Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 8

My legs were on fire as we marched the five miles along a frozen dirt road from the freight train to a temporary prison compound. The sky was lead gray, and the dark winter brown of the earth showed in patches through the ice and snow that covered the fields and hills. The few peasant farmhouses, made from mudbricks mixed with straw, were deserted, and at odd intervals across the fields there were old craters left from a stray bombing. Our Chinese guards, in their quilted uniforms and Mongolian hats, walked along beside us with their burp guns slung on straps at port arms, one gloved finger curled inside the trigger guard, hating us not only because we were Occidentals and the enemy but also for the cold and misery in their own bodies. When a man fell or couldn’t keep pace with the line or find someone to help him walk he was pushed crying (or sometimes white and speechless in his terror) into the ditch and shot. The Chinese were thorough. Two and sometimes three guards would fire their burp guns into one shivering, helpless man.

By all chances I should have bought it somewhere along that five miles of frozen road. My pants legs were stiff with dried blood, and each step sent the flame in my wounds racing up my body and made my groin go weak with pain. I had never known that pain could be as prolonged and intense and unrelieved. I saw the guards kill six men and I heard them kill others behind me, and I knew that I was going to fall over soon and I would die just as the rest had, with my arms across my face and my knees drawn up to my chest in an embryonic position. But a Marine major from Billings, Montana, a huge man with lumberjack arms, caught me around the waist and held me up, even when I felt my knees collapse entirely and the horizon tilted quickly as in a feverish dream. His right ear was split and crusted with black blood, and his eyes were bright with control of his own pain, but it never showed in his voice and his arm stayed locked hard around my waist.

“Stay up, doc. We’re going to need all of our corpsmen,” he said. “Just throw one foot after another. Don’t use your knees. You hear me, son? These bastards won’t march us much farther.”

And for the next four miles we went down the road like two Siamese twins out of step with each other. That night the guards put us in a wooden schoolhouse surrounded by concertina wire, and in his sleep the major cried out once and tore open his mutilated ear with his fingernails.

Several months later I heard that he died of dysentery in the Bean Camp.

I was in three camps while I was a P.O.W. Whenever the complexion of the war changed or a new offensive was begun by one side or the other, the Chinese moved us in cattle cars or Russian trucks or on foot to a new camp where there was no chance of our being liberated, since we were an important bargaining chip at the peace talks. I spent two months at the Bean Camp, a compound of wretched wooden shacks used by the Japanese to hold British prisoners during World War II, and for reasons unknown to me, since I had no military knowledge worth anything to the North Koreans or the Chinese, I was singled out with twelve others, including two deranged Greeks, for transfer to Pak’s Palace outside of Pyongyang. Major Pak conducted his interrogations in an abandoned brick factory, and each morning two guards led me across the brick yard covered with fine red dust to a small, dirty room that was bare except for two straight-backed chairs and the major’s desk. A rope with a cinched loop in one end hung from a rafter, and when everything else failed the major would tie the hands of a prisoner behind him and have him drawn into the air by the arms and beaten with bamboo canes. It was called Pak’s Swing, and the screams that came from that room were not like human sounds.

Major Pak’s personality was subject to abrupt changes. Sometimes his eyes burned like those of a religious fanatic or an idealistic zealot who reveled in the pain of his enemies. His tailored uniform was always immaculate, as though he were born to the professional military, but the wrong answer from a prisoner would make his face convulse with hatred and his screaming would become incoherent. Then moments later his eyes would water, his constricted throat would relax, and his voice would take on the tone of a tormented man who was forced to do things to people who couldn’t understand the necessity of his job or the historical righteousness of his cause. The two Greeks suffered most from him, because he was sure that their insane, pathetic behavior was an act. Each night they were returned to our building streaked with blood and moaning in words that we couldn’t understand.

The major also had fixations. He threatened to tear out my fingernails with pliers unless I told him where the 101st Airborne planned to drop into North Korea. I infuriated him when I answered that I was a Navy corpsman and that I had spent only six days on the line before capture. He believed that all Americans lied instinctively and looked down upon him as an Oriental of inferior intelligence. He struck me in the head with the pliers and cut my scalp, and as I leaned over with the blood trickling across my eye I waited for him to order the guards to draw me up on the rope. However, he threw a glass of water in my face and pulled my head up by the hair.

“Americans are weak. You can’t accept pain for yourselves. You only expect others to bear it,” he said.

Then I realized that it really didn’t matter to him whether or not I knew anything about the 101st Airborne. He hated me because I was everything that he identified with the young American archetype portrayed in The Saturday Evening Post: I was tall, blond, good-looking, unscarred by hunger or struggle or revolutions whose ideology was just rice. So Major Pak’s interest in me was personal rather than of a military nature, and he soon tired of interrogating me in favor of a British commando who had been caught behind their lines, and I was sent back to the Bean Camp in a captured U.S. truck loaded with Australian prisoners.

But my recall deals primarily with Camp Five in No Name Valley, where I spent the greater portion of the war until I was exchanged at Freedom Village in 1953. Also, it was here that I learned that men can live with guilt and a loathsome image of themselves which previously they didn’t believe themselves capable of enduring.

The Yalu River was north of our camp, and in the winter the ice expanded against the banks and rang in the cold silence at night, and sometimes we would hear it break up and crash in great yellow chunks at a turn in the current. The wind blew all the time, sweeping out of the bare hills across the river in China, and when there was no fuel in our shack we slept on the floor in a group, breathing the stench of our bodies under the blankets, the nauseating odor of fish heads on our breath, and the excretions of men with dysentery who couldn’t control themselves in their sleep.

We were always cold during the winter. Even when we had fuel to burn in our small iron stove the heat would not radiate more than a few feet, and the wind drove through the cracks in the boards and would drop the temperature enough to freeze our jerry can of water unless we kept it close to the fire. During the day the sun was a pale yellow orb in the sky, and the light was never strong enough through the gray winter haze to cast a hard shadow on the ground. Three men were taken out with a guard once a week to forage for wood, but the landscape was largely bare and the sticks and roots that hadn’t already been picked up were now covered by ice and snow. We had one pair of mismatched knitted mittens in our shack, and when the wood detail went out one man would take the mittens and be responsible for gathering the largest share of fuel, as our fingers would often be left cut and swollen or discolored at the tips from frostbite after a day of ripping frozen sticks out of the snow.

