And thus, although Big Dog Tsou who had murdered was now among the ‘whites’; and Fong Kiap who had carried so much meat to the People Inside was in rehabilitation camp; Neo, who had done no wrong, but was unable to smile, sat in the ‘black’ section, listening to the rain.
- Attap: palm leaf roof. ↵
- Mem and Tuan: honorifics for female and male Europeans. ↵
7
VIPERS, LITTLE AND HORNED
Barbed wire surrounds the Nissen huts erected among the dusty pink buildings of Police Headquarters. In these huts were lodged surrendered terrorists, in police jargon S.E.P.s (surrendered enemy personnel).
S.E.P.s were sent here from all parts of the State, after being used ‘on the ground’, which meant their immediate interrogation by a detective, and often leading Security troops straight back into the jungle, to their previous camps, to ambush their former comrades.
When their practical use in the jungle was over, they came here. It was better living than the jungle, and also better than what had come before the jungle. Here was shelter, food, and seventy dollars a month. And very little work. Just talk. Tell everything. And a new sense of importance. A perception of their power, obtained from what they told.
Police Headquarters kept on tap Chinese and Malay inspectors and interrogators and translators. Hours, days, the interrogation of S.E.P.s proceeded. It was a thing which always astonished the English police officers: the readiness with which S.E.P.s poured out their life story, their passion for minute descriptive detail, their phenomenal memory of events, places, names, and physical appearance of their contacts and comrades. One, a woman of fifty, who had been a communist courier, remembered thus over six hundred people.
After the statements in Chinese, translators took over and turned them into English. The welter of information would then be typed, and often ran to a document close to a hundred foolscap pages. The British Assistant Superintendent in charge would sift this material, check points, countercheck this confession with others already in the files, and classify the information. Some of it would go back to the ‘ground’, to be used by the army units; some would go to higher levels; to Kuala Lumpur for general information and overall planning. Thus, from all over Malaya, information slowly accumulated about the people inside the jungle.
S.E.P.s were of great interest to the higher departments of Psychological Warfare, and to the American scholars who wanted to write theses on Asian communism for their doctorates. Few more exciting themes, or more appropriate, than those gleaned in this tumultuous and tangled battlefield of hazy notions, misunderstood movement, revolution gone awry, and colonialism preparing its subject country for independence. Few more immediate and burning questions than those that perhaps the S.E.P.s could answer: What makes a communist surrender? What makes a young man or girl go to the jungle in the first place?