Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [67]
Every day, with big wooden ladles, they scooped rice into our tiny bowls. A few guys liked their rice dry, but dry rice never made me feel nourished, especially when I’d find straw in it. Other times it was too moist and had rat droppings in it. When all you get is rice, it’s funny how you’re always conscious of the way it’s prepared. Sometimes we also got a small cup of water with a piece of daikon radish, the Japs’ version of soup. If we were lucky, we’d get miso paste.
Lunch was the same. Dinner, too.
ALTHOUGH I WAS starving, sometimes I preferred hunger to eating what the Japanese served. A few of the prisoners—we had Americans, British, Australians, Norwegians, even Italians captured from merchant ships—knew international law required that we get meat rations once every week or so. We mentioned that to the guards, and a few days later a truck backed up to the big cement trough outside the barracks, where we washed ourselves and spit. The truck was packed with fish that had been frozen but had spoiled. Even before the driver dumped it in the trough, the smell overpowered us and the whole mass seemed to move. In fact, it was moving, it being infested with thousands of maggots.
The guards told us to wash the “fish.” Looking at it made me sick, but I hosed it down and tried to get the maggots off and kill the stench. Then I helped shovel the mess into big soup tureens. We all got the result, hot, the next morning. (They had to serve us hot food or we’d die. Japan was contaminated with human feces, which they used liberally as fertilizer.) The maggots floated lazily on top, as if in their own private swimming pools. I half expected to see them wearing sunglasses and drinking lemonade. Some guys considered the maggots nutritious, guzzled, and threw up. At no more than eighty pounds I was probably the hungriest guy in camp, but I just shook my head no.
A guard barked a command. “Eat!”
“I can’t eat it,” I said.
“You eat,” he said, and stuck me with the point of his bayonet, behind my ear, right on the muscle. I bled. He repeated himself. “You eat.” I ate.
We’d asked for meat; they’d given us “meat.” Two weeks later, we each got a little whale steak, about the size of a fifty-cent piece and as thick, cooked with teriyaki. Now, that was tasty.
ONE SPRING DAY, when the ice broke in the little reservoir between the barracks that served as a fire-fighting supply, the guards took turns throwing a little puppy high in the air and watching it splash in the water. When, inevitably, the puppy missed the pool, he showed up in the stew the next day. I passed.
I wasn’t the only one who shied away from the rations. One old Norwegian would regularly trade his food for cigarettes. We told him he’d die if he didn’t eat. “I think maybe the tobacco is better for me,” he joked. He finally died of malnutrition.
Our food should have been better. In fact, it was supposed to be, except that the cook, Hata, had a racket. He stole rations meant for the prisoners and traded them through the fence to civilians. He wrapped the booty in bandanas and had me and others wait with them by the edge of camp until a tiny Japanese farm woman came along. I gave her Hata’s package and got a package in return. I’d give that to Hata. Sometimes he got chestnuts to boil with the rice—not that the prisoners ever got any. He also got gifts to share with the officers; in other words, insurance that let him conduct his illegitimate business so openly.
AFTER BREAKFAST I sat outside with the men on long wooden benches. Since we couldn’t speak to one another or hold anything in our hands—so no reading—each day seemed like a month. (When, after many months, we were allowed to read, we got basic books about an English girl named Pam, titled Pam’s Own Story, Pam’s Little Box, and Pam Visits Her Grandmother.) Any communication we managed was by Morse code. When the guards were far enough away, I’d shield one hand and tap out messages. Everyone did the same after lights-out, when the night patrol had moved to a different barrack.
For anyone caught breaking the