There were oil stoves in the camp, but these went to the progressives, those who had signed peace petitions, confessions to participating in germ warfare, or absurdly worded statements denouncing Wall Street capitalists. The progressives were kept in two oblong buildings on the far side of the compound, separated from the rest of us by a barbed-wire fence and a wooden gate that stayed locked with a chain. Many of them were informers, or “snitches,” and they would have been killed had they been forced to live with the rest of the prisoner population. In the morning they exercised in the yard behind the wire fence, their faces averted so they wouldn’t have to look at the rest of us. They received the same diet as we did, bean cakes, millet, and boiled corn, but much more of it, and occasionally they were given some greens and hardboiled eggs, and they didn’t have to worry about beriberi and diarrhea that left your entrails and rectum burning day and night. I should have hated them for the weight on their bodies and the flush of health in their faces, the Red Cross packages they were given by the guards, but I was always too sick, cold, or afraid to care what they did on their side of the fence. Like most of the others I didn’t believe that we would ever be liberated or exchanged. New prisoners told us that the Chinese had poured into South Korea, the R.O.K.’s had thrown down their weapons and run, and our forces were being pushed into the sea. So even the most optimistic and strong knew that freedom was probably years away, and our death rate in the camp averaged a dozen men a day.

Some died quietly in their sleep under their blankets, and in the morning we found them white and stiff, the skin hard as marble, and we dragged them outside the shack like pieces of stone and left them for the burial squad. Others died delirious with agony, their eyes feverish and rolling white in their heads, their inflamed entrails bulging out the colon like inflated rubber. There was nothing to do for them — no medicine, no priest, not even the option of killing out of mercy.

There were fifteen enlisted men in my shack (the Chinese kept the officers, N.C.O.’s, and enlisted men separated from one another so there would be no system of military order or authority among us). We spent our days in boredom or listening to ridiculous lectures by Colonel Ding and a “group monitor,” one of the progressives whom Ding always brought with him. Ding was a small, thin man, with a harelip and a face that was as lifeless as wax. There were spaces between his front teeth, and when he ranted about imperialism and the American bombing of Pyongyang his disfigured mouth gave his face the appearance of a lunatic’s. He was fond of telling us that he had attended the University of California for a year in the thirties, and also that he had been with Mao on the Great March. Many times he would digress from his tirades on the evils of the Western world and slip into a history of his own career, which seemed to give him a special pleasure. Sometimes he would ask where each of us was from, and then show the knowledge that he had of that area, although he often referred to such places as “San Antonio, Missouri.” The group monitor was usually even more pathetic. He would stand behind the colonel, embarrassed, his gloved hands never able to find a pocket more than a few moments, and sometimes he would light a cigarette nervously, then pinch it out and put it back in the pack when our eyes looked into his. After the colonel had finished, the monitor would read to us from his journal, his self-deluding confession of guilt, and tell us that American troops were waging a war against innocent people and that we were as much victims of the defense industrialists as the people whom we killed. But his face always stayed buried in the notebook, as though he couldn’t read his own handwriting, or he stared above our heads at the distant hills. Many times his words faltered and he would look helplessly at the colonel, who would only nod for him to go on. I suppose that I felt more pity toward the progressives than anger. They were cared for and would live, and eventually they would have to face some of us after the peace came.

However, our classes weren’t merely an exercise in Marxist buffoonery. The Chinese knew a great deal about the effect of compromise on the individual. The progressives did not end up on the other side of the wire fence simply because they knew that the rations were better there. It was a gradual process, much like the irreversible stages of seduction portrayed in a stag movie. Most of us knew that it was a matter of time before we died of hunger or any of the diseases that accompanied it, and if we volunteered for Ding’s classes, although it was never stated, we knew that the guards would put extra bean cakes in our shack’s food bucket at night. And once we were in the classes all we had to do was sign a nonpolitical peace petition, asking in the most general terms for an end to the war (supposedly these were sent to the United Nations), and our millet would include fish heads, which we could boil into broth with roots and give to those who had the worst cases of dysentery. Then if we wanted an occasional hardboiled egg or a package of tobacco for the shack, we could say a couple of sentences against war into a tape recorder without identifying ourselves. Many nights we sat close to the small stove in silence, the honey bucket reeking in the corner, and thought about the next stage in the progression. Sometimes we would discuss the morality of signing a peace petition or whether or not it was all right to do it if you misspelled your name or gave your serial number incorrectly, since someone would surely know that you didn’t mean it after all and you had beaten the Chinese at their own game, and I thought of Chaucerian monks debating the virtue of their fornication.

“Fuck it. I’m going to sign what the bastard wants,” one man would say. “Nobody believes that shit, anyway. It probably don’t even go out of camp. Ding gets his rocks off and we get some more chow. It’s just a piece of paper. He probably wipes his ass with it.”

We wrote journals for Colonel Ding, confessing imaginary sins and describing the poverty of our lives in America (many times this was done as much to relieve our boredom as it was to earn extra rations). He particularly liked descriptions of slums and sweatshops. Often we would collaborate on one journal and invent accounts of social injustice that would make Charles Dickens pale. Orphans were beaten with whips by Catholic nuns, virtuous young girls were forced into prostitution and infected with venereal disease by fat bankers, southern policemen fired their pistols from car windows into Negro homes, a dismal pall of despair and political oppression hung over the tenement buildings of the working classes while Zionists with faces like sleek pigs filled their bank accounts with the profits of war. We all had committed every type of sin, from sodomy and incest to fornication with sheep. In the candlelight at night we reveled in our iniquity and wrote detailed histories of ax murders, arson, screwing a dead woman, and male rape in the shower at the Y.M.C.A. No group of men had ever been guilty of greater crimes, and the more depraved the confession the more generous Ding became toward his captives.

We all grew to know one another in the intimate and physical way that men do when in confinement. There was no secret shame or weakness that one of us could conceal from the others for very long. We shared our love affairs, our nights of depravity in Japanese brothels, our memories of a beating by a bully on the elementary school ground, our failures with wives and company bosses. We knew one another’s smell, latrine habits, particular nightmares, or when one man was masturbating under the blanket. Through hunger and fear our virtues and inadequacies burned just below the skin. When one man in the shack died and was replaced by a new prisoner, we knew him within a week as well as we had the lifeless piece of stone we had dragged out into the compound for the burial detail.

