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Tap Code “By tapping covertly on our cell walls using an alphabet code we maintained our unity. We encouraged and cared for each other. We passed information, learned poetry, even learned new languages. I got to know my fellow prisoners like brothers, though I’d never even seen them.”
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14 Hanoi Moon Life sometimes passes ever so slowly. We are frequently led to believe that stability is stagnancy, that the sameness is deadly. Yet beneath the surface of calm acceptance an inexorable current is moving us forward. Perhaps only from that place of feeling trapped do we stop to integrate the truths by which we flow with the process and allow ourselves to move on.
Keys! The jingling of keys in the night; in the night when they shouldn't have been there. I stopped pacing and listened. I had learned that sometimes the guards did it just because they knew the terrorizing effect it had on each man in each stifling cell. I listened and watched the half-inch crack beneath the door of my cell for the first sign of trouble. It was clear now, the sound of key on key, keys on ring. In the normal routine and in their proper context, the sound of the keys had become almost like an old friend, a measure of time passing - so slowly, but passing nonetheless. In the morning: keys... door open... empty bucket. Midmorning: keys... pick up food... eat... keys... set out dishes... fill water jug. And so, another day closer to home, whenever it might be. Nothing could happen, time couldn't pass without the keys. At night, however, the keys were wrong and my heart pounded harder as I saw through my door-bottom "window" the dark form of rubber-tire sandals on brown feet. Suddenly the random juggling stopped and was replaced by the sinister little clink-clink of selection. He was picking out my key. That was the sound, the one night sound, that had come to make the time stand still. Instinctively I glanced around for anything out of place in my cell. It was one of only seven here at a grubby little prison fashioned from an old maintenance building next to the Hanoi power plant. It was even more filthy than Hoa Lo, so we had dubbed the place Dirty Bird. As I stood before the door, the lock creaked in the eye of the hasp, I was sweating. Several drops broke free from my bare chest, joined, and coursed there little zigzag route down my torso, pooling at my navel, then broke free again and melted into the waist of my loose-fitting shorts, already soaked. The bolt of the door slammed open, echoing through every wall in the building. The night swung in, revealing Swish and Mouth. Swish held a small flashlight, but the unfrosted 60-watt bulb on the wall above me diminished its beam. By habit, he shined it in my face anyway. Swish was just the usual gun guard. He was named Swish because he walked like a prissy girl. Though the custom of men walking arm in arm or embracing was very common to the V, hundreds of combined man-hours of crack- and peephole watching had revealed to us that Swish seemed to relish this affectionate custom with more than comradely interest. I think he knew we knew, but that didn't seem to make him any more of a bastard that he already was. There he stood, half a step behind Mouth, with his small Czech-made grease-gun automatic cradled in his arm. "Bow! Bow!" With a brief but by now well-grooved rhythm, I nodded my head and rolled my shoulders slightly forward, then straightened again. A drop of sweat, rolling down my nose, landed on the black rubber strap of my left sandal. His keys clutched tightly in his hand, Mouth just stood there, in the jaundice of my 60 watts, considering the shabbiness of my bow. Standing there, waiting for what was sure to come, I thought of the men in the other cells, especially my two buddies on either side. All had heard the keys. All had heard the bolt. All had heard the "Bow!" Interrupted from their plans, their dreams, their prayers, or their pacing and memory work, they waited, hardly breathing, straining to hear some clue of who or why. It made little difference where the keys stopped. As often as not, the first stop only portended the next, and the next. And besides, if it's "him" it's almost the same as if it were "me." We suffered the same pains, as if all were joined to the same nerve fiber stretched taut from one end of the cell block to the other. We all felt the same anxious knot in our middle, knowing that the temporary security that develops from being in a familiar cell, with an established routine and a good comm system, was about to be jerked from beneath us again. I knew my buddy on one side had his tin cup against the wall, his ear pressed tightly against the bottom, listening for an order from Mouth or some signal from me. I knew the one on the other side was watching my door, his