Pale Blue

by Mike Jenne

  Slowly twisting in the air, he was conscious that it was only a matter of time before his body weight would dislocate his shoulders. In a few minutes, he heard a sickening pop as his left shoulder snapped out of socket. Seconds later, he winced sharply as his right shoulder separated in the same manner. Violently trembling, he resisted an almost overpowering urge to scream or cry out.

  Writhing in pain, Carson knew that the worst was coming. He decided that it was time to board his imaginary submarine to ride out the remainder of the session. As he dangled there, he escaped deep into the recesses of his mind, patiently closing every watertight door and hatch, working his way through the different compartments inwards toward the control room where he could watch the proceedings through his periscope.

  Regardless of the mechanism of suffering, the interrogator’s agenda rarely changed. His preliminary questions were exactly the same, as if he was always starting anew. The scowling man stood next to Carson, adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, and curtly asked, “What is your name and rank?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Andrew C. Scott, US Navy,” grunted Carson defiantly.

  “And what kind of aircraft do you fly, Lieutenant Commander Scott?”

  At that instant, aboard Carson’s make-believe vessel, the last hatch clanged shut; he madly spun the wheel to dog it down, and then he was finally isolated from his pain. He heard the inquisitor’s question like a hushed voice from a distant room, but did not respond. He wasn’t sure how long he could linger here; his endurance had been eroded considerably with every new torture session. Still, he knew that rescuers would eventually swoop down on the camp to extricate him from these horrors. In the meantime, he had to strive to remain calm under intense duress, endure whatever he was confronted with, and stick to the story he had been given.

  10:15 a.m., Friday, March 9, 1973

  Several weeks had elapsed since Carson’s untimely arrival in the North Vietnamese camp. His initial treatment had been brutal, but for some inexplicable reason, his captors had lightened up significantly in the past month. He was no longer being tortured; perhaps he had convinced them that he was immune to physical coercion. His diet had improved dramatically; once given only a small bowl of rice a day, he was now fed a generous serving of rice in the morning and an even more substantial meal in the late afternoon.

  Although he had settled into a predictable routine and his conditions were immensely better, it was still captivity. He spent the largest part of each day cooped up in his small cell. Constructed entirely of concrete, it was square, roughly eight feet on a side, with two small windows set just below the ceiling to let in light. Earlier in his stay, he had been clapped in manacles and leg irons every night, but lately he was allowed to sleep without the chafing restraints.

  He had a thin mat of woven straw to shield him from the rough floor, and a moth-eaten wool blanket to keep him warm. The flimsy blanket stank of worn-in sweat and grime, and was obviously sized for the Vietnamese; when the nights were cool and damp, it was a struggle for him to cover his entire body, almost like trying to sleep under a handkerchief. One metal bucket served as a chamber pot and another held his daily allotment of water for bathing and drinking. All told, that was the extent of his accommodations.

  One of the most aggravating aspects of his ordeal was that he had not yet seen or spoken to any other American prisoner. Recalling his SERE training at Aux One-Oh and intelligence briefings that he had received aboard the carrier while en route to Yankee Station, he knew that the North Vietnamese maintained an elaborate network of POW facilities, so he assumed that he was being temporarily held in solitary confinement to break his will, and that other Americans had to be close by, perhaps in another part of the compound.

  Maybe since his captors had realized the futility of torturing him, and now that he was being fed and treated so much better, then surely he would be allowed to mingle with other US servicemen. While he assured himself that he could endure pain and deprivation indefinitely, the seclusion was wearing on Carson, and he ached to be among others like himself.

  With nothing to read or otherwise occupy his idle time, Carson had plenty of time to think. He thought of his childhood and wished that he had been granted the opportunity to know his parents better. He thought of his days at West Point, learning to fly in the Air Force, the grave disappointment he had felt when he was selected to fly interceptors after flight school, and the marvelous exhilaration he had experienced when he was chosen to become a test pilot.