We were of every background and mental complexion; the helpless who already had the smell of their dying in their clothes; the strong ones, the gladiators, with iron in their bodies, who knew they could live through anything and boiled their fish heads into broth for the sick; the brave and the terrified, the cowards and the Shylocks, the hoarders, the dealers, the religious, and those whose self-sacrifice made them glow, in the hush of their deaths, with the aura of early martyrs. There was Joe Bob Winfield from Baton Rouge, a redneck hillbilly and an ex-convict at nineteen, with leg-iron scars on his ankles and a story about every type of crime and prison caper; Bertie Fast, the house mouse, our one roaring homosexual, who was raped his first week in camp and liked it so much that he went professional; a Sears Roebuck shoe salesman from Salt Lake who wrote endless letters to his wife and children, which Ding threw in the garbage can; O. J. Benson from Okema, Oklahoma, a bootlegger who used to run whiskey from Joplin in a bookmobile before the war; a reactivated World War II paratrooper, the oldest man in the shack, who had spent two years in a German concentration camp; Cigarette Williams, the other Navy corpsman, from Mount Olive, Alabama, a six-foot-five country singer who hanged himself during the night because his feet were so frostbitten he couldn’t put boots on them; the Australian miner who called Ding a bloody yellow nigger and was strung up all day on a rafter by his hands; and the wild Turk who knew no English, a man on fire, a killer with insane eyes and a bricklayer’s trowel hidden in his tick mattress.

There were many others who came and died or were transferred for interrogation, but only two of them from my shack are important in this brief account of my Korean experience. Private First Class Francis Ramos from San Angelo had Indian-black hair, wide-set intense eyes, hard bones in his face, and hands and wrists that could break boards in half. He used to drive a beer truck before he was drafted, and the muscles in his shoulders and chest were as taut and hard as concrete from years of loading and stacking metal beer kegs. There were white scars on his knuckles where they had been mashed on a warehouse ramp, and another thick, raised scar that he had received in a whorehouse brawl ran back in a crooked line through his hair. He had an obsession with escape. He had spent six months in a city stockade once for nonsupport, and he was released only after the jailer became convinced that he was mad, and solitary confinement and beatings with rolled newspapers would not make him less of a threat to the guards and the rest of the prison population. He had been Golden Gloves middleweight champion of Texas in high school, and sometimes when I looked at his huge fists and the swollen veins in his wrists I had nightmarish images of what he must have done to his opponents in the ring.

He couldn’t sleep at night. After Sergeant Tien Kwong handed us our food bucket and locked the chain on the shack door, Ramos’s eyes flicked wildly across the walls and ceilings, his breathing became deeper, and then he would set about doing dozens of unnecessary things with the frenetic energy of a man on the edge of hysteria. He put fuel into the stove when we were trying to conserve every twig, boiled water to make soup when we had no fish heads, shook out his blankets and folded them so he could unfold them again, restrung his bootlaces, tried to teach the wild Turk English, and eventually sat alone in the darkness after the rest of us had gone to sleep. He would be so tired the next day that sometimes his head would fall on his chest during one of Ding’s lectures, which meant one night in the hole under the sewer grate.

Then there was Airman First Class Lester Dixon, captured when the Chinese overran Seoul, a teenage hoodlum from Chicago, one of the dealers, a ten-percenter, a poolroom hustler and reefer salesman on the South Side, slick, a kid with a venal mind and an eye for the profit to be made from free enterprise, blue movies, dope, and fifteen-year-old Negro prostitutes. He had tattoos of skulls and snakes’ heads on his arms, and his hair had grown out long enough to comb back in ducktails. His colorless face was like the edge of a hatchet. He thought of charity as naïveté, bravery as stupidity, and honesty with others, even in a prisoner of war compound, a fool’s venture.

He shared nothing. He stood first in line for his bean cakes and millet, and ate alone from his tin plate in one corner while the rest of us put small bits of our food into the soup pot on the stove for the Australian who was dying of beriberi. He was never ashamed of not sharing, or at least he didn’t show it; he ate with his face in his plate, his chopsticks scraping against the metal, as though his whole being were concentrated into one scrap of bean cake that he might miss.

It was a cold, windswept gray morning with hailstones on the ground, and Dixon had just left the shack with the wood detail.

“I think he’s a snitch,” Ramos said. “I seen him eating some vitamin pills in the dark last night.”

We were hunched around the iron stove, bent toward the heat. Our breaths steamed out like ice in the silence.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“He took three of them out of his pocket and swallowed them dry.”

“I don’t know about no vitamin pills,” Joe Bob, our ex-convict, said, “but I got something in my pecker that goes off when I get near a snitch, and that boy gives me a real bone.”

“If you’re right, what are we going to do with him?” another man said.

“For openers, you better start shutting up about running,” Joe Bob said. His sandy red hair stuck out from under his stocking cap, and he chewed on the flattened end of a matchstick in one corner of his mouth.

“We ice him,” Ramos said.

“Hey, cut that shit, man,” Joe Bob said. “Ding’ll waste the whole shack.”

“No, he ain’t,” Ramos said. “I’ll tell Kwong that Dixon’s been spitting blood and ask him for some eggs, and then we wait a few days and smother him.”

“I tell you, buddy, they ain’t that stupid,” Joe Bob said.

“We got to take him out one way or another,” O.J., the bootlegger from Okema, said. “If Ding’s greasing him, he’s got to burn somebody.”

“Yeah, you don’t fuck around with guys like this.”

“There’s other ways to get a snitch out of the shack,” Joe Bob said. “We can turn the Turk loose on him, and he’ll ask Ding to transfer over with the pros.”

“You’re not sure about him, anyway,” I said. “He could have gotten those pills off of somebody else in the yard.”

“You know that’s a lot of crap, too, Holland. He smelled like a snitch when he first come in here,” Ramos said.

“He’s a pimp and a wheeler, and that’s all he’s been his whole life. That doesn’t mean he’s working for Ding,” I said.

“I’ll do it in the middle of the night,” Ramos said. “There won’t be no sound, and he’ll look just like every other guy we drug out in the yard.”

“I ain’t telling you what to do,” Joe Bob said, “but you got some pretty amateur shit in your head for this kind of scene. Ding might be a harelip dickhead, but he ain’t dumb and he’s going to fry our balls in a skillet before you get done with this caper.”

“The sonofabitch has to go. What else are we going to do with him?” O.J. said.

“If you got to ice him, use your head a minute and do it out in the yard,” Joe Bob said. “Catch him in a bunch during exercise time and bust him open with the Turk’s trowel. You’ll probably get shot, anyway, but maybe the rest of us won’t get knocked off with you.”

“If you don’t want in it, just stay out of my face,” Ramos said.

