As the song of the rails clicked along and the beautiful sunset colors in the desert heavens faded into night, I sat alone in one end of the luxurious East- bound streamliner. Outside the Mojave wastelands flashed by. This was the first real relaxation I had enjoyed since leaving Yokosuka Naval Hospital about a week before. Soon the interior lights were turned low and the other few passengers in the opposite end of the car began to doze. I believe that there and then I first began to grasp the full meaning of what had happened to me. Not so much in regard to my recent escape from the Chinese Communists in Korea, after being their prisoner for six months, but the fact that twice this wonderful freedom had been lost to me and both times miraculously restored. Almost twelve years of service with the Marine Corps lay behind me. Three years and eight months of it I had spent as a prisoner of the Japanese. At the age of twenty I had faced a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds on Wake Island. Seeing my buddies and shipmates die there, and then tasting the bitter medicine of surrender, had left a harsh and indelible mark on my mind. Again last year, on a bitter cold winter night in the mountains of North Korea, I had witnessed and imposed death in a battle more fierce and hopeless than Wake. This one also had but one path left to the survivors—• surrender.
My thoughts turned back to the trip from Tokyo to San Francisco a few days before when our flight schedule had put us down at Wake for a short stopover. Revisiting Wake was not as interesting to me as those who knew of my previous experience there believed it would be. I remembered how, as I had stepped from the plane into the bright glare of sunlight on coral, the old vision of oriental eyes glaring hatred across barbed wire had flashed back across my mind. The stop there had been short and soon we were in the air again. As Wake faded from view over the horizon the excitement of homecoming had filled me again.
Now, speeding across the desert night much closer to home, to Mary, my lovely Irish wife whom I had known and loved since childhood, to Pat, our four-year-old son, and to little Mike whom I had never seen, a strange feeling of individuality took over. Why had the Great Skipper up there guided my course into those long years of oriental subjugation and both times brought me safely back into home port? Diagnosing my own feelings now I knew that I was a better Marine, a better man, and by far a much better American than I would ever have been otherwise.
No person who had ever known me well,especially Mary, would expect to find me bitter and disillusioned from my double dose of hard luck. I thought of many others, however, who as casual observers or acquaintances would probably expect to see a very dejected and spiritually broken Marine arrive home this second time. If only they could know how to appreciate America and ‘"things American” as I do!
As the motion of the train lulled others into sound sleep, my mental journey into the past continued. I was not wide awake but in spite of the tired condition of my body, sleep failed to take me. A young man of twenty or so, dressed in neat civilian clothing, walked hurriedly through the darkened car carrying a sandwich and a container of milk in his hands. I wondered if persons such as he, who had probably never experienced the pains of near starvation, could ever realize just how very precious his simple little cargo was.
In China, where I was confined by the Japanese after the fall of Wake during World War II, I had known the meaning of real hunger for the first time. I remembered vivid dreams of delicious food and of waking with saliva drooling from my mouth and a steady gnawing pain in my stomach. I thought of how the conversation had always turned to food during those hungry weeks, no matter what the opening conversation had been. Peanut butter and hot cakes monopolized the talk then and it was amusing to me last winter to again hear these same two items of food take the spotlight first and be enthusiastically discussed by a different group of gaunt and hungry prisoners. As I remember, I did not take part in the discussion this time, but a diverting thought had entered my mind as they talked. Surely peanut butter and hotcakes must be America’s outstanding articles of chow. What a noble gesture for some wealthy person about to check out for Davy Jones’ realm to bequeath a monument to the Great American Hotcake, with bronze peanut butter fairly dripping from it!
The lights of several towns had brightened the windows of the train during my wakeful dreaming and now we slowed to a stop beside a well-trimmed lawn. Flood lights illuminated a depot of Spanish-type architecture. Glancing out of the window across the aisle I noticed men busily engaged in removing large cakes of ice from a refrigerated storeroom. The hands of my watch stood at 0200 hours. Looking back out the window at the abundance of ice, my thoughts went back to the mountains of far Northern Korea where I had spent the winter in a tiny room of a Korean farmhouse with seven other American prisoners. The temperature had held fairly steady around forty below zero during the months of December and January. From the place of our capture we had been marched about one hundred and fifty miles to this little ice-box cell. The journey was over rugged mountain trails, through snowstorms and howling icy wind. A few of the group of over one hundred of us who began that trip perished on the trail. A few more died soon after our arrival in the North. Still others, as had been the case during my experience with the Japanese, died later during confinement directly or indirectly from the effects of exposure and starvation. Again I wondered if perhaps God did not have some special duty assignment for me in the future. More punishment had come my way than I would ever have believed the human mind and body capable of enduring, yet for the second time I was safely returning home with no apparent ill effects.
Less than a month before I had been one of a small group of prisoners being moved southward under light guard. The Chinese were so confident of victory that they risked taking us within ten miles of the front lines. Our chance for escape came at a point near Chunchon. I was thinking now of my friends who were still prisoners somewhere back there in the unfriendly Korean mountains. There was Mathis, one of my closest friends, the father of three youngsters. He spoke often of Sally, his wife, who must be a wonderful person. In the month of March as we were moved southward from our winter place of confinement, he and I tried always to walk near one another in the column. The snows were melting then, and one day we began a march over a high mountain in the rain. Everyone was weak from hunger, and when we reached the summit some time after noon our guards gave the signal for rest. Mathis and I dropped wearily on a big flat rock. Looking out over the hills and valleys below we saw a break appear in the clouds and a large rainbow arched and stretched across the sky to the east of us. “You know, Harry,” Mathis said, “just over that rainbow is America and home.” Now, sitting comfortably on the train, drawing ever closer to home, I knew that I had finally crossed Mathis’ rainbow just as I had crossed another one several years before after surviving imprisonment by the Japanese.
Weariness finally overcame emotion and I slept. A jolt of the train awakened me just before dawn. Slowly at first and then in marvelous splendor, God’s paint brush spread all the colors of the rainbow across the eastern sky in the breath taking beauty of an Arizona sunrise. To me it was not only the start of a new day but of a new life. Almost six years before I had traveled this same route coming home from a much longer period of torture and confinement. I had lost and regained life and freedom twice, and now I was looking forward to a long leave with my family after which I could resume my naval career with an appreciation of life in my America that would be hard for the most eloquent speaker to describe.
I am not an experienced writer, nor am I a philosopher, but perhaps a part of the appreciation of living in America that I have learned from a few hard knocks may be conveyed to someone by this little record of thoughts that were with me as I returned from death for the second time. Life is very good, twenty-four hours each day, for the person who wishes to make it so. Some of us must bear a few more hardships than others, but in each of these hardships there is an humble lesson to be learned by him who will accept it as such.