P. O. W.

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Arnason knew.

  Woods moved down the trail in a low crouch, but he still maintained his speed. He wanted to get as far away from the recon team as possible before Arnason discovered him missing. He knew that technically he was going AWOL, but he didn’t care. He was going to find Spencer Barnett or die in the process. He knew that he couldn’t go on living with the memory of leaving his friend behind haunting him every day and night, especially after he had promised Spencer that he would never leave him alive out in the jungle.

  Sergeant Amason knew that he had only a few minutes to catch up to Woods before the extraction helicopters arrived. He hoped that Woods had stayed on the trail and wasn’t moving too fast. He himself was running with little regard as to any chance meeting with NVA soldiers, banking on the air strikes’ having cleared the immediate area of any enemy for him. Arnason just caught a glimpse of Woods’s back as the soldier turned a slight bend in the trail. He ran harder.

  Woods heard the footfalls and turned with his CAR-15 to meet the threat. He was hoping that it would be NVA, but he knew instantly that Arnason had figured out what he was planning to do.

  Woods hissed the words. “Get away!”

  Arnason dived and tackled Woods just above his knees. The pair rolled into the thick underbrush. Woods struggled, but his CAR-15 and pack hindered him. Arnason grabbed Woods under his jaw and forced his head back against the thick plants on the ground.

  “You’re coming back now!” Arnason growled the words. “No questions asked!”

  Woods realized that the game was up and nodded his head in agreement.

  “And no more of this shit! You hear?” Arnason was angry. “I like Barnett too! But this is not the way to find him!”

  Woods’s eyes flashed his anger, and he tried talking with Arnason’s fingers squeezing his cheeks. His voice sounded muffled. “I made a promise.”

  “Let’s get back…. I’ve already called for extraction.” Amason ended the conversation

  The run back to the edge of the landing zone seemed a thousand times longer than it had going for both of the men. Arnason could see the slick making its approach and signaled for Simpson and Lee San Ko to load up first. He kept himself within arm’s length of Woods. The chopper’s skids were starting to lift off the rocks when Arnason hopped on board and took hold of Woods’s web gear. The look in the sergeant’s eyes told the soldier not to try to jump back down on the ground. Woods sighed and leaned back against the nylon webbing of the seat.

  The Special Forces captain stood in the clearing inside of his A-camp with the hand flare uncapped, ready to fire. He waited until the slick was passing over his camp and rammed his open palm against the bottom of the blue star cluster.

  Arnason could see the burst off to his right side and looked down at the small dot on the ground. He gave the captain a thumbs-up sign and smiled.

  The tigress had watched the two humans wrestling on the edge of the trail and was just about ready to attack when they stopped and started running back down the trail. She knew that her maimed hip would prevent her from catching either one of them and growled her disappointment. She started a slow hobble down the trail, knowing that every time the loud sounds came to the jungle there was always something dead that was good to eat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Black Cong

  The old Montagnard sat under the shady overhang of the thatched roof of the longhouse and mixed another pot of rice wine. He dipped in water from the jug his eldest grandson had carried up from the river and then added a handful of husked rice. The wine was being fermented for a special ceremony in honor of Tang Lie, the devil spirit that had taken possession of their village through the North Vietnamese. He mumbled enticing chants under his breath as he prepared the wine, trying to get Tang Lie interested in the intoxicating drink. The tribe was hoping that they could get Tang Lie drunk and then lead him from the village so that their god, Ae Die, would return and bring happiness back to the mountain community.

  The girl began to cry very softly, but the old man could still hear her through the matting that covered the end of the community house. She was his youngest daughter and his favorite one. He heard the American soldier begin grunting like a pig and knew that he had mounted her again. The old Montagnard threw in a double handful of rice and slowly stirred the large pot of wine. He watched the tiny bubbles rise to the top and begged Tang Lie to accept his humble gift and give the black American soldier the disease that slowly rots away a man’s body. He added another handful of rice and asked that the leprosy start with the man’s sex organ.

