Читать книгу Beyond Survival - Gerald Coffee - Страница 11

3

Forgiving Oneself

The decisions we make out of loneliness and pain, uncertainty and fear can take us to the extremes of shame and pride. The turning point that changes adversity into opportunity, defeat into victory comes when we are willing to forgive ourselves. Too often our unreasonable expectations lead to self-judgment and guilt. Our best is the best we can do.

“If you do not cooperate, there no reason to keep you alive.” The province administrator, as he had called himself, shrugged as he said it, then commenced lighting a cigarette very deliberately. The click of his small metal lighter that he snapped closed deftly with one hand punctuated the silence that followed his words.

He still exhaled smoke through his nostrils as he continued, “And if you are to die, maybe you have some last words you are pleased to tell this man of the cloth.” He flicked his head toward the man seated at my right, the only one dressed significantly differently from the other four at the table. The table itself was rough-hewn wood and looked almost as though it had been built hurriedly for the occasion. It matched nicely the tree-pole rafters of the low ceiling and smooth dirt floor.

We seemed to be in some kind of anteroom of one of the more important cadres’ houses. The host was seated at my interrogator’s right, probably a low party official, perhaps the political cadre of this tiny hamlet. He and one of the other men slouched at the table were dressed similarly, in clean but drab and threadbare work clothes. The army uniform of the fifth member of the delegation was so faded it looked like a khaki work outfit; only the bright red insignia on the collar—a red felt square with two gold stars—distinguished him as military. The insignia was like a dab of bright crimson pigment on an otherwise dull canvas. It must have been pinned on for the occasion. My two guards stood at either side and slightly behind me, their arms crossed and feet planted firmly at shoulder width apart, like eunuchs guarding a harem. Their stern pose appeared to be well rehearsed.

The head man at the opposite end of the table continued to stare from beneath his bushy brows and pale forehead; a forehead still marked by the red indentation from the headband of his dirty gray pith helmet, which now hung askew on the back of his chair. He had the only chair. The rest of us sat on very crude benches like the ones pictured in my Boy Scout manual that you hew out of rough logs in the wilderness with knife and hatchet.

“Well?” he said with a sharper edge to his invitation, “this is your last chance.” Again he nodded toward the “man of the cloth.”

I looked at the man to my right and he looked at me. His gaze was almost passive, slightly expectant. The faded brown frock that buttoned high in a stiff collar flowed loosely everywhere else and was as clean and threadbare as the work clothes of his comrades. After the two buttons at his collar, none of the other buttons down the front matched. Like the others, he smoked almost constantly. His Truong Son cigarette package, his lighter, and cheap souvenir plastic rosary were on the table in front of him. He looked like he could be a priest. He was older (there were no young priests here), and his eyes held the classic tired compassion of a priest in a war-torn country.

In the predawn darkness, the guards had shaken me roughly from a stonelike sleep. One had pulled sharply at my swollen arm. As the pain shot through my upper right quarter, I had cried out and bolted upright, searching the darkness for the source of the cry. The guard jumped back, himself startled. The pain or the cry—I hadn’t been sure which—had brought me instantly awake and alert. The guards had laughed at my bewilderment and seemed to be in a nasty mood, out of character really with their previous attitude of curiosity and businesslike indifference. They had tied my wrists behind me with the same strip of cloth that had been my blindfold earlier. That would have been hard enough on my injured arm, but the stiffness of sleep on straw caused me to contort down and to the right as I tried to minimize the pressure and the pain.

For the next fifteen minutes they had yanked and jerked me along the little mazes of the hamlet, pushing me one way, then another, spinning me sideways, twice into the smelly binjo ditch that seemed to carry urine and feces nowhere in particular. Each time I had tried to roll with the fall, but the prickly bushes scratched and punctured my feet and hands and face. God, just what I need! More open wounds to attract the millions of deadly bacteria among which I was groping to regain my footing.

