The Shadow of Arms

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “About the time the office closes.”

  “You now have a complete understanding of the orders for operations and the duties of each cell, right?”

  Pham Minh nodded. Thach was about to leave the office when he paused and asked, “Did you see the girl?”

  “Yes, just for a short time.”

  “So, what’s to be done about it?”

  “Seems her family is pressing her to enter into an engagement. I told her to do as she pleased.”

  “Was that truly necessary? In my opinion, your judgment wasn’t very good. The same thing once happened to me. And forget about what Comrade Thanh said.”

  “The truth is, I lacked confidence, sir.”

  Lifting his gloomy face up toward the ceiling of the warehouse, Thach was lost in thought about something, and then murmured, as if to himself, “Now that I think of it, the road to love and the road to revolution are one and the same.”

  Footnote:

  10 From the poem “Rappelle-toi Barbara” by Jacques Prévert

  30

  Investigation Report on Atrocities by G2 and MID11

  The present case arose from charges submitted at the military prison facility. An officer and a sergeant were interrogated in connection with allegations of torture. The accused were sentenced to reduction in rank and disciplinary punishment. No public announcement of the findings has been made. The informants have been released and have returned to duty assignments. Transcript of interrogation follows:

  Informants: Marvin Cole, Private (Age 22, born Pennsylvania)

  Von Taylor, Private (Age 21, born Ohio)

  Howard Brown, Private (Age 23, born Nebraska)

  Defendants: Lieutenant Sloat (Regimental intelligence officer, born California)

  Master Sergeant McCoy (Division MID)

  Witness: Master Sergeant Nguyen (ARVN interpreter)

  Interrogator: State your prisoner numbers, your rank prior to confinement, and the charges of which you were convicted.

  Cole: Number 2-40-1. Rank lieutenant, charged with homicide by misfire.

  Taylor: Number 2-40. Private. Assault on a superior.

  Brown: Number 2-40-2. Master sergeant. Dereliction of duty.

  Interrogator: Before we begin the questioning on this incident, state the circumstances up to the point at which Lieutenant Sloat summoned the informants.

  Cole: I can tell you myself. Our day usually started with roll call at 0500. Everything followed the loudspeaker’s instructions. All you could see in the dark was the spotlight and the barbed wire. After finishing breakfast, we immediately started the morning work. Lunch is the only meal we have in the sunlight. The work assigned to us was loading sand. Other teams were assigned to breaking rocks, so we considered ourselves lucky.

  Interrogator: Only state the facts relevant to the present case.

  Cole: I was an officer. The reason I’m mentioning prison conditions is, though it’s not included in the charge, I think these are things that absolutely must be known outside of the prison.

  Interrogator: Fine. Go on.

  Cole: Escape from the prison is almost unthinkable. In front is the sea, and looking over the stretches of sand is a watchtower equipped with machine guns. Beyond is the jungle. At ebb tide you can swim out about ten miles from shore, but the tide comes in so fast that many who have tried to escape were found drowned. The jungle starts about five or ten miles away.

  Taylor: Some prisoners cut their way through the wire fence, planning to head for Cambodia, but they were soon captured by pursuit patrols. Or shot by the enemy.

  Brown: I escaped once. Whenever I got the chance I widened a hole in the bottom of the fence a bit at a time. At night I dug out the sand and crawled out under the wire. I got to the edge of the jungle, but I didn’t have the courage to go in, so I came back. I was given solitary соnfinement.

  Cole: Even so, there’s always some prisoner trying to run away. Some head into the sea, hoping to reach Japan, and are never seen again. The attempts were constant because in that prison the work is harsh, the food is miserable, and you can trust neither the friendly captors nor the enemy.

  Brown: The guards would say we could rest after finishing our work, but from my experience I’d say it was better to slow down and keep working. For it became clear that as soon as we finished one thing, they’d load more work on us.

