Goodbye, Darkness Read online

  The easiest way to see Bataan, if you can afford it, is by helicopter; next easiest is by rented launch, which can take you from Manila to Mariveles — where tadpole-shaped Corregidor is visible, three miles from the peninsula — in less than two hours. But if you really want to steep yourself in Bataan's synoptic past, you must go by land. Since there is no rail service and buses are unreliable, this means in a car, preferably with four-wheel drive, because ruts and potholes pit MacArthur Highway. Lack of maintenance characterizes the Pacific's adoption of occidental modes almost everywhere. It may even be found in the tiny central Pacific Republic of Nauru, whose precious phosphate deposits are said to give its six thousand people a per capita income of over forty thousand dollars a year. If a car breaks down on Nauru, it is ditched and replaced with another.

  There are no limousines on Bataan, and very few cars. The typical vehicle is a wagon drawn by a horse or a bullock. To park and enter a barrio is to move back to the Stone Age. Until MacArthur retreated into the peninsula, the inhabitants lived as their ancestors had, content in their insularity. After the war most of them returned to it. There are a few signs of the twentieth century there — an Exxon refinery at Lamao and a few tiny huts with rusting tin roofs where Hollywood films are shown. Even so, none of the natives seems to grasp what a refinery is, and the favorite recreation is watching cockfights. The government in Manila has outlawed them, but the peasants here don't know it; inland, they haven't even heard of Manila. Or, for that matter, of Bataan. It is their universe; they need no name for it. Except for the inhabitants of New Guinea and the northern Solomons, I know of no people more isolated from the outside world than the Bataanese. Here, on mountainous slopes within sight of the Philippines' capital, warriors hunt game with bows and arrows. Lithe Filipinas, striding past rice paddies with hand-carved wooden pitchforks balanced on their lovely heads, pass backdrops which might be taken from a Tarzan movie — waterfalls cascading in misty rainbows, orchids growing from canyon walls, and, from time to time, typhoons lashing the palm-fringed beaches.

  Driving from the site of the Calumpit Bridge to Mariveles, you leave your car from time to time for excursions beyond the bayside barrios. The villages are all pretty much alike. There is no electricity — generators must be brought in for the rare movies — and virtually no line of communications to the world outside. Fishermen live in little straw shacks atop stilts. Their boats are outriggers. Inland, bullocks tug hand-hewn implements through rice paddies; the green sprouts are reaped by stooping women wading in the ankle-deep water. Their husbands climb palm trees to toss down coconuts, whose dried meat, copra, is their one export — the largest export, indeed, of the entire Philippines. An acrid scent bites the air; following it, you come upon a sugarcane field being burned off. Somehow the jungle seems friendlier to those who inhabit it. Men sing as they hammer away with rough mauls; women gossip while sitting in a circle, peeling leaves from cabbage plants; children hoot cheerfully as they play tag between lumbering water buffalo in shallow, muddy streams crowded on their banks with huge green shrubs whose wide leaves dip gracefully in all directions.

  Twice, in the memory of their patriarchs, outsiders have arrived uninvited to use this as a killing ground: in the 1942 struggle and again when the victorious Americans returned three years later. No one knows how many peasants were slain by random shots and artillery bursts, but certainly more of them died than American civilians at home, who had a stake in the war yet were out of danger. And what, the Sergeant in me asks, did we give them in return? Well, there was venereal disease, hitherto unknown here. And insensate hatred between aliens, and efficient ways to destroy those you hated. Most cruelly, they were left with an uneasy feeling that these monstrous strangers had, for all their brutality, found clever ways of making life more tolerable and interesting. It was cruel because that way of life can never coexist with theirs. One recalls a prescient passage in the journal of Captain James Cook, the first European to discover the South Seas, in 1769: “I cannot avoid expressing it as my real opinion that it would have been far better for these poor people never to have known our superiority in the accommodations and arts that make life comfortable, than after once knowing it, to be again left and abandoned in their original incapacity of improvement. Indeed they cannot be restored to that happy mediocrity in which they lived before we discovered them if the intercourse between us should be discontinued.”