“Like I said, I ain’t trying to grow any hairs in your asshole. You just don’t know what you’re doing. Like this escape caper. I chain-ganged in the roughest joint in the South, and I started to run once myself, but you got to be out of your goddamn mind to try and crack a place like this. You got two fences to cut through, there’s a hundred yards of bare ground between both of them, and them gooks up on the platform ain’t going to be reading fortune cookies while you’re hauling for Dixie. You better get your head rewired before Ding lays you out in the yard like he done to that Greek that took off from the wood detail.”

“If I get nailed I’ll buy it running on the other side of that wire,” Ramos said. “I ain’t going to stay here and shit my insides out till somebody rolls me into the yard like a tumblebug. There’s a colored sergeant with a compass and some pliers for the fence, and he figures if we can make it to the sea we can steal a boat and get out far enough for one of our choppers to pick us up.”

“Goddamn, if that ain’t a real pistol, Ramos. I once knew a guy that climbed into the back of a garbage truck with chains on, buried himself in the trash, and rode down the highway with the hacks looking all over for him. Except he almost got fried when they unloaded the truck in the county incinerator. But you got him beat, buddy. Running across North Korea with a nigra. Now that’s cool. You guys ought to stand out like shit in an ice cream factory.”

Ramos didn’t say anything more. He glared at the gray ash in the grate awhile, then paced around the shack, beating his arms in the cold. He didn’t have the intelligence or prison experience to argue with Joe Bob, but we knew that he planned to kill Dixon, regardless of what anyone said.

And it wasn’t long before Dixon knew it, too. He came in from the wood detail late that afternoon, his face red and chafed with windburn, and dropped a load of sticks and roots by the stove. There was snow in his hair, and his quilted pants were wet up to the knees. In the silence we heard Kwong lock the chain on the door. Dixon pulled off his mittens with his teeth and stuck his hands under his armpits.

“Somebody else is going on that bastard next time,” he said. “That whole goddamn field’s picked clean. I broke two fingernails digging down to the ground.”

No one answered.

“Shit, look at them.”

We turned our faces away or found things to do that would remove us from the eventual meeting of eyes between Ramos and Dixon. But instead it was O.J. and Bertie Fast, the drag queen, who tore open the wrapper and let Dixon look for just a moment inside the box.

“What is this crap, anyway?” Dixon said. “Maybe I didn’t wipe my ass clean this morning or something. Don’t I smell sweet enough to you, house mouse?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Bertie said, his voice weak and his eyes searching for a spot on the far wall.

“House mouse, you better not hold out on me.”

“Fuck off, man,” O.J. said. He was sticking twigs into the fire grate, and his jawbones were flat against the skin.

“What’s the deal, then?” Dixon said. “You want me to kick in part of my chow for the soup? Okay. No sweat. Is everybody cool now?”

“Where did you get vitamin pills?” O.J. said.

“Vitamins? You must have a wild crab loose in your brain.” But he was surprised, and there was a flicker of fear in his face.

“Yeah. Like those little red ones Ding gives to the pros,” O.J. said.

“You better see a wig mechanic when you get out of here. You got real problems.”

“You’re up to your bottom lip in Shit’s Creek, buddy,” Joe Bob said. “This ain’t the time to be a Yankee smart-ass.”

“You guys have been flogging your pole too much or something. I mean what kind of joint is this, anyway? I spend the whole day digging in the ice with Kwong jabbing me in the ass, and I come back and you guys got me nailed for a pro.”

“How did you get the pills?” I said.

Everyone was looking at him now. The snow in his hair had melted, and his face was damp with water and perspiration. He held his two bruised fingers in one hand and glanced at the locked door.

“I traded them off a spade in the yard for some cigarettes. All right, so I didn’t share them. Big deal. You going to tear my balls out because I want to stay alive?”

“Which spade?” O.J. said.

“I don’t know. He’s with the N.C.O.’s.”

“There ain’t but one over there,” Ramos said.

“Maybe he’s an enlisted man. What difference does it make? All those boons look alike.”

“Get it straight, cousin,” Joe Bob said.

“You guys already want to fry me. It don’t make any difference what I say. You’ve been pissed ever since I come in here because I wouldn’t put in my chow for guys that were already dead. All of you got a Purple Heart nailed right up in the middle of your forehead because you keep some poor sonofabitch alive a few extra days so he can shit more blood and chew his tongue raw. If I buy it I hope there ain’t a bunch like you around.”

“Okay, you got the pills off a colored sergeant,” Ramos said. He sat cross-legged on his blanket close to the stove, rubbing his dirt-caked bare feet with his hand. “That’s all we wanted to know. Next time you share anything you get in the yard.”

Dixon stared into Ramos’s face, and then realized that he was looking at his executioner.

“Not me, buddy,” he said. “You’re not going to stick my head down in the mattress. None of you pricks are. You find some other cat to hang a frame on. How about Bertie here? He don’t keep his ass soft and fat on bean cakes.”

“Quit shouting. There ain’t anybody going to bother you,” Ramos said. “Just don’t try to bullshit us next time.”

“No, you’re going to ice me. You been wanting to do it a long time, you spic, and now you got these other bastards to go in with you. Hey, Kwong!” He began beating against the wooden door with his fists and kicking his feet into the boards. The chain and padlock reverberated with the blows.

“You get down here. You hear me? I want to see Ding!”

O.J. and Ramos started for him at the same time, but Joe Bob jumped up in front of both of them and stiff-armed them with all his weight in the chest.

“The shit already hit the fan. Just ride it out and stay cool,” he said.

We heard Kwong running through the frozen snow outside. Dixon’s face was white with fear, and he brought his knees into the door as though they could splinter wood and snap metal chain after his feet and fists had failed. Kwong turned the lock and threw open the door, with his burp gun slung on a leather strap around his neck and the barrel pointed like an angry god into the middle of us. His squat, thick body was framed against the gray light and the snow-covered shacks behind him, and his peasant face was concentrated in both anger and anticipation of challenge. He grabbed Dixon by his coat and threw him into the snow, then flicked off the safety on his gun.

“Crazy,” Joe Bob said, pointing to his head. “He had the shits all week. Shea tu. Blood coming out his hole.”

We were all frozen in front of the burp gun, each of us breathing deep in our chests, our hearts clicking like dollar watches. I couldn’t look at the gun. Dixon got to his knees in the snow and started crying.

“He needs medicine,” Joe Bob said, and held his head back and pointed his thumb into his mouth. “Shits all the time. Got shit in his brain.”

“You fucked,” Kwong said, and kicked the door shut with his foot, then locked the chain.

He must have hit Dixon with the stock of his burp gun, because we could hear the wood knock into bone, then the two of them crunched off in the snow toward Ding’s billet on the other side of the wire.

