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Then, after the beating, cursing, and application of the water cure, the wet cloth would be unwrapped from Binh’s face to reveal James Yoon, who knew this was his best chance for a supporting actor Oscar. He had been disposed of many times before on-screen as the evanescent Oriental, but none of those deaths possessed this agony, this nobility. Let’s see, he had told me one night at our hotel’s bar, I’ve been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn, hanged by a character actor you don’t know, thrown off a skyscraper by another one, pushed out the window of a Zeppelin, and stuffed in a bag of laundry and dropped in the Hudson River by a gang of Chinese guys. Oh, yes, I was also disemboweled by a squad of Japanese. But those were all quick deaths. All I ever got was a few seconds of screen time at most and sometimes barely that. This time, though — and here he trotted out the giddy smile of a freshly crowned beauty pageant queen — it’s going to take forever to kill me.

So whenever that cloth was unwrapped, and it was unwrapped many a time during the interrogation session, James Yoon gorged on the scenery with the starved fervor of a man who knew he was not going to be upstaged for once by the perennially cute and unbeatable little boy whose mother would not allow him to watch this scene. He grimaced, he groaned, he grunted, he cried, he wept, he bawled, all with real tears hauled up by the buckets from some well deep inside his body. After this, he yelled, he screamed, he shrieked, he wriggled, he twisted, he contorted, he thrashed, and he heaved, the climax being when he vomited, a chunky regurgitated soup of his salty, vinegary breakfast of chorizo and eggs. At the conclusion of this extended first take there was only cathedral silence on the part of the crew, stunned as they regarded what was left of James Yoon, as scarified and beaten as an uppity slave on an American plantation. The Auteur himself came with a wet towel, knelt by the still strapped-down actor, and tenderly wiped the vomit from James Yoon’s face. That was amazing, Jimmy, absolutely amazing.

Thank you, James Yoon gasped.

Now let’s try it one more time, just to be sure.

In fact, six more takes were required before the Auteur declared himself satisfied. At noon, after the third take, the Auteur had asked James Yoon if he wanted to break for lunch, but the actor had shuddered and whispered, No, don’t unstrap me. I’m being tortured, aren’t I? While the rest of the cast and crew retired to the somnolent shade of the canteen, I sat by James Yoon and offered to shelter him with a parasol, but he shook his head with tortoise determination. No, dammit, I’m seeing this through. It’s only an hour in the sun. People like Binh went through worse, didn’t they? Much worse, I agreed. James Yoon’s harrowing experience would at least be finished today, or so he hoped, whereas a real prisoner’s mortification continued for days, weeks, months, years. This was true of those captured by my communist comrades, according to our intelligence reports, but it was also true of those interrogated by my colleagues in the Special Branch. Did the Special Branch interrogations take so long because the policemen were being thorough, unimaginative, or sadistic? All of the above, said Claude. And yet the lack of imagination and the sadism contradict the thoroughness. He was lecturing to a classroom of these secret policemen in the National Interrogation Center, the unblinking eyes of the windows looking out onto the Saigon dockyards. The twenty pupils of his subterranean specialty, including myself, were all veterans of the army or police, but we were still intimidated by his authority, the way he held forth with the pedigree of a professor at the Sorbonne or Harvard or Cambridge. Brute force is not the answer, gentlemen, if the question is how to extract information and cooperation. Brute force will get you bad answers, lies, misdirection, or, worse yet, will get you the answer the prisoner thinks you want to hear. He will say anything to stop the pain. All of this stuff — here Claude waved his hand at the tools of the trade assembled on his desk, much of it made in France, including a billy club, a plastic gasoline container repurposed for soapy water, pliers, a hand-cranked electrical generator for a field telephone — all of it is useless. Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is a science.

Myself and the other secret policemen dutifully wrote this down in our notebooks. Claude was our American adviser, and we expected state-of-the-art knowledge from him and all the other American advisers. We were not disappointed. Interrogation is about the mind first, the body second, he said. You don’t even have to leave a bruise or a mark on the body. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But it’s true. We’ve spent millions to prove it in the lab. The principles are basic, but the application can be creative and tailored to the individual or to the imagination of the interrogator. Disorientation. Sensory deprivation. Self-punishment. These principles have been scientifically demonstrated by the best scientists in the world, American scientists. We have shown that the human mind, subject to the right conditions, will break down faster than the human body. All this stuff — again he waved his hand in contempt at what we now saw as Gallic junk, the tools of old world barbarians rather than new world scientists, of medieval torture rather than modern interrogation — it will take months to wear the subject down with these things. But put a sack on the subject’s head, wrap his hands in balls of gauze, plug his ears, and drop him in a completely dark cell by himself for a week, and you no longer have a human being capable of resistance. You have a puddle of water.

Water. Water, James Yoon said. Can I get some water, please?

I fetched him some water. Despite the water cure, he had not actually had any water except what was absorbed through the wet cloth, which was just wet enough, he said, to be suffocating. As his arms were still bound, I slowly trickled the water down his throat. Thanks, he muttered, just as any prisoner would be grateful to his torturer for the drop of water, or the morsel of food, or the minute of sleep that the torturer doled out. For once I was relieved to hear the Auteur’s voice, calling out, All right, let’s get this done so Jimmy can get back to the pool!

By the final take two hours later, James Yoon really was lachrymose with pain, his face bathed in sweat, mucus, vomit, and tears. It was a sight that I had seen before — the communist agent. But that was real, so real I had to stop thinking about her face. I focused on the fictional state of total degradation that the Auteur wanted for the next scene, which itself required several takes. In this scene, the last one of the movie for James Yoon, the Viet Cong, frustrated because of their inability to break their victim and get him to confess to his crimes, beat his brains out with a spade. Being a bit exhausted from torturing their victim, however, the quartet first decide to take a break smoking Pete Attucks’s Marlboros. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the will of this Binh, who, like many of his southern brethren, whether they be freedom fighters or freedom fighters, was as laid-back as a California surfer regarding every matter except the question of independence from tyranny. Left alone without the towel around his head, he was free to bite off his own tongue and drown under a faucet of his own fake blood, a commercial product that cost thirty-five dollars a gallon and of which approximately two gallons were used to paint James Yoon and decorate the earth. When it came to Binh’s brains, though, Harry had concocted his own homemade cerebro-matter, a secret recipe of oatmeal mixed with agar, the result being a gray, clumpy, congealed mess that he lovingly daubed on the earth around James Yoon’s head. The cinematographer got especially close to capture the look in Binh’s eyes, which I could not see from where I was watching, but which I assumed to be some saintly mix of ecstatic pain and painful ecstasy. Despite all the punishment inscribed on him, he had never uttered a word, or at least an intelligible one.