Myself and the other secret policemen dutifully wrote this down in our notebooks. Claude was our American adviser, and we expected state-of-the-art knowledge from him and all the other American advisers. We were not disappointed. Interrogation is about the mind first, the body second, he said. You don’t even have to leave a bruise or a mark on the body. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But it’s true. We’ve spent millions to prove it in the lab. The principles are basic, but the application can be creative and tailored to the individual or to the imagination of the interrogator. Disorientation. Sensory deprivation. Self-punishment. These principles have been scientifically demonstrated by the best scientists in the world, American scientists. We have shown that the human mind, subject to the right conditions, will break down faster than the human body. All this stuff—again he waved his hand in contempt at what we now saw as Gallic junk, the tools of old world barbarians rather than new world scientists, of medieval torture rather than modern interrogation—it will take months to wear the subject down with these things. But put a sack on the subject’s head, wrap his hands in balls of gauze, plug his ears, and drop him in a completely dark cell by himself for a week, and you no longer have a human being capable of resistance. You have a puddle of water.
Water. Water, James Yoon said. Can I get some water, please?
I fetched him some water. Despite the water cure, he had not actually had any water except what was absorbed through the wet cloth, which was just wet enough, he said, to be suffocating. As his arms were still bound, I slowly trickled the water down his throat. Thanks, he muttered, just as any prisoner would be grateful to his torturer for the drop of water, or the morsel of food, or the minute of sleep that the torturer doled out. For once I was relieved to hear the Auteur’s voice, calling out, All right, let’s get this done so Jimmy can get back to the pool!
By the final take two hours later, James Yoon really was lachrymose with pain, his face bathed in sweat, mucus, vomit, and tears. It was a sight that I had seen before—the communist agent. But that was real, so real I had to stop thinking about her face. I focused on the fictional state of total degradation that the Auteur wanted for the next scene, which itself required several takes. In this scene, the last one of the movie for James Yoon, the Viet Cong, frustrated because of their inability to break their victim and get him to confess to his crimes, beat his brains out with a spade. Being a bit exhausted from torturing their victim, however, the quartet first decide to take a break smoking Pete Attucks’s Marlboros. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the will of this Binh, who, like many of his southern brethren, whether they be freedom fighters or freedom fighters, was as laid-back as a California surfer regarding every matter except the question of independence from tyranny. Left alone without the towel around his head, he was free to bite off his own tongue and drown under a faucet of his own fake blood, a commercial product that cost thirty-five dollars a gallon and of which approximately two gallons were used to paint James Yoon and decorate the earth. When it came to Binh’s brains, though, Harry had concocted his own homemade cerebro-matter, a secret recipe of oatmeal mixed with agar, the result being a gray, clumpy, congealed mess that he lovingly daubed on the earth around James Yoon’s head. The cinematographer got especially close to capture the look in Binh’s eyes, which I could not see from where I was watching, but which I assumed to be some saintly mix of ecstatic pain and painful ecstasy. Despite all the punishment inscribed on him, he had never uttered a word, or at least an intelligible one.
Chapter 11
The longer I worked on the Movie, the more I was convinced that I was not only a technical consultant on an artistic project, but an infiltrator into a work of propaganda. A man such as the Auteur would have denied it, seeing his Movie purely as Art, but who was fooling whom? Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.
Man, not surprisingly, understood Hollywood’s function as the launcher of the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization. I had written him a worried letter about the relevance of my work on the Movie, and he had written back his most detailed messages ever. First he addressed my concerns about the refugees: Conditions here exaggerated there. Remember our Party’s principles. Enemies of the Party must be rooted out. His second message concerned my fear of being a collaborator with the Auteur: Remember Mao at Yan’an. That was all, but it disspelled the black crow of doubt sitting on my shoulder. When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art and literature? I cannot recall. And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them. By urging me to remember Mao, Man was telling me that my mission with this Movie was important. Perhaps the Movie itself was not terribly important, but what it represented, the genus of the American movie, was. An audience member might love or hate this Movie, or dismiss it as only a story, but those emotions were irrelevant. What mattered was that the audience member, having paid for the ticket, was willing to let American ideas and values seep into the vulnerable tissue of his brain and the absorbent soil of his heart.
