Fredrick Brantley
A DISTANT VICTORY
We had established our small Naval hospital in a patched
Filipino schoolhouse that had been burned by the retreating Japanese
army and had been crumbled casually in spots by our off-shore fire,
but during the time I did duty as a corpsman there I seldom tried
to imagine its past atmosphere nor to hear in my mind a nostalgic
and drowsy pedagogical drone. The village-several ruined gray
stone structures blooded by Bougainvillaea buds, nipa huts scattered
disorderly as peanut shells, a dark grove of majagua trees,
all
this
quickened by scraggly proud children and game chickens-stretched
back from the bay that coiled in from the coast northward of Manila.
The bay offered perfect harbor and was rimmed magnificently by
mountains that gave it a fictionalized air, and I cannot remember
ever lifting my eyes to the entire scene without a nagging
sen~e
of
tired incredibility. Once or twice, though the hospital was but fifty
yards from the beach, I had walked along the shore and in the soiled
sand I had noted a rotting side of beef, several water-soaked oranges,
an empty Red Cross packing case, and a half-disintegrated Japanese
tennis shoe.
It
was no shore for weeping. The tennis shoe I had
thought a discovery, and the funny split-toe arrangement held a
momentary fascination that was sad and sentimental. I had carried
it dangling from a stick, for we had been cautioned about souvenirs
and germs, and dropped it in the hospital yard. For several weeks
the shoe was kicked about, ignored by most and eventually by me,
and then one day I made a special trip to search for it, but it had
disappeared.
The war was over, had been for two months, and the season of
drought was upon us: the days pure and filled with glare, the nights
a groping black near the earth where we moved, but the stars shone
with an exotic luminosity in the sky. The continuity of what we did
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