Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  “Realism,” he said aloud, and snorted. “It’s so fashionable to kick that term around now, isn’t it? To equate it with cynicism, savagery, inhumanity … The fact is, war has come to us here in Khotiane. And since it has come, since it has been forced on us this way, why not let it work to our advantage? prepare us for the conflicts that lie ahead?”

  The war would be expanded, he knew in his heart of hearts; it had to be expanded because it was the only logical step in the national pattern. The consumer market was nearing saturation, industry was hamstrung by costs and labor demands, the balance-of-payments deficit was becoming serious. All this liberal talk about war no longer serving as the instrumentation of policy was so much claptrap. In actual fact, a massive intervention in Khotiane was just what the doctor ordered, if only Washington had the brains to see it: here was John Hay’s “splendid little war” revived in midtwentieth century, the perfect extension of the American martial tradition—a war the populace need not commit itself about, supported by big industry and the universal military obligation—now legalized and perpetuated—carried on at the far end of the world, and with little or none of the risks of a big power conflict. In some ways it was even preferable to the China venture …

  “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we are drifting,” he said aloud. “Drifting into recession, drifting into complacency, stagnation, timidity. The country lacks unity, cohesion, a sense of destiny. There’s a very real question as to whether participation in an ideological conflict like this one here in Khotiane might not serve as a partial and much-needed mobilization of the nation’s resources, as a focus for American concerns, economic and psychological, you know? …”

  He stopped and sipped his Cognac. He would go no further than that; see what it elicited. That was the weakness of most military men—they never could resist uttering the additional word that brought the roof of the temple down on their bullet heads. That fellow Walker was a glowing example, with his loony covenants with Almighty God. MacArthur was his own worst enemy—he should never, never have issued that unfortunate statement about its being a new and dangerous concept that the soldier owed his primary allegiance to his country and the Constitution rather than to those who temporarily exercised the authority of the Executive. Disastrous. From that moment on MacArthur was dead as a political power in America. It was all right to think it, but he should never have said it aloud. And Patton—!

  The Undersecretary had glanced at his watch. “Good heavens, it’s after three. Well after.” He got rapidly to his feet, and his assistants followed suit. He removed his glasses and delicately patted his brows and mustache; his broad French collar was stained. “It’s a tribute to your eloquence and cuisine, Courtney. But I must run.” Moving toward the entrance he said, “If American participation in the Khotianese conflict were to be expanded, can you give us assurances that the Chinese Communist government will not actively intervene?”

  “Categorically,” Massengale answered. “The most significant information our Intelligence has secured out here over the past three years is the knowledge that China will not march in such an eventuality. Of that we’re certain.”

  The Undersecretary nodded, the glasses’ stem in a corner of his mouth. “That was, of course, the contention of MacArthur’s headquarters before the Yalu operation …”

  “That is true. But the situation is not at all analogous. I’m sure Frederick Brokaw will bear me out on this.”

  “What do you feel would be the position of our SEATO allies?”

  “I believe they would support it wholeheartedly. Especially the Philippines and Australia.”

  The Undersecretary nodded. “That’s interesting. Would you work up a memorandum on this for me on my way through again?”

  “I’d be happy to do so.”

  “And thank you very much for the most royal repast, Courtney. I haven’t eaten like this since my salad days in the embassy in Paris.”

  Massengale took his hand. “I’ll tell Kimh—he’ll be overjoyed.”

  “I’m very grateful to you for the extensive briefing.”

  “My pleasure entirely.” Massengale swung open the door. “God speed, Mr. Secretary. I will hope for your rapid and successful return …”

  In Tuyet’s room he lay on the broad, low bed and frowned at the ceiling. It was a quiet time of day. Far below in the street he heard two voices calling, then silence. Indolently he turned his head and watched Tuyet who was bent forward doing her nails, her lovely lacquered profile so delicate it seemed that the faintest gesture, the faintest sound, would shatter it. Aware of his gaze after a while, she turned and looked at him and smiled—the quick, childlike, empty smile of the Khotianese. A simple people. He sighed. Her body was slender, almost breastless, suggestive of some very fragile, beautiful young boy, but her lips were full and moist in the soft saffron light.

  His rage had subsided; he felt in its place a gross, immovable weight, like a physical obstruction in the defile of his mind. He had lost; when he had been so certain. That credulous, stubborn, sentimental fool Damon. After all these years. The deep apocalyptic assault he’d dreamed of, that giant thrust into the heartland of China, would not come about. Not for a good long while, anyway. With luck they might ease their way into large-scale participation here, but that was not what he sought. He was facing retirement unless he could secure the post of Chief of Staff or some other executive intercession. That swine Velanger—he and that wretched little clique of his had blocked him. Now he could only reach it through a thunderbolt, some dazzling coup that would rivet attention on him out here, ten thousand miles from that blasted Pentagon.

  Of course there was politics: he could go to the conventions, make the rounds and sound out the committeemen and ward heelers, the grubby, venal souls who carried on the errant business of the Republic. But he doubted if he would ever be able to stick it. An appointment, yes—such as Marshall had got, and Maxwell Taylor before the Administration had recalled him to active duty; but to curry favor with the flabby-faced men and strident, aggressive women …

  Or he could go up to the old home at Rensselaer, listen to the snow stinging the storm sash, hire himself a housekeeper and tread out the dreary round of an old man’s regimen, assembling his papers, writing letters to the editors of the New York papers. But he could never endure that after this—not after Fort Myer and Paris and Reina Blanca and Cau Luong: what he could not bear, he knew, was to fall back into obscurity, into solitude—

  There was a distant boom, then another: muffled, stealthy, persistent. Artillery, up near Hua Ngai. What were they firing at? He opened his eyes. Tuyet had put down her stylus and brush and was gazing at the sea. She was so still. A longing urgent as breath swept over him. He said: “Tuyet.”

