White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  The tarpaulin hadn’t been securely replaced, and he glimpsed the embankment of a large river and the houses and streets of a city. The truck began to slow down. There were trees and then a high concrete wall topped with shards of broken glass and a triple strand of barbed wire. The truck came to a halt. He had arrived. He was at Hoa Lo. And in another few minutes he would be inside. Perhaps for years. Perhaps forever.

  The truck halted for a second and there was the sound of massive gates creaking open. Slowly the truck rumbled forwards again for a few yards and then came to a halt. Behind them the gates grated and slammed shut.

  It was the most terrible sound that Kyle had ever heard.

  Minutes passed and then the tarpaulin was lifted back by a Vietnamese wearing the uniform and insignia of an officer. He spoke sharply to the two soldiers in the truck, and they leapt to their feet, prodding Kyle out of the truck at rifle point.

  His first impression was of how cold it was. Ever since he had arrived in Vietnam he had sweltered in almost unbearable heat. Now, in Hoa Lo, he shivered in the damp, chill air. He was at the entrance of what looked to be a long tunnel. The officer turned, leading the way into it, and Kyle saw that it was an underpass running beneath part of the great, gaunt building that stood above it.

  At the end of the underpass were yet more gates. They were double gates made of heavy iron. Kyle had never heard of any captured Americans escaping from Hoa Lo, and the reason was obvious. Hoa Lo was escape-proof.

  Beyond the gates was a bare courtyard about a hundred feet long and sixty or seventy feet wide, paved with worn cement. The buildings surrounding the courtyard were of grimy white stucco and the windows were few and high. Looking upward, Kyle could see that they were glassless and barred with double steel grating. He clenched his jaw. Being imprisoned in Hoa Lo would be awful, but he had to survive it. He had to think of Trinh and of what she would be suffering, not knowing what had happened to him or where he was.

  He was marched to the far end of the courtyard, where there was yet another high double gate. It remained shut. Instead, he was led into the right-hand cell block, down a concrete-floored corridor, and through two sets of steel doors. There was no sign of other inmates, no noise except for the echoing resonance of the guards’ booted feet. A cell door was thrown open and he was shoved inside.

  It was then that his heart really sank, then that he experienced his first real wave of panic. The cell was barely seven feet by seven feet, and it was totally empty except for a sleeping pallet and a slop bucket. Ever since he had figured out where he was being taken, he had anticipated at least being with other Americans. He knew what his own strengths and weaknesses were. He could fly into the jaws of hell if necessary, with crazy, daredevil defiance, but he couldn’t face the thought of being locked away alone.

  He gritted his teeth, knowing damn well that if the bastards suspected how much he hated solitary they would keep him in it permanently. As it was, he would be alone only until after he had been questioned. Such a tactic was routine. A nerve began to tick at the corner of his jaw. What might not be so routine was the method of questioning. He had been captive now for over three months and he had suffered nothing worse than shouted insults and the prods of rifle butts. He had been lucky. Unless he was very much mistaken, his luck was fast beginning to run out.

  He was ordered to strip out of the remnants of his uniform and was given two pairs of well-worn and well-washed shirts, two pairs of khaki trousers, two pairs of athletic shorts, two sets of underwear, and a belt. He sat on the edge of the low pallet, looking at the clothes in mild surprise. It was better than he had anticipated. At least the clothes were clean and the spare set indicated that they would be kept laundered.

  He wondered if there was anyone in the adjoining cells and tapped experimentally on the wall behind him. Immediately a guard screamed at him through the inspection grate in the cell door. Kyle shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. He had achieved his object. His tap had sounded hollow and he was sure that the cells on either side of him were empty, which meant that the many pilots who had been shot down over the North, and imprisoned in Hoa Lo, were in another section of the prison, probably in the section beyond the double gates at the far end of the courtyard. The area he was in, then, was merely a reception area. His spirits lifted slightly – perhaps his eventual cell might not be quite so small or so spartan – and then immediately fell at the realization that he would find out only after he had been interrogated.