The next morning at dawn Kwong was back with two other guards. They opened the door and motioned us against the far wall of the shack with their guns before they stepped inside. The fire in the stove had died out during the night, and the room temperature must have been close to zero. We stood in our socks, shivering under the blankets we held around our shoulders, and tried to look back steadily at Kwong while his eyes passed from face to face. He already knew the ones who had been chosen for the first interrogation, but he enjoyed watching us hang from fishhooks. Then he motioned his burp gun at five of us: O.J., Bertie Fast, Joe Bob, the Turk, and me. We sat down in the middle of the floor and laced on our boots, then marched in single file across the yard with the guards on each side of us. The pale sun had just risen coldly over the hills, and as I looked at our dim shadows on the snow I felt that my last morning was now in progress, and that I should have bought it back there in the Shooting Gallery and whoever shuffles the cards had just discovered his mistake and was about to set things straight.

The wounds in my legs had never healed and had become infected, and when I slowed my pace in the snow Kwong jabbed the barrel of his gun into my scalp. I felt the skin split and I fell forward on my hands and knees. Kwong kicked me in the kidney and pulled me erect by my hair.

“You walk, cocksuck,” he said.

I put my arm over Joe Bob’s shoulder, my side in flames, and limped along with the others to the yellow brick building that Ding used for his headquarters. Bertie Fast’s eyes were wide with terror, and I could see the pulse jumping in his neck. He looked like a child in his oversized quilted uniform and all the blood had drained out of his soft, feminine face. Even Joe Bob, with scars from the black Betty on his butt, was afraid, although he held it down inside himself like a piece of sharp metal. But the wild Turk showed no fear at all, or possibly he didn’t even know what was taking place. His hot black eyes stared out of his white, twisted face, and I wondered if he had the trowel hidden somewhere inside his clothes. His tangled black hair had grown over his shoulders, and he breathed great clouds of vapor, as though he had a fever, through his rotted teeth. He stood immobile with the rest of us while Kwong knocked on the door, and I thought that beyond those hot black eyes there was a furnace instead of a brain.

Ding sat behind his desk in his starched, high-collar uniform with a tea service in front of him. Dixon stood in one corner by the oil stove, his face heavy with lack of sleep, and there was a large, swollen knot above his right eyebrow. His eyes fixed on Ding’s desk when we entered the room, and drops of sweat slid down his forehead in the red glow of the stove.

Ding finished his tea, flicked a finger for a guard to remove the tray, and lit a Russian cigarette. He leaned forward on his elbows, puffing with his harelip, his eyes concentrated like BB’s into the smoke, and I knew that we were all going to enact a long and painful ritual that would compensate Ding in part for his lack of a field command.

“I know there’s a plan for an escape,” he said, quietly. “It’s a very foolish plan that will bring you hardship. There has never been an escape from a Chinese People’s detention center, and you’re hundreds of miles from the American lines. Now, this can be very easy for you, and it will also help the men who would be shot in trying to escape. Give me their names and you can return to your building, and nothing will be done to the men involved.”

We stood in silence, and the snow melted off our clothes in the warmth of the room. I looked at Dixon, and for a moment I wished that Ramos had killed him as soon as he had come back from the wood detail. The cut in my scalp was swelling and drawing tight, and my legs felt unsteady from fear and the pain in my calves.

“You’re not in a cowboy movie,” Ding said. “None of you are heroes. You’re simply stupid. I don’t want to punish you. I don’t want to see the other men shot. There’s no reason for it. This war will be over someday and all of you can return to your families. It’s insane for you men to die in trying to escape.”

Our eyes were flat, our faces expressionless, and the room was so quiet that I could hear Kwong shifting the weight of his burp gun on its strap.

“Do you want me to punish all of the men in your building?” Ding said. “Do you want to see the sick Australian punished because of a stupid minority? All of you grow up on silly movies about Americans smiling at death. You think the Chinese are busboys in restaurants and laundrymen for your dirty clothes. You believe your white skin and Western intelligence reduces us to fools in pigtails groveling for your tips.”

“We don’t know about no escape, Colonel,” Joe Bob said. “Nobody can crack this joint. Dixon give you a lot of shit last night.”

“You do think we’re stupid, don’t you?”

“No, sir, we don’t. I done time before, Colonel, and I don’t want to get burned because some jerk wants to run. Believe me, there ain’t no break planned.”

“What do you have to say, Airman?” Ding said, and turned toward Dixon.

Dixon’s face blanched and he swallowed in his throat. He hadn’t thought it was going to be this tough. His eyes looked up at us quickly and then fixed on the desk again. His words were heavy with phlegm.

“It’s like I told you, Colonel. They been planning it a long time.”

“How long?”

“I heard them whispering about it in the corner the other night after they blew out the candle.”

“Which ones?” Ding drew in on the cigarette and looked at Dixon flatly through the smoke. He was really tightening the rack now, and he enjoyed tormenting Dixon as much as he did us.

“All of them, I guess. It was dark.”

“You haven’t told me very much to earn all those extra gifts.”

Dixon’s face flushed and drops of sweat began dripping from his hair.

“You should move away from the stove,” Ding said. “It’s bad for you to become overheated.”

“Colonel, we ain’t trying to con you,” O.J. said. “We got on Dixon because he wouldn’t share nothing and he was eating vitamin pills, and he thought we was going to knock him around. He went off his nut and started beating on the door and screaming for Kwong. There wasn’t no more to it.”

“Would you like to say something, Private?”

“No, sir,” Bertie said. I had to turn and look at him. His voice was high with fear, but I didn’t believe the resolve that was there, also.

“Do you want to suffer with these other men?”

“They told you the truth, Colonel. There ain’t any break.”

“You haven’t spoken. Would you like a turn?” Ding said to me, and at that moment I hated him more than any other human being on earth, not merely for his cruelty but also for the mental degradation that he could continue indefinitely with his physical power over us.

“There’s nothing to say, sir. Dixon lied.” I wouldn’t let my eyes focus on his face, but he sensed my hatred toward him, anyway, and he smiled with that crooked harelip.

“So the corpsman believes me stupid, too. What are we going to do with you American fighting men? That’s how you’re called at home, isn’t it? What would you suggest if you had my position? Intelligent Western men like you must have suggestions. You’re a Texan, aren’t you, Corpsman? You must have learned many lines from cowboy movies.”

“They gave it to you straight, Colonel.”

“He was one of them last night,” Dixon said. “They were going to smother me in my sleep.”