Finally, as one edge of the gray sky was tinged by pink, I was jerked to an abrupt halt in front of an open doorway. One of the guards went in and announced our arrival in a respectful monotone, received his orders, stepped back outside, and snarled at me: “Go through.”

In the relative darkness of the room I could distinguish the five men at the oblong table, one at the far end and two on either side of it. The near end of the table was open for me. A small kerosene lamp like the one that Lan had used sat in the middle of the table, barely revealing their faces, the papers spread before them, and the emptiness of the rest of the room.

“Sit down.” A hand belonging to the toneless voice at the far end of the table gestured toward the spot in front of me. “I am the administrator of this province, and these are my . . . my . . .” He searched for the word. “. . . my council.” His hand made a small circle indicating the others at the table. I was surprised that he spoke English.

“You are captured by the people of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and have been caught redhanded. You are the blackest criminal. You have no rights, no rights for medicine, no rights for anything. You are at the complete mercy of my government and my people. We can kill you at any time and your fate will be unknown. We can keep you in prison for many, many years. When the war is over in my country, and the heroic Vietnamese people have defeated the U.S. imperialistic aggressors and their lackeys, maybe you can go home and maybe not. It is according for us.” He drew deeply on his cigarette and paused for effect, then continued in a more conciliatory tone. “On the other hand, if you have correct attitude, if you surrender your will—You understand ’surrender your will’?” I nodded. “If you surrender your will, you will receive humane and lenient treatment. That is the policy of our people, even though they hate you very, very much.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the others, then back at me.

“Do you understand?” I nodded again. “Good.” He glanced down at several papers spread on the table in front of him and shifted one to the top of all the others.

“What was the name of your aircraft ship?”

I was silent.

“What kind of airplane were you flying?” More silence.

He said something to the others rather matter-of-factly, then lit another cigarette. This time he glowered at me as he snapped the lighter shut. “You must know you must answer my questions! You must show good attitude because the fat is in the fire!” It was becoming apparent that those Vietnamese who spoke English relied heavily on idioms in order to sound competent. Some were effective and some not. It could even be comical. I remained silent and looked at him as benignly as possible. Surely, I thought, there’s a good bet he already knows what kind of plane I was flying and from which ship.

My mind flashed to the image of the six-inch-high black letters on both sides of the fuselage of my aircraft back near the tail: “RA–5C” and, below it, “USS Kitty Hawk.” This was standard for each type of aircraft on each aircraft carrier. The image focused more specifically on the last preflight inspection of our plane. As I had checked the control surfaces on the port wing, Bob had run his hand across the words Kitty Hawk on the fuselage, checking the security of the port engine access hatches.

Ignoring his question, I said almost reflexively, “Where is my crewman? Where is the other man who was in my airplane?”

With some exasperation he again shuffled through the papers on the table, extracted a stiff plastic card, and flipped it toward me like a Las Vegas dealer. It was Bob’s military ID card.

“He has been shot.” The words themselves were like a shot and I felt them in my chest.

Then he picked up my own ID card, which was also among the papers. Holding its picture toward me, he said, “And I think you are the very, very lucky one.”

He snapped his fingers and said something in Vietnamese. The man on my left plucked Bob’s card from my hand and returned it to the head of the table. Still I pictured Bob’s face on the card I had just held. I didn’t believe what I had just been told. I couldn’t believe it. Surely Bob was alive. Perhaps even in this village in a different hut somewhere. He had probably been shown my ID card and been told that I had been shot, too. I couldn’t give up on him.

“Now then,” the administrator sighed heavily, “what kind of airplane were you flying?”

I wasn’t about to answer, even though they may well have recovered some of the wreckage from my plane by now and could simply read the type and carrier from the pieces of fuselage. In any case, the information would have been reported by now in our own news media:

“AP February 3, 1966. The U.S. Navy reported today that an aircraft operating from the carrier USS Kitty Hawk was shot down just off the coast of North Vietnam. The aircraft, an RA-5C Vigilante, was on a routine combat reconnaissance mission. A spokesman said that aircraft exploded before hitting the water and one parachute was sighted. The two crewmen are officially listed as missing. Their names have been withheld pending notification of next of kin.”