  The questioning began the next morning, shortly after dawn. He was taken out of his cell and down the flaking whitewashed-walled corridor to a nearby room. In the centre there was a table, behind which sat the officer who had led him from the truck into the prison. There were steel hooks in the ceiling of the room and ominous dark brown stains on the walls and on the concrete floor. Kyle tried not to imagine what the hooks might be for and what the stains had been caused by, and concentrated instead on feeling nothing but contempt for the diminutive Vietnamese who had him so totally in his power.

  ‘Your name?’ the officer asked curtly in heavily accented English.

  ‘Anderson.’

  ‘Your full name?’

  ‘Kyle Royd Anderson.’

  ‘Your rank, service number, and date of birth?’

  Kyle answered equally curtly. There was a moment’s silence. He had given all the information that the Code of Conduct allowed and his interrogator was obviously well aware that he had done so. When he spoke again there was a more menacing tone in his voice.

  ‘The name of your division?’

  ‘I’m not obliged to answer that question.’

  ‘I ask you again, the name of your division?’

  Kyle eyeballed him. ‘Under the American Code of Conduct I’m not obliged to answer that question.’

  There wasn’t a flicker of emotion on the officer’s impassive face. ‘The American Code of Conduct is not recognized in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,’ he said stonily. ‘Please answer the questions you are asked. The name of your division?’

  For a fleeting second Kyle was tempted to avoid what was obviously going to happen and to tell him. After all, he wasn’t a duty, honour and country West Point grad. He hadn’t been flying helicopters out of patriotism. He had been flying them for kicks, for the sheer hell of it. What difference would it make if the obnoxious bastard questioning him learned the name of his division? It was hardly information that would enable Hanoi to win the war. If he had been a fighter pilot with a knowledge of future targets, then he could understand the importance of keeping what he knew to himself. But he wasn’t a fighter pilot. He was a chopper jock, and nothing he knew could be of the slightest help to the North Vietnamese war effort. The temptation came and went. He was also an American and he had never yet been shit scared of anyone or anything.

  ‘The name of your division?’ the officer repeated.

  ‘I’m not obliged to answer that question,’ Kyle said again.

  ‘But you will answer my question. You will answer all my questions,’ the officer said, rising to his feet. For a disbelieving moment Kyle thought the interview had come to an end, and then the officer continued. ‘Many Americans before you have stood where you stand now. They, too, have always said that they would not answer my questions.’ He paused and gave a shadow of a smile. ‘They always have. Eventually.’ He began to walk towards the door. ‘I am going to let you think about what I have just said. When I come back I will ask the same question again. It will be in your best interests for you to give me an answer.’

  The door closed behind him, the guards remaining in the room. Despite the cool dampness of the walls a bead of sweat trickled down the nape of Kyle’s neck. He had never been a coward, but he could think of better ways of spending his time than sitting in a room where blood had obviously been spilled, waiting for the moment when his own blood would, in all likelihood, mingle with the stains on the walls and the floor.

  His interrogator was gone for what Kyle
judged to be thirty or thirty-five minutes. When he returned he sat once more behind the table, resting his clasped hands lightly in front of him. ‘You have now had time to think,’ he said, his voice bereft of any inflection whatsoever. ‘I will ask you again. What is the name of your division?’

  Kyle knew that if he told him, it wouldn’t end there. There would be other questions, hundreds of them. ‘I’m not obliged to answer that question.’ Contempt and defiance oozed from his every pore.

  The officer smiled thinly. ‘You are very foolish,’ he said and nodded towards the guards at the door.

  Behind him Kyle heard the door open and two sets of footsteps approach. He clenched his knuckles until they were white. The bastards could do whatever they wanted, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing him break. He would die before allowing them to gloat over him.

  His arms were wrenched behind him and his mouth tightened. His broken arm had mended while he had been on the trail north, but he was still protective of it. His elbows were strapped together and then his wrists. He gritted his teeth against the pain as his chest was forced outward. He had expected something different. He had expected them to make play of the barely healed skin on his back and head. Shackles were fastened around his ankles and then his legs were splayed out and a bar was run through the shackles to keep them that way.

  Trinh, he thought. I must think of Trinh.

  The strap was brought down and beneath the bar and then pulled, yanking the bar upward and forcing him into a contorted ball. He closed his eyes, fighting the cries that rose in his throat. He thought of Trinh, gentle-eyed and tender; he thought of her mischievous sense of fun, her beguiling naïveté.

