Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [204]
He called her as soon as he landed in Washington. With no public transportation available thanks to the rush of postwar traveling, they settled for a few hours on the telephone. “We talked for a long time,” Jane said. “It was unbelievable to hear his voice, that was for sure.”
America’s veterans of Asia Station came home to a nation in fervid celebration. But the jubilance was the flip side of an equally widespread ignorance of the costs. It would be decades before the culture of therapy took root and debriefings and psychological counseling became standard practice for men returning home from war’s bloody funhouse. “This was all so new to everybody,” said Jane. “The U.S. had had no experience with POWs. What do you do with them? Doctors at the veterans hospital didn’t know how to cope with it.”
In Washington, Howard Charles, John Bartz, and John Wisecup were ordered to the Marine Corps headquarters building at 8th and I Streets. “They treated us like real psycho cases,” Wisecup recalled. “They didn’t put us in the hospital. What they did was put a corporal to stay with us all the time.” For the few days they were there, that corporal shadowed their every move. He explained once, “I’m told you aren’t responsible. I’m told to stay with you. You guys are Asiatic.” The Marines were offered either a hospital stay, a ninety-day leave, or a return to duty. They were interviewed not by psychiatrists but by prosecutors. War crimes tribunals were gathering. They wanted names, descriptions, affidavits, depositions.
Returning to duty briefly, Wisecup had no great expectations. He wanted two things: his promotion and his back pay. He got promoted to corporal for his six and a half years in the service, but when he asked for his private’s back pay the topkick at the headquarters told him that no Marine, private or corporal, had any business walking around with two thousand dollars in his pocket. Wisecup didn’t disagree and it appears he didn’t take the money.
He had a run-in with a mail clerk who refused to turn over his squad’s mail to him unless he was wearing an NCO insignia. Wisecup erupted and nearly punched the kid’s lights out. The incident got him a meeting with the post sergeant major—and convinced him that there was no place for him in an organization that required adherence to such Mickey Mouse rules. He told the sergeant major he was through with the Corps. “What are you going to do when you get out?” he was asked. “You don’t know how to make a living.” Wisecup told him he had all kinds of experience. He had, in fact, worked on a railroad. “I can work in the mines,” he offered. “You’ll be digging ditches,” the sergeant major responded. “Maybe so,” Wisecup told him. “But I’m going out.”
The trick was to go somewhere. The trick was to do something, keep your mind busy with movement and learning and activity and happiness, faked if necessary, just to keep it from settling in on and picking over the details of the previous four years. But the details were exactly what the U.S. government needed as they were preparing for the war crimes tribunals.
In Washington, Harris and Huffman collected their back pay and bought new uniforms. At the Navy Department of Records building, Huffman was approached by a commodore, who asked him, “Do you know where the Houston was sunk?” Huffman said he did, and the officer showed him to a huge room with a two-story-high map. Huffman climbed a moveable ladder and put a star near St. Nicholas Point. The commodore expressed surprise, saying they thought the ship had gone down two hundred or three hundred miles from there.
Their first challenge on survivor’s leave was finding their way back to the west coast. With no mass transportation available, they hired a cabbie with a seven-passenger DeSoto for ten cents