My Detachment by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder [Kidder, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-458-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

ROSENTHAL WAS ALREADY FAIRLY SHORT WHEN I’D ARRIVED. AFTER HE LEFT, I realized his importance to me, how useful he had been in keeping our little role in the war on a comfortable, theoretical plane. I missed him. Looking for new company, I’d sometimes wander over to chat with the lieutenant in charge of the POW cage. He’d been to college. There was a diffidence about him that I liked. I sensed he didn’t think too highly of this war either and was just trying to get through it to his DEROS. One time, I arrived and found my friend chatting with an Englishman, a jovial, tall, broad-shouldered man with a reddish handlebar mustache, dressed in the uniform of an American Army sergeant. He was a LRRP (pronounced “lurp”), a long-range reconnaissance patrolman. I’d heard of these soldiers, of how they’d parachute alone and in pairs into the forest and sneak around trying to locate large enemy units, like the 3d NVA Regiment. It was perilous work. More than once at the colonel’s briefings I heard of LRRPS being maimed or killed. Noting the man’s accent, I asked him if he was an English citizen. He said he was. But what was he doing in Vietnam in the U.S. Army? I asked. He smiled. “It’s the only war going, isn’t it, mate?” The LRRPs had been mythical soldiers to me, and they still were after that brief encounter, like so much else about the war around me.

The lieutenant in charge of the POW cage seemed to have a better observation post on the real action than I did. He told me, for instance, that some Americans in dark glasses and civilian clothes had shown up here and asked him with voices a little too eager, “Got any prisoners for us?” They were looking for someone to torture. He knew it right away. He told this with disgust, and then one day I wandered over there and found in the room a small Vietnamese man—a new prisoner, suspected VC, my friend explained. I’d been playing in my mind the kind of speculative game I used to play with Rosenthal. I imagined myself enlarging on the little intelligence we knew and wondered aloud to the lieutenant if this prisoner might know something about the 3d NVA Regiment. My friend beckoned the prisoner over. He asked the man something in Vietnamese. Hearing the answer, not liking the answer evidently, he leaned forward in his chair and yanked the prisoner toward him. He pinned the man between his legs and lashed him across the cheeks with a shoelace three or four times. The lieutenant pursed his lips as he whipped the shoelace back and forth. Then he stopped, satisfied, like a person folding a letter. He let the prisoner go and said, “He doesn’t know anything.”

We chatted afterward, as if nothing had happened. I went back to my detachment feeling sick. Was there something that could have been done to stop that little cruelty, and was the problem that I couldn’t do it? Forget it, I told myself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.