Case of the Buddhist Sergeant

When John David Provoo was six years old, he fell from the second-story porch of his home near San Francisco and fractured his skull on a concrete courtyard. The injury may or may not have permanently affected his brain, but for most of his life he has acted like an exceedingly odd duck. When he was eleven, he became a devotee of Buddhism; later, a Buddhist priest taught young Provoo to read, write and speak Japanese. In 1940 he went to Japan to learn more about Buddhism, lived in a Buddhist monastery near Tokyo. Back in the U.S., he enlisted in the Army and was sent to the Philippines. Nothing in John Provoo's whole odd story was stranger than the tortuous trail which led him from a Japanese prison camp on Corregidor to a federal courtroom in New York's Foley Square, where he sat on trial last week for treason during wartime (maximum penalty: death).

In court, the prosecution produced witness after witness to back up its charges that Provoo (rhymes with "no boo") had committed a long series of "overt acts" against his fellow prisoners after the fall of the Philippines. As they told their stories, the grim old names--Corregidor, the Malinta Tunnel, the Death March of Bataan--evoked bitter, half-forgotten memories of the painful days of U.S. humiliation and defeat.

"Boss of Corregidor." The witnesses, most of them fellow prisoners of Provoo, pictured him swaggering about the prison cave on Corregidor with a riding crop, toadying to the Japanese and terrorizing his fellow prisoners. As soon as the Japanese arrived, one witness testified. Provoo "made a deep bow" (the witness demonstrated it stiffly in court) and. in fluent Japanese, offered them his services. Thereafter, according to the witnesses' stories, Provoo worked for the Japanese as a combination of bully boy, informer and mess sergeant. He served them tea, provided them with liquor, whipped up three-layer cakes even in times of severe food shortages. Provoo called himself the "boss of Corregidor."

Provoo, said the witnesses, extorted cameras and other valuables from his fellow prisoners to pass them on to the Japanese, once knocked down a G.I. and stripped him of his boots because a Japanese officer said he wanted them. One retired U.S. colonel testified indignantly that Sergeant Provoo had yelled at him and other prisoners marching in a column: "All right, you guys, get over to this side."

Provoo tried, said other witnesses, to be even more Japanese than the Japanese themselves. They claimed that Provoo often said he hoped the Japanese would win the war and that he called Emperor Hirohito "the essence of divinity." Corporal Robert Brown testified that Provoo hit him in the face because he did not know how to cook tempura (Japanese fried fish or shrimps) and declared that "all American women on Corregidor should be turned over to the Japanese for immoral purposes." Once, said Brown, he followed Provoo to the top of a hill where Provoo, clad in a shroud, "let out those wild Buddhist chants . . ."

Sunken Treasure. The most serious testimony against Provoo so far: that 1) he caused the death of a U.S. captain "who gave me some lip" by complaining to the Japanese, who executed him; 2) he tried to get a U.S. colonel to turn U.S. codes over to the Japanese; 3) he beat up a U.S. sergeant in a vain effort to get information about a hoard of $7,500,000 in silver which the U.S. Army had dumped into the sea rather than let it fall into Japanese hands.

One of the oddest aspects of the Provoo case is that in 1946, after he was liberated, the U.S. Army investigated him for eight months, found no proof that he had collaborated with the enemy, and discharged him honorably. After six weeks, he re-enlisted for a three-year hitch. In 1949, he was indicted. Provoo's defense will be chiefly that he was "driven to irrationality" by imprisonment, and that he acted under duress.

As witness after bitter witness testified against him, Provoo sat in court, writhing at the accusations. He was heard frequently to mutter curses under his breath--or possibly one of those wild Buddhist chants.

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