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By Root 1566 0

a mile plus two hundred dollars for the return trip. Seventy-two hours later they were in LA. Reunited with his wife and his father, Harris told most of his whole horrible tale. After the suffering and uncertainty his folks had endured on the home front, they were entitled to it. No one else, Harris seemed to think, was. The rest of the world would never understand. “That was bad for him,” Jane Harris said. “He kept all this inside. When he came home, everybody wanted to know something. I said to him he ought to write a book. But he would tell just the funny things that happened, things that they would do to the Japs in the camps—urinating in the baths and so on.” Adventure. Hilarity. End of story.

Lanson Harris was home in Los Angeles when the FBI summoned him and asked him to look at some pictures. They wanted him to identify some guards. Accusations had been made. Charges had been leveled. “They asked me questions like, ‘Did you see this happen? Do you know if this happened? Is there anything else you can tell us that happened?’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ I didn’t tell them anything. If they asked me a question—‘Did you do this or that?’—I’d say, well I guess we did, or I guess we didn’t. I never gave any positive answers.”

“You had a period of exuberance and then a sort of a pall comes on you,” John Wisecup said. “For four or five months, nothing could make you mad. But after that, gee whiz, I had trouble.” Back in the Burma jungle Dr. Henri Hekking, farsighted and wise, had warned his patients of the fresh ordeal that would confront them on returning home after the war. There would be consequences for those who failed to take good care of themselves. “He told us the importance of exercise, of the mental attitude of living,” Jim Gee said. The transition was strenuous. Howard Charles wrote:

I remembered the little amenities people in civilized circles took for granted, but I was not comfortable using a knife and fork, trying to remember that pants were to be zipped, that toilets were to be flushed, that car doors and doors to buildings were to be opened for females, that money was to be kept in checking accounts which one had to know how to balance. I was awkward with all those things, and it bothered me. My body was loaded with hookworms and I could not gain weight. I was fleeing from something, I knew not what, although there was no longer anything to fear or run from. I was nervous because I was nervous.

Slug Wright had trouble adjusting to the sound of a woman’s voice. “We watched these pretty-looking girls coming to work with red lipstick,” Jess Stanbrough said, “and we hadn’t seen that in about three and a half to four years…. If you hadn’t seen painted lips, it looked so strange, and we sat there and marveled at that.” After his wife picked him up to bring him home from the naval hospital in Van Nuys, she told him she wanted a divorce. Such cruelty had never been devised at Outram Road. “Why didn’t you let me know when I called you, or why didn’t you let me know when I was in the prison camp?” he asked her. “You wrote. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“She said she just couldn’t do that because she’d heard about all these other problems that we were supposedly having. I said, ‘Don’t you know that when you’re in a bad situation, a little more trouble doesn’t hurt?’” Stanbrough got his revenge by living well. After returning to Austin and continuing his studies, he and three other men founded a firm in 1955 that became the defense contractor Tracor, a Fortune 500 company that at its peak employed eleven thousand people.

Revenge was on Howard Charles’s mind when he returned to Kansas “with the thought of finding my stepfather and dealing with him once and for all—possibly giving him a dose of his own blacksnake whip.” He found Jim Evans and took him for a drive. They cruised out to a field near Partridge, where the older man had once left the soon-to-be Marine for dead after beating him with a whip. Charles stopped the engine, fixed his stepfather with a cold stare, and said, “I’ve waited a long time.” It was then