The Kid Was a Killer by Caryl Chessman

Author:Caryl Chessman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: マイコンテンツ
Published: 2011-01-27T05:03:20.853000+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The shooting battle ended—later. And following a great deal of high-and medium-level wrangling Korea was divided at a conference table.

Emaciated from his months of captivity and deloused, the kid was among the third group of POWs to be exchanged. He resembled more nearly a fumigated skeleton with parchment-like skin stretched across its bones than he did a living human being. When the photographers from the news services asked him to pose for pictures, he invited them politely to go to hell.

“You're a hero, soldier,” one of them said good-naturedly. “A returning hero. So give us a big smile.”

“You dumb bastards,” the kid said without malice. “Don't you know that the heroes are all dead?”

Hospitalized for a few weeks in Japan, fed thick steaks and pumped full of vitamins, he lost that fugitive-from-a-boneyard look. Dentists had him “open wide,” peered, poked, and drilled. Then came the sessions with the boys from Army Intelligence, the sharpies with more questions than a TV quizmaster. Had he been mistreated, or had he seen anyone mistreated, by the enemy? Where? When? How?

To these questions, the kid had a stock reply. “If they gave me a bad time,” he said, “maybe I asked for it. I got no beef.”

“But can't you see?” he was told. “It's important that we know.”

The kid couldn't see that. He personally wasn't convinced it was important—or, for that matter, that it made the least damned bit of difference—that his interrogators know what had happened to him as a POW. Besides, his peculiar code wouldn't let him complain of the brutal treatment accorded him by his captors.

“I'm ready to forget it,” he replied. And if they pushed him, gently of course, he would say, “I don't remember,” and his flashing eyes would dare them to call him a liar.

Well, then, they would say, trying another tack, what information could he supply on that lanky sergeant with the southern drawl who had chosen to remain behind? Or on the young corporal in his outfit who had informed on his fellow POWs? Or on that looie from the West Coast who had confessed that the United States was waging germ warfare?

Or—on the brainwashed, the weak, the toadies, the fools, the cowards, the confused?

“What can I tell you about those guys? Nothing. You signed me up to fight, not fink.”

“Yes, of course. We sympathize with your feelings. Yet we want to see justice done.”

“Justice? What the hell is justice? I'll tell you. It's just a word that means anything you say it does.”

“You have a duty to tell us, a duty both as a soldier and a citizen.”

“That's a laugh. And if I don't tell you, assuming I know something, then I suppose you'll toss me into the army pen at Fort Leavenworth. I'll probably get twenty years for not turning stool pigeon.”

“You realize, of course, that you're making it most difficult for us.”

“Unh-unh. You're making it difficult for yourselves.”

That ended the interrogation. “Uncooperative and uncommunicative,” his file read. That same file also contained accounts by field officers of the kid's insatiable hunger for battle, his suicidal fearlessness.

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