ANN BEGAN 1946 WITH little to hope for. Phillip’s view of the future was equally bleak. Sitting on the edge of a hospital cot in Honolulu, he knew he was no longer the same man who had left his wife four years earlier. He stared at his image in the mirror above the sink. It was like looking at a total stranger. His eyes were haunted, and his skin was drawn tightly across his cheekbones. Looking down, he noticed that his pajamas swam around his skinny legs, and he remembered that a fall in the last months of the war had left him with a permanent limp.
Would Ann even want him back? He was so terribly changed. His hair had begun to grow in from where they had shaved it, but there was a large bald spot that refused to fill in. His face was permanently scarred from Nakanishi’s blow with his gun. He was hardly the handsome young husband who had left his adoring bride.
Worse still was the change that didn’t show. The long years as a prisoner of war had sapped his spirit. His ambition had faded along with his hopes for the future. All he wanted to do for the rest of his life was to sit quietly in some safe harbor.
The little room suddenly made him feel claustrophobic. Small spaces had been intolerable to him ever since his stint in the cage. When the Japanese major had wanted to punish a prisoner, he locked the offender in a tiny bamboo cage where it was impossible to stand, sit, or lie down. The victim could only shift position, desperately waiting for death or release. It was Phillip’s worst memory of the war. A week’s confinement had led to his decision to volunteer when the major had demanded reasonably healthy prisoners to work on the railroad the Japanese wanted to build through Burma.
Nothing could be worse than the camp, Phillip had decided, and with Bugleman’s death there was no one he really minded leaving. He had lined up the next day with thirty other GIs. As they shuffled out of the camp, Phillip experienced a sense of freedom, but it faded quickly as he was jammed into a train which took them back to the coast. From there they went from bad to worse. When they got off the train they were marched to the docks and thrown into the hold of a transport. The weeks-long trip was a hell of vile water, little food, and agonizing heat. Added to that, Phillip was violently seasick. But in a way, the constant nausea and near delirium were a blessing because afterward he remembered little of the trip.
Once in Burma the men were forced to hack their way through the jungle to the site of the railroad. Phillip could not believe the sick and malnourished prisoners could work so hard. No one was spared, neither officers nor enlisted men. Phillip strained his bony shoulders under the weight of heavy ties and boxes of iron spikes, the ceaseless hammering and pounding jarring every nerve in his body.
In charge of the work gang was a sadistic officer named Oto. Like Nakanishi, he despised and loathed the white men over whom he had been given power. But unlike Nakanishi, Oto displayed a total lack of military discipline. His worst outbursts were often followed by quiet interludes when he would retreat to his tent. Later he would emerge with a vacant stare and refuse to speak to anyone for several hours.
Some of the men whispered that Oto smoked opium. Phillip neither knew nor cared. His only goal was to survive. He worked as little as possible, trying to conserve his strength, but not so little as to attract the guards’ notice.
As the months passed, the death toll began to mount alarmingly. Meanwhile, pressure from the Japanese High Command increased. Oto’s opium sessions decreased and his temper became more and more vicious. Impossible work quotas were imposed, which sapped the prisoners’ little remaining strength. Those who didn’t perform were dragged out of the work party and beaten with bamboos.
One day Oto stumbled out of his tent at noon, red-eyed and bleary. He strode to the worksite, surveyed it for a minute, then, pointing to a fair-haired soldier staggering under a load of timber, he barked a string of orders. The guards immediately seized the young soldier, who had been pulled from the line with Phillip at Morton Air Field. He had been desperately ill with malaria and had lost so much weight that he could barely walk, let alone work. The guards threw him to the ground and stripped his shirt from his back. Then they began to beat him. Frantically, Phillip made his way over to Oto, hoping to get him to stop his men, but as he approached he saw Oto’s mouth curl in a faint smile.
It was that expression that made something snap inside Phillip. He had vowed that he would never again do anything to attract attention—and punishment—to himself, but he couldn’t just stand there and do nothing. How could any man remain silent before such an act of barbarism?
“Captain Oto—I beg you to stop. What you are doing isn’t an act of military discipline—it’s cold-blooded murder.” Phillip paused for a moment to catch his breath. He was almost amazed he was still alive. He continued: “You’ve heard the rumors—Japanese victory isn’t sure now. You might have to answer someday for this outrage.”