sticky face pressed against the tiny nail hole running obliquely through the inside corner of his door, his body stretched across the doorway to keep both feet behind the edge of the door jamb, thus avoiding the costly betrayal of a shadow beneath the door. Should I disappear that night, just drop out of sight, my friends would know - unless, of course, we should all drop out of sight. Our experience thus far had given us reason for serious concern. Just as I had reported the delirium and death of my anonymous friend that night in New Guy Village, others had told me of instances when men would be taken out for what would seem to be a routine quiz and simply never return. A guard would be seen retrieving their gear from the empty cell later on. Some would reappear eventually in a different prison, but others would never be seen again. Mouth made the crisp, chopping motion with one hand across the outstretched wrist of his other, meaning "put on your long-sleeved shirt and long trousers." By this I knew I was about to go to a quiz, or my cell was about to be inspected for unauthorized items, or I was being taken out. To be taken out after "office hours," as the V themselves called the time from 5 P.M. to 7 A.M., implied ominous things. But Mouth wasn't finished. He rotated his hands, one over the other in the paddlewheel motion. "Roll up your belongings, you're moving out." Then, to punctuate his little charade like performance, he barked, "Quigley!" So, I was moving. Where to? Perhaps just down the passageway in a routine switch to keep us off balance. It had become fairly routine to do this periodically to keep us from getting well organized in communication and clearing procedures, or escape coordination, or whatever "diabolical plots" of which we were regularly accused. As I slipped into my trousers, I listened for other keys, for other locks to open, other activity out in the open-air passageway. I could hear nothing but my own heart beating. The outside silence meant I would be traveling alone. I knew that wherever I was going, I must got out a signal... soon. If I coughed an "M," my comrades would know I was moving. A "Q" would indicate a quiz. They would pick it up as instinctively as a night creature reads the enveloping darkness. The ears of each prisoner had become so finely tuned to all sounds in relation to our tap code that they would easily perceive my sign. I approached the familiar task of packing my belongings into my blanket roll so that no matter how much it might get banged around, all would be secure. The loss of anything - my cup, my toothbrush, or even my sliver of lye soap - could be a disaster. When one had so little, so little meant so much. Strangely enough, I had even come to appreciate how little I really needed to subsist - an insight that would never have been accessible otherwise. I surveyed my meager inventory gathered neatly on my rice straw mat. It provided the only clean place on the pitted cement floor. Recalling the proper place for each item in my bundle, I gingerly set my tin cup and a one-liter water jug aside to accommodate my unfolded blanket. "No! No!" Mouth shook his head. "Man, I just don't read you. What the hell do you want me to do?" He smacked me on the ear with the heel of his hand. I knew my buddies heard it. Swish, slouching in the doorway, interjected a few words and poked his weapon toward my mat. Mouth grunted an answer, then squatted down. With a great show of distaste, like a girl picking up a dead mouse by the tail, he lifted the corned of my mat. I comprehended the action but not the meaning. He wants me to roll up my mat and nothing else. This is a new one. Under their satisfied scrutiny, I complied. Then as I stood before the two of them, dressed in my faded khaki "longs," still stained from the bloody parade over a year ago, and with my mysterious empty mat rolled neatly under my arm, I just didn't know whether to cough "M" or "Q." Stepping down the two steps from the cell to the passageway, I understood why Mouth was more disagreeable the usual. The night was hot and sticky, bad enough to give even the V a good case of heat rash. Even so, it was better that the superheated atmosphere of my cell. In fact, it was like stepping out into an ocean breeze - at least ten degrees of relief. With his flashlight, Swish pointed to the spot where I was to stand while Mouth closed and locked the door. That's it, don't let any fresh air get in there, whatever you do. At the far end of the passage, I could discern a small cluster of figures, two wearing pith helmets and with shoulder-slung weapons, and on with a flashlight. The helmet less one, with the flashlight, shorter than his two comrades, was Louie the Rat. He liked to fancy himself the camp commander. He had been assigned as a sort of officer-in-charge of this "camp" but he obviously supervised closely. He and