When Man first discussed such issues with me, in our study group, I was dazed with his brilliance as well as Mao’s. I was a lycée student who had never read Mao, never thought that art and literature had any relationship to politics. Man imparted that lesson by leading myself and the third member of our cell, a bespectacled youth named Ngo, in a spirited discussion of Mao’s lecture. The Great Helmsman’s arguments about art thrilled us. Art could be both popular, aimed for the masses, and yet advanced, raising its own aesthetic standard as well as the taste of the masses. We discussed how this could be done in Ngo’s garden with blustery teenage self-confidence, interrupted every now and again when Ngo’s mother served us a snack. Poor Ngo eventually died in a provincial interrogation center, arrested for possession of antigovernment pamphlets, but back then he was a boy passionately in love with the poetry of Baudelaire. Unlike Man and Ngo, I was never much of an organizer or agitator, which was one reason, Man would say later, that the committees above decided I would be a mole.
He used the English word, which we had learned not so long ago in our English course, taught by a professor whose greatest joy was diagramming sentences. A mole? I said. The animal that digs underground?
The other kind of mole.
There’s another kind?
Of course. To think of a mole as that which digs underground misunderstands the meaning of the mole as a spy. A spy’s task is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy’s task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything. Now ask yourself: What can everyone see about you but you yourself cannot?
Enough with the riddles, I said. I give up.
There—he pointed at the middle of my face—in plain sight.
I went to the mirror to see for myself, Man peering over my shoulder. There it indeed was, such a part of myself I had long ago ceased to notice it. Keep in mind that you will be not just any mole, Man said, but the mole that is the beauty spot on the nose of power itself.
Man had the natural ability to make the role of a mole, and other potentially dangerous tasks, seem attractive. Who would not want to be a beauty spot? I kept that in mind when I consulted my English dictionary, where I discovered that a mole could also be a kind of pier or harbor, a unit of measurement in chemist
ry, an abnormal mass of uterine tissue, and, if pronounced differently, a highly spiced Mexican sauce of peppers and chocolate that I would one day try and very much enjoy. But what caught my eye and has stayed with me ever since was the accompanying illustration, which depicted not a beauty spot but the animal, a subterranean, worm-eating mammal with massive clawed feet, a tubular whiskered snout, and pinhole eyes. It was surely ugly to all except its own mother, and nearly blind.
Crushing victims in its path, the Movie rolled with the momentum of a Panzer division toward the climactic firefight at King Cong’s lair, which would be followed by said lair’s incendiary vaporization by the US Air Force. Several weeks of shooting were required for what amounted to fifteen minutes of screen time popping with helicopters, rocket fire, gun battles, and the utter and magnificent destruction of the elaborate sets that had been raised with every intention of being brought low. Enormous supplies of canned smoke ensured that bewildering mists draped the set every so often, while so many blank rounds were fired, and such significant quantities of detonation cord and explosives used, that all the birds and beasts of the locality vanished in fear and the crew walked around with wicks of cotton in their ears. Of course it was not enough to merely destroy the hamlet and the cave where King Cong hid; to satisfy the Auteur’s need for realistic bloodshed, all the extras also had to be killed off. As the script called for the deaths of several hundred Viet Cong and Laotians, while there were only a hundred extras, most died more than once, many four or five times. The demand for extras was reduced only after the pièce de résistance of the firefight, an awesome napalm strike delivered by a pair of low-flying F-5s flown by the Philippine air force. Most of the enemy thus exterminated, all that was required for the shoot’s last days were twenty extras, a reduced population that left the hamlet a ghost town.
It was here that the living went to sleep but the undead awoke, as for three dawns the set rang to the cry, Dead Vietnamese, take your places! An obedient tribe of zombies rose from the earth, a score of dismembered dead men stumbling forth from the makeup tent all bruised and bloodied, clothing ripped and torn. Some leaned on comrades and hobbled on only one leg, the other leg strapped up to their thigh. In a free hand they carried a fake limb, the white bone protruding, which they positioned somewhere close once they lay down. Others, with an arm inside a shirt and a sleeve hanging empty, carried a fake mangled arm, while a few cupped the brains falling out of their heads. Some gingerly clutched their exposed intestines, which looked for all the world like glistening strings of white, uncooked sausages because that was what they were. The use of sausages was an inspired move, for at the appropriate moment when the shooting started Harry would unleash a stray hound who would dash hungrily onto the scene and begin gnawing madly at the innards of the dead. These corpses were all that remained of the enemy in the smoldering remains of King Cong’s lair, scattered about in grotesque poses where they had fallen after being shot, stabbed, beaten, or choked to death in the bitter hand-to-hand melee between the Viet Cong and the Green Berets, along with their Popular Forces. The dead included numerous unfortunate, anonymous Popular Force troops as well as the four Viet Cong who had tortured Binh and raped Mai, their end dealt to them with appropriate vengeance by Shamus and Bellamy, wielding their KA-BAR knives with Homeric frenzy until
They stood panting in a battlefield from which arose only the hiss of embers.