  I am aboard a helicopter, descending through a blue mist between Corregidor's sheer cliffs toward the old Fort Drum parade ground. From this height the island seems larger than expected — about the size of Manhattan — and attractive. Of course, that was not always true. “Why, George,” Jean MacArthur said to George Kenney, her husband's air commander, when she returned to Manila Bay at the end of the war, “what have you done to Corregidor? I could hardly recognize it, when we passed it. It looks as though you had lowered it at least forty feet.” Certainly it had been lowered some. Between Japanese artillery in the first months of the war and Kenney's B-24s dumping four thousand tons of bombs on it later, the Rock had been changed beyond belief, denuded, among other things, of all vegetation. Today neither Jean nor Kenney would recognize the Rock. Two years after the war American troops reforested it, populated it with monkeys and small deer, and presented it to the Philippines as a national park. Only park police and caretakers live there now, though there is a small guesthouse on a bluff overlooking the North Dock for tourists who want to remain overnight. Like the picnics at Verdun in the 1920s, turning the Rock into a recreational spot may be an attempt to exorcise the desperate past.

  If so, it fails, for despite the view from the helicopter, once you step upon the parade ground you feel yourself caught by a slipped cog of time, transported back in a thirty-seven-year time warp. Especially is this true in Malinta Tunnel. The tunnel is a short ride from the parade ground in a park bus, or, if you have taken the two-hour ferry from Manila, a short winding walk from the North Dock. Twin sets of rails lead into Malinta, but they are useless now; a recent typhoon loosened an avalanche on the craggy hill overhead, which slid down the seventy-foot beetling outcropping over the east entrance, partly blocking it and reducing the carved legend there to nnel. Inside the 826-foot shaft are twenty-four 30-foot laterals, short passages branching off the main corridor. There is no electricity, and you have to step carefully to avoid stumbling over old crates of eight-inch-gun ammunition, but with a flashlight you can read signs identifying which laterals were used for casualties, for religious services, for messing, for nurses' quarters (a wooden barrier across the maw here; the memory of their virginity is honored by Filipinos, who still think maidenhood important), and — Lateral Number Three — for MacArthur's headquarters.

  In the dim light and dank, musty air, one feels like an intruder. You are surrounded by some eleven thousand ghosts, the number of men Jonathan Wainwright surrendered to the Japanese on May 8, 1942. A sense of individual loneliness survives them. Here they had wept, moaned, sworn, slept fitfully, dreamed, quivered with fear, bled, and died. In these laterals each had endured his or her special kind of illness — the women terrified of rape, Filipino Catholics (four of every five) of dying without last rites; Romulo in anguish for his family, now in Jap hands; Quezon coughing away his tubercular life; MacArthur pacing in his cramped quarters and threatening to disobey Washington's repeated order that he abandon his command and try to break out to Australia, saying, as he paced, that he would rather resign his commission, cross to Bataan, and enlist there as a private. The general's prose was dramatic, as always, but Corregidor's last stand was nothing if not melodramatic. After Corregidor had fallen he said of it: “Intrinsically it is but a barren, war-worn rock, hallowed as so many places [are], by death and disaster. Yet it symbolizes within itself that priceless, deathless thing, the honor of a nation. Until we claim again the ghastly remnants of its last gaunt garrison, we can but stand humble supplicants before Almighty God. There lies our Holy Grail.”

  The rem
ains of Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor

  American sophisticates mocked such empurpled rhetoric, but there was no laughter in the Philippines. To Filipinos the Rock is still sacred ground. Leaving Malinta one discovers, around a corner to the left, a thirty-foot stone shaft with a simple plaque identifying this as the spot where Wainwright displayed the white flag. A mounted diagram shows who was where during the siege. On Top-side, Corregidor's highest point, a marble dome is suspended above a white memorial; once a year the sun shines through the hole in the dome, turning white to gold. Nearby an eternal flame flickers, and torn pieces of shells and strips from wrecked aircraft have been welded into a cathedral spire. Walls alongside bear the names of the great Pacific battles. The Japanese remember Corregidor, too. Nipponese Christians have erected a cross, with the inscription, in Japanese and English: “May the bodies of the dead soldiers of the Philippines, the U.S., and Japan rest in peace.”

