Meet Ben Steele
We interviewed more than four hundred people for "Tears In The Darkness," among them a retired professor of art from Billings, Montana, Ben Steele, a man of insight and remarkable good humor who became the book's central character. Born in 1917, Ben Steele grew up in a pine-log house by a crystal spring in the shadow of the Bull Mountains on Montana's eastern plain. By the time he was eight he could ride, rope, and shoot. He herded cattle, drove horses, tended sheep. In 1940, just before his twenty-third birthday, he joined the Army Air Corps and was shipped to the Philippines. On April 9, 1942, after ninety-nine days of battle, he was captured by the Japanese and spent one thousand two hundred and forty-four days as a prisoner of war. He was 81 years old when we first met him in 1999. The more we talked, the more we could see that he had thought deeply about what had happened to him. His reflections had led him to a profound understanding of what war does to those swept up in it. Most of all, we were taken with his philosophy of life. He is a man determined to make every day, every moment, count.
Photos
Bess Steele with Ben and his sister, Gert, circa 1919.
Ben, mounted, age two or three, at the homestead ranch at Hawk Creek.
Ben (right) and his cousin, Pat, at Hawk Creek, circa 1922.
Ben Steele's father, Ben Steele Sr. (left), called "The Old Man" by his sons, with his cousin, John McCleary, circa WWI.
The Old Man during a roundup, Yellowstone County, circa 1912.
The homestead ranch at Hawk Creek, Bull Mountains, Montana, circa 1920s.
Ben Steele, roughly 19 years old, Billings, Montana.
Coal mine slave labor camp ID photo, Japan, fall 1944. Ben is 26 years old.
Ben after liberation, September 1945.
Ben and Bobbie Mellis, wedding photo, 1945.
Ben, self-portrait done at the Cleveland Institute of Art, 1949.
Ben in Worden, Montana, in front of the bar the Old Man used to own, 2000.
Ben Steele by an old homestead graveyard on the prairie, 2001.
Ben visiting the site of the original homestead ranch at Hawk Creek, 2002.
Ben, center, dark shirt and glasses, with other artists in drawing session, 2003.
Ben toasting well-wishers at his 90th Birthday party, 2007. Michael Norman to his left.
Artwork by Ben Steele
A pine log homestead cabin in the Bull Mountains.
Riding the open range.
American soldier on Bataan early in the battle.
American soldier just before surrender on Bataan.
Ben Steele just after capture carrying a Japanese pack.
Walking the death march.
Guard on death march.
Japanese officer in battle dress.
Japanese soldier executing a prisoner of war.
Japanese soldier wielding sword.
Prisoners being packed into boxcars for trip to prison camp.
Prisoners cooking scraps at Camp O’Donnell.
Prisoner near death in O’Donnell’s “Zero Ward.â€
Prisoners of war starving.
The face of defeat.
A guard confronts a prisoner.
The burial detail at Camp O’Donnell putting the dead in a mass grave.
Sleeping in the open on a bed of stones during a work detail.
Ben Steele, self portrait, swollen with beriberi in Bilibid prison hospital.
Ben staring out of the bars in Ward 11, Bilibid Prison hospital.
Boarding the Canadian Inventor, a hellship the men nicked-named the Matte-Mattee (very slow) Maru.
In the tightly packed hold of the hellship Matte-Matte Maru.
POW coal miner in Omine Machi, Japan, 1945.
Japanese guards.
