P. O. W.

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Garibaldi risked another look down at the beast. “It looks like a hunk of her fur has been burnt and her leg has been broken….”

  “Yeah… look how it bends out funny.” Spencer looked at the colonel and added, “I wonder why she didn’t just reach up the tree and swat you off the vines….”

  “What do you mean?” Garibaldi swallowed air down his dry throat.

  “She was under you when you were only eight or ten feet off the ground. A normal tiger could have easily jumped up that high and had you.”

  “Shit, Spencer! You didn’t need to tell me that!” Garibaldi realized how, if he had walked around the tree looking for a better way up it just one extra time, he would have been lunch for—he looked at the tiger’s rear end as it slipped behind the tree—her.

  “I haven’t seen a tiger that big in a zoo.” Spencer had been to only one zoo, but the tigers there had been well fed and were bigger than the ones normally found in the wild. The tigress circling the tree below them seemed to be a good two hundred, maybe three hundred pounds larger than the ones at the zoo.

  Garibaldi watched her for a half-hour before he spoke. “I think she’s a man-eater.”

  “Why do you say that?” Spencer had been watching her too.

  “Look at the way she hobbles…. She could never catch deer and wild pigs… and she’s way too fat.” Garibaldi balked at his next thought. “She’s probably been living off dead animals from bomb strikes….”

  The full force of Garibaldi’s statement hit Barnett all at once. “That bitch!” Barnett pulled his eight-inch knife out of his waist string and start climbing down the trunk.

  Garibaldi grabbed him and pulled him back into the fork of the tree. “Where in the hell do you think you’re going!”

  “That bitch ate Fillmore!”

  Garibaldi didn’t understand what Barnett was babbling, but he could see that the young soldier was very upset. “Spencer! You can’t kill a tiger with a knife! Now stop it!”

  Spencer leaned back against the colonel, realizing that what he had heard was true. He started crying softly. “You bitch!… You bitch!”

  The Montagnard boy sat on the limb and watched the man cry. He wondered what was making the man cry. They were safe from the tigress in the tree; there was no reason for the man to cry.

  Garibaldi waited until Spencer had gained control of himself and then he asked him about Fillmore.

  Spencer shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  The tigress lay down next to the trunk of the tree and started licking her front paws. Her tail flicked every once in a while as she waited patiently for the meat to come down out of the tree and be eaten. Monkeys would usually panic after a few minutes and try jumping out of the tree and running to what they thought was a safer tree.

  Darkness came, and she was still waiting. Garibaldi had Spencer and the boy all straddle the branch in front of him and hold on to one another. He remained closest to the trunk, with Barnett sitting in front of him holding the small Montagnard boy. The order on the branch was based on size, with the colonel being the tallest; it would have been hardest for him to balance himself farther out on the branch. All three of them knew they wouldn’t fall asleep during the night, but they might doze off. A single mistake, and they would not have a second chance.

  There was no moon. A heavy cloud cover had slipped in during the night and blocked out all of the light. The tigress coughed, letting everyone up in the tree know that she was still waiting. It made no difference if you closed your eyes or kept them open. The darkness was the same. The Montagnard boy scooted back against Spencer on the branch. The darkness and the hated man-eater were scaring him. Spencer placed both of his arms over the boy’s shoulders and hugged him against his chest. He heard the child sigh, and then the tiny boy dropped his head against Spencer’s arm and fell asleep.

  “You awake, Colonel?”

  “There’s no way I’m going to fall asleep with her down there!” Garibaldi whispered into Spencer’s ear. “I’m not Tarzan!”

  Spencer smiled in the dark. The colonel had a sense of humor. “Fillmore was on patrol with us, and the night before we ran into the NVA ambush he was pulled out of his foxhole by a tiger and hauled off into the jungle screaming for help…. Man! That was some heavy shit….” Spencer stopped talking long enough to catch his breath. “You know, I had forgotten all about that until she came along.” Barnett looked down but couldn’t see the tigress lying on the ground below them.

  “That’s pretty normal… most people block stuff like that out of their minds.” Garibaldi reached up and squeezed Spencer’s shoulder. “It must have been pretty bad having to listen to all that….”

