The American Prisoner

Ian’s leg wounds had healed when I first met him. He asked me for the word “blowfly.” He remembered the ruồi xanh following him for three days. By then  his legs began to smell. He could see white eggs in his wounds. “You pick them and leave them in the sun and they will hatch in three hours,” he said. “I saw it myself.” Some hatched in his wounds. They had turned purplish blue. But he never let the wounds bother him. The pain just throbbed. Horribly at times. The smell had grown stronger. He watched the white things wiggling at his bare feet as he tried to rise to salute the camp commander. A guard yelled at him. “Bow!” He steadied himself and lowered his head at the commander. Then he slumped to the cot. White maggots dropped from his wounds to the dirt floor. The commander winced. Later in the day a nurse came in. Before she did, a guard told him of her arrival. From what the guard said—“Americans number ten”— he gathered that she hated him and his kin. The girl was young. Clear-eyed, perky. Yet she wore a glum look around him as she poured alcohol on his legs. The wounds smarted. He felt ashamed when she pinched her nose, then averting her face, donned on a mask and worked her hands into a pair of surgical gloves. She squeezed the pus out of the wounds as he looked down at her gentle face. He held still, not even breathing, while she swabbed the wounds with a cotton-tipped hemostat. He watched her bandage his wounds deftly, neatly, and he could smell the fresh gauze, the stinging antiseptic. As she handed him a small bottle of antibiotic, he said in English, “What’s your name, Miss?” She looked into his eyes in silence. No English, he thought, and then tried to put together a couple Vietnamese words he’d learned. Just then she looked at his bandaged head. “Do you have much headache?” she said in English. “Yes,” he said. “I can’t sleep.” She motioned for him to sit up and then unwrapped the gauze and checked the gash. She changed the gauze. “Our doctor will look at this,” she said. He felt comforted by her soft voice. She turned to leave and he called to her, “You didn’t tell me your name, Miss.” She spoke without turning her head, “You don’t need to know.”

Only a few days after the young nurse had cleaned and wrapped his leg wounds,  Ian had a running fever. The pain returned in his legs. Every day he ate very little from his meager meals and lay the rest of the day shivering on the rickety cot. He couldn’t walk. So every day an interrogator came to his cot, the same interrogator who spoke little English and was accompanied by an interpreter. Ian told them what he knew. He’d thought about the interrogation before they came. He knew he must tell whatever they asked, not to lie but at same time not to harm the lives of his fellow soldiers with what he told the interrogator. He’d memorized the Code of Conduct. He also knew how much he should say under the Geneva Convention for the treatment of the prisoners of war. But all that vanished when the interrogator said, “You are a criminal of war and you will be treated accordingly.” From there Ian gave them his name, rank, his birth date. Then pressed, he gave them his service number, his unit. He kept silent on the military questions. The interrogator glanced at Ian’s legs and gave them a quick tap with his metal ruler. He mouthed his words in Vietnamese and when he stopped the interpreter said, “We will treat your legs if you cooperate. If you do not, you will eventually lose your legs to amputation because of unavoidable abscesses.” Ian said, “I will tell you what I know. Radio frequency? No, I am not a radioman. How many M-79s in the company? No, I am a rifleman, I only know what’s in my squad. Other weapons carried by the company? No, I am in a rifle squad, my knowledge of weapons stays within my squad.” The interrogator asked, “How did you get to Vietnam?” Surprised, Ian said nothing. It must be a trick question. At the interrogator’s patient silence, he said, “By airplane. Twenty hours by airplane.” The interrogator turned to the interpreter. “Hai mươi giờ à?” The interpreter nodded. Twenty hours. The interrogator said, “Ôi!” His baffled  exclamation had Ian nodding to confirm what he’d just said. “Very far,” Ian said. They both shook their heads in bewilderment. “Give us your family’s address in America,” the interrogator said. Ian felt perplexed. “What for,” he said. “Just give,” the interrogator said. Ian heard in his head the ugly threat about his legs. He thought of the distance between shores. He told them of his family’s address. Unsettled, he felt cross. The interrogator said something incomprehensible in English. The interpreter then said to Ian, “What is your father’s profession?” Ian studied the men, then said, “He is dead.” “What was his profession when he was alive?” the interrogator said. “He was a . . . civilian,” Ian said. “Who did he work for?” “The CIA.” The interrogator winced. “Xịa?” he asked the interpreter who asked Ian, “SeeEyeAy?” Ian  nodded. “What was his rank?” “No rank. He was not in the army.” “What rank?” “He was an officer. He had a GS grade. You probably would not understand if I explain.” The interrogator mused then said something to the interpreter who asked, “Where did he die?” “At home.” “What did he die of?” Ian looked down at the floor to hide his resentment. They waited on him with the usual patience. Finally he lifted his gaze at them. “Cancer,” he said. “What?” the interrogator said. “He died of sickness,” Ian said. But the interrogation went on for two more days until the interrogator felt satisfied with the consistency of Ian’s answers. By then, biting down the evil pains in his legs, Ian began to grit his teeth until his jaw locked to drive his thoughts away from the pains. But only momentarily. Evil pains. Horrible pains. He knew now why people killed themselves when pains became unbearable. Then while he was racked with pains, a doctor came in. The doctor began feeling his calves, probing them with his fingers. Each probe made Ian swallow his moans. In no time, the doctor shot his legs with Novocain and proceeded to clean out the wounds with a hemostat, the way the nurse did. Then he picked the bone splinters out of the wounds. It took a long time. After the last sliver was removed, he shot Ian’s legs with Penicillin. His thick glasses fogged when he was done bandaging Ian’s legs. He clapped shut his medical satchel. “You are gud,” he said. “Tomorrow I give you more Penicillin and I luk at your head.”

