their asses.
But the soldier continued, demanding to know master battle plans, refusing Louis’s explanation that he knew nothing, that he was just following the leader like Fuzzy and the others.
When the soldier wasn’t satisfied, he put on a glove and swatted Louis again, but this time not very hard. And that made Louis suspicious that they were saving him for bigger things. They were.
The same line of questioning went on for several minutes until Colonel Chop Chop appeared to grow weary of Louis’s insistence. He mumbled something to the Russian, who responded with a burst of words. Chop Chop immediately conveyed the message to the baby-faced corporal, who gave Louis a look that sent a bolt of electricity through him. The soldier stepped between Louis and Fuzzy and removed a knife from a holster on his hip—a long, wickedly sharp looking blade that flickered in Louis’s face and made his heart nearly rupture. The soldier looked at Louis with that flat, inscrutable expression, then in a lightning move that Louis later thought was well rehearsed, he grabbed one of Fuzzy Swenson’s ears and sliced it off.
Fuzzy screamed as blood spurted from the side of his head. Still without expression the soldier dropped the severed ear into Louis’s helmet. It struck with an obscene
By reflex Louis tried to shake the helmet free. But the soldier whacked Louis in the face to remain still.
Louis looked down at the thing. It was horrible—just the bloodied rim of the ear, a gaping hole for the canal opening still attached to Fuzzy’s head. “Please,” Louis begged. “I don’t know anything. Please. Please.”
Fuzzy whimpered and bobbed his head, his hands jerking against the ropes to cup the pain, stop the blood. But he had been tightly bound, and his hands twitched like injured animals.
The interrogator shouted at him to explain the kind of armaments in his company.
Louis looked at the hideous severed ear.
He glanced at Chop Chop, who stood in the corner with the Russian studying Louis through those fucking half-moon black gook eyes—bright with pleasure. The bald Russian beside him looking like a warhead.
Louis began to mumble, trying to compose his mind to come up with something that sounded like military plans. The colonel said something and the translator shouted for Louis to speak up. But all he could do was mumble dissociated words—
But before he could cobble together something that made sense, the knife man pulled Fuzzy’s head up by the other ear and sliced it off.
Louis screamed. But Fuzzy only let out a gasp, since he was already half gone from the beating and loss of blood. His head flopped from side to side as if trying to free itself of the pain, his hands jerking fitfully. The soldier dropped the second ear into Louis’s helmet.
Louis looked at the officer. “I beg you, please, no more. Leave him alone. He didn’t do anything. He doesn’t know anything. I don’t know anything.”
Louis mumbled something about a battalion of two hundred men with armored personal carriers and Howitzers coming from the east toward Wonju. He made stuff up and let it come, scraps of stuff he knew and stuff he just created in the moment. Anything.
The translator passed that on to Chop Chop, who responded. The translator then lowered his face to Louis’s and screamed: “No good. You lie.
“No, it’s the truth. I swear.”
The Russian grunted something, and the colonel tipped his head at the soldier. He raised Fuzzy’s face and jabbed the point of the knife into his left eye, and with a flourish he scooped out the bloody mass and dropped it in the helmet.
Louis felt his gorge rise in his throat. But he held, barely able to register Fuzzy’s whimpering and pathetic attempt to free his bound hands to stop the flow of blood and ocular fluid. He closed his eyes and screamed so hard for them to stop that he hoped his brain would short-circuit-that he’d just pass out. Maybe shock himself out of this horrible nightmare place and wake him up on the other side of the globe where he belonged.
But none of that happened.
He was still in the Red Tent, bound to his chair with the bloodied head of Fuzzy across from him, his ears and gory eyeball sitting in the helmet between Louis’s legs and the Russian muttering more shit to Chop Chop. Louis tried to mouth pleas of mercy but Chop Chop grunted something, and the knife man jabbed out Fuzzy’s other eye and dropped the bloody thing onto the pile.
Louis closed his eyes against the sight, against the groans rattling out of Fuzzy’s throat, against the sight of his poor ruined head.
But they wouldn’t let him. The soldier sliced off four of Fuzzy’s fingers, one by one, and deposited them in the helmet. Then the thumb. Then they began on the other hand.
When Fuzzy appeared to have passed out, Chop gave the final order. The soldier jabbed Louis on the chin with the point of the knife, and in a flash, as his eyes snapped open, the bastard forced back Fuzzy’s head and slashed his throat.
That was all Louis remembered of the Red Tent, because they unbound him and hustled him out to the pen with the other prisoners.
Later that evening, as the sun dropped over the mountains, they brought him and nine other men from first platoon to a low bridge over some river. A detail of soldiers pulled them out of the trucks and lined them up shoulder-to-shoulder against the low rail of the bridge, maybe twenty feet above the water. In the distance Louis could see dark, rolling hills. He focused on a star just above the hills—maybe Venus or Mars, it made no difference —and he thought of Marie Carbone on the other side of the world—his high school sweetheart, the girl he had planned to marry when he got back to the States—and how she had no idea that at this very moment as she was waking up in her parents’ home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, he was being lined up over some godforsaken river to be shot dead.
Louis heard the metal snap as the machine gunners locked the belt of fifty-caliber shells into the magazine.
He heard the whimpers of the men staggering in terror beside him, knowing that this was their death.
He heard the alien syllables of Colonel Chop Chop’s command to fire.
And with his last breath of air bulbed in his throat, Louis heard the moment explode with a ratcheting insistence that propelled him backward over the side and into the water.
By reflex, he held his breath and waited to pass into death.
But he did not pass into death. As he plunged deep into the chilled black water, he was stunned that he had not been hit. Amazingly, he was alive.
He continued holding his breath and let the current take him. Because his feet were loosely bound, he could make dolphin kicks. And when he could no longer hold his breath, he surfaced, took a gulp of air, and resubmerged, his back to the bridge where, if any soldiers saw him, they’d think he was just one of the corpses bobbing on the surface.
Three days later and half starved, Louis flagged an American spotter plane, and in hours a squad of GIs from Baker Company found him. For nearly two days he slept in the infirmary tent. And for the next fifty years he worked to get those Red Tent images out of his head.
But now they were back with brutal insistence.
47
JACK SHOOK HIMSELF AWAKE. ANOTHER BAD dream.
He could not remember what exactly it was about, and he was grateful—just vague images of misshapen creatures and screams and other nasty sounds he couldn’t identify.
Jack blinked around the room, taking in the shapes in the dim night-light as the dream dissipated.
Greendale. His room at Greendale Rehab.
The window with the broken Venetian blinds. The digital clock on the TV. 5:17. Muddy gray light seeped through the slats. Dawn light. He had been asleep since yesterday afternoon when the doctor was in with her test