  His bones were being wrenched from their sockets, his muscles and tendons were being torn apart. He couldn’t think of Trinh any longer. He thought only of wanting the excruciating agony to end.

  It didn’t end. It grew worse. Time no longer had any meaning. Periodically the straps would be released and his circulation would start to flow again, the pain as it did so almost as intense as that of the torture. He would be asked if he would now answer the questions put to him. Each time he refused, his interrogator would take another cigarette from the packet on the table and nod to his henchmen to restrap and shackle him and the agony would begin again.

  At one time he thought the room was getting darker, as if night were approaching. Perhaps it was. Perhaps he had been in hell the whole day. Or perhaps the room seemed dark because his eyes were full of blood.

  He had vowed that he would die before allowing his torturers to gloat over his capitulation. He knew now that they weren’t going to allow him the luxury of death. The agony he was suffering would not kill him, it would simply continue for ever and ever and ever. And he couldn’t endure it. No one could. Now, when he was restrapped, eyeball to eyeball with his ass, he was also beaten. Bamboo clubs rained on his shins and elbows and knees. Rubber-strip whips cut into the barely healed flesh of his back. Fists smashed into his face. He vomited and kept vomiting and when he could croak out a sound other than a scream of pain, he pleaded with them for the pain to stop. And he promised to tell them anything that they wanted to know.

  Afterwards, alone in his cell, he wept. The bastards had broken him. The information he had been able to give them had been minimal. But it would have made no difference if it had been top secret. He would still have given it. And the knowledge filled him with self-loathing.

  For a week he was virtually ignored by his guards, and in that week something cold and rocklike entered into him. He had given into the bastards once, but he would not do so a second time. And there would be a second time, he was sure of it. It wasn’t only military information that the North Vietnamese wanted from their prisoners. It was propaganda. The day would come when a uniformed figure would enter his cell and demand that he make a tape recording proclaiming how he repented of his war ‘crimes’, and admitting to being a ‘Yankee imperialist aggressor’. At the thought of his father, or Serry, listening to any such babblings, his resolve became obsessional. He wouldn’t do it. He had sunk as low as he was going to sink, and he would be damned to hell for all eternity before he would sink any lower.

  At the end of seven days he was removed from his cell and taken once more down the corridor and out into the courtyard. The double gates at the inner end of the courtyard were opened and he was led through them into yet another underpass. This time it wasn’t a tunnel, but a roof between two one-storey buildings. There was a further courtyard, slightly smaller than the first one, and to his intense relief he could see hands at the bars of the windows that looked out on to it.

  He was marched across the courtyard and into the right-hand cell block. He could physically sense the nearness of other Americans and nearly sobbed with disappointment when he was led into another empty cell. Within minutes of his being left alone there, there came a tapping on the wall. He answered it eagerly, euphoric at making contact. Was it a fellow G. I.? The tapping continued in carefully spaced out rhythms. Kyle listened intently. Was it Morse? Was the guy in the cell next to him tapping out the Morse code? Whenever a guard was in the vicinity the tapping stopped, only to be continued later, in the same insistent rhythms.

  Over the next few days tapping came from the cell on the other side of him as well. It wasn’t Morse, he had worked that out nearly immediately, but it was obviously a similar code by which his fellow prisoners were communicating with each other. An alphabet code. And in order to participate, all he had to do was crack it.

  He was still trying to fathom it out when he was moved from his cell and put in with another prisoner. His initial delight was slightly tempered by the fact that his fellow prisoner, a radar intercept officer who had been shot down in an F-4 Phantom, was sullen and uncommunicative and obviously suffering from some kind of mental breakdown. He had been a prisoner for eighteen months, and though Kyle could not get him to talk about himself, he did manage to get from him the key to the wall-tapping code.

  The code was called the Smithy Harris code, and was named after the prisoner who had devised it. It was based on a crossword puzzle of letters, five lines down and five across. The first line across was A-B-C-D-E. To spell out a word containing one of these letters you made a tap on the wall to indicate that it was in the first line across, then paused and quickly tapped out one for A, two for B, and so on. The second line was F-G-H-I-J. Two taps indicated that the letter was in the second line, and then the taps followed the same pattern as for the first line. The letter K was not used at all, the letter C being used as a substitute in order to keep the letters to twenty-five, and not twenty-six.