  Taylor: We decided Howard was right, so we used to load the sand bags slowly and take our time carrying them. We loaded almost a full truck, but we still weren’t too tired. A new prisoner, who wasn’t used to the sun, kept collapsing. We had to fill his quota, too. At 1000 we had a five-minute break. They gave us a cup of water dipped from a rusty drum.

  Cole: As we stood there drinking, gasping like dogs, we heard Brown say there was a new addition to the family. An army Jeep was approaching, raising plumes of dust. That was when he arrived. The guard shouted at us to get back to work and stop gawking, but we were so fed up with the monotony of the work we just stood there and watched. In the Jeep was a young Vietnamese boy, his hands tied behind his back, wedged between two American soldiers. The boy was in black pajamas, and was very thin with a long neck. The guards roughly dragged him down from the Jeep.

  Taylor: I was stunned. I had never seen a little boy tied up like that before, and I couldn’t stop staring. The guard whacked me on the back of my head with his baton.

  Brown: It was during the lunch break that Marvin and I were summoned. They called it lunch hour, but roll call took about twenty minutes, so there was only about ten minutes left to wait in the scalding heat and then gulp down that slop. The loudspeaker was blaring that vaccinations were to be given. Then Marvin’s name and number were called over the speaker. They repeated it several times, and then started swearing.

  Cole: I was dozing off. The guard walked down my file, looked around and then dragged Howard and me out. After checking our numbers, he led both of us to the main gate in the wire-mesh fence. There we were handed over to the guard, who took us to one of the Quonsets outside the fence.

  Interrogator: Private Taylor, you didn’t go with them, so how is it you became an informant about the misconduct?

  Taylor: I was summoned later, at the very end.

  Interrogator: Are you the one who disposed of the corpse?

  Taylor: Yes, that’s right. The dead body was—

  Interrogator: Ah, you can testify on that later.

  Cole: It was dark inside the Quonset. All the blinds were drawn. There was a lamp on the desk, but it was dim. I guess the lieutenant had turned the dimmer down. The walls shook from the air-conditioner unit in the window.

  Interrogator: How many people were inside, and who were they?

  Cole: Lieutenant Sloat, Master Sergeant McCoy, the Vietnamese interpreter, and the little boy.

  Interrogator: Sergeant Nguyen, are these men the ones who entered the Quonset at that time?

  Nguyen: That’s correct. Those two men came inside.

  Interrogator: Lieutenant Sloat, why did you summon these two, of all the prisoners?

  Sloat: I had seen their personal records. In the first place, Cole was an officer and a college graduate, and his charge on an accidental shooting didn’t seem too bad. The file showed that Cole had studied Vietnamese at the officer school in San Francisco. He’d also been through a special training course in Saigon, so I figured he’d make an excellent assistant.

  Interrogator: Do you mean to imply that Sergeant Nguyen was not capable of translating alone?

  Sloat: I hate to say this, especially in his presence, but we intelligence officers don’t have so much faith in the Vietnamese military interpreters. After all, the Viet Cong and they are in the same family. They’re hard workers up to a certain point, but beyond that they tend to sympathize with their fellow countrymen—that means siding with the enemy. H
aving a Vietnamese-speaking American present would, I figured, make him more careful.

  Interrogator: I see. So that explains Private Cole, but why did you summon Private Brown?

  McCoy: That was the guard’s mistake. We gave him Cole’s number, but he wasn’t sure he had it right so he brought both of them. But once Brown had come into the Quonset hut, we couldn’t just let him go back.

  Interrogator: Why not? You mean to maintain secrecy?

  Sloat: Yes.

  Interrogator: Then you had planned in advance to commit the atrocities. So, it looks like you were trying to conceal . . .

  Sloat: Gathering intelligence like we do at G2 and MID requires us to dig as much information as possible out of prisoners in the shortest possible time. Our duty is to send that information immediately to our forces in the field, and this priority allows us to make exceptions to general principles.

  Interrogator: That you dragged a suspected guerrilla to the military prison, was that also against general rules?