SHAMUS
You hear that?
BELLAMY
I don’t hear anything.
SHAMUS
Exactly. It’s the sound of peace.
If only! The Movie was not yet complete. An old woman dashed from the cave to fall, wailing, onto the body of her dead VC son. The astonished Green Berets recognized her as the friendly, black-toothed madame of the dismal brothel where they had so often played the venereal disease lottery.
BELLAMY
Christ, Mama San’s VC.
SHAMUS
They all are, kid. They all are.
BELLAMY
What do we do with her?
SHAMUS
Nothing. Let’s go home.
Shamus forgot the cardinal rule of westerns, detective stories, and war movies: never turn your back on an enemy or a wronged woman. When they did, the enraged Mama San seized her son’s AK-47, blasted Shamus from hip to shoulder blades, then fell victim herself to Bellamy, who, spinning quickly, unloaded the last of his magazine. So she died in slow motion, bathed with fourteen lifelike squirts of blood from squibs rigged by Harry, who provided her with two more to bite on. This tastes awful, she said afterward, mouth and chin covered in the fake blood I was wiping off. Was I convincing? Astonishing, I said to her great satisfaction. No one dies like you.
Except, of course, for the Thespian. To ensure that no one could claim that Asia Soo or James Yoon had outacted him, he demanded that his death be filmed eighteen times. The greater acting job was required of the Idol, however, who had to embrace the dying Will Shamus in his arms, a difficult task as the Thespian had still not taken a shower after seven months of shooting. This was despite the fact that no soldier ever passed up the opportunity for a shower or bath, even if it amounted to no more than lathering himself with soap and cold water from a helmet. I mentioned this to the Thespian one night early in the shooting, and he responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only that my fly was undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was. It is exactly because no soldier has done this that I am, he declared. As a result, no one could force themselves to eat at his table or stand nearer than fifteen or twenty feet, his stink so ghastly that it drew tears to the Idol’s face as he leaned in close with every take, weeping and gagging, to hear Shamus whisper his last words: The whore! The whore!
With Shamus dead the stage was set for Bellamy to call for the Arc Light strike on King Cong’s lair. In the heavens above, an unseen B-52 Stratofortress would squeeze out thirty thousand pounds of dumb bombs onto the lair, the purpose being not to kill the living but to cleanse the land of the dead, to do a victory dance on King Cong’s corpse, to wipe the hippie smile from Mother Earth’s face, and to say to the world, We can’t help it—we’re Americans. The scene was a massive industrial production that required the digging of several trenches, which were then filled with two thousand gallons of gasoline, as well as a thousand smoke bombs, several hundred sticks of phosphorous, a few dozen sticks of dynamite, and untold numbers of rockets, flares, and tracers, all deployed to simulate the explosions coming from King Cong’s detonating ammunition stockpile, supplied by the Chinese and the Soviets. Everyone on the crew had been waiting for this moment, the greatest blowup ever in cinematic history. It is the moment, the Auteur proclaimed to the massed crew during the last week, when we show that making this movie was going to war itself. When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie. I made a great work of art. How do you know you’ve made a great work of art? A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won’t even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war.
And there you have the absurdity. Not that there was not some truth to what the Auteur claimed, for the absurd often has its seed in a truth. Yes, art eventually survives war, its artifacts still towering long after the diurnal rhythms of nature have ground the bodies of millions of warriors to powder, but I had no doubt that in the Auteur’s egomaniacal imagination he meant that his work of art, now, was more important than the three or four or six million dead who composed the real meaning of the war. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Marx spoke of
the oppressed class that was not politically conscious enough to see itself as a class, but was anything ever more true of the dead, as well as the extras? Their fate was so inane that they drank away their dollar a day every night, an act in which I gladly joined them, feeling a small part of myself dying with them, too. For I had an encroaching sense of the meanness of my accomplishment, that I had been deluded in thinking I could effect change in how we were represented. I had altered the script here and there, and incited the creation of a few speaking parts, but to what end? I had not derailed this behemoth, or changed its direction, I had only made its path smoother as the technical consultant in charge of authenticity, the spirit haunting bad movies that aspired to be good ones. My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese people saying real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died. The swing of a dialect and the trim of a costume had to be real, but the truly important things in such a movie, like emotions or ideas, could be fake. I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.