Shit, nothing is secret in this war. Even the enemy can read a complete account of everything to fill in the blanks, or know when one of us is lying to them. If Bob or I had been able to get to shore without being seen and was trying to evade capture, all these guys had to do was read the New York Times in Hanoi to know what they might not otherwise have known: There had been two Americans in that plane and one was still loose. My predicament was only a small example of the difficulties this would cause us militarily. There were virtually no restrictions on our media, and the military released information on combat losses as freely as if they had been training incidents. Since our nation was not officially at war, there was nearly unrestricted freedom of information, a state of affairs with serious implications for me as a POW, one I would soon come to curse.

I decided a courteous response would serve me better than silence.

“Under the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, I am required to tell you only my name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. I am Lieutenant Gerald Coffee, 625308, June 2, 1934.”

“I know all that,” he hissed, as the cadre on his right interpreted my response to the others. “You have no rights under the Geneva agreements. You are not a prisoner of war. You are a criminal and you must answer my questions!”

He jammed his cigarette into the tabletop with two quick thrusts and purposely threw the butt on the floor beside his chair. I returned his stare briefly, glanced at the others, shrugged, and then looked down at the hole in the knee of my fatigue trousers, which had torn during one of my earlier encounters with brambles. I was becoming more and more distracted by the pain in my arm, which was still tied behind me. Fortunately, the severe swelling had the effect of a cast so my elbow and forearm, the focus of my injury, could not bend much; but that increased the pressure on my shoulders, and even the contorted position I assumed on the stool couldn’t alleviate much of the pain.

Again, he pressed me on my type of aircraft and the name of my carrier. Again, I stated only my name, rank, serial number, and date of birth.

“Obviously you are a diehard so we have no more purpose for you. You might as well tell your last words to the priest here who is with us.”

The priest looked at me almost pleadingly. He said, “C’est nécessaire que vous répondez, s’il vous plaît.”

“I have nothing more to say.”

With that, my interrogator slammed his fist on the table, startling even his comrades. He said something sharply to the guards behind me, who immediately grabbed me by the shoulders. Pain shot through the upper right side of my body. They jerked me off of the stool, and because the ceiling was low, my head bounced off the nearest rafter. I hardly noticed because of the pain in my arm. But even that was minor compared to what was yet to come.

The guards held me upright, waiting for further orders from their senior. They didn’t have long to wait. He rattled off several sentences in Vietnamese and pointed outside. They immediately turned me and pushed me back out through the door toward the small courtyard. It was full dawn now, and I could see more of the courtyard. There were fewer shadows. The dirt itself had been swept clean, much like the floor of the room where I had just been. The entire courtyard was shaded by one huge hau tree, and although the trunk wasn’t very large, it formed a large canopy over the courtyard about the size of a large living room or den. The three sides not bounded by the hut in which I had just been questioned were delineated by shrubbery and bushes and several clumps of bamboo. The yard sloped off to one side and then down into a drainage ditch that seemed to wander off into the paddies beyond.

The guards pushed me more urgently toward the trunk of the tree. I could hear shouting behind me as those who had been in the room followed. As they untied my wrists they pushed my back against the tree, and then retied my arms around the trunk. It was too big for them to reach all the way around, and I felt wrenching pain in my arm as they pulled my wrists within six or eight inches behind the other side.

The young officer with the red insignia on his collar was looking around the far side of the house, shouting orders to somebody I couldn’t yet see. Finally, as the guards finished tying my hands, I winced at the one final tug on the rope and bit down hard on my lip to keep from crying out. I tried to imagine what was going on inside my arm. If I had a simple fracture at the beginning, I would be lucky to keep it from becoming compound, and my elbow felt like there was nothing left that would resemble the normal joint.

