The Prisoner

By David Beakey

It was the picture of the Playmate of the Year that confused them. They found it inside his leather wallet, carefully folded. The marines were going through the prisoner’s belongings, most of which were predictable; food, ammunition, field dressings and such. But then there was the picture, cut out from a French magazine and tucked away. It befuddled the captors. Why would a Viet Cong carry such a thing? They discussed it. They argued about it. Some of them had trouble putting the two things together, The Playmate and their enemy, a Viet Cong. It was much easier to envision him as a beast, a gook, or as a larger than life, evil thing, a King Kong, for example. But this discovery, the picture, was disturbing. Some of the men thought of home, “the world”, where events were occurring at a rapid pace, perhaps passing them by. They had heard rumors of hippies marching on Washington, “Be Ins” and “Love Ins”. It made their heads hurt, and they felt out of touch. They tried to stay current, stay hip. They listened to Hendrix and the Beatles when possible, on small transistor radios, pressed against their ears as they hunkered in their foxholes. But they knew that they were getting a sanitized version, via the Armed Forces Radio. Now they wondered, as they rummaged through the bare belongings of one of their enemy, “Can this guy, who lives in tunnels and eats nothing but rice, be more tuned in than us?” They passed the picture around, handling it as if it were part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then they gazed at their prisoner. He squatted impassively, behind the barbed wire. He was small and young. He wore nothing but black shorts. His eyes burned with passion, but he did not meet their gaze. He looked beyond them. He looked past them. He no longer bothered with war. His thoughts were now solely of the woman, the woman in the picture, the woman with frosted hair and perfect skin.