P. O. W. (5 page)

She roared her anger again, and this time the rest of the jungle heard her and showed their respect by becoming quiet.

Woods ran straight ahead and took up a fighting position near the edge of a bomb crater. Arnason passed him and headed in
the direction of the trail. He had a little difficulty locating the first seismic-intrusion detector, but after that it was
fairly easy locating the rest, because he remembered how far apart they were. Woods worked frantically with his entrenching
tool, digging up the sensors and flipping them over to activate the destruction devices. He recalled how heavy they were carrying
them up the mountain and was glad that they didn’t have to haul them out again.

The Special Forces captain sat in his command bunker and watched the lights first flash on, telling him that the sensor had
been activated, and then flash off, signaling that the instrument had been destroyed. He waited until each one of the devices
had flashed its message on the receiver in his A-camp, and then he called back the number that had been broadcast to his headquarters.
He understood why the secret devices had to be destroyed, but at the same time he was very unhappy about it, because the sensors
had provided him and his team with a number of early warnings regarding enemy movement, just in the few weeks they had been
working.

Arnason located the last sensor and pointed for Simpson to dig it up and activate it. Sergeant Lee San Ko worked over the
surrounding jungle with his eyes. He radiated an impressive sense of calmness under pressure. Arnason was well pleased so
far with the NCO. He keyed his radio and called for the slicks to return and pick up his team. They had accomplished their
mission. He waved Lee San Ko and Simpson back to him and looked for Woods. Arnason shifted his position to the opposite side
of the trail and looked both ways for Woods and still couldn’t locate him.

Arnason turned to the junior sergeant and whispered, “Where’s Woods?”

Lee San Ko pointed with his rifle barrel down the trail. “He was going in that direction the last time I saw him.”

Arnason knew.

Woods moved down the trail in a low crouch, but he still maintained his speed. He wanted to get as far away from the recon
team as possible before Arnason discovered him missing. He knew that technically he was going AWOL, but he didn’t care. He
was going to find Spencer Barnett or die in the process. He knew that he couldn’t go on living with the memory of leaving
his friend behind haunting him every day and night, especially after he had promised Spencer that he would never leave him
alive out in the jungle.

Sergeant Amason knew that he had only a few minutes to catch up to Woods before the extraction helicopters arrived. He hoped
that Woods had stayed on the trail and wasn’t moving too fast. He himself was running with little regard as to any chance
meeting with NVA soldiers, banking on the air strikes’ having cleared the immediate area of any enemy for him. Arnason just
caught a glimpse of Woods’s back as the soldier turned a slight bend in the trail. He ran harder.

Woods heard the footfalls and turned with his CAR-15 to meet the threat. He was hoping that it would be NVA, but he knew instantly
that Arnason had figured out what he was planning to do.

Woods hissed the words. “Get away!”

Arnason dived and tackled Woods just above his knees. The pair rolled into the thick underbrush. Woods struggled, but his
CAR-15 and pack hindered him. Arnason grabbed Woods under his jaw and forced his head back against the thick plants on the
ground.

“You’re coming back now!” Arnason growled the words. “No questions asked!”

Woods realized that the game was up and nodded his head in agreement.

“And no more of this shit! You hear?” Arnason was angry. “I like Barnett too! But this is not the way to find him!”

Woods’s eyes flashed his anger, and he tried talking with Arnason’s fingers squeezing his cheeks. His voice sounded muffled.
“I made a promise.”

“Let’s get back…. I’ve already called for extraction.” Amason ended the conversation

The run back to the edge of the landing zone seemed a thousand times longer than it had going for both of the men. Arnason
could see the slick making its approach and signaled for Simpson and Lee San Ko to load up first. He kept himself within arm’s
length of Woods. The chopper’s skids were starting to lift off the rocks when Arnason hopped on board and took hold of Woods’s
web gear. The look in the sergeant’s eyes told the soldier not to try to jump back down on the ground. Woods sighed and leaned
back against the nylon webbing of the seat.

