Soldiers in Hiding Read online

  Jimmy grew more silent in the days after Ike’s death. Now that I was aide to Nakamura we rarely saw each other and by the time we got to Bataan I was too busy to worry about what he thought of my miraculous return. If he knew I’d run, I wasn’t ashamed. If he was beginning to feel we should shoot like all the other Japanese, that was his problem. While working for the major I was assured of staying away from the front, and because I had survived such a brutal battle, I had all his confidence. I carried my clipboard, the same one Ike had used, and I walked about the camp doing my duties. Jimmy spent his free time with his face pressed against the wire, staring in at the poor prisoners of war.

  Most of the prisoners at Bataan were American, and because of my duties as aide I often came in contact with them. The conditions under which the prisoners lived were bad. Many people in America are still convinced of the brutality of the Japanese, but part of it was that we simply didn’t know how many prisoners there would be, we didn’t have the tools to handle them, not enough food, not enough housing. And running a camp was hard work. It was easy to get angry.

  When I came into contact with the prisoners, I kept my knowledge of English to myself. I was responsible for supplies and security. When I walked among them my heart went out, but what was I to do? If I told them I was one of them they would despise me, and there was no way they could help me get back home. If I told them merely that I spoke English they would want to talk to me and the quaver in my voice might give me away, letting them know the feelings of sympathy I had for them and weakening my position with the major.

  One day when I got to Major Nakamura’s office there was a man from Los Angeles standing at tired attention in front of him. The man was the commander of a new group of prisoners, and had presented the major with a list of demands for better treatment, with requests for a change of diet, for better toilet facilities, for a place that the men could use for physical exercise. The American did not know it, but Major Nakamura was embarrassed. He’d been an elementary school principal before the war and had recently wondered aloud whether he’d ever be back in the school again. The man spoke to the major through an interpreter, a Filipino whose face did not change no matter what was said.

  “He’s a prisoner. Tell him not to forget his position,” Nakamura told the man to tell the American. “These Americans… If we Japanese were being held captive we’d know how to act.”

  “War has rules,” the man told the American. “Obey them.”

  Major Nakamura had gained a wide and unreasonable reputation as a disciplinarian but in truth he was a meek man, a man whose mind was set on surviving the war as much as mine was. He wanted to get home to his wife and family once again, to busy himself with the dainty discipline of the elementary school. Still, he knew belligerence when he heard it, even if the language used was English, and as the man from Los Angeles talked on the major got madder.

  “Watch out,” he said. “I have my orders. I will not have rowdiness.” But when the man heard the translation all he did was laugh. He had not been a prisoner long. He still had a modicum of meat on his bones.

  “What?” said Major Nakamura.

  The interpreter looked from one man to the other, but neither spoke. “He didn’t say anything,” the interpreter told the major.

  “He laughed. Doesn’t he know that his life is in my hands? Tell him not to laugh. Tell him if he laughs again I’ll kill him. See how he likes that.”

  When the interpreter repeated what the major had told him, the man from Los Angeles kept quiet, but in a moment he said, “Obey the international rules for keeping prisoners,” and he turned to try to leave before the major had said he could go.

  “No!” shouted Nakarnura. “You can’t go until I give the order! Have you no sense of the way things are, of the relationship between conqueror and defeated during war? Don’t you know how you are supposed to act?”

  The major shouted and the guards at the door pushed the man back into the room. He sighed and said nothing after that, but he stood with his hands on his hips.

  “Arms akimbo!” the major shouted, suddenly looking at me. “Japanese people hate arms akimbo! He knows that too, doesn’t he?”

  The Filipino interpreter had lost the line that the major was taking and when the major ordered the man to put down his arms the interpreter told him to surrender his weapons.

  “We don’t have any weapons,” the man said. “We just want fair treatment. Tell him we just want fair treatment.”

  The interpreter told the major what the man had said, but by this time things were completely confused. Only I knew what was really going on, but I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to tell this man that not only was I a fellow citizen of his, but I was from the same town, perhaps the same stretch of city.

  “I will not tolerate arms akimbo,” Major Nakamura told the man very slowly. “It is something I will not have.” He was leaning over his desk and speaking directly to the man now, the interpreter pushed aside. Out in front of the room where we were talking, the American soldiers of the man’s company were waiting in the dust. The sun beat down on them but the guards would not let them come into the shade. Everyone could hear the major yelling. When I looked through the window I could see Jimmy standing near the tired, defeated Americans. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and was staring at the group and at the window where I watched him.

  “Maki,” the major shouted. “Come here. Maybe you can make this man understand.”

  “I’d prefer not to speak to him in English,” I said. “It will undermine my effectiveness later.”

  “He’s standing arms akimbo, look at him. Tell him to stop. That is what I can’t stand about Americans. They are defeated but they act as if somehow they are better than we are. It’s too much.”

