Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [190]
The dragon was watching over them, for the soldiers moved on. But the Americans quickly realized there was no point taking the risk of traveling by day. “We stayed under that bush until nightfall,” Harris said, “until a guide picked us up and took us to what we call a kampong, nothing more than a small village in the middle of the jungle. We walked to this kampong, and there we rested and had something to eat. Then we picked up and went to the next kampong.” Moving by night, they trusted their escorts to know where to go and when to stop. Their faith was well placed. One night they stopped at a hut of some kind. The woman who inhabited it was duly awakened, and before they knew it they were being served a meal. In the dark, Huffman had no idea what he was eating, but Harris’s taste buds had a longer memory. He told Huffman that it was freshwater shrimp. Wherever they stopped to rest, the Thais piled up green leaves and set them afire, producing smoke apparently meant to drive away the mosquitoes. “They would nearly kill you with the smoke. You couldn’t get any sleep,” Huffman said. But soon he would find himself fearing larger predators.
One afternoon Harris heard a commotion outside the jungle hut he was staying in. Three or four Japanese soldiers appeared and accosted the Thais, making demands. Harris had no idea where they had come from. He couldn’t hear the conversation but saw the guerrillas point up the road into the jungle. The Japanese stormed off in that direction. When they got under way again, the escapees hadn’t gone more than half a mile before they had their first glimpse of the formidable capabilities of their escorts: Around a bend in the path they came upon the Japanese again, their bodies sprawled limp beside the trail, clothes and heads gone. There was no going back now.
Days passed in flight, a week, maybe more. One day they were tracing the route of a small but deep stream through the jungle, seeking a way across—Harris in the lead, followed by Huffman and three armed Thais bringing up the rear—when they came to a place where a fallen tree bridged the stream. Crossing it, they marched up the path on the other side when out of the bush emerged a squad of men, olive-skinned and small of frame, but well armed and “painted like Comanche Indians,” Huffman recalled. They were carrying Japanese rifles, which they leveled and aimed at the Americans’ guts. Huffman was bare-chested, with a tattoo of an eagle and an American flag all but screaming his status as an escaped prisoner. One of the newcomers stuck a big pistol right in his face. It looked like a .45, but it was no make or model the sailor had ever seen before. Harris thought, After all this…With unintelligible grunts and stark gestures, the Americans were ordered to fall in and follow.
Wholly uncertain of their status, they marched another two or three hours into jungle, finally coming to a clearing that was the site of a camp of some kind. Harris didn’t get a good look at it because he and his shipmate were quickly ushered to a bamboo shed and locked inside. That evening, one of their captors opened the door and told them to come out. He took them down to a river. He reached into a bag and produced something. It was a bar of soap. “He told us to take a bath,” Harris said. Soap hadn’t touched their skin in more than three years. They rinsed the detritus of Thailand and Burma from their filthy hides. The two Americans spent that night locked up again in the