The Special Forces captain stood in the clearing inside of his A-camp with the hand flare uncapped, ready to fire. He waited
until the slick was passing over his camp and rammed his open palm against the bottom of the blue star cluster.

Arnason could see the burst off to his right side and looked down at the small dot on the ground. He gave the captain a thumbs-up
sign and smiled.

The tigress had watched the two humans wrestling on the edge of the trail and was just about ready to attack when they stopped
and started running back down the trail. She knew that her maimed hip would prevent her from catching either one of them and
growled her disappointment. She started a slow hobble down the trail, knowing that every time the loud sounds came to the
jungle there was always something dead that was good to eat.

The old Montagnard sat under the shady overhang of the thatched roof of the longhouse and mixed another pot of rice wine.
He dipped in water from the jug his eldest grandson had carried up from the river and then added a handful of husked rice.
The wine was being fermented for a special ceremony in honor of Tang Lie, the devil spirit that had taken possession of their
village through the North Vietnamese. He mumbled enticing chants under his breath as he prepared the wine, trying to get Tang
Lie interested in the intoxicating drink. The tribe was hoping that they could get Tang Lie drunk and then lead him from the
village so that their god, Ae Die, would return and bring happiness back to the mountain community.

The girl began to cry very softly, but the old man could still hear her through the matting that covered the end of the community
house. She was his youngest daughter and his favorite one. He heard the American soldier begin grunting like a pig and knew
that he had mounted her again. The old Montagnard threw in a double handful of rice and slowly stirred the large pot of wine.
He watched the tiny bubbles rise to the top and begged Tang Lie to accept his humble gift and give the black American soldier
the disease that slowly rots away a man’s body. He added another handful of rice and asked that the leprosy start with the
man’s sex organ.

The North Vietnamese soldier looked up in the sky for aircraft before running the short distance from Lieutenant Van Pao’s
office to the longhouse where the black American lived with his Montagnard woman. He hated going to get the American, because
every time he saw the man his jealousy burned his throat. The American was the only one allowed to have a woman all to himself.

The old man saw the soldier coming and removed any expression of hate from his face. The Vietnamese thought the mountain people
were dumb, so he would act dumb for them. He added another handful of rice to his wine. Tang Lie would be very happy: the
wine was strong and would make the evil one’s head hurt.

The NVA runner pushed the bamboo curtain aside and saw the naked man lying next to the young girl. “Come! The lieutenant wants
to talk to you!”

“Get the fuck out of here!” James pointed his finger at the soldier but made no attempt to cover his nakedness. He enjoyed
teasing the North Vietnamese by exposing his large penis; it was one of the few things he could do to show his superiority
over them.

“Come now!” The soldier left the longhouse angry. He wanted to kill the American pig, slowly.

Lieutenant Van Pao sat behind her makeshift bamboo desk with her hands folded in front of her. She twisted her lip and stared
directly into Barnett’s eyes. “What am I going to do with you, Spencer? You refuse to cooperate…. You taunt the soldiers of
the People’s Army. You are
not
a good boy!”

Barnett sat on the bamboo pole that had been erected in her office and struggled to balance himself. The pole was designed
not as a seat, but for a man to hang from upside down. The guards on each side of Barnett held him up by holding him under
his armpits. He had been tied to the pole in the worst torture position of all. The two-inch bamboo rod had been placed behind
his knees, and his forearms were pulled forward under the bar and tied at his wrists. A thin parachute cord was tied around
his ankles and pulled tight and tied behind his back and around his neck. Once the guards let go of him, he would roll off
the top of the bar and hang below it, with all of his weight falling on his knee joints. If he tried relaxing his legs, the
parachute cord would start to strangle him.

“Please! Please, cooperate with us and I can have you untied…. Oh, Spencer Barnett, you have served your country well!” She
smiled when James walked into the room and stood next to the doorjamb behind Barnett where he couldn’t be seen. “Why can’t
you be sensible like Mohammed James and help us?”

“Fuck you, Sweet Bitch.”

She flinched. The nickname the POWs called her behind her back always angered her, not because of what it meant but because
it showed a lack of respect for her as a soldier and an NVA officer.

