, the men drifted back to the barracks, which had no lighting. There was nothing to do but face the nightly adventure of sleep. Pete found it impossible to get comfortable on the bamboo poles and eventually found a pile of weeds in a corner and curled himself into a ball.
His mouth was parched and sticky and he craved water. The starvation was painful enough, but the lack of water was driving men mad. There was barely enough to drink and cook with and operate the hospital, and not a spare drop for anything else. Pete’s skin was filthy and raw in places from the lack of soap and water. He had not bathed in weeks, had not shaved since before the surrender on Bataan. His clothes were rags and there was no way to clean them. His one pair of underwear had been tossed days ago. He could not remember the last time he brushed his teeth and gums and they ached from such a rotten diet. He smelled like a walking sewer, and he knew it because every other prisoner reeked.
During his first night at O’Donnell, a sharp crack of thunder awakened Pete and his bunkmates. A storm was rolling through. As the rain began, thousands of men staggered into the open and looked at the skies. They opened their mouths, spread their arms, and let the sheets of cool rainwater wash over them. It was delicious, and precious, and there was no way to collect it. The rain went on for a long time and turned the walkways into muddy ditches, but the men stood through the storm, savoring the water and happy to get a good cleansing.
At dawn, Pete hustled through the mud to the hospital. He had been told that getting there early was advisable. It was a wretched place, filled with dying, naked men, many lying on the floor in their own waste and waiting for help. A doctor looked at the gash in the back of Pete’s head and thought he could help. Pete was lucky; there was no infection. With a pair of electric army shears, the doctor shaved Pete’s scalp and took his whiskers while he was at it. It was refreshing and Pete felt lighter and cooler. The doctor had nothing in the way of anesthesia, so Pete gritted his teeth while six stitches were sewn to close the wound. The doctor was happy to see a patient he could treat, explaining as he worked that there was so little he could do for the others. He gave Pete some antibiotics and wished him well. Pete thanked him and hurried back to the barracks in anticipation of food.
Breakfast was rice, as were lunch and dinner. Filthy rice, often with bugs and weevils and mold, and it didn’t matter, because starving men will eat anything. The rice was steamed and stewed and boiled and stretched as thinly as possible. Traces of meat sometimes appeared, beef or water buffalo, but the portions were too small to taste. Occasionally the cooks added whatever boiled vegetables they could find, but they were tasteless. There was never fruit. As they starved between meals, the men ate leaves and grass and before long O’Donnell was picked clean of all vegetation. And when there was nothing to eat, the listless prisoners lounged in whatever shade they could find and talked about food.
They were dying of starvation. On average, they were given fifteen hundred calories a day, about half of what they required. Added to the fact that most had been starving for four months on Bataan, the diet at O’Donnell was lethal, and intentionally so.
Like water, food was plentiful in the Philippines.
The lack of it only intensified their diseases. Every man suffered from something, be it malaria, dengue fever, scurvy, beriberi, jaundice, diphtheria, pneumonia, or dysentery, or combinations of these. Half the men had dysentery when they arrived. The officers organized teams to dig latrines, but they were soon filled and overflowing. Some men were so crippled by the violent diarrhea they could not walk and soiled themselves where they lay. Some died from it. With no medicine and a pathetic diet, dysentery was soon epidemic. The entire prison reeked of a huge, open sewer.
Pete had suffered through two mild bouts of dysentery since Christmas, but he had been able to get paregoric from doctors. During his second day at O’Donnell, he was suddenly short of breath and fatigued. The warning signs arrived, and like all the prisoners he spent a few hours self-diagnosing and wondering which disease was coming. When his stomach began cramping, he suspected dysentery. Halfway through his first bout of bloody diarrhea, he knew for sure. The first few days would be the roughest.
His new pal was Clay Wampler, a cowboy from Colorado who had been a machine gunner with the Thirty-First. Clay shared a space in the barracks next to Pete and had welcomed him to his miserable new home. With Clay’s assistance, Pete went to the hospital in search of paregoric, but the demand was so high there was none in the prison. Clay was a dutiful nurse and joked that he was happy to help Pete because he, Clay, would expect the same attention when he got hit with the damned disease. On the third day, Pete was somewhat relieved when he realized his current bout was not as severe as many he had witnessed. Dysentery killed many men. Others suffered the cramps and diarrhea for a week and shook it off.
That night, Pete awoke soaking wet and with violent chills. He had seen enough malaria to know the signs.
The remnants of the Twenty-Sixth Cavalry were housed in the northeast compound, as far away from Pete as possible. When it had retreated to Bataan, it was still intact and operating, with forty-one American officers and about four hundred Filipino Scouts. Early in the siege, though, cavalry proved ineffective in the treacherous jungles of the peninsula, and the horses were soon needed elsewhere as hunger became an enemy. April 9, the day of the surrender, the Twenty-Sixth had lost fourteen officers and about two hundred Scouts. At O’Donnell, thirty-six of the Americans were together, including Sal Moreno and Ewing Kane. Six of the missing were known dead, including Pete Banning. Others had evaded capture and were still at large, including Lieutenant Edwin Ramsey, the leader of the last cavalry charge at Morong. Ramsey was on his way to the mountains, where he would organize a guerrilla army.
In charge of the Twenty-Sixth was Major Robert Trumpett, a West Pointer from Maryland. He had arrived at O’Donnell two days before Pete and was busy organizing his men into a survival unit. Like everyone else, they were suffering from starvation, dehydration, exhaustion, wounds, and disease, primarily dengue fever and malaria. They had survived the death march and were quickly realizing that they would have to survive O’Donnell as well. Trumpett prepared a list of the six men killed either in action or on the march, and managed to hand it to an aide for General Ned King. The general had asked all commanders to do this so families back home could be notified.
Of the six, four had died in action, with two known to have been buried. Pete and another lieutenant had died on the march and their bodies would never be recovered.
General King asked the commandant to pass along the names of the dead and captured to an American administrative staff working under house arrest in Manila. At first the commandant refused, but later changed his mind when his superiors ordered it. The Japanese were proud of the large numbers of American casualties and wanted it known.
The hospital was a collection of flimsy bamboo huts on stilts. There were five wards, long buildings with no beds, blankets, or sheets. Patients lay shoulder to shoulder on the floor, some in agony, others in comas, still others already dead. Under manageable conditions, it could safely house two hundred patients at a time. By late spring there were over eight hundred men lined along the floors, waiting for medicines that were not going to arrive. Most of them would die.