Robert Jones - Blood Tide

And this was shore duty with a vengeance.

Culdee came to know it—its geography, language, customs, nuances—better than he knew his own homeland. From Dogpatch up near the Chinese border to the cluster of camps in and around Hanoi—Alcatraz, the Zoo, the Plantation House, Skidrow, the Rock-pile, Farnsworth, and Camp Hope. He knew the floor plan of the Fiery Furnance—Hoa Lo in Vietnamese, the Hanoi Hilton to the POWs—as well as he knew that of any house or ship he’d ever lived in. Hoa Lo had all the amenities. It was an old French prison from colonial days. Many times he took a sauna and massage in Room 18, more familiarly known to paying guests as the Meathook Room. Many days and nights (indistinguishable from one another) he spent in meditation in the austere decor of the Black Room or the Knobby Room.

He came to know the staff with an intimacy formerly reserved for family members, and not just by face or name, but by the very tread of their sandals and the jangle of their keys. He could not fault them for attentiveness. Often he wished he could. Manager of the entire chain was Major Bui—the Cat to those on conversational terms with the man—slim, soft-spoken, tall for a Vietnamese, well educated, fluent in both French and English. A busy fellow, the Cat, assiduous, serious, totally dedicated to his profession, the consummate military hotelier. Unfortunately, though, he was addicted to quiz shows. A malaise of the times, no doubt. His favorite was a Tonkinese variation on Truth or Consequences . If you didn’t do well on the questions, Beulah the Buzzer rang, and in came the consequences—Pigeye, Vegetable Vic, Hocus Pocus, or the one they called Puddles. These men were conjurers of great art, adept with leg irons, handcuffs, and the Southeast Asian rope trick. In the wink of an eye they could turn a white man’s hands and feet black with dead blood. They were marvels at the vanishing thumbnail gag. In a matter of mere hours they could cause shiny bright scars to encircle a man’s arms—“Hanoi bracelets,” which were a great rarity Stateside.

The highest-paid masseurs and bone crackers of the Western world had nothing on these practitioners when it came to limbering a man up. By tying his arms—tightly, in Manila rope—behind his back so that the elbows touched, they imparted remarkable elasticity to the rib cage and chest muscles. They were expert as well at tenderizing tough meat. Their skill at evoking a sincere primal scream was unequaled in therapeutic circles.

Puddles in particular seemed fond of his work. At the height of the treatment, with his client enjoying (perhaps for the first time in his life) a total aspiration of the lungs and maximum vibration of the vocal cords, Puddles was wont to step back thoughtfully, a dreamy smile playing about his lips, and perform an act of manual self-therapy—selfish but uncontrollable—the culmination of which earned him his nickname. Or, as Culdee once relayed it in tap code through the camp: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village slope-head sat, amusing himself by abusing himself and squirting the juice in his hat.”

Most of the prisoners in the Hanoi camps were fly-boys—either brown-shoe navy or air force. Culdee had little in common with them. Now and then, though, a blue-water sailor would fall into the hands of the V, men like Culdee with no state-of-the-art technological or tactical knowledge. He thought at first that because of his ignorance of the big picture he would be spared the quizzes and beatings afforded his superiors—the talking walls reported nightly on these sessions. But the V weren’t really after military information. They wanted to break your spirit. They wanted propaganda. They were out to break you, whoever you were, to get you singing the full-dress blues regardless of rank or service. If they could get you talking once, they could teach you how to sing. Writing was even better.

Culdee first caught on to this at a temporary camp near Haiphong Harbor called Brigadune. He’d been out at a place they called Upper Slobbovia, near the Laotian border—the camp must have been used by Russians at one point, because the walls of the huts were plastered with pinups of enormously fat ladies, the Fanny Fullenwiders of the Slavic world—and was suddenly awakened in the night, told to grab his tin cup, bamboo mat, blanket, and spare pajamas and di-di-mau . He di-di’ed as mau as he could after two years of jungle soup, cold rice, sour brussels sprouts, weevily bread, and an occasional piece of pigskin with the hair still on it. The truck bumped and rattled for hours, then they were at Brigadune.

It looked like a navy camp, and you could smell the sea. There were sand flies and mangroves and mosquitoes as loud as A6 Intruders. The commandant was a fat little lieutenant commander of the North Vietnamese Navy with a weedy cookie-duster on his apelike upper lip. The My —the Americans—nicknamed him Wimpy. His henchman were Bluto and Swee’pea. The assistant commandant was a two-striper who played good cop to Wimpy’s bad cop. This man was known as Olive Oyl.

Culdee spent his first two weeks at Brigadune in solitary, in a stifling, mildewed, ten-by-ten cell called the Chain Locker. His only companions were spiders as big as teacups. In the haste of departure from Upper Slobbovia, he had lost his mosquito net. No replacement was issued. The room, windowless, was lighted by the world’s weakest light bulb. Culdee figured it at about fifteen or twenty watts. The diet was nautical—hardtack, nuoc mam , smoked shark, the occasional hunk of boiled catfish, but more often, its whiskery head. And rice, of course. But at least there was plenty. No two ways about it. Brigadune was a feeder.

Or at least until the quizzes began. A Quiz:

WIMPY. Cuddy, you tell. What you do U.S. Navy?

CULDEE. Toi khong hieu . [I don’t understand.]

W. What your job—your rating—in American navy?

C. Oh, I thought you were talking Vietnamese.

(Silence, only the sound of buzzing mosquitoes.)

W. Cuddy, You tell! I wait! What you rating? (He is angry now, mustache twitching.)

C. You know that already. Deck Ape.

W. (Calmer now) . Cuddy, what is deck ape? Same bosum mate, hein?

C. Yeah.

W. (Getting to the point.) What equipment you use bosum mate, Cuddy?

(Silence. This is stupid, Culdee thinks, his balls contracting. This shit heel knows damn well what a boatswain does—same fucking thing he does in any navy. He just wants to break me. Again. If I don’t talk—if I follow the code . . .)

W. You tell, Cuddy, or you receive resolute and severe punish.

(There it is, Culdee thinks, the operative phrase. They use it at every camp.)

W. Cuddy, you have bad attitude. You tell!

C. Well, I can’t tell you without violating the code of conduct I swore to uphold.

W. You have bad attitude, Cuddy. (He gestures to BLUTO and SWEE’PEA.)

(Later.)

C. (Hoarsely) . I use the same gear as these guys. (He looks up at BLUTO and SWEE’PEA.)

W. (Looks over at the torturers, shocked, perhaps a bit fearful.) What equipment, Cuddy?

C. Ropes. Hooks. Blocks and tackles. Fids—

W. What is fid, Cuddy? (He pushes over pen, ink, and paper.) You write down.

C. Well, no. I can’t. I can’t write it down.

W. Cuddy, you have bad attitude. You will receive reso—

C. Okay, okay, I’ll write it down. (He reaches for the pen and knocks over the inkwell, splattering the soggy gray writing paper. Patiently , WIMPY takes more paper from a desk drawer and hands it to CULDEE. CULDEE forces his fat, black fingers around the pen, dips it weakly in the ink, writes: “Fid: A long, pointed wooden spike used in the splicing of rope.”)