BATAAN

We were moving across an open ridge, when we got a terrific dive bombing by six Japanese planes. They blew some of our men into fragments. Some of the trees were blown down. The grass was on fire. The officers kept hollering, "Get Moving! Get Across! Go! Go!" The smoke was everywhere. Some enlisted men were shouting, "Captain! You've got to come over here. Private So-an-so's got his arms around a big tree and he won't let go!"

"Oh, Jesus," I said, "pull him off!"

"No, you better come yourself."

They took off, and I went to the tree and there he was, with his arms around the tree. At first I thought he had a little bundle of something on the back of his neck. But it wasn't a bundle. His scalp had been blown off, and his hair was hanging down on his neck. The back of his exposed skull looked like a baseball. I went up to him, " Jesus Christ, let's go, let's go! We'll get you down to an aid station." But he was incoherent. I yelled, "Let's go, for Christ's sake, I've got other things to do!" I tried to pull him off but he had a steel grip on that tree. He stood there in the smoke. No blood was coming from his skull, just white bone. Finally I told him, "All right. You'll just have to stay here till the day of doom. Good-bye." And I left him hanging on that tree. I didn't even know his name.

Our officers were having a meeting in a clump of trees and I was standing nearby. The Japanese put a round right in the trees. Plump! I don't know how many were killed. It blew me down and away. Whenever I got up, I got up running. They say you don't remember when you're shellshocked, but I remember I dove into a foxhole. I wouldn't budge. Finally, some of the medics came over and told me they were going to send me back to the hospital. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to leave the fellows I was with. Nothing to do with heroics. I was too scared to leave. I kept digging deeper down into the hole. Whenever they reached down to pull me out, I'd fight them off. Finally my captain came over and coaxed me out by telling me he wasn't going to send me back. A few hours later I was normal again.

The Japs just pounded us. The worst day was April 8. The Jap bombers came over in waves. Then they'd send in the fighters to strafe us. Most of our men were sick or wounded. Morale was so bad that I treated a guy who shot himself in the arm. Bang! Guys would do anything to get away from the artillery and the planes.

We were loading wounded on a bus. The shells were landing all around. An officer told me to get on too: "You might as well go, too. This is the last bus back. It's all hopeless." I refused. I wanted to stay with my group. So I didn't get on. That bus went fifty yards and got hit square. Blown to smithereens.

About 200 of us were sent up to see if we could stem the Japanese advance. It was my last battle. They turned all their artillery on us up there. They blew those big trees to toothpicks. You had to see it to believe it. I was shot through both legs and the foot. Somehow I was carried down off the mountain and left at Hospital #2. I didn't know where I was. When I came to the last time, I was sitting in a stream with my feet in the cold water because it felt good. I was watching the bloody water run down the stream. A nurse who had come down to get a pail of water found me and yelled for some medics. They came and carried me up to where a whole bunch of guys were on the ground. I didn't even know where the hell I was. When my time came, they took me in the operating room. The doctor told me they were going to have to cut off one of my legs. I told them that if they did, I was going to cut their goddamn heads off. While I was lying there, they cut the legs off another guy. That scared the hell out of me. Finally, they began working on me and got my left leg in a cast. About the time they started on my right leg the word came around that the nurses had to leave, on account they were going to be evacuated to Corregidor. What I remember most about the nurses was that some of them were pretty damn nice-looking gals. 'Course, I'd been in the jungle a long time, too.

When the order to surrender came it was a great relief to me. I should have been very wary, very fearful, but I wasn't. The first Japs we saw were bone tired. They marched right past us. One Jap infantry private was so exhausted that he stumbled and fell in front of us Americans. A Jap officer gave some command, two riflemen came up, picked up the fallen soldier, took him off the road where we couldn't see him. Then we heard a shot, and the two Japs returned alone.

They pulled us off into a rice paddy and began shaking us down. There were about a hundred of us, so it took time to get to all of us. Everyone had pulled their pockets wrong side out, and laid all their things in front. They were taking jewelry and doing a lot of slapping. I laid out my New Testament. In the Bible I had some pesos and a ten-yen note my first sergeant had given me. There was a captain in front of me and I whispered to him whether I should leave the Jap money out. He said, "Well, I guess so. They said to lay everything out." Something told me there was trouble, though. I don't know how it came to me, I guess the Good Lord was on my side, but when I could I reached down and picked up that ten-yen note, folded it up real small and tucked it in right behind my belt.

After the shakedown, the Japs took an officer and two enlisted men behind a rice stack and shot them. We got to inquiring why they'd been shot. The men who had been next to them said they had had Japanese souvenirs and money.

At one stop a Japanese sergeant, who spoke beautiful Oxford-type English, came up to me. He wasn't one of our guards, but happened to be around. He said something to me that I've always remembered. "You are going to find a lot of bad Japanese and you are going to find a lot of good ones. Please don't think that all Japanese are alike as far as the treatment you are going to receive." Then he opened up a can of sardines, and with some rice, gave them to me and the men around me. It was the first real food I'd had in days.

When I got off the boat, no folks were there to meet me, no friends, nobody. I could never figure out why nobody was on that dock waiting for us.

I couldn't talk to people. I couldn't talk to any of my old friends. I couldn't even talk to my parents.

Coming home was very confusing. I'd shake and go to pieces. There had to be something wrong with my nervous system. There were no psychiatrists waiting for us when we got off the boat in San Francisco. I didn't know where I was going. I was at the end of the line. It was like I'd been put in an airplane and, at 30,000 feet, dumped out.

Chipper. We were on a truck driving detail when a Jap tried to part his skull with a gun butt. The rest of his life he had a tender spot on the back of his head and terrible headaches. The VA said he developed his medical problems after he came home. He died of a stroke.

Wes. Could write a complete medical book on what happened to him overseas. He is blind in one eye and deaf. Diabetes. Leg is dead and walks with a cane. VA gave him a 40% disability.

Red. Mother nature cured him of beriberi. He's dead from the knees down. He can't see, and he can't feel the ground. He falls down a lot. The VA says there's no connection with his being starved in Cabanatuan (prison camp).

Boyd. My tank driver. Died of a stroke the first year home.

Orvis. When he came home he was skinny as a rat. Sick all the time. The first x-rays they took showed nothing. They finally found TB with oblique x-rays. It was hidden by his collarbone and shoulder blades. They operated and took off the top of both lungs. They said it wasn't service connected because the first x-rays had shown nothing. He lived with an oxygen tube down his throat for one and a half years, then he died.

My own story is simpler. I went to every place I knew around town looking for a job. Answer was always the same, "We aren't taking applications today." For four years I had clawed and fought and killed to get back home. Now, no one wanted me or gave a shit if I had a place to live or a job to support a family. I was alone and felt lost again. But it don't matter now. Does it?