FB - Torture

The hole was ten feet deep, barely wide enough for him to sit with his legs outstretched. In the evenings they sometimes came with flashlights to peer down at him through the bamboo grate. Shortly after each dawn they removed the grate and hoisted him up to do their chores. It was the same jungle camp they had tortured him in, the same thatched huts and rich green mountains. For a reason he did not at first understand, they had treated his wounds while he was unconscious: the slashes in his chest where the officer had repeatedly punctured him with a slender knife and drawn the blade across, grating against his ribs; the lacerations in his back where the officer had crept up behind, suddenly lashing. Lashing. His leg was badly infected, but when they had opened fire on his unit and captured him, no bone had been hit, only thigh muscle, and eventually he was able to limp around.

Now they did not question him anymore, did not threaten him, did not even talk to him. They always made gestures to show him his work: dumping slops, digging latrines, building cook-fires. He guessed their silence toward him was punishment for pretending not to understand their language. Still, at night in his hole, he heard their conversations dimly and from the scraps of words he was satisfied that even while unconscious he had not told them what they wanted to know. After the ambush and his capture, the rest of his unit must have gone on to its objective, because now he heard about the exploded factories and how this camp was one of many in the mountains watching for other American guerrillas.

Soon they had him doing more chores, heavier ones, feeding him less, making him work longer, sleep less. He came to understand. Too much time had gone by for him to know where his team would be. Since he could not give them information, they had fixed his wounds so they could play with him some more and find out how much work he could take before it killed him. Well, he would show them a long wait for that. There was not much they could do to him that his instructors had not already put him through.

[...]

That was the point of becoming a Green Beret. He could take anything. But each day in the jungle camp he grew weaker, and at last he was afraid that his body could not keep on. More work, more heavy work, less food, less sleep. What he saw went gray and blurred; he stumbled, moaning, talking to himself. After three days without food, they tossed a snake flopping into his hole to squirm in the dirt, and they watched as he twisted off its head and ate the body raw. He only managed to keep a little of it down. Not until later — a few minutes, a few days, the time was all the same — did he wonder if the snake was poisonous or not. That and the bugs he found in his hole and the chunks of garbage they occasionally threw down at him, that was all that gave him life the next few days — or weeks, he could not tell. Hauling a dead tree through the jungle back to camp, he was permitted to pick fruit and eat it, and by nightfall he had dysentery. He lay in a stupor in his hole, mired in his excrement, hearing them talk about his foolishness.

But he had not been foolish. In his delirium his mind seemed better than it had been since capture, and the dysentery was intentional. He had eaten just enough to catch it mildly so the next day when they hauled him up be could pretend his cramps were more severe than they were actually, so he could collapse while dragging the dead trees back to camp. Maybe they would not make him work for a while then. Maybe his guard would leave him in the jungle and go for help to carry him to camp, and by the time the guard returned, he would have been able to escape.
But then he realized that his mind was not better at all. He had eaten too much fruit, and the cramps were worse than he expected, and once he could no longer work, the guard would likely shoot him, and even if he did escape, how long could he last, how far could he get, starved and half-dead and diarrheic? He could not remember if he realized all this before or after. Everything became confused, and suddenly he was on his own, crashing through the jungle, collapsing into a stream. The next thing he knew, he was crawling through ferns up a slope, standing at the top, falling onto level grass, standing again and straining to get across the level, then crawling up another slope, at the top no longer able to stand, only to crawl. The mountain tribes, he was thinking. Get to a tribe, was all he could think.

Somebody was making him drink. The soldiers had caught him he was sure, and he fought to break away, but somebody was holding him down and making him swallow. It wasn't soldiers, it couldn't be: they let him break away, stumbling through the jungle. Sometimes he thought he was back in his hole, only dreaming he was loose. Other times he thought he was still dropping from the plane with the rest of his team, his chute not opening.

In two weeks the rain started, coming down forever. Mud. Wood rot. Showers streaming down so thick that he could hardly breathe. He kept on, dazed by the pelt of the rain...


- First Blood, Part 1, Chapter 10