*

There were more American prisoners now, a dozen more, since I saw him the first time. By now Ian’s legs had healed but his head wound still gave him a constant headache. He’d never smoked before he had the headache. Now he chain-smoked. Now he knew how to roll cigarettes like us, his captors. Thumbs,  middle fingers twirling and coaxing the tobacco packed paper into a tight, stubby cylinder, the paper edge quickly licked to seal it. He took a drag, sitting on his haunches just like a Vietnamese, his arms flopping over his knees, the cigarette hung between his lips the way the Vietnamese smoked their handrolled joints. On a nearby cot sat a red-haired American, thin as reed, with hairiest eyebrows like caterpillars, who shook his head at Ian. “Doesn’t he look like a gook, eh?” he said, grumbling. By and by some of the prisoners had begun to squat like gooks. They also rolled up their trouser legs past their knees like gooks. From their cigarette ration that he had pooled together, Ian bribed a guard with two dozen cigarettes in exchange for a small bottle of Nhị Thiên Đường, the eucalyptus oil the Vietnamese would daub on their nostrils, their temples when sick. Squatting on his heels, Ian smeared his palm with a streak of the blue-gum oil and then rolled his cigarette back and forth over the streak. He passed the bottle to a next guy among the smokers. “Conserve it,” he said. “That’s gold.” He lit his cigarette, sucked on it deeply and closed his eyes. The acrid smell of handrolled cigarettes momentarily distracted the nose from a rotten odor in the hut. It wasn’t from the kitchen―an aperture in the ground lined with rocks with a long bamboo tube that carried the cooking smoke and dispersing it out of sight against the American spotter planes. The odor came in from outside, five feet away in the rear of the hut, where the open-air latrine was―a hole in the ground covered with a wooden plank. Blowflies would drop eggs in the hole whenever someone forgot to lid the hole and soon the pit was alive with maggots and the air was humming with metallic blue, green flies. Sometimes a hen, a rooster would come and stick their heads in the hole to peck away the maggots among the muck. Whenever I came by his hut I’d stay outside, for a permanent stench pervaded the hut when the breeze blew toward it, and on a hot day the heat would cook the hut, the god-awful smell would give everyone a headache.

*