  He reflected on all the money he had squandered on sports cars and expensive watches, and he thought about the scores of women he had known but barely knew. He wondered what his life might be like if he had made an effort to cement a meaningful relationship with someone, and whether he might be married now with a wife and children who anxiously awaited his return.

  More than anything, he reminisced about the very best days of his life, when he and Scott Ourecky had flown into space together. He thought of him often and hoped that he would see his friend again soon. He missed Ourecky more than he could have ever previously imagined, and hoped that his friend had finally found his way to MIT.

  Considering the circumstances, he thought that he was doing a good job of keeping up his spirits, but occasionally he would become disheartened and lapse into a melancholy funk that stretched on for days. What motivated him to remain alive was the certain knowledge that he would eventually be rescued. It’s only a matter of time, he assured himself over and over, especially when he heard the roar of jets nearby. All he need do was to be patient and endure.

  He knew that other prisoners were housed in nearby buildings. He regularly heard their muffled voices at night, but their Vietnamese was an incoherent babble to his ears. He never saw them, but knew their routine by heart. Early in the morning, even before the sun rose, they assembled in a central courtyard between the buildings. Judging by their voices, it sounded as if they answered a roll call.

  Every morning, after he had finished his breakfast of rice, he was escorted to the same courtyard for his daily exercise. He spent most of the time walking laps around the perimeter of the yard. As he exercised, he remained attuned to his surroundings, looking for any possible weak spots that he might exploit in an escape attempt.

  Apparently the other prisoners worked while he exercised. Because of the camp’s layout and the other buildings, he couldn’t see them, but he heard the sounds of digging and scraping sounds, like earth being broken with pick axes and shovels, and assumed that they were tending to some sort of garden.

  After their morning labors, after he had been locked back in his cell, the unseen Vietnamese prisoners were brought back to the central courtyard for classes or lectures of some kind. The material was delivered in a painfully boring monotone, amplified over a blaring speaker. Typically, the lectures dragged on for hours, and then the prisoners were apparently sent on labor details.

  Carson stiffly stood up and kneaded the lumbar region of his aching back. Although the torture sessions had exacted a debilitating toll on his body, he suspected that the trauma of his ejection had also caught up to him; he now endured a chronic backache where his spinal disks and vertebrae had been explosively compressed.

  Stretching as he listened to the incomprehensible drone of the Vietnamese orator, Carson studied the angle of the shadows formed on the cell’s gray floor. His heart beat slightly faster in anticipation of the high point of his otherwise oppressively monotonous routine. Every day at this time, he received a visitor, an English-speaking NVA officer named Bao Trung. The officer had been present for his interrogations, but had not taken part in torturing or questioning.

  When he visited, Bao Trung did not press him for information; most of their time was spent talking about places in the States, history, and other innocuous topics. Bao Trung occasionally asked him about his upbringing and family, but Carson diligently avoided revealing anything of a personal nature. While Carson relished the opportunity to converse with another h
uman being, he didn’t entirely trust Bao Trung, and assumed that the officer was being sent in to subtly extract information while portraying himself as a sympathetic listener.

  Early on, Bao Trung had attempted to teach him rudimentary Vietnamese, but abandoned the effort when Carson showed no enthusiasm or aptitude for learning a new language.

  Lately, the Vietnamese officer had begun teaching him to play chess, which Carson enjoyed immensely. So, they had fallen into a routine where they played and chatted, and Carson had become comfortable with it. Interestingly enough, just a few weeks ago, they discovered that they shared an interest in astronomy. Often, Bao Trung brought a detailed cloth celestial map that his wife had embroidered for him, and Carson taught him the English names for the constellations and stars, and described the Greek mythology behind the names. In turn, Bao Trung told him the Chinese names for the familiar shapes in the heavens, and the various legends associated with them. Carson regretted that he wasn’t able to view the night sky, except for the fragment through his tiny cell window. He frequently begged the Vietnamese officer to escort him outside at night, but citing security reasons, Bao Trung told him that he could not.