  The North Vietnamese soldier looked up in the sky for aircraft before running the short distance from Lieutenant Van Pao’s office to the longhouse where the black American lived with his Montagnard woman. He hated going to get the American, because every time he saw the man his jealousy burned his throat. The American was the only one allowed to have a woman all to himself.

  The old man saw the soldier coming and removed any expression of hate from his face. The Vietnamese thought the mountain people were dumb, so he would act dumb for them. He added another handful of rice to his wine. Tang Lie would be very happy: the wine was strong and would make the evil one’s head hurt.

  The NVA runner pushed the bamboo curtain aside and saw the naked man lying next to the young girl. “Come! The lieutenant wants to talk to you!”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” James pointed his finger at the soldier but made no attempt to cover his nakedness. He enjoyed teasing the North Vietnamese by exposing his large penis; it was one of the few things he could do to show his superiority over them.

  “Come now!” The soldier left the longhouse angry. He wanted to kill the American pig, slowly.

  Lieutenant Van Pao sat behind her makeshift bamboo desk with her hands folded in front of her. She twisted her lip and stared directly into Barnett’s eyes. “What am I going to do with you, Spencer? You refuse to cooperate…. You taunt the soldiers of the People’s Army. You are not a good boy!”

  Barnett sat on the bamboo pole that had been erected in her office and struggled to balance himself. The pole was designed not as a seat, but for a man to hang from upside down. The guards on each side of Barnett held him up by holding him under his armpits. He had been tied to the pole in the worst torture position of all. The two-inch bamboo rod had been placed behind his knees, and his forearms were pulled forward under the bar and tied at his wrists. A thin parachute cord was tied around his ankles and pulled tight and tied behind his back and around his neck. Once the guards let go of him, he would roll off the top of the bar and hang below it, with all of his weight falling on his knee joints. If he tried relaxing his legs, the parachute cord would start to strangle him.

  “Please! Please, cooperate with us and I can have you untied…. Oh, Spencer Barnett, you have served your country well!” She smiled when James walked into the room and stood next to the doorjamb behind Barnett where he couldn’t be seen. “Why can’t you be sensible like Mohammed James and help us?”

  “Fuck you, Sweet Bitch.”

  She flinched. The nickname the POWs called her behind her back always angered her, not because of what it meant but because it showed a lack of respect for her as a soldier and an NVA officer.

  “Come on, Spence…” James stepped forward so Barnett could see his smiling face. “It’s not that bad… you might even get a woman.”

  Barnett didn’t answer James. He glared at him, and with his eyes he told his ex-teammate what he would like to do to him.

  “Now, now, Spence…” James huffed and smiled, using only one side of his mouth. “Don’t you remember the last time you got uppity?”

  “Enough, Mohammed James!” Van Pao wasn’t going to give up her authority as the senior interrogator of prisoners. “I will handle him.”

  Spencer sucked as much spit as he could from his dry mouth and looked over at James. The spit hit the black soldier under his left eye. Barnett smiled.

  “You!” James too
k a step forward and was stopped by the guard holding Spencer’s left arm. “You’re dead!”

  “Spencer… this is your last chance! Tell me where you buried the sensors, and you’ll be cut free….” She lit a Marlboro and blew the smoke at the prisoner. “If not…” She shrugged her shoulders. “We haven’t had a prisoner die in a long time… not since the South Vietnamese lieutenant committed suicide.”

  Barnett took a deep breath, knowing what was coming next. It was going to be the last easy breath he would take for quite a while.

  The guards released Spencer’s arms, causing the prisoner to fall backward, almost making a complete revolution around the pole. The pain was instant. He rocked back and forth under the smooth rod, which bent under his weight. The yokes at each end of the pole vibrated but remained upright. That was the good thing about bamboo: it always gave under pressure from the elements and never broke. Barnett recalled what Colonel Garibaldi had told him about being flexible. When he had first been interrogated, he tried not to yell or scream, but the colonel had assured him that he would last longer without telling them what they wanted to know if he screamed as loud as he could.

