Free The Devil in Canaan Parish by Jackie Shemwell Page B

somehow feel it myself, but the horrible things I had seen in my life made me bitter.
    Sometimes I felt a stab of longing for my own mother.   She did not give me up to God – she had given me up to war.   There were no mothers where I had gone.   No maternal compassion, no womanly tenderness -- nothing but men and their pride, their hate and anger.   Nothing but the abuse and cruelty of Japanese soldiers, who felt that surrender at the hands of one’s enemy was an absolute disgrace.   In surrendering the Philippines, we Americans became little more than animals to them -- worse than animals.   They marched us sixty miles across Bataan to Camp O’Donnell. Every day and sometimes during the night for almost a week, they marched us, with no food, no water, and no rest.   They would beat you with the butt of a rifle if you stepped out of line.   They would run a bayonet through you if you fell.   They would slit your throat if you bent down to help a buddy.   We were dying from thirst.   There were beautiful, pure artesian springs just off the road, but we were denied them.   We could see them, almost reach out and touch them, but we couldn’t drink.   We were desperate for that cool, clean water – our tongues swelled and split and the sun beat down on us every day, and still we couldn’t drink.   After a few days, some of the men went insane and began running toward the springs.   They were shot in the back for their trouble.
    One of the few times they did let us rest, I was sitting across from a soldier who appeared frantic.   He told me he was a doctor, and he was carrying quinine and was trying to empty his pockets before a Japanese soldier searched and killed him.   I stuffed a bottle in my pants.   Later at Camp O’Donnell, when I lay down on the bare dirt floor of my barracks and the malaria seized me, made me feel like someone was wringing my guts and the fever made me delirious,   those quinine pills saved me.  
    The abuse continued for years – prison in the Philippines, then the hell ship to Japan, when they crammed 1,500 of us into the hold, shoulder to shoulder.   They crammed us so tightly that we couldn’t sit.   You could squat or stand, but you couldn’t sit.   There was no light, except for what trickled down from the tiny hatch, fifteen feet over our heads and the only way in or out. For twenty-three days they left us in the darkness and heat, fear and stink.   Each day they would send down one bucket of water for 1,500 men.   One bucket of water for 1,500 thirsty men. If you were lucky, you got about a teaspoonful.   The latrine was an open tub, and if you had to use it, you had to crawl over the backs and heads of hundreds of men to get to it.   I was unfortunate enough to be standing near it, and had to endure that festering reek for twenty-three days.   When the Japs would occasionally lift the latrine out of the hold to empty it, the urine and feces would slosh down onto our heads. I was covered in filth, and would retch at the smell of myself.  
    The prison camp in Japan was worse.   We were forced to build an airstrip:   twelve hours a day of back-breaking labor, breaking stones with pick axes and carting them in wheel barrows.   The rations were meager and mostly rice, but never enough to end the gnawing hunger that ate you from the inside.   The rice diet caused blocked bowels in some of the men.   My buddy Dave died from it.   He crawled under our barracks like a wounded animal and wouldn’t come out – just lay there moaning in pain until he finally died.   I can still hear him.  
    They would beat you with rifle butts until you couldn’t hear.   They would slap and punch and kick you.   If you tried to escape, they would kill every man in your squad.   When we were finally liberated, we were weak with hunger and fear – like dogs who suffer from the cruelest of masters.   They had made us into what they thought that we were.   It was months