Ship of Ghosts (63 page)

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 that the strength he had acquired through adversity, the seasoning by abuse that helped him fight through long years as a prisoner, enabled him to see his stepfather for the sorry, aged weakling he really was. Evans cowered, seeming to fear for his life. But Charles had said everything he needed to say with the icy stare. He resolved then and there that he would no longer go by the name his stepfather called him, Howard, that he would thereafter take the name Bob. He told his stepfather to just drive on home. Given the reprieve, Evans breathed a sigh, offered Charles a job, and hinted that he might let him inherit the
farm. “Go to hell,” came the reply. This war was over. All wars were over. And Bob Charles, like America, had won.

John Bartz returned home to Duluth and confronted demoralizing disbelief within his own home. “When I first came back my mother and all of us got together, the whole group, about forty of them, relatives and all. They wanted to hear the whole story. I started, and you could see skepticism come on people. I guess it’s hard to believe that somebody would take a hose and shove it up your ass and down your throat and pour water up both ends. It’s hard to believe that. You don’t want to believe it. So I just quit.”

He quit talking, but he could never quite keep his mind from sorting it through. “I couldn’t sleep,” Bartz said. “I’d wake up at night screaming.” He found a way to fight through it. He would leave the house in the middle of the night, get in his mother’s car, and “drive it like a son of a gun.” A few times he got pulled over by the police. The local cops learned who he was pretty quickly. “Oh, you’re that Bartz kid, prisoner of war?” they would say. “Well, I’m not gonna give you a ticket, but you’d better slow down. There are other people on the road.”

Slowing down was the last thing Lanson Harris needed. He came back from the war, reenlisted, and attended flight school at Pensacola and Corpus Christi. “I was flying for five or six years, and I was feeling pretty good.” His career kept him moving. He kept going until it came time to stop. Jane Harris said, “It came time when he was in twenty years, and we had our daughter then, and she was ten. And he said, ‘Well, I’d better get out of the Navy before I kill myself.’” He got an engineering degree. Working for Northrop, he tested parachute recovery systems for the Apollo program. In the sixties, tired of government waste, he turned to a line of work he found much more rewarding: teaching junior-high wood and metal shop.

“I was absolutely lost, like a fish out of water,” Otto Schwarz recalled. “I’ll never forget. I arrived in Newark late in the evening. I had taken the five o’clock from Washington. I was all alone. Now I hadn’t been home in seven years. Washington had gotten a call through the day before to tell my parents that I’d be coming home. I stood in the railroad station absolutely alone. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that I didn’t want to be alone.” And yet going home meant returning to the broken home he had been only too happy to
leave in the adventurous blush of 1941. That adventure was over, and 1945 showed him a bleaker, less certain vista.

“I spent the next three months just drinking my way from one bar to another,” Schwarz said. “Most of my old friends from the neighborhood were still overseas. I went back to Washington twelve days early because I was broke. I had to go back and get more money. Really, really absolutely lost! We should never have been left and released like that, you know. It’s a really strange feeling because you really don’t feel like a human being anymore after coming out of those jungles.”

Wisecup retrieved his manhood quickly enough by joining the Merchant Marine and going back to sea, where he stayed for seventeen years. His postwar career took him to Japan, where he met and married a Japanese woman, his third wife. She would outlive him, but his long correspondence to friends after the war reveal a man at peace with what war had forced him to suffer. John Wisecup died in Tokyo in 2001.

The habits of a prisoner languished and rattled but never seemed to die. They drank their tea extremely hot, having learned in camp to gulp the brew fast so they could go back quickly for more. They preferred burnt-rice coffee to Maxwell House, and slept better on hard floors than plush mattresses. They prepared the meals they had fantasized about on the railroad and savored them. They met their wives or married their girlfriends, had children who would have to sate their curiosity about the Death Railway from sources other than Dad, flailed at ghosts in their sleep. There were mixed feelings about rice. Some never lost their taste for it; others, when they left the chapel after their weddings, insisted that their guests throw cornflakes. Charley Pryor craved sweets in the jungle camps but seldom ate them after his freedom. More than anything else, he craved fresh lettuce. To Don Brain, a good meal was a quart of milk and a head of lettuce held and eaten like an apple. They caught up with world developments—atomic bombs, helicopters, ballpoint pens, kidney dialysis, aerosol sprays, as well as the new faces suddenly prominent in the culture. They had never heard of this newcomer Harry Truman, but boy, had that youngster Bing Crosby become big stuff. CBS Radio was featuring a sensational new singer named Sinatra.

Jess Stanbrough did well enough in life, but the lesson he took from his POW ordeal had nothing to do with wealth. “I resolved
that although I might never be rich, I’d never be poor or hungry. If you come to my house at Cape Cod…if anyone hears this, and they come visit, they’ll see a nice freezer filled up with food. They’ll ask me, ‘Well, you’re a bachelor. Why do you have all that?’ I have a nice big house on a one-acre lot and a big freezer. I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s called POW syndrome.’”

Dentists would marvel at how their tree sap fillings had held up over the years. Doctors would wonder at the dead spots on their legs where tropical ulcers had once rotted the nerves out from beneath their flesh. They cultivated deep religious faith, learned Oriental cooking, went to pieces at the first echo of taps.

