Model heroes for these troubled times

Ghost Soldiers
By Hampton Sides
Little, Brown and Company, 342 pages
Available at National Book Store

We are in dire need of heroes these days, it seems. In times of spiritual crisis or moral relativism, it becomes harder than ever to say what is right and wrong, let alone stand up for it.

Hampton Sides’ remarkable history about the daring rescue of the Bataan Death March survivors, Ghost Soldiers, is packed with heroes. They come in all shapes and sizes – Filipino and American – with roles both big and small to play. Sides is an American journalist too young to have been alive during World War II, yet what he manages to capture in this best-selling document is the next best thing: tales brought back by survivors – the ragtag 500 or so Americans left alive in the Japanese prison camp in Cabanatuan – and accounts from the brave 6th Ranger Battalion men who brought them home.

If it sounds like Saving Private Ryan II, then maybe those too young to have lived through a world at war should pay special notice: there actually were people capable of such bravery and sacrifice, and it wasn’t just in the movies.

Run by the Japanese Imperial Army, Cabanatuan was the final stop after the Death March of 1942. And for the 20,000 Americans who entered its barbed-wire gates, there was no way out. Dysentery, malaria, beriberi, dehydration and other ailments which could have easily been fought with simple medicines cut down thousands of the captured US soldiers. Indiscriminate torture and execution whittled down their number even further as the years went by. As the Pacific war started to turn in favor of the Americans in 1945, it became clear the Japanese would plan a retreat. The fate of the 500 Americans left in the camp was in jeopardy, since the Japanese considered it their duty to leave no surviving witnesses.

It was the duty of Lt. Col. Henry A. Mucci to lead a secret rescue attempt by the 6th Ranger Battalion. His mission led through swamps and jungles, trekking 30 miles with Filipino guerrillas guiding them every step of the way. The goal was to sneak up behind the camp, attack the Japanese soldiers’ barracks at night, and guide the remaining prisoners to safety through the front gates before they could be executed by the Imperial Army.

Such fears of Japanese execution were not idle. The Japanese army had a reputation for eliminating prisoners, in defiance of the Geneva Convention. According to one directive sent by the War Ministry of Tokyo in 1944:

Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, and whether it is accomplished by mass bombings, poisonous smoke, drowning or decapitation, dispose of them as the situation dictates. It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave a single trace.

Part of this harshness stemmed from the Japanese sense of shame and honor: few Japanese considered it honorable to give themselves up to the enemy; hence, toward the end of the war, Americans would come upon hundreds of disemboweled Japanese bodies – those who had committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, rather than surrender. In contrast, the Japanese were amazed when thousands of Americans gave themselves up in the cul-de-sac of Bataan. (The Americans had been waiting for months for US Naval support to arrive at Corregidor, little aware that the US Navy had effectively been wiped out at Pearl Harbor.) Sides argues the Japanese held such Americans in contempt, and thought little of shooting or torturing them.

When the Japanese prepared to move their big guns to the shores of Bataan in order to bombard Corregidor – the last US holdout in 1942 – it became necessary to move the captured Americans elsewhere. Hence, the deadly trek north to Camp O’Donnell, which was quickly turned into a Japanese prison camp. By most accounts, some 23,000 Americans died in 20 days during the Death March. But that was only the beginning of their misery. Lack of food and basic nutrients reduced the American population to virtual skeletons by 1945, the time of the rescue mission. In Sides’ recounting, many characters stand out in sharp relief: soldiers with an enduring spirit to survive, and a certain steely toughness that saw them through the worst.

Now all that was left at Cabanatuan were the dregs, the sickest and the weakest. The ghosts of Bataan, they called themselves, with a mixture of black humor and the peculiar proud toughness of the orphaned. When General MacArthur had abandoned the Philippines in March 1942, these were the men he abandoned – or rather, what was left of them. They were a special lot, a subset of a subset of bad fortune, an elite of the damned.

Filipinos play a key role in this rescue tale, and Ghost Soldiers relates the importance of guerrillas like Eduardo Joson, a resistance fighter who came up with a method to ferry the wasted American prisoners – some who could no longer walk – back through the dangerous jungles: he enlisted the help of the lowly carabao, proudly donated by local farmers to carry the prisoners on the animals’ backs. It worked. This is just one of many surprises that turn up in this fresh account of an often-told episode in local history. Other heroes emerge: a local "guest relations officer," who went by the name of High Pockets and who catered to Japanese officers, was actually a spy for the US, using her charms and that of her girls to pump the Japanese for information on troop movements.

Notably absent from this telling of the rescue mission is the name of Ferdinand Marcos, who claimed early in his political career to have been a key figure in the story. Sides hasn’t unearthed any evidence to either prove or disprove Marcos’ large claims; in any case, the Marcos name is nowhere to be found among the heroic deeds of the Philippine Scouts mentioned in Ghost Soldiers.

Sides manages to capture the immediacy of the Philippines, and its attraction for many American soldiers who happily considered the post to be "paradise on Earth." That was before the Japanese rounded them up, quickly turning it into the complete opposite.

There’s a lot of good old-fashioned storytelling in Ghost Soldiers. Sides wisely alternates the 1942 Death March chapters with chapters detailing the preparations for the 1945 assault on Cabanatuan, keeping the reader in suspense. Through historical accounts, interviews and photographs, characters are given dimension and depth: they are depicted neither as Hollywood-type heroes nor as hapless victims. What emerges is the complexity of heroism, how it must be summoned daily, on a constant basis, in every decision made by prisoners in order to survive. The prayer of the captured Americans, as expressed by a poet lieutenant named Henry Lee, was as simple and as difficult to swallow as today’s headlines:

I kneel and hail thee as my Lord
I ask not life
Thou need not swerve the bullet
I ask but strength to ride the wave
and one thing more–
teach me to hate.

This is a lesson with a profound and solemn significance to our present-day problems.