  Sloat: Yes, sir. Unless we maintain strict security, there’s a lot of leakage, and unflattering publicity can be exploited by the enemy.

  Interrogator: In this case, weren’t you were more concerned with your own forces learning about your secret interrogation methods than about leaks to the enemy?

  Sloat: In every department, the methods and procedures used to carry out a task are evaluated by the results. The task I undertook was not the kind of work requiring strict adherence to military regulations or the rules stipulated in international treaties.

  Interrogator: The informant may state how the defendants coerced you into taking part in this misconduct.

  Cole: Lieutenant Sloat called out my name to confirm which of the two of us was Marvin Cole.

  Brown: He was angry that the main gate sentry had brought me along too. He ordered me to stay inside with Marvin until the work was finished. The lieutenant introduced everyone one by one and then, pointing at the boy, said they were going to interrogate him. Master Sergeant McCoy suddenly turned the dimmer all the way up, and the light was shining straight in the boy’s face. The boy, who was sitting bound to a metal chair, grimaced and tried to turn his face away. Only then did I notice the boy had already been beaten. His mouth and chin were all smeared with his own blood.

  Cole: I felt so sorry for the boy I couldn’t even look him in the face.

  Interrogator: The boy’s age is recorded as fourteen. Was he beaten?

  McCoy: We hadn’t laid a finger on him at that point. At the time of his arrest one of the patrol troops had beaten him with a rifle butt.

  Cole: That’s a lie. Their Jeep drove right past us prisoners as we paused from working. At that time the boy’s face was pale, but not bloody.

  Sloat: Usually, we strip the guerrillas before we interrogate them. They might have something concealed, and anyway we need to check and see if they show any signs of having been in the jungle or any scars from shrapnel to determine whether they’re veteran guerrillas. Sergeant McCoy was bitten while trying to undress the boy. So he hit him, not that hard, and it seemed the boy caught it the wrong way.

  Cole: He said he was going to start interrogating and I should interpret. But Howard, who was standing beside me, gave me a nudge as a signal not to do it. I hung my head and remained silent. Sloat said I better cooperate, and that they had to get information on the organization of local guerrillas. He also told me to forget about the prison. I asked him what that little boy, much younger than my own kid brother, could possibly have to do with the Viet Cong. Sergeant McCoy said the little bastard had been captured on Route 1 trying to ambush one of our patrols. The lieutenant then explained why he had summoned me instead of calling in another official interpreter. Since they were due to ship back home within a year, the case might be publicized back in the States, that was his explanation. But it would be safe with me, he said, because I had to serve three more years of time in prison, and then return to my unit to complete my hitch. Then he said that, depending on how things went, he could arrange for me to work outside the prison, at the division headquarters, or out on some field detachment. Then I decided I had no choice but to cooperate.

  McCoy: The surprise ambushes of the guerrillas along Route 1 were giving us a real headache. The day before the boy was captured, several spots on the road were hit. At dawn the same day, a Jeep was blown up and three American soldiers inside were killed.

  Sloat: The boy was carrying a bundle of Russian-made hand grenades. They were bundled up in a club shape with a percussion detonator hooked up. The little bastard apparently had been transporting supplies for the guerrillas. The patrol took the grenades and also medical supplies off of him. It was a period when we were taking constant casualties without accomplishing much, and all of us intelligence officers were being pressed hard by our senior staff officers. It was urgent that we find out where the boy was heading with those supplies.

  Cole: I had them untie the little boy’s hands and interpreted Nguyen’s questions and the boy’s replies for Lieutenant Sloat. Under the bright light the boy’s black hair, his pale forehead and cheeks, and his brown eyes stood out distinctly. So did the dried blood stuck all over his soft chin. Whenever Nguyen asked him something, the boy struggled to speak through his torn lip.

  Interrogator: Do you recall the contents of the questioning?

