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"Buck privates lie under the majority of white crosses in Asiatic cemeteries or lie alone on the battlefields. We were the most expendable. The nose-to-nose battles on Bataan were fought by 24,000 American soldiers and some great Filipino scouts, who held the Japanese four months until America could arm Australia and thereby have a base of operation back toward Japan. But we paid for it with our lives, or long years as POWs," said Middleton, who spent more than three-and-a-half years as a POW.
When Gen. Douglas MacArthur escaped to Australia, "he left us battling bastards of Bataan ready for the kill, starved to death and deserted. We were men without a country," Middleton said.
Of the 24,000 prisoners subjected to the infamous Bataan Death March, more than half died. In fact, nearly 1,000 a day died along the march. Middleton said although he did not understand Japanese, he knew what the jabbing of a bayonet meant.
"When a prisoner fell, those Japs gutted them in cold blood with their bayonets," he said. Going days without water or food, the men resorted to eating vomit for survival.
Beginning at Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula, on April 9, 1942, they were force-marched 55 miles to San Fernando, then taken by rail to Capas. From there, they walked the final 8 miles to Camp O'Donnell Prison. All the while, Middleton was nursing a bullet wound.
Stripped of clothes, Middleton's only possessions at the prison were a small canteen, a tin of quinine and his Bible. Conditions were barbaric and inhuman, he remembers.
"Feces was everywhere; dysentery was a big killer. So were malaria, malnutrition and beriberi," he said. As if those weren't enough, the Japanese used bio-chemical warfare on the prisoners, injecting them with deadly toxins. In addition to a bullet in the rear, Middleton had his nose broken. Primitively, he straightened it with a piece of tape and a small wooden stick.
"Bodies were waning away... there was the constant smell of rotting flesh... our spirits were devoid of hope... we felt death coming on." In this "most dreaded place in existence outside of hell," Middleton said they were "a sight to make angels weep." Each morning burial detail would carry the dead bodies and dump them in ditches. Rain water would wash bodies out of the shallow graves where animals would fed on them.
One of the most "despicable" things Middleton remembers the Japanese doing was "to steal from us the food that our American Red Cross sent." In the prison, many of the prisoners themselves became "thieving savages," stealing what they could from others.
What kept Middleton from resorting to that? "I struggled hardest, I guess, to find a level that would most honor my mother's prayers for me," he said.
Growing up poor in the rugged mountains of Western North Carolina, Middleton developed survival skills that helped him in prison. Plus, his "mountain memories gave him spiritual food during those lonely hours of Japanese imprisonment," he said. Many times as he escaped a narrow death, Middleton felt the presence of a guardian angel.
But as much as he was abused by his Japanese captors, Middleton said, "Gen. MacArthur abused us more than the Japanese." When he returned home to North Carolina, Middleton said his father told him that the American people had no knowledge whatever that their boys in Bataan were double crossed and deserted and that their families were lied to.
"That's part of why I had to write this story," said Middleton, who just about wore his finger off writing his memories in long hand. "It's taken me a long time to be able to do it. Remembering puts my soul in turmoil. But now that my story is finally down on paper, it's like a catharsis, a healing process."
Part of what needed healing was the malady Middleton brought home with him - one that turned his nightmares and subconsciousness into feverish hell and constantly gnawed away at his waking brain. Doctors couldn't find any explanation in their textbooks for either his symptoms or a cure. Only years later would physicians put a name to it - post-traumatic stress syndrome.
While his recovery at Moore's General Hospital in Asheville was a long process, Middleton said the equally long process of writing this book was an even better cure for his lifetime of haunting memories.
Now retired from the pastoral ministry, Middleton has served churches in Jackson County for almost half a century.
"Through the years I have decided that it is needless to try to understand America and the things she does. I am just one of the millions of people who are a part of her," he said. "If I didn't still love her and wasn't again willing to die for her, warts and all, I'd leave and go to some less worthy place. There is no place equal to her and I'm so proud I shed blood and bore lots of painful living for what she stands for in this world of ours. My prayer is 'God bless America.'"
Copies of his book are available at City Lights Bookstore, where Middleton will have a book signing Saturday, Oct. 21, from 12-2 p.m.
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