(At the time I would have never guessed that the terrified man in the corner, sweating in the heat of the stove, would one day have his picture on the front page of newspapers all over the world as one of the twenty-two American turncoats who chose to remain in Red China after the peace was signed. However, the photograph would show him with full, clean-shaved cheeks, his cap pointed neatly over one eye, a red-blooded enlistee fresh out of the Chicago poolrooms.)

“Then maybe we should begin with you, Corpsman,” Ding said, and motioned Kwong with his hand.

The sergeant slammed me down in the wooden chair in front of the desk. Ding lit another cigarette and dropped the burnt match into a butt can. The room was now close with the smell of our bodies and the cigarette smoke. I could almost feel the cruel energy and expectation in Kwong’s body behind me.

“Do you want this to be prolonged, or do you want to talk in an intelligent manner?”

I stared into nothing, my shoulders hunched and my hands limp in my lap. I could hear the Turk breathing through his teeth in the silence. Kwong slapped me full across the face with his callused hand. My eyes watered and I could feel the blood burning in the skin.

“Do you think you’re in a movie now, Corpsman?” Ding said. “Are the Flying Tigers going to drop out of the sky and kill all the little yellow men around you?”

I stared through my wet eyes at the wall. The lines in the room looked warped, glittering with moisture, and the oil stove burned brightly red in one corner of my vision. Ding nodded to the sergeant, an indifferent and casual movement of maybe an inch, and Kwong brought my head down with both hands into his knee and smashed my nose. The blood burst across my face, my head exploded with light, and I was sure the bone had been knocked back into the brain. I was bent double in the chair, the blood pouring out through my hands, and each time I tried to clear my throat I gagged on a clot of phlegm and started the dry heaves.

“He don’t know nothing, Colonel,” Joe Bob said. “Sometimes the guys bullshit about escape, but he don’t even do that. He knows they’re bullshitting and he always walks away from it. He don’t have no names to give you.”

“Would you like to give me some names?”

“It ain’t nothing but guys setting around shitting each other about a break, Colonel. Anybody in a joint does the same thing, or you start beating your rod with sandpaper after a while. Dixon’s a goddamn fish and he couldn’t cut it, so he sold you a lot of jive.”

“Your corpsman hasn’t been hurt at all. The sergeant can do many other things to him.”

“I know that, sir,” Joe Bob said. “It just won’t do no good. He can’t tell you nothing.”

“Then I think you should take his chair,” Ding said.

My hands were covered with blood and saliva, and I was still choking on my breath, but I wanted to go over Ding’s desk and get my thumbs into his throat. However, I never got the chance to learn if I was that brave or desperate with pain and hatred, because the Turk suddenly stopped breathing a moment, his white face filling with dark areas of rage, and his hot, black eyes glared insanely. Then he shouted once, a bull’s roar that came out of some awful thing inside him, and he started for Ding with his huge hands raised in fists over his head.

Kwong stepped quickly in front of him and swung the stock of his burp gun upward into the Turk’s mouth. I could hear his teeth break against the wood. He reeled backward on the floor, his lips cut open in blue gashes, then Kwong raised his foot back, poised himself, and kicked him in the stomach. The Turk’s breath rushed out in a long, rattling gasp, he drew his knees up to his chin, and his face went perfectly white. His mouth worked silently, the veins rigid in his throat, and his eyes were glazed with pain like a dumb, strangling animal’s.

Ding was on his feet, shouting in Chinese at Kwong. His waxlike face was enraged, and he kept stabbing one finger in the air at some point outside the building.

“He’s crazy, Colonel,” Joe Bob said. “A stir freak. He probably don’t even know where he is.”

“You wouldn’t behave intelligently,” Ding yelled. “You stand there with your confident faces and think you’re dealing with comical peasants. You’re stupid men that have to be treated as such.”

Kwong pulled me out of the chair by my collar and pushed me toward the door, then he began kicking the Turk in the spine. The Turk’s breath came in spasms, and when he tried to suck air down into his lungs the blood bubbled on his lips.

“Pick him up and carry him!”

Joe Bob and O.J. lifted him between them by the arms. His dirty black hair hung over his face, and his chest heaved up and down.

“Look, Colonel, we ain’t to blame for what some nut does,” Joe Bob said. “He ain’t much better than that with us. We got to watch him all the time.”

Ding spoke again in Chinese to Kwong and the other two guards, and they leveled their burp guns at us and motioned toward the door.

“They’re going to kill us,” O.J. said.

“Colonel, it ain’t fair,” Joe Bob said. “We never give you no trouble out of our shack.”

“I told you it could have been very easy for you.”

“There wasn’t nothing to tell you,” O.J. said. “Do we got to lose our lives because we give it to you straight?”

“Fuck it,” Joe Bob said. “They’re going to waste us, anyway.”

Kwong hit him in the ear with his fist and pushed us outside. It had started to sleet, and the ice crunched like stones under our feet. The sun was a hazy puff of vapor above the cold hills, and then we saw a lone F-86 bank out of the snow clouds and begin its turn before it reached the Yalu River. It dipped its wings once, as all our planes did when they passed over the camp, and then soared away into a small speck on the southern horizon. We stopped at the work shack, and each of us was given a G.I. entrenching tool. The Turk dropped his in the snow, and Kwong picked it up and punched it hard into his chest.

“You hold, cocksuck,” he said.

Kwong chained the door shut, and we marched across the compound, past the silent faces of the progressives who watched us from their exercise yard, past the few men who had stopped scrubbing out the lice from their clothes under the iron pump, past our own shack and the men inside who were pressed up against the cracks in the wall, and finally into the no-man’s-land between the two fences that surrounded the camp.

“Here. You dig hole,” Kwong said.

“Oh, my God,” Bertie said.

“You dig to put in shit.” He kicked five evenly spaced places in the snow, and then raised his burp gun level with one hand.

We folded our entrenching tools down like hoes and started chopping through the ice into the frozen ground. The bridge of my nose was throbbing and the blood had congealed in my nostrils. I had to breathe through my teeth, and the air cut into my chest like metal each time I took a swing. The Turk knelt in a melted depression around him, thudding his shovel into the ground, while large crimson drops dripped from his mouth into the snow. I raised my eyes and saw the compound filling with men. The guards were unlocking all the shacks while Ding delivered a harangue through a megaphone. He had his back to us and I couldn’t understand the electronic echo of his words, but I knew the compound was receiving a lesson in the need for cooperation between prisoner and captor. Hundreds of faces stared at us through the wire, the steam from their breaths rising into the air, and I began to pray that in some way their concentrated wills could prevent Kwong from dumping that pan of bullets into our bodies.

