Pete had made the decision that he would not die from disease or starvation. He was a tough farm boy, a West Point man, a cavalry officer, and he had a beautiful family back home. Perhaps luck had given him a stronger physical and mental constitution. He was tougher than most of the others, or at least he told himself so. He wanted to help the weaker ones, but there was nothing he could do. Everyone was dying, and he had to take care of himself.
As conditions worsened at O’Donnell, the men talked more and more of escape. As prisoners, they were expected to attempt it, though in their condition it seemed nearly impossible. They were too weak to run far, and there were Japs everywhere. It would be easy to get outside because of the work crews, but they were not healthy enough to survive in the jungle.
To suppress the urge to run, the Japs implemented some rules that were simple in their understanding but exceedingly brutal in their application. Initially, if you ran and got caught, you were to be struck with a bullwhip until you bled to death. To demonstrate how this rule worked, the guards rounded up several thousand prisoners one afternoon for a show near the commandant’s quarters.
Five Americans had tried to escape and been caught. They were stripped naked and their hands were bound together above their heads and attached to ropes looped over a rail so that their toes barely touched the ground. At first it looked like they might be hanged. All five were emaciated, with their ribs jutting out. An officer with a bullwhip strutted in front of the prisoners, and through an interpreter explained what was about to happen, though it was rather obvious. He was an expert with the bullwhip, and his first stroke against the back of the first soldier caused him to scream. The bullwhip popped with each blow, and his back and buttocks were soon bloodied. When he appeared to be unconscious, the officer moved a few steps to the second soldier. The mauling lasted for half an hour, under a hot sun. When all five were bloodied and still, the commandant stepped forward and announced a new rule: If a prisoner escaped, then ten of his comrades would be whipped and left to die in the sun.
Needless to say, the demonstration curtailed many escape schemes that had been in the works.
Clay found a Filipino Scout who was working as a truck driver and had managed to establish a black market for food within the American section of O’Donnell. His prices were fair and he offered tins of salmon, sardines, and tuna, along with peanut butter, fruit, and cookies.
Pete and Clay made a decision. They would take the cash hidden in Pete’s canteen cover, buy the food they could afford, share it between themselves but include no one else, and try to survive. The scheme would take both of their efforts because it was difficult to hide and eat black market food. Everyone was ravenous and watching everyone else. They felt lousy hiding and not sharing, but they damned sure could not feed the sixty thousand starving souls at O’Donnell. Clay’s first haul was a tin of salmon, four oranges, and two coconut cookies, and for $1.50 they ate like kings.
The plan was to stretch the money as far as possible, and when it was gone, they would think of something else. The extra food energized Pete and he began roaming the prison looking for his old friends from the Twenty-Sixth Cavalry.
The Japanese rarely entered the camp and had little interest in what went on there. They knew the conditions were inhumane and deteriorating, but they simply ignored the prisoners when possible. As long as they remained locked up, and worked when they were instructed, the Japanese didn’t seem to care.
However, the piles of dead bodies could not be ignored. The commandant ordered that they be burned, but General King pleaded for a more respectful burial. The Japanese might believe in cremation, but the Americans did not.
With the Americans dying at a rate of a hundred per day, General King organized burying rituals. Groups of gravediggers took turns at the shovel, while other groups hauled the bodies. Most came from the morgue at the hospital, but there were decomposing bodies all over the prison.
Pete and Clay learned that those who stayed busy lived longer than those who sat around in a stupor, so they volunteered to dig. They left the barracks after breakfast and walked to the American cemetery just outside the main camp, about eight hundred yards from the hospital. They were handed their tools, old spades and pieces of metal bent here and there and barely able to scratch up a pound of dirt. An American officer stepped off the boundaries of the next mass grave — six feet wide, twenty feet long, four feet deep. The diggers began their work. There were dozens of them and the work was urgent because the bodies were rotting.
They arrived in blankets strung between bamboo poles, or on litters fashioned from old doors. The burial parties used anything that would haul a hundred-pound skeleton, many of which had begun decomposing in the heat. The rotting corpses emitted a noxious odor that stung when inhaled.
At each grave, a registration officer handled the paperwork and recorded the name and exact location of each man as he was laid to rest. However, some of the dead had no dog tags and were unknown. Each grave held twenty or more men. When one was filled, the gravediggers went about the glum business of covering their comrades.
The cemetery was nicknamed the Boneyard, and how fitting that became. Pete could count the ribs on virtually every corpse he buried, and he never failed to utter a curse at the Japanese as he covered each American soldier.
Day after day, he and Clay volunteered to dig graves. For Pete, it was a way to hang on to his humanity. Someone had to make sure each soldier received a proper burial, or at least the best under the circumstances. If Pete died, he would do so with the assurance that some kind soul had dug a real grave for him.
As the casualties mounted, the digging became more intense. And with lousy tools and straining energy, the work was difficult. The Boneyard expanded as more graves were necessary. The pallbearers arrived in a steady stream.
A grave was filled and an officer ordered it closed. Pete and Clay and four others began the chore of backfilling, of covering the men. As Pete did so he stopped cold. Below him, just a few feet away, was a face he recognized, even with its closed eyes and thick black whiskers. He asked the registration officer for the name. Salvadore Moreno, of the Twenty-Sixth Cavalry.
Pete closed his eyes and stood motionless. “You okay, Pete?” Clay asked. Pete backed away from the grave and stumbled a few feet to a fence post. He sat down, covered his face with his hands, and wept bitterly.
Chapter 29
As things developed, the grave digging was not such a good idea after all. The Japanese were watching from a distance. They needed some of the “healthier” Americans to ship back to Japan to work as slave laborers in coal mines. Pete and Clay were chosen in a group of about a thousand. The first hint of change came after breakfast in late June when a guard appeared and ordered five men from their barracks to follow him. At the parade ground, they formed lines and stood at attention. A convoy of trucks arrived, and as each man boarded he was given a rice ball, a banana, and a can of water.
Pete and Clay knew that this was not a normal work detail, and as they rode for more than an hour some excitement crept into the conversations around them. Could it be possible they were leaving O’Donnell for good? The Japanese were constantly moving prisoners around, and wherever they were going had to be an improvement over O’Donnell.
Soon they were entering the busy streets of Manila, and speculation ran wild about their destination. When they stopped at the harbor, the men were confused. Should they be delighted that O’Donnell was behind them, or terrified of being shipped to Japan? Before long, all excitement vanished.