  “The major wants you to put your arms at your sides,” I said quietly, looking at the American directly for the first time. “He feels that your posture is defiant and would prefer that you act the part of the conquered soldier rather than that of his equal.”

  The man from Los Angeles was startled at what I’d said, but without comment he dropped his hands to his sides and then looked back at Nakamura.

  “That’s good,” Nakamura said, talking to me. “Now I want you to put this man and his men in separate housing. We might make an example of this man. It seems every time I look through the fence I see someone standing arms akimbo. I want this guy in the center of the yard for a while. The heat will make him lower his gaze when he speaks to a Japanese officer.”

  Without looking at the man from Los Angeles again I went outside and told the guards what they should do. The American soldiers were all about my age. When Jimmy heard that the group’s leader would be kept in the center of the yard he looked at me, but when the time came he lowered his rifle and marched them away. The whole thing was disgusting. Major Nakamura had been milder in the jungle region than he was here and I had some trouble now, picturing him as an elementary school principal. Jimmy and I had been with him for the entire time we’d been in the Philippines and until this day he had not raised his voice, either at a prisoner or at a soldier of his own.

  A day passed and the major still made the man from Los Angeles stand in the center of the courtyard. At times it seemed that he wasted more energy than the man did, constantly getting up and walking to the window to see if his prisoner had moved. Jimmy and five others were made to guard the man in rotation, night and day, and though the man was sometimes allowed to sit down, the major had gone out and drawn a circle around him saying that he’d be killed if he stepped or fell across the line.

  A few days passed and the man from Los Angeles seemed to grow more defiant. His men could see him when they walked about their barracks and he seemed to take strength from the shouts that they gave him, from the sentimental, football-field mentality that they had. The major had cut the man’s rations to a minimum so it was surprising how long he lasted. After the first few days I could tell that the major wanted the af
fair ended, for he had seen in the American a willingness to see it through. He sat at his desk sitting tall so that he could see the thin shape of the man’s head, the way it waggled occasionally all loose on his still shoulders. Unable to sleep, Nakamura would rise from his mattress and stand at his window in the humid darkness just to see the slumped shoulders of the man in the moonlight. I knew, on about the fifth day, that if the man did step across Nakamura’s line, the major was ready to kill him. The body of the sari-sari store woman had made the major retch, yet now he was willing to murder this man over a test of his will.

  Late one night when the major was at his customary position, a worried look upon his face, nose pressed against the dirty glass of his office window, he saw something that broke the stalemate of the situation. Jimmy was on duty, standing facing the tall American, his rifle loosely held in his hands. Nakamura’s eyes were rimmed red, I am sure, yet they were keen, and what they saw was Jimmy ’s hand coming up and something passing between it and the American officer’s mouth. The major got out his field glasses and watched for the movement again and saw the brown band of a Japanese candy bar folded and tucked back into Jimmy’s pocket. He was beside himself. He paced his room furiously for a few moments, then sneaked out his side window and came around to the general barracks where I and the others were sleeping.

  “Psst,” he said. “Everybody up. Keep quiet, don’t turn on the lights.” He sneaked around from mat to mat shaking our shoulders and whispering in our ears. “What we have here is mutiny,” he told me after I was finally on my feet and awake. “Your friend has been feeding the prisoner. He has been supplementing his strength with Japanese candy!”

  When we heard what the major was saying we looked at one another. “Get your guns and let’s go,” the major whispered, so we stepped behind him, silent as snakes, and wound around the side of the barracks until we were gathered in the gray courtyard a few meters away from them. I could hear English spoken softly, just a word or two, before the major stepped forward and shouted, before a switch was thrown that flooded the entire area with light.

  The major marched forward and slapped Jimmy as hard as he could across the face. “Scoundrel!” he shouted. “Traitor!”

  Jimmy fell down, but got up immediately, blood coming a little from his lower lip. Everyone’s eyes were still trying to adjust to the light.

  “Empty your pockets!” the major ordered, but Jimmy stood swaying a moment, so the major hit him again. The American officer looked on. His face had changed in the five days since I’d seen him closely.

  “You,” shouted the major, “will be shot! And you,” he said, turning to Jimmy, “will do the shooting!”

  The major pushed his own hand into Jimmy’s pocket and then carefully smoothed out the creases in the crumpled candy wrapper.

  “Where were you born?” the major screamed, looking straight at Jimmy.

  Jimmy paused, then said, “Los Angeles.” He spoke in English and silenced the already dead-quiet crowd.

  The major looked from one to the other of them. The American inside the circle was skinnier than he had been in the office the week before. If Jimmy’d given him candy he couldn’t have given him much.

  The major turned to all of us, the candy wrapper held up above his head. “We have a traitor in our midst,” he said. “Yamamoto even speaks English when he is asked a question in Japanese.” He stood a moment until his hands began to shake. His fury had forced his thoughts from him, but finally he shook his head and said, “In all my years as a school principal I never ran up against anything as awful as this.”

