Page 18 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

and saxophones, belching from a surfeit of good food and easy liquor, puffing
Chesterfields and whistling coolly in the tropic dark.

Now he was returning in the afternoon, when the bay typically turns leaden, the
blinding clarity of morning replaced by a dirty, vaporous film. His ship lay at anchor,
unable to dock just yet because the city’s longshoremen had inexplicably chosen this
moment—this day! this ship!—to go on strike, but its engines would have been
running at some level to keep its officers and refrigerators cool while temperatures
and tempers rose, and its fumes, however faint, would have contributed to the general
pallor of the day.

This ship was biding time in a virtual graveyard. Months earlier, a US Army soldier
named Bob Armstrong had taken a similar ship from San Francisco and had kept a
diary of the voyage, which ended with this entry: “3/24 Arrival Manila Bay we are
told there are 300 ships sunk in the harbor of which we could see many some just the
masts and stacks you can see the city and much of it is burned.”

And yet, for all these losses, the ravaged landscape was the least of the young man’s
worries. The city that waited for him was steeped in death; the liberation of Manila
had exacted the lives of more than 1,000 Americans, 16,000 Japanese, and 100,000
Filipinos, these latter victims ruthlessly massacred by the retreating defenders. They
could have included the young man’s relatives; at one point he had believed that
his father had been executed. It wasn’t true, this he now knew, but the euphoria
of learning that his father had been spared would have since been replaced by the
gnawing impatience to rejoin his family, to squeeze their bony arms with his own
small but steady hands, to recover the lost years, and then to rebuild his future.

A banker’s son

The man’s name was Washington Z. SyCip. He was 24, short and slight of build but
toughened by two years of military service in India. His ship—half laden with Asian
civilians coming home, and half with soldiers on a fresh tour of duty—had come
from San Francisco. SyCip himself had been on a much longer, roundabout voyage
that had taken him from India to Europe through the Suez Canal, and then to New
York, before boarding this transport on the West Coast. In his luggage was a box of

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