“We will wait some time, Charles Ravich. You think. Maybe think where you are now.” The officer left. The question of the plane was only a beginning. They knew it was an F-4.
“Now,” the interpreter said. “You talk soon.”
A soldier brought him water and a pasty, fibrous gruel—mashed rice and bamboo sprouts. The soldier motioned him to eat, which he did, hungrily, with his hands.
Then he felt clearer. He knew where he was. His job was to endure all physical and psychological torture until he lost either his mind or his life. Resist making propaganda statements. When no longer able to withhold information, he’d lie or divulge innocuous data. Hard to judge the sophistication level. Some of the North Vietnamese had studied in French educational systems, some were opportunists, others Communist zealots. Tell them your parents were Iowa pig farmers. Where was he? Just north of the DMZ? Eastern Laos? Somewhere a North Vietnamese officer could go about in uniform, but southern enough that the Vietcong served as soldiers. He hadn’t watched his direction in the last minute. A few degrees on the compass might mean the difference between liberation and long-term incarceration. No way to know. Insist on food and medical treatment. The better care he received, the better he’d withstand punishment. The Air Force trained pilots not to crack but assumed they would. Every man had his breaking point. All information and training could be divided into three categories: Most important were systems and weaponry capabilities—the USSR and China could find that information useful in other parts of the world; somewhat important were specific mission and strategy information; and least important—and first to be divulged under torture—were training techniques and Air Force policy. If a pilot was captured and not immediately taken to Hanoi, then the longer he survived, the better the chance of rescue by American or ARVN forces.
AFTER SEVERAL HOURS the officer returned. He opened a slim file.
“Captain Charles Ravich, we start.”
He lifted his eyes.
“You see we move you to big trail soon when repair. Soon. Now you must listen—”
“I am a prisoner of war and an American officer. I—”
“Charles Ravich, you criminal! You criminal of war. I explain to you. We will teach you before difficult question. Show criminal of war Charles Ravich first photograph.”
The soldier brought in three small albums bound in black.
“The first photograph is boy who stand by railtrain track when your jets strike. You look at it.” The officer stood over him and put his hand around his neck, forcing his face to within inches of the color photos, which were small and square. “These pictures are what your bombs do to my country, Charles Ravich. Little proof, they are little, little proof. You are accountable. Many dead. Too many. Look at next photograph, look … sixty-two-year-old woman. She make fixing her own house when your jet attack. You see, this is the napalm. She live four day and then die. Now, you know Western philosophy. Man sum of action. Man accountable. This is Western, you believe. I say to you, as one human being to another, why you do this to us, why put the bombs on our children? People of my country die. You say maybe this is normal way to treat criminal pilot. No. I try to be civilize with you, Charles Ravich. But I say to you I want to kill you fast. My people are farmers. Now I ask you—do you have a young son? Young daughter? Ah, your face change. Daughter. Now I ask you … Next photograph! Do you make this of your responsibility? This! Or, next photograph, this? These your acts. You Western man, you individual responsibility. Why you make yourself a criminal?”
After the first album, they showed him two more. He recognized background structures. Depos. Bridges. Truck camps, railyards. He’d seen them. He’d bombed them.