  As he wondered what would be in store today, Carson decided that he wanted the answer to a question that had been troubling him for weeks, and he elected to forgo the daily pleasantries and casual conversation until Bao Trung was forthcoming with information.

  Carson heard the clicking sounds of the lock being unlatched. The heavy wooden door opened, and Bao Trung stepped in from the bright sunlight. Carrying a pasteboard box in his good hand, he announced, “I brought my chessboard, Drew. Perhaps we can work on your game again. You’ve been making excellent progress.”

  “If you don’t mind, I would rather just talk today,” said Carson. “I have a question for you.”

  “Talk? Certainly. Is there something pressing on your mind?”

  “Yes. Why am I kept from other Americans?” asked Carson.

  “Honestly, I don’t know, Drew,” replied Bao Trung, sitting down on the floor and crossing his legs. “Perhaps you know the answer yourself.”

  9:25 a.m., Monday, March 12, 1973

  Major—Thiếu Tá—Han Ngoc Thanh was the administrator for Reeducation Camp # 4. The camp’s inhabitants were mostly recalcitrant South Vietnamese officers, almost exclusively former military pilots, clandestine agents and commandos. They were sent here to be made over. The camp’s primary focus was to fracture their spirits, obliterate their capitalist tendencies and the other loathsome habits they had accumulated in associating with the French and the Americans, and to educate them in the pristine virtues of socialism. All this was done in the hope that they might eventually be rendered into productive members of a progressive society.

  To be made over, mused Thanh, reflecting on the irony. He would probably have better luck leading rabid dogs to water. A hand-painted sign at the camp’s entrance proclaimed it to be a glorious site of socialist redemption, but Thanh knew that he was actually overseeing a one-way railroad into oblivion.

  Every few weeks, yet another consignment of healthy men trudged through the gate. For the first two weeks, they were crammed into dark cells, receiving no food or medical treatment. After the initial softening-up phase, the bewildered survivors were let out to fall into the camp’s numbing routine.

  In relatively short order, they were systematically starved and worked to death, eventually finding their places in the camp’s burgeoning cemetery. In the interim, as they waited to expire, they attended indoctrination lectures and labored under the scorching sun, chiseling shallow graves out of hardened clay.

  As any loyal socialist soldier would, Thanh had taken his duties seriously when he first arrived here. Triumphantly standing before the vanquished, even though he had never personally set foot on a battlefield, he obediently recited the carefully scripted lectures, sincerely believing every word that he expounded. He even convinced himself that he glimpsed hope in at least a few of their faces, a chance that at least one or two would come to their senses and abandon their old ways.

  Now, he was just weary of this sordid tedium, watching as men faded away and eventually disappeared. As he delivered the lectures, all he could see was the exhausted resignation in the gaunt faces of those wretches who had been here for several weeks, those already on the verge of death, and restrained anger on the faces of the newly arrived who realized what their abbreviated futures held.

  While he first disliked being so removed from Hanoi or Haiphong, he since had come to appreciate the virtues of administering a camp that was far from the beaten path. Camp # 4 rarely hosted official visitors. Consequently, while Major Thanh and his men enforced discipline and maintained their stern façade, they had settled into sort of a symbiotic equilibrium with their charges. Unlike the other reeducation camp administrators, Thanh did not go out of his way to torture or otherwise punish his prisoners for minor infractions. Their unspoken agreement was that he would do nothing to make the prisoners’ stay any more painful than what it had to be, so long as they reciprocated by dying politely and on schedule.

  This morning, reviewing a packet of documents just in from Hanoi, he was in a terrible quandary. He glanced at a small chalkboard hanging by the door; it reflected the official headcount from morning muster. The numbers were constantly in flux, but consistently tended to trend downwards as each day passed; when the sun rose this morning, Camp # 4 housed one hundred and fifty-six men. According to the senior guard’s estimate, that tally would likely dwindle to one hundred and fifty by nightfall, since six sick prisoners—four with malaria and two with dengue fever—were expected to die today. Thanh knew that the count would slip another six or seven notches by dawn, as others succumbed to starvation or sheer exhaustion.

