Read Forty Days at Kamas Online
Authors: Preston Fleming
Forty Days at Kamas (48 page)
Meanwhile, the identification and sorting of prisoners continued while Jack Whiting left the sun–baked yard stretched across the back seat of a jeep and slipped rapidly into shock.
I watched the jeep cross the no–man's land, join the road toward Heber, then pass by the command tent where I saw my own body lying under the tent's shaded entry. A few feet away, a foursome in desert camouflage uniforms played poker, their rifles propped within easy reach. The Kamas Valley was quiet now. The battle was over. The bosses had won.
"I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country."
—Pol Pot, Cambodian dictator
THURSDAY, JUNE 27
DAY 38
I turned my attention away from where my body lay and looked back across the no–man’s land into the Division 4 parade ground, where 5,000 or more prisoners squatted on the ground in tightly massed squares. Security teams and their turncoat helpers strolled slowly up and down the rows, now and then culling a prisoner to send to the fringes of the yard where a queue of troop trucks waited.
Across the wall in Division 3, I saw warders stack the dead and wounded onto flatbed trucks, stopping only to finish off the occasional survivor with a knife slash across the throat.
I turned my gaze back toward the camp jail just in time to see George Perkins block the path of Colonel Majors as the colonel tried to slip past him. Without making eye contact or showing any sign of their former friendship, Perkins pointed his outstretched hand at the colonel.
"Here’s the one you want," he said to a lean young captain holding a clipboard.
The Chief Commissioner had managed to remove all insignia of rank from his desert camouflage fatigues and looked up in astonishment when his former protégé betrayed him.
"You're certain this one is Majors?" the young captain inquired.
"Completely," Perkins replied, taking one last self–satisfied look.
"Then get him aboard a truck. They'll want him interrogated right away," the captain ordered.
"Oh, no, you don't," Majors challenged. "Get Doug Chambers over here. He and I have a deal. Or call General Boscov or Colonel Tracy. They’ll know what I'm talking about."
"The Deputy Warden is busy. Save it for your interrogator," the captain said with a dismissive sneer. "Your days as a wheeler–dealer are over, Mister."
Majors didn’t see the rifle butt that slammed between his shoulder blades and knocked him to the ground. In an instant a warder seized his wrists and bound them with a plastic restraint loop.
I thought of Doug Chambers and Fred Rocco and wondered how they would be celebrating their victory. The very next instant I found myself soaring across the no–man's–land and the rocky hills surrounding the Kamas camp toward the administration building about a half–mile away. There, on the building's ground–level balcony a modest buffet had been spread on a wooden picnic table. The food was simple fare, consisting of fresh bread, local butter and cheese, tinned meats, greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers, with chocolate bars for dessert. A few steps away stood a card table laden with an ice bucket, plastic cups, and half–filled bottles of bourbon, vodka, and gin.
The Warden and Deputy Warden stood at the edge of the balcony basking in the warm glow of praise from their superior officers. Visiting from State Security Headquarters were Kenneth Cronin and General Gil Hardesty, both of whom had sat down with the rebels and had experienced their bloody–minded intransigence at first hand. Howard Barger had also flown in, along with several lesser lights from Washington and the Denver regional office.
The happiest man in the group appeared to be Fred Rocco, who boasted that only thirty–two more workdays separated him from his retirement with full pension. Doug Chambers broke into a broad smile at Cronin’s announcement that Chambers would replace Rocco as Warden before returning to Washington for a substantial promotion in the fall. Hardesty injected the only gloomy note in an otherwise triumphant gathering by announcing the deaths in action of General Jake Boscov and Colonel Jim Tracy and the wounding of Jack Whiting, along with several dozen troops killed and injured.
The camp bosses and visiting dignitaries showed hearty appetites after rising so early to watch Doug Chambers unleash the attack. Now that the spectacle was over and the battle won, they returned to fill their plates and glasses again and again before departing on wobbly legs.
As the last visitor left the parking lot, Doug excused himself from the Warden to make a phone call from his office. He let the telephone ring many times before giving up and returning the receiver to its cradle. The exhilaration and pride were gone from his face now, leaving loneliness and dejection in their place.
I left the building and returned in the blink of an eye to the spot where my morning's ordeal had begun, behind the massive berm at the edge of the camp's eastern no–man's–land. For several minutes, I watched a pair of young soldiers probe and prod my inert body outside their command tent, disputing with surprising vehemence whether or not to hoist it onto a waiting truck. At last the taller and more forceful of the pair picked up my ankles while his partner stuck his hands under my armpits; then together they swung my body high enough for the warders inside the truck to pull it in.
I moved in closer, not out of any sense of close identification with this lifeless form, but out of pity for the man who had inhabited it. Once he had been someone’s child, had grown up and taken his place in the world, had married and fathered children, had been a decent and capable member of society. Then the Events had swept away the orderly world he had lived in and had brought on the social and moral decay that in little more than a decade had produced the camp system and the people who ran it. Here was a man much like all the other innocent men and women who had been arrested without good reason and compelled to confess to nonexistent crimes to meet the regime’s inexhaustible appetite for enemies.
I moved closer still and reached out instinctively to embrace the pitiable remains. But I could feel nothing. I had no legs for kneeling beside him, no arms for reaching, no hands for touching. Then I felt a sensation that started as a warm tingling. It rose to a dull ache, then to a stabbing pain, and all at once I felt my injured back slam into the floorboards of the flatbed truck as the rear wheels struck a rut and roared off down the dusty track.
"Of all the treasures a State can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious."
—Joseph Stalin
MONDAY, JULY 1
DAY 42
The next time I opened my eyes was on the day after the assault, in the new dispensary unit inside the Service Yard. The only reason I knew this much was that I recognized my nurse and asked her how long I had been unconscious. She told me I had suffered a mild concussion, cracked vertebrae, and ruptured discs, and in the same breath cautioned me that any patient who could walk would be included in the next transport north, expected to depart on Monday.
