The American Prisoner

By Khanh Ha

We lived deep in the jungle. To reach us, it would take two full days on foot from the Mekong Delta. We hacked away brush and vines and bamboo thickets and leveled the fern-covered ground to build our camp. Above us rose very tall, giant trees, one rising above another so that they formed foliaged crowns so thick when it rained it became drips sluicing down the underneath curves of the vault. When the sun reached its zenith at midday, it felt like twilight below.

The American prisoners were quartered in a thatched hut, low lying with three mud-and-bamboo laced sides. Its open side faced a guard shack outside the bamboo enclosure. I could see them moving around, drooped, heads bent. The hut was built that way so that, to move around, the prisoners had to lower their heads all the time. That adopted posture would eventually affect their psyches. Outside the fence, along its base where the earth was thick with creepers, a line of bamboo stakes were planted underground. I knew that none of the prisoners would ever try to escape, because the booby traps might not kill them but the wilderness beyond would.

*

He was one of the first American prisoners of war I saw. He could speak Vietnamese and, unless in long sentences, he had only a slight accent. I heard his prison mates call him Ian. Later I heard that he’d been with us for six months. They captured him before his friends got to him. Then they had to carry him. His legs were messed up badly from one of our hand-made mines. A piece of metal from the mine was still lodged in his head. He said our doctors told him they couldn’t remove it, not that they didn’t want to try, but they didn’t want to risk his life if they did. So now he only slept on the one side opposite the side of his head wound. He said it gave him a numbing headache if he slept on the other side. It was his bad karma, he said, that he stepped onto the mine. He said it in Vietnamese and we all laughed at the word he used. Nghiệp. Smart man. Said the mine was made from a howitzer shell. American artillery shell, he said. Then he winked at us as we sensed the irony.

When the mine sprang on him, he screamed, then blacked out. Waking he felt like he’d just got hit on the side of the head with a blackjack. O death, where is your victory? O death where is your sting? he said the Bible words in his head. He saw faces looking down at him. Crowned by oyster-colored pith helmets. He said―without even opening his mouth―Pleasehelpme!

*

Now I looked at him, his frail frame, his red-haired head always lolling to one side, the opposite side of his head wound. I said to him in English, “No one wants to die.”

“To die is gain,” he said, then quickly added, “that’s from the Bible. You Catholic?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Buddhist?”

“No.”

“No religion?”

“No.”

His lips puckered, he eyed me. He looked so gaunt, so malnourished  his cheekbones cut sharp like Vietnamese cheekbones.

 “I’m surprised they didn’t kill you back then,” I said.

“They didn’t,” he said, this time in Vietnamese. “But the people in the next village almost did.”

“What did they do?”

“This woman came running to me,” he said. “She had a hoe in her hands. I was in a litter. The guards did not see her. I raised one arm to avert the blow. I grabbed a guard by his shirt with my other arm. He turned. I shrank to the size of a rabbit. He grabbed the hoe and shoved her back. She shot her finger at me repeatedly and words flew out of her mouth. I’m sure they must be scathing.”

His words came out slowly. His Vietnamese accent was neither northern nor southern. It had a neutral intonation. He must have picked up the language from all sources of speakers. He could talk small talks in Vietnamese. When he talked at length, he’d throw in English words. Likewise, I’d fall back on Vietnamese when I talked at length with him in English. And we had done just fine in our small conversations.

He paused to regain his breath. His eyes were serene. Light golden-brown eyes. They never darted while he spoke to you. Never a second thought fleeting in them. I liked him.

He asked for a Vietnamese word. Cinders. Then another. Mortar. I told him. He said, “Then I saw many huts burned to cinders on our way through. Like half the village was gone. People gathered along the dirt road. They pointed toward me on the litter and yelled Meey! Meey! I felt that I was the main attraction. We went past a graveyard. There was a number of fresh graves. I could tell by the color of fresh dirt. In front of a grave I saw three mortar shells laid out in a row. Iron-rust color. They were duds.”

He said the word “duds” in English. I said I knew what it meant. He said, “I’m sure later they will be used as booby traps on us. Then a guard spoke to me in his broken English, ‘See that man?’ I tried to follow his hand pointing toward the crowd. ‘See that woman? That boy?’ Then he pointed toward the fresh graves and kept nodding at me. I couldn’t help thinking that one of those fresh graves was for someone from the woman’s family.”