  The code transformed Kyle’s life. Information could be passed and received around the prison. Conversations could be conducted via the walls. He discovered that as a helicopter jock he was a rarity in Hoa Lo, but that he wasn’t alone in having capitulated to torture. The knowledge came as a kind of relief, but did not alter his fierce determination to withstand anything in the future rather than become a propaganda tool.

  Tapping messages out, and receiving them, took painstaking time. Y-O-U A-R-E N-O-W I-N H-E-A-R-T-B-R-E-A-C H-O-T-E-L, his neighbour in the next cell tapped out to him when he first understood and began to use the code. T-H-E P-R-I-S-O-N A-S A W-H-O-L-E I-S C-N-O-W-N A-S T-H-E H-A-N-O-I H-I-L-T-O-N. T-H-E S-E-C-T-I-O-N W-H-E-R-E Y-O-U W-E-R-E I-N-T-E-R-R-O-G-A-T-E-D I-S N-E-W G-U-Y V-I-L-L-A-G-E. T-H-E-R-E A-R-E T-W-O M-O-R-E M-A-I-N S-E-G-T-I-O-N-S T-O T-H-E P-R-I-S-O-N. O-N-E O-F T-H-E-M I-S F-O-R W-H-E-N W-E M-O-V-E O-U-T O-F H-E-A-R-T-B-R-E-A-C, W-H-I-C-H I-S U-S-E-D A-S A R-E-C-E-I-V-I-N-G S-T-A-T-I-O-N. T-H-E O-T-H-E-R I-S L-A-S V-E-G-A-S A-R-E-A.

  W-H-A-T I-S L-A-S V-E-G-A-S A-R-E-A? he tapped back, none too happy at the thought that if he was still in the receiving area, there were still, presumably, question sessions to undergo.

  L-A-S V-E-G-A-S I-S A C-I-L-L-E-R came back through the wall. I-T I-S U-S-E-D F-O-R P-E-R-I-O-D-S O-F L-O-N-G A-N-D B-R-U-T-A-L I-N-C-A-R-C-E-R-A-T-I-O-N. Y-O-U A-R-E B-E
-T-T-E-R O-F-F H-E-R-E O-R I-N N-E-W G-U-Y T-H-A-N I-N V-E-G-A-S.

  Kyle found it hard to believe that treatment anywhere in the Hilton could be worse than what he had received in New Guy Village. A chill ran down his spine. His decision not to cooperate if asked to make statements that could be used by the North Vietnamese for propaganda purposes would very likely lead him, eventually, into Las Vegas. It wasn’t a prospect to look forward to, and he tried hard not to think about it, concentrating instead on culling every little bit of information he could via the wall taps.

  He was asked to memorize the names of every man known, to be imprisoned, so that if he were sent to another camp he could pass on all the names that he knew, and add new ones to the list. That way, if anyone escaped or was unexpectedly released, he could carry the names back to the States. There were over three hundred names and he memorized them all, in alphabetical order.

  It came as a surprise to him to learn that somewhere on the route north Christmas had come and gone without him being aware of it. He wondered how Trinh had celebrated it, and remembering the family ancestral altar he had seen in her home, with candles flickering beside it, he wondered if she was perhaps more Buddhist than Catholic, and if she would have celebrated it at all.

  Serry would have celebrated it. Serry would have been at Bedingham. He only had to close his eyes to imagine every aspect of Serry’s Christmas. There would be a huge, decorated tree in the yellow and white formal living room. There would be log fires, holly and mistletoe, mince pies and mulled wine and carol singers. And if it hadn’t been for her brother’s stupidity on their wedding day, he would probably have been there, sharing it all with her. And he would never have met Trinh.

  Despite his physical discomfort a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Trinh. God, but he loved her. When the present nightmare was over, he would track her down, wherever she might be. He would take her back to the States with him. Trinh was the only good thing to have come out of his time in Vietnam. Trinh, and his friendship with Chuck.