From The Blast

Abstract

from The Blast Joseph Matthews (bio) Set in San Francisco in 1916, The Blast depicts a period when the city was roiled by street battles among such factions as radical workmen, goons, and cops employed by capitalist owners, Italian anarchists, and militant suffragettes. Kate Jameson arrives from Boston tasked with clandestinely investigating the attitude of community leaders toward the prospect of America entering the Great War in Europe. She is also hoping to discover what had happened to her husband, Jamey, during the war in the Philippines, leading to his suicide six months after his return. In this excerpt, she learns the truth. f.s. By the time Jamey arrived in the Philippines, the American war to oust the Spanish as the islands' rulers had turned into a war to replace the Spanish as the islands' rulers. Though the US government certainly didn't call it that. And among soldiers in the field, it was seen as a fight against unwashed, untamed, ungrateful insurgents who simply didn't understand or appreciate liberation by the Americans and the benevolence of their subsequent occupation. As with almost every other US soldier, Jamey had no clear grasp of what was going on. The Spanish military, erstwhile enemy, was now providing information to American forces about local resistance. Filipino guerillas, on the other hand, who'd been fighting the Spanish for decades and who had joined the Americans to drive the final spike into Spanish rule, were now waging a campaign against their American former partners. All Jamey knew for sure was that, despite Spain's capitulation, US soldiers were still being killed and wounded; immediately upon his arrival in the islands he was thrown into medical work at a military hospital in the countryside north of Manila. Within a short time, his superiors noted Jamey's fluent-sounding—though in fact fairly rudimentary—spoken Spanish, developed during his many extended stays in Cuba during his childhood and youth. As a result, they moved him from the field hospital to a more forward position, at the edge of a large battle zone, where Filipino prisoners were being held. Jamey was to treat their wounded. Not just any wounded. Jamey was primarily tasked with seeing to prisoners who had "special value," meaning information the army might find useful. His job was to save their lives so that they could be interrogated, or further [End Page 72] interrogated, though initially he had no idea of the army's plans for his patients once he'd treated them. Nor of how they'd come to be injured in the first place. It was thought by Jamey's superiors that these special prisoners might respond better to interrogation if medical treatment was provided by someone who could converse with them directly, rather than through an interpreter. This despite the fact that, in the minds of his prisoner-patients, Jamey's light skin and obviously North Atlantic accent could only connect his Spanish-speaking with the hated European occupiers who'd just been overthrown. Attunement to the sensibilities of Filipino resisters was not high in the Army's skill set. The nature of the prisoners' injuries and conditions was often curious to Jamey. There were the prisoners brought to him with the seemingly anomalous combination of bloated bodies and severe abdominal or back injuries; as Jamey treated them, the men expelled copious quantities of water. When Jamey asked what this was about, the soldiers would explain that the prisoners had been pulled from one of the many nearby rivers. How they could have inhaled and swallowed so much water and not drowned was not a question Jamey asked himself. At least, not at first. Over time, as the damage inflicted on US forces became more substantial and their personal hostility toward the insurgents more virulent, the efforts of the army jailors to shield their doings from the medical staff became more lax, with some particularly ugly treatment of prisoners carried on in the open. Soon Jamey had seen several instances of what the soldiers fetchingly called the water cure. A prisoner was held down by four or five men while another pried open his jaws, another jammed a funnel...