The Japanese did nothing to
provide for us at 92nd Garage, not even to provide us water.
Every once-free soul of Corregidor, the defenders and the
defended, the brave and the shirkers, the fit and the lame,
concentrated on this quarter-mile of misery, almost fourteen
thousand strong, and each of us getting weaker by the day.
There was a single square pipe
that barely emerged from the ground. Through it, water seeped
towards the surface and was dipped out by a round vienna sausage can
and poured into canteens held by the shaking hands of men standing
in an endless line waiting for water.
It was the only water provided
to us until we left on 23 May.
When I went down to 92nd
Garage in 1981, I found the square pipe. By 2001,
it had disappeared under an unsympathetic architectural monstrosity.
In no place on Corregidor was there ever a more concentrated curse
of misery in the air, and it is my curse that any commercial
operation at that accursed ramp should likewise fail.
Caption
by Al McGrew
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