PARTISAN REVIEW
fortable, and I can, at least, visit the ruins left by the war. I suppose
the comfort was the reason I have missed writing you for several months.
I will show you all my photographs of the destruction of the war when
I return home. On my journey to this station our ship stopped at Zam–
boanga. There is a rather crude old song about the girls of Zamboanga,
but perhaps you will not remember it, Ida, and besides it is far from
true anyway. I was disgusted by the way our sailors behaved towards
the natives. The natives were very interesting, and I was astonished to
learn that they really have no sense of history, absolutely no idea of
the past. ...
My mind wandered, and I could not continue the letter. Outside
the thunder persisted, swelling into more prolonged reverberations,
and the fast descending, sometimes terrifying, tropical night had
come. The brilliant overhead lamps of the treatment room were
flicked on, making me blink nakedly as I sat there musing, trying
to peer into the black beyond the windows. I gave up hope of finishing
the letter to Ida Miller that night.
A group of corpsmen, now off duty, were lounging in the room,
debating whether they should go to the village, whether they would
be trapped by the rain before they could reach the short row . of
hastily constructed "nite clubs" where there would be a few girls,
whiskey, and music. We were all in the room, not talking loudly,
when a member of the shore patrol brought him in.
There was a silence in the room, but I noticed nothing unusual
at first.
Behind me, one of the men said softly, "Well, I'm damned to
hell. It's the enemy."
I looked closely at the man who had just entered, prodded through
the doorway by a shore patrolman who was belted heavily with a
cartridge belt and holster. The S.P. stood blinking, too, in the sudden
light and his confusion. He turned to the dwarfed, cadaverous, brown–
skinned man who stood listlessly at his side, and, pointing with his
club while he cursed aimlessly, he indicated that the man was to
take off
his
Filipino-style straw hat. That done, he poked the man
forward to the desk of the night corpsman in charge.
"He don't understand English very good," the shore-patrol
sailor said to the room at large.
The man was one of the few Japanese soldiers I had ever seen
face to face. A green Marine skivvy, nearly worn out, hung loosely
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