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