My two guards stood off to the side, and there was a great deal of discussion among the others as they looked at me and then toward the corner of the hut where the young officer had been shouting his orders. Finally, they appeared: five soldiers, each carrying a rifle of some kind, each in some kind of a ragtag uniform. It seemed as if nobody in this country had a uniform that matched. Nevertheless, the reality of the threat that had been made inside the hut began to be more clear. A firing squad was forming in front of me.

The officer shouted his orders to the five soldiers, actually all young boys. This, too, had probably been rehearsed beforehand, but they sure weren’t remembering their moves very well. They finally managed to shuffle into a straight line about twenty feet from me. God, they were so young! Just kids really. A couple wore really baggy pants; none of their shirts seemed to fit. Their weapons were of the Heinz-57 variety: a couple of old American-made World War II–style M-1 rifles, a couple of French rifles that were worse for wear, and another rifle whose origin I didn’t recognize. About all they had in common were the pith helmets that each wore. A couple of those had camouflage bits of cloth on them, and the others were bare.

About the time the officer in charge decided that they were in a straight enough line, a couple of women emerged from around the same corner the soldiers had come from. They stopped abruptly with wide eyes, startled by what they saw. Obviously, they didn’t have any idea what had been going on in the courtyard. My interrogator saw them and shouted something. They turned around and fled back out of sight.

I was distracted from the pain in my arm now as I looked in the faces of the young boys with the guns. I could see that some of them weren’t sure about what they were supposed to do, and one youngster with an M-1 rifle almost as big as he was didn’t seem to be any more certain about what was going to happen than I was. They all tried unsuccessfully to look tough and serious.

The interrogator walked up to me, looked in my eyes, turned, and motioned the priest over toward us. He repeated, “This is your last chance. If you have anything to say to this man of God, you had better say it now.”

I looked at the priest and again at the five young gunmen. My mind flashed back to survival training school in Brunswick, Maine. I’d been there less than six months before. There was a section in the POW training that talked about instances like this, and I remembered the words of the instructor: “No matter what they say or how they threaten you, they probably won’t kill you because you represent something of value to them.”

God, I hoped he was right. They’re only bluffing, I said to myself.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the field. There was an open rice paddy—no wall, no fence, nothing to stop bullets. And since there was nothing out there, I supposed they could go ahead and shoot without worrying about hitting anyone behind me.

Again, the words came ringing back: “No matter how they threaten you, they probably won’t kill you.”

I looked at the interrogator, shook my head, and said, “I have nothing to say.” He nodded his head decisively, took three or four steps back, motioned the priest out of the way, and said something to the officer with the red tag on his collar. The officer positioned himself off to the side of the line of gunmen, snapped an order that seemed to rouse them out of their stiff positions of attention and into a wider stance, rifles positioned across their bodies, much as hunters walk through the woods, ready to bring their weapons up at any time. Then he barked out the next command very sharply, and although I couldn’t understand what it was, there was no question in my mind it was the first word of those three infamous words: “Ready. Aim. Fire!” Those three words that we’d played around with as kids, had seen in movies, and heard on the radio. We’ve read those words in novels and we’ve thought about the things that go through people’s minds when they’re faced with those three words. It conjures up notions of last-minute rescues of our cowboy heroes who are saved by a lifelong friend at the very last moment . . . .

But I could see no way that the fatal process would be interrupted now for me.

As the officer barked that first command, the squad brought their rifles up to eye level, partly sighting down the barrels toward me. I noticed that the kid with the M-1 was so undersized he’d hardly been able to heft it up to eye level.

“AIM!” The officer’s second command seemed to fill the courtyard. I glanced around me and took in the scene.

“Whatever they tell you, they probably won’t kill you. You represent something of value to them.”

They’re bluffing. They’ve got to be bluffing.

