War as Cinema

America is in love with its wars, for which it can scarcely be blamed; it is as much by winning them as the grace shown by the US in losing that the character of the last great superpower is measured.

They’ve hardly recovered from the lingering Vietnam hangover, which has continued to spawn a trove of novels, movies and other cultural artifacts, when along comes the aftermath of 9-11. War movies are just about the staple in Hollywood these days, and everywhere you turn, down to the seediest theater aisle in downtown Manila, there is now showing in sensurround an episode of Vietnam, Corregidor, the Balkans.

A couple of years ago two of the frontrunners for Best Picture in the annual Oscar awards (not that we admit taking the academy votes as Bible truth) –Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line–were war movies. A major contender this year was Black Hawk Down. Continuing to rake it in at the tills is We Were Soldiers.

It comes then as no surprise that news is out that moviemaker Steven Spielberg’s latest project is Hampton Sides’ Ghost Soldiers (Little, Brown and Company, 2001) a riveting narrative re-creation of the rescue of American POWs in a Cabanatuan camp during the Pacific War. In a post 9-11 scenario, and George W’s either-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, the movie is not likely to lose. Not at the tills anyway.

Sides, a writer for Outside magazine, does a dizzying research job, making use of a plethora of sources to weave together accounts of the late January 1945 rescue of veterans from the prison camp, juxtaposed with survivors’ memories of the actual Death March less than three years earlier.

Some of the atrocities said to have been perpetrated by the Japanese Occupation forces may sound familiar–such as the cutting of a prisoner’s finger to get his ring, or the gouging out of a pregnant woman’s fetus –as they have been retold countless times by oldtimers as well as other depictions in film and literature.

In college literature class they called it "power writing", popularized by the late fictionist Jerzy Kosinksi in the mid-70s, where stories of war and other grotesqueries are magnified to the point of the surreal. In Ghost Soldiers power writing takes on an added dimension, in particular when the ghastly procession of newly sprung POWS walk their way to freedom in Nueva Ecija in a kind of reverse death march, a canvas perhaps reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch.

But they are very real people, with very real lives lost in an apparently senseless manner, regardless of the cliché about how all is fair love and war.

The documentary novel–even if the material is based on actual events, Sides’ exposition has the touch of fiction–opens with a massacre of American pows in a Palawan prison camp, the details every bit as bloody and wrenching as the unforgettable introductory sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

Made for Hollywood? Power writing? These become insig-nificant in the light of history, a jealous mistress and muse frozen in time.

The photographic documentation of the main players in Sides’ narrative helps the story along, from Capt. Robert Prince, the Ranger who led the raid on the Cabanatuan camp, to Filipino guerrilla Juan Pajota, to the spy Claire Philips alias "High Pockets" in a kind of subplot.

And Sides is no stranger to employing cinematic effects, like the playing on a rickety turntable of the old Tin Pan Alley hit "Wait till the sun shines, Nelly" as the raid on the Cabanatuan prison commen-ces.

The motley assortment of prisoners are each given not only a name and face, but also an understandably sympathetic treatment almost to the point of rendering them in flesh and blood.

On the other hand, Sides’ take on the enemy mostly verges on the stereotypical cut-out villain–short, squat, mean and ignorant–with the exception of Gen. Masaharu Homma, repeatedly described as "the poet general," and a few comparatively lenient guards.

Sides, a journalist whose retracing of a war is approached like a protracted sojourn in the great outdoors, spent time in Japan interviewing Homma’s son, and the "Beast of Bataan" comes out less a war animal than a man misunderstood by over-zealous historians.

Forms of war torture are given great shrift, as well the festering assortment of prison camp diseases. A so-called life during wartime is not pretty, but where the possibilities of either heroism or breakdowns are ever present.

Particularly engaging is the subplot of "High Pockets," which sounds as if made for the movies. No movie, however, can capture the horror of the period–not to denigrate the art of film-making, but the wide screen tends to make even a nightmare attractive.

Ghost Soldiers is a good read, and may hold additional significance in the recent bolstered alliance between Filipino and American soldiers in ongoing joint military exercises. It might even be considered subtle propaganda, if the stakes weren’t so high then, as they remain a matter of life and death today. Live targets, the dynamics of power, could well turn to putty in the hands of an able writer like Sides: mortal acts can in the end be justified only by mortal words.