A harsh exchange in Vietnamese. The eyes belonged to an officer, either of the NVA or the Viet Cong. He was a captive American soldier, and there was clarity in that. From some distance came the static of a shortwave radio, like a section of tuneless violins: the volume waxed and waned until he realized that it was his perception, not the sound, that was shifting, that his consciousness was zoning in and out. A black-clad soldier brought him rice gruel and spooned it into his parched mouth. He felt, absurdly, grateful; at the same time, he realized that he was an asset to them, a potential source of information. To extract that information was their job; to prevent them from extracting it, while keeping himself alive, was his. Besides, he knew, amateur interrogators would sometimes reveal more information than they elicited. He told himself that he would have to use his powers of concentration … when they returned. Assuming they ever did.
A bit of the rice gruel caught in his throat, and he realized it was a beetle that had fallen into the pasty substance. A half smile flickered on the face of the soldier who fed him—the indignity of feeding a Yank made up for by the indignity of what he was feeding him—but Janson was past caring.
“Xin loi,” the soldier said, cruel as a jackknife. One of the few Vietnamese idioms Janson knew: Sorry about that.
Xin loi. Sorry about that: it was the war in a nutshell. Sorry we destroyed the village in order to save it. Sorry we napalmed your family. Sorry we tortured those POWs. Sorry about that—a phrase for every occasion. A phrase nobody ever meant. The world would be a better place if someone could say it and mean it.
Where was he? Some sort of Montagnard hut, was it? Abruptly, a greasy cloth was wrapped around his head, and he felt himself unroped and dragged down, dragged under—not to the bottom of the lake, as in his dream, but into a tunnel, burrowed around and beneath the shallow tree roots of the jungle soil. He was dragged until he started to crawl, simply to spare his flesh the abrasion. The tunnel veered one way and then another; it sloped upward and downward and intersected with others; voices grew muffled and close, then very distant; smells of tar and kerosene and rot alternated with the fetor of unwashed men. When he reemerged into the insect symphony of the jungle floor—for it was the sound of insects that told him he had left the network of tunnels—he was trussed up again and lifted onto a chair. The cloth around his head was removed, and he breathed deeply the clammy air. The rope was coarse, the sort of hemp twine used for tying river sloops to bamboo docks, and it bit into his wrists, his ankles. Small insects hovered around the fretwork of small cuts and abrasions that covered his exposed flesh. His T-shirt and underpants—that was all he had been left with—were encrusted with dirt from the tunnels.
A large-boned man with eyes that looked small beneath his steel-framed glasses approached him.
“Where … others?” Janson’s mouth was cottony.
“Members of your death squad? Dead. Only you safe.”
“You’re Viet Cong?”
“That is not correct term. We represent Central Committee of the National Liberation Front.”
“National Liberation Front,” Janson repeated, his cracked lips forming words only with difficulty.
“Why you not wear dog tags?”
Janson shrugged, prompting an immediate whack with a bamboo stick across the back of his neck. “Must’ve got lost.”
Two guards stood to either side of the scowling interrogator. They each carried AK-47s and a link-belt of rounds around their waists; a Makarov 9.5mm pistol hung just below the ammo belt. One of them had clipped to his belt a U.S. Navy SEALs combat knife, the six-inch blade gleaming. Janson recognized the scars on its Tenite handle; it was his.
“You lie!” the interrogator said. His eyes darted toward the man standing behind 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, no? What you faced wasn’t the response of surprised men, was it? So you know what I say is so.”
Janson felt another heaving surge of nausea: what Phan Nguyen said was true. It may have been wrapped in deceit, but the truth remained, stony and indigestible.
“You say you did not divulge the details of your identity to me. But that leaves you with a more troubling question. If not you, who? How is it that we were able to intercept your team and capture a senior officer of the legendary American counterintelligence division of the legendary Navy SEALs? How?”
