Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

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.

       4

      The “Fiery Forge”

       The only real security we have is the certainty that we’re equipped to handle whatever happens to us. Too often we try to build strength through position, possessions, family or friends, social and religious rituals—all the outer trappings by which we form our identities. Stripped of them all, we have to draw from what is left: our basic sense of identity as human beings. From there true security is born.

      The next evening my guards and the officer who had presided at my bizarre firing squad led me back along the levee paths to Highway 1, the main north-south artery in North Vietnam. We had actually crossed it a few nights earlier, but it was so insignificant I never guessed it could be that snaking red line on the briefing maps on which we had expended so much energy and ordnance. A few months earlier, Air Force General Curtis LeMay had suggested we bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age. In a few months, I would be convinced that most North Vietnamese wouldn’t have known the difference.

      Electrification outside the cities and larger villages was still a long way off. I supposed this contributed to the simple pattern of the people’s lives: early to bed and early to rise. Their existence was as visually drab as it was routine. Thus far I had seen no one, except some of the small children who had visited me, wearing bright colors. The dominant schemes were dark blue, black, and white and uniforms of khaki and olive drab. Indeed, were it not for the tranquil tropical-agrarian beauty of the countryside and the sloping verdure of the mountains to the west, I surmised their lives would have been unendurable.

      With the exception of military people and goods, mechanized transport was almost nonexistent. I had seen all sorts of people stopping through the village, weaving under huge loads of straw, manure, rice seedlings, and pieces of equipment. Even most bicycles were reserved for official transport. Eventually I would read of and see depicted in propaganda films the stories of famous bicycle porters, renowned for the huge loads they could lash onto their bicycles and then push across high jungle passes to South Vietnam to supply their troops there. The overall simplicity and almost total lack of technological development of North Vietnamese society contributed to their seeming indestructibility.

      Our trek from the village took about an hour. We rendezvoused with a jeeplike vehicle on Highway 1, where I was turned over to another officer, a guard, and a driver, all with uniforms more matching than anything I’d seen so far. After receiving some papers and a small package—probably containing my dog tags and wallet stuff—the young officer in charge ordered me into the back seat alongside the guard, cuffed my wrists together in my lap, and ordered the driver to head out into the night.

      We traveled northward for several nights. Like most of the other travelers, we spent the better part of the daylight hours beneath heavy tree canopies or, when such natural cover was not available, beneath intricate networks of camouflage netting. Almost all vehicles were heavily camouflaged as well. Headlights were seldom used but when they were, they showed only through the bottom third of each lens. The rest was painted over.

      Although we traveled each night from dark to daylight, we seemed to be in no hurry. We stopped frequently at small villages and hamlets so the people who might be up and about could be rounded up for the treat of seeing firsthand the “black-hearted American Air Pirate” from so far away.

      In the early evenings before getting underway, impromptu rallies were staged by the local political cadres. The villagers, young and old, were encouraged to take out their anger and frustration (whether they had any or not, it seemed) upon me. Their frenzy—like that of my original captors—was played like an instrument by their cadre, who exhorted them through chants to a near-crazed pitch and modulated their intensity while he lectured them.

      One time a husky young peasant who appeared to be retarded became more frenzied than the rest. With what seemed like the strength of three men, he wrenched my cradled arm away from my body and twisted it back and upward. I spun my torso around and up, trying to diminish the pressure. Too late! I heard and felt the crack in my forearm where what little mending of the bone fibers had begun was instantly undone. The strobelike pain was blinding as I crumpled to the ground, hugging my bent forearm tightly to my chest. I hardly noticed the sharp kicks to my torso and buttocks that followed.

      Another night we stopped at an isolated dwelling between villages and just off the road. The driver and my guard seemed to be familiar with the teenage girl who came out to meet us. She offered directions to the officer who trudged ahead up the road leaving the four of us at the vehicle. After the usual flashlight in my face and the relating of the pitched battle for my capture, and the wide-eyed “oohs” and “aahs,” there commenced among the three of them the universal ballet of the sexes—the one rehearsed infinitely through the ages. There was the young warrior’s boasts of heroics and dragons slain, the girl’s flashing smiles and coy glances, their teasing threats to throw her to me, her mock horror and pleading little dance. It could have been at the local drive-in, the gathering place of my youth, or at a squadron beach party where young sailors flexed and preened for the nearby girls who pretended not to see. To the three of them at the moment there was no war, no captive to be guarded.

      Their mood was almost festive as they led me to the largest hut of the small complex. Inside were five or six people and a boy of five or so. They were seated or squatting around a low wooden table with several bowls of rice, fish, and sauce. Two of the typical small oil lamps imparted a warm familial air to the room. After a light exchange between the girl and the others—perhaps introductions—I was gestured to sit nearby and was given a cup of tea and a sort of packet of sticky rice surrounding a core of pork and fat, all bound tightly by strips of banana leaves. I guessed it was a field ration because of its compactness and density, and it looked like it would keep well. A year later I would learn that it was a bahn-chung, a traditional delicacy prepared for and eaten only during the annual Tet, the twelve-day New Year’s celebration for which this family was so happily preparing.

      Their focus on this celebration was all the more understandable when I realized that it represented the only yearly break in an otherwise terribly gray and stoic existence. Tet represented not only the “new beginnings” celebrated by Westerners on the calendar new year, but was also a special time of reunion and family togetherness. The bahn-chung was one of several Tet delicacies that could be provided only by months of sacrifice and scrimping. The rest of the year’s diet consisted mainly of rice, greens, gourd-type vegetables, and limited fowl and pork—all kept on the hoof. Cows appeared to be sparse and most milk must have come from the goats I had seen. All drinking water had to be boiled and was as often as not consumed as tea.

      After more tea, I was ushered to a smaller room where the flickering light barely revealed a carved wooden bed that framed a wicker mat stretched taut. Two wooden blocks for pillows denoted the head from the foot. I accepted the invitation to lie down, not realizing it would be the last even remotely real bed I would feel beneath me for years. The child was brought in by his mother,