the others were given very little latitude in dealing with us - to out benefit. I moved along the walkway with Swish following. The passageway, formed by the cells on my right and the roofless shell on the warehouse on my left, was fairly wide. Cough, cough, cough, cough-cough! Surely my rasping "Q" would be recognized instantly. On the other side of the doors, the thought would be: What the hell is that going to be about? Hang in there, Babe. God bless. And a short prayer would be breathed. Louie said in his whiny voice, "Tonight you will go someplace. Wait some minutes." Within the next few minutes, I found myself blindfolded and handcuffed in the back of a beat-up ambulance-type vehicle, seated on the floor between what must have been litter attachment brackets. As I leaned back against the side of the vehicle, I appreciated that Louie had left the cuffs fairly loose. The chatter between Swish and the driver was relaxed. With this, I relaxed a little myself. We had all learned that when the mission is really serious and they're uptight about getting something through you, the hostility in their handling and speaking comes through clearly. Looking down, beneath the blindfold, I saw a little Czech-made machine gun in Swish's lap. As deadly a weapon as it could undoubtedly be, we had come to belittle it: You can tell' it's swell; it's Mattel. Outside, someone cranked the engine into action; actually cranked it by hand, like an old Model-T Ford. It died and was recranked; died and was recranked twice more. In the name of frugality, they usually set their carburetors so lean that the drivers had to use more gas just revving the engine to keep it running at idle. As we jostled out of the power-plant yard, the spring less beast bounced me on and off the brackets on the floor. I tried to use this movement to disguise my hand sweeping up, almost imperceptibly, pushing my blindfold up a little more. "Isssh!" The muzzle of the toy gun slapped reprovingly at my hand. "Co! Tsk, tsk, tsk!" Down the ramp and onto the street we went. I counted the passing of blocks by the drainage dips at each intersection. Three blocks, four... at five we made a sharp right that caused me to brace my feet against the other side. The driver jammed the reluctant gears into reverse, then we backed in a ninety-degree arc to the left and stopped. The gears whined again; we turned right and were on our way. The driver, now less casual, had barked and bitched at the pedestrians and cyclist throughout the maneuver, the sum total of which was another left turn. At rare times like that, when I seemed to be so close to the everyday people of Hanoi, I wondered what they were thinking; why they were out on that particular street, going in that particular direction. And I wondered what they would have thought had they known that only inches away from their war - and work-weary bodies sat at captured American pilot, that curious, impersonal entity found only within the clichéd context of "U.S. war of aggression," "U.S. ruling clique," and "Saigon puppets." I wondered if, somehow, through the callus of indoctrination, they could possibly think of me as just another human being, just as they seemed so human to me at this moment. We're really looking for the same thing in life, Lord. Why can't we make it? Why must it come to this? Slowing down... left turn. About four of five blocks after our last turn we slowed again. The conversation, which I wasn't understanding, took on a more purposeful tone. Halfway through another left, we stopped. An order was passed to the outside and I heard the dull clunk of wood on wood. Suddenly, the scene outside was clear: It was the sound made by the street guard raising the crude, counter-weighted barrier blocking the entry to Pham Hong Thai Street - the street that passes right in front of Dirty Bird and the Annex, and then, a dew feet farther down, along the south side of the power plant. For the past few months (squinting through the cracks in the boards, battens, and tin that had been a window), I had watched the guards admit army vehicles and dump trucks that were hauling debris from around the power plant. I had watched them deny access to others, surmising that the restriction was to protect the power plant from sabotage and keep the curious neighbors away from prison. We were rolling; down Pham Hong Thai Street, past my unsuspecting comrades in their 60-watt ovens, past the point where Ninh Binh Street butts in from the south. I could visualize the heart of the power-plant district outside. The plant had been attacked several times. Some of the damage had been inflicted by a sophisticated weapon we called the Wall-Eye. It homed into its target on a TV-type sensitivity to dark and light contrast. To thwart this contrast-sensitive eye of the wall-eye missile, the entire power plant and surrounding neighborhood - roofs, walls, sidewalks - had been painted gray. The people there endured a threefold environmental oppression. First, like the power-plant district in most large cities, the air was always choked with coal dust, so thick that it collected on bare shoulders like black dandruff. Second, the streets and buildings there, like the rest of the city, assumed that all-pervasive drabness of any society where freedom of expression is stifled. And finally now, nothing was left to inspire imagination. There was no dark, no light, no sense of contrast anywhere in the entire neighborhood. Suddenly we jerked to a stop, jerked forward a few more feet , and then again to a stop as the engine expired. After all the driving, we were scarcely fifty yards down the street from my cell. Outside, Louie's voiced snapped officiously. I heard the broken panes in the window of the ambulance's door shift against themselves as it swung open and banged against its hinges. Swish moved past me and grabbed my sleeve. "Co! Come down." As I stood on the curb with my rolled-up mat in hand, Mouth removed my towel and dropped it to my feet. The power-plant Annex, as we had dubbed it, was a line of bout eight two-room apartments that had been abandoned as living quarters after the first raid. Each faced onto the street. A common corridor in the rear, much like the passageway at Dirty Bird, joined them all together in a communal entity. Each two apartments shared a common kitchen and wash area along the corridor. Being one of the newer and more substantial buildings in the area, these accommodations had probably been quite choice. It was likely, though, that two or three families had been quartered in each, thereby reducing them to the crowded shabbiness of the surrounding bomb-shaken structures. Louie was more officious that usual. There were orders acknowledgments over and over. The driver slammed and reslammed the weary door. The whole damned neighborhood would be roused from its drab and uneasy sleep, people peeking furtively through the straw-mat screens of the tiny apartments and rooms to which they'd been assigned, all watching this Chaplinesque drama in the grubby yellow circle of the lone street light. To any who might witness my arrival, I would appear to be a new prisoner to the Annex. The more "going and coming fire drills" staged by the authorities, the more obvious it would be that Americans were being imprisoned here. That was the purpose pf this exercise: Word would get around and leaks would filter through to our government, if not by convert means, then surely through the myriad of foreign journalists and "investigators of U.S. war crimes." Schwinman had told me he had been given a complete tour of the city. I felt certain that this whole routine was just the beginning and that others would soon follow in that junky old ambulance. I was led into the only lighted room in the Annex and seated on a low wooden stool. The walls, though freshly whitewashed, were bare, except for the omnipresent red-framed photo of Ho Chi Minh over the door to the back corridor. The red-tiled floor was still wet from a half-assed splashdown and the air was warm and moist, almost steamy. Before me was a massive wooden table with ornate floral carvings on the apron and legs, all now chipped and scarred. One of the castors was bent almost to the side of its little ceramic wheel, a cultural vestige possibly left by some French-favored mandarin, now contemptuously misused in the service of the People's Army. Had Zhivago returned to find his old boyhood furniture-friends so treated? Louie sat across from me, his finger tracing a deep gouge in that formerly splendid mahogany plane. As usual, the relative heights of his chair and my stool ensured him a downward perspective, even though I sat as erect as possible. "Co, tonight I ask you some question." I said nothing. "How do you think about this camp?" I wondered what he was probing for. Or was he just killing time? "I think it is illegal for your government to keep POWs in a known target area. Then Geneva agreements on POW treatment specifically forbid this." "Why you think this is a target? What is target?" He shrugged. "You can see. Many, many people live here." He made an indifferent little wave toward the street. "This power plant supplies electricity to most of Hanoi. Your air defense system and most of your local industry would be hurt very much if it might be destroyed." We had learned to structure our own sentences for their ease of comprehension. Louie widened his eyes in sham surprise. "Hanoi? Hanoi? Why you think this is Hanoi?" "I saw the road signs that said Hanoi the first morning I arrived in the city. The guards saying Hanoi this and Hanoi that." I paused. "And the water girls wear football jerseys that say Hanoi High on the front." Surely Louie isn't really so naive as to think I don't know where I am, I