“Come on, Spence…” James stepped forward so Barnett could see his smiling face. “It’s not that bad… you might even get a woman.”

Barnett didn’t answer James. He glared at him, and with his eyes he told his ex-teammate what he would like to do to him.

“Now, now, Spence…” James huffed and smiled, using only one side of his mouth. “Don’t you remember the last time you got uppity?”

“Enough, Mohammed James!” Van Pao wasn’t going to give up her authority as the senior interrogator of prisoners. “I will handle
him.”

Spencer sucked as much spit as he could from his dry mouth and looked over at James. The spit hit the black soldier under
his left eye. Barnett smiled.

“You!” James took a step forward and was stopped by the guard holding Spencer’s left arm. “You’re dead!”

“Spencer… this is your last chance! Tell me where you buried the sensors, and you’ll be cut free….” She lit a Marlboro and
blew the smoke at the prisoner. “If not…” She shrugged her shoulders. “We haven’t had a prisoner die in a long time… not since
the South Vietnamese lieutenant committed suicide.”

Barnett took a deep breath, knowing what was coming next. It was going to be the last easy breath he would take for quite
a while.

The guards released Spencer’s arms, causing the prisoner to fall backward, almost making a complete revolution around the
pole. The pain was instant. He rocked back and forth under the smooth rod, which bent under his weight. The yokes at each
end of the pole vibrated but remained upright. That was the good thing about bamboo: it always gave under pressure from the
elements and never broke. Barnett recalled what Colonel Garibaldi had told him about being flexible. When he had first been
interrogated, he tried not to yell or scream, but the colonel had assured him that he would last longer without telling them
what they wanted to know if he screamed as loud as he could.

Lieutenant Van Pao strolled over to where Spencer hung and gently caressed the bare soles of his feet with her split bamboo
rod. She walked around him for a couple of minutes, humming softly, and then she swung the bamboo version of a cat-o’-nine-tails
hard so that the split rod landed on the soft inner soles of Spencer’s feet. The pain behind his knees was forgotten as his
feet burst apart in pain. Spencer bit his lip, even though the colonel had told him to start screaming the instant they touched
him. He would try to hold back for just a little while.

“Well, he’s going to be a
brave
boy today.” She lashed out with the rod again and again, until she heard the first whimper from the young man’s throat.

“Let me have a swing….” Mohammed James held out his hand for the bamboo rod. Van Pao hesitated and then smiled. She gave the
switch to James and spoke rapidly to one of the guards in Vietnamese.

Spencer was gasping for air. The pause in the lashes against his feet let the pain flash up his legs.

James noticed the bulge in Barnett’s black pajama pants where the teenager’s testes were and lowered his aim. The blow was
so hard that it rocked Spencer halfway around the pole.

The old Montagnard heard the blond boy’s screams from his seat on the porch. He stopped adding water to his rice wine and
looked over toward the building where the female Vietnamese tortured the prisoners and occasionally one of the villagers.
He had been the headman of the village until the North Vietnamese soldiers had come. He had spent a couple of very unpleasant
days in the darkened room.

Colonel Garibaldi heard Spencer’s scream and felt like crying. He watched Mother Kaa sleeping in her cage and mumbled to himself.
“Please… talk, Spencer! Tell them every damn thing you know! Talk… talk…
talk.
” He started crying.

The old Montagnard struggled to his feet. The cool weather was making his joints hurt all of the time. His eyes were getting
so bad that he was blind as soon as it got dusk outside; even with a full moon, he was sufficiently incapacitated to need
one of his grandsons to lead him to the men’s place behind the village, if he had to go at night. He knew what he must do;
a Bru chief did not sit idly by and allow the evil spirit, Tang Lie, to bring so much pain to his village. He was still the
chief of the Bru.

Colonel Garibaldi looked over at his wooden cross and started praying for Christ to intervene and stop the boy’s pain.

Spencer passed out.

“He isn’t lasting as long as he used to….” She gently tapped the bamboo whip against her leg and could feel the sting through
her khaki pants. She stopped hitting herself.