Five deadly muzzles pointed toward me, not very steadily. But steady enough.

They’ve gotta be bluffing. But if they’re not . . . what a shitty way to die . . . so far away from home. God, let them be bluffing!

My heart thumped loudly and my body tensed for either the impact of bullets or the draining relief of the bluff.

The third command—“FIRE!”—rang out but was engulfed by the fiery roar of the kid’s M-1. I viewed the scene as if it were in slow motion. I saw the kid slammed backward by the recoil of his weapon. His pith helmet jerked down over his face as he struggled to regain his feet while reeling back. Out of the smoke and flame emerged the slug from the muzzle of his rifle. I could see it coming. It should have been spinning from the rifling in the barrel of the gun and coming at me near the speed of sound, but for some reason—even though it was heading right toward me—that was not my impression. In fact, I could see the bullet wobble as it came closer and closer. For a moment, I felt I could even jerk my head out of the way before it reached me.

Instead, I closed my eyes in helpless resignation. Suddenly, I seemed to know in my gut that only my impression was slow motion and that there was truly nothing I could do to keep from actually being killed.

WHACK! The slug slammed into the tree trunk next to my ear. The splinters and pulp from the impact stung my neck and cheek. I kept my eyes closed and my body tense waiting for the impact of the next slugs. Surely they couldn’t all miss.

I waited. The roar from the gun gave way to a great deal of shouting and jabbering. Everybody in the courtyard seemed to be yelling, but the voice of the provincial administrator rose above the rest. I opened my eyes. Still tense and disbelieving, I saw them all converging on the kid with the M-1, shaking their fists and their fingers in his face.

Overwhelmingly relieved, I understood what had happened. Now I was aware of my body slumping heavily as all muscle tone seemed to disappear. Totally limp, incredulous, I realized that they had indeed been bluffing.

But there had been a glitch. The chambers of all the rifles were supposed to be empty but the kid didn’t get the word or had been careless. The other soldiers were standing there with their rifles at their sides in disbelief. The shot had surprised everyone, especially them—and even more especially, I suppose, the kid who had fired it, now being shaken by the collar of his shirt by the officer.

The administrator was really pissed. He stood there with his arms waving, ranting and raving, the soldiers and the young officers recoiling from his voice as if from a hot blast of air. They gathered themselves up and hurried back around the corner of the hut, hardly in the semi-military way in which they had appeared.

The administrator stood with his hands on his hips watching them go and then turned and had a curt exchange with two of his councilmen. He turned on his heels and strode toward me, seething in anger and embarrassment.

“So you think we are through with you!” He barked an order to the guards, who came around behind the tree and untied my arms. The release of the pressure was almost as excruciating as its application. As the guards twisted me away from the trunk, I noticed the gaping wound in the trunk of the tree, white jagged splinters sticking out stiffly, the sap already oozing. It was easy to imagine what my face would have looked like had the kid not missed.

Now they shoved me back to the other side of the courtyard toward the drainage ditch. With his rifle butt between my shoulder blades, one of the guards forced me down to my knees and finally flat on my face in the dirt. They tied the rope around my upper arms very tightly until it cut off the circulation; then with his foot behind my neck, he cinched my upper arms behind me. The strain and pain on my shoulders and injured arm was unbelievable. I could feel the cartilage begin to pop in my clavicle and my sternum and in the joints in my shoulders. Then, dragging me by the rope and the scruff of my shirt, they pulled me up toward a tree that was growing on the slope of the drainage ditch, threw the remaining rope over a low limb, and hoisted me up taut against the trunk of the tree until the tips of my toes were all that touched the ground. One of the guards secured the rope around the trunk of the tree, leaving me there in a semi-hanging position, my toes barely able to absorb the weight of my body. The administrator, who had been watching all this with his arms folded in front of him, moved closer, his face in front of mine, and said, “We will see. We will see.” Then he strode back into the hut.