  Lieutenant Van Pao strolled over to where Spencer hung and gently caressed the bare soles of his feet with her split bamboo rod. She walked around him for a couple of minutes, humming softly, and then she swung the bamboo version of a cat-o’-nine-tails hard so that the split rod landed on the soft inner soles of Spencer’s feet. The pain behind his knees was forgotten as his feet burst apart in pain. Spencer bit his lip, even though the colonel had told him to start screaming the instant they touched him. He would try to hold back for just a little while.

  “Well, he’s going to be a brave boy today.” She lashed out with the rod again and again, until she heard the first whimper from the young man’s throat.

  “Let me have a swing….” Mohammed James held out his hand for the bamboo rod. Van Pao hesitated and then smiled. She gave the switch to James and spoke rapidly to one of the guards in Vietnamese.

  Spencer was gasping for air. The pause in the lashes against his feet let the pain flash up his legs.

  James noticed the bulge in Barnett’s black pajama pants where the teenager’s testes were and lowered his aim. The blow was so hard that it rocked Spencer halfway around the pole.

  The old Montagnard heard the blond boy’s screams from his seat on the porch. He stopped adding water to his rice wine and looked over toward the building where the female Vietnamese tortured the prisoners and occasionally one of the villagers. He had been the headman of the village until the North Vietnamese soldiers had come. He had spent a couple of very unpleasant days in the darkened room.

  Colonel Garibaldi heard Spencer’s scream and felt like crying. He watched Mother Kaa sleeping in her cage and mumbled to himself. “Please… talk, Spencer! Tell them every damn thing you know! Talk… talk… talk.” He started crying.

  The old Montagnard struggled to his feet. The cool weather was making his joints hurt all of the time. His eyes were getting so bad that he was blind as soon as it got dusk outside; even with a full moon, he was sufficiently incapacitated to need one of his grandsons to lead him to the men’s place behind the village, if he had to go at night. He knew what he must do; a Bru chief did not sit idly by and allow the evil spirit, Tang Lie, to bring so much pain to his village. He was still the chief of the Bru.

  Colonel Garibaldi looked over at his wooden cross and started praying for Christ to intervene and stop the boy’s pain.

  Spencer passed out.

  “He isn’t lasting as long as he used to….” She gently tapped the bamboo whip against her leg and could feel the sting through her khaki pants. She stopped hitting herself.

  One of her soldiers appeared in the doorway. “Lieutenant! There is a call for you in the radio bunker!”

  She nodded her head and started for the door. She turned and looked at James, who was watching Barnett’s face. “Mohammed?”

  James looked up at the officer with an expression of pure pleasure. “Yes?”

  “You were too busy to notice….” She held up the half-dozen Polaroid photographs of him beating Barnett that her guard had just taken and fanned them out in her hand. “This is what we call in the intelligence community… insurance.”

  “Keep them! I could give a fuck less… Lieutenant!” James spat out the words.

  She left, and all but one of the guards followed her. She shivered when her back felt the warm sunlight touch it, not from the warmth but from her thoughts of Mohammed James. He was a very sick man.

  Spencer had forced his eyes open and saw the photographs in Lieutenant Van Pao’s hand. The pain coming from his feet, buttocks, and testes was excruciating and blended together as one great force. He swallowed hard and shivered.

  “James… I am going to kill you….” The words were spoken so softly that James barely heard him.

  “You’re not going to do shit, honkie!” James kicked Spencer’s bruised buttocks, sending the POW swinging back and forth, as he left the darkened room.

