Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Roger,” replied Sergeant Mars.

Squatting over the prisoner, Mars placed his hand under the man’s chin, slowly squeezed the skin of his cheeks together, then shook the head briskly several times. He lifted the head off the ground.

“Tên māy lā gī?” Mars shouted. (What is your name?)

He twisted the face into rubber shapes.

“Tên māy lā gī!”

He let the head fall back. With his hands free he began slapping the prisoner again and again. Sweat flew from his face. On impact his hands made sharp popping sounds. Claypool wanted to scream.

“Tên māy lā gī?”

The prisoner’s upper lip was split but it appeared to move, it made a noise.

“Phuong,” repeated Mars.

“Good,” said Captain Raleigh.

The South Vietnamese police spoke to one another and they all laughed again.

“Māy ō dâu?” (Where do you live?)

The parts of the prisoner’s mouth no longer worked in coordination but functioned in separate movements. Brown fluid dribbled onto the chin. He looked like a feeding grasshopper.

“Binh Doa,” said Sergeant Mars.

Captain Raleigh consulted one of the maps tacked to the wall. “His tag said Tuy Long. That’s more than twenty clicks from Binh Doa.”

Lieutenant Phan said something to his men. This time they did not laugh.

“Tuy Long,” said Sergeant Mars. “Tai sao māy dā dêń dó?” (Why did you go there?)

The prisoner looked into each of the faces hovering around him. He might have been memorizing details.

“Tôi dā dêń dó thăm chi tôī,” he murmured.

“To visit his sister,” said Sergeant Mars.

Captain Raleigh grunted. “And what’s she, a VC nurse?”

“Your football more exciting than this, yes?” inquired Lieutenant Phan.

Sergeant Mars bent closer. “VC,” he whispered.

The prisoner shook his head. “No VC, no VC, no VC. Tôi lā nông dâu.”

“He says he’s a farmer,” translated Mars.

Raleigh peered at the prisoner over the tops of his glasses. For a moment he reminded Claypool of his grandfather. “Well, son,” he said, “I was a farmer once myself and the one thing I never forgot was the smell of horse manure.” The hard polished toe of his boot slammed into the prisoner’s groin. The prisoner screamed just once, then rocked from side to side, the mouth working, tears sliding back into his black hair. “Get this fucker up on the table. Let’s call his sister up and see if he ain’t lying.”

In the center of the shed was a large wooden table sturdy as a butcher’s block. Field pack straps and web belts had been cut, altered, and nailed to the top. The rough surface was covered with stains, the nailheads with rust. Sergeant Mars and Lieutenant Phan lifted the prisoner onto the table, fastened the belts and straps tightly about the thin arms and legs.

“Pay attention now, Claypool,” ordered Captain Raleigh. “You’re about to see something you never saw. Know what I mean?”

Sergeant Mars was unraveling a pair of wires which were attached to a mechanical contraption that resembled a bicycle exerciser. Each wire ended in an alligator clip. Weren’t they going to lock the door? Claypool knew what was next. This was the one they told the stories about, seasoned instructors dispensing trade secrets and coffee between classes at Fort Holabird. It was during these breaks that the students received their most important lessons. The classrooms were reserved for official reality, the corridors for what really happened. Claypool had been disturbed. He hadn’t wanted to hear such stories, to have confirmed as true what was printed in leftist magazines, shouted by hysterical war protesters. It was like learning your family dentist overcharged for extractions or drilled into healthy teeth. It meant there were cliffs where he had always assumed there were fences. It meant he might be required to participate personally in events he had imagined as the aberrant behavior of Marines or Green Berets or airborne paratroopers, angry soldiers out in the boondocks with the heat and the pain. Intelligence personnel, stationed in cozy rear area quarters, conducted interrogations across office desks or seated at the hospital bedsides of wounded prisoners. Preinduction fantasies. Now an actual field phone interrogation was about to take place not six feet from where he sat. He didn’t know what to think. He just hoped he wasn’t going to be asked to turn the crank.

“Doesn’t hurt as bad as it looks,” explained Captain Raleigh. “Think of the lives we’re saving.”

The National Police were joking among themselves again. From the few words and phrases Claypool was able to decipher they seemed to be discussing the relative designs and performances of various American cars. The bottom of Claypool’s stomach felt as if it were floating in a pond of cold green water. Lieutenant Phan sat down at the contraption, hands resting across the handles of the crank. Sergeant Mars clipped the wires to the prisoner’s right ear. Shouldn’t the American turn the crank and the Vietnamese be the one to apply the electrodes? Claypool was distressed by the procedure. He wanted to turn away. The prisoner was breathing quite rapidly now.

“You VC?” asked Sergeant Mars in an expressionless voice.

“No,” answered the prisoner. “No VC.” He shook his head. It was obviously painful for him to speak.

Lieutenant Phan turned the crank. It made a harsh grinding noise like a pencil sharpener. The prisoner made an “ai” sound and tried to lift his body off the table. Lieutenant Phan smiled at Claypool. Those bony teeth.

“VC?” repeated Sergeant Mars.

The prisoner shook his head.

Lieutenant Phan turned the crank.

The prisoner was still a farmer from Binh Doa on a visit to his sister in Tuy Long. Her name was Mai.

“Try his balls,” said Captain Raleigh.

Sergeant Mars ripped the prisoner’s black shorts in half. Leaning forward between the prisoner’s legs, he clipped the wires to the scrotum.

Lieutenant Phan turned the crank.

Claypool had never heard such a cry, not even in the movies. It pierced the skin, continued unbroken between cranks. Once the prisoner seemed to admit that yes, he was VC, a sapper lieutenant, but then he seemed to deny it. Then he talked on and on, a babbling brook of disconnected Vietnamese running out of a ruptured dike.

“I don’t know what he’s saying,” said Sergeant Mars in disgust.

“He praying hard,” Lieutenant Phan explained, “but Buddha not answering his phone.”

Claypool was experiencing difficulty understanding anybody. It was lunchtime and across the compound normal people sat before trays heaped with hot food, a gentle cooking aroma settling over their shoulders like a spell, and in clean well-lighted offices air-conditioned clerks were typing on clean white paper, and down in the motor pool boyish mechanics with greasy fingers were lying on their backs screwing bolts into silent engines, and up in the sky leather-gloved pilots weaved and dipped over land green as a garden hose, and on the other side of the planet, wrapped in a familiar darkness, his mother and father slept peacefully together in a warm locked house.

The prisoner began to weep.

“Shut up,” screamed Sergeant Mars.

He yanked a wire from the prisoner’s groin and whipped it across his cheek. Tears dribbled down into the prisoner’s ears. Mars and Raleigh exchanged looks.

“He disappoints me, this prisoner,” said the captain.

“Hog-tie to jeep,” suggested Lieutenant Phan. “Drive to PX. Number one penalty play.”

“I tell you, Phan buddy,” said Captain Raleigh, “when I leave here I’m gonna put you on a leash and take you with me.”

Lieutenant Phan nodded. “Fine for me. I go States double-time.”