Happy New Year. I’ve decided to publish my novel one page at a time, a la Ernie Pyle. I shall also endeavor to publish earlier works that have made me famous in certain circles. And if you’re lucky, and believe me you are (i.e., you can read, you are curious and you have an internet connection), I shall also include some new theories and philosophies on the subjects of: time/space, the purpose of life, how we all came to be and why, artificial intelligence, math, Latin, and ancient Greek languages, proof of the existence of God and a divine solution to the theory of everything. Plus a few jokes along the way. So, in DEFIANCE of FOOLS awash in the radiant absurdity of ignorance I proudly present
Faded Yellow Ribbon
by
Ryan Kelly
DEDICATION
Nam Erga Oblitus
(For the Forgotten)
FORWARD
The war against the Japanese in the Philippines, and the consequential surrender of more than 75,000 US and allied troops is largely regarded as among the most brutal and horrific consequences of World War II.
After the surrender of the Philippines, the Japanese rounded up US and Filipino POWs and led them on a forced march known as the Bataan Death March – about 65 miles in horrendous heat from Mariveles to San Fernando. The prisoners were starved and beaten by their captors and bayoneted when too weak to walk. It is not known how many died but estimates are in the thousands. Prisoners were taken from San Fernando to prisoner of war camps throughout China and Japan and forced into slave labor to support the Japanese war effort.
Camp conditions were brutal. Insufficient heat and food. Rampant with live human experimentation and dissection. And foul with disease. Beriberi, dysentery, malaria, scurvy and more.
Inspired by a true story, it took Captain Kelly more than 10 years to research and write this novel. And although it is historical fiction, much of the information, including facts, events and horrors is true.
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Page 1.
PROLOGUE
Oh, what dreams we had!
Mel Sheya
Denver, Colorado, Summer,1999
A breeze not much stronger than a sigh pulled the cotton from the trees. A gentle snow. Drifting through the pine valleys and ancient canyons of the Rocky Mountains, with the heron fishing among the cattails, the black bear lumbering in his meadow and the beaver, gliding low and quiet in his water.
The summer floated slowly, rolling through the languid air and above the wild rapids of the Colorado River splashing over jags of granite, its spray gleaming like mercury in the morning sun. The river is untamed. The great Colorado, where the current churns and folds swift and wild and strong. Treacherous and beautiful. Relentless and powerful. Smashing all it captures into submerged tangles of inescapable nests. Cluttered with remains of life. Uprooted trees, sticks black with mold, flip-flops and rusty PBR beer cans and plastic bags, broken logs and branches slick with slime.
Good luck if you fall in it. Slashing and clawing against the current, choking on the backsplash, ripping your fingernails bloody against jagged and slippery rocks, hoping, praying, vainly, for rescue. Before the undertow, lurking in the deep, gets you. Because you know it will. Then suddenly, stone hands grab your ankles and the world vanishes as they yank you under, violently contorting and crumpling your frame – like a rag doll in a washing machine – snapping bones, collapsing lungs, before getting bored and jamming you into a strainer where you will bloat and rot. Your dreams, your youth, your optimism, your life – temporary and flashing like riflescopes in the sun.
That’s how Mel Sheya, 81, thought of his war as the road dilated in his rearview mirror. Its image distorted at the edges.
A Peterbuilt dragon roared past him hell-bent for leather, hauling a precious cargo of Fiji artesian bottled water and artificially-flavored coconut popsicles, destination Denver. Its wind blast shuddered Mel’s car windows and careened his lava red 1959 Cadillac Eldorado toward the steel guardrail lining the right shoulder of eastbound I-70. The last defense of a 50-foot drop to the Colorado rapids below. His whitewalls burped over the crimped drift strips, as Mel hit the brakes skidding to a stop on the shoulder, his front bumper inches from the rail before he could wrestle his road boat back on to the Interstate. “Fucking douchebag asshole!” Mel yelled.
Flipping down the sun visor, Mel thumbed the cruise control back up to 95 mph and sped his Cadillac into the glimmer; the sunshine bending shadows through the glass, changing the geometry of his face. Shading his eyes. The color of a washed sky.
He had been handsome once, some 60-years-ago. But age did its thing. Melting his face into a sagging mass of wrinkles, mottling and bruising his paper-thin skin with miniature thunderstorms of burst blood vessels, and thinning his hair into corn silk. Corroding the elasticity of youth.
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Drooping eyelids slanted over his eyes, made all the more recessed when compared to the expanse of his elongated ears and hunchbacked nose, crooked and misshapen from dozens of breaks. His mouth and lips curved inward over a set of ground teeth (four of which were fake) discolored from tobacco like Indian corn. Despite the onset of decay, he radiated a vitality and a strength of indomitable spirit and commanding presence. Almost as commanding was the six-inch jagged scar that raked across his temple. And he walked with an aching, teetering gait, shifting his weight heavily onto his right leg. Akin to an old cowboy who got broke breaking too many wild horses.