DUSK. Insects swarmed around a lamp hanging from the thatched roof. The officer dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. The hours passed. His back stiffened. A soldier came into the hootch, talking quickly. Some kind of emergency. They tied a crusty, gasoline-fumed rag around his head. He heard a whisking sound, a broom over dirt. “Down!” the interpreter yelled, striking Charlie in the face. He sank to his knees and felt the earth. “In!” the interpreter cried. A foot caught him in the ribs, pushing him into a hole—the fuckers were going to kill him in a hole. He didn’t know his children yet, he hadn’t had enough time with them. He crawled forward and then suddenly down into a chute. Someone pushed him from behind and he heard the whisking sound again. Now his shoulders rubbed the tunnel wall. He stumbled forward on his hands and knees as a voice behind him cried, “Nanh len!” Hurry. Adjusting, using his hands to guide himself, he learned the width and height of the tunnel. Surprisingly regular. The earth beneath his hands and knees was cool, packed. No light. Someone shuffled behind him, urging him on with a rifle. They crawled a long time. His hands ached. The crawling made his back worse—something was cracked or chipped or broken in the lower vertebrae. Periodically he crossed flat pieces of wood, distance markers perhaps. He tried counting paces between markers but lost count as the tunnel dipped and turned. Once he heard the rush of water. Other times voices, near, far, singsong, echoing eerily, laughing, whispering, perhaps even the cry of a baby, followed by the windy static of a shortwave radio. The Vietcong mountain cities. He came to divergent tunnels, judging by echoes and an odd feeling of the air moving around him. The rifle muzzle touched him, indicating which way to go. The air was fresh, then putrid, foul. Underground burial pits. That would be like the Vietcong. Removing their dead to conceal losses. Or just rotting fish? The tunnel rose and curved, branched off, fell. Then he heard a rumbling so portentous it seemed to come from the very center of the earth. The walls of the tunnel shook. By instinct he threw himself flat. “Nanh len!” the soldier behind screamed, punching him. He scrambled to his knees and scurried forward, roots tearing at him, the tumbling roar approaching, wavelike, bearing down, rippling the earth, gaining. He bumped into a tunnel wall. The soldier poked at him to go right but grabbed his shoulder. He could hear the soldier breathing, mumbling to himself in Vietnamese, perhaps counting intervals, listening to the explosions above the earth. They were close. How far underground were the tunnels? Moisture content of earth … detonation height … He tried to recall how deep a five-hundred-pound bomb cratered the earth. The B-52s also used thousand pounders … The rumbling seemed almost above them now. The soldier sang to himself in terror, awaiting some answer. He understood—one tunnel cut away from the bombing vector and the other led beneath it. The earth shook. He hunched on his hands and knees, paralyzed, seeing nothing but black, feeling the hot, dank air.
“Nanh len!” the soldier screamed, yanking him to the left. He pitched forward, the roar on top of him followed by a rush of heat. Then silence. The two men rested before moving on.
Light. Smell of burning kerosene. The rifle touched him if he hesitated. Voices speaking Vietnamese. Something—a stick?—jabbed him in the ribs. Laughter. His hands brushed burlap, grains of rice. The smell of oil, the sound of metal being filed. Then dark. The shuffling of his guard was all he could hear, save his own breathing. Sweating heavily, feeling the dirt work into his hands and hair and flight suit, he crawled on his knees for hours. A mask of filth covered his face. The bailout from the F-4 seemed days prior. Adjusting already, Ellie, I am adjusting already, too fast.
A hand grabbed his foot. The gun indicated he was to climb upward into the chewing drone of insects.
A soldier pulled off his blindfold. He was standing on a dark jungle path. They put a rope around his neck. His back felt hot and weak, but he showed no pain so that they could not use it against him. Now, a few hours after dawn, direct sunlight did not penetrate the thick canopy of vegetation. Lushness out of control. Everywhere, huge leaves dripped. He sucked in the dense, wet air. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed in humming, adhesive clouds. The men bound his arms behind him. It hurt immediately, enough to make him hate them. He could feel the sweat drip through his clothing, a rash creeping across his armpits and groin. He wanted to scratch himself, shake loose his arms. The rope cut i
nto his wrists so deeply that in a matter of minutes his fingers were numb.
A group of soldiers came along the trail, walking nimbly, each dressed in a black pajamalike uniform and carrying an AK-47 rifle. With them, led by a rope around his neck, walked a B-52 pilot, judging from the flight suit. A foot taller than the soldiers. His face seemed vaguely familiar—perhaps they’d shared some training class years ago. B-52s were rarely shot down, but it wasn’t impossible; the huge planes were easy targets at low altitude and maneuvered ponderously when under attack. A bloodied bandage circled the man’s mouth and jaw. The flier could even have been from one of the planes bombing the previous night. He walked with uncertainty, dragging his feet, bobbling his head as if something in his neck were loose.
“That man needs medical care.” He wondered if his captors spoke any English.
“You go,” one of the soldiers said, pushing him along the path.
