“It is time for your confession!” announced General Kim’s interrogator, a bowl of steaming rice on the bare table beside him as he stood menacingly, a thick bamboo stick tapping his leggings. General Freeman, face hollow, eyes down, blinking nervously, his ravenous gaze fixed on the rice, nodded obediently. All he could think of was the film he had seen of Orwell’s 1984 when, in the end, Winston Smith — he of the famous first name and common surname — the embodiment of all mens’ strengths and weaknesses — had bowed his head in obedience to his interrogator, conceding tearfully and irrevocably that two plus two were five.
“Remember,” the interrogator cautioned Freeman, “you must not try any jokings. You must only say what is printed on the screen.”
“I—” began Freeman, “I do not require a—” he had difficulty remembering what it was called “—cue card. I know it.”
“Tell me!” insisted the interrogator, the bowl of rice still steaming, holding Freeman captive with its promise.
“I wish,” began Freeman, “to apologize for my part in the criminal warmongering activity of the United States against the freedoM-1oving peoples of the Democratic Republic of North Korea and the freedoM-1oving peoples of the People’s Republic of China…” The confession went on to “acknowledge” various other perfidies against freedoM-1oving peoples all over the globe. But Freeman was so weak, he could barely proceed. Despite the vitamin shots giving him some color, the effects of malnutrition were evident in his speech. But he knew that before the camera went on, he would be given the rice if he agreed and the promise of a full meal of vegetables and fish, which was a promise, whatever the brutalities the NKA inflicted on their victims, they had never reneged on. He had smelled it after others had confessed — the smell a torture and incitement in itself. No one, Freeman knew, who had not been starved could possibly understand how quickly one’s resolve broke down. As they took him up from the tunnel cells, a guard on each side helping him, he thought of Winston Smith again and of Jeremiah Denton, the senator from Alabama who had been so badly tortured by the North Vietnamese.
In the glare of the lights, he looked like an animal out of its tunnel, blinking almost continuously.
General Kim, unsmiling, dressed in immaculately pressed NKA fatigues, his flat gold-striped and red-starred shoulder boards showing to maximum effect, waited patiently, smoking contentedly.
Kim cleared his throat and suddenly the bevy of technicians, producers, et cetera, fell silent, and in the surreal glare of the kleig lights, the smoke of his cigarette rising voluminously about him, filling the small studio, he spoke to the interrogator, though Freeman knew that Kim spoke quite fluent English from his days as the NKA’s chief negotiator at Panmunjom, where he was in the habit of informing the Americans that “you had better be careful or you will the like the Kennedys— shot like dogs in the street.” The interrogator turned to Freeman. “The general says to remind you that this is on videotape and that if you do not say exactly the words, then there will be great punishment. No food. More beatings.” The interrogator was snaking his finger at Freeman. “You understand?”
Freeman lifted his head and nodded.
The session began, and Freeman, the glare bothering him, asked that the lights be turned down. They refused. Still blinking like a frightened spaniel, he began, “I wish to apologize for my part in the criminal warmongering activity…” astonishing all present by getting the confession word-perfect on the first take, the interrogator pointing out to Kim how Freeman had been celebrated for his attention to detail.
When it was aired on American networks via a South American neutral country, the American public saw the general making his confession on all three networks and the public broadcasting system. So did army intelligence. They wound back the tape and went forward in freeze-frame. Freeman’s blinking was a carbon copy of what Jeremiah Denton had done in Hanoi. Well, almost a copy, as Army General Grey explained to the president. Denton had blinked “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse. Freeman had blinked “B-U-L–L-S-H-I-T.”
Freeman got the vegetables and fish hours before Beijing caught on. By then, the surrender of all Communist forces had been made, and within two weeks, Douglas Freeman was recuperating in the Walter Reid Army Hospital, regaling his wife and cat, whom she had illegally smuggled in, about those “stupid sons of bitches in Pyongyang.”