Readers Guide

The book you’ve read, or are about to encounter, is not per se a history, though it has a lot of history in it. It’s a “story,” a true story, and like all stories, it aims to be an experience on the page.

 
Question: What parts of “Tears In The Darkness” were most vivid? When did you feel as though you were part of the experience, and how do you think the authors created that effect?
 
The story involves many characters, but returns regularly to one character, Ben Steele.
 
Question: What makes Ben Steele such a good exemplar of American values and the American experience?
 
Question: What makes Ben Steele both an interesting character and one worthy of the reader’s time and attention?
 
Question: Have you ever met anyone like Ben Steele, someone who appears to have the quality that Hemingway called, “grace under pressure?”
 
Question: Although it’s not in the book, Ben Steele told the authors he “hates the word ‘hero.’” Why do you think he said that? And what does that say about him? Better yet, what makes a hero? Has the word completely lost its meaning these days?
 
Ben Steele and his comrades spent more than three years in captivity under brutal conditions, so “Tears In The Darkness” can be read as a “survival” story.
 
Question: What lessons can we take from such stories that can be applied to everyday life? Doesn’t it often take courage just get through the day? What is courage? And how should we measure it? Where does it come from?
 
There are many stories of torture, brutality, starvation and gruesome murder in “Tears In The Darkness.”
 
Question: Why did the authors go to such lengths to detail these events? Is that the nature of all warfare or just war at its worst? Why do we have to read such details to understand war? Isn’t it enough just to say it’s violent. Why all the grim images?
 
No where in the book are there references to either “good” or “evil” when, clearly, the atrocities committed by the men of the Imperial Japanese Army could easily be labeled “evil.”
 
Question: Why does the book work so hard to avoid this easy characterization of the behavior of Japanese troops? Is it possible to try to understand something once it has been labeled “evil?” What, exactly, is evil?
 
In the early reviews of the book, critics pointed out that the authors seemed to treat their Japanese characters – the “evil” doers – with great sympathy: “The authors are unsparing but sympathetic in telling the Japanese side of the story…The Normans’ chronicle of the bitter experiences of very human and often guilt-wracked Japanese soldiers…The Normans take pains to present the Japanese side of the story, and some readers with direct memories of events may find their account too sympathetic.”
 
Question: Do you find the treatment of the Japanese “too sympathetic?” Why did the authors take such pains to paint as human men who clearly did inhuman things to other men?
 
Question: In what ways did reading about the lives of the Japanese soldiers change your thinking about World War II in the Pacific?
 
Question: When an “enemy” starts to appear familiar, starts to resemble you, what does that say about the nature of war and why we wage it?
 
Ben Steele and his comrades had no control over their lives as POWs. One of them, Don Schloat (Chapter 10), a man who tried to escape and was caught, was made to sit and stare at a wall all day.
 
Question: What would you do if you found yourself in a situation where your every movement, your every moment, was controlled by someone else? How would you keep your sanity? What is “mental toughness?” Do you know anyone who has that quality? Could you sit and stare at a wall all day without going mad? How would you do it?
 
The characters in “Tears in the Darkness” -- American, Japanese, Filipino – are always thinking about home. The longing for home, in fact, is a major theme in the book, home in Montana, home in Aoya, home in Manila.
 
Question: Does this powerful sense of longing, this thinking constantly about home, help or hurt when people who find themselves facing death far away from home?
 
Some people believe that history runs in cycles, that we keep seeing the same basic events, the same basic human mistakes, over and over. The places and people change, but not the story.
 
Question: What are the similarities, and differences, between the battle of Bataan and its long aftermath and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
 
Question: Can the militant Muslims or Arabs who attacked the United States in 2001 and dozens of other places since remind you at all of the militant Japanese nationalists and the fanatics in the Imperial Japanese Army who turned East Asia into a bloodbath in the 1940’s?
 
Ben Steele and his comrades were, essentially, hungry for three years. At points during those dark days, they, literally, were starving to death.
 
Question: Is it possible to imagine that kind of hunger and thirst? How hungry or thirsty have you been? What would you do in such circumstances? Would you steal, or worse, to stay alive? Feed your hungry family?
 
Ben and his mother Bess Steele were close. He was, in many ways, “Every Mothers’ Son.” Bess encouraged him to join the army, and he took her advice. Later, she suffered a nervous breakdown thinking of him in captivity.
 
Question: Have you ever given advice to a son, daughter, grandson or granddaughter that you later regretted? Can you imagine what it’s like to have a child far from home and in harm’s way?
 
Question: Do you ever find yourself in conflict, urging your children to take risks and knowing that if they do, the consequences may break your heart?
 
Question: Why did Ben’s mother give him that unusual gift after he was liberated and came home for the first time in five years?
 
Ben Steele discovered his talent, and passion, for art when he was a POW in Manila’s notorious Bilibid prison. Since the war he has used that talent to document what happened to him.
 
Question: Can any form of art ever capture the reality of war?
 
Question: What was your reaction to the sketches in “Tears in the Darkness?” Did they add to the story, detract from it, or act as a kind of book within a book?
 
Two of our Japanese interviewees told us, “the Filipinos weren’t our enemy, you were.” And yet the Filipinos suffered terribly during the Japanese occupation of their country.
 
Question: Can you put yourself in the place of the Filipino civilians in the book? Would you have taken a chance, as they did, and tried to help the American soldiers, soldiers who since 1898 had been an occupying force in your country?
 
For men who were sick, starving and exhausted from days of battle, the sixty-six miles of the Bataan Death March seemed like six hundred.
 
Question: How do you think you would have done on the march? How would you have kept your feet, kept putting one foot in front of  the other?
 
Question: Would you have stopped to help a fellow POW who dropped out and was in danger of being murdered by a guard, or would you have followed the philosophy of “every man for himself?”
 
Officials in Washington knew about the Bataan Death March and other Japanese atrocities in the Philippines as early as mid 1943, but did not tell the public, or the families of the prisoners of war, until January 1944.
 
Question: Should the government have withheld that information? Do the families of servicemen have an absolute right to know the fate and plight of their loved ones as soon as the government learns of it?
 
Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the army that invaded the Philippines, was arrested in 1946, tried in a military court, and sentenced to death for failing “to control the operations” of his men, thus “permitting them to commit brutal atrocities,” in this case, the death march.
 
Question: If there was no direct evidence to show that Homma had either ordered the march or, knowing of it, failed to stop his men from murdering prisoners of war, should he have been executed? Was his sentence just? And did it reflect American values?
 
Ben Steele came home from war without being consumed by anger and hatred.
 
Question: How was he able to hold on to his humanity? How do any of us keep the cruelty we experience from shaping our attitudes toward others and toward life?
 
Readers might find the following Q&A useful as well:
 
 
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