I was an interrogator during the Vietnam war altho I never interrogated anybody except myself asking "Why me?" to me and not getting a good answer even when I tried to trick myself, use the Mutt and Jeff technique and so on. I just would not crack and remained as baffled as any. But due to absurd circumstances I was stuck in a former cavalry stable at Fort Huachuca with colonels, sergeants, and so on who had interrogation experience in the Korean and Vietnam wars and their favorite stories (when talking about Vietnam) were about the relatively high level NVA captives who co-operated when they were shown that people in Saigon had motorcycles and a chance for rapture with various ladies of the night. Some switched sides when treated to a nice meal and a promise of...you know.
And then they railed at the stupidity of the US turning some prisoners over to the South Vietnamese where they would be torured and ruined..
and no useful intelligence elicited.
I helped revise the interrogation manual. Well, I actually did it while these guys played golf and dreamt of retirement. The Geneva Conventions all over that manual. No techniques at all involving violence or harsh treatment set out.
I was a draftee and looked on all of this from the draftee's point of view -- distanced, sardonic, aware of the absurdity ... and I was in a company full of draftee interrogators.
How did we become interrogators? Got to take a language and then they said you boys can now be interrogators! "I thought, sir, that I was to be a translator/interpreter."
Laughter...
Now, I know, because I remember who I was in the army with...my fellow draftees...that the draftee's attitude doesn't make for making it easy to brainwash them to do a bunch of absurd and brutal this and that. Except for a kid from Kansas who collected guns and various Mormans who, in fake exercises, wanted to torment the poor jerks who were "captured" none of my fellow draftees would have anything to do with this shit.
The point -- getting rid of the draft eliminated a certain sort of resistance...and there is a certain sense of the absurd, a certain suspicion of power that seems rarer...
But I have recently been cheered up – in the literary sense – by reading James Jones’ "From Here to Eternity." Saw the movie a while back and on a whim...and really there is nothing like that novel (especially the movie)... hailed back in 52 as the great WW2 novel everyone doing so apparently determined to ignore what is there. Japs attack at Pearl Harbor – maybe the last 60 or so pages and First Sergeant Warden directs fire at the planes – most firees drinking or drunk. But the novel really is all about the stockade – days in solitary, relentless beatings with hoe handles, the strange group of losers from Harlan County and Indiana and, of course Maggio from the Bronx all mad and saying non servium -- all from untypical (in the usual books) motives and inspired by a guy who was with the Wobblies but thinks it all useless and just the right thing to do. (This guy never gets in the movie) And all of these guys so limited and trapped. The officers as completely self-serving and monstrous and ordinary and everyday (these career fellows always this way) as they actually are...oh a few exceptions... and the enlisted men (the career privates! and sergeants) all lost but there is this sense that a stumbling drunk (Jones in his finest moments) is approaching something real always denied.
The most impressive physical feat I saw in the army was the mile run of Norman (Coughing) Codega. Codega was, to put it gently, not meant for life in the field. He was smoking two packs of Camels a day when he was drafted, was overweight, and cried easily. He was persecuted mercilessly, of course.
It was the end of Basic. The final PT test. Our Drill Sergeants told us that failure would mean recycling -- beginning all over again. The naive and fearful believed this.
Actually, the Army didn't want to spend the money and the goal was to get em out of basic and into Vietnam.
These were the days of Project 100,000 -- when 100,000 persons in Mental Category Four were to be drafted anyway and given the chance to serve their country.
Codega was one of these proud men.
He completed everything but the mile run and, as it turned out, unless he finished in less that 6 minutes 20 seconds he would fail and have to go through basic all over again! Or such was the cruel hoax played on him.
The Drill Sergeants cleared the track. His fate was explained to him. Under the specified time and he was free to leave to train as a cook and be sent to some squalid messhall in the Far East. One second above and he was doomed!
Drill Sergeant Gilmore Davis bellowed into the bullhorn:
"Private Coedga -- RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!"
And he did. I have never seen such a look of terror and please remember that I have given many final examinations ...
He ran and then began to puke. Pounded the track and fell to the gravel skidding on his face. He was weeping and screaming and puking and running and we were all cheering.
And he ran and ran faster and passed the finish where he collapsed in a puke covered trembling heap.
He looked up in theological terror.
Drill Sergeant Davis announced the time.
6 minutes 17 seconds!
Codega howled his gratitude to the God above.
We screamed in joy and when, only five minutes later, we were run in formation the four miles to the barracks, Codega ran with us circling us as we ran whooping like a noble Native American and screaming obscenities so joyful and imaginative he might have been a Marine from Kentucky at a house of ill repute in Manila.
It was a great day for America.
That is -- the whole thing was absurd, Codega was OWNED.
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!