Oto was dumbfounded by this act of rebellion, and his first impulse was to shoot this insolent American as an example. But in spite of his drugged state, the commandant heard an inner voice that cautioned prudence. The winds of war had indeed been shifting, and if his prisoners were abused unnecessarily, he might be held accountable by an Allied war crimes tribunal. Furthermore, he needed every available man to complete this section of the railroad. If he killed this man, he might provoke a work slowdown. Oto could read between the lines of the communiqués he was getting daily from Tokio. If he failed in his assignment he might well be shot.
All these thoughts crowded into his mind as he stood, tapping his riding crop on his boot and reflecting.
“I will order the beating stopped. But you, my friend, will spend time in the monkey cage. I heard that your week there made you volunteer for Burma. We will see how you like my accommodations.”
Mention of the cage left Phillip stupefied with terror. He let himself be led away in a daze, unable to take satisfaction in the fact that the young soldier had been spared.
The dreaded bamboo box sat in a cloud of flies, near the middle of the compound. It was damp and fetid at night, then blazingly hot all day long. As the bars closed with chilling finality, Phillip knew in that moment that he would have done anything, said anything, betrayed anyone, sold his very soul to escape. All he could hope was to die before he went insane.
A vision he had seen on the Death March still haunted him. They had come upon a young Filipino soldier tied to a post, left by the Japanese to die, water placed just beyond his reach. He had gone mad and was running back and forth on all fours like a rabid dog.
God, don’t let me end up like that. Let the end be quick, Phillip prayed.
He had been almost three weeks in the cage when the Allied forces invaded Burma and Australian soldiers liberated the camp. They had found Phillip almost catatonic. He was skeletal by then, riddled by beriberi, and his hair had fallen out in clumps. He was covered with vermin. The cage stank unbelievably, and he was so crazed by his confinement that he believed the soldiers who released him were Japanese come to further torture him. When they approached the cage, he had flown into a terror-stricken frenzy.
Kicking and clawing, Phillip had raved wildly as his rescuers dragged him out. A medic rushed over and restrained him. They hadn’t released him until he reached the psychiatric hospital in Honolulu….
Sitting in the solarium, gazing out beyond the flowered terrace to the Pacific, Phillip took the first hesitant steps to recovery. Some part of him would have been content to spend the rest of his life in this island paradise. It was as if his soul had been permanently scarred. He doubted if he would ever ask for more than three meals a day and a soft bed in which to sleep. But later that night he confronted the task of writing Ann. The doctors had told him if he wasn’t up to it, they would tell one of the officers to send her a telegram. That would be cruel, he thought.
Now he looked down at the note paper and picked up a pen. Four times he started. My dearest, My dear Ann, Darling, darling, darling…. His hand was trembling so badly that he could not form the letters. My God, what can I say after all this time?
Over four years had passed since he had seen her. He hadn’t written since the day he had sailed for Corregidor. Did she know what had happened to him? Had the army notified her that he had been taken to a psychiatric hospital? His dog tags had disappeared somewhere along the line—Phillip couldn’t remember where. God only knew what Ann had been told, if anything.
Finally he picked up the pen again.
My dearest Ann,
I don’t even know how to begin. By now, they must have let you know that I am still alive and in a Honolulu hospital. They tell me that I’ve been here for several months, but it is only in the last few weeks that I have begun to remember who I am and how I got here.
Now that I am able to write, I am not quite sure what to say or how to say it.
Except for a period at sea, I’ve been a prisoner of war, first in the Philippines and then in Burma. When I was rescued I apparently wasn’t lucid. I still can’t remember what happened. But I was luckier than the rest of my men. None of them survived.
Well, enough of that. I have been thinking and wondering about you, Ann. You have been in my mind, day and night for over four years. The thought of you was often the only thing that kept me from giving up.
But I realize that things have probably been very different for you. Four years is a long, long time, especially for someone as young and lovely as you, Ann. And, of course, you had no way of knowing if I were still alive. It would be only natural if you had begun to plan for a future without me.
I feel I must warn you that I have changed a great deal physically. At times, I barely recognize myself. I lost about sixty pounds while I was in captivity, and though I’ve regained some, I am still only about 135, which is pretty skinny for six feet. My leg was broken over there and did not heal properly, so that I walk with a limp. But the worst is that I have a bad scar across my face. I have to be honest with you, Ann—it’s pretty horrible.
I guess what I am telling you is that you have your whole life ahead of you, and I don’t want to tie you down to a broken-down wreck of a man.
I still love you, Ann—more than anything in the world. But I will understand if you feel that we cannot pick up the threads of our lives as if nothing had happened.
If all goes well, I will be released in two weeks’ time and my ship will dock in San Francisco on April 15th.
With all my love,
Phillip