Baa Baa Black Sheep (41 page)

While in prison camp, and for a long time afterward, I was very much in the dark, so to speak, concerning two words. I prided my ego on both of them, although I knew, even then, that my pride in one of them was not honest. These two words seem to fit in well at this point with the rest of my thoughts.

The first one is “bravery,” for which I took many a phony bow, and I imagine to this day that many people still believe I was mighty brave. I mention this because I was beginning to learn the difference between daredevil and brave. In looking back over the years I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have never been brave, but most of the things for which I had been given credit for bravery were nothing but daredevil stunts. I was trying to build up my own ego, trying to imitate the bravery of people I had read about or had been told about in the years gone by.

The second word, will-power, closely allied with bravery in my mind, was a thing in which I honestly prided myself, for too many years. And, needless to say, it was quite a spiritual revelation to finally get these two bothersome, ego-feeding expressions straightened out in my mind. The reason it had taken me so long a time, even though it happened to be nobody’s fault but my own, was that my emotional maturity was very retarded.

Can you imagine how the air went out of me when I finally found the true meaning of will-power? Will-power means that one is going to do whatever he wants to do most at any particular time. So actually one of the things I prided myself for is really no accomplishment at all.

My definition of bravery is when a person does what he honestly believes is the best thing for him to do at any particular time. So the majority of my life can be linked up with show-off, or daredevil. The bravest man in the world would be the man who acts as he honestly thinks best more particular times than anyone else. Little wonder, then, that so many of the true acts of bravery go unheralded, while the spectacular or daredevil antics are played up.

I’m not trying to change the world any more—people can go on writing and thinking what they damn well please—but for my own peace of mind I have to realize the truth about myself, and not what somebody writes about me—good or bad.

Some subjects are timeless, and I would say that food is one of them. Yet only by comparing notes this way can We of the World Who Have Known Real Hunger actually get together and form our own sort of imaginary club.

Our members today would be from everywhere, from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, everywhere. But regardless of our assorted languages, regardless of our assorted politics,
the members would have something far more in common than the members of most clubs do. We would at least know that the universal implement we all have, the stomach, usually behaves the same way under duress and causes us all to have much the same kinds of dreams.

Now the Japanese themselves had very little food. They had a mixture of rice and barley for their main diet. This meant even the military, who got the best food in the country. But prisoners, as we know, got far less. In Rabaul our food had been supplemented by mildewed rice that had been left in Rabaul by the Australians. Now, provided this rice had been brought in as recently as the day the war was started, it nevertheless would have been some two years old by the time I was captured. This accounted for the rice being mildewed, full of worms, and everything else.

To go with this were odds and ends from the officers’ mess. This would come to us in the form of a brew that was poured over the mildewed rice, and accounted for the reason we oftentimes found plum pits in the brew and rice. We knew that nobody had put a plum in there. Some Japanese had merely spat it out of his mouth into his plate or onto his table, and everything had been scraped off and put into a rusty can, brought out to our camp, warmed and poured over the rice.

The food we later got in Japan consisted of a mixture of rice and barley, one of rice to twelve of barley. Then we got a hot watery soup with it, flavored with bean paste, a by-product of the soya bean. There were a few greens in it, and greens in that country consisted of carrot tops, potato peelings, and the like.

Ordinarily one would think that one heaping bowl of barley and a heaping bowl of soup, larger than any bowl of soup to be had in any restaruant, would be sufficient for any man three times a day. In bulk we actually were eating more on this diet than we would have eaten at home. But the food value just was not enough to keep a man more than alive, and he gradually lost weight, went down, down, down.

After nine months of this I weighed one hundred ten. Ordinarily I weighed one hundred eighty to ninety and had been at my normal weight when captured.

As the prisoners were going down, down in weight, it seemed to affect the minds of most of them. I know that I put
myself to sleep each night by thinking of all the iceboxes I ever had seen. I thought, or tried to think, of every meal I ever had. I would remember from my childhood, very vividly, each meal my mother cooked me that I liked. The funny part of it was that I never thought of extravagant foods, just the basic foods, anything that was simple and common. I never craved fancy desserts or anything like that, just simple food.

The other prisoners sat around, just the same as I did, and dreamed of all these foods, and then they started making recipes. This was something that always amused me.

In this camp was Louis Zamperini, the famous miller, now an evangelist, and he is of Italian descent. No doubt his mother is an excellent Italian cook and knows how to make wonderful Italian foods. Some of the prisoners would show me recipes that Louie had written out, and he must have been drooling from the mouth when writing them.

The others would say of Zamperini’s recipes: “I’m going to copy these things all down,” and they would be busy scribbling them. We were not allowed to have pencil or paper, or be caught writing or reading, so very secretively they would write them down. They swore that when they got home they were going to have all those recipes cooked.

Once or twice I looked at these recipes and saw that Louie had put the tomatoes in at the same time as the potatoes. And anybody who has cooked at all knows that tomatoes should be left until the last. He would put butter in the first thing, and it struck me that good old Louie Zamperini had never cooked in his life. He was just the same as any of the rest of us. He merely must have remembered that his mother’s Italian cooking was good, and he just dreamed that he had cooked all those things. He would swear to the high heavens, though, that he had cooked all of these dishes himself.

The meals we had were a dietitian’s nightmare. Often we used to mention to each other: “Good Lord, if any dietitian ever tells me when I get back home what I should eat, I’ll just say: ‘Lady, or whoever you are, you are nuts!’ ”

Our most favored meal was a heaping dish of barley, which would be given us sometimes on special holidays, and a bowl of mashed potatoes without salt, pepper, or butter on them. Nothing but starch. Practically every meal we had was mostly starch. Later, when I got a job in the Japanese kitchen
there and could see for myself, I learned for sure that the average prisoner didn’t get one pound of grease, meat, or fish in a year’s time.