  “You can’t imagine!” Spencer shook his head from side to side. “It was horrible, listening to his screams fading away in the jungle and there wasn’t a fucking thing we could do!” The Montagnard boy jerked in his sleep and Spencer squeezed him. “What I’d give for a fucking gun right now! With just one fucking bullet!”

  “At least she didn’t get one of us, Spence.” Garibaldi adjusted his position on the branch. “You’ve got to look for the good things, or you’ll go crazy.”

  “Colonel… I think I’m already crazy.” Spencer spoke the sentence matter-of-factly, without having to accent it.

  Garibaldi nodded his head in agreement, but the darkness hid the gesture. “Me too…”

  The first rays of morning light let the tree dwellers know that the big cat was still with them. She had slept the whole night under the tree. She could smell the fresh meat above her head and roared her anger and her hunger. The sound traveled for miles in the quiet jungle. She roared again, ending it in a snarl.

  “I think she’s pissed.” Spencer spit, trying to hit her. “Hey, bitch! You hungry?” He spat again, and it landed right on the tip of her nose.

  She roared and shook her head from side to side, trying to dislodge the horrible man-smell from her sensory organ.

  “You don’t like that, bitch?” Spencer almost laughed.

  The Montagnard boy looked at Spencer with an expression of total respect. He was taken in by Spencer’s bravery.

  “This is getting to be a bit too much.” Garibaldi tried adjusting his position on the branch, but nothing worked after the all-night vigil. “Maybe she’ll leave if she gets hungry enough.”

  “I’m more worried about the NVA finding us right now than her…. She can’t stay down there much longer.”

  “So what if she leaves…. I don’t really relish the idea of getting down from here and trying to make it to the A Shau camp with her nearby.”

  “We really don’t have much of a choice.” Spencer didn’t like the idea either. There was one good thought, though: they would have no problem wanting to take breaks on their way.

  The NVA patrol heard the tiger roar. It was the first time any of the city-raised soldiers had heard that sound in the wild. The sergeant pushed the safety off his AK-47 and dropped down into a battle-ready squat, turning slowly from side to side. The parachute cloth he used for a camouflage cape ruffled in the breeze, coming down the mountain trail. He signaled for the point man to continue down the mountain trail in the direction they had been going, directly toward the roar.

  She coughed and moved her head from side to side with her mouth open in a quiet snarl. The smell was too strong coming down the trail. She looked up at the meat in the tree and snarled again before leaving to find something better to eat.

  “I think she’s leaving!” Barnett took a deep breath, hoping that she wouldn’t turn around and come back at the sound of his voice. She slipped off the trail into the thick brush.

  “We’d better wait a while before getting down. She might be trying to trick us.” Garibaldi had reason to be paranoid.

  “Fuck! She’s going the same way we are….” Spencer didn’t like that one bit.

  They waited up in the tree for an hour before deciding to get down. Spencer wouldn’t let the Montagnard boy go do
wn first and made Garibaldi hold him so that he wouldn’t follow. Spence didn’t enjoy the climb down one bit and stopped when he was about ten feet off the ground and waited, just in case she was lying out of sight in the brush. His hands started hurting and his grip was slipping on the vines, forcing him to finish the climb down. He felt his foot touch the ground and turned around quickly, fully expecting to see a charging tiger coming after him. What he saw instead was an NVA soldier step back onto the trail, pointing a AK-47 at his chest.

  “We’ve got visitors, Colonel….” Spencer’s voice reached the colonel at the same time as the sound of a rifle butt striking flesh reached him. Spencer folded over, holding his stomach with both hands.

  The NVA sergeant screamed for the colonel and the boy to come down out of the tree. Garibaldi was five feet off the ground when he felt rough hands yank him the rest of the way down.

  The walk back to A Rum seemed like it would last forever. The NVA didn’t spare the nine-year-old and beat him as much as they beat the Americans. Spencer didn’t think he would make it. Frankly, he didn’t care.

  Enough was enough.