He walked back and forth in front of us, his eyes bright, his hand rubbing the top of the ventilated barrel. His face was as tight and flat as a shingle, and when one man slowed in his digging he jabbed the gun hard into his neck. Some of the prisoners said Kwong had been a train brakeman in North Korea before the war and that all of his family had been killed in the first American bombings. So he enjoyed his work with Americans. And now he was at his best, in his broken English, with the loading lever on the magazine pulled all the way back.

“Deep. No smell later,” he said.

We were down two feet, the mud and broken ice piled around us. I was sweating inside my clothes, and strange sounds lifted in chorus and disappeared in my mind. The wind polished the snow smooth in front of me, rolling small crystals across Kwong’s boots. His leather laces were tied in knots across the metal eyes. The sleet had stopped, and the shadow of my body and the extended shovel moved about as a separate, broken self on the pile of dirt and ice that grew larger on the edge of my hole.

“I ain’t going to buy it like this,” O.J. said. “I ain’t going to do the work for these bastards.”

“You dig deep,” Kwong said.

“You dig it.”

“Pick up shovel,” Kwong said.

“Fuck you, slope.” O.J. breathed rapidly, and the moisture from his nose froze on his lip.

“All stand, then.”

“Mother of God, he’s going to do it,” Bertie said.

The sun broke from behind a cloud, the first hard yellow light I had seen since I had come to the camp. My eyes blinked against the glaring whiteness of the compound and the hills. The ice on the barbed wire glittered in the light, and the hundreds of prisoners watching us beyond the fence stared upward at the sky in unison, their wan faces covered with sunshine. The stiff outlines of the buildings in the compound leaped at me and receded, and then Kwong turned his burp gun sideways so that the first burst and recoil would carry the spray of bullets across all five of us.

“You stand!”

We got to our feet slowly, our clothes steaming in the reflected warmth of the sun, and stood motionless in front of our graves. My body shook and I wanted to urinate, and my eyes couldn’t look directly at the muzzle of his burp gun. I choked in my throat on a clot of blood and gagged on my hand. Joe Bob’s face was drawn tight against the bone, and Bertie was shaking uncontrollably. O.J.’s arms were stiff by his sides, his hands balled into fists, and there were spots of color on the back of his neck. The Turk’s heavy shoulders were bent, his ragged mouth hung open, and the blood and phlegm on his chin dripped on the front of his coat.

“You want talk Ding now?” Kwong said, and smiled at us.

No one spoke. The line of men behind the fence was silent, immobile, some of their heads turned away.

“Who first?”

“Do it, you goddamn bastard!” O.J. shouted. Then his eyes watered and he stared at his feet.

“You first, then, cocksuck.” Kwong raised the burp gun to his shoulder and aimed into O.J.’s face, his eyes bright over the barrel, a spot of saliva in the corner of his mouth. He waited seconds while O.J.’s breath trembled in his throat, then suddenly he swung the gun on its strap and began firing from the waist into the Turk. The first burst caught him in the stomach and chest, and he was knocked backward by the impact into the grave with his arms and legs outspread. The quilted padding in his coat exploded with holes, and one bullet struck him in the chin and blew out the back of his head. His black eyes were dead and frozen with surprise before he hit the ground, and a piece of broken tooth stuck to his lower lip. Kwong stepped to the edge of the grave and emptied his gun, blowing the face and groin apart while the brass shells ejected into the snow. When the chamber locked open he pulled the pan off, inserted a fresh one in its place, and slid back the loading lever with his thumb. The other two guards began to kick snow and dirt from the edge of the grave on top of the Turk’s body.

“You next, Corpsman. But you kneel.”

The wire fence and the empty faces behind it, the wooden shacks, the yellow brick building where it had all begun, Kwong’s squat body and the hills and the brilliance of the snow in the sunlight began to spin around me as though my vision couldn’t hold one object in place. My knees went weak and I felt excrement running down my buttocks. The wind spun clouds of powdered snow into the light.

Kwong shoved me backward into the hole, then leaned over me and pushed the gun barrel into my face. His nostrils were wide and clotted with mucus in the cold.

“You suck. We give you boiled egg,” he said.

I clinched my hands and put my arms over my face. There were crystals of snow, like pieces of glass, in my eyes, and he brought his boot heel down into my stomach and forced the barrel against my teeth. My bowels gave loose entirely, a warm rush across my genitals and thighs, and my heart twisted violently in my chest.

“Good-bye, prick. You no stink so bad later,” and he pulled the trigger.

The chamber snapped empty, a metallic clack that sent all the air rushing out of my lungs.

Kwong and the other two guards were laughing, their faces split in hideous grins under their fur caps. Their bodies seemed to shimmer in the brilliant light. Kwong pushed his boot softly into my groin, pinching downward with the toe.

“I put new clip in and we do again. Each time you guess.”

He spoke to one of the other guards, who handed him a second pan, then he pulled the empty one loose from his burp gun and held them both behind his back.

“Which hand you like, Corpsman?”

“You fucking chink. Get it done!” Joe Bob said.

The guard who had given Kwong the pan struck him back and forth across the face with his open hand. Joe Bob’s arms hung at his sides while his head twisted and his skin rang and discolored with each slap.

“I pick for you, then,” Kwong said, and he dropped one pan into the snow and snapped the second one into place.

He stood above me, his gun balanced on its strap against his waist, and we went through it again, except this time I curled into a ball like a child, my hands over my face, a sickening odor rising from my clothes, and when the firing pin hit the empty chamber I vomited a thick yellow residue of millet and fish heads out of my stomach.

Then I heard Ding speak in Chinese through the megaphone on the far side of the fence. Kwong’s boots stepped backward, and I saw the shadow of his burp gun swinging loose from his body. But I couldn’t move. My heart thundered against my chest, my body was drained of any further physical resistance, and I kept my face pressed into the wetness of my coat sleeves.

“You lucky. All go to hole now. Another time we have class.”

I heard Joe Bob, Bertie, and O.J. crunch past me, but I still couldn’t lift my head. The other two guards picked me up from the grave by my coat and threw me headlong into the snow. The crystals of ice burned on my face and in my eyes. I got to my feet slowly and stood in a bent position, the compound and the hills shrinking away in the distance and then leaping toward me out of the sunlight. I tried to stand erect, and an electric pain burst through the small of my back and rushed upward into my head. Excrement dripped down my calves into the snow. I looked over at the half-covered body of the Turk in his shallow grave. One glaring eye was exposed through the snow, and his curled fingers extended up as though he wanted to touch his toes. In seconds it seemed that the others were already far ahead of me, crunching silently between the guards toward the far end of the compound. Kwong pushed me forward between the shoulder blades with his hand, and I stumbled along in the slick, wet tracks of the others, tripping on my bootlaces, to the square of barbed wire and row of holes and sewer grates where Ding put the reactionaries.

