Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [162]
At 100 Kilo Camp, Luther Prunty, suffering from tropical ulcers, tore a page from his Bible and rolled himself a nice cigar. He and a soldier named Worthington “had a testament each.” Prayers took many forms on the Death Railway: spoken, read, thought, puffed through the lungs. When faith failed, death almost always followed. Death seemed to be a by-product of collapsed moral strength, a slow decline, as if the patient were acclimating to the idea before the final surrender. Time and again at the 80 Kilo Camp hospital, Charley Pryor witnessed the slow atrophy of the will to live. One Houston sailor, in his final forty-eight hours, complained that he was having just endless trouble getting his leave arranged. He’d signed the papers but now they couldn’t find them. He needed to find them because he’d bought a bus ticket back to Arkansas and if they didn’t find them, he couldn’t go, and there was a good chance he’d get on the wrong bus anyway. He’d never get home. To top it all off, someone had swiped the dress whites he was planning to wear home. The sailor had had them pressed and laid out just so. He wanted Pryor to go to the master-at-arms and help him solve the mystery of their disappearance. It’s the kind of thing the Padre would do. No doubt the Marine sergeant told him he would.
According to Pryor, one prisoner, having seen how the Japanese sometimes excused the worst tropical ulcer patients from work, thought he’d go get himself one. He found a piece of bamboo—the stuff seemed poisonous; its scratches festered almost immediately—and began scratching a sore on himself. He worked at it over a period of days, picking at the wound with bamboo slivers, rubbing mud in it. When Pryor was working as steward, custodian, and chief gravedigger at 80 Kilo Camp, this man was among one day’s incoming litter patients. He lasted about four days.
It was usually apparent when a man was preparing himself to die. Often he would stop eating. Sometimes he would announce his despair to the world. One remedy, surprisingly effective, was tough love. Actually, it more resembled hazing. This kind of therapeutic ball busting came naturally to a guy like John Wisecup, who seemed to have a talent for getting inside people’s heads. “They’d tell you, ‘I’m finished. I’m gone.…’ So you’d slap them around or something like that. Make fun of them. That was the best way, to ridicule the guy. Curse him. Call him all kind of names. That’s the best way. Really, it’s the old Prussian system, you know…. What you’ve got to do is make a guy mad. As long as he’s feeling sorry for himself, he’s dead.” Unhealthy thoughts had to be confronted and conquered immediately. It was like scraping an ulcer, like laughing at a friend getting beaten by a guard just to prevent a necrosis from infecting the group psychology.
Paul Papish, who was laid up with dysentery and beriberi at Changi and later reunited there with the returnees from H Force, said, “It was Wisecup, I guess, who would stand back there and just berate us: ‘Go ahead and give up! Die! I’ll get your shoes!’ I told him one time that, by God, I was going to get out of there, and I was going to get well enough and strong enough to punch him right in the nose.” They learned to read the subtle signs that they were stoking somebody’s will to live. If a guy started trimming his beard again, it was a hopeful sign.
When Gus Forsman was on the brink of surrender, gripped by dysentery, wet beriberi, jaundice, and malaria, an old friend from the gun mount on a ship that seemed like a ghost from a lost time stepped up and saved his life. In another life, Elmer L. McFadden had been a gunner’s mate and first loader on the flight deck five-inch gun on which Forsman was a pointer. McFadden knew him well enough to threaten that if he died, he would go to Forsman’s