In 1978, in Coldwater, Michigan, Bob Charles was immersed in his business interests, running a printing company, resolvedly avoiding Otto Schwarz’s reunions, “determined that the war would not be the biggest thing that had ever happened to me.” One day the war found him, in the person of Pack Rat McCone standing on his stoop. It didn’t take Charles more than a second to see the twinkle in the old Marine’s eye. He showed him around his plant. At once McCone was on his game, casing the facility like a warehouse in Batavia. He thought for a minute, then said, “Charlie, you’ve got thirty windows in this place. You’ve got guys running very expensive and dangerous printing presses, and they’re looking out the window. Not only that, you’re losing heat in the wintertime and losing cool in the summer. Why don’t I cover them for you?”

Ever resourceful, famously adept at odd jobs using odder tools, McCone stayed for dinner and convinced Charles to let him stick around for a while. Before McCone retired to the cot that Charles had set up on his enclosed back porch, the businessman told his wandering shipmate, “When you go down to the lumberyard, mention who you’re doing it for. Charge the company. Get what you need. By the way, you’re on my payroll.”

“Oh, no I’m not.”

“Yes you are. Either that, or you quit right now.”

“I’m not going to quit,” McCone said, “and you’re not putting me on any payroll.”

“Why?” Charles countered.

“Charlie, if you don’t know why, I can’t tell you.”

They knew each other as few other beings can know each other. And they had confronted ordeals few innocents could summon in their most fraught nightmares. In 1980, troubled by the seizure of
the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Fred Quick, at the age of fifty-nine, seriously considered putting that experience to work. “If I had my way about it, I’d find forty-nine other ex-POWs and we’d go over there and relieve those folks,” he told a reporter. “Anyone who’s been through the torture I have can take what these Iranians are handing out standing on your head.” But it would be gilding the storm clouds to pretend the Death Railway was always a source of strength. One day in 1996, more than twenty years after he retired, Lanson Harris got a letter from the Long Beach Veterans Hospital calling for a physical. When he went in, and he saw some patients getting examined by the medical staff, and the doctor closed the door, it seemed to pop some kind of a psychological membrane. “I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I see these POWs…. Oh God, I was crazy. Next thing I knew the doctor had me and two guys were holding onto me. They put me in the hospital to keep me from committing suicide,” he said.

Red Huffman lives in Santee, California, outside San Diego, as this is being written, seldom venturing into the traumatic territory of memory that might have defined his life had he allowed it. Like John Wisecup and so many others, he stayed busy with challenging work. After the war he signed on for service in the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, seeing action in Korea. Like his Marine shipmate from New Orleans, he looked to the Orient to find a bride. Though his right arm is no good, his mind is sharp. Only recently, though, has he taken to sharing with his wife, Mary, the details of his war experience. They sit together and read out loud to each other what little has been written about the
Houston
and the ordeal of her crew. Huffman has little to do with the USS
Houston
Survivors Association anymore. Though it has held reunions faithfully since about 1948, Huffman has found it painful territory to tread, and if you don’t feel the need for the powerful bond of love and brotherhood available there, what’s the point? His partner in flight from Phet Buri, Lanson Harris, who is Huffman’s equal in independence of spirit, lives just up the highway from him, in Irvine. They haven’t seen each other in many a year and it seems they might never again.

The Association’s guiding light has been Otto Schwarz. Second only to the heavenly spirit of Captain Rooks in his stewardship of the
Houston
’s legacy, the retired chief boatswain’s mate and postal worker has organized most every significant event on behalf of the ship’s memory. Anything that has touched on the old cruiser, its
history, its traditions, or its people has gone through Schwarz in Union, New Jersey. “I always had the philosophy that whenever I have the opportunity, no matter how I have the opportunity, either newspapers or television interviews or anywhere, one-to-one meeting with people, I don’t want the world to forget this. I don’t want them to forget the
Houston,
first of all, because it was an absolutely gallant ship with a courageous crew. I don’t want people to forget what men can do to men.”

Schwarz has run the reunions long enough, and published the
Blue Bonnet
newsletters regularly enough, that no gathering ever really takes place in his absence. Even when he’s not there, you sense his presence in things. He has donated his entire personal collection of artifacts to the University of Houston Libraries, whose Cruiser
Houston
Collection houses sixty-eight boxes of documents, artifacts, and memorabilia pertaining to the ship and grows with the passing of every survivor. With the actual survivors aging fast and traveling less, the survivors’ children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews are taking over under the auspices of the USS
Houston
Next Generation Organization, under the energetic leadership of Val Roberts-Poss, daughter of survivor Valdon Roberts. The Lost Battalion Association holds its own events in Dallas every August, and the children are well in attendance there too. They’re animated by the spirit that drove their fathers, but so long as a half dozen veterans still show up at the reunions, they don’t need to look too far for a hero.

O
n September 22, 1945, a field party of sixteen British and Australian troops from the War Graves Commission, accompanied by a Japanese interpreter named Takashi Nagase, a veteran of the Kempeitai’s counterintelligence branch at Kanchanaburi, left Bangkok in a caravan of
atap
-roofed wagons and began a three-week journey up and down the full length of the railway searching for the dead. By the time they reached Thanbyuzayat and returned to Bangkok, they had located 144 cemeteries, innumerable scattered roadside graves, and more than 10,000 bodies.

The Allied War Graves Registration determined in 1946 that the total deaths among Allied POWs in the Pacific numbered 12,399. Of the 270,000 native laborers or
romusha
on the line, 72,000 were counted as fatalities, although the actual number of deaths may be three times that high. More recent estimates put Allied POW deaths at 16,000 and
romusha
deaths at more than 200,000.