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e INTERROGATION STONEFACE GAVE A HINT THAT SOMETHING UNUSUAL WAS about to happen when he came in about an hour after sunrise on September 21st and made the gestures for me to shave and look smart. He led me into the room where I had been interviewed by the reporters from the Voice of Vietnam Radio. Owl and Chihuahua flanked a man older by ten years, dressed in a starched off-white shirt, khaki trousers and gleaming brown polished boots. Above his expansive forehead was a neatly-coiffed wave. All three sat on raised chairs so that they peered down on my lowly stool. "How are you?" asked the newcomer, with a gracious smile that showed off his perfectly white, straight teeth. Though he talked to me, he looked beyond as if addressing the door behind. "I want you to understand," he said in impeccable English, "that we have come to interrogate you. You were captured attacking our territory and we have come to find out all you know." "Oh God!" I thought, chilled with foreboding. "You have good food now. Your conditions are better. But they could get much worse. Do you understand? We could go back to the food that was not as good." I shifted anxiously,fearful of the threat. Only forty-eight hours had passed since the first good meal. "Do you like sports? Football?" he asked, throwing me off guard. "Sure." "Tell me about football. We call it soccer." "No, no. Our football is something else." "How do you play football? What is it?" I gave a brief explanation as he nodded and smiled while Owl took notes. He said he wassports-minded, with a particular likingfor track events. This is what he would follow closely in the Olympic Games, scheduled to open 91 92 CHAINED EAGLE at Tokyo in three weeks. While he talked I tried frantically to come up with a game plan to handle the questions. Nothing in survival traininghad taught me how to react to a quiz in these circumstances. There was obviously no formal state of war between our countries. Was I supposed to clam up completely—even on discussionsabout sports? How would I handle questions about my family and personal background, and even about my ship and my plane when they already knew so much from published reports in the American media? If I refused to answer anything, they might try other means of forcing me to talk. Perhaps drugs or torture. Then I might be compelled to say things that I didn't want to, and maybe I could have misled them if I'd spoken out in the first place. I paced anxiously in my back courtyard when we broke for lunch. And I prayed before my altar, imploring divine help in seeing me through this quandary. Suddenly the sound of voices filtered out of the back window of the quiz room facing the courtyard near the corner latrine. Slowlyand quietly I stood on the topmost step at the entrance to the latrine and hoisted myself up the drainpipe. A partition stood between the window and the table where we'd faced each other. I cocked my ear and heard the three of them repeating the word football over and over. In an instant it clicked. The interrogator wanted me to loosen up and talk about anything, the more innocuous the better, so that he could get a good reading of my natural demeanor in normal conversation. This would make it easier for him to spot shifts in my tone and attitude under pressure, when I would most likely be lying. I had little time to devise a strategy. One thing I knew for sure: it would be foolish to act humble and subservient. Once before I'd tried that with a turnkey and it had the opposite effect; he'd popped his chest out and pushed me around more than usual, enjoying his dominance and watching me jump to his orders. Likewise, I knew that it paid dividends to act with reasonable civility. Every time I'd blown my stack with a guard I'd been cut down to size with a lecture: "You must keep good attitude!" I figured my best hope was to play it by ear. I would lie and invent where I thought I could get away with it. But I'd also plead ignorance and play the naive junior officer, green, inexperienced and too far down on the pecking order to...

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