I walk every afternoon. I have been doing this since my heart surgery. “The River Kwai March” runs through my head, and I walk all around my suburban neighborhood to its marching tempo.

I was about nine or ten years old when my father took me to see “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” That movie made a lasting impression on me. Even today, at age seventy, emotions will wash over me whenever I hear the whistling of that song from the soundtrack. It opens the movie with World War II prisoners in a Japanese camp returning from a day of forced labor whistling as they march. They show a defiant spirit against the Japanese, against death. An orchestra joins in as if it supports their spirited dignity.

My father fought the Japanese in World War II. He was a paratrooper jumping out of planes to kill as many Japanese soldiers as he could. I wonder if he thought about those Japanese he killed while we were watching the movie in a small theater built by the federal government. We lived in the Panama Canal Zone, so everything around us was made by the federal government. Our house, my school, the neighborhood pool, the library, the grocery store, and of course, the canal itself were all US government structures. The only way to escape that was to cross a wide street called Fourth of July Avenue into Panama City. Then I was no longer in small-town America but a raucous, spirited Latin American city. The Panama Canal Zone housed federal employees and their families who, in some capacity, contributed to the operation of the canal.

For five Saturdays in a row, my father and I took ten-mile hikes so I could earn my Boy Scout hiking badge. We would begin before dawn and cover as many miles as possible before the tropical sun made its appearance, and vigorous walking became an uncomfortable activity. The route we took included a stretch of road that paralleled that part of the canal where it was a big deep ditch. Then it was known as Gaillard Cut named for the American engineer who oversaw the project. Today it is called Culebra Cut.

The sun would not yet have risen when we reached this part of our hike, but the large florescent lights on both banks of the canal made Culebra Cut easy to see. On more than one occasion, we could see ships moving slowly through the illuminated water. The Panama Canal operates twenty-four hours a day. On the opposite side of Culebra Cut, there is a sunken road, and from that vantage point, ships in the ditch looked like they are on land moving through a field of tall grass.

Fifty-six hundred men died building the Panama Canal, many of them at Culebra Cut. The abundant rain of Panama soaked the sides of hills made top-heavy by the excavation. When that gave way, avalanches of mud would rush down on hapless workers. The canal killed a diverse bunch of working people, white and black Americans, Panamanians, Jamaicans, and Chinese.

“The River Kwai March” did not run through my head on those hikes with my father. Facts about the canal and its history did. As part of the socialization process, schools in the states taught young people about the history of their state. Canal Zone schools socialized us with the history of the Panama Canal.  

There were class activities that glorified Theodore Roosevelt, the president who made it all possible. George Washington Goethals, the army engineer who oversaw the canal’s construction, was revered and memorialized with a massive white fountain that high school students like to fill with soap suds. There were lessons about William C. Gorgas, the doctor who protected the laborers from deadly yellow fever and the namesake of the Canal Zone’s largest hospital.

There were no lessons about Roosevelt’s blatant imperialistic behavior or the roughshod way he manipulated the new and inexperienced Panamanian government into a lopsided treaty. There were no lessons on the history of Panama, even though we were smack in the middle of that country. Nor was anything taught about racial segregation in the Canal Zone during and after the canal’s construction. Much like southern towns of the time, black Zonians lived nowhere near white Zonians.

The road that paralleled Culebra Cut turned left away from the canal to wind around a hill called Contractor’s Hill, a source of many of the fatal mudslides. It was terraced to stop the slides and thus had a flat top that provided a panoramic view of the Cut. It was a favorite place for teenage parties.

Our route did not take us there. Instead, we took an intersecting road that wound its way deeper into the rain forest that comprised much of this part of the isthmus. Once while on this road, we encountered a long thick boa constrictor crossing in front of us. We stopped and watched until the serpent slid off the macadam and disappeared into the tall grass that lined the side of the road. Boas are not poisonous, but they have lots of teeth that curve inward towards the throats. A bite can result in a nasty wound. There are twenty-one venomous snakes on that isthmus, and I grew up believing that all snakes are dangerous.

Unlike the jungles in movies, this one did not have monkeys screeching and other exotic sounds. It was quiet. My father and I did not talk much as we hiked. Did he in those long stretches of silence with the ambiance of the rainforest all around transport himself mentally back to Corregidor?  Did he think about the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers portrayed in the movie as justification for killing them?

Like many combat veterans, my father did not talk much about the war. It was a reference in time he often used in conversation. I remember him frequently starting a sentence with “Before the war” or “During the war.” Whoever he was talking with understood which war he was talking referencing. Can veterans of today’s wars do that without someone asking, “What war? We were in a war?”

Once I told him that the droppings of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were now considered controversial. He replied that there was no controversy in his mind. The other option was an invasion, and he was confident that if he and his fellow paratroopers dropped on mainland Japan, he would not come out alive.

More than halfway through our hike, we arrived at a river. It was smaller than the Kelani River in Sri Lanka, which represented the Kwai in the film. Here we would take a break and enjoy the refreshing water before walking back to the car. After a week of work and school, we would do it again. It was our morning activity for five Saturdays.

I was a poor student, and my bad grades were a source of tension between my father and me. The only time he ever beat me was over grades. When I was a sophomore in high school, my parents decided to send me to a military school in Minnesota. It was quite an adjustment for a boy who had never seen snow. My fellow cadets and I learned how to form up, dress right, and cover. And we learned how to march. The first time the cadet battalion marched in pass and review, the band played “The River Kwai March.”  It felt incongruous with the cold air of a Minnesota fall. It made me homesick.

The Panama Canal Zone is no more. Neither is my father. He died quite some time ago, and my mother followed him later. If the family dies in proper chronological order, I will be the next to go.

Walking is my way to delay that certainty. I pass an old tree with brown leaves that should be green. The whistling from the “The River Kwai March” comes back into my head, and I pick up my pace to match it. I can hear the orchestra joining. I add a defiant swagger and hike onward.

– Steve Bailey

Note: This piece was previously published by Commuter Lit in October 2020.