Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [74]
Stopping in front of a seaman from the submarine Grenadier, he stuck his finger in the man’s face and said, “You do not stand at attention. You move!” The sergeant’s face contorted and he shook with uncontrolled rage. He unstrapped his sword and was about to strike the seaman across the face but hesitated, replaced the strap, and instead hit him full in the mouth with his fist. The sailor staggered back but remained standing. The sergeant adjusted his sword and resumed pacing.
Soon it was my turn. When I looked into those black and indelibly sadistic eyes I had the eerie feeling that the sergeant knew me. That was impossible, of course, but I couldn’t take the intensity of his stare and looked over his shoulder. Whack! He knocked me down.
“Why you no look in my eyes?” he barked. He stared again, and this time I stubbornly met his gaze. Whack! “You no look at me!” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I immediately hated the little bastard—and feared him.
This was my introduction to Sergeant Matsuhiro Watanabe, disciplinary NCO and, although he had superiors, functional head of Omori. The prisoners called him “the Bird.” The practice with guards and camp officials was always to label them with the worst and dirtiest names we could invent. Watanabe was the Bird not because of any physical or personal characteristic but just because he was so rotten that no one could think of a name derogatory enough to match his irrational behavior. Also, if we’d called him an insulting name and he found out about it—Watanabe could speak broken English—he might punish the whole camp.
Deranged, brutal beyond belief, vicious like someone who tortured animals as a child before turning his evil talents on people, the Bird by his mere existence allowed me to focus all the hatred I’d accumulated and let fester since my capture.
Later, I would learn that even Omori’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Kato, was simply a puppet. He’d see the Bird mete out punishment and look away. The Bird’s beatings went beyond doing his duty; he seemed to get personal satisfaction from causing pain. We thought he had almost too much authority; perhaps he belonged to the Kempeitai, the secret police. Tom Wade thought he might be in the Black Dragon Society, a secret, patriotic group. No one knew.
Compared with the Bird, the Ofuna guards were country gentleman.
I SPENT MY first three days in a quarantine shed. I’m being generous; it was more like a carport: a roof and posts without walls, surrounded by an inch of snow and camp debris. I still wore my original, ragged clothes and the Norwegian’s coat. I slept on the dirt with nothing to keep me warm but a thin paper blanket. At only ninety pounds, with little meat on my bones to protect me, I nearly froze and I knew I couldn’t spend another night that way. But maybe I wouldn’t have to. I had an idea. I scoured the area and found an abandoned apple crate, old mats, driftwood—plenty of kindling, if only someone had a match.
Thank goodness for my Boy Scout training.
I took apart the box and made a base, a stick, and tinder. I borrowed leather shoestrings from another guy in the shed. Everyone chuckled while I worked, but pretty soon smoke streamed upward and no one laughed. I used bits of an old tatami mat to feed the embers, then I began to blow, blow, blow. Before long I had a small flame. I put it under the apple-box kindling, and soon we had a fire to warm ourselves. We moved in close, only to have each man immediately pull out a long-stashed cigarette butt and light up. Priorities. Only in wartime.
When word got to the Bird that we had a fire without permission he wanted to know who’d built