The staked Goat

but translating them from army jargon and abbreviations to real English. I went slowly through the first files, refreshing myself with designations and geography. Then, like the return of a foreign language, it came back to me in the clear, my brain automatically decoding the cryptic report texts.
    I riffled through the simpler, ordinary stuff of traffic accidents, drug overdoses, fights, and petty thefts that happened just before Al got to Saigon. I lingered over two reports.
    In the first, a quartermaster staff sergeant named Kevearson was killed shooting it out with MPs raiding a heroin refinery. He turned out to be the entrepreneur. The MP in charge was a Captain David L. Bonner. I remembered Al mentioning him once. I wrote down Kevearson, Ronald B., then Bonner’s name.
    In the second report, an MP sergeant named De-Long had siphoned seized heroin from an evidence locker, replacing it with flour. Al later testified at the court-martial, but I couldn’t recall why. DeLong, Alvin B.
    I reached the point chronologically when Al and J.T. had hit Saigon. There were dozens of major crimes in the files for the eight weeks before I arrived. Several had Al’s name on them.
    One was the shooting of a pace trooper named Brewer by a bar girl. He apparently wanted things a bit kinkier than she tolerated. The report suggested he had lived. Brewer, Delvin J. I remembered his name for some reason, so I wrote it down.
    J.T. and Al both covered a second lieutenant in the infantry who went AWOL. Brought him in from the boonies, living with a Vietnamese woman outside a formerly French plantation. How the hell he had avoided being killed by Charlie in the three nights out there was beyond me. There was a photo in the file of the lieutenant. He looked miserable. Court-martialed, imprisoned back in the States. Named Raiser, Lionel P. Write it down. A guy who would risk living in the bush was capable of anything.
    A staff sergeant named Crowley, Matthew M., got his head blown off by a Eurasian drug merchant named Ren6 Bouvier. There was a photo in the file of a short, black-haired sergeant with two or three other staff-looking noncoms around him. Everyone was smiling, and the flip side of the photo said the short guy was Crowley. The Eurasian was never found. Al and a technician CID named Clay Belker investigated the killing, Belker signing on the body’s fingerprints. Belker I remembered, a gangly, surly white guy from Alabama. Al always thought that Belker was O.K., God knows why.
    I reached November 1967, when I arrived in Saigon. The next file involved Al directly.
    An MP was knifed and died when he stumbled on two GIs buying heroin from a Vietnamese. On his way down, the MP winged one GI named Curtis D. Chandler, who was caught six blocks away, bleeding freely. Al interrogated Chandler, who refused to give the name of his partner. I wrote down the full name of Chandler and the word ”partner?” There was no further mention of partner except that ”further interrogation proved unsuccessful.” Involuntarily, a picture of a different kind of interrogation came to mind and decided to stay awhile.
     
    The hallway was in the damp basement of the South Vietnamese National Police substation three blocks from our headquarters. To the basement were brought confirmed or suspected VC (Viet Cong). The hall was dim, one 25-watt bulb on a wire about halfway down the corridor. The place stank more from disinfectant than puke, urine, or feces, but not by much. The atmosphere of successful interrogation, National Police style. Rumored but not seen. Well, not often seen.
    Sometimes they did it with switches of split bamboo, swacking the stick against a prisoner’s bare feet or palms until the screaming gave way to the shortlived relief of unconsciousness. A little slapping about the face, and the questioning proceeded. A slow mode and strenuous.
    A second method was cigarettes. No, not as bribes. Lit ones. Applied to earlobes, lips, eyelids. Like the killer had done with Al. Some noise and smell, agony extreme but intermittent. Effective and less strenuous, but still time-consuming.
    For quickest results, a crank telephone box and a couple of wires were employed. The interrogator’s aide would crank the box, the current thus produced transmitted by the wires connected to the prisoner’s genitalia, male or female. The aide’s muscle tone and endurance weren’t much limitation on the pace and the duration of the questioning here.
    I was