Colin Harrison: Afterburn

Reading set phrases, the man insisted that Charlie appear on Hanoi television and renounce the United States. A crowd gathered outside the pen, faces crowded to the slats. More questions. Approach altitudes, fuel requirements. Decoy formations of missions over Hanoi. He shook his head. The man sang on, getting angrier. The villagers outside the pen began to yell, and the men forced his head closer to the trough, where a scum of dead flies, manure, and buffalo hair floated.

"You say!"

He shook his head.

They shoved him deep into the trough. He counted to fifteen.

He was yanked out of the water. "Say! What formation!"

They forced him under again. He held his breath, a matter of concentration, conserve, relax, do not use oxygen… surely they would bring him up… his lungs burned… purple darkness crowded his mind… They pulled him up from the trough. His breath burst.

"Say!"

They gave him no chance to respond. This time his lungs began to burn almost immediately. He could feel water trickling between his lips, his knees sagged, his head was expanding…

They forced him underwater dozens of times, then suddenly stopped and dragged him to a small pit caged over with bamboo near the buffalo paddock. He could walk at a stoop. Here they left him alone, though some of the villagers approached the cage to stare. He forced his head against the bars on the high side of the pit, where he could see the village and surrounding area. In a marshy field below, young women winnowed rice by tossing it on flat baskets. Soldiers with machine guns over their shoulders stood idly by, talking, smoking small pipes. Farther up the hill, a group of villagers dug into the mountain with hand tools. The entrance to the shelter was reinforced with wooden beams laid across one another; women pushing wheelbarrows emerged from the hole. Other villagers poured rice into burlap bags, which they then sewed shut. The soldiers kept a watchful eye over all of this activity. Chickens strutted about the packed earth. An old man smoothed long lengths of green bamboo with a double-handled drawknife. The food-gathering and fortification activity may have meant the Vietcong feared American ground forces were closing in. They had positioned Soviet M-46 130-millimeter field guns on the perimeter of the village. Two Chinese trucks sat axle-deep in dry mud near the edge of the forest. Perhaps the village lay along a spur line of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, within ten or fifteen miles of the Laos border, one way or the other. If American forces were near, and if the rough-cut jungle roads remained difficult, air recon would pick up the trucks.

A day later they took him out of the cage and sat him down in a hootch. The B-52 pilot was lying on a mat, breathing faintly, his exhalations not moving the flies about his mouth and eyes.

"You have to help that man."

The B-52 pilot was dragged outside into the sun.

Then they started on him again. The older man with the slim book.

"You say what is F-4 approach altitude."

He shook his head.

"What is approach speed? How much fuel fly from Ubon to Hanoi? You must say."

When he refused again, they tied his arms tighter behind his back, so tight his elbows touched. They bound his feet and connected a rope from his ankles to the ropes around his wrists. Then they tied another rope to his wrists and ran this up his back and around his Adam's apple. Any movement tightened one rope or another, causing him to feel the connections of bones and cartilage and muscle. Something in his back, he knew now, was broken.

He didn't say anything for the first hour. He was trying to think about it. He was trying to understand the pain so that he could find a way not to feel it. He believed that he was using his best thinking, but it was not working. When he tried to sleep, they poured hot water on his head. Not boiling but very hot. His thinking was no good now. The soldiers put a stick through the ropes and carried him back to his hole in the ground.

It rained. He licked the slats of his cage. Every minute that I live, I can live another. Soldiers stood next to the cage and laughed.

A day, a night, a day, a night, perhaps another day, followed by another night, or was that day a night previous, or was that night a day ago the same one from which he'd just awoken? He tried to count sunrises and sunsets, but his systems of remembrance collapsed into their own complexity, and he was left muttering a number, forgetting what it signified and why he cared. His limbs had stiffened so that he could not quite stand. Even after the ropes were removed, he couldn't bring his arms forward of his ribs. The ropes had rubbed through his flight suit into his skin. Each time the soldiers untied him, they hit him. The tied position became easier. He hated it but he also waited for it. His lips were crusted. He was caked with mud, not the silty brown mud of his youth (not the mud near the river where they played on the tire-swing, arcing high over the water, plunging into the dirty warm current, scrambling up the slick banks to the swing again), but lumpy ooze in which red worms twitched. The villagers trudged by in their conical hats, and the children no longer found him interesting. His shit went from soft to hard. The pain in his stomach started and he would follow it as it dropped through his bowels, and when the ropes came off, he would pray that he could shit the pain out. When he was dragged from his cage, they rinsed him with a bucket of water and put a wooden bowl near his face. Bamboo gruel, rice, dead flies. He was expected to eat it like a dog, and he did.

Some boys poked a stick into the body of the B-52 pilot and it exploded in gas and stink.

There was great hurry. There was no hurry. Night and then day. He knew that.

They broke his arms and he said yes, he flew a plane that dropped bombs.

They were keeping him alive, he did not know why. They made him eat. He remembered his children. A little girl and a little boy. He was glad they would never see him like this. They would grow up and never know their daddy, and if Ellie had any sense, she would marry again as soon as possible. She would know he wanted her to do that. Have more babies, sweetie, as soon as you can.

He said many things about many things and they gave him water and tried to write it down and he kept saying everything and perhaps this made sense to them. One day the complete three-dimensional diagram of the F-4's electrical system came into his head and then it left and he knew he had forgotten it forever.

They tried to wake him so that he could feel what they were doing.

One morning an American prop plane flew over, dropping loose bales of surrender leaflets. They pattered to the ground, several through the slats of his cage right in front of him. He'd seen translations of such leaflets. This one would have fit easily into his palm and showed a picture of a B-52, cargo doors open, a stream of bombs dropping from the plane's belly.

The village children gathered the pamphlets and burned them.

They moved him to a hootch. They took off his old ropes, but he did not change his position. They tied his arms together and the new rope to a pole. Shit softly bubbled out of his ass, a great relief to him.

He spent an entire day straightening his leg. When he finally looked at the leg, it was not straight, not even close.

One morning they laid a board across his shins and put three rice sacks filled with stones on it. By the afternoon he had told them Ellie had signed a mortgage for forty-seven thousand dollars and that his life insurance was thirty-five thousand. They were interested in such large sums and wrote them down. You very rich man. What else you own? He saw no benefit in withholding now. They were killing him, he knew. What else you own? Shares of IBM, he whispered, eight hundred shares. What is IBM? International Business Machines, a company. What is shares? That's a piece, a small piece of the company. How many pieces in all of company? they asked. I don't know. They whipped his back with the flat inner tube of a bicycle tire. Maybe ten million, he cried. This number was far too high for them to believe, and so they whipped him again.