Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [215]
If we are to believe David Lean’s vision of Pierre Boulle’s novel The Bridge on the River Kwai, the prisoners took fierce pride in building the best railway they could and developed a sporting competition with the Japanese who were working alongside them. There were no tropical ulcers or kneeling prisoners taking headshots and toppling into graves they had dug for themselves. There were no cholera camps, no afflicted wretches lurching through the monsoon to drain themselves into disease-ridden pits. If you believe what you read in James Clavell’s King Rat, the British-run facility at Changi was the most notorious prison in Japanese-held Asia, not Outram Road or Kempeitai headquarters at Kanburi or 100 Kilo Camp or Hintok.
Time and again, the demands of entertainment have taken an essential aspect of historical reality and driven it so far as to outrun the truth. In King Rat, an American prisoner acquired vast personal power by breaking rules, accumulating contraband, and engaging in petty subversions that built a legend. Truth is different, more practical, and less or more interesting, depending on how much someone like John Wisecup or Pack Rat McCone intrigues you. Rules were there and opportunity was there. Survival was the product of one’s ability to balance the two. “The fact is, the ones that obeyed the rules are the ones that are still there,” said Seldon Reese of the Houston. “Now a few of us guys that did the stealing and swapping and trading, we got back home. Some of us got shot, but some of us got back home.”
Frank Fujita had seen, somehow, a glimpse of everyone’s future. On August 11, 1945, under skies droning with Wright radial engines, B-29s seeding the air with black specks whistling earthward, he pulled out his diary, put pen to paper, exuberant, and waxed Solomonic:
Well after almost 4 years our fate is to be decided within the next few hours. We become free men or dead men in two days. If we are to be free we will emerge emaciated, weary fragments of humanity into a strange world, endowed with nothing but a few measly dollars, an unsurpassed knowledge of human nature and such a morbid philosophy on life that it will serve to ostracize us from society should we put it to use. We will be easy to please and hard to fool. We will be products of 1941 coming into a world five years in advance of us, the world of Buck Rogers.
Most of us will be utterly lost, bewildered and cannot or will not fit into the new way of life and thus become the next generation of criminals, human derelicts or philosophers. Yet on the other hand a small percentage of the “horios” shall fit into society sufficiently enough to enable them to live out their span of life as the bourgeois. And yet a still smaller percentage, in years to come, will join the ranks of America’s foremost men; men of medicine, men of science and government; men to become world famous in the aesthetic arts.—OR—we shall end our “horioship” as we would have been better off to have begun it,—in death.
He was right. Among the survivors—the resurrected ghosts of Captain Rooks’s ship’s company, the wayward Texans of the Lost Battalion—there was enough variety in the endgame of destiny to fulfill the breadth of the bomb-raid prophecy. Though every day thereafter they would fight their way through a monsoon-laced jungle of memories, and though they and their loved ones would wrestle with the legacy of an ordeal that claimed some four hundred lives per mile of track set down, most of them kept the memories where they belonged, boxed up, stored for exploration only when the time was right, held down and ignored at all other times. Most of them, in spite of it all, managed to do all right.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Telling the story of a ship populated by more than a thousand souls is an exercise in arbitrary selection and undeserved exclusion. Confronted with the risk of overgeneralizing from unusual experiences, or missing the drama of a particular viewpoint in the rush of diverse stories, an author can only hope