Once I was instructed to draw a diagram of an aircraft carrier. I decided to comply with the order, but took considerable artistic license in the process. I drew a picture of a ship’s deck with a large swimming pool on the fantail, the captain’s quarters in a chain locker, and various other imagined embellishments.
Vietnamese propaganda about the soft, luxurious life that upperclass Westerners (a social class to which military officers were naturally thought to belong) led made the interrogators easy marks for a lot of the b.s. we devised to avoid giving them any useful information. My fantastic rendering of an American carrier didn’t arouse my gullible interrogator’s suspicions until I noted its keel was three hundred feet deep. Unfortunately, he knew that the shallow waters of the Tonkin Gulf couldn’t accommodate a ship that drew this much water. He denounced me as a liar and ordered me punished.
After a couple of physically intense interrogations, my captors forced me to read the “news” a few times over the camp loudspeakers. On each occasion, I managed to badly fracture the syntax of the prepared text and affect a goofy, singsong delivery. The Vietnamese, observing that my prisonmates laughed whenever my voice came over the speakers, soon despaired of my qualities as a broadcaster. One of my interrogators informed me that “the other prisoners say you make fun of us,” and soon my brief career as the Plantation’s Walter Cronkite was over.
One spring, a young interrogator I had not seen before decided to practice his English by chatting amiably with me about Western religious customs. “What is Easter?” he asked me. I told him that it was the time of year we celebrated the death and resurrection of the Son of God. As I recounted the events of Christ’s passion, His crucifixion, death, resurrection, and assumption to heaven, I saw my curious interrogator furrow his brow in disbelief.
“You say He died?”
“Yes, He died.”
“Three days, He was dead?”
“Yes. Then He came alive again. People saw Him and then He went back to heaven.”
Clearly puzzled, he stared wordlessly at me for a few moments, then left the room. A short time later, he returned, his friendly manner gone, an angry resolve replacing it.
“Mac Kane, the officer say you tell nothing but lies. Go back to your room,” he ordered, the mystery of my faith proving incomprehensible to him.
On other occasions the interrogators were deadly serious, and if they threatened to beat you into cooperation, you were certain they would give it a hell of a try.
Often we knew how difficult things were likely to become by the identity of the interrogator. We called one interrogator “the Soft Soap Fairy,” for his delicate manners and the solicitous good-cop routine he employed in well-spoken English to plead with prisoners for their cooperation. “How are you, Mac Kane,” he would greet me. If another interrogator who lacked Soft Soap’s gentility had recently roughed me up, he would tell me how sorry he was. “This terrible war,” he would say. “I hope it’s over soon.”
“Me too,” I would reply.
After these preliminary courtesies were concluded, Soft Soap would start questioning me with a schoolboy’s curiosity about life in the States, and American movie stars.
Soft Soap was a political officer, and theoretically he had authority at least commensurate with the camp commander’s. But he was never around for the less pleasant aspects of an interrogator’s work. He never threatened to torture us, but would advise us that our lack of cooperation was likely to incur the camp commander’s displeasure and warn us that the commander could be a harsh and unforgiving man. Whenever we personally experienced just how harsh and unforgiving, Soft Soap always claimed that he had been away from the camp at the time and unable to prevent our punishment from getting out of hand.
“I’m sorry, Mac Kane, I was not here. The camp commander sometimes cannot control himself.”
“No problem.”
Regrettably, I didn’t always draw Soft Soap as my interrogator. In the later years of my captivity, I sometimes sat on the stool looking into the cockeyed stare of the Bug. If I refused Bug’s demands or gave him any lip, he would order the guards to knock me around until I at least stopped trading insults with him. The Bug was a sadist. Or at least his hate for us was so irrational that it drove him to sadism. He was famous for accusing prisoners, when our recalcitrance had enraged him, of killing his mother. Given the wildness of his rage, I often feared that we had.
On occasions when he was particularly determined, I would find myself trussed up and left for hours in ropes, my biceps bound tightly with several loops to cut off my circulation and the end of the rope cinched behind my back, pulling my shoulders and elbows unnaturally close together. It was incredibly painful.
However, even during these difficult encounters I realized my captors were more careful not to permanently injure or disfigure me than they were with other prisoners. When they tied me in the ropes, they rolled my sleeves up so that my shirt served as padding between my arms and the ropes, a courtesy they seldom granted their other victims. The Vietnamese also never put me in ankle stocks or leg irons, a punishment they inflicted on many POWs.
With the exception of a rough time I would experience in the summer of 1968, and a few other occasions when a guard or interrogator acted impulsively out of anger, I always sensed that they refrained from doing their worst to me. The realization that my captors accorded me different treatment than the other prisoners made me bolder and at times more reckless than I should have been. It also made me feel guilty to know that my courage and loyalty had not been put to the test with the same cruelty and tenacity that marked our captors’ attempts to destroy the resolve of other prisoners.
There were others who, like Bug, seemed to enjoy their work. But many of the interrogators were bureaucrats who mistreated us simply because they had been ordered by their superiors to extract certain information from us. For them, it was a job, less dangerous than other jobs, to be sure, but not particularly pleasant. The word would come down from the ministry to get more war crimes confessions, and, dutiful to a fault, the interrogators would set about getting war crimes confessions by whatever means necessary.
We could always tell when new orders had arrived and things were about to take a turn for the worse. Prisoners would start disappearing from their cells, some for hours, others for days. When they returned to their cells they would start tapping, telling us they had been tortured, how bad it was, and what the Vietnamese were after. The rest of us sat in our cells, sometimes listening to the screams of a tortured friend fill the air, sweating out the hours until the guards came for us.
They never seemed to mind hurting us, but they usually took care not to let things get so out of hand that our lives were put in danger. We strongly believed some POWs were tortured to death, and most were seriously mistreated. But the Vietnamese prized us as bargaining chips in peace negotiations, and, with tragic exceptions, they usually did not intend to kill us when they used torture to force our cooperation.
In my case, I felt pretty certain that no matter how rough my periodic visits to the interrogation room were, my father’s rank gave me value as a potential propaganda opportunity and as a proffer in peace negotiations, and thus restrained my captors from killing me.
Authority was apportioned among four categories of prison authorities. The senior officers and interrogators occupied the top of the pecking order. The camp commander, a regular army officer, was nominally in charge of the prison. But it was obvious to all prisoners that the camp political officer, drawn from the ranks of the political bureau of the army, was the man in charge. He had responsibility for all matters involving prisoner indoctrination and behavior, interrogations, confessions, and propaganda displays.