Chapter 4: Captured Enemy Personnel

For the first three days, nothing happened, which turned out to be its own kind of ordeal.

The Japanese garrison that took possession of Malinta Tunnel moved through it with a bureaucratic patience none of the nurses had expected—counting beds, counting patients, counting nurses, recounting all three when the numbers didn’t satisfy whatever ledger the occupying officers were keeping. Halloran stood beside every count, translating instructions when she could and guessing at them when she couldn’t, and the nurses kept working, because the wounded in the beds didn’t care whose army now owned the tunnel above their heads.

“They haven’t told us anything,” Dorothy said, on the third night, checking supplies by lamplight because the generator ran on a schedule set by someone else now. “Not where we’re going, not when, not what happens to the patients who can’t be moved. I don’t like operating without information.”

“None of us like it,” Helen said. “None of us get a vote.”

Bea, coiling gauze into a drawer with hands that hadn’t stopped moving in three days, said what none of the others had said aloud yet. “They haven’t hurt anybody. Three days in, and nobody’s been hurt. I keep waiting for that to change, and it keeps not changing, and I don’t know which is worse—waiting for the blow, or wondering if maybe there isn’t one coming.”

~ ☆ ~

The blow, when it came, was smaller than any of them had braced for and larger than any of them had wanted. On the fourth day, a Japanese officer who spoke passable English—young, correct, unfailingly polite in a way that unsettled Ruth more than shouting would have—informed Halloran that all nursing personnel would be transferred to Manila within the week, to a civilian internment facility. The wounded would remain under Japanese medical staff. The nurses would not.

“You’re telling me to abandon my patients,” Halloran said. It wasn’t a question.

“I am telling you the order,” the officer said. “Your patients will receive care. This is not for you to arrange any longer.”

Halloran didn’t argue further, not because she’d accepted it but because arguing changed nothing and she’d learned, in four days, exactly how much of that math she now controlled. She gathered the nurses instead, in the tunnel’s mess corridor, and delivered the news the way she delivered everything—complete, unsoftened, and immediately followed by instruction.

“We hand off patient charts today, in full, to whatever staff replaces us. We do it properly, the way we’d want it done for our own men, because it’s the last thing we get to control about their care and I intend for us to control it well. Then we pack what we’re allowed to carry, and we go where we’re told, because that is now the entirety of our choices.”