After graduating from East High School, he had tried college — a semester at Colorado University. But Milton, Dante and chalk-dusted professors held little sway over skidding his 1930 Indian motorcycle around dirt racetracks and flirting with the long-legged, perky-breasted girls in tight sweaters sipping bourbon-spiked Dr. Pepper in the stands.
“The only good thing college ever gave me was a copy of the Kama Sutra and a case of the crabs,” Mel would crack to his war buddies hunched over the bar at the VFW Post 1.
But after two blown engines, a broken collarbone, a broken right leg, an empty wallet and a summer in casts and mopping up puke and unclogging toilets at his dad’s pool halls, Mel had had enough.
On September 11, Mel blatted down Broadway and idled his Indian in front of a U.S. Marine recruiting office. Displayed in the window was a poster of a crisp and chiseled U.S. Marine saluting the flag in white cotton gloves.
Scrawled in bold yellow letters beneath the picture were the words “Adventure! Travel! Pay! Semper Fi Marine!”
It was 1939. A Tuesday. And he was 21.
But that was then, Mel thought. Now I’m just old bones in old skin opening old wounds because of an old promise. This is bullshit, he thought. I should just tell her I talked to the bastard, and go fishing instead. He had some new Pheasant Tail ties he wanted to try and the trout were biting.
He continued down the road, whipping past Aspen groves clapping in the breeze that pulled the cotton.
His wife, Elise, had made the appointment for him last month. He balked, but she persisted and now here he was. On the damn highway. Driving back to the war. And part of his life he had tried so long to forget. Forget everything about it. Even his friends. Especially his friends. But what the mind forgets, the heart remembers — but that’s the trouble with hearts. Their eternal memory.
Can’t blame her, though, he thought.
Flashbacks. Panic attacks. Nightmares. Night sweats. Soaked sheets. Pissed beds. Double-, triple- checking locked locks and latched windows every night. Prowling through the house at night, checking out suspicious noises and dark spaces with a loaded rifle.
His insistence that the icebox always — always — be packed with fresh food. Meat, fruit, bread, chocolate, vegetables, whole milk, bacon, eggs; at restaurants — his refusal to sit anywhere but with his back to the walls, near the exits. Always ordering more off the menu than two men could possibly eat in one sitting; his refusal to eat rice, under any circumstances. His abject hatred of rodents which — when field mice skittered through his garden of rhubarb and tomatoes and corn — launched him into an uncontrollable, murderous, hoeing rage that always, always, ended in drunken stupors and fits of violent vomiting and two-day blinding migraine headaches.
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Page 3.
His refusal to take anything but a hot shower – often not washing, just leaning against the glass door, resting his head on his forearms, breathing in the steam, allowing the clean, clear, water to soak his body, until the spray turned cold.
The hidden stores full of beef jerky and dehydrated fruit — apricots, raisins, cherries — bags of mixed nuts and trail mix, and hunks of chocolate in jars squirreled throughout the house, the garage, the basement and car trunks. The whiskey. The bourbon. The brandy. The vodka. Bottles hidden everywhere. In the shed. Under the sofa. Behind the dryer. And tiny ones, the kind they serve on United, stashed in ceiling lamps and golf bags and camouflaged in coffee cans layered with a sprinkle of screws and rusty nails. Cash. Thousands of dollars, twenties, tens, fifties, hundreds slid into books, and rolled up in socks, and in tips of his pointed cowboy boots.
The-quarter-for-a-beer nights at the American Legion. The hard, sad, knowing looks shared over the bar at the VFW. The wincing and shaking and trembling when trucks bang over potholes and the rattle of jackhammers and balloons that pop. The 4th of July? Forget it.
The loaded 12-gage, double-barrel, double-trigger shotgun, kept oiled and ready, under his bed. Elise hated it. The gun terrified her. But Mel insisted, assuaging her fear by promising to keep it unloaded. That was a lie, of course. They both knew it. She found his 10-box cache of double-ought, 640-grain man-killers hidden inside a shoebox in the basement behind the water heater.
He wondered if Elise knew about the loaded Colt 1911A1 .45-caliber pistol stowed under his car seat (she did).
Probably not, and it was better that way, he thought. But lies are often easier to live with than the truth. The truth . . .the truth . . . the truth was that when it came to the guns, he didn’t care about her fear. He only cared about his own. What did she really know about fear? What did anyone else know? The truth was that he would never again be unarmed. That he would never again feel unsafe. That he would never again be starving. He would never again eat rats. Never again be a prisoner. Be vulnerable. Be lost. And that was the truth. His truth. And fuck you if you didn’t like it. So for Mel and Elise the war stayed neatly tucked under the bed with the shotgun.
Almost.
It had happened only once, soon after he had returned home from the out-processing center in San Francisco. Soldiers were coming back in waves then.
She waited among hundreds of other girlfriends and wives and children crowding the station. The platform shuddering beneath their feet as his train pulled into Denver Union Station at 9:42 a.m. Friday morning. She wore a white cotton dress with a citrus-yellow bow around her waist a hat and an anxious smile. Elise was an arresting beauty by any standard.
A joyful embrace, she jumped into his arms. A lustful, longing, heavenly kiss.
Welcome home, baby!
Party time.
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