Except for the two guards the courtyard was empty now. One of them checked the tightness of the knot around the tree trunk, said something to the other as they looked at me, made a joke, then they too left. I was alone with my pain.

Now I longed for the dull, gnawing ache that had been my constant companion the past few days. Compared to this, it would have been blessed relief. I couldn’t comprehend how they could leave me like this. The worst pain I had ever known until now was the tearing of cartilage and the twisting of ligaments in my knee while playing football: I had crumpled to the ground instantly, clutching my knee tightly to my chest while almost blacking out. But the pain had dissipated rapidly and continuously from that first blinding, wrenching instant. Now there was the same sharp, hot wrenching pain but no dissipation. It was constant, and getting worse.

Driven by the raw need for relief, my mind raced and contrived ways to alleviate the pain. I tried maneuvering my arms behind me, raising them up to get some slack in the rope. It worked a little bit, but I could only stay that way for a few seconds because I was barely touching the ground with my toes. I tried working my feet back up against the base of the tree trunk itself, hoping there might be some roots growing from the trunk on which I could stand to elevate my body and take the weight off my arms. That proved to be futile as well.

I could no longer concentrate on an intellectual solution. There was increased pain in my arms from the lack of circulation. My left arm—the good arm—began to throb and hurt as much as my broken arm. The pain was coursing through my arms in waves now, crashing against my consciousness. The muscles in my thighs and calves began to burn as I strained to be on tiptoe. As long as I could keep pressure on my toes, the pressure on my arms was less intense. But I couldn’t stay focused. As my mind became more and more enmeshed with my pain, I seemed to be less and less aware of the world around me. The pain was blanking out the courtyard, the tree with the bleeding bullet hole across the way, the softness of the morning air. From somewhere came the guttural sounds of a wounded animal, grunts and whines and sobs. It was me.

The pain was all-consuming. I lifted my head to the sky. “Oh, God!” I implored. I realized that by raising my head and taking the pressure off my shoulders it helped to alleviate the pain in my arm. I stood as straight as I could and held my head as high as possible. It was the only way I could tolerate it.

Finally, the two guards came back, apparently with new orders. I guessed I’d been there twenty or thirty minutes, I couldn’t be sure. Apparently, the administrator was becoming impatient, so the guards began their fun and games.

The tree was on the slope of the drainage ditch, and the side of the trunk that I was tied to and standing on was the high side. The guards began pushing me around the back side of the trunk so my feet couldn’t touch the ground. I cried out. I cursed and I yelled and I tried to kick at them. The administrator appeared in the doorway a few feet away with the filthy rag that had been my blindfold. He held it out to them and said something. One of them retrieved it and began stuffing it into my mouth as a gag. I tried to twist my head away, but the other one held me by the hair and the ears while his companion shoved the rag into my mouth. I’m sure he was afraid I would bite him, so as soon as he got it in part of the way, he poked the rest of it in with the barrel of his rifle. On the final thrust of the barrel, I heard a crack and felt the sharp stinging pain of half of one of my front teeth breaking off.

Again I tried to reach them with a roundhouse kick, but that only made the pressure on my arms all the worse. I was so furious and demoralized and I was hurting so badly. My shouts and cries were nothing more than growls and gurgles lost in the wad of cloth.

My tormentors just followed through on the momentum of my kicks now and had a pretty good rhythm going. Down and around the downhill side of the tree with no ground beneath me, roll around to the uphill side of the trunk, touch my toes briefly, then they’d push me with the rifle butt back down around the far side of the tree again, just like a tetherball in slow motion.

My thoughts were fragmented: pain . . . Code of Conduct . . . aircraft carrier . . . type of aircraft . . . pain . . . name, rank, serial number . . . Bob—dead or alive? . . . pain . . . and more pain.

Oh, God, please help me to do what I need to do here. Help me to be strong. Help me to get through this, Lord. Please!