*

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.

*

It rained all night. In the morning the distant mountain lay shrouded in a fog burning slowly off as another wall of fog would come rolling in, thinned then by the sun and drifting away like hallucination.

Outside the prisoners’ hut I saw Ian sitting on his haunches, swathed in a burlap bag. It was what we gave the prisoners for a blanket. We took the U.S. Agency for International Development rice bags―stamped on the outside with a clasped-hands logo above the line Donated by the People of the United States of America―cut them open and sewed them together to the size of a small blanket. It was chilly. Ian peered up at me, his hands palming a tin cup. It must be hot tea, for steam was curling up from the cup. They received tea ration but never coffee, and by now most of them must have forgotten what coffee tasted like.

I drew a deep drag on my cigarette and his gaze followed my hand motion as I exhaled a plume of smoke. I could tell he craved a cigarette. Yet I couldn’t offer him one, for the guard in the lookout shack behind me must be watching.

“Tea is good on a morning like this,” I said to him in English.

“This isn’t tea,” he said, dropping his gaze to the cup. “Sữa ngọt.”

He extended his hand that held the cup. The condensed milk looked like chalk water. He sipped, holding it in his mouth as if to savor something precious in it. As he gulped it down he sucked in his cheeks. Gaunt and anemic looking, his face had a fuzzy line along the jaw. His beard wasn’t growing anymore because of malnutrition. He clasped his hands around the cup, shivering.

“Where’re your sandals?” I asked, looking down at his bare feet. Hunched up, he looked like a pelican at rest with the burlap bag draping his back.

“Saving them,” he said, eyeing my black-rubber sandals. “Wearing them only when I go picking greens.”

They would go with the guards deeper in the forest to pick wild greens and the guards would tell them which plants they should stay away if they were to live another day—most of the greens were inedible and some poisonous. Often they brought back wild banana flowers and then peeled away the tough outer layers until they reached the tender-looking, finger-length buds, yellow and lithe. They would cook them in watered-down nước mắm and eat with cooked rice. They craved fish sauce which was rationed, so Ian told me they added water to it and boiled it. The heated nước mắm would taste much saltier that way and they would wet their rice and eat it.

Sipping his watered-down milk, he told me they received a can of condensed milk the other day to share among themselves. Each one got a spoonful to add to his cup of hot water and the diluted milk was so thin it barely tasted sweet anymore. He said the trick was to drink it hot to intensify the sweetness. He said he hoped to receive another can of condensed milk soon, for fresh supplies had just arrived. At my quizzical look, he grinned and pointing toward the trail beyond the lookout shack said he saw women carrying U.S. AID burlap bags into camp the evening before. I nodded, remembering one time he asked me why the women porters each had a large banana frond covering her back beneath the bag, and I explained to him that the frond helped keep her sweat from soaking into the rice bag. “Ingenious,” he said. “Just common sense,” I said. He shook his head, said, “No, I mean the way they took our AID bags and turned them into backpacks with straps sewn on them for carrying things around.”

Like most prisoners, he cherished rice. I knew between that and boiled manioc, they would beg for rice and nước mắm which they treasured for the scarcity of salt. Once I saw him sitting outside under the sun with the rice pot between his knees. “Rat shit,” he said. I could see black clumps among the shiny rice grains. Whenever they forgot to lid their rice pot, much often as they would with their latrine, rats would get in the pot in the night and eat the grains. Mornings they would have to wash the rice grains to get rid of rat feces which, at times, were so clumped up with the grains they could not be separated.

The next day I gave Ian a handful of black seeds and told him to soak them in water overnight and then plant them. “What are they?” he asked. “Mồng tơi,” I told him. “Red-stem spinach.Very nutritious.”

