Armed with a new library card, I wasn’t about to leave empty handed so I hunted down Hampton Sides’ Ghost Soldiers, a book that has long been on my “must read” list. My curiosity is based on the fact that my grandfather was a survivor of the Bataan Death March and did time in both Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan. I don’t think he was rescued from Cabanatuan but was transfered to another camp before the Great Raid.
I’ve got a few more chapters to go, but I thought I’d share that I really like this book. Besides being well-researched, Sides has done a wonderful job of crafting the story into something not just cohesive but wonderful to read. Ironic, considering the subject matter. Here’s a sample:
If the slaughter could have been viewed without sound, one might have been disposed to call it beautiful. In an instant, the entire fence line lit up in a corona of frenetic glitters soon umbering in the thousands, each burst crisp and discrete against the black night. The orange flashes came in pleasingly random and inscrutable patterns like the semaphore of fireflies in a dense forest. Occasionally gold stars streaked across the field and ended abruptly in warm blooms of yellow and vermilion, leaving the sky crisscrossed with trails of smoke.
Yet the sounds, shrill and fulminant, were at odds with the majestic visuals–splintering bamboo, the whine of stray slugs, glass fracturing into shards, sputters of pulverized dirt. The blunt sound of bullets make when they enter flesh, sending up aerosol clouds of blood. Polyrhythmic jackhammerings and ricochets of BARs, of carbines, of M-1s and tommy guns. The bilious rip of fragmentation grenades, of antitank missiles piercing metal, of walls riven apart.
