Read Online MATT HELM: The War Years by Keith Wease - Free Book Online
Authors: Keith Wease
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his class was a different experience. He looked quite ordinary. They usually do. Very few of them have werewolf fangs and pointed, tufted ears. He was dressed in a faded, flowery sports shirt, frayed jeans, and tennis shoes. But I didn't like his eyes. Well, hell, maybe he didn't like mine. We all have our little specialties. I was in no position to criticize, even though I was just a little uncomfortable - it's one thing to kill a man; it's quite another to torture him. Frank had just explained the concept of the I-Team - "I" being short for interrogation, of course - that was being formed in London to handle certain prisoners who had vital information we needed. My conscience - what was left of it - told me that if I had to get information by such means the least I could do was to get my own hands bloody. Using an I-team would make me like the kind of hypocritical creep who loves steak but wouldn't dream of going out and murdering a poor little steer - or deer - himself. Or herself.
Apparently with that same thought in mind, Frank was explaining the basic principle behind interrogation techniques. "Dignity," he said. "Remember that dignity is the key to any man's resistance, or any woman's. As long as your subject is allowed to feel that he's still a human being with rights and privileges and self-respect, he can usually hold out indefinitely. Take, for instance, a soldier in a clean uniform, lead him politely to a desk, seat him decorously on a chair, request him to place his hands before him, stick splinters under his fingernails, and set fire to them … and you'll be surprised how often he'll watch his fingertips cooking and laugh in your face. But if you take the same man, first, and work him over to show that you don't mind bruising your knuckles and don't have a bit of respect for his integrity as a man - you don't have to hurt him much, just mess him up until he can no longer cling to a romanticized picture of himself as a noble and handsome embodiment of stubborn courage."
Like I said, I wondered where Frank got his training. Or Mac himself. We had lots of fun discussing Mac. One school of thought had it that although he was great at picking, and setting up training programs for, dangerous men, Mac himself couldn't fight his way out of a lightweight airmail envelope. I didn't buy it. Nobody got that look sitting behind a desk, and I've often thought about his possible background. He wasn't really old enough to have gotten that much experience in the first war - what up to now had always been called The Great War. I had in mind a certain little-known arm of British intelligence, not that Mac was even remotely British, but they were known to hire Americans upon occasion. Or perhaps he'd been one of those soldiers-of-fortune so popular in the movies. Hell, he could have been an enforcer for Al Capone or one of the New York Families, recruited out of prison just for this purpose, but that didn't wash. I'm not sure why, but I had the impression that this idea was his own little baby from start to finish and he'd had to work like hell to sell the idea to someone.
Mac kind of appeared and disappeared at random. I assumed he had other duties involving the first group to graduate from the Ranch. When he was in residence, so to speak, he taught an occasional class himself. One of the more interesting ones had to do with escape. He covered a lot of ground on basic techniques, but the part that stuck in my mind, and saved my life a time or two, was his lecture on escape theory.
He didn't pull any punches or dress it up in fancy language. And, to me at least, it sounded like he was speaking from experience, not just theory. "In the movies," he explained, "you see the heroes - and heroines - carefully plotting their escape, planning a way to break out, overpower their captors, tie them up nice and neat, and summon help, preferably with a
Apparently with that same thought in mind, Frank was explaining the basic principle behind interrogation techniques. "Dignity," he said. "Remember that dignity is the key to any man's resistance, or any woman's. As long as your subject is allowed to feel that he's still a human being with rights and privileges and self-respect, he can usually hold out indefinitely. Take, for instance, a soldier in a clean uniform, lead him politely to a desk, seat him decorously on a chair, request him to place his hands before him, stick splinters under his fingernails, and set fire to them … and you'll be surprised how often he'll watch his fingertips cooking and laugh in your face. But if you take the same man, first, and work him over to show that you don't mind bruising your knuckles and don't have a bit of respect for his integrity as a man - you don't have to hurt him much, just mess him up until he can no longer cling to a romanticized picture of himself as a noble and handsome embodiment of stubborn courage."
Like I said, I wondered where Frank got his training. Or Mac himself. We had lots of fun discussing Mac. One school of thought had it that although he was great at picking, and setting up training programs for, dangerous men, Mac himself couldn't fight his way out of a lightweight airmail envelope. I didn't buy it. Nobody got that look sitting behind a desk, and I've often thought about his possible background. He wasn't really old enough to have gotten that much experience in the first war - what up to now had always been called The Great War. I had in mind a certain little-known arm of British intelligence, not that Mac was even remotely British, but they were known to hire Americans upon occasion. Or perhaps he'd been one of those soldiers-of-fortune so popular in the movies. Hell, he could have been an enforcer for Al Capone or one of the New York Families, recruited out of prison just for this purpose, but that didn't wash. I'm not sure why, but I had the impression that this idea was his own little baby from start to finish and he'd had to work like hell to sell the idea to someone.
Mac kind of appeared and disappeared at random. I assumed he had other duties involving the first group to graduate from the Ranch. When he was in residence, so to speak, he taught an occasional class himself. One of the more interesting ones had to do with escape. He covered a lot of ground on basic techniques, but the part that stuck in my mind, and saved my life a time or two, was his lecture on escape theory.
He didn't pull any punches or dress it up in fancy language. And, to me at least, it sounded like he was speaking from experience, not just theory. "In the movies," he explained, "you see the heroes - and heroines - carefully plotting their escape, planning a way to break out, overpower their captors, tie them up nice and neat, and summon help, preferably with a
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