thought, but he persisted in this futile effort to keep me from knowing where I was and that I was only one of many other American POWs. My sarcasm met a blank expression as he pondered the more immediate problem of my knowing exactly where I was within Hanoi. "And besides," he meowed, "why you think this is power plant?" My smile was as condescending as I could make it. "Because it looks like one, and it sounds like one, and it smells like one, and there are a lot of electric wires going from it in many directions." And besides, I thought to myself, my neighbor told me it was a power plant the morning after I'd moved in. "Nah!" Louie grunted, warding off my words with half a head-shake. "You make mistake; you make many, many mistake. How do you think about the food in this camp?" I realized now he was just killing time. "It is not enough and it is dirty and it makes my stomach hurt and makes me have diarrhea." I didn't even get into my intestinal parasites, the rash of boils I had already endured, or the body weight that had disappeared. On the one hand, it had been a scary thing to see myself deteriorate like this physically, but on the other hand, I continually marveled at my physical and emotional resilience. I had shit spaghetti like worms into my bucket and was revulsed at the thought of passing them out through my throat while asleep, as had happened to at least one man so far. I had stoically out-waited festering boils in my nose, my ears, and the crack of my ass, knowing there would be no relief until they were ripe enough to depressurize by squeezing out the core - the self infliction of intense short-term pain for the prospect of long-term relief - perhaps several times on the same boil. In a year and half, my weight had gone from 165 to an estimated 130, and I knew the spiral wasn't over. Louie repeated his Catch-22 answer more emphatically: "You should remember the war. Food is very difficult. Even so, your ration is bigger that the army men's, and much bigger than the people's in the villages." After a long politically inspired monologue in that whine I'd learned to hate, Louie must have made his main points to his own satisfaction. He paused, apparently to asses the effect it had had on me, but was really just sopping up the long night, to make my recent "arrival" look legitimate. The charade would never work if, within only a few minutes, I went traipsing back down the street to where I really lived. At last he said, with more that just official interest, "Do you think your government well bomb the power plant if you live here?" This was the first question of the evening for which he really wanted an answer. Without hesitation I said, "Of course, and in fact, they already have." "You see! Your government does not care about your life! Johnson will kill you himself!" He slapped the table, leaned back, and crossed his legs, satisfied with himself. "Not so," I countered. "You can remember in the last raid the power plant was hit but our cells were not hit. Our pilots are always very, very accurate." I lied. In the lethal crossfire of SAM 2s plus triple-A and light arms fire that saturates the sky over this entire end of the city, in spite of their intentions the guys were doing damn well just to hit the city block that the power plant was on, let alone to miss our little prison enclave. That puts us well with the "circular error probable." We had been lucky so far. "I think you will die here no matter if bomb kill you or not," he snapped from his chair and strode toward the door to the street. At the doorway he paused and spoke to Swish at the other door. I recognized the Vietnamese words Mot mot gios: eleven o'clock. It had been 9:30 a few minutes earlier when Louie's watch was accompanying his finger through the air as he dramatized his monologue. Swish replied with something affirmative as Louie disappeared into the moonlit street.
For the next hour at Swish's direction I sat on the cool tiles of the floor, meticulously scraping dried drops of whitewash from the tiles around the edges of the room with a piece of broken glass. After scraping each tile, I splashed away the loose flakes of lime with a full bucket of water. An overkill, of course, but the puddles of excess water cooler to sit in. Mouth was in and out. He and Swish joked as they watched me wallowing there in the thin pools of water, probably comparing my relative bliss to that of the tender-skinned buffaloes they had both tended as boys in the verdant countryside. On my way north I had seen those gentle, plodding beasts that could slog a plow through several kilometers of paddy each searing day. I had even seen one lolling in a huge bomb crater filled with seepage, with his own little master lounging easily on his shoulder and cooing into his ear. It was a scene dear to all V hearts - North and South. To them, this image of the little boys and