Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [163]
Jim Gee helped bring Howard Charles around from dysentery by teaching him to play chess. “Look, Charlie,” he said, “your mind is like the muscle in your arm. Either you use it or it gets flabby and useless.” Gee described survival as a kind of dialectic. “There are three forces at work here,” he told Charles. “Like legs of a triangle. First food. Either we have enough or we’re dead. Second, health. That needs no explanation. Third, attitude, which is probably the best medicine. Food, health, attitude. They’re interlocked, each totally dependent on the other. We have to have all three. No food, no health. Bad attitude: the triangle collapses…. Those guys who turn in early, they’re the ones I worry about.”
Capt. Hugh Lumpkin knew how to deal with them. The Branch Five medical officer knew how to give the tough kind of love that hurt initially but saved lives. Once a demoralized soldier told him he didn’t have the strength to walk to the mess line. When Lumpkin suggested the kid have a friend do it for him, he responded, “I don’t have a friend.” Sensing a potentially fatal case of self-pity, Lumpkin said, “If you haven’t made a friend, you deserve to die.” It was enough of an emotional spark to help the kid fight his way to survival.
Sometimes no psychological tricks were needed. Straight-up Samaritanship saved lives too. Two soldiers, Jesse Webb and Lester Fassio, came to Dan Buzzo, who was sick and near death, and asked him how he liked his eggs. Buzzo knew eggs were a luxury worth four days’ wages on the line, and he said, “Don’t kid me. There are no eggs within a hundred miles.” But Webb and Fassio weren’t kidding, and their bruised bodies were the receipt for the price they had paid to bring the eggs into camp. A Korean guard had caught them and gave them the de rigueur bashing, but inexplicably let them keep the eggs. Buzzo had them sunny side up, but required his benefactors to have a bite too. “I guess that was my turning point,” Buzzo would say, “those two eggs.” According to Major Fisher, the senior Australian medical officer, “Probably no single factor in the whole of P.O.W. existence saved more lives than the humble duck egg.”
People who died did so out of despair. They died cursing God. They died in a dissociating madness, protesting their circumstances then shutting themselves down like zombies. Perth survivor Ray Parkin captured the specter of a prisoner’s death rattle with images that do not easily leave the mind:
A figure of six foot three inches emerges from between the gleaming wet tents. He is so thin that every bone in his body shows. The two bones of his forearm stick out painfully at his wrists, and the two rows of carpals and metacarpals in the backs of his hand. His fingers hang long and thin, punctuated by the knobs of articulation. Swinging at the end of stiff, bent arms, with sharp protruding elbows, they look like two small stiff faggots. His shoulders are sharp with emaciation and the studs of the acromium process, where the collarbone meets the shoulder blade, stick up like bollards on a wharf. His collar bones jut out, like bent iron bars, over a chest cage which might be that of a dressed fowl in a delicatessen. The navel sits on an odd little hemisphere low in front. On either side bony hips flare like the rim of a jug. His thighs are bones, with strings of haunches running down the back, from the shriveled knot that was once a round buttock. A knee cap sticks out in front like a piece of spiked armour. Below this, the long thin knife-like shin: it too, has strings instead of muscles. Legs not unlike those of a fowl. Long, bony feet, right-angled, are splashed past the ankles with the mud and excrement through which they walk.
This is a man. This is a man who walks naked in the rain to the latrine. Side by side with other wretches, yet