Special Branch

Special Branch is the security and intelligence-police organization through which the narrator works in Saigon and receives training in interrogation. It monitors political and clandestine activity, including the National Liberation Front’s underground networks in Cholon, and operates within a system where intelligence gathering, suspicion, and coercion repeatedly blur into one another. Its significance lies not only in what it investigates but in what its methods reveal: the institution’s claim to disciplined expertise sits uneasily beside violence, prejudice, and the narrator’s own compromised participation.

Intelligence Work and Institutional Setting

In Saigon, The crapulent major’s function in Special Branch was to analyze Chinese-language communications and track the clandestine political organizing, terrorist activity, and black-market smuggling associated with the National Liberation Front’s network in Cholon. This detail gives the organization a practical intelligence role, rather than presenting it solely as a place of interrogation. It also links surveillance of communications to the wider effort to understand underground political activity.

The narrator belongs to the branch’s secret-police workforce and studies under Claude, an American adviser. Claude lectures at the National Interrogation Center to twenty police officers, including the narrator, who have already served in the army or police. The classroom’s hierarchy is clear: Claude speaks with the authority of an expert, while the Vietnamese officers take notes and expect state-of-the-art instruction from their American adviser. The branch’s methods are therefore shaped not only by local policing but by the imported expertise Claude represents.

Claude’s Theory and the Practice of Interrogation

Claude teaches that interrogation should seek information and cooperation, not punish a prisoner. He warns that brute force can produce lies, misdirection, or answers the prisoner believes the interrogator wants. The equipment displayed in his classroom includes a billy club, a plastic gasoline container repurposed for soapy water, pliers, and a hand-cranked electrical generator for a field telephone. Claude dismisses these implements as ineffective and presents interrogation as a science centered on the mind before the body.

The principles he advocates include disorientation, sensory deprivation, and self-punishment. At the National Interrogation Center, the narrator’s first assignment under Claude involves observing a prisoner in a room designed to test how conditions might make him yield. The room is painted entirely white: bed frame, desk, chair, bucket, dishes, soap, and the prisoner’s clothing. Air conditioning holds the temperature at eighteen degrees Celsius; overhead fluorescent lights never go out, and white speakers stand ready to play music selected to distress the prisoner. When Claude asks what the prisoner might find unbearable, the narrator suggests country music. The room’s controlled whiteness and relentless light turn the theory of psychological pressure into a physical environment, while the narrator’s answer makes him a participant in designing that pressure.

The distinction between Claude’s theory and the branch’s actual conduct is not stable. The narrator recalls that interrogations by his colleagues could involve brute force and that Claude himself acknowledged their duration might reflect thoroughness, lack of imagination, or sadism. In another account involving The crapulent major, a tax collector is beaten over a week in an interrogation center before the men are convinced he is not an operative. The evidence that settles the matter is a substantial bribe delivered by the man’s wife. The episode joins mistaken suspicion to physical abuse and corruption: the interrogation does not establish guilt, and the bribe exposes the officer’s own compromised conduct.

Suspicion, Informants, and Institutional Judgment

The branch’s intelligence culture also appears in the narrator’s exchange with The General about the possibility of a spy among their own men. Under direct scrutiny, the narrator fears that denying the existence of a suspect will itself look suspicious. To redirect attention, he names The crapulent major, whom he does not believe to be an informer. The suggestion distracts The General, but it also gives an unsupported suspicion a path into the organization’s decisions.

Later, The General identifies The crapulent major as the suspected informer. His stated grounds include the major’s Chinese background, his family’s apparent prosperity in Saigon, and The General’s dislike of fat men. Claude questions why the major would be a spy, but The General treats family circumstances as suspicious and denies being racist even as he relies on the major’s ethnicity as evidence. The narrator recognizes that the accusation has been strengthened by his own earlier diversion. The sequence shows how an intelligence inquiry can become a test of allegiance in which weak evidence and prejudice acquire force through repetition.

The organization’s capacity to distinguish reliable information from suspicion is further unsettled by its treatment of the tax collector. Beatings continue until a bribe changes the investigators’ conclusion, while the officer implicated in the episode hands the narrator a share of the money. The narrator refuses the temptation to keep it and gives it to Man for the revolution. Yet that act does not undo the interrogation or establish that the institution has corrected its practices; it instead exposes the distance between its claims of vigilance and the conduct of those exercising its authority.

The Communist Agent and the Limits of Accountability

The narrator’s most consequential memory of Special Branch concerns the interrogation of The Communist Agent, a courier for Man. She is caught with a list of policemen’s names concealed in papier-mâché in her mouth; the narrator’s own name is on it, though she does not know his true identity. He has passed the list to Man, making him both implicated in the intelligence struggle and concealed from the courier whose interrogation he witnesses.

The interrogation takes place in a room called the movie theater when foreigners visit. With the room’s blackout curtains closed, Claude watches from beside a projector while The crapulent major, formally in charge, sits aside after leaving the three policemen to carry out the interrogation. The narrator objects that the treatment is wrong and asks for time alone with her, but he does not stop what follows. The policemen sexually assault her. When asked her name, she gives it as Viet Nam; they laugh, and the middle-aged officer attacks her. The narrator watches as the violence continues, unable to make his protest effective. The scene makes the institutional chain of responsibility visible without resolving it: the major is in charge but has delegated the act, Claude is present as adviser, and the narrator sees and objects but remains a witness rather than an intervening force.

Afterward, the officers use a soda bottle to further abuse her. The narrator remembers that the room and table were washed down, and that she was left silent on the table. The crapulent major later claims to have ordered the cleanup. These details make the scene persist not as an abstract report of interrogation but as a memory marked by its room, its objects, and the effort to erase its immediate traces. In the narrator’s later questioning, the episode emerges through broken recollection and competing voices: The crapulent major says he has had enough, while Sonny insists that the narrator is sweating and that they are getting somewhere. The organization’s violence thus returns as both evidence and a test of the narrator’s confession.

Institutional Meaning in the Narrator’s Account

Special Branch is presented through overlapping roles: an intelligence service monitoring communications and underground networks, a workplace where the narrator is trained, and a setting in which interrogation can slide from claimed expertise into abuse. Claude’s insistence that interrogation is a science does not prevent the officers from using violence; the all-white room’s calculated sensory pressure and the assault on The Communist Agent show different forms of coercion rather than a clean division between scientific and brutal practice.

The narrator’s place in the organization is equally divided. He is a student of Claude, an intelligence operative whose name appears on the captured list, and an observer who recognizes the wrongness of an assault but does not prevent it. The branch’s account of itself as a means of extracting information is therefore shadowed by the narrator’s memory of what its personnel do to a prisoner—and by his knowledge that institutional participation cannot be reduced to the distinction between adviser, officer, interrogator, and witness.