their buffaloes heading for the water as the sun dipped below that peaks of the Truong Son range imparted a feeling that all was well, a sense of peace and serenity. This was the Vietnam of other days. "Co, wash." I could see from the shower behind apartment number one that several of the other rooms down the line were lighted. I coughed my initials twice as I removed my shorts and turned the water on. Strain as I might, I could hear no double-cough reply from down the corridor. Swish and Mouth smoked unconcernedly, hardly paying attention to either my cough or the sound of the running water. But to me, the sound of water spurting from the open end of the rusty pipe and beating on the slimy concrete slab was like a chorus from heaven. And of all the good fortune, there, wedged between the pipe and the peeling wall, was a piece of soap, a little smaller than a motel-sized bar. I washed and rinsed, washed and rinsed again, and the again. I rinsed and rubbed the sweat and grim from my shorts and then from that offensive rag of a towel. And then I just stood there, my hands extended overhead, gripping the curved pipe just above where the nozzle might have been. With my weary body dropping limply from the leaden spout, the joy of the cool water was indescribable. I swayed slowly from side to side, playing the water down each part of my body. With an almost sensual satisfaction, I could feel the welts from heat rash receding inward; each tiny blister shriveling back into its respective pore. God, it felt good to cool down! I missed hot water in the cold winter, but this moment now was worth the promise of hot water year-round. I knew that if I could chill my skin sufficiently, I might get through an entire night without being awakened by rivulets of sweat trickling from my groin, waist, and inside my upper arms. I dried my the lower half of my body gingerly, wringing the towel two or three times to insure that my genitals and the surrounding area were as dry as possible. The stars in the southern sky were softly bright. The night seemed to take on a new and welcome dimension as a light breeze cooled the droplets from my chest, back, and arms. My closely clipped hair dried fast and I had only to pat the water from my eyes. I let the breeze do the rest. It had been several months since I had even seen the stars. The Arch of Capella stretched from the right: Perseus and Pleiades, the Seven Sisters; then bright, beautiful Aries, the eternal beacon to all men in uncharted seas; Orion, the triad of his belt perfectly parallel with the ridge pole of the tile roof before me; and lastly fiery orange Betelgeuse. I could barely see Polaris above and behind me, but the shower roof blacked out its eternal pendulum, the Big Dipper. As I craned my head towards the sky and glanced from roof to roof, my two guardians probably suspected I was sizing up the area for the implementation of some dark scheme. Their suspicion roused them from their flat-heeled squat as they smoked and chatted, perhaps about how lonely it got for Mouth between his wife's semiannual visits from their native village. Obeying Mouth's slightly impatient motion, I stepped through the front door and onto the sidewalk, then hesitated there, for I was unprepared for the sight that greeted me. The moon was full, suspended in the eastern sky, halfway between the terracotta roof s of Hanoi and the sparkling zenith of the night. All of its light seemed to be focused onto this short strip of weed-cracked asphalt and, incongruous as it seemed, Pham Hong Thai Street was magnificent. The daytime drabness of those gray walls and roofs was transformed into a cloak of black velvet that appeared to cover it all like the soft, luscious moss of a shaded brook side glen. Each corner, each edge, each windowsill and doorway reflected the moonlight with a luminous, ghostly sheen, like freshly fallen black snow. As I stepped out into the deserted street, the moonlight felt like it was in the air itself, lingering on my arms and shoulders like frost, flowing ankle-deep from curb to curb, rising up onto the cement walks and walls with a phosphorescent sigh. As I waded on, I looked up at that shining face. Well, 'ole moon, beautiful... gorgeous... splendid moon... you've just been shining down on my beloved Antipodes. Did you see my love tonight?... Did she see you?... Did she think of me?... My love... But I was now abreast of the Dirty Bird gate, and in a few seconds, Mouth would order me to go inside. He would then jingle his keys and single out mine, the one that would re-seal me into my steamy cell with its dreary 60-watter. This night would be left outside, out here in the center of Pham Hong Thai Street, in the center of Hanoi, North Vietnam, on the wrong side of the world. I must have stopped walking. "Co!" The moon was misty now.
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