Historic Laredo

of bone in some of my wounds. The Japanese
sent me to a British camp at Batavia (now
Djakarta). They had us loading ships with
things they were stealing—gold, appliances, and
refrigerators,” he said.
“The Japanese took us to the Bicycle Camp
inside Batavia, a military camp where the Dutch
Bicycle Troops were prisoners. The Korean soldiers
who looked after us were at the bottom of
the rung, and they treated us like they were
treated by the Japanese, with slaps and kicks.
They beat you for any reason. When one of
them broke my arm with a rifle stock, a Dutch
doctor, Dr. Hendrik Hekking, set it with bamboo
splints. In the camp we came down with illnesses
we had never heard of, including Malaria,
Dengue fever, black water fever, two types of
dysentery, and tropical ulcers. Dr. Hekking
saved my life twice. He would trade his medical
services to Japanese soldiers with venereal disease
for medicines he needed to treat us,”
Martinez recalled.
“We Americans were used for specialty jobs,
like distributing supplies and rations for those
who were building the railroad across Burma.
We ran odd jobs up and down the railroad from
Mouelmein, Burma to Bangkok, Thailand. The
railroad was being built by native laborers,
Chinese laborers, Malaysians, the British,
Dutch, Australians, and New Zealanders. There
were surveyors, diggers filling in the roadway,
stone cutters making the railroad bed, shovel
and pick men cutting passage through the
mountains, a crew laying in the ties. The native
and Chinese laborers were fed what the rest of
us prisoners were fed—rice from the floor
sweepings that included rat dung. The railroad
would be a fulfillment of the Japanese dream of
a Greater Asia, Asia Raya, a Malayan term for the
conquest of Mongolians, Koreans, Chinese,
Malaysians, and Indians. Some of the Japanese
officers who were construction engineers had
not been home since 1936,” he said.
“Near the end, we could tell the tide had
turned. We had become such a large liability to
them. We demanded a great deal of their energy.
Our Korean guards could hardly disguise their
hate for the Japanese. We were sent to dig caves
at Na Kon Na Yok. I now weighed 93 pounds
and would not have lasted 45 more days. I had
Malaria, tropical ulcers, and stone bruises.
Thank God the bomb was dropped and that the
Japanese finally surrendered. We were picked
up by a Major in a commando group who took
us to warehouses on the wharves of Bangkok,”
Martinez said.
“We were given new uniforms, food, and
medical attention,” Martinez said, and even
now, 54 years later, there is such a measure of
gratitude in his voice for the care he received.
“The doctor said, ‘You’re in a hell of a shape.’”
Martinez was flown to an American hospital
in Calcutta. “We were feted with a superlative
banquet of every kind of food. It just made us
sick, though, because our stomachs had shrunk
from starvation. We got better, a little stronger.
The PX was turned over to us. We could have
whatever we wanted. Captain Taylor from Waco
told me I would be leaving by air for
Washington, D.C. I had been helping him prepare
documents for the Pentagon about where
the dead were buried, what were the atrocities.
At the airport in Washington, I ran into a slim
version of Edmundo Rendon, the son of the tailors
on Lincoln Street in Laredo. It was quite a
reunion. I stayed at Walter Reed Hospital while
in Washington, and then I came south on a
troop train to New Orleans and then to San
Antonio. I ran into Roberto Azios in front of the
Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, and he brought
me home,” Martinez continued.
“I came home to a family who had never
believed I was dead,” Martinez said of his parents,
Margarito Martinez García and María de Jesus
Hernández de Martinez. “The government had
reported me ‘captured in action, believed dead,’
and offered them my insurance money,” he said.
In those last moments of an interview that
could have ended at several places prior,
Homero Martinez lingered over bits of conversation,
clarifying this or that detail. He said, “I had
done the damnedest things to stay alive, using
the trapping skills I had learned as a boy on a
ranch—catching monkeys, dogs, iguanas,
snakes. The battle became not the war, but the
battle to stay alive.”
THE TERRIBLE BUSINESS OF WAR
“I left Laredo by train on October 12, 1942
with Daniel Salinas and Ciro Martinez,” recalled
U.S. Army Air Corps gunner José María Guerra.
“We reported to our recruiter in San Antonio and
44 ✦ HISTORIC LAREDO