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soldier with two stars over his pocket screamed something at a Filipino fighter and the man saluted. That must’ve been the wrong move, because the officer brought his knee up and slammed it into the testicles of the Filipino, who fell to the ground writhing. The soldier then emptied his pistol into the prostrate Filipino. The Americans, rooted by their fear, could only watch.
    Those who could stand on their own two feet were herded like cows down a hill, then divided into groups of one hundred, stripped of their rings and watches and pens, and forced into two columns, Americans on the right side of the road, Filipinos on theleft. They still didn’t understand the guttural shouts of their captors, but they’d learn soon enough.

    Along the Bataan Death March, on which these prisoners were photographed, their hands were tied behind their backs. The march was from Bataan to the prison camp at Cabanatuan. National Archives and Records Administration
    â€œKurah!”
the Japanese soldiers shouted.
“Speedo!”
    Get moving, now.
They had no idea where they were going, how long the march would be, what would happen once they arrived. They just marched, bearded and bedraggled prisoners as far as the eye could see down the rural Old National Road, stone and coral and ankle-deep sand, afraid they’d get their heads pounded if they didn’t. They marched up the bayside highway, daydreaming of pot roast and rib-eye steak smothered with gravy, past their own bombed-out jeeps and smoldering tanks, through blinding dust and oppressive heat that soared above ninety degrees. The humidity was so thick it felt like walking through cellophane. They had no food or water, and many pairs of them carried their wounded comradessuspended in bedsheets hanging from bamboo poles, like pigs at a barbecue. Those who fell on the roadside from exhaustion were bayoneted and left where they fell. The Filipinos and Americans tried to bury their friends, but their new captors soon tired of waiting. The highway was littered with bodies. Word spread of a Japanese cleanup squad taking up the rear, bayoneting those too sick or tired to keep walking. Right foot, left foot, mile after mile, days into nights into days, four then five then six. They sucked sweat off their dirty fingers and filled their canteens in a slough occupied by a dead and bloated caribou. They marched through barrios where Filipinos wept at the sight, offered rice and coconut and whatever they had, and were driven back by the soldiers. They stopped to spend the night at a schoolyard ringed by barbed wire and slept on fly-covered human feces and bloody entrails left by the preceding groups the night before. They stopped sweating and then stopped producing saliva. The sun made blisters on their skin, and the cloud of dust hanging over the road caked their ears and beards. They stole the socks off dead patriots to protect their own feet from more blisters. Some with dysentery soiled themselves, then dealt with the dreaded chafing. Some grew deranged from dehydration and made the mistake of asking their captors for water, receiving instead a rifle butt to the mouth or ribs. Japanese soldiers in trucks would sometimes drive by the columns, randomly lancing soldiers with their twenty-inch bayonets, which were more like swords, or whipping them with lengths of rope. Men died with prayers on their lips.
    Sixty-five miles they walked on the highway to nowhere.

 16 
SPIES
    I ndependent guerrilla organizations sprang up across Manila, and the soldiers and ROTC boys who had escaped Bataan were forming their own groups, building mountain hideouts and learning whom among the local Filipino population they could trust. Japanese soldiers were crawling across the open city, so returning to Manila was unimaginable. What they needed was a way to communicate.
    The commander of one of the organizations asked Joey if she’d like to work as a courier. She’d simply walk from