76 AMERICAN SPYAngry beatings and more cries of pain.
I fought to suppress a smile. On the one hand, Jack’s unbending resis-
tance to these goons was admirable. On the other, he was making it unnec-
essarily hard on himself. My approach was to give up minimal, insignificant
data, live my plausible cover story without variation from one interrogation
to the next, and generally try and stay off their radar. But, to each his own.
“What’s your mission?” my cigar-chomping interrogator angrily
demanded, banging his fist on the table to get my attention.
Before I could answer with my meticulously memorized cover story,
two heavily armed men burst into the interrogation room and shot my
Cuban interrogator and the inbred guard dead. The attack was lightning
fast, deafening, and lethal. The killers were Americans. I could hear other
American special operators moving down the corridor, clearing each cell in
a similar fashion. It was loud and chaotic. And glorious. For some reason I
noticed the cup of rice and water was still sitting, undisturbed, on the table.
It took a second for me to fully realize what was happening: a small
band of American Special Forces had overrun the POW camp, killing our
enemy captors and liberating all of the American prisoners.
After the dust had settled, the US troops herded the dazed, newly freed
prisoners outside. They lined us up for a head count—we were filthy, smelly,
exhausted, and still in our Vietcong-style pajamas. The sun hurt my eyes, which
had not been exposed to daylight in God knows how long. The American sol-
diers stood in formation facing us and ran an American flag up the flagpole,
replacing the enemy flag. They played “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the
camp loudspeaker. Together we recited the pledge of allegiance. Tears streamed
down the faces of most of the freed prisoners. I was grateful the ordeal was over.
Meanwhile, the vile guards stood off to one side and quietly observed
the ceremony. They weren’t actually dead. We weren’t in the jungles of
Latin America. We were in the humid, tick-infested woods on a secret CIA
base somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard. This was all part of our sur-
vival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) training.
Deep down we knew it was training, but it didn’t feel like it. It was
real. We hated those bastard guards, and many of us could not bring our-
selves to shake their hands when the ceremony concluded. The guards
were actually fellow CIA and former military colleagues whom we’d never
seen before SERE, and they took their abusive, sadistic roles seriously.