Principally, the patients were dying of malaria, dysentery, pellagra, acute dehydration, beri beri, or assorted combinations thereof. Yet in many cases the act of dying seemed to come by force of will. Every doctor saw it. A patient who was sick but not necessarily terminal would get an unmistakable look on his face – a million mile stare, a crushing melancholy, as if to say ‘I cannot bear another moment’. He would simply give up. Within hours, sometimes within minutes, he’d be dead. The prisoners called it ‘give-up-it is,’ the doctors referred to it as inanition, the absence of spirit. Living was like holding on to a rope, said one medic. “All you had to do was let go, and you were a goner.”
Hampton Sides. Ghost Soldiers.
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