On Sunday my wheel chair was taken away from me and I was obliged to use crutches to move between my bed and the toilets. The new chief physician accordingly declared me fit for transport. The next morning, less than an hour after the orderlies delivered a breakfast of oatmeal and heavily sweetened tea, a dozen warders arrived at the new dispensary in a school bus to take some twenty of us to the Heber rail yard.
A handful of prisoners refused to go, arguing that their injuries were too severe for work or travel. But the list had already been signed and any resistance was pointless. Those who refused to walk were carried or dragged onto the bus and deposited in a heap in the center aisle.
Although the ride from the camp to the Heber railhead lasted less than a half–hour, I tried to stretch it out as long as I could by paying close attention to every detail of my surroundings. The tufted green blanket of scrub oak covering the western slopes of the valley, the rippling surface of the Jordanelle Reservoir, the clouds of red dust rising behind us on the unpaved roads–all these were scenes I thought I would want to remember when we arrived at our new home in the tundra.
Ever since my arrest I had tried not to harbor unrealistic hopes about regaining my freedom. I had taken the advice of the old–timers and stopped tormenting myself with thoughts of my former life, my family, and what might have been. Then the first glimmerings of revolt had awakened in me a new kind of hope that I could nourish without fear of disappointment, since the true source of the revolt's success lay in our hearts rather than our hands. But the news that Claire was living nearby, that my family's exit visas had been renewed, and that I might be released to join them had created an unbearable tension between the hope of recovering my old life and the need to give meaning to my new life at Kamas.
Now the tension was gone. I had not betrayed the revolt, though I had done my best to escape Kamas. Soon I would be rejoining my fellow rebels and would share their fate. News of the transport north came almost as a relief. I hadn't realized how far I had come already toward accepting it.
The bus turned off the Upper Provo Canyon road onto the main highway that ran through the center of Heber. A few minutes later our bus pulled up at the same rail siding where I had arrived on my first night in Kamas. Across the yard the tanks and APCs that had destroyed the camp four days earlier waited now in well–ordered columns to be loaded onto flatcars. On a nearby siding sat the prison transport cars, their windows barred and screened. Inside I could see the outlines of prisoners huddled in the sweltering compartments until the locomotive arrived that would bear us on our long journey north.
I heard the rear door of the bus creak open and joined the rush to the exit to avoid blows and kicks from the warders. The men who were able to jump down did so and then remained to help those who lacked the strength. I waited my turn and accepted a hand to avoid reinjuring my back.
No sooner had I made it to the ground than my helpers ran ahead to join the queue of prisoners outside the train, with warders in hot pursuit all the way. I looked over my shoulder half expecting a truncheon blow before I realized that I was alone except for a tall middle–aged man in a blue business suit and two submachine gunners who were his bodyguards. It was the Warden, Fred Rocco.
"Come closer, Wagner. I won’t bite you."
I approached slowly, holding on to the side of the bus to keep my balance.
"I figured something was up when Reineke was so eager to get rid of you," Rocco said in a jocular tone. "This morning Headquarters ordered us to send you to Philadelphia."
I leaned against the side of the bus for support. I had heard what he said but could not yet fully absorb it.
"I asked Chambers about you," the Warden continued. "He told me the whole story. Including the part about Claire being your daughter. Remarkable, truly remarkable."
I bristled at the thought of a monster like Rocco speaking my daughter’s name but let it pass.
"And have you decided what to do with me?" I asked.
Rocco looked at me with feigned disbelief.
"What's to decide? What Headquarters wants, Headquarters gets. Besides, with Claire and you both going east, there will be less chance of any, shall we say, embarrassment for Doug's career. I think that’s healthy all around, don’t you?"
"Then I won't be going to Yellowknife?"
Rocco ignored my question.
"I've told these two fellows here to take you to the military airfield in Provo, get you cleaned up, and escort you onto the next military flight to Denver. Our people in Denver will take care of getting you to Philadelphia. Just do me one favor. When you see Claire, tell her Uncle Fred sends his best, won't you?"
I wanted to slug him but I lacked the strength.
"Don't just stand there, Wagner. Go home! We do release some prisoners now and then," he said with a jovial chuckle. "We're not monsters, you know."
"And the generation that has seen the watch."
–towers of the Soviet labor–camp, and witnessed the repudiation of God, and heard the cry "without mercy"; the generation that has seen Bolshevism and Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism; the generation that has witnessed two climaxes—the climax of cruelty in tyranny, and the climax of self–sacrifice and heroism of those who love freedom–must draw these conclusions:
The end justifies the means? If you are faced with tyranny, do not hesitate to say: Yes!
Every end justifies the means? —No!
The end justifies all the means? —No!
Every end justifies all the means? —No, never"!
—Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel
WEDNESDAY, JULY 3
DAY 44
Claire felt her distaste for Philadelphia rise the moment she awoke. Since the train had pulled into 30th Street Station the evening before, memories of her trip west came flooding back to her. Suddenly she recalled the terror and the anger of discovering that she was the only one in her family who remained free. She also remembered the gray skies, the crumbling brick buildings, the rusting bridges, and the sulfurous stench of Philadelphia's oil refineries.
Helen and Martha had reserved a room in a motel just south of the city, within reasonable walking distance of State Security’s Philadelphia District Office. The motel was cheaply built and even more badly managed, being part of a nationalized chain frequented by government employees and other low–budget travelers. Since the collapse of tourist travel shortly before Claire’s birth and the collapse of business travel a few years later, what had once been a glut of hotel space across America had become a permanent shortage. Now, merely finding a vacant room posed a challenge.