One of the guards opened the gate and used an ice hook to pull the grates off four holes. Three occupied holes were still covered with tarpaulins from the night before, the creased canvas heavy and stiff with new snow. Ding pushed me forward with his burp gun at port arms into the first hole and kicked a G.I. helmet in on top of me, then slid the grate back in place. He squatted down and leaned his face in silhouette over me.

“You can play with prick when you get cold tonight,” he said.

The hole was eight feet deep and four feet wide, and the mud walls were covered with a dirty film of ice. The inside of the steel helmet was encrusted and foul from the other men who had used it, and the sour smell of urine had soaked into the floor. I heard the grates dropped heavily into place on the other three holes, then the guards moved away in the snow and chained the wire gate shut.

I spent the next six weeks there, although I lost any concept of time after the first three days. We were each given two blankets, and at night the guards marched a progressive into the wire square, and he emptied out our helmets and handed down our food pans before they covered the grates with the tarpaulins. We had to sleep in a sitting position or with our feet propped up against the wall, and there was always a hard pain in my spine, and sometimes at night I dreamed that I was in a chair car on a train and if I could just stretch my legs out in the right direction the pain would go away. Then I would wake with the blankets twisted around me, the small of my back burning, and I would stand in the darkness until my knees went weak.

During the day we would talk to each other by speaking upward through the iron slits, then our necks would become tired or there wouldn’t be anything else to say, and each of us would fall back into his silent fantasies on the floor of the hole. The wounds in my legs had festered and small pieces of lead rose with the pus to the surface of the skin, and many times I slipped off into feverish, distorted scenes that lasted until I heard the ice hook strike the grate at nightfall. Sometimes my eyes stayed fixed on the pattern of iron over my head and the distant, checkered clouds, as though I were staring upward out of a tunnel, and then I would be fifteen years old again in a winter cornfield, the sun bright on the withered stalks, with the single-shot twelve-gauge against my shoulder and a cottontail racing across the dry rows. I aimed just in front of his head and squeezed off the trigger, and when the gun roared in my ears I knew that I had hit him clean, without destroying any of the meat, and that night Cap would deep-fry him in egg batter and flour for supper. Then I would be back in the Shooting Gallery, and I’d feel the heavy weight of the stretcher in both palms while the potato mashers exploded in our wire and the B.A.R. man searched frantically in the bottom of the ditch for another magazine. The wounded Marine on the stretcher stared up at me, his eyes full of terror, as I stumbled forward with his weight over the empty ammunition boxes, then the burp guns raked the ditch and knocked men like piles of rags into the walls, and I dropped him and ran. But in one heart-rushing second I saw the expression of helplessness and betrayal in his eyes, and in my feverish dream I wanted to go back and close his eyes with my fingers and tell him that we were all going to buy it, they had already overrun us, and there was nowhere I could have taken him.

Each day I saw the Shooting Gallery again, sometimes in an entirely different way from previously, and the faces of the men in the ditch became confused; their screams when they were hit and their death cries often sounded like a distant band out of tune with itself, and I tried to go back to the winter cornfield and the smell of oak wood burning in the smokehouse and the rabbit racing toward the blackjack thicket. I knew that if I just held that field in the center of my mind, or the smokehouse with a shallow depression in the ground under one wall where my father used to push in the oak logs, I could keep everything intact and in its proper place and I wouldn’t let Ding or Kwong make me admit that I was guilty of a wounded Marine’s death.

Then on a bright, sun-spangled day I would look up through the slits at the drifting clouds and briefly realize, with a sick feeling in my chest, that they didn’t care about the Marine, they only wanted me to inform on Ramos and the Negro sergeant, and eventually I might begin to cry in my sleep, as Bertie sometimes did, and one morning ask Kwong to take me into Ding’s office. I heard the voices of other men from our shack farther down the row of holes, and Joe Bob whispered hoarsely up through his grate one day that the World War II paratrooper had been machine-gunned and buried next to the Turk. The temperature began to go above freezing in the mid-afternoon, the melted snow ticked into the bottom of the hole, and the reek from the helmet and my own body often made me sick when I tried to eat my bean cakes. My hair and beard were matted with mud and the thick residue of fish heads that I licked from the bottom of my food pan, and my yellow fingernails had grown out like a dead person’s. My ribs felt like strips of wood to my touch, and although I had masturbated my first week in the hole, creating geisha girls under me, with their toy, pale faces and sloe eyes, I couldn’t hold the image of a woman in my mind more than a few seconds. Then on a wet morning, with the fog lying close against the ground, I heard the ice hook click against the sewer grates and the hushed voices of O.J. and Bertie as the guards helped them out of their holes.

A day later I was still hoping that they would return. It was too easy now to bang on the grate with my food pan and shout for Kwong to pull me out. Whatever I told Ding now wouldn’t have any effect on Ramos and the sergeant, I thought, and it was insane to die for men who possibly were already dead themselves. As the fog rolled over me and drifted through the iron slits I went through all the ethical arguments about surrender, and I discovered that there were dozens of ways to justify any human act, even dishonor. I thought of my grandfather, who had fought the most dangerous man in Texas, and I wondered what he would do if he were here now instead of me. I saw the flashes of Wes Hardin’s revolver, and his murderous, drunken eyes, and my grandfather standing in the open barn door with the Winchester in his hands. Then Hardin wheeled his horse and charged, his fingers tangled in the mane, the shotgun banging against the saddle, and Old Hack leaped forward and swung his rifle barrel down with both hands into the side of Hardin’s head. But his wars had been fought in a different time, between equally armed men, under hot skies and in dusty Texas streets, and death or victory came in a matter of seconds. He hadn’t lived in an age when lunatics locked men in filthy holes and turned them into self-hating creatures that were sickened with their own smell.

So that night, at feeding time, I knew that Old Hack would understand when I held up my hand silently to the progressive and he pulled me over the edge of the hole on my stomach.

I was the eighth man to inform. The Australian died in the hole, and it took another week for Ding to break the three remaining men from our shack. Then on a dripping, gray morning we all stood at the wire and watched Ramos and the Negro sergeant executed and their bodies thrown into an open latrine.