Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [139]
The regular relocations of working parties put undue strain on prisoners already teetering in illness. When an Australian working party from 75 Kilo was abruptly moved up the line, a thirty-man kumi under Lieutenant Hamlin was called to fill the hole at that camp. It was an onerous commute. For four days straight they marched ten kilometers every day from 85 Kilo to 75 Kilo Camp to finish an embankment. Rising before dawn and making the three-hour march, they worked all day and marched back to 85 Kilo after dark. The special duty kept them away from their huts for sixteen to twenty hours at a time. Their exertions, coinciding with an increase in the dirt-hauling quota to 2.2 cubic meters, marked the onset of a brutal period in which Lieutenant Hamlin’s kumi was hit with a series of deaths. After continuous protests by Hamlin, the Japanese discontinued that particular work detail. But the deaths of Lawrence F. Kondzela, James H. White, and Sgt. Joe Lusk at the makeshift hospital at 80 Kilo Camp opened a breach in the hopes of even the most optimistic of the Americans.
Lusk was Charley Pryor’s closest friend, and Pryor was on the detail that buried him at a cemetery near 80 Kilo Camp. He spread rocks over the grave and marked it with a heavy cross fashioned from a teak four-by-four carved with Lusk’s name. He measured the distance and direction to each of the other graves in the cemetery there and marked it on a map. When people came for them—and he had faith that someday they would—they’d find them all.
But it was the death of another sergeant from the Houston’s Marine detachment two weeks later that irrevocably changed the alchemy of the survivors’ experience and left them with questions that linger to this day. First Sergeant Harley H. Dupler had been admitted to the Thanbyuzayat hospital with chronic bacillary dysentery. Prisoners of a less clinical mind have speculated that it was the psychological ravages inflicted by the guards that did in the Houston’s “poster Marine.” Dr. Fisher had treated him once already for dysentery, releasing him in early April. “He went to a working camp,” Fisher wrote, “and six weeks later returned, an almost unrecognizable skeleton.” The physician encouraged Dupler, saying that with a transfusion, some food, and rest he would make a rapid recovery. It was soon clear to the Australian, however, that Dupler had wounds that went deeper than the merely physical.
The story goes that Dupler had gotten bashed by a guard up the line in the jungle sometime in April, and at that point decided to stop eating. As a sergeant, he believed in the transforming power of roles. So long as he was investing himself in the rigors and rituals of the Marine Corps, as he had defiantly and famously done at Bicycle Camp, he was First Sergeant Dupler. Now, as a prisoner, he was something else, something that after seventeen years in the service he could not tolerate or reconcile himself to. As one survivor told it, Dupler embraced his illness as a last route to honor. According to Sgt. Benjamin Dunn of the Lost Battalion, Dupler said, “I’m glad I’m sick because I’m not going to work for the Japanese and help them fight my country. I won’t do it. I’ll die. I’d rather die.” Dupler was a dead man well before he landed in Dr. Fisher’s care. The Australian physician’s positive prognosis had cheered him for a day, “then he became depressed again,” Fisher wrote, “thanked his attendants, but said he wanted to die.” And that’s exactly what he did.
Lt. Ilo Hard of the Lost Battalion tried to split his rations with