How would they even know if I wanted to give up? They didn’t even seem to care. They just kept playing with me, laughing, taunting. The bastards really seemed to be enjoying what they were doing. I was soaked with sweat. My shirt and trousers were sopping wet.

Below where the ropes were tied, my arms were on fire. My shoulders seemed to be coming apart, and time stood still. I was consumed by the pain, aware of nothing else. The faces of the guards, the leaves of the tree that made the canopy over the courtyard, the smoothly swept dirt, the huts of the village, the hamlets, the sweep of the rice paddies as I swung across the downhill arc of the tree—it all became just a swirling manifestation of my pain.

Suddenly during one of those straining moments with my toes stretched as far down as possible and my head lifted to the sky, I became aware of the blurry face of my inquisitor standing in front of me. He grabbed my hair and pulled my face down toward him. The sweat stung my eyes. As it splashed off, I noticed a couple of spots on the shoulder of his shirt. The pain was causing me to gray out, like when pulling too many Gs in an airplane and peripheral vision narrows to a small, constricting hole. All I could see was his flushed and contorted face framed by the gray fog of my pain.

Somehow I was able to grunt my desperation and readiness to him; or perhaps he read it in my eyes. He pressed his palm against my sweaty forehead and pushed my head back against the trunk of the tree. He picked gingerly at the rag that had been stuffed in my mouth, unraveled it, and dropped it at his feet.

The relief was instant. I hadn’t even realized how suffocating the gag had been, and how much it was contributing to my desperation. Instantly the tip of my tongue found the spot where the rest of my tooth should have been, but I was gasping for air and the pain made my broken tooth insignificant.

“Well?” he said. His eyes narrowed. I was shaking my head “no” as I heard a reluctant, raspy voice whisper. “RA-5C. Kitty Hawk.” The voice was my own.

When the rope was untied from the trunk of the tree and I was able to stand on my feet again, the relief of solid ground was immediate. But as soon as the ropes were untied from my arms and my circulation resumed, the pain came back with a rush. In the future I would find that this was always the worst part: the end of the ropes instead of the ropes themselves. It was a devilish twist: the relief couldn’t come without the rush of excruciating pain first.

I was hardly aware of being led back to the little stable in which I’d spent my previous nights. The guards led me gently, not binding my arms behind and not blindfolding me again. I marveled at how they could be turned on and off. I plopped down on my little pile of straw totally exhausted. It had to be near noon by now. The pain in my battered arm had tapered off but remained at a high-level ache. I was given some water and a bowl of soup and then left alone. I couldn’t eat.

My conscience began to work on me now. I was ashamed for not having stuck to my name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. I always thought I would be able to. It was such innocuous information I’d given them, I rationalized. But still, they shouldn’t have gotten it from me. Had I given in because I really didn’t think it was important information or was I just weak? Surely by now they would know what type of aircraft I was flying, the aircraft carrier from which I had been flying. Surely they would know the information from our own news releases.

What if they had wanted something important? Could I have held out longer? Could I possibly have beaten them? How could I live with myself if I’d given them our attack altitudes, the frequency spectrum of my electronic countermeasures equipment? What if they would press me for a future target list? I had been briefed on our probable target priorities and seen them designated on the charts in the Operational Intelligence Centers.

Coffee, you weak sonovabitch, you’ve got to do better. God, please help me to do better next time. I shuddered at the thought of a next time. Could I put my shame and disappointment behind me, to be stronger? To hold out? Hell, there hadn’t even been any beating. There had been no bamboo slivers beneath my fingernails. There had been no hot brands burning my flesh. It had been just a variation of being tied up. My shame seemed to grow with each thought.

Finally, at some point that day, Lieutenant Gerald Coffee, professional warrior—trained in survival . . . evasion . . . resistance . . . escape—let go of his preconceived ideas of victory and defeat. Without really understanding it, I reluctantly acknowledged the first crack in my physical and psychological ramparts. But in my confusion and shame, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I had just been brutally tortured.