Based On A True Story

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2003)

It was on only my third mission for Her Majesty's intelligence services that I was captured. My respected father had faced down Stazi interrogators in East Berlin years before in the same line of work, and I had no intention of betraying his honourable record.
Yet, my confidence was soon proven to be misplaced. I had not expected the true variety of torture that my captors would employ to encourage me to talk. Scorpion venom, bamboo splinters, electric shocks... many unspeakable torments, but none of them could persuade me to betray my country. I would not talk, I would not utter a single word.
After the first month, I was a wreck, a wretched shadow of a human being. After the second month, I had begun to pray for death.
After six months, I had talked - I had told them everything I had ever known, a hundred times - and yet they still tormented me.
Soon they stopped torturing me, but they kept me imprisoned. On a diet that allowed me little more than the luxury of slow starvation, I was in a state of continual exhaustion and weakness. I lost teeth. I was once allowed to see myself in the mirror and I knew then that I would never again be the man I had once been, not without the help of God and all his angels.
Then, after three years a sparrow began to visit my cell. The few crumbs I could spare to feed the little animal encouraged him to be my friend, and soon his visits made my life a little less lacking in despair. Until, one morning my guard saw this, and shot the sparrow. My despair was profound beyond the telling.
And it was only at this point that the experience became objectively worse than watching Pearl Harbour.