Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [88]
Next, I went to Corporal Kono, the Bird’s assistant. A rotten stinker, Kono idolized Watanabe and always tried to imitate him by using the kendo stick to beat us at every opportunity and bolster his own doubtful courage. “I want to get back on full rations,” I said. “You got work for me?”
Kono spoke to the Bird, and they made me handmaiden to a skinny, sickly little goat. The Bird himself offered me the job, hoping to humiliate me.
“Care for goat,” the Bird said. “Care good.”
Whatever. I just wanted food.
Unfortunately, that night someone let the goat into the grain shack and closed the door. The next morning I heard, “Zamperini!”
The Bird shoved me into the kitchen and pointed at the young goat, which lay on the brick hearth, heaving for breath, its body bloated from gobbling barley all night.
“I told you take care of goat!” the Bird screamed. “If goat die, you die!”
I NURSED THE goat while word of the Bird’s ultimatum spread through camp. When the goat died a week later, I prayed the Bird had been joking; I’d never seen him kill anyone, but I still I couldn’t be sure that the threat had been idle. Several senior officers who had seen the Bird come close to killing advised me to attempt an escape before the Bird found out.
I didn’t take their advice. Instead, I went straight to the Bird and told him the truth. He rushed at me, enraged, and I thought I’d made the wrong decision. Watanabe could easily have killed me. He beat me, then dragged me outside and ordered me to stand at one end of the compound while holding a four-by-four-by-six-foot hardwood timber at arm’s length over my head—and keep it there. Then he said, “Wait,” and sat on a low roof nearby, chatting with the other guards, watching.
The first three minutes I could hardly take the pain. Every muscle burned and begged to collapse. Then all one hundred pounds of me went numb. I froze in that position and time stood still until, seething with anger and frustration, the Bird hopped off the roof and punched me in the stomach with all his might. The beam dropped on my head and knocked me flat on my face, and out.
When I awoke, Tom Wade told me he’d timed my punishment. I’d held the wood aloft for thirty-seven minutes.
ABOUT A WEEK later I asked the Bird for another job. “Okay,” he said. “You are in charge and take care of pigs.” I swear, the pigs were so skinny you could see through them. He said, “We’re getting food for the pigs. You clean out the pen.”
I said, “You got any tools?”
“No tools. You clean out by hand.”
Oh, God, what a mess.
They fed the pigs rice polishings, which are high in vitamin B. I knew this and ate along with the pigs. It helped protect me against beriberi, which had infected the camp.
ANOTHER TIME THE Bird suddenly filled a tub with water and told me to prepare to die, he would drown me in it. I don’t know what kind of response he expected, but when he didn’t get fear or begging he abruptly changed his mind. “I drown you tomorrow,” he said, before stomping off.
THE LATRINES AT Camp 4-B had cement floors and a trough into which we peed. The toilets had wooden seats like an outhouse, and the refuse went into big steel tubs underneath. When the tubs were full, prisoners on benjos duty scooped out the excrement with big wooden dippers and put it in barrels, on a cart, to be used in our garden six miles away.
When a heavy rain fell for days we couldn’t empty the steel tubs and the muck overflowed into the urinal trench and then all over the cement floor. This was disgusting stuff on its own; the nonstop diarrhea from one ever-present disease or another made it worse.
The Bird, being the Bird, called a surprise inspection. Men in the head with the runs rushed back to the barracks as fast as possible, put their