Moore - As Good As Dead

D OU G B OGUE WISHED he could make himself invisible.

Crouching behind large rocks on the beach of Palawan Island, the Marine sergeant watched as Japanese soldiers shot and bayoneted American POWs who were fleeing for their lives along the shore. Sixty feet above, atop the steep bluff overlooking the rocky coastline, black smoke rose into the blue sky, a vivid reminder of the unspeakable horrors he had just escaped, scraping through the barbed wire fencing and tumbling down the cliff toward the Sulu Sea below.

Bogues body was a mass of injuries. His hands and torso had been slashed as he plunged through the razor wire. His right leg throbbed from a rifle bullet embedded in his thigh, and his bare feet were lacerated and bloody from running along the rough coral beach. As he hid behind the boulders, nearly naked, trying to catch his breath and wondering what to do, two POWs ran past him in an attempt to swim to freedom. Both men were cut down by Japanese riflemen.

It was December 14, 1944. For twenty-eight months, Bogue had slaved as a prisoner of war for the Imperial Japanese Army, working to build the second-largest airfield in the regionone being used to attack Allied forces in the Philippines. He had endured unbearable heat and humidity, illness, physical abuse and torture, and near starvation, and his once-powerful frame had been reduced to skin and bones. That dismal life now seemed merciful in comparison.

All around him, Bogue could hear the screams of other Americans being slaughtered as they tried to escape. If he ran for it, he knew he might be shot down like the rest. If he stayed put... Either way, the odds were stacked against him. He had to do something, and quickly.

One thought raced through his mind: Theyre going to hunt us down and kill every last one of us.

I T WAS A time when even the most optimistic of souls had little left to believe in. American servicemen, who just a year earlier had relished duty in the Philippines for its enviable life, now questioned their purpose. They were men abandoned by their own government, left to hold out against a fate already cast, and now, late in the afternoon of April 8, 1942, their five-day fight for freedom and survival was nearing its futile end.

Still, Beto Pacheco was not about to surrender. Handsome, athletic, and quick to flash a toothy smile in better times, the private first class now looked like a bum: His once-sharp uniform had been reduced to rags, his shoes were nearly worn through, and even his underwear was in shreds. Weeks of exposure to the brutal tropical sun had burned his skin, but Pachecos Spanish and Mexican ancestry had at least provided him more natural protection than some of his fair-complected companions.

The air smelled of death, dirt, smoke, and gunpowder. The once-lush green jungles were denuded of vegetation, swept bare by endless weeks of pounding artillery and aerial bombardments from the Imperial Japanese Army. Explosions sent shock waves through the earth around Pacheco as he and his comrades continued firing back with their few antiaircraft guns that were still marginally operational. Silver-winged Japanese warplanes flashed past, unleashing violent bomb blasts and chattering rounds of machine-gun bullets that shredded the nearby jungle surrounding the last two American airfields on the Bataan Peninsula.

For Pacheco, the last stand at Bataan was a true test of his devout Catholic faith. At one point, as a strong force flung him from his foxhole, he felt as if the hand of God had saved him. A brilliant red-orange blast left him no time to determine whether a nearby artillery round had propelled him. When the acrid black smoke parted, two of his comrades lay dead in the hole from which he had been thrown.