Insight: Unlikely eyewitness to history

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I never knew it until many years thereafter, but I once worked for an American hero who is credited for saving many lives in a forgotten chapter of our nation’s history.

Joe Chavez, a 200th Coast Artillery member from New
Mexico who was serving in the Philippines at the onset
of World War II, was forced by Japanese captors to
take part in the Bataan Death March, a brutal 65-mile
trek through intense heat to a prisoner of war camp.
COURTESY PHOTO 

While preparing to return to college after serving in the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s, I answered a newspaper ad looking for typing help. We agreed to meet at his home, which was only five minutes away from where I lived, and he could tell me more about the job.

Arriving at his house, Joe Chavez greeted me at the door and had a sense of urgency about what he wanted to accomplish. He was retired and lived alone following the death of his wife and his health was poor. Severe diabetes resulted in him losing his vision.

A long career in construction caused his feet to hurt all the time, so he walked around barefoot, even in winter. While taking his trash bin to the end of his driveway, he cut his right foot, and it later developed into gangrene causing doctors to have to amputate his right leg at the knee. He used crutches to get around and was adept at climbing and descending stairs with them.

Upon meeting him, I discovered that despite his physical issues, Joe had purchased a word processor, a computer-like device for creating, editing, formatting and printing documents and it was something highly unusual to own in rural New Mexico in the 1980s. He wanted me to type on the word processor what he dictated to me, and to help him write a children’s book for his grandchildren.

When the first book was completed, he had me print out the manuscript and drop it off at his publisher. He asked if I would help him write another book, and then a third book, a fourth and a fifth. Each book was less than 30 pages long and he was self-publishing them to give to his grandchildren for Christmas.

At the end of my work for him, I went over to his home to collect a paycheck for a month’s worth of typing for him, and he told me that he had spent all his money publishing the books and couldn’t give me a check. Instead, he instructed me to go to the freezer in his garage and pick out a reasonable number of packaged steaks and ground beef. Before I had come to work for him, he had purchased a side of beef and was storing it in the freezer.

When I got home, my wife was mad that Joe hadn’t paid me in cash and we had to scramble to pay that month’s electric bill. It taught me a lesson to always find out from employers how they planned to compensate me for my work.

About 15 years later when Joe passed away, I learned a bit more about him from reading his obituary in the newspaper.

As a young man, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned as part of the 200th Coast Artillery from New Mexico in the Philippines. His unit was forced to surrender to the Japanese following the Battle of Bataan and on April 10, 1942, along with other American prisoners of war, Joe was subjected to undertake an arduous 65-mile trek to a prison camp in Luzon. It has been described as the “Bataan Death March.”

The Japanese had gathered an estimated 78,000 prisoners of which 12,000 were Americans and 66,000 were Filipinos on a forced march up the east coast of Bataan. The POWs were not told how far or how long they would need to march through the intense tropical heat, and they suffered unspeakable cruelties.

Japanese guards clubbed POWs with rifle butts for no reason. Those who dropped from exhaustion or sickness, fell behind, broke ranks to fetch water, or tried to escape were bayoneted, shot, or beheaded. Dragging themselves onward, the prisoners endured horrific conditions, brutal heat and inhumane treatment.

Along the march, Joe Chavez is credited with picking up and carrying soldiers too weak to go on. He was mistaken for dead twice but refused to give his captors the satisfaction of killing him. Somehow, against all the odds, Joe was able to survive. 

Over six days, the POW caravan marched roughly 65 miles until they reached the village of San Fernando. In groups of 100 men, the Japanese forced the POWs into railroad boxcars designed to hold no more than 40 people, causing more men to die of heat exhaustion and suffocation. Arriving in the town of Capas, the prisoners disembarked and continued marching for seven more miles to Camp O'Donnell where they were held until the war ended.

Joe never spoke to me about what he had witnessed during the war or the unthinkable conditions he had overcome to be able to return to his life in New Mexico after World War II. He was discharged from the U.S. Army, and later got married, became a home builder, and had two children and five grandchildren.

I didn’t know it then, but I had been in the presence of a war hero and someone who had endured more pain and suffering than I could ever imagine. <