Brothers in Arms

This Christmas holiday season is a bittersweet time of remembrance and reflection for Vancouver’s Jesus Gonzalez, a retired civil engineer who was recently reunited with a U.S. veteran whose life he helped save in The Philippines nearly 65 years ago.

“The events of that night, of that year so long ago, it has definitely haunted me through my life,” said Gonzalez, from his home in South Vancouver.

James Carrington, a highly decorated World War II veteran, had just escaped the occupying Japanese and their notorious wartime Bilibid Prison in central Manila, when he ran bloodied and desperate into Gonzalez and his brother Moises on the night of April 14, 1944.

The Filipino brothers were returning home with the family’s horse-drawn hay cart. They quickly hid the young Marine beneath the hay, and spirited him away.

Eleven days after his emotional reunion with Gonzalez at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center in Destrehan, Louisiana where he resided, Carrington died quietly December 7. He was 88.

Carrington’s son, James Carrington Jr., said he believes his father rallied to stay alive for the long-awaited visit from Jesus Gonzalez, who was just a boy of 11 in 1944.

“It took every bit of strength he had,” the veteran’s son said. “It kept him alive, in my opinion. That’s all he was looking forward to.”

Gonzalez, who emigrated to Canada in 1966, said that while Carrington was ailing and weak during their heartfelt reunion, “I could see him happy.”

“I thought I could visit him again next Thanksgiving Day,” he told the Asian Pacific Post. “I hoped that’s what would happen, but not anymore. His family was just so happy. They just looked so surprised and happy.”

Jesus Gonzalez, 76, moved to Vancouver with his wife, a wood scientist, and they raised three children, who would later provide the family with six grandchildren.

James Carrington is survived by a son and a daughter, three sisters and two brothers.

The families of Jesus Gonzalez and James Carrington for decades had heard stories from the war years, and tales of the risks taken to assist Carrington after his prison break loomed large. But the notion of the two men actually talking and meeting again didn’t materialize until Gonzalez’s daughter, Valerie, a classical musician now living in New Jersey, began playing detective with her father.

Valerie Gonzalez, her curiosity aroused by a visit to The Philippines a decade ago, began assembling material for a book about her family. In July, she visited her parents and refined her questions for her father.

“I grew up loving this story” about a Marine, she said in a recent interview. “I grew up loving James Carrington, and I didn’t know his name. I knew that there was an American soldier who heroically escaped and Dad helped him, and he was out there in the great beyond.”

As her father recalled Carrington hiding in the family’s home, he mentioned a monogramed cigarette lighter the soldier left - and that jogged his memory of the soldier’s full name. His daughter was stunned at the belated revelation.

“Let’s Google him,” she said.

Valerie quickly came up with a reference to a James Carrington, Marine, on a website that gave her a lead to someone who knew Carrington. That person got word to the nursing home where he lived.

In less than two days, Jesus Gonzalez and his daughter got a call from Carrington. They caught up at a distance, then made plans for a visit to Destrehan.

“Just my daughter, she arranged everything,” recalled Gonzalez, a former B.C. transportation ministry engineer. “She was quite the detective over the years.

“I’m very glad that we made the effort to go and see him,” he added. “ It was such a joyful moment with me to have met him at last after all those years. I’ll see him again somewhere, somehow, up in heaven perhaps. He was a great man. He did a great service to the United States and to The Philippines.”

Carrington was one of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese after the fall of the island of Corregidor, a tiny but strategically vital island during the Second World War.

Carrington’s experiences have been well-chronicled. The battle ended in surrender, imprisonment and torture.

“They hung me up by my thumbs for laughing,” the veteran said in 1992. “They tried to make you beg for mercy, but I didn’t. I just put my mind in another world. I just thought about, well, you’re a Marine, you’re supposed to be tough.”

When the two men met 65 years ago, James Carrington was a tall, strapping American soldier, and he was running from the perimeter wall of his fortified prison.

“Please give me a ride!” the stranger blurted out to Jesus and his 20-year-old brother, Moises.

“He looked at that time so tall,” Gonzalez recalled. “He was running fast, just running along the cart with us.”

The brothers hid Carrington amid the hay. With a Japanese checkpoint just around the corner, the younger Gonzalez was terrified and burst into tears.

At each of two checkpoints, a Japanese soldier jabbed the hay with a bayonet, checking for a stowaway. One of the jabs lanced Carrington’s leg, but he remained undiscovered.

Gonzalez couldn’t stop sobbing.

“The Japanese soldier was asking me why I was crying, and I cried all the more louder,” he recalled. “It was scary. If we had been discovered . . .”

Carrington spent three days with Gonzalez family. He would later help lead guerrilla fighters who created havoc for the Japanese military before American forces retook The Philippines.

Gonzalez older brother Moises – betrayed by a spurned woman – was later arrested by Japanese soldiers for his role in the episode and is believed to have been executed. No trace of him was ever found. Carrington knew well the contributions of the Gonzalez brothers during those few frenetic days in the Spring of ‘44. Without them, he said, there would have been no fight for freedom. No life as a building contractor back in the States. No Joyce Carrington and the couple’s two children.

“If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be here,” he said, during the teary reunion before his passing.

For Gonzalez, the events of the past few weeks have summoned old memories from the depths of time. He remembers that cart ride long ago, the desperate Marine, his own brother’s decision to assist the POW though such an act could spell certain death.

“With my brother (Moises) my mom and my whole family did everything after the war but there was no answers,” said Gonzalez. “It is hard. We do not know there was never a closure on that.

“But to have finally met this man (Carrington) and brought happiness to him, that is something,” he said.