“I need bandages and water. If you untie my arms—”
The Vietcong soldier put his rifle to the ear of the wounded pilot and indicated that he would shoot the man.
AFTER THREE HOURS the wounded pilot crumpled onto the path. The Vietcong yelled and kicked at him to get up.
“Get him some water,” Charlie said.
The Vietcong cut some vines and constructed a crude litter. The pilot made a noise when they rolled him onto it.
The ropes had cut off all feeling in Charlie’s hands. The pain began again around his elbows and worked up the arms and circled his shoulders and dug into his chest. He tried to move his fingers, get the blood going. Nothing. If the ropes were removed, it’d be hours before he could use his arms. Even worse was his thirst. In the humid air he had sweated away perhaps seven or eight pounds, none of it replaced. He had no piss in him. His throat was dry, his lips sore. Branches and vegetation brushed against him; a latticework of cuts and scratches bled lightly. Insects flitted against his face. For a time he concentrated on putting one foot before the other. One and two. One and two, just say that. Fucking football practice. One and two. The earth was black and wet. The trail looked heavily used. He was glad the soldiers hadn’t taken his leather flight boots, which had steel shanks. He wondered how they could walk in their little black sneakers. He could hear the other American moaning, calling to people not there.
The trail descended for several miles until they approached a wide stream. Shiny black larvae by the thousands hung from branches, so thick the trees were covered by a moist slithering mass that brushed off on him and the others as they walked. He shook his shoulders yet the larvae stayed on, inching purposefully across his chest, probing his skin with their pincer mouths. The larvae landed on the Vietcong as well, but they seemed unconcerned. Across the dirty green water stretched a footbridge suspended by woven vines. The floor of the bridge, only two feet wide, was constructed of heavy steel links in strips of about fifteen feet, old tank treads. When they reached the other side of the stream and had gone up the bank onto drier ground, one of the soldiers broke open a shell casing and removed the gunpowder, which he sifted with some dry powder he also carried. He wrapped the mixture with a large green leaf and lit the leaf with a butane lighter marked with the insignia of the Miami Dolphins. AFL. Don Shula. Acrid smoke billowed. The soldier jabbered in Vietnamese and he understood. The soldier circled the men with the burning leaf, enveloping them in the smoke. The larvae fell off, and they moved on.
They came upon an old elevated road. The guards hurried across this open space, looking left and right. Five feet to the other side, in the tall reedy grasses, sat the rusting hulk of a bulldozer cannibalized for parts. A remnant from the colonial period, when the French tried in vain to build a highway system. They had lost one hundred years in Vietnam, a century of sunsets.
An hour later, the men untied his hands but still kept the rope around his neck. His arms fell to his sides and flopped uselessly. It was hard to walk that way, and he waited for the feeling to come back. He noticed the trail got wider and flatter, with smaller paths leading off from the main one. Then, as if they had passed an invisible boundary, the trees became twisted and ripped apart, great banks of browned leaves hanging down, odd patches of light streaming through the canopy. The land fell in a valley and opened up.
Before him for hundreds of yards the ground lay blackened and cratered, as if the earth itself had collided with something, leaving a planetary skid mark. Charred tree trunks stood limbless, leafless, dead. Birds winged silently over the earth, and a gray-blue pall lingered in the low places, the smoke of what had been. Here and there, under clods of soil, protruded the remnants of a hootch, broken crockery, spilled rice, the wheel of a bicycle.
The soldiers yanked at the rope around his neck, urged him along. He lifted his eyes, understood why he hadn’t seen any people. A creek ran through the bottom of the village. The muddy, disturbed banks were choked with corpses. The bodies lay tumbled and crushed and dismembered over one another, frozen pandemonium. Children, women, old men, stomachs bloated and streaked with rot, flies swarming over the portions above water, caught noisily in the wet black hair, buzzing on genitals, landing on toes, noses, knees. One and two. Farther down the stream lay five dead water buffalo. They looked healthy, well fed. Again, the flies. He knew the reason the villagers were all in one place. The B-52s had walked the bombs, flying slowly to create a thorough carpet effect. The big green lizards flew so high the village could not have been warned. The people had fled an approaching wave of fire and exploding earth, driving the water buffalo across the stream. The bombs had caught up.
