A Wartime Encounter That Never Occurred: Moral Injury and Literary Healing

Brigadier General William Brougher became a prisoner of war in April 1942, when thousands of Americans and Filipinos surrendered to Japanese forces. Brougher spent three and a half years in prisoner of war camps in Formosa and Manchuria before liberation. He spent his captivity in ways that may surprise those with conventional views of professional soldiers: he read extensively, kept a secret diary that was an intimate record of daily life and his states of mind (deep resentment of his captors; fears about the present; shame about surrender; anxieties for the future of his military career), and he wrote poetry. Brougher resolved to become a poet and short story writer and worked intensely at his writing while a POW. He took that ambition back to the United States. A short story, Baggy Pants, he wrote about a POW’s meeting in a prisoner yard with a Japanese guard that begins with the tension that frequently governed such encounters and eventuates in their discussion of poetry and sharing and appreciating one another’s verse, won a prize in 1956 from the popular monthly, the Reader’s Digest. Brougher framed the story so that it was to be read as a memoir. “Baggy Pants” was the nickname of a not especially well-liked guard, Lt. Jiro Wakasugi, in a Formosa camp. Reviewing a prepublication draft, the editors assumed the story was autobiographical. In response, Brougher encouraged their view. But did this encounter actually take place, and if it did not, as I suspect, why did Brougher write as if it had? This essay seeks answers to those questions.