Thomas Harris - Black Sunday

Good news. The medics rate my hand only ten percent impaired. It should not affect my flying status. Margaret and the kids will have to see it sooner or later.

St. Alban‘s, March 20.

Jergens is down the hall. He hopes to go back to teaching, but he is in bad shape. We were cellmates exactly two years, I think. He says it was 745 days. He is dreaming, too. Sometimes the Weasel. He has to have the door of his room open. It was all the solitary toward the last that brought him down. They would not believe that he wasn’t yelling deliberately in the cell at night. The Weasel yelled at him and called General Smegma. Smegma’s real name was Capt. Lebron Nhu, I must remember that. Half French, half Vietnamese. They shoved Jergens back against the wall and slapped him and this is what Jergens said:

“Various species of plants and animals carry lethal factors which, when homozygous, stop development at some stage and the individual dies. A conspicuous case is that of the yellow race of the house mouse, mus musculus, which never breeds true. This should be of interest to you, Smegma. (That was where they started trying to drag him out of the cell.) If a yellow mouse is mated to some nonyellow, half the young are yellow and half are nonyellow (Jergens was holding on to the bars then and Weasel went outside to kick his fingers), a ratio to be expected from mating a heterozygous animal, yellow, with a homozygous recessive, any nonyellow such as agouti, a small voracious rodent, slender legged, resembling a rabbit but with smaller ears. If two yellows are mated together, the young average two yellow and one nonyellow, whereas the expected ratio among the young would be one pure yellow to two heterozygous yellow to one nonyellow. (His hands were bleeding and they were dragging him down the hall and him still yelling.) But, the ‘homozygous yellow’ dies as an embryo. That’s you, Smegma. The ’creeper fowl’ with short, crooked legs behaves genetically like the yellow mouse.”

Jergens had six months solitary for that and lost his teeth on the diet. He had that about the yellow mouse scratched on the slats in his bunk and I used to read it after he was gone.

I am not going to think about that anymore. Yes I am. I can say it to myself during the other things. I must raise this mattress and see if anyone in the hospital has scratched on the slats.

St. Alban‘s, April 1, 1973.

In four days I can go home. I told Margaret. She will trade days in the car pool to come get me. I have to be careful with my temper, now that I am stronger. I blew up today when Margaret told me she had arranged to trade cars. She told me she ordered the station wagon in December, so it’s already done. She should have waited. I could have gotten a better deal. She said the dealer was giving her a very special deal. She looked smug.

If I had a protractor, a level, navigation tables and a string I could figure out the date without a calendar. I get one hour of direct sunlight through my window. The strips of wood between the windowpanes make a cross on the wall. I know the time and I know the latitude and longitude of the hospital. That and the angle of the sun would give me the date. I could measure it on the wall.

Lander’s return was difficult for Margaret. She had begun to build a different life with different people in his absence, and she interrupted that life to take him home. It is probable that she would have left him had he come home from his last tour in 1968, but she would not file for a divorce while he was imprisoned. She tried to be fair, and she could not bear the thought of leaving him while he was sick.

The first month was awful. Lander was very nervous, and his pills did not always help him. He could not stand to have the doors locked, even at night, and he prowled the house after midnight, making sure they were open. He went to the refrigerator twenty times a day to reassure himself that it was full of food. The children were polite to him, but their conversation was about people he did not know.

He gained strength steadily and talked of returning to active duty. The records at St. Alban’s Hospital showed a weight gain of eighteen pounds in the first two months.

The records of the Judge Advocate General of the Department of the Navy show that Lander was summoned to a closed hearing on May 24 to answer charges of collaboration with the enemy lodged by Colonel Ralph Delong.

The transcript of the hearing records that Exhibit Seven, a piece of North Vietnamese propaganda film, was shown at the hearing, and that, immediately afterward, the hearing was recessed for fifteen minutes while the defendant excused himself. Subsequently, testimony by the defendant and by Colonel Dejong was heard.

The transcript on two occasions records that the accused addressed the hearing board as “Mam.” Much later, these quotations were considered by the blue-ribbon commission to be typographical errors in the transcript.

In view of the accused’s exemplary record prior to capture and his decoration for going after the downed air crew, the action that led to his capture, the officers at the hearing were inclined to be lenient.

A memorandum signed by Colonel Dejong is affixed to the transcript. It states that, in view of the Defense Department’s expressed wish to avoid adverse publicity regarding POW misconduct, he is willing to drop the charges “for the larger good of the service” if Lander offers his resignation.

The alternative to resignation was court martial. Lander did not think he could sit through the film again.

A copy of his resignation from the United States Navy is attached to the transcript.

Lander was numb when he left the hearing room. He felt as if one of his limbs had been struck off. He would have to tell Margaret soon. Although she had never mentioned the film, she would know the reason for his resignation. He walked aimlessly through Washington, a solitary figure on a bright spring day, neat in the uniform he could never wear again. The film kept running in his head. Every detail was there, except that, somehow, his POW uniform was replaced with short pants. He sat down on a bench near the Ellipse. It was not so far to the bridge into Arlington, not so far to the river. He wondered if the undertaker would cross his hands on his chest. He wondered if he could write a note requesting that the good hand be placed on top. He wondered if the note would dissolve in his pocket. He was staring at the Washington Monument without really seeing it. He saw it with the tunnel vision of a suicide, the monument standing up in the bright circle like a post reticule in a telescopic sight. Something moved into his field of vision, crossing the bright circle, above and behind the pointed reticule.

It was the silver airship of his childhood, the Aldrich blimp. Behind the still point of the monument he could see it por poising gently in a headwind and he gripped the end of his bench as though it were the elevator wheel. The ship was turning, turning faster now as it caught the wind on the starboard side, making a little leeway as it droned over him. Hope drifted down upon Lander through the clear spring air.

The Aldrich Company was glad to have Michael Lander. If the company officials were aware that for ninety-eight seconds his face had appeared on network television denouncing his country, they never mentioned it. They found that he could fly superbly and that was enough.

He trembled half the night before his flight test. Margaret had great misgivings as she drove him to the airfield, only five miles away from their house. She needn’t have worried. He changed even as he walked toward the airship. All the old feeling flooded him and invigorated him and left his mind calm and his hands steady.

Flying appeared to be marvelous therapy for him, and for part of him it was. But Lander’s mind was jointed like a flail, and as he regained his confidence the half of his mind held steady by that confidence gave strength to the blows from the other half. His humiliation in Hanoi and Washington loomed ever greater in his mind during the fall and winter of 1973. The contrast between his self-image and the way he had been treated grew larger and more obscene.