Santa Fe was all the proof anyone needed. The old Gods had failed, the new ones were alive and throbbing with power. Saint German was their hope.
“When it’s the right time, The I AM Presence will blast his Circle of White Lightening and simply end the war,” Anissa had described the power of the Violet Ray to Nicasia so many times, over and over. And she was so convincing that for Melo’s sake, Nicasia had given up meat and took to passing out I AM literature on the Plaza.
The following morning, earlier than usual, Nicasia stood by the open door holding a bowl of bread pudding, and called out again, “Señora?”
No answer, but Anissa glanced up from her ever present distress over the printed news thinking she’d heard shuffling footsteps outside her open door. She had grown accustomed to these early visits and to the delicious meals Nicasia brought when she timidly asked if the paper had any good news. Meaning of course, news of her youngest son, Melo. She rarely ever called him Melicio.
He and his brother Franque had been conscripted into the war with the other boys his age because they had joined the National Guard. The Great Depression was not quite over and in 1939 the only work was government work. So the young men and their fresh-out-of-school buddies joined the Guard to learn to shoot and ride horses for money and glory at Fort Marcy. John Wayne cast both Melo and his brother as extras in his Santa Fe Stampede when, without discussion or agreement, the National Guard became the 200th Army Artillery and Santa Fe’s Federalized sons were shipped to Clark Field in the Philippine Islands with few supplies and little training. Faustino, Nicasia’s husband, followed them later when he signed up the days after Pearl Harbor, December, 1941.
“Anissa? Señora?” Nicasia stood straining for a reply. There was no audible response from the adobe room. Peering into the darkened room, Nicasia could easily make out Anissa lying on her daybed under the woven wool coverlets, prostrate, presumably overcome with her usual anger at the war. Anissa appeared to be emotionally stricken but then she always showed very strong feelings about things, a rare trait for a Gringa.
Nicasia passed over the doorstep quietly. Anissa rested in the front room, beyond which was the kitchen and beyond that, a bedroom and a bathroom. She tiptoed farther into the darkened house, fearing that Anissa was now depressed over devastatingly bad news which might involve her own family. Nicasia knew, in fact they all knew, that the men from Santa Fe had been setup by Washington as lures for the bullets of the Empire of the Rising Sun; they were given nothing to defend themselves with while Roosevelt lit Churchill’s cigars and gave the British everything they asked for. Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Surely Roosevelt had known that the enemy was gearing up for war when he casually requisitioned these boys from the Santa Fe National Guard and assigned them a new name: General Wainwright’s 200th Army Artillery. They were sent to the Philippine Islands (named for King Phillip the Second of Spain) because of their mutual Hispanic heritages. The two distant penal colonies left over from the 16th century spoke the same antiquated Inquisition Spanish and this made them brothers. In the beginning, it was good times for all of them.
But eight hours after Pearl Harbor, boys and men of Santa Fe were bombed, strafed and eventually abandoned to the enemy. April 9, 1942. They were handed over to the Japanese four months after the sneak attacks on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field, needing the food, medication, and shelter due them as human beings. Trusting that the Empire would adhere to the Third Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war, they were surrendered by their officers in a blundering effort to save lives by asking for humanitarian aid.
The Japanese were staggered by the Americans’ ignoble surrender. Their orders were to kill the enemy, not to take them in and bed them down. They had no food to share. Where were they to find enough extra food for 55,000 non-Japanese speaking guests in a war they had waged for their own badly needed rice and oil? The Allies may have been starving but the Japanese were stretched thin. It was imperative that honorable prisoners fall on their swords and kill themselves. But this massive defending army arrived with their hands out for food.
MacArthur walked backwards on his beach toward an awaiting landing craft, talking to the movie cameras. “I shall return,” he intoned during his close-up, the words slipping like honey out of his lying mouth. This was how he abandoned his men to a brutal enemy, affecting every home in Santa Fe.
MacArthur was given the Medal of Honor and became the toast of Australia. Lamb chops and lager.
For the morale of America, he asked that information regarding the Death March and the prison conditions be blacked out. Only positive news should be broadcast. But in time, stories from one source or another leaked out, causing the town to seethe, suffer and despair.
Nicasia carefully picked her way over the balls of crumpled newspaper lying on the floor. Anissa had undoubtedly read the headline saying how Roosevelt’s dark angel, MacArthur, had personally given the order to have all Japanese ships sunk. How he had approved killing the remaining American Prisoners of War being shipped from the Philippines, the islands he had abandoned.
“Puedo?” Nicasia asked again after she had crossed the threshold and placed her plate on the coffee table next to her neighbor. Anglos were difficult. You had to ask permission even to bring them tamales; otherwise they called it barging in. But Nicasia actually loved this strange woman from Chicago who rented her Tia’s house and paid every month on the first day, even if it was a Sunday. She respected the blonde lady who had twice climbed the Eiffel Tower and could read stories in French, and she was honored to clean for her occasionally, because she learned such interesting things. She did not need the money; the $10,000 death benefit she’d received for Franque sat untouched in the bank. And she had been offered her husband’s $10,000 when they said he was missing in action. To accept it would equal an admission.
“Entra,” Anissa said, coming alive. “I was reading the goddamned newspaper again and it made me positively sick to my stomach. I had to stop reading and now I can barely move, it made me so ill.” Anissa was about to repeat Roosevelt’s last orders.
Nicasia rarely argued with her intriguing neighbor. The woman had been to the university, she knew important people. It was worthwhile listening to such an intelligent and rich woman. “Go on,” she said, agreeing to be sick herself.
Anissa read the editorial aloud, “Eschuche.” Then she paused because the article was padded with backtracking and speculation. The truth was hidden in the patriotic rant.
She put the paper down. “It says, basically, that our flyboys are now bombing and sinking the Japanese ships carrying our POWs to Nagasaki. Our Navy is murdering our own American prisoners of war.”
“No!” Nicasia’s hope for Melicio foundered; her eldest, Franque, had been bayoneted by the Japanese right at the start of the Death March. A year later, she had heard that her husband Faustino had been tortured to death or that he’d gone missing but she knew nothing more and hope seesawed in and out of her shallow sleep. She feared each day that she might receive the telegram, or his dog tags.
As for who was winning and when it would all be over, Anissa had brought her slowly around to seeing the hidden truth—that all Allied propaganda was lies and confusion. No one was winning yet.
Anissa had said, “No one ever knows a goddamned thing.” That was the only truth anyone could believe. Censorship itself was propaganda, everything about the War was managed and controlled.
“It’s not the Gooks this time, you see?” Anissa explained.
“Uncle Sam?” Bile rose in Nicasia’s throat. She was about to vomit.
“For once, the Japs must have marked their POW ships, not with a red cross, but with words in their own language.” Anissa shook her head in outrage, and continued without taking a breath. “You think our idiot men ever made the smallest effort to learn a few characters, to translate the most urgent signs?”
“What should the writing say?”
“It had to say, Prisoners on Board. Do not Bomb.”