Torture - A Memorial Day Tale

In Buddhism, there are four stages of mind-development, called jhanas. The first jhana is thinking. The second jhana is not thinking. The third jhana is remembering past lives. The fourth jhana is emptiness.
I have been to all four stages, as, I think, all people have, but we don't know it. The third jhana interested me, from the beginning of my Buddhism, because I thought, "How can I know myself, if I don't know where I came from?".
Memory reveals itself to me, with little video kind of pictures in the mind. If you want to remember what happened a few minutes ago, you look inside and see a little kind of film about what happened. But it is distorted, like a dream, or imagining things, but if it was an occurrence that happened just a few minutes before, it can be pretty clear. However, memories of past lives are not easy as that to believe.
I seem to remember my last life and something about what happened. This is a tale about that.
I was a young man who wanted adventure. I joined the army. It was the Korean War. I was a Christian, but met a Korean woman who I fell in love with. She introduced me to Buddhism. I liked it.
Us soldiers parachuted into the front lines. We came upon a Buddhist temple, and for some reason, the order came down that we couldn't take the monks as prisoners. We had to kill them. So I was facing court martial or killing my fellow Buddhists. I didn't want to face treason, because I refused an order, so we shot the monks.
Later, I was captured by the enemy, and beaten severely in the armpits with the butt of a rifle. I was put in a dark cell. They deprived me of sleep. I was drowned until I almost died, and then they brought me up, and then drowned again, and up again, over and over. I had bamboo shoots shoved up under my fingernails. They gave me ice cream one day, that was filled with maggots which I was forced to eat. They heated up a metal rod to red heat, and burned my genitals. I was completely wrecked.
I think the genital mutilation was more than I could take so I broke and told them what they wanted to know.
Later, I got out, but my own government brought up charges of sedition. While waiting for my court martial and the possible death sentence, I blew my brains out with a pistol, after a last cigarette, and screaming the words, "Help me, Jesus!"
Much of my current life is explainable, knowing or not knowing that this happened.