Sometimes I was interested, far more than amused, in finding out how little it takes to keep the human body alive. All we wanted was a little more barley or a little more of this watery soup and we would have been, under those circumstances, what could be called comparatively content, I suppose. But we didn’t get it.

Most people, especially in America, just simply do not know what it means to spend one’s days dreaming and thinking of food. It is not their fault that they do not know, and may they never have to know. But We of the World Who Have Known Real Hunger
know.
And that is why our imaginary club should be such an understanding one, between member and member.

As another idea of how hungry a human can get, once I had a soupbone as big as my fist and it took me only two days to devour all of it, completely.

Prior to being captured, if I had been told that a large hungry collie dog could have gotten away with all of a soupbone as large as this one, I would have considered the informant crazy. But I got away with it, every bit of it, within two days.

After nine months of capture—and with my weight down to almost a hundred pounds—I met one of my most unforgettable characters. She was a Japanese grandmother, and I called her “Auntie.”

But the reason I am especially thinking of her this evening is, perhaps, that I have helped my wife set the table for supper. And it is always in regard to food somehow that I remember Auntie the most. The Japanese word for “Auntie” is
Obason
, and this is what I called her.

After all this time as a captive the Nips were finally through questioning me two or three times a week, and I was getting to be rather an old prisoner around the Ofuna camp. So I was given a job in the kitchen to work from four-thirty in the morning until nine o’clock at night. For my services I was allowed an extra bowl of barley and a bowl of soup a day. It happened that I was not able to get along even with this additional ration because I was lugging heavy barrels of water
and sacks of rice around that weighed close to two hundred pounds. For strength to do this I had to resort to other methods.

I guess everybody is inherently dishonest in some shape or form, or manner, so I stole food. I never stole any of the prisoners’ food, of course, but I stole the Japanese food, which was a great deal more nourishing, and more tasty.

I decided when I went into the kitchen after nine months of starvation that I was going to eat four times as much as any Japanese guard got of the same kind of food. Many times I had to vomit it up and many times I had other troubles, such as a little diarrhea, but I maintained that diet during all the six months I was in the kitchen.

Now, due to the help of the little old civilian lady who worked there, by watching out the door to see that none of the guards was looking, and my own kleptomaniac ability, I went from my hundred or so pounds to my normal hundred ninety. I could determine my weight because in the kitchen we had some kilo scales, and the kilo is 2.2 pounds.

This little lady, who watched the door so carefully to see that no Japanese guards were around, was the only sweetheart I ever had in Japan. When I mentioned this in one of my War Bond lectures (years later in Phoenix, Arizona), with my wife in the audience, some jovial old boy said: “I bet he promised to marry her, too.” He was merely keeping current with the newspapers that were busy printing the statements of some woman who said that I promised during the war to marry her, and then married someone else instead. The newspapers had a spicy story to add to my war publicity, I’ll have to admit, because talking happened to be one of this girl’s strong points. The trouble with me was that I had always been slightly under the influence while these conversations had been going on, so I wasn’t capable of paying proper attention. But neither the newspapers nor I realized that getting sobered up in a prison camp helps one to see things in a different light, at least for a short period of time.

Well, it was all good humor, even though this little old sweetheart of mine was about sixty years old. She didn’t know a word of English and she had never been outside of Japan. If any of you mothers have given things to any of the war prisoners in the United States here, you were in a way
repaid, for this little old lady certainly did help me out. To her I was just a starving boy. The fact that I was from America, the outfit that was sinking her sons on land, air, and sea, had nothing to do with it.

Of course, in her conversations when the guards were around, she would damn all prisoners. The poor little old thing felt she had to do that. But when the guards were away, she would continue letting me sneak out the guards’ food; although she would have been beaten too, like anybody else, if she had been caught doing this for me. So when the guards were away, she would let me walk over to their lard barrel, the stinkingest old stuff anyone could imagine. I would get some fish also. Naturally I would look around too, while doing all this, for I wasn’t trusting too much on her tired old eyes, for if one of these guards had caught me it would have meant a beating session that might cost my life. I would scoop out a big handful of this stinking lard, shove it in my mouth, and gulp it down in a second. Even though it did stink, nevertheless to me it tasted like honey.

And occasionally, when very important persons were expected, they baked fish in the kitchen. To get one of these, Obason and I had to co-operate to the fullest, almost like a quarterback and a fullback on a football field. For we weren’t allowed all the time we had had with the lard snatching. We had to fool a kitchen full of people. Much the same as a quarterback, Obason would nudge me, and say
“Gomen nasi, Boyingtonson,”
for the guard’s benefit, which means: Pardon me, fellow, for bumping into you. I would then put a free hand down underneath a fairly high working table in the kitchen, and there in the spacious folds of Obason’s apron was a hot baked fish.

The first time she ever handed me one of these hot fish I stuffed it immediately down my throat to avoid detection. The thing was so hot I had to grab the tail between my front teeth in a futile effort to stop it from sliding on down and burning my stomach. And there I stood—the tears running out of my eyes, a guard asking:
“Nunda”
—while I was pretending to blow my nose and still keep from choking on the hot fish.

The reason I needed this food of some sort was that, before I worked in the kitchen, all of us had to do compulsory athletics twice a day. And when we prisoners were bent over
for our calisthenics we could hear these knee-joints, and ankle-joints and elbows snap, crackle, snap, just like a dry forest of twigs going off.

During those days in the kitchen we usually had a lull in the midmorning and midafternoon when the civilian cook and the guards were not there. This was when the little old lady would say to me in exceptionally polite Japanese: “Let’s have a yesomai.”