Janson—Janson could not see him, but he could smell him, could feel his body
heat even through the heat of the moist jungle air—and a crushing blow struck
Janson’s side. The barrel of a rifle, he guessed. A bolt of agony shot through
his side.
He had to concentrate—not on his interrogator but on something else. Through the
bamboo struts of the hut, he could see large flat leaves dripping with water. He
was a leaf; whatever fell upon him would drip off like beads of water.
“We hear about your special soldiers who do not wear tags.”
“Special? I wish.” Janson shook his head. “No. I lost it. Snagged on a thornbush
while I was bellying through your trails.”
The interrogator looked annoyed. He moved his chair closer to Janson and leaned
forward. He tapped Janson on his left forearm, and then his right. “You can
choose,” he said. “Which one?”
“Which one what?” Janson asked dazedly.
“Not to decide,” the rawboned man said somberly, “is to decide.” He glanced up
at the man behind Janson and said something in Vietnamese. “We break your right
arm,” he told Janson, explaining almost tenderly.
The blow arrived with sledgehammer force: a barrel unscrewed from a machine gun
deployed as a weapon itself. His wrist and elbow were supported by the bamboo of
his chair; the bone of his forearm extended between those two points. It gave
way like a dry branch. The bone had split from the blow: he knew it from a soft
crunching noise that he felt rather than heard—and from the horrendous pain that
surged up his arm, taking his breath away.
He wriggled his fingers, to see whether they would still obey him; they did.
Bone but not nerve had been severed. Yet his arm was largely useless now.
The noise of metal sliding against metal alerted him to what was to happen next:
a two-inch-thick bar was inserted through the heavy irons around his ankles.
Next, the unseen torturer tied a rope around the bar, looped it over Janson’s
shoulders, and pulled his head down between his knees, even while his arms
remained bound to the arms of the chair. The torque on his shoulder was a
growing agony, vying with the pulsating pain of his broken forearm.
He waited for the next question. But minutes elapsed, and there was only
silence. The gloom turned into darkness. Breathing became even more difficult,
as his diaphragm strained against his folded body, and his shoulders felt as if
they were in a vise that narrowed and narrowed without end. Janson passed out,
and regained consciousness, but it was consciousness only of pain. It was light
outside—had morning come? Afternoon? Yet he was alone. He was only
half-conscious when his bonds were loosened and bamboo gruel was poured into his
mouth. His underpants had been cut off him now, and a rusty metal bucket was
placed on the ground beneath the stool. Then the loop was tightened again, the
loop that bound his shoulders to the ankle irons, that forced his head between
his knees, that threatened to tear his arms from his shoulders. He repeated a
mantra to himself: Clear like water, cool like ice. As his shoulders burned, he
thought about the summer weeks he had spent ice fishing in Alaska as a child. He
thought of the emerald beads on the huge flat jungle leaves, the way they
dripped away, leaving nothing behind. Later still, two boards were tied to his
broken arm with twine, as a sort of makeshift cast.
From the inner recesses of his mind, the words of Emerson that Demarest so often
quoted returned to him: Whilst he sits on the cushions of advantages he goes to
sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn
something.
And another day passed. And another. And another.
His innards cramped powerfully: the fly-ridden gruel had given him dysentery. He
desperately sought to defecate, hoping he could rid himself of the agony that
now convulsed his very guts, but his bowels would not move. They harbored their
pain greedily. The enemy within, Janson thought mordantly.
It was either evening or morning when he heard a voice, once more, in English.
His bonds were loosened, and he could now sit up straight once more—a postural
shift that initially caused his nerve endings to scream in renewed agony.
“Is that better now? It soon will be, I pray.”
A new interrogator, no one he had seen before. It was a small man with quick
intelligent eyes. His English was fluid, the accent pronounced but with clipped,
crisp articulation. An educated man.
“We know you are not imperialist aggressor,” the voice went on. “You are a dupe
of the imperialist aggressors.” The interrogator came very close; Janson knew
that his smell must be offensive to the man—it was foul even to himself—but he
evinced no sign of it. The Vietnamese touched Janson’s cheek, rough with
stubble, and spoke softly. “But you disrespect us when you treat us like dupes.
Can you understand this?” Yes, he was an educated man, and Janson was his
special project. This development alarmed him: it suggested that they had
figured out that he was, indeed, no ordinary soldier.
Janson ran his tongue over his teeth; they felt furry and somehow foreign, as if
they had been replaced with a set of choppers carved of an old balsa raft. A
noise of assent came from his mouth.
“Ask yourself how it was you were captured.”
The man walked around him, pacing like a schoolmaster in front of a class. “You
see, we are actually very similar, in a way. Both of us are intelligence
officers. You have served your cause bravely. I hope the same might be said of
me.”
Janson nodded. The thought briefly flickered: In what demented scheme did the
torture of a defenseless prisoner count as bravery? But he quickly stowed it
away; it would not help him now; it would cloud his composure, betray an
attitude of sedition. Clear like water, cool like ice.
“My name is Phan Nguyen, and I think that, really, we are privileged to know
each other. Your name is … ”
“Private Kevin Jones,” Janson said. In his moments of lucidity, he had created a
whole life behind that name—an infantryman from Nebraska, a little trouble with
the law after high school, a pregnant girlfriend at home, a brigade that had got
lost and wandered away from where it was supposed to be. The character seemed
almost real to him, though it was cobbled together from snippets of popular
novels, movies, magazine stories, TV shows. Out of the thousand tales of
America, he could craft something that would ring truer than any true American
tale. “U.S. Infantry.”
The small man flushed as he boxed Janson on his right ear, leaving it bruised
and ringing. “Lieutenant Junior Grade Paul Janson,” said Phan Nguyen. “Do not
undo all the good work you have done.”
How did they know his true name and rank?
“You told us all this,” Phan Nguyen insisted. “You told us everything. Have you
forgotten, in your delirium? I think so. I think so. This happens often.”
Was it possible? Janson locked eyes with Nguyen, and both men saw their
suspicions confirmed. Both saw that the other had lied. Janson had revealed
nothing—or nothing until now. For Nguyen could tell from his reaction, not of
fear or perplexity but of rage, that his identification was correct.
Janson had nothing to lose: “Now it is you who lie,” he growled. He felt a
sharp, stinging thwack of the bamboo stick across his upper body, but it was
more for show than anything else; Janson had come to be able to judge these
minuscule gradations.
“We are practically colleagues, you and I. Is that the word? Colleagues? I think
so. I think so.” Phan Nguyen, as it emerged, often said those words, I think so,
almost beneath his breath: they distinguished questions that did not require
voiced assent from those that did. “Now we will speak candidly to each other, as
colleagues do. You will drop your lies and fables, on the pain of … pain.” He
seemed pleased with the English idiom, with the way it could be twisted this way
and that. “I know you are a brave man. I know you have a high tolerance for
suffering. Perhaps you would like us to test just how high, like an experiment?”
Janson shook his head, his innards churning. Suddenly he heaved forward and
retched. A small amount of vomit reached the hard-packed ground. It looked like
coffee grounds. A clinical sign of internal hemorrhage.
“No? Just for now, I’m not going to press you for answers. I want you to ask
yourself the questions.” Phan Nguyen sat down again, looking intently at Janson
with his intelligent, curious eyes. “I want you to ask yourself how it was that
you were captured. We knew just where to find you—that must have puzzled you,