Valleys of Death (23 page)

Like before, the guards separated us into groups and shuffled us into the houses. Almost all of the houses were wooden poles with mud baked walls, thatched roofs and dirt floors. Like in the valley, each house had three rooms, with paper doors to the outside. Again, we were packed tightly inside the two rooms. Winter was still with us and temperatures at night continued to drop below zero.

I was sitting on the side of a hill next to a house waiting for my assignment when another prisoner and I saw green stalks poking out of the dirt. I pulled one out of the ground. It was a wild onion. We dug up a few more and all of a sudden the guards screamed at us.

“No, you cannot have them,” one guard said in garbled English. “Do not take more.”

I was put in a house near the hill. The rest of the day, I kept an eye on the guards and the hill. The next morning, I raced over to the hill when the guards weren't looking and dug up eight more onions. I handed them to the guys in my house and dashed back to the hill to get more. I dug up another half dozen before I felt a boot slam into my back. Rolling over, I saw that one of the guards was standing over me screaming. He gestured for me to stand up just as two more guards arrived. One spoke English.

“We take you to the river,” the English-speaking guard said.

I could see the men in my house watching as the guards shoved me toward the river. As we got close, one of the guards gestured for me to pick up a short log lying on the ground.

“Out on the ice,” the English-speaking one said. “Hold log up.” Showing how he wanted me to hold the log over my head.

I stood on the frozen river and hoisted the log over my head. It didn't take long before the pain in my arms overtook the pain in my feet. After what felt like an hour, I started to lower my arms. The guard immediately started hollering and gestured for me to put my arms back up. I tried to keep the log above my head, but I could no longer do it. I let it drop. The guard screamed at me to pick it up again. I was almost too weak to stand and I dropped to my knees. The guard was still screaming at me. I ignored him. I was on my knees, hands on my thighs, with my head down, when the guard delivered a swift rifle blow to my back that sent me sprawling flat on the ice.

“Stand,” the English-speaking guard said, grabbing my arm. I walked with him off the ice and up the bank.

“You learned a lesson, no?” he said.

“No,” I said, whispering “you bastard” under my breath.

The guard shoved me forward toward the house. Pushing open the door, he held me by the arm in the doorway.

“You see what you will get if you break rules,” the guard said. “Do not take things.”

He pushed me in and left. None of the others spoke. We all pretended it hadn't happened. That was a lesson that I'm sure was not lost on the men. But that night, I got a piece of onion. It was the best onion I'd ever tasted.

The Chinese finally took over operation of the camp in the spring. They were always running things from behind the scenes, but now they weren't hiding who was in charge. Chinese guards took over security, and political officers started coming into the camp. The Chinese issued each of us a small drinking cup along with a bowl for our millet or our maize. No more eating out of a helmet liner. We also were allowed to start a cookhouse for each company and were occasionally given soybeans.

 

 

 

We'd hoped that conditions would improve at this new camp, but little changed. Pyoktong had grown in clusters around deep wells that served a number of houses. But all of the wells were contaminated from animal and human feces seeping through the ground and into the well water, so we didn't have fresh water. The large prison population only added to the problem.

There were about three thousand men in the camp. Conditions were about as bad as a human being could possibly live with. This was about as close as you could get to Andersonville in the Civil War.

We were all full of lice. The farm boys told us they were hog lice, growing larger every day on our blood. While the lice got fat, we starved. The guards brought us two small bowls of millet a day and one bowl of boiled water, which barely kept us alive. And even when we ate, dysentery kept us weak and dehydrated.

Hunger can do some strange things to your mind. I was at the latrine—a slit trench—and I noticed that many of the soybeans were passed whole. I thought, Christ, if I picked them out of the feces and washed them off I could eat them. Then it dawned on me that I must be going crazy or turning into an animal. It would be a few days before I was able to get over the fact that I had let myself sink to a disgusting thought like that.

Soon after taking over the camp, the Chinese came in and ordered all sergeants to come outside. They wanted to separate the leaders and they marched us over to a new cluster of houses. At the same time, they moved all the blacks to a different area of the village.

As I got my stuff to move, I noticed the smart-ass from the battalion intelligence section who had led that noisy patrol near the bridge at Unsan. He was near the back and looked away when he saw me. Five of us got up and started to go outside. The battalion intelligence sergeant didn't move.

“Let's go,” I barked at him. “Get off your ass and move outside.”

“I'm not a sergeant,” he said.

I shook my head. I knew battalion hadn't taken my warnings seriously. For a second, I thought back to Unsan. What if they'd sent a competent sergeant who patrolled correctly? Would we have found the Chinese before the attack? It didn't matter now.

“You son of a bitch,” I said, glaring at him. “I was right about you all along.”

Outside, I joined a group of about sixty senior sergeants. Without a doubt the best thing that happened to me was being put with sixty master sergeants and sergeants first class. I was the youngest of the group. As we walked, I struck up a conversation with a redheaded Irish sergeant. He had a prominent crooked nose and the weight loss made him look smaller than he was.

I introduced myself.

“Vincent Doyle,” he said as we shook hands.

