The Souvenir (22 page)

Into the caves they threw explosives, white phosphorus bombs, flamethrowers—incinerating the occupants. Sometimes Japanese soldiers ran out, their clothes on fire. Then they were shot down. “You had to stay to the side before you threw anything in, so they couldn't shoot you,” Sylvan Katz recalled. He also remembered the time his unit took a position on a ridge for eight days, directly above a sealed Japanese cave. “I was standing with another GI, a guy we called ‘the minister' (he'd been to divinity school) and we were talking. We noticed that the ground underneath us was moving, then it opened. An emaciated Japanese soldier emerged from the hole. He was nearly naked. His only tool was a U.S. Army spoon. He'd been in the dark for around five or six days, because we were in our positions that long. It took him all that time to dig his way out.” I gasped. “The minister shot him,” said Sylvan. “No questions asked.”

Another factor Yamashita couldn't have foreseen: tanks. With much ingenuity and great effort, engineers from the Twenty-fifth managed to get tanks up the mountains. The tanks moved along ridges so narrow that portions of their treads hung over the edge.
The Japanese had not brought any antitank weapons up with them from the Central Plains into the mountains. They never imagined the Americans would be able to bring tanks up the precipitous heights. According to the
U.S. Army in World War II
, “Many Japanese, overcome by surprise as tanks loomed up through the forest, abandoned their prepared defenses and fled.”

As we wound higher and higher up the slopes, I tried not to look down. Large sections of road simply weren't there—washed out by the last typhoon or cracked off the side of the mountain by an earthquake. Occasionally we passed work crews, barefoot men with trowels, repairing a section of road; it looked to be an interminable project. As soon as they repaired one section, Mother Nature ruined it again.

Peter Lomenzo was the Twenty-seventh Infantry Regiment's staff officer during the battle for Balete Pass. His job, “under the colonel's name” as he describes it, was to lay out the plan for attack. “To understand the battle for Balete Pass,” he told me, “you have to keep in mind the most salient fact:
It was uphill
, so you were always tired. Tired beyond imagination. You were always struggling against fatigue.” Army uniforms are called fatigues for a reason.

My father's fatigue persisted for years after the war ended. It was Balete Pass that did it; those 165 days of fear and uphill stress wore him out. Combat, the aftermath of combat, and the anticipation of combat all wear you down. Months of continuous combat, continual fight-or-flight arousal conditions, take the human body's nervous system to its furthest extremes. It's not uncommon for a soldier in combat to urinate or defecate in his pants. The body, literally “blows its ballast.” The physiological price for this constant revving of the nervous system—in its aftermath, an incredibly powerful weariness.

I can still see my father's frame sunk into his armchair, asleep
after dinner, night after night, for so many years after the war. I still hear in my head that repeated phrase, “Don't wake your father, he's so tired.” He was perpetually fatigued.

On March 17, the Twenty-seventh Regiment began an attack some three thousand yards south of Balete Pass where the Japanese had organized their main line of resistance. The underbrush was so dense, they had to cover some of the distance on hands and knees. The Twenty-fifth Division yearbook describes “torturous, close-in fighting.” The Americans were then less than five miles from the pass. But it would take two months to cover that distance.

As his comrades “went the way of Dr. Orange,” my father referred to combat as the “Buzz Saw of War.” Others called it “the meat grinder” because of the way war in this tropical hell devoured
men. He warned my mother, “I'm going to be a pretty hard guy when I get back—this army really has toughened me. I don't take any crap from anyone—and everyone really respects me for it.”

A
RNEL MANEUVERED THE
van up the precarious pitted road toward the three-thousand-foot summit of Balete Pass. The van's heat gauge pegged past the neutral zone. Arnel snapped off the air conditioner. The ninety-degree-plus heat made me dopey. We'd been traveling since morning, and it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon.

Just when I could see ahead where the grade leveled off, the left rear of the van gave a threatening hiss, then sighed and sank. Flat tire. Arnel managed to get the van to a pull-off, then pointed toward a klatch of small buildings up the road. Maybe someone there could give him a hand.

We scrambled out. As Arnel pulled out of sight, we looked around and noticed a curious concrete column across the road. As we walked toward it, we saw that it was the marker constructed by the Twenty-fifth Infantry in May 1945 to commemorate the Balete Pass Campaign.

On May 10, the Wolfhounds finally declared Balete Pass secure. “Thus,” it is recorded in the Twenty-fifth Infantry yearbook, “the operation from San Jose to the strategic ‘front door to the Cagayan Valley'—33 miles of bitter, yard-by-yard fighting—had reached its climax.” Lieutenant Peter Lomenzo remembers making a radio call to Colonel Lindeman, his commanding officer, to assure him that his men were indeed at Balete Pass: “I told him that I was pissing on it and could see the other side.”

The commemorative column was far less grand than it looked in the Twenty-fifth Division yearbook. No longer was the approach set up on a walkway of mortared stone. It was low on the ground and dwarfed by a nearby radio antenna as well as a monument to victims of the latest typhoon.

The plaque on the column read:

General MacArthur announced to the press on May 15, 1945, that Balete Pass had been won. However, numerous American casualties—including the loss of General Dalton on May 16 and Sam Wengrow later that same month—occurred during the fierce “mop up,” which lasted until June 30. By then, the final toll of Japanese known dead during the entire Luzon Campaign would be 14,569—with 614 taken prisoner. On September 2, 1945, the same day Japan surrendered to the Allies, General Yamashita and his staff officers walked out of the Caraballo Mountains and surrendered.