  Of the one hundred and fifty-six men currently in his charge, four were not South Vietnamese. Three were Chinese soldiers who had accidently—or perhaps intentionally—strayed across the nearby border. The fourth was a US Navy pilot named Lieutenant Commander Drew Scott.

  How the American came to be here was no profound mystery. Although its primary mission was ostensibly rehabilitation, Camp # 4 also served as a way station and consolidation point for Americans captured in the region. If their conditions mandated, they received cursory medical treatment in the camp’s modest infirmary. They remained here, strictly segregated from the South Vietnamese prisoners, until suitable transportation was available to move them to Hoa Lo or one of the other POW facilities that housed Americans.

  Since he had briefly trained at Hoa Lo before being assigned here, Thanh knew that some US prisoners were occasionally earmarked for “special treatment.” In such instances, the chosen unfortunates were kept strictly isolated from any other Americans. Thanh was aware that there were three principal categories of US servicemen to be set aside.

  The first category comprised prisoners of potential political value, such as men related to political figures or high-ranking officers, who might be valuable as bargaining chips in the future. The second category were US prisoners who had become such disruptive troublemakers that they could not be mixed in with the general POW population, and had to be relocated to special camps elsewhere.

  Obviously, the third category were those prisoners suspected of possessing “special knowledge” that was of particularly high intelligence value. This category included pilots who flew new or unique aircraft types, had undergone special training in classified systems or nuclear weapons, but also included personnel who had been assigned to the US Strategic Air Command.

  Almost without exception, according to what Thanh had been told, “special knowledge” prisoners were so designated by Soviet GRU spetsgruppa advisors in Hanoi. The spetsgruppa was an intelligence organization tasked with exploiting high value American personnel and equipment. He had once heard that so much new American technology and expertise fluttered down from the skies over North Vietnam, the spetsgruppa joked that it was like receiving manna from heaven.


  Most “special knowledge” prisoners were questioned by specially trained Vietnamese interrogators, operating under the supervision of the spetsgruppa. But as rumor had it, a select few “special knowledge” prisoners were immediately delivered into the waiting hands of spetsgruppa, and spirited away to God knows where after that.

  But Lieutenant Commander Drew Scott was in a category unto himself. From the information Thanh had gathered, Scott was set aside not because he was thought to have special knowledge or political value, but rather because of some peculiarities surrounding his capture. Specifically, the Americans had mounted an unusually intensive effort to rescue him. In particular, the high command in Hanoi was perplexed why the Americans would go so far as to send a special team—led by one of their most experienced and capable commandos—deep into North Vietnam. In retrospect, it appeared that the team probably had not been dispatched for Scott, but rather for the man who shared his aircraft.

  With an edict that Scott was to be kept strictly secluded, Hanoi periodically dispatched a special interrogation team to work him over. After five grueling sessions, the trio found Scott to be exceedingly disciplined and virtually impervious to even the most barbaric tortures, but they were fairly confident that he was nothing but a common Navy pilot.

  After all, the GRU spetsgruppa had expressed no particular interest in him, and they seemed to have an acutely developed knack for identifying prisoners worthy of special treatment. Consequently, as of last week, because there was no evidence that he was anyone extraordinary, Scott’s status was on the verge of being downgraded so that he could be treated as a regular US prisoner.

  But now there was a problem. Although Scott had revealed no information of value, the interrogators had recently come to realize that he was not correctly identifying himself. This may have never come to light, except for a recent development that emerged during the Paris peace talks. The arrogant Americans demanded a full accounting for prisoners of war, as well as the missing and otherwise unaccounted for, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. To this end, they had provided a list of 1925 names for resolution. The problem was that the name of Lieutenant Commander Andrew Scott did not appear on the reconciliation list.