How indeed? There was only one answer: Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest had funneled the information to the NVA or its VC allies. He was too careful a man for the leak to have been inadvertent at this point. It would have been extraordinarily easy. The information would have been “accidentally” revealed to one of the ARVN personnel whom Demarest knew to have close NVA links; it could have been “hidden” in a cache of papers “accidentally” left behind at a jungle outpost, too hastily decamped under enemy fire. The details could have been deliberately transmitted via a code and radio frequency known to the enemy. Demarest had wanted Janson out of the way; he had needed him out of the way. And so he had taken care of the matter as only he could. The whole mission had been a goddamn snare, a subterfuge from the master of subterfuge.
Demarest had done this to him!
And now the lieutenant commander was no doubt sitting at his desk, listening to Hildegard von Bingen, and Janson was trussed to a stool in a VC compound, foul pus oozing from open sores where the rope cut into his flesh, his body shattered, his mind reeling—reeling, most of all, at the realization that his ordeal had only begun.
“Well,” Phan Nguyen said. “You must concede that our intelligence is superior. We know so much about your operations that to hold back would be pointless, like depriving the ocean of a teardrop. Yes, I think so, I think so.” He walked out of the compound, conferring in a low voice with another officer, and then returned, taking his seat at his chair.
Janson’s eyes fell on the man’s feet, which didn’t touch the ground, and took in the large American laceups, the childlike calves.
“You must get used to the fact that you will never return to the United States of America. Soon, I will tell you about Vietnamese history, starting with Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, the joint queens of Vietnam who ousted the Chinese from our lands in thirty-nine A.D.—yes, as far back as that! Before Ho, there were the Trung sisters. Where was America in thirty-nine A.D.? You will come to understand the futility of your government’s efforts to suppress the rightful national aspirations of the Vietnamese people. You have many lessons to learn, and you will be well taught. But there is much you must tell us as well. Are we in agreement?”
Janson said nothing.
At an eye signal from the interrogator, a carbine smashed into his left side: another electric bolt of agony.
“Perhaps we can start with something easier and work up to the more advanced subjects. We shall talk about you. About your parents and their role in the capitalist system. About your childhood. About America’s abundant popular culture.”
Janson paused, and he heard the sound of metal sliding on metal, as the thick steel bar was inserted between his leg irons again.
“No,” Janson said. “No!” And Janson began to speak. He spoke about what was shown on television and at the movie theaters; Phan Nguyen was particularly interested in what counted as a happy ending, and what sort of endings was permissible. Janson spoke about his childhood in Connecticut; he spoke about his father’s life as an insurance executive. The concept intrigued Phan Nguyen, and he grew scholarly and serious, pushing Janson to explain the underlying concepts, parsing the notions of risk and liability with near Confucian delicacy. Janson might have been telling a fascinated anthropologist about the circumcision rites of the Trobriand Islanders.
“And he led a good American life, your father?”
“He thought so. He made a good livin
g. Owned a nice home, nice car. Could buy the things he wanted to buy.”
Phan Nguyen sat back in his chair, and his broad weathered features were alert and quizzical. “And this is what gives meaning to your life?” he asked. He folded his slender, childlike arms around his chest and tilted his head. “Hmm? This is what gives meaning to your life?”
The questioning went on and on—Nguyen refused to call himself an interrogator; he was, he said, a “teacher”—and each day Janson was permitted more and more mobility. He could walk around a small bamboo hut, although always under watchful guard. Then one day, after an almost good-humored discussion of American sports (Nguyen suggested, as if it were self-evident, that in capitalist societies the class struggle was provided imaginary resolution on the playing field), Janson was given a document to sign. It stated that he had been given good medical care and had been kindly treated by the National Liberation Front, whom the document heralded as freedom fighters devoted to peace and democracy. It called for the withdrawal of the U.S. from imperialist wars of aggression. A pen—a fine fountain pen of French manufacture, evidently a legacy of one of the old colonials—was placed in his hand. When he declined to sign the document, he was beaten until he lost consciousness.
And when he regained it, he found himself chained inside a sturdy bamboo cage, six feet tall and four feet in diameter. He could not stand up straight; he could not sit down. He could not move around. He had nothing to do. A pail of brackish water, strewn with ox hair and dead insects, was placed near his feet by a closedfaced guard. He was a bird in a cage, waiting only to be fed.
It would be, he somehow knew, a very long wait.
“Xin loi,” the guard taunted. Sorry about that.
Chapter Twenty-five
Molnár. The town that history erased.