  War monuments have never stirred me. They are like the reconstructed buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, or elaborate reproductions of great paintings; no matter how deft the execution, they are essentially counterfeit. In addition, they are usually beautiful and in good taste, whereas combat is neither. Before the war I thought that Hemingway, by stripping battle narratives of their ripe prose, was describing the real thing. Afterward I realized that he had simply replaced traditional overstatement with romantic understatement. War is never understated. Combat as I saw it was exorbitant, outrageous, excruciating, and above all tasteless, perhaps because the number of fighting men who had read Hemingway or Remarque was a fraction of those who had seen B movies about bloodshed. If a platoon leader had watched Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Errol Flynn, Victor McLaglen, John Wayne, or Gary Cooper leap recklessly about, he was likely to follow his role model. In crises most people are imitative. Soldiers received “Dear John” letters copied from those quoted in the press. The minority who avoided Hollywood paradigms were, like me, people who had watched fewer B movies than we had read books. That does not mean that we were better soldiers and citizens. We certainly weren't braver. I do think that our optics were clearer, however — that what we saw was closer to the truth because we weren't looking through MGM or RKO prisms.

  Thus my most moving moments on Corregidor are neither in the tunnel nor before the shrines. They are more mundane, coming amid the island's surface relics, where men like me fought against impossible odds to defend the yawning AA batteries and the huge, 360-degree, 12-inch coastal batteries, with their 17-mile range, which still leer across Manila Bay. Particularly evocative are the gaunt stone dun-colored skeletons of the ruined Fort Mills barracks, now overgrown with lichen and dalakorak vines. Here, rusted but still recognizable, is the homely debris of military housekeeping, the canteens and mess gear, the hastily discarded .30- and .50-caliber shells, the old-fashioned straight razors and steel combs and mops used in preparing for formal inspections in the last days of peace. And as I poke and prod among these souvenirs of anguish, my mind drifts back to the tunnel's rail track. It troubles me, something there. I once saw rails like that before.

  Of course! It had been that single, narrow-gauge set of tracks at the Asa Kawa. I had skulked along its embankment on my way to …

  Abruptly the poker of memory stirs the ashes of recollection and uncovers a forgotten ember, still smoldering down there, still hot, still glowing, still red as red.

  The name of the little rise was Amike Ridge. The Japs held it; we needed it. But enemy guns on adjacent hills kept driving us off. The last time there had been any large-scale action here, an attacking company had been reduced to one officer and nineteen men. Now Bob Fowler, Fox Company's CO, was being told to take the crest late that afternoon. I carried the message to him in the shadow of that railroad embankment. His SCR-536, his hand-talkie, wasn't working — they never did when you needed them — and his SCR-300, his backpack radio, had also broken down, cutting his only wireless tie with battalion. So I had been sent. Had I known I was carrying a sheaf of death warrants, I would have ducked into the company command post (CP), left Fowler's order with any one of his several lieutenants or senior noncoms, and made myself scarce. Runners like me were transients, subject to hijacking by any commander who needed an extra hand. Sure enough; moments after I rambled in, smeared with mire from the embankment, the corporal who was supposed to lead the right-hand squad took a bullet in the shoulder. Fowler, recognizing me, told me to replace the corporal. I was, I realized, in deep peril. One squad, twelve men, would be looking out for each other. And who was going to look out for their strange new three-striped leader? Since Fowler himself was later killed, I can't be bitter. But God knows I felt ill-used before that night was over.