A soldier prodded him with a rifle. They walked on.
THE SOLDIERS HIKED until they reached a high spur of land. He was hungry, exhausted, but finally his hands were working. He figured the soldiers must be headed toward Laos, going nearly due west and toward the spine of mountains that marked the eastern border. They climbed higher along the spur as the light failed. He needed food and sleep. The night was clear; behind him, to the south and east, he saw a wide expanse, dark and undulating. The soldiers dropped the other pilot to the ground and camped. They ate cold sticky rice and took turns sleeping. He was made to sit near a ledge, his arms roped to a tree, his back grinding when he shifted. They gave him one cupful of rice.
Sometime during the night a huge soundless explosion bloomed to the south, maybe thirty miles away. Just a sudden ball of light, followed by lesser explosions, each eerily beautiful, rendered silent by the distance. In the morning he was not sure if he had dreamed them, or even slept.
He missed his children, their mouths and noses and eyes. Daddy, Daddy.
THE NEXT DAY they came to a village. He was dragged to a livestock pen with a galvanized trough of water. Three huge water buffalo stood to one side, hoof-deep in mud, switching their tails, the earth around them pocked by great flat turds. Using the same small book the first officer had used, an older Vietcong soldier tried to teach him the history of Vietnam through the millennia, fighting aggressors: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the Chinese, the Japanese Fascists, the French imperialists, and now the Americans. Each foreign country, the soldier said in an up-and-down voice, had some pretext for war—the conquest of spice routes, Catholicism, the French mission civilisatrice, the “protection of freedom”—and each time the Vietnamese (the Vietcong saw no difference between the North and South Vietnamese, only that one part was trying to free the other from the Americans and their “puppets”) repelled these attempts. “We fight for ten, twenty, fifty year. Your government want war over quickly. No know Ho Chi Minh! We lose ten men for every one of you, we still win.”
Reading set phrases, the man insisted that Charlie appear on Hanoi television and renounce the United States. A crowd gathered outside the pen, faces crowded to the slats. More questions. Approach altitudes, fuel requirements. Decoy formations of missions over Hanoi. He shook his head. The man sang on, getting angrier. The villagers outside the pen began to yell, and the men forced his head closer to the trough, where a scum of
dead flies, manure, and buffalo hair floated.
“You say!”
He shook his head.
They shoved him deep into the trough. He counted to fifteen.
He was yanked out of the water. “Say! What formation!”
They forced him under again. He held his breath, a matter of concentration, conserve, relax, do not use oxygen … surely they would bring him up … his lungs burned … purple darkness crowded his mind … They pulled him up from the trough. His breath burst.
“Say!”
They gave him no chance to respond. This time his lungs began to burn almost immediately. He could feel water trickling between his lips, his knees sagged, his head was expanding …
They forced him underwater dozens of times, then suddenly stopped and dragged him to a small pit caged over with bamboo near the buffalo paddock. He could walk at a stoop. Here they left him alone, though some of the villagers approached the cage to stare. He forced his head against the bars on the high side of the pit, where he could see the village and surrounding area. In a marshy field below, young women winnowed rice by tossing it on flat baskets. Soldiers with machine guns over their shoulders stood idly by, talking, smoking small pipes. Farther up the hill, a group of villagers dug into the mountain with hand tools. The entrance to the shelter was reinforced with wooden beams laid across one another; women pushing wheelbarrows emerged from the hole. Other villagers poured rice into burlap bags, which they then sewed shut. The soldiers kept a watchful eye over all of this activity. Chickens strutted about the packed earth. An old man smoothed long lengths of green bamboo with a double-handled drawknife. The food-gathering and fortification activity may have meant the Vietcong feared American ground forces were closing in. They had positioned Soviet M-46 130-millimeter field guns on the perimeter of the village. Two Chinese trucks sat axle-deep in dry mud near the edge of the forest. Perhaps the village lay along a spur line of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, within ten or fifteen miles of the Laos border, one way or the other. If American forces were near, and if the rough-cut jungle roads remained difficult, air recon would pick up the trucks.
Afterburn: A Novel Page 3