  The major was in charge but was out of control. The American officer had been crouching when we’d approached him but was able to stand, his long legs bringing him high above the rest of us. Jimmy still held his rifle on the man, trying to act the part of the proper guard. When the major regained himself he looked a long moment at Jimmy. He raised a short finger and pointed at the prisoner.

  “Shoot this man, Yamamoto,” he said. “Shoot him now.”

  The American seemed to know what was happening for all of a sudden he backed out of the major’s circle and took a step or two to his right.

  “Wait,” he said.

  The major’s finger followed the man a moment, then he lowered it and called my name. I had been standing in the very back of the group of newly awakened soldiers. When he called me I felt a chill, though I was sweating and though the night was hot.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, softly beside him.

  “Go to the barracks and bring a blindfold. Bring something with which to pin it behind this man’s head.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to wait, major?” I asked. “In the morning perhaps all this will seem less serious.”

  “We will resolve it now,” the major said. “You Americans really stick together, don’t you?”

  “Yamamoto merely felt sorry for the man, I’m sure. Really, he’s as Japanese as…”

  “Go!” the major said, swinging around, red-eyed again. “Or maybe, Maki, I’ll find myself another aide as well.”

  I jumped a little when he shouted at me, but stepped away quickly while he turned his attention back to the two Americans. In his office it was easy to find the blindfolds, but I held back a little, hoping that time would cool the major off and maybe save the life of the man from Los Angeles. I could see them standing, waiting for me, through the window. Jimmy had been so stupid. In another day the major might have let the man slink back with the others, and that would have been the end of it. Now he was decisive, had locked us all on his course. As the men were waking up, they began to chatter and he didn’t stop them. The American in the center of the circle was gauging his chances as slim, I’m sure. Even from the window I could see him bobbing about, his feet nervously scraping back and forth across Nakamura’s old line.

  “Maki!” the major shouted, so I went back fast, the whole box of blindfolds in my hands.

  “Surely sir…”

  “Tie the blindfold quickly.”

  I walked up to the shaking soldier and held a blindfold up to his eyes.

  “Wait,” he said. “I’ll be good.”

  He tried to turn his head away from me so the major had a couple of the others hold him until I could secure the thing tightly behind his neck. “Try not to worry,” I whispered.

  Before the major turned to poor Jimmy again, he had another idea. He called to the guards who walked the ground around the American barracks, and told them to bring all the prisoners out.

  “We’ll let them watch,” he said. “One lesson and we won’t have a bit of trouble for weeks.”

  The guards were afraid to go inside the building where all the Americans were sleeping, so they shouted first, ordering those on the inside to turn on the lights. It took nearly ten minutes for the prisoners to be brought, single file, out into the courtyard, but when they were lined across from us the major seemed satisfied and drew another circle around the poor man, using the tip of his boot. All the Americans watched in sullen silence.

  “Yamamoto,” said the major.

  Poor Jimmy had been standing there all this time, weakly holding his rifle. He was such a silent man, such a private one, that even during this moment, even when the essence of confrontation was upon him, he remained within himself. He had his rifle and it struck me that he might murder the major instead. He might turn the thing on us all.

  “Yamamoto,” the major said once more.

  Jimmy walked a ways toward the major, then back near where I was standing with the wilting prisoner.

  “It was only a candy bar,” he said. “An extra one. Nobody wanted it.”

  The major walked to the prisoner and turned him around so that he was facing the others of his kind, all of them standing there in their drab Japanese issue, their poor pants all high water, the sleeves of their shirts too short.

  When the major touched him the American said, “Ahh.” Then with all the timbre gone out of his voice, all of its character mis
sing, he said, “Please…”

  There was no noise now, no talking. All eyes, those of the Japanese soldiers and of the American prisoners, were on Jimmy. The major made all of us stand at attention, then he backed away from the prisoner and waited.

  Jimmy walked up to the man and said, “I ’m going to have to shoot you now.” He held his rifle to the man’s head, its barrel just touching his clumsily cropped hair. Time passed. The American shook. I, in my position at the edge of the platoon, was holding my breath. The major did not move. Only Jimmy, absurdly, seemed calm. When he put the rifle down he turned back toward us and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt at the same instant.

  “No,” he said, very calmly and in English.

  When the prisoner heard him he jumped a little and all of the other Americans began to talk.

  I remember Jimmy had a slight smile on his face. When he spoke he broke the tension so completely for the Americans that their words came out harshly at us, like taunts. Major Nakamura stood still as the noise slapped against his ears: His face was red again, but this time he was not locked in indecision. He pulled his side arm from its holster and, walking over to where Jimmy was, put the barrel of it to Jimmy’s temple and fired. Jimmy’s smile did not leave his face as the small-caliber bullet passed through his brain. He seemed to stand an instant longer than he should have, then he fell at the feet of the blindfolded soldier, who, when he’d heard the shot, had nearly fallen himself.