  As it happened we weren't part of the assault. There was a little draw just west of the ridge, pitted with shell holes. Fowler wanted it cleared out; Japs hidden there could turn his flank. It was uninhabited, but lethal all the same, for the enemy was encircling the entire ridge with a tremendous concentration of artillery. As my father had found, the worst shells are those that burst overhead. That was what the Nips were sending over. I remember hearing the chargers braying on the left as the men went up the slope, the Southerners among them yip-yipping their rebel yells, while I carefully probed the length of the draw, my .45's safety off, my finger ready to squeeze at the slightest sound or movement. My exaggerated, combat-wise, high-knee gait was like the strides of a man wearing new bifocals and unsure of how far away the ground might be. I was seasoned now, scared but in control provided I wasn't pushed too hard. I didn't anticipate trouble once I saw the draw was empty. No shells were arriving there just then.

  Actually I was about to be shoved and decked. I was returning to the squad on the double when I tripped on a strand of communications wire and fell headlong into a large muddy crater left by an earlier bombardment. At that instant a Jap shell shimmied in and exploded about fifteen feet above the draw. My fall saved me. The others were all killed instantly, though I had no way of knowing that at the time. Fowler's attack was clearly failing; the shouts were fading, dying down. I had no intention of moving till night fell. When it did, I crawled around to find whether there were any of my people still alive. There weren't; no one moaned; everywhere I groped I felt only gobs of blood, shards of shattered bones, ropy intestines, and slimy brains. A flare burst overhead. I saw none of the squad had made it. There wasn't even the form of a human body. I slid back into the crater and lay there for a while in a numb stupor, trying to wipe the offal from my hands. Suddenly I half turned into the muck, a victim of survivor's guilt, pounding and pounding and pounding my fist, sobbing, It isn't fair, it isn't fair, they're dead, why can't I be dead, it isn't fair. Twelve men had been entrusted to me and I had lost them. Still weeping, I passed out.

  There are no clocks on battlefields. Time is seamless there. I haven't the faintest idea how long I was out. As I regained consciousness in the darkness a fly was drawing Zs around my head. There was no other sound, only an enormous stillness without echo. Apparently rain had fallen; I was drenched, and there were new puddles around me. I felt paralyzed. It was so bleak in that hole, so lonely and so forever. I wondered vaguely if this was when it would end, whether I would pull up tonight's darkness like a quilt and be dead and at peace ever more. Again I passed out, and as I came to, I felt the skin prickling on the backs of my hands and the nape of my neck. A fresh fear was creeping across my mind, quietly, stealthily, imperceptibly. I sat up, my muscles rippling with suppressed panic, stared across the shell hole, now dimly lit by moonlight and a descending flare, and saw that I had company, a creature somehow familiar, who flickered in and out of sight, an adumbration on the fringes of my awareness.

  Hallucinations, as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon recalled in their memoirs of World War I trench warfare, are common in war. If you lie in a dark hole, listening to the sound of your own breathing, dead objects may rise and live, bald rocks may be transformed into men's pates, pinnacled stones may become witch's fingers.
One of the commonest delusions is to see in the distance a buddy you know is dead, one you actually saw die, now very much alive. He is smiling at you. You run over and, of course, he isn't there. Then there are appearances of phantom Nips. I knew a major who dropped his pants in the bush on Guadalcanal and squatted to defecate. A shot rang out. Another Marine had spotted a Nip sniper in a coconut tree overhead. The dead sniper dropped thirty feet and plopped right in front of the major. Starting right then he developed an extraordinary case of constipation. Every time he tried to empty his bowels he saw Japs above him. Three weeks later he was flown to Nouméa for surgery, but meanwhile his value in combat had been wiped. Similarly, a man in our 81-millimeter mortar platoon awoke in his foxhole one night and saw himself ringed by Japs with fixed bayonets. He grabbed his carbine, tried to turn off the safety, and hit the magazine release instead. The magazine fell out. He had a weapon but no ammunition in it. He grabbed the barrel by the stacking swivel, turning the butt into a club, and swatted away in all directions, crying for help. He was lucky he wasn't killed by the Marines around him. They wrestled him to the ground and convinced him he was out of danger, but to the end of his life, three weeks later, he stubbornly insisted that those Japs had been real. And, of course, to him they were.