  Cole: At first, Nguyen asked him where he got that stuff. The boy said from a dead soldier. An American soldier? A North Vietnamese soldier. Where was it, the dead body? On Route 1. There was no dead body of a North Vietnamese soldier on that road, in fact, was there? There was, next to a stream by the road. Why did you pick up the grenades? To protect myself. Where did the medical supplies come from? From the same dead soldier. But North Vietnamese fighters don’t carry antibiotics or painkillers, do they? I don’t know what those are. Where were you taking those supplies, tell the truth. I was on my way to see my sister in Qua Jiang. There was fighting on the other road, so I was scared. Now, given me a straight answer. Where were you taking those supplies? Really, I was not taking them anywhere, I was just going to my sister’s. My parents were killed. That was more or less how the interrogation went. McCoy was impatient, and he said heatedly that if they left the boy to him, he’d get some answers out of the little devil in no time.

  Interrogator: When did the torture begin, and who initiated it?

  Brown: That sergeant started to rough him up. He slugged the boy with his fists right in front of us.

  McCoy: That’s not true. I didn’t start it. I had to follow the orders of Lieutenant Sloat.

  Sloat: All right. I’ll tell you. The interrogation had gone on until three in the afternoon, but we kept getting the same damned answer from the boy, who claimed he was headed for his sister’s house. So I said we’d have to intensify the interrogation. So I sent Nguyen to fetch a kettle of water.

  Nguyen: That’s different from the facts. I opposed rough treatment. Almost all Vietnamese are Buddhists. As you may know, the greater the agony, the harder Buddhist believers fight to endure it. They’d rather seal their lips and choose death.

  Interrogator: But wasn’t he just a small boy?

  Nguyen: True, but any human who’s treated cruelly tries to triumph over the pain, out of hate for the enemy. Sergeant McCoy’s blow ended our interrogation before it started.

  McCoy: Shut up! Fuck, that wasn’t a real blow.

  Interrogator: Sergeant, watch your language. You’re under investigation here. This investigation is being conducted by order of the high command of the US-Vietnam forces with the intention of vindicating US military regulations and methods of wartime operations. Accordingly, atrocities against prisoners of war or suspects are absolutely prohibited, regardless of rank or mission. Witness, please proceed with your statement.

  Cole: McCoy complained about having no time to spare, saying he knew plenty of good methods. And
Lieutenant Sloat asked me if I had any effective way to make the boy open his mouth. I did not want to hear anybody saying I’d taken part in it, even afterwards, so I just kept my mouth shut. But then McCoy struck the boy again in the face with his fist. The boy, still tied to the chair, was knocked over backwards onto the floor.

  Brown: I was standing a little back, and I sat the chair back upright and saw that the boy was not moving. He seemed to have fainted. Blood was running down his face.

  Nguyen: I swore at Sergeant McCoy, calling him a barbarian. It would have gone much better if we’d given the boy some food to eat. You could see he had eaten nothing the whole day.

  McCoy: The lieutenant was the one who ordered us to intensify the interrogation.

  Sloat: That’s misleading. The fact that I said to increase the intensity of the questioning was not an order to engage in torture.

  Nguyen: It’s true that the lieutenant was angry at the sergeant. Lieutenant Sloat shouted at Sergeant McCoy to get out, saying he wouldn’t let him get away with such brutality. And when the sergeant left, he swore at him, calling him a stupid bastard of a lifer. The lieutenant seemed worried about leaving evidence behind. He ordered for a medic.

  Brown: The lieutenant sent me out to get a medic and said the medic should bring drugs to give the boy a shot to wake him up. When I asked whether we shouldn’t treat his wounds first, the lieutenant flew into a rage. He told me to hurry up and bring a medic with a syringe of stimulants before he smashed my face. I ran out. It happened that the whole prison was getting vaccinations and I managed to find a medic and bring him back to the Quonset. The medic took out a little vial of clear liquid and gave the boy an injection. A moment later, his head began to move.