  Mohammed James walked down the jungle trail with Spencer Barnett’s CAR-15 slung over his right shoulder. The short version of the M-16 rifle was perfectly designed for the thick jungles of the highlands. The telescoping stock could be pulled out and the weapon selector switch placed on semiautomatic, or else the weapon could be used as a compact, fully automatic submachine gun. James smiled to himself as he walked between the NVA company commander and the unit’s first sergeant. He was recalling the first time Spencer Barnett had seen him carrying the weapon. His ex-teammate had literally thrown himself against the bars of his cage and screamed curses at him. It served the uppity white trash right to have the weapon taken away from him. Sergeant McDonald had no right giving Woods and Barnett their own CAR-15s after they had graduated from the Re-condo School in Nha Trang. He had graduated too, and with honors! That was the way it was with white people: they always took care of each other and shit on the black and colored people of the world! James’s smile changed to a full-mouthed grin. Who had the CAR-15 now?

  The North Vietnamese column he was part of moved at a casual pace down the jungle road that would have been a trail in a more developed country. NVA engineers had built the road running next to the Rao Lao River to link up with Highway 547 in South Vietnam, cutting the A Shau Valley in half and providing high-speed access to the prized city of Da Nang. Groups of NVA soldiers passed James’s unit riding bicycles on their return trips to the NVA supply depots in Laos. The NVA modified the bikes to carry huge loads of ammunition and supplies to their troops in the south by removing the seat and placing the load where the man would normally ride. The soldier would walk next to the bike and steer it using a modified bar across the handlebars.

  James had learned a great deal about the NVA in just the short couple of weeks he had agreed to work with them against American units. The NVA traveled mostly at night down well-used trails and roads. The jungle was used only to get into and out of major command or supply areas in the south. The American units spent almost all of their time humping through the heavy jungle sounding like an old steam engine as they hacked their way through the virgin terrain. The NVA were never taken by surprise if the American unit was larger than a squad. James wondered how much the American intelligence people would pay him for what he knew about NVA small-unit operations; it could probably change the results of the Vietnam War.

  The North Vietnamese commander stopped his company and gave orders for his men to fill their canteens and eat. James found himself a comfortable spot to sit next to a large tree and removed his nylon backpack. He opened a side pocket and took out a can of potatoes and beef. Everything James wore was authentic American equipment, down to his underwear. He was supplied with gear that had been taken off American dead and POWs. The only thing that James did not wear was camouflage paint, and there was a reason for that: the NVA wanted the fact that he was a black man to be very obvious to anyone they encountered once they r
eached the Laotian–South Vietnamese border.

  James leaned back against the tree and ate his can of C-rations alone. The NVA soldiers stayed away from him, and only the first sergeant or the company commander would even bother talking to him. James liked it when the sergeant gave him his orders, because the man spoke almost letter-perfect English—in fact, the North Vietnamese spoke English better than he did.

  Sweat rolled down in his eyes, and he used the back of his hand to wipe it away. He started thinking of home, back in Detroit, Michigan, where he had been raised in a white-built ghetto that had been designed to contain the black people and keep them all together, below 8 Mile Road in the city. The whites had always treated black people like shit. The ghetto projects where his mother had found them an apartment were new when they moved in, but the whites who controlled everything in Detroit refused to give the black people good jobs, and so they were forced to tear the toilets and sinks out of the apartments and sell them to feed their families. If a light bulb was screwed into a socket in the hallway, it was gone within minutes. The halls at night became a battle zone for muggers and dope dealers.

  Mohammed James ground his teeth as he thought about how the white people treated blacks back home in Detroit. The whites were the ones who had forced his mother to work long, eighteen-hour days operating a steam press in a white-owned laundry. She had caught pneumonia during his fourteenth winter and died. Mohammed chose to live in the streets, rather than go to the Wayne County Youth Home and be forced to feed the emotional vampires who worked there under the protection of the powerful social services organization. It was on the streets that he had first met the man who became the most powerful influence in his life: Malcolm Pride. James had learned through the popular Black Moslem exactly what his personal calling in life was, and at sixteen years of age, James had become the youngest Death Angel in the United States.

  A smile of pride crossed James’s face under the jungle tree. He had known from his first Black Moslem secret ceremony for Death Angels what his lifetime vocation was going to be.