by: Marty Chrisman

 It was almost two days before they finally stopped walking through the jungle and reached the Viet Cong’s hidden camp. Luke and the other prisoners were totally exhausted and seriously dehydrated. Their hoods were ripped off and their hands and feet were cut loose. Luke blinked and blinked against the sudden glare of the sun. He glanced around and realized that Henry and two other men from his unit besides himself had been taken prisoner. One of their captors waved a gun at that and said in broken English “You strip now….”

With trembling fingers, Luke started taking off his uniform and his boots. When the four prisoners were standing naked in front of them, one of the men jerked off each set of dog tags from around their necks. Another man threw each of them a pair of ragged pants with a drawstring waist and a loose fitting shirt with long sleeves. “You dress…” he ordered, keeping his gun trained on them as they did as they were told. Luke pulled on the dirty ragged clothes, his heart still pounding fiercely in his chest. When they had finished redressing, they were ordered to walk across the compound to a run down building not much bigger than Luke’s bedroom at home. One of their captors unlocked the door and they were all four shoved inside with the door securely locked behind them.

The shed was crowded with other prisoners. Even though there was no light in the shed, there was enough sunlight creeping in through the cracks in the walls to be able to see clearly. Most of the other prisoners didn’t even look human anymore. Their bodies were wasting away from a lack of food and their eyes were empty and dead. Most of them were covered with sores or open seeping wounds. Some injured men were holding amputated body parts against their bodies, trying to will away the pain. The air was heavy with moans and the sound of grown men crying.

Luke crawled over to a corner and sat down, pulling his knees up to his chest and burying his face on top of his crossed arms. He had never been more terrified in his life. The smell in the shed was terrible, a combination of blood, sweat, vomit, rotten flesh, dirty bodies, urine and feces. The odor made Luke gag and he started to retch, his body convulsing with dry heaves since he had nothing in his stomach to throw up.

He jumped when he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. Turning his head between his attempts to bring up something in his stomach that wasn’t there, he saw Henry kneeling beside him. Henry gently rubbed a soothing circle on Luke’s back as he continued to retch violently. Finally the retching stopped enough for Luke to lean back against the wall, weak and exhausted.

“It’s gonna be okay, Lucas.” Henry whispered softly “We’re gonna make it through this as long as we stick together.”

“I hope so…” Luke whispered back trying to keep the fear from showing in his voice.

“It’s okay to be scared, Luke.” Henry said as if he had read Luke’s mind. “I’m scared too. I’ve never been so damned scared in my life.”

“Neither have I.” Luke admitted. He groaned as he bent forward and started retching again. Henry stayed by his side as he went though another bout of dry heaves that left him trembling violently by the time it was over.

“Don’t worry…you’ll get used to the smell soon enough” someone called to Luke from across the room.  “And then it’ll never go away.”

Another man dressed in rags even filthier than theirs crept forward and handed Henry a small wooden cup. It was half full of foul smelling lukewarm water. “That’s all they give us to drink.” The man told Henry as he crept away. Desperately thirty, Henry forced down half the water and then handed the rest to Luke. Luke gagged at the foul taste of the water but drank it anyway, desperate for something to soothe his parched mouth and throat. His stomach churned uneasily but he forced himself to keep the water down at least for now.

As night fell and the sunlight no longer crept through the cracks in the walls, it became impossible see beyond the blackness that settled around them in the shack. But noise didn’t stop, the moans, the crying, the sound of men getting sick somewhere in the darkness. Luke continued to retch off and on all through the night and Henry stayed close by his side. Neither of them got any sleep that first night.

Early the next morning, the door to the shed was opened and a guard held his gun on the prisoners as they crowded around the door. Henry soon realized that food was being passed out so he went to get some for himself and Luke. After a long wait, he returned with two small wooden bowls filled with water and a little rice. One of the other men in line had told Henry that was all they would get until the next morning. It was barely enough to keep a man alive but it was all they had. A big tub of water had been set inside the shed at the same time and that would be their rationed water for the day. They would use their food bowls as their drinking cup as well.

Henry handed one of the bowls to Luke who accepted it even though the sight and smell of the food made him start gagging again. But somehow he forced it down knowing that he had to keep his strength up if he hoped to survive this hell hole. When he had finished eating, Luke leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. In his mind, he went home. He went back to Hazzard. It was something he had learned to do early on as a way of relaxing and keeping his sanity in this crazy place called Viet Nam. At least for awhile in his mind he could leave this place and go back to the one place he felt safe and secure.

That first day in that shed, two men died and their bodies were left lying on the ground in a corner of the shed where some of the other men dragged them. One of the other men told Luke and Henry that the guards came in every so often and collected the bodies of the dead to be buried in a common grave. That is the bodies that hadn’t already been eaten by the animals that crept into the shed at night to feed on the dead and sometimes on the living too. Mainly rats, some of them the size of a small house cat. Luke and Henry had both felt them crawling over them in the darkness the night before.

The second day they were there, Max, one of the other men from their squad who had been captured along with them came down with a raging fever and by the next evening he was dead. His body was added to the growing pile in the corner. Luke was terrified that he was going to die here in this place and that his family would never know what had happened to him.

Some of the other men in this place with them had obviously gone insane, their minds and souls destroyed. Luke sometimes wondered if he would end up like one them. Maybe they were the lucky ones. They didn’t seem to know or care where they were. It was a better alternative than facing the reality of the situation. Luke could already feel his spirit starting to die inside of him as his body started to weaken from the lack of food and the dysentery that Luke caught from the only food they were given to eat. Most of the men got it within a few days of being captured. It was accompanied by severe abdominal cramps and a fever which only added to their general discomfort.