Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [189]
Harris and Huffman were debating how to play their hand when they received an omen. The rains were frequent on the coastal fringe of the summer monsoon, but that day out of the clouds fell a driving rain of fish. Red Huffman has never been able to forget the moment when the heavens turned loose the silver-scaled torrent. “I don’t think you could see the ground, there was that many of them,” he said. “It poured down.” Outside the camp’s perimeter, kids ran around picking them up and impaling them on bamboo sticks to dry and eat. At least one rationalist found a ready explanation for the phenomenon. Dr. Epstein, the senior American officer at Phet Buri, said it must have been the product of a waterspout off the coast. In a Christian’s worldview, it might have seemed downright apocalyptic. But the Chinese had several centuries of lore that told them otherwise.
“You ever seen it rain fish?” Huffman asked Marco Su, the mess cook. Su said that the fish storm was a sign of the arrival of the dragon. In the annals of Chinese serpent-worship the species of “spiritual dragon” known as the shen lung is the god of rain and water, a common man’s deity who responds to prayers by exhaling clouds over farmers’ fields and sprinkling them with fertilizing moisture. In some versions of the legend, the dragon—half animal, half divine—rains its own scales, like those of a carp, over the fields, heralding the coming of better days.
Unexpectedly blessed with the piscine shower, the prisoners turned out and gathered as many of the fish as they could. In the camp kitchen that day, the cooks made a fine stew. Three and a half years of submitting to foreign laws of war may have predisposed the Americans to accept alternative laws of nature, and hear their messages too.
Shortly afterward the prearranged signal came from the mysterious Thais. “All of a sudden we looked up and here comes this clown walking through the camp with this big grin on,” Harris said. It was a Thai guerrilla. He was carrying a saw over his shoulder. It was their signal. Harris said to Red, “Damn it, it’s now or never.”
They chose their moment carefully, waiting until the nearest Japanese guard had retired to his hut, finished lunch, and fallen asleep. As a prostitute stood by him, fanning away flies, the Americans bolted. Harris found the small tunnel they had prepared under the fence some days before, and he scurried through; Huffman followed.
Outside the perimeter, the two USS Houston sailors ran. Sprinting through the banana grove north of camp, alive with adrenaline, they encountered four more Thais. One of them grabbed Huffman by the hand, saying, “Come, friends, come.” As they ran, the Americans saw the smoking embers of campfires outside the camp and realized that their guides had been patiently waiting for them, perhaps for days.
Thirty-nine months after a Japanese projectile struck the faceplate of the Houston’s Turret Two, forcing him to dive blindly through a hatch to escape the inferno, 880 days after he listened to a war criminal on the edge of Burma’s carnivorous jungle grandly welcome him into a life of servitude for the glory of Imperial Japan, Red Huffman sprinted through a grove of banana palms hand in hand with strangers whom he had no choice now but to trust. He prayed for the jungle to swallow him.
*Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.
Part Five
RENDEZVOUS WITH FREEDOM
“Those are our boys! Go get them!”
— Adm. William F. Halsey, on board flagship USS New Jersey, approving directive to medical rescue teams, August 1945
CHAPTER 58
Harris and Huffman ran for a good four hundred or five hundred yards, through the banana grove, over a streambed, into a cornfield, and into thicker woods before one of their Thai escorts showed them to a shelter and they allowed themselves to rest and take stock of the new world