After a successful raid on a convoy, Major Banning and his men were withdrawing when they approached a barrio. They smelled smoke from the trail and soon came upon a horrible scene. The Japanese had raided and destroyed the village. Every hut was on fire and children were running everywhere, screaming. In the center there were about fifteen dead men, all with their hands tied behind their backs. Their bodies were bloodied and mutilated; their detached heads were a few feet away, lined in a neat row. Several women had been shot and they lay where they fell.
A teenage boy bolted from the bush and ran toward them, crying and screaming. Camacho grabbed him and spoke to him in a dialect. As the boy wailed he shook his fists angrily at the guerrillas.
Camacho said, “He blames us, says we brought the Japanese here.” Camacho kept talking to the boy, who was inconsolable.
“He says the Japanese came here a few hours ago and accused the people of helping the Americans. They demanded to know where the Americans were hiding, and since we didn’t know and couldn’t tell them, they did this. Both his mother and his father were murdered. They took his sister and some of the young women away. They’ll rape them and then kill them too.”
Pete and his men were speechless. They listened to the exchange and gawked at the carnage.
Camacho went on, “He says his brother went to find the Japanese and tell them that you’re here. It’s all your fault, all your fault. The Americans are to blame.”
Pete said, “Tell him we’re fighting the Japanese, we hate them too. We’re on the side of the Filipinos.”
Camacho jabbered on but the boy was out of his mind. He was bawling and kept shaking his fist at Pete. He finally tore away and ran to the dead men. He pointed at one and screamed at the corpse.
Camacho said, “That’s his father. They were forced to watch as the Japs cut off their heads, one at a time while threatening to kill all of them if they didn’t give up the information.”
The boy ran to the bush and disappeared. Children were clinging to the bodies of their mothers. The huts were still burning. The guerrillas wanted to help in some way, but the situation was too dangerous. Pete said, “Let’s get out of here.” They hurried away, sloshing through the mud. They marched until dark as heavy rain began, then set up camp under leaking lean-tos and tarps. The rain was unrelenting and they slept little.
Pete had nightmares about the ghoulish scene.
Back at the base, he reported to Lord Granger and described the raid on the barrio. Granger refused to show emotion, but he knew Major Banning was rattled. He ordered him to rest for a few days.
Around the fire that night, Pete and Clay told the story to the other Americans. They had their own stories and they had grown callous to such tales. The enemy had a limitless capacity for savagery, and it made the guerrillas vow to fight even harder.
Chapter 33
In Pete’s absence the cotton grew anyway, and by mid-September the picking began. The weather cooperated, the prices held firm on the Memphis exchange, the field hands worked from dawn to dusk, and Buford managed to keep enough itinerant labor in place. The harvest brought a level of normalcy to the land and to a people living under the dark clouds of war. Everyone knew a soldier who was either waiting to be shipped off or already fighting. Pete Banning was the first casualty from Ford County, but then other boys were killed or wounded or missing.
Four months into widowhood, Liza managed to establish some semblance of a routine. Once the kids were off to school, she had coffee with Nineva, who slowly became her sounding board and her strength. Liza puttered in the garden with Amos and Jupe, met each morning with Buford to discuss the crops, and tried to stay away from town. She quickly grew tired of the endless inquiries about how she was doing, how she was holding up, how the kids were handling it all. If spotted in town, she was forced to endure hugs and tears from people she hardly knew. For the sake of her children, she forced the family to go to church, but the three of them grew to dislike the Sunday ritual. They began skipping occasionally to avoid the constant condolences, and instead walked to Florry’s cottage for brunches on the patio. No one condemned them for their “chapel cuts.”
Most weekday mornings, Dexter Bell drove out to visit Liza. They had coffee, a devotional, and prayer. They sat in Pete’s study with the door closed and talked in soft voices. Nineva, as always, hovered nearby.
Pete had been gone for almost a year, and Liza knew he was not coming home. If he were alive he would find a way to send a letter or a message, and as the days and weeks passed without a word she accepted the unspeakable reality. She admitted this to no one, but gamely went about her dark days as if she held out hope. It was important for Joel and Stella, and for Nineva and Amos and everyone else, but in private she wept and sat for hours in her dark bedroom.
Joel was sixteen, a senior in high school, and was talking of enlisting. He would soon turn seventeen, and upon graduation could join the army if his mother agreed. She said she would not and such talk upset her. She had lost her husband and was not about to lose her son. Stella fought with Joel to quell such nonsense, and he reluctantly stopped talking about fighting. His future was in college.
In early October, the rains stopped and the skies cleared. The soggy terrain bred a fresh wave of mosquitoes, and malaria hit the guerrillas hard. Virtually every man had it to some degree, many for the third or fourth time, and living with it became normal. They carried bottles of quinine and cared for their sicker comrades.
With the roads passable, the Japanese convoys became more frequent, but the guerrillas were often too weak to strike. Pete had gained a few pounds, though he guessed he was still fifty pounds below his fighting weight, when fevers and chills knocked him down for a week. During a lull, when he was wrapped in a blanket and semilucid, he realized it was October 4, one year to the day after he left home. Without a doubt, it had been the most memorable year of his life.
He was sleeping when a runner woke him with orders to report to Lord Granger. He and Clay staggered from their hut and reported to the general’s post. Intelligence had reported a large convoy of oil tankers leaving a port and headed inland. Within an hour, G Troop was moving down the mountain in the darkness. It bivouacked with DuBose’s D Troop, and forty guerrillas were on the move, most of them weakened with malaria but excited to have a mission. The rains and mosquitoes had not stopped the war.
Engineers from the imperial army had carved a new supply road, one that Granger had heard rumors of. DuBose found it first, and he and Pete hiked it with their men in search of an ambush point. Finding none, they began to backtrack when four Zeros suddenly appeared at treetop level. Majors Banning and DuBose ordered their men to retreat to a hillside and bury themselves in the bush to wait. A recon unit soon appeared, two platoons of Japanese soldiers on foot. They carried machetes and hacked their way through the bush beside the road, looking for guerrillas. It was a new tactic, one that clearly showed the importance of the convoy. Trucks could soon be heard, and lots of them. The first three were open carriers packed with soldiers at the ready. Behind them were six tankers loaded to the brim with gasoline and diesel fuel. Their rear was protected by three more carriers.
The plan was to attack with hand grenades and ignite a massive fireball, but the guerrillas were not close enough. The target was tempting, but Major Banning wisely backed off. He signaled DuBose a hundred yards away. DuBose agreed and the guerrillas withdrew even deeper. The convoy inched along and was soon out of sight.