  One of the NVA struck out with his rifle butt at the Montagnard boy and caught him on the side of his knee. Spencer heard the bone crack under the blow. The boy fell down on the trail, wriggling in pain, but not a sound came out of his mouth. The NVA soldier raised his rifle to shoot the boy, and Spencer stepped over and pushed it to one side. With his eyes he dared the NVA to shoot him and then reached down and swung the small-framed boy onto his back. He grabbed hold under each of the child’s thighs and started walking again on the trail. The boy grabbed hold around Spencer’s neck and laid his head on the soldier’s back. Spencer could hear the boy whimpering softly.

  Spencer had a new reason to live. He would get the boy back to his grandfather.

  Lieutenant Van Pao sat on the porch of her hooch and tapped her bamboo whip against her pants leg. She had been informed by radio that the Americans had been found and that they would be arriving in camp very soon. She felt the fire for revenge burning in her throat. Everything had changed in the four days that they had been gone. She was now considered the worst POW camp commander in the North Vietnamese Army. She was told that an American had never escaped from one of their camps before. She was disgraced.

  The guards calling back and forth alerted her that they were arriving with the POWs. She left the shade and stepped out into the clearing where she could see. Colonel Garibaldi was the first one to appear behind the camouflaged field soldier. Spencer Barnett stepped out of the jungle with the Montagnard boy on his back. She felt the hate erupt. How could they be so stupid as to let the American return a hero in front of the Montagnards! The NVA sergeant stopped the patrol and pulled the boy off Spencer’s back. The child fell to the ground and remained there, moaning.

  The Montagnard chief watched his grandson. Only a person experienced in the ways of the mountain people would have noticed that the old man was very disturbed. He kept a poker face as he walked over to where his grandson lay. One of the field soldiers pushed the old man back away from the boy, using his rifle.

  “What you two have done will cost you a great deal! One of you will die a very slow, painful death… while the other one watches!” Van Pao hissed out the words. “Tonight you will have time to think about it and wonder which one of you will be so lucky as to die!” She whirled and walked away.

  The POW camp sergeant screamed orders to his men, who grabbed Spencer and Garibaldi and dragged them back to their old cages. One of the guards grabbed the boy by his broken leg, and the youth released a high-pitched scream, then caught himself and bit his tongue.

  Lieutenant Van Pao stopped walking and turned around with an evil smile on her face. She barked out some orders to her guard, and he picked up the boy and carried him into her hut.

  Barnett and Garibaldi had both been beaten by the NVA sergeant who had made the mistake with the guard roster and had allowed for their escape. The Americans spent the night lying on the floors of their stripped cages. Their exhausted state from the escape and the all-night vigil allowed them to pass out and sleep most of the night.

  A guard woke Barnett by pulling him out of the cage onto the ground, and then the pain from the guard’s heel in his side brought Spencer to his feet. Garibaldi was already standing next to Mother Kaa’s cage, waiting for Spencer. The look in the colonel’s eyes told Spencer that the old officer was near the point of giving up.

  Spencer knew that if he said anything he would be beaten, but he risked it anyway. He looked directly at Garibaldi and spoke. “You chickenshit fucking officer! Don’t you have any fucking guts?” Spencer butted the colonel with his shoulder. “At least think of your wife and kids! Live for them!”

  Garibaldi blinked and came out of his mental coma of self-pity to see Spencer fall to the ground from the rabbit punch.

  Lieutenant Van Pao, Mohammed James, and all of the Montagnard villagers were standing in a semicircle facing the jungle when Garibaldi and Barnett arrived with their guards. Spencer saw the nine-year-old Montagnard boy who had helped them escape sitting on the ground with his legs tied Indian fashion. The guards had used nylon cord to tie the boy’s calves up against his thighs. The pain from his broken leg must have been excruciating. The boy’s hands had been tied behind his back, and then a nylon cord had been wrapped tightly around his upper arms to hold them against his sides. The boy was naked.

  “I want you to see what happens to enemies of the People’s Republic of North Vietnam!” She nodded her head and two of the camp guards picked up the small boy by grabbing his bound thighs and arms.

