Apache l'écouilleuse de G.I

Apache enjoyed torturing prisoners within earshot of U.S. bases.. Across the quarter-mile of rice fields that separated the tree line from the hill, the tormented Marine who had been taken prisoner that afternoon hung naked on a rack made of bamboo. He wore only his boots and the green wool socks that had his name stamped in black ink across the tops. Blood streamed down his cheeks, mixed with tears. The boy, just out of his teens, tried to blink, but the effort only obscured his vision with blood that flooded from where his eyelids had been cut away. He cried and prayed aloud, reacting to the pain each time he strained to blink. The Viet Cong woman had pried off each of his fingernails and was now in the process of bending his fingers backward, snapping them at their middle joints. She had finished with the left and right little fingers and was working her way toward the index fingers, one at a time. Breaking a finger every twenty minutes, she followed a well-planned timetable of torture that covered her prisoner's entire body and would carry the session through the night. At a few minutes before midnight, she had eight fingers to go. The woman and four men from her platoon sat at the Marine's feet, speaking softly in Vietnamese and laughing. The remainder of her platoon lay quietly surrounding her in a maze of sniper hides, ready to ambush anyone who might try to come to rescue the prisoner.

The woman chewed betel nut, spitting the juice between her feet as she squatted with her arms resting across the tops of her knees. She looked at the youthful Marine. "You cherry boy? I think maybe no. You get plenty $%!@ back stateside, yeah. You get Vietnamese $%!@ too? I think you do. You go China Beach swimming, $%!@ plenty. "You like get cherry $%!@? Plenty American GI like cherry $%!@. Rape many young girl-take cherry $%!@. True! I know true." She shouted in Vietnamese at the men squatted by her, and they glared at the Marine. The woman walked to where the boy hung limp on the bamboo rack and spit a mouthful of betel nut into his eyes. "You goddamn-$%!@ing GI!" she said... As the fog thickened just before dawn, the Viet Cong woman torturer completed her work on her prisoner. "Goddamn-$%!@ing GI. You no $%!@ no more," she said, as she approached him with a long, curved knife in her hand. Taking his genitals in her left hand, she jammed the blade's point beneath the base of his $%!@, grazing his pubic bone. She pulled the knife with a sweeping, circular cut that released both testicles and his $%!@ in one large handful of flesh that gushed with blood. Blood surged from the gaping cavity left between his legs. She knew that this man could not last long, and, quickly cutting away the cords that bound him to the bamboo rack, she said, shaking with laughter, "Run, GI. Maybe you live-you find doctor in time! Run to wire. We watch Marines shoot you $%!@ing $%!@." The Marine ran, shouting unintelligibly, as blood gushed so rapidly from his body that it left jellylike pools on the compost of decaying leaves that covered the forest floor. And when he emerged from the trees on the far side of a rice field that lay below the observation post where Land and Wilson watched, he began waving his arms, screaming incoherently and sobbing. "The poor bastard's trying to tell us not to shoot," Land said. "Look at him, Gunny. That bitch has emasculated him."