Doyle became the leader of our little group. An infantryman during World War II, he had a wife and a son in Fall River, Massachusetts. He'd received a battlefield commission in France and left the Army as a lieutenant. He opened up a frozen food store in Fall River, a little ahead of its time. Not many families had freezers. He went out of business and reenlisted as a master sergeant, not an officer. He was an inch too short to be an officer, the Army told him. We called him the “The Renaissance Man” because he seemed educated and wrote poetry. He carried a small red book with red Chinese characters printed on the top of the page. I'd catch him jotting down stanzas or quotes all the time. Sometimes, he'd read a few lines to me. One poem, “An Infantryman's Troubled Dreams,” was a favorite. Written in staccato sentences and observations, it seemed to capture the jarring experience of war.

Since we were a smaller group, I started to meet other guys in the house. We became sort of a family. On one of my first days in the house, I sat down next to Sergeant First Class Smoak. He'd been with the Thirty-fifth Infantry Regiment and was wounded early on.The bullet had ripped through his lower buttocks and taken out his right testicle. We all cringed when he told us. But he smiled and kept telling us his story. He was evacuated to a hospital in Japan, recuperated, and went on a few days' leave. From his bed in Japan, he wrote to his girlfriend to tell her the bad news. But, as we'd come to learn, Smoak was always the optimist.

“Though there is one motor gone I can still carry on,” he wrote.

For the rest of my time in that house, Smoak was the sunshine that kept our spirits up. Quick with a joke, he always seemed to be humming a few bars of “On Top of Old Smoky,” his favorite tune. Smoak's mental outlook kept him strong.

O'Keefe was another World War II guy who got out and started a local truck business in and around Boston. He got tired of the trucking business and reenlisted. We'd been around each other off and on since the first night. It was O'Keefe who prayed that first night and said psalms during the death march.

Next to him sat an old Filipino sergeant. He was dressed in a hodgepodge of uniforms. He didn't say anything and just sat all day rocking back and forth and murmuring a lot of mumbo jumbo. As if he were a human metronome, you could keep the beat off his rocking. That and the mumbling used to drive some of the guys crazy.

O'Keefe used to blow his top at the Filipino. It always started with O'Keefe telling him to shut up and ended with O'Keefe screaming it and stomping out. The old guy got on all of our nerves, and O'Keefe was just saying what the rest of us were thinking. O'Keefe was quick to apologize when he returned.

Our biggest problem was our physical condition brought on by the march. Men with open wounds, many with gangrene, didn't survive long. Some were saved from gangrene by maggots eating their dead flesh, which only meant they suffered longer.

Some of the soldiers had black feet from frostbite and trench foot. I watched while one man pulled rotted fresh off his toe bones. The soldiers from the Second Infantry Division had it the worst. They'd been issued shoe-packs, rubber boots with felt liners and insoles. Their feet would sweat and were continuously wet while marching, and they would freeze when they stopped marching. Since they never took the shoe-packs off, the soldiers got trench foot.

It is easily understood when men die of wounds or pneumonia. It was more difficult to understand when men just lie down and quit. I have seen strong men seemingly just give up and die. First, they would stop eating and stare with blank eyes at the mud walls of the hut. Their minds were gone, and life just slipped away. Then, after a few days, you heard an all too familiar death rattle.

We were dying at a rate of about thirty a day. Each morning, we took the dead out of the houses, stripped them of their clothes, and stacked them like cordwood in a pile. At first, we tried to take the uniforms and coats and give them to other prisoners, but the Chinese guards wouldn't allow it. What they did with the uniforms is still a mystery. For the most part, they sat in a pile.

 

 

 

We were required to provide men for a burial detail. The detail carried the bodies on makeshift stretchers made out of burlap bags stretched between two poles. It took four walking skeletons to carry each dead man across the ice. The ground was frozen solid. The detail would try to scrape a shallow hole and cover up the body with some dirt and rocks. At night, we could hear the wild dogs growling and fighting over the bodies.

I hated being put on burial detail. The physical part was bad enough, but the mental part was much worse. Thoughts about the families of the dead men and if they left children behind who might never know what happened to them. I knew from listening to men talk that what bothered most of them was the thought that they might be next. That's the one thing I never let my mind think about.

In a little more than three and a half months, sixteen to eighteen hundred men made the trip across the ice. One morning Doyle and I watched a burial detail. The dead were hanging off both ends of the jerry-rigged stretchers, heads and legs banging on the ground. Doyle turned and looked at me.

“Rich, if I go, promise me you won't let me drag along the ground like that.”

“I promise you I'll make sure,” I said.

How the hell could I do that? I wondered as I watched the ghostly parade pass by. I couldn't, because in my own mind I knew that within four or five days half of the men on the detail would be carried to their graves. We were all beginning to look more dead than alive.

Four or five days after the Chinese separated us from the others, I saw two political officers taking fifteen prisoners into a hut close to ours. I asked Doyle what he thought was going on.

“They're trying to get some men to write home and tell their folks how good they are being treated and that their families should tell our government to stop the war.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“No, I'm not, Rich,” Doyle snapped at me, and then he smiled and said, “Believe me, Rich, that's what's going on.”

“Goddamn, we're stacking our dead bodies about fifty feet from that building. How the hell can anyone write that shit?” I said.

The next day, when the Chinese headed the prisoners toward the building, a bunch of us started shouting at them and telling them not to write letters. We repeated the same scene later when they left the building. This was one of the earliest attempts to use us for propaganda.

When I could, I went looking for Vaillancourt or Roberts. I'd been told that they were prisoners too. I was asking around a group of soldiers when I heard someone call my name. It was one of my guys, Elliott. He'd shown up just before Unsan. I'd sent him across the bridge before the Chinese attack and figured he'd been killed when they swept over the bridge.