The following day I saw him behind the hut, burying seeds in the soil. “Some kind of seeds,” he said to me and showed me the can in which he’d soaked the seeds. The color of water was wine-red. I explained to him that the red-stem spinach would grow as tall as an average Viet man and he said, “I’ll build a teepee for it.” “What’s a teepee?” I asked. “Wait till you see it,” he said and started splitting bamboo and drove the strips into the ground and tied the splits with the choại strings―the vines from a swamp fern plant that we would soak in water and use them as ropes. The conical-shaped support he built became a home for the climbing spinach. Monsoon rains that soaked the forest for days helped the seeds sprout quickly. In two weeks scarlet stems began pushing up and twining around the teepee and pale green leaves shot out from the stems that now lost their baby red and turned into a deep-wine red. After I showed him how to cook the spinach, he went around collecting more than two dozen cigarettes and traded them with the guards for two chicken eggs. He cooked the spinach in two pots they had―the rice pot and the pot for boiling water―and borrowed from the guards another pot to cook their rice in. He had his mates crush a handful red peppers that they grew behind their hut and mixed them with the diluted nước mắm in a wooden bowl. He cut up the two boiled eggs and dropped them into the bowl. It was the first time I saw the prisoners eat together, sitting on their haunches in a circle, the pots in the center on the dirt floor, swept clean, arms flying, chopsticks clacking, shoveling rice into their mouths, dipping clumps of spinach into the egg-and-red-pepper nước mắm, inhaling their food and all forgetting the latrine-nauseating stink that made the air blister.

*

Summer drew to a close and that year the cicadas hung on stubbornly in the trees. You could hear them ringing and shrilling across the air, deep in the tangles of cajeput and bamboo groves. Ian and his mates had seen the guards hunt baby cicadas at night, and the sight of flickering lanterns around the bases of trees every night had become familiar around the camp. They looked for newly hatched cicadas. They peeked through the earth, crawled up tree trunks and shed their skins. Their wings were pale. Before the nymphs’ new skins  could harden and their wings were to fill with fluid to turn themselves into an adult, the guards picked them, one by one, off the tree trunks. They dropped  those nymphs into a salt-water pot so the nymphs’ wings stopped stiffening and then they boiled them. In a wok they stir-fried them with granular salt and you could smell a mouth-watering aroma coming out of the camp kitchen.

At noon when I walked by their hut I heard Ian call out from inside, “Giang!” I saw him sitting on the dirt floor with five of his mates, the lidded rice pot on the floor among them. Inside the hut the evil smell from the latrine made me hold my breath. I saw what they had for lunch. The only dish to go with rice was boiled corn which they grated and doused with nước mắm mixed with crushed hot peppers.

“You want ve?” Ian asked me, holding the rice bowl in midair.

“Ve?” I said. “Cicada?”

He nodded, shushing me with his finger against his lips. I looked out toward the guard’s hut and turned back. “You caught the baby cicadas?” I said, feeling curious. The prisoners were forbidden to go outside their hut at night, except to use the latrine in the full view of the guard. One of his mates lifted the lid on the rice pot and inside, piled up above the cooked rice, were stir-fried baby cicadas. Ian picked one up. “Try it,” he said. The cicada had a smoky smell when I sank my teeth into it. It popped with a plup sound. A fatty flavor so rich with raw salt bit my tongue. “This is good,” I said to him, licking my lips, feeling all my taste buds rise up. “You caught them?”

“Late last night,” he said, grinning, as all the hands snuck at the same time into the rice pot and then came the popping sounds and the lid was quickly put back on. They all grinned, happy as a child on the Lunar New Year.

*

We had a late-summer storm. Most of the roofs suffered damages and we also had a shortage of drinking water. The storm and heavy rains had roiled the creek nearby from which we ran a long bamboo channel to our kitchen and from the kitchen the prisoners were to carry water to their own hut in hard-rubber containers. Mud was everywhere. Red mud left footprints on the dirt floors, the footpaths, on cots and hammocks.

For days rain came and went. During the lulls the heat beat down on the forest mercilessly and the forest floor steamed. While we lay the footpaths with wooden planks, the prisoners were taken to a distant grassland to cut buffalo grass and elephant grass, bundle them and carry them back to camp to thatch the roofs. I saw them hauling home large bundles of grass. It was a sweltering day and the forest vapors hazed the air. I saw Ian sit down on his heels by the trail to take a breather. He was naked to the waist, his back striped with cuts from grass blades. They smarted with their toothy blades and their coarse undersides caused skin rash. You would scratch yourself until your skin chafed. The guards ordered him to move on and I could see the heat was taking toll on him. His legs looked rubbery, his head hung to one side.

