The performance was quite dull, until one of the children discovered the Americans in the back of the truck. The little faces brightened and broke into smiles; "V" signs began to appear, followed by a chorus of "Hello, Joe! Hello, Joe! Hello, Joe; Mabuhay, Joe!" The Japs were plenty irked and hurried the truck down the highway.
In the early afternoon we passed through the barrio where we had encountered the Japanese Chevy and tanks seven months before. Shortly we passed through San Jose and on to the central plains.
About one mile before reaching the internment camp at Cabanatuan, we suddenly became aware of a horrible, acrid stench, the smell of disease, dysentery and death.
Chapter V
JAPANESE PRISONER OF WAR CAMP NO1, CABANATUAN
Toward evening we arrived at the gate-made of slender poles and barbed wire-which I immediately recognized as one of the camps built prior to the war to house a division of the Philippine Army. It was located on several hundred acres of treeless wasteland (formerly rice paddies) near the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains. It consisted of some one hundred cantonment type barracks with walls of nipa and roofs of swali and cogan grass.
Within the barbed wire enclosure, many of the seven thousand half-naked, starved bodies, the "captives," slowly milled about camp. In the several guard towers along the fence, sentries closely scrutinized their movements. The arrival of our old truck and its handful of new captives were scarcely noted in camp.
I made my "duty calls" on Col. D. J. Rutherford, C.A.C.,
Camp Commander, on Lt. Col. Leo Pacquet, Group II Commander, and Col. Gillespie, Medical C. O. Group II Dispensary proved to be a small, twenty by twenty foot grass shack. In one corner was my two-by six foot bamboo slat bed for the next several months.
Although my weight was down from 165 to 120 pounds because of amoebic dysentery, I was still relatively active and in fair health. How lucky I had been to have missed the starvation, the many diseases, the battles and bombings on Bataan and Corregidor, and most of all, the "Death March," which had taken so many thousands of lives, "slaughtered by the Japs."