Filipino litter-bearers had carried out the American wounded and dead. I asked Sylvan Katz if the Japanese dead had been buried up at Balete Pass, another question that exposed my naivete. “We weren't about to risk our men to carry out their dead,” he said patiently.

In Los Angeles, I interviewed a woman from the Philippines
named Salud Ilao, who'd been a nurse's aide for the Twenty-fifth Division near Balete Pass. She remembered it differently: “As soon as a battle was over, the American engineers cleared away the bodies, buried them in a hole. It was because of sanitation.”

A bit of both is probably true. Sometimes the American engineers would bulldoze the bodies of the enemy dead into mass graves. Because the flanks of Balete Pass were so steep, bulldozers were in short supply. The Japanese dead littered the landscape. Or they died alone of starvation in jungle-choked ravines. The wounded, who asked their medics for painkillers, were more likely given a grenade to blow themselves up. Unknown thousands of Japanese soldiers had been sealed into caves and dugouts surrounding Balete Pass.

Most of the Japanese dead suffered the fate soldiers fear the most—their flesh reduced to meat. In Homer's
Iliad
, a soldier who died unburied was considered doubly defeated—first by the enemy and then by the scavenging buzzards and dogs who clean up the battlefield when the fight is over.

In
The Burmese Harp
, Kon Ichikawa's powerful 1956 antiwar film, a Japanese infantryman realizes the purposelessness of war and is transformed by his realization. He takes the vows of a Buddhist monk and dedicates his life to collecting and burying the remains of his dead comrades whose corpses litter the landscape of war-ravaged Burma. It's a poignant fiction. In reality, the bodies of Yoshio Shimizu and his dead comrades probably decomposed in trenches in the open fields around Umingan, or in caves sealed into the brushy slopes of the Caraballo Mountains.

W
E WALKED PAST
the Balete Pass marker to the concrete typhoon monument. There was a small door on the side. We entered and climbed up a spiral staircase. The stairwell was stiflingly hot and filled with trash.

From the top I could see down the other side of the pass, toward rice-terraced hills, which were, as Peter Lomenzo recalled, “as green as Ireland.” Glancing up, Lloyd caught sight of a cluster of larger structures farther up the hill. “Maybe they've built another monument to the Twenty-fifth Division,” he suggested.

We trudged up the hill. The path leveled out on the plateau, where there was an open area ringed by at least five mammoth dark-gray granite markers. I started to read the plaque on the nearest one, and for a few moments wondered why I couldn't decipher the writing. Then I realized: The writing was in Japanese. These were all monuments erected after the war by the Japanese.

One plaque had an English translation: It spoke of “universal peace,” of the eternal rest of all the soldiers—American, Filipino, Japanese—who had died at Balete Pass. The irony was superb: After losing this ferocious battle to the Americans, who struggled uphill for more than a hundred days, the Japanese had claimed the higher ground.

I was shocked by the unpeaceful feelings surging through me. I felt my father's anger erupt in my own body.

A calmer voice intruded. More than sixteen thousand souls were floating around Balete Pass. More Japanese than Americans died here. What would all those dead have to say? What would Sam Wengrow, lying in a grave in the American Cemetery in Manila, have to say about this place, this war? Had
he
forgiven his enemies? Had he met Yoshio on the other side? Did Yoshio believe in the emperor's war at the moment of his death?

“I know you have a certain empathy for the flag-bearing Japanese soldier,” Peter Lomenzo had once written me. “I understand that. But believe me (and I fought in three major campaigns and innumerable battles)—the Japanese enemy was just that in
every sense
of the word.” When Sylvan had told me about the soldier who'd dug his way out of a tunnel with an Army spoon, I'd asked,
“Didn't you think he wanted to surrender?” He'd replied without sentiment, “He was just a Japanese soldier.”

The image of the Shimizus outside the window of my train compartment returned to me. Spirits of ancestors and offspring—of those who died and those who survived—commingled on this steep, scrubby mountain pass.

I couldn't expect my combat veteran friends to forgive. That would have to be left to future generations. At least we could try to understand what all these men had gone through, bear witness to their suffering.
That
, I realized, was why I was here.

I
N SPITE OF
the oppressive afternoon heat, I started to shiver. Lloyd gripped my shoulder. We walked down the hill to the highway and headed in the direction we'd last seen Arnel and the van. Across the road, three young boys in ragged T-shirts yelled, “Hey you! Rich Americans! Give us dollars! We're so poor!” Lloyd returned their yells and gestured them toward us.

Arnel and the van lumbered up the steep incline. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out. Followed by our three new friends, we all walked over to a tiny kitchen under a palapa by the side of the road. Three little tables with plastic checkered tablecloths, a framed portrait of the Virgin Mary graced the stained stucco wall. The aproned matron who took our order had a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from her lips. A plastic flyswatter was tucked in her waistband. The two young men who had helped Arnel change a tire also joined us. We ordered cold Coca-Colas and platefuls of sliced mangoes.

While everyone ate and drank, I imagined an eerie brigade of shades, black dogs growling at their heels, trooping sorrowfully over these hills. I was grateful for the laughter of the living, grateful to return to the present.

I
T WAS WELL
after midnight when we returned to Baguio. Lloyd and I crept into our room at the inn and slid, exhausted, under the cotton sheets. From the Sound and Motion Western Ballroom on the street behind the inn, the evening's entertainer crooned lyrics about hard luck, the vagaries of troubled love.

I pressed closer to Lloyd and thought of a tender passage from one of my dad's letters to my mother: