Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [143]
For Lanson Harris, the dream was always the same. There was a fabulous pink marble hall, so palatial and long that it disappeared to a vanishing point in the indeterminate distance. Down its center ran a table, bejeweled and plated in silver and gold, loaded with every kind of edible thing one might dream of. “I would try to get to this table,” said Harris, “and so help me God for three and a half years I never made it. Something would always happen. I never would get to this damn table.”
Their time as sailors seemed remote and undefined. They worried about things they had taken for granted. They cursed themselves for having ever complained about Navy chow. Hunger spurred creativity. Harris had learned to watch the monkeys. What they ate a person could eat. “If they ate certain leaves, shoots, we’d collect these up, take them back to the camp, boil them up and eat them. It didn’t always taste the best. But they helped us get nutrition we were missing.” The tobacco available locally, known as “wog,” so full of nicotine it produced a powerful buzz, had off-label uses. Harris couldn’t remember who got the idea to use the wog as a fisherman’s Mickey Finn, but it saved more than a few lives.
He said, “We’d take little bits of tobacco and make a rice ball out of it. When we camped down on the river we’d get five or six guys across river and we’d throw these rice balls loaded with tobacco into the water. Other guys would be waiting a hundred yards down across the river with big bamboo clubs. The fish ate the rice balls, they got sick, regurgitated, and filled up with air. They would float up to the surface, and the floating fish would come by, and the guys with the clubs would whack them and throw them up on the beach. You’d do almost anything to eat.”
At 100 Kilo Camp one day, a fifteen-foot king cobra, fleeing the rains, had worked its way into the rafters of the hospital hut. It was spotted and turned into dinner for the guards. The jungle was “like a zoo without the cages,” said Roy Offerle.
Prisoners used most anything on hand to flavor their rice. Minnows, fish heads, even toothpaste filled the bill. John Wisecup crushed Indonesian peppercorns and mixed them with water and drank it, finding that it suppressed his appetite. At least it burned his stomach lining so bad he lost the urge to eat.
One afternoon, loud shouts roused the men at 100 Kilo Camp. A prisoner had gone down to the river to fetch a bucket of water and had sat down on a log to rest. When the log shifted and slithered beneath him, he got a little excited. Led by a Korean guard, some prisoners ran to the noise. The guard shot the great python and it rose up, head swaying waist high. He shot again and it fell dead into the underbrush. They measured its length at nineteen feet, eight inches, then carved it into twenty-inch tenderloins as thick as a man’s thigh. Everyone in the hunting party got a piece.
The rains were heavy and steady enough to form an actual stream running through the sick hut. The waters brought an unexpected windfall just as they ruined the livability. The hut’s residents learned to shape a crooked piece of wire into a hook, hang a small piece of rice on the wire, and dangle it through the bamboo decking into the stream below. There was nothing at all sporting about using one’s bunk as a fishing boat, but the occasional lungfish the men pulled from the raging gullywasher under the hut was a gift they would have been fools to refuse.
The daily routine at 100 Kilo Camp, which Charley Pryor called “one of the most unlikely campsites on the whole road,” was not for the sick or the weak. It was a life of continuous work whose ritual was enforced by the fact that only working men ate. Most of the survivors found someone to lean on, to trust unconditionally, and would help him in turn along when his own prospects sagged. The relationships sometimes paid their dividends in death: to the dead came eternal peace, while the survivors got his gear. Red Huffman and a sailor named Guy Pye helped each other along for a while. When Pye’s tropical