Interrogator's Notebook - Novel Opening
Many Gods were created. Many more questions were asked. Scientists queried time, matter and space. Explorers probed worldly limits. Philosophers wondered if humanity existed. Only interrogators mapped each man, unearthing the savage beauty within us, each truth a work of art.
In the beginning, I was not much of an interrogator. I was still uncomfortable in my man suit and did not yet appreciate the skill involved in harvesting secrets. I was the youngest in my training platoon, still seventeen, the desert landscape of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, as alien as the moon after growing up in a gold mining family in Alaska.
Our first training assignment was navigation.
We were told that interrogators needed to be more certain of terrain than an army scout. After you convinced your nervous subject to open up, you needed to chart their course backwards over time and space to find their comrades, tanks, supply lines, commanders.
We trained to be expert navigators in the field. I remember racing with other trainees to find checkpoints in the heat and dust, armed with a compass, canteen and plastic-coated maps. I always made sure to finish near the top of each race, willing myself to distinguish dirt roads from dry riverbeds, choosing teammates who could add some advantage to the race.
This exercise taught us how to read a map at a glance, sideways, upside down, in the dark. That way, when we culled the location of enemy units and compelled our prisoners to jab at the map with dirty fingers, we knew where to send in a strike team. After a few weeks of navigation, the swirls on the map representing a hilltop were as unique as smudged fingerprints. A ridge could be a shivering spine. A valley was as distinctly endearing as a scar between the nose and cheekbone. In this way, we learned the value of mapping the body.
At the same time, my own body was changing under the strains of adulthood and a military regimen. I was voracious and could not get enough food in the mess hall, and was too keyed up to sleep. We poured into the barracks each night like fish spawning over falls. I slept with every female interrogator in my class I could, beginning with a brunette who climbed on top of me to lose her virginity and ending with a lonely redhead who stole my phone card to call her boyfriend late at night. I was learning to control the world at a frightening, and accelerating clip. I had a natural intuition about people, and a chip on my shoulder to prove my father wrong.
My time in the army was filled with war exercises, hobnobbing with commanding officers and debriefing Russian defectors. I became a Warrant Officer at the end of my second term, and decided to return to Fort Huachuca as my last tour stop before joining the CIA. I was cocky, of course, my powers of observation sharpened to bayonet sharpness.
I could immediately tell which of my trainees were worth a damn just by handing out maps, compasses and canteens. The best interrogators would size up their competition as much as the environment. They were loners, even in a squad of smart alecks. By my second class, I moved all navigation to nighttime exercises to raise the stakes and more easily separate those who were lost from those in control.
On one exercise, I caught a pair of my students screwing around…literally. The yelps of the woman betrayed them as her partner in crime thrust into her up against a tree. They saw me step into their clearing as they finished up, and I was left with a conundrum. To inform the military or let it go?
In the end, I left it up to fate. I told my training platoon that someone had broken the code of military conduct that evening, and that the class needed to interrogate each other until the secret was revealed. It took two weeks and a few hints on my part, but the man finally broke down and confessed. The young soldier got transferred to an infantry platoon, and my commander commended me on my usage of them for training purposes. The woman went AWOL and I never heard what happened to her. Perhaps she was caught when she came out of hiding to attend college, to be married, to have a credit card, or else she stayed off the grid forever, a ghost.
I never questioned my decision until I had sons of my own, and thought about how a youthful mistake could change the course of a life, or several lives. Truth was, I had been arrogant, a victim of my cleverness. This woman would not be the last person whose life I ruined as an interrogator.
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