  Spencer couldn’t figure out what they were going to do with the kid.

  Garibaldi let out a soft cry and then started begging Van Pao. “Please… please… spare the boy…. He’s just a kid!”

  Van Pao smiled. “Would you like to take his place, Colonel?”

  Garibaldi looked down at the ground in shame.

  Spencer looked from Garibaldi to Van Pao and then over to James, trying to figure out what was going on, and then his eyes rested on the clump of bamboo growing at the edge of the clearing. One of the two-inch-thick poles had been cut off about three feet above the ground, and the end had been sharpened to a needle point.

  Barnett understood what they were going to do to the boy.

  “Van Pao!” Spencer tried taking a step toward her but was restrained by the guards on each side of him. “Let the boy go, and I’ll tell you everything I know… everything!”

  The lieutenant smiled at Barnett, then the look changed to one of pure hate. “You are too late, Spencer Barnett! Some of your friends returned and destroyed the sensors!” She spat at him. “You have nothing that I want!” She looked at the guards holding the boy and nodded her head. They lifted him up and held him over the sharpened stake. Some of the Montagnard women started to wail.

  “Wait!” Spencer struggled against his guards. “I’ll take his place!”

  She turned around slowly, smiling a full-mouthed grin. “Fine!”

  James looked over at Barnett with an expression of total disbelief on his face. “You fool! He’s just an ignorant Montagnard! He’s not worth it!”

  Spencer looked over at James and smiled, using only the right side of his mouth. “Would he be worth it if he was black?”

  The sound of the slap across Spencer’s face echoed through the village. “You white motherfucker!”

  Van Pao stopped James from hitting Barnett again. She gave her guards orders to prepare the American for the bamboo stake. They stripped him naked in front of the assembled villagers and bound him in exactly the same fashion as they had tied the boy.

  Garibaldi watched as they wound the nylon parachute cord around Spencer’s upper body. He bit his lip and swore to himself that if he survived the POW camp, he was going to submit the young soldier for the Medal of Honor.

  Van Pao waited until her guards were finished tying Spencer, then she lit up a Salem ci
garette—she had changed her brand to something a little stronger—and looked over at Garibaldi. “Would you like to take his place?” She nodded at Spencer.

  Colonel Garibaldi dropped his head in shame.

  “Come on, Colonel! You’re the leader… are you going to let your soldier die?”

  Colonel Garibaldi’s lower lip trembled. He was so ashamed, but he didn’t have the courage to take Spencer Barnett’s place.

  “Well, answer me!” Van Pao screamed at the colonel.

  Garibaldi kept looking down at the ground and whispered, “No.”

  Spencer saw what the NVA lieutenant was doing. She was going to kill him, but at the same time she was going to totally break the colonel and turn him into a mental case. “Hey! Sweet Bitch! I won’t let him take my place!” Barnett screamed over at the colonel, “Damn you, sir! Don’t you fall for this shit! You know the game she’s playing!”

  One of the guards kicked Spencer in the side to shut him up, and he yelled all the louder.

  “Colonel! You’ve got to live for both of us!”

  Garibaldi’s head snapped up, and he looked directly at Spencer. “You bet your ass on that one, Spencer Barnett!”

  Spencer smiled.

  Lieutenant Van Pao curled her lip. “You stupid, stupid… fool.” She barked orders to the guards, and they picked Spencer up by his thighs, one guard on each side. A third guard held his hands against the soldier’s back to balance him. They placed him directly over the sharpened stake and lowered him until his rectum touched the very tip of the bamboo rod that was still anchored in the ground by its own root system.

  Spencer felt the point of the stake enter his rectal passage about an inch and then a sharp pain when the point scraped against the wall of his colon. He clenched his jaws.

  “Does it hurt, Spencer Barnett?” Van Pao smiled and flipped her cigarette at the soldier. The butt struck his chest, sending a spray of red coals over his bare flesh. Spencer glared at the woman. He was terrified, but there was no way he would give her or James the pleasure of knowing that he was. He concentrated on a short prayer, asking Jesus Christ to let him die swiftly.