CHAPTER 18
A Dead Body Breathing
A biscuit was tossed into Louie’s cell, breaking into bits on the floor. A tiny cup of weak tea was set on the windowsill. Louie gulped the tea and crawled around, picking up crumbs and putting them in his mouth.
There was a rustle outside, and a Kwajalein native appeared. He greeted Louie cheerfully, in English, by name. Louie stared at him in confusion.
The man said the castaways were the talk of the island. He was an ardent track fan, and when he’d heard Louie’s name, he’d come to meet the great runner. As Louie listened, bewildered, the man chattered about sports, indifferent to Louie’s plight. When he glanced at his watch and said he had to go, Louie stopped him. What happened to the marines held there?
They’re all dead, the man said. All POWs held on Kwajalein were executed.
As the man left, the guard looked challengingly at Louie, lifted a flattened hand to his throat, and made a slashing gesture. He pointed to the names on the wall, then to Louie.
The second day began. Phil and Louie lay in sweltering silence, expecting to be dragged out and beheaded. Louie developed explosive diarrhea, and cramps doubled him over. Flies, lice, and mosquitoes teemed on him. The heat was smothering. Down the hall, rats wallowed in Phil’s waste bucket and skittered over his face. Guards stalked past, snarling and drawing the sides of their hands across their necks with cruel smiles.
Days passed, each bringing two or three rice balls tossed to the floor and a few tiny cups of tea. Louie’s diarrhea became bloody. He begged for water. The guard brought a cup. Louie, grateful, drew close to the door to drink. The guard threw scalding water in his face. Desperately dehydrated, Louie kept begging. Each time, the response was the same, leaving Louie’s face blistered. He knew dehydration might kill him, and part of him hoped it would.
As he lay in misery, he heard again the singers from the raft. He let their voices wash over him, finding reason to hope. He held the song in his mind, praying intensely. He stared at the marines’ names, wondering who they were, how the end had come. He pulled off his belt, bent the buckle up, and carved his name beside theirs.
The guards were in a fixed state of fury at the captives. Nearly every day, they flew into rages that usually ended with Phil and Louie being spat upon and bombarded with rocks and lit cigarettes. Every day, at gunpoint, Louie was forced to dance while his guards roared with laughter. They stabbed him with sticks and taunted him as he crawled around picking up bits of rice. Once, driven to his breaking point by a guard jabbing him, Louie yanked the stick away. He knew he might be killed for it, but under ceaseless humiliation, something was happening to him. He was losing his will to live.
The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical hardship, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards deprived them of something deeper: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, leaving victims in a state of profound wretchedness and loneliness, unable to hang on to hope.
Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom loss of honor could merit suicide. This is probably one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose. On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can keep a man alive long past the point when he should have died. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.
Louie had been on Kwajalein for about a week when his cell door was thrown open and guards pulled him out. Terrified, thinking he was about to be beheaded, he was marched into a building. Before him were Japanese officers, sitting by a table heaped with food meant to entice him. Louie wasn’t going to be executed. He was going to be interrogated.
The ranking officer stared coolly at Louie. Which model of B-24 did he crash in? Louie replied, truthfully, that it was a D-model. The officer handed him a pencil and paper and told him to draw the plane. On Oahu, Louie had heard that a crashed D-model had been captured by the Japanese. Knowing that they already knew the plane in detail, he drew it accurately. His interrogators held up a photo of a D-model. They’d been testing his truthfulness.
What did he know about the E-model? Nothing, he replied. It was a lie; D-model Super Man had undergone upgrades that effectively made it an E. How do you operate the radar? Louie knew the answer, but replied that as a bombardier, he wouldn’t know. Told to draw the radar system, Louie drew an imaginary system so elaborate, it was later written, it resembled “a ruptured octopus.” The interrogators nodded.
They moved on to his bombsight, which was top-secret. How do you work it? You twist two knobs, Louie said. The officers knew he was lying and sent him to his cell without giving him any food.
Suspecting he’d be brought back, Louie tried to anticipate questions. He thought of the things he could tell and those he had to keep secret. He invented lies and practiced telling them. Because he’d been partially truthful in the first session, he knew his captors would be more likely to trust his answers.
One day, a new guard appeared at the door. Louie felt an upswell of dread.
“You Christian?” the guard asked. Louie said yes. The guard smiled.
“Me Christian.”
The guard reached into the cell and slipped two pieces of candy into Louie’s hand, then gave two pieces to Phil. A friendship was born.
The guard’s name was Kawamura, and he spoke almost no English. Each day, he walked between the cells, drawing pictures of things and saying and writing their Japanese names. Louie and Phil would write and say the English names. They understood almost nothing Kawamura said, but his gentle smile and goodwill needed no translation. It was lifesaving.
When Kawamura was off duty, another guard came. He launched himself at Louie, ramming a stick into his face as if trying to put out his eyes. When Kawamura saw Louie’s bloody face, he asked who’d done it, then sped away, furious. Later, he returned, opened Louie’s cell door a crack, and proudly pointed outside. There stood the guard who’d abused Louie, his forehead and mouth heavily bandaged. He never guarded the cell again.
One day Louie and Phil looked up to see angry faces pressed into their cell windows, shouting. Rocks flew in. More men came, screaming, spitting on the captives, hurling sticks. Louie balled up on the floor. On and on it went, some ninety men taking turns attacking the captives. At last, it ended. Louie lay in pools of spit and jumbled rocks and sticks, bleeding.
Kawamura was distraught over what had been done to his friends. He told them the culprits were a submarine crew, stopping over on the island, who had learned Americans were being held there. During interrogation, Louie complained about the attack. It’s what you should expect, the officers replied.
The interrogators asked Louie the numbers of aircraft, ships, and servicemen in Hawaii. Louie said he’d left Hawaii in May. Now it was August. He had no current information. He was sent back to his cell.
Louie and Phil were ordered to lie down. The doctors pulled out two long hypodermic syringes and filled each with a murky solution. Louie and Phil realized they were about to be used for an experiment.
The doctors slid the needles into the captives’ forearms and pushed the plungers. Within a few seconds, the porch started gyrating around Louie. The doctor pushed more solution in, and the spinning worsened. Louie felt as if pins were being jabbed all over his body. Then he felt light-headed. His skin burned, itched, and stung. Nearby, Phil endured the same ordeal. The doctors questioned the captives on their symptoms. Louie cried out that he was going to faint. The doctor withdrew the needle.
The captives were returned to their cells. Louie’s entire body was covered in a rash. For days, he was maddened by itching and burning. When the symptoms subsided, he and Phil were again injected, this time with more solution. Again they rolled through dizziness and burned with rashes. Then came a third experiment, then a fourth. In the last, a full pint of fluid was pumped into their veins.
They were lucky to survive. In their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for unimaginably hellish experiments in medicine and biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.