We worked long days into nights until our camp was restored. At night it turned cold. I had to put on another shirt and, wrapped tightly in my blanket, I still shivered. I thought of the prisoners and their burlap blankets. Each of them had only one shirt, one pair of pants. I had seen them join their cots so they could draw heat from each other, each sleeping balled up in fetal position to keep warm. A few days later Ian came down with dysentery. They said he had drank unboiled water that the prisoners carried back to their hut from our kitchen, unclean water that we tapped from the nearby creek. I understood that the prisoners had neglected boiling their own drinking water because they were taken every day to the grassland to cut buffalo grass, a long trek away and back. Then from dehydration to bone-chilling cold at night, something had to give. Some other prisoners had diarrhea. One of them walked around with no pants in the hut. The guards told him to put his pants back on and the next thing they saw was watery discharge running down his legs. I went into the hut to check on Ian a few times and he wasn’t doing too well. He could hardly sit because his testicles had swollen to the size of his fist. His legs, his stomach puffed grotesquely. At night sometimes the urge to release was so sudden and great he would let it gush out of his body on his cot. The guards would make them clean the floor every day to rid of the excrement.

*

Within days summer was over. One morning we heard the sound of airplanes and the next day then several days after. The droning of the planes soon became familiar in the early days of that autumn. Nobody knew what the lumbering planes were doing, except that everyone would feel like they had just walked out into a drizzle and felt a dampness on their faces. Everywhere it was damp. The thatch roofs were wet, the hammocks were wet and leaves began to fall, suddenly browned and withered, not the brown nor the red of autumnal leaves, and the grass yellowed like suffering a drought. Then we knew about those C-123 planes and the chemicals they sprayed the forest. The sprays fell like mist, wetting the leaves, and the air smelled tart. On the morning we woke up and saw a giant canopy of the forest cleared away, the mountain showed through as if the forest had moved overnight toward it. On that day Ian’s red-stem spinach died.

That afternoon I visited Ian in his hut. I bought him a can of condensed milk. He looked so pale and his face so misshapen he shocked me with his smile. “Cám ơn,” he said, holding the can tightly in his hand.

“You are welcome,” I said, standing by his cot and holding my breath. His teeth were clattering. I took out a Gauloises Caporals pack of cigarettes and placed it in his other hand.

“This-thing-is-strong,” he said, slurring.

“Help me cut down,” I said with a grin.

He held up the blue-colored pack, gazing at the winged helmet logo, while I let out my breath slowly. I could see dark blotches on the fly of his pants and on the inside of his pants legs. The legs had swollen noticeably.

“Our treasure plant died,” he said, raising his voice with an effort.

“The spinach in the back?”

He nodded. “Many o’em died around’re.”

I told him about the chemicals the two-engined Caribous sprayed our forest with. He said nothing for a while, then, “So they can see you. That’s bad.”

“Bad for all of us,” I said, thinking of him and his sick mates if we had to move on.

That evening, after supper, Ian lapsed into a coma and died before midnight. They said he craved sweet so he drank half the can of condensed milk without eating his evening meal. Our doctor said that could be fatal for a dysentery victim. In the morning we gave them a coffin to bury Ian in and his mates carried the coffin to the camp’s graveyard and dug a grave. They were digging when we heard the plane and soon we saw a spotter coming over the forest. The prisoners stopped and lowered the casket. It was a shallow grave. They said the Lord’s Prayer in the droning of the plane as it disappeared over the mountain.

Sometime in the afternoon the sky buzzed and throbbed with the sounds of helicopters. The gongs alerted us to aerial attack and many of us, including the prisoners, were forced into the bomb shelters. From underground we heard the gunships firing rockets and the roaring of their miniguns and we heard our antiaircraft in concealed locations around the camp. The tremors went through the earth and we could feel it shake in our bunkers.

It was dusk when we left the bomb shelters. Most of the huts were destroyed, our kitchen and the prisoners’ hut, too. Trees fell, snapped in half, looking ragged and white. The graveyard was hit with rockets and large holes in the ground gaped. We could see old coffins upheaved, many burst open, flung about. We could see our fresh grave lay gutted and there wasn’t anything left in it.

As I walked away from the graveyard I remembered I’d once told Ian I had no religion. Something clawed at my throat. Had I a faith, what explanation would I receive?

Khanh Ha is the author of ‘Flesh’ (2012, Black Heron Press) and ‘The Demon Who Peddled Longing’ (November 2014, Underground Voices). He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and the recipient of Greensboro Review’s 2014 Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction.

‘The American Prisoner’ previously appeared in print in the Winter 2014 issue of Permafrost. All rights remain with the author.