  She looked up, her flaring cheekbones and short, broad nose accentuated by the sun’s low rays.

  “Come here,” he said in French. “Come to me.”

  Obediently she rose and came over and sat on the edge of the bed. There was in her movements the small, fastidious grace of a cat. “Will there be a film tonight?” she asked softly.

  “I don’t see why not.” He put his hand on her thigh, her belly, feeling the young, firm flesh under the light chartreuse fabric; and a faint tremor of rage, of desolation, shook him.

  “What is the matter?”

  “Nothing. Nothing is the matter.”

  “Oh.” She looked down at him, neither kindly nor fearfully. A simple, receptive look. Children, they were all children. But no matter what he did, in the end he always had to ask her.

  “Serve me,” he said in French.

  Slowly, with infinite grace she undressed—he insisted on this although there was no actual need for it—and kneeling beside him began the ministration he needed now with the desperate, resurgent hunger of an opium smoker. He raised his head: he needed to watch her. It was sweet, the control of another being, the possession of this supine form, maculate flesh serving him, dependent on him, only him; it was th
is that was sweet, seething, tensing, caught in tumbling orange and indigo light that spread swiftly, tightened, released in joy, in joy, in spurting flaccid loss.

  So brief.

  It was so trivial, so brief. But it was what he had to have, now. He had to, he didn’t quite know why … The urgency was gone, as usual. Its fulfillment was only for himself, that was paramount—but he could only enjoy that fleet fulfillment if he were with another. That was what was humiliating even while it gave him gratification—the need of another.

  He looked up at her with utter hatred. “How strange it is,” he said in French. “You have no sense of shame about it, have you? None at all …”

  “Why should I?” She seemed merely surprised. “It is what you want. It is what you enjoy.”

  They said she was of good family; her parents had been killed in an air raid by the French. Her brother was in the North now, with the Hai Minh. She had been the lover of a Khotianese colonel who had been shot or exiled or imprisoned—purged, anyway—when Vu Khoi had taken over; she never spoke of him. Emptily he watched her dressing, her lithe, slender legs slipping into her trousers.

  It is what you want. Yes. But that was not enough. Not nearly enough.

  5

  “The name of the game is: Bounce the Chinks!” Tony Giandoli declared. With a flick of his thumb he snapped open the cuff of his left sleeve and whipped out a wicked-looking Malaysian throwing knife strapped to his forearm. “All right, you Hai Minh hotshots—come on out of that folding bed! It’s zapping time in old Khotiane …”

  “Put it away, Gee, before you cut yourself and we have to leave you here as a line company replacement,” Colonel Krisler told him.

  “I just want ’em to see I’m ready, that’s all. There’s no front lines out here, you know. Got to be ready to fight at three hundred and sixty degrees. Right around the clock.”

  “What do you know about guerrilla warfare?” Captain Forbes taunted him lazily. “You’ve never heard a shot fired in anger.”

  “I can wait,” Corporal Giandoli said. “I mean, let them work down the list till they get to me. You know?” He moved the blade along his bared forearm, staring in fascination as the thick black hair lifted away in tight rolls. “Look at that. What a gook-stabber … Hey, Chief,” he said to Damon, “hey, when we wrap up this high-level diplomatic caper, how about us making it over to Hong Kong for a quick Rape and Ruin?”

  “What do you want in Hong Kong?” Sam asked him.

  “That crew chief Wodtke was telling me about a jazzo place called the Blue Phoenix, where they give you a menu—only the menu hasn’t got chow on it but tail. Yeah!” His big, liquid eyes gleamed. “You draw a circle around the names you like and choong!—there they are, right at your table, rubbing up against you like they meant it.”

  “Come off it, Gee,” Forbes said.

  “He’s right, Bob,” Joey Krisler said with a grin. “Only thing: you’ll have to pay four bucks an hour taxi-dance rental for each girl.”

  “Yeah, but while it lasts—heaven can wait!”

  The four of them were sitting in a seedy little café near the airfield at Pnom Du. The sinking sun poured gold over the metal tables, the half-reclining customers, the faded pink and yellow façades of the tin shacks across the street. Dust rose in quick eddies on the gusts of wind, and bits of paper and leaves tumbled past as stealthily as forest animals. Now and then a plane took off in a shuddering, straining roar, and all talk ceased; then it was gone, fading up the sky, and the dust and poured molten light returned, and the smell of the cooking fires, strange with iodine and mold and fish and old brass. Sam Damon, slumped in one of the wire chairs, worn with heat and the interminable waiting, was reminded of the smells in Pasay, and then the long room at Charmevillers, above the Marne: there was that same beguiling odor sharp with outlandish ways, which had always drawn him on—all the fantastic worlds beyond Walt Whitman, the island valleys filled with people in burnooses, pantaloons, barongs, loinskins, ao dais …

  But this tawdry little midway of bars and cribs and laundries did not make the heart leap.

  “Probably picked up a case of drippy tummy and changed his mind,” Joey was saying crossly. “God damn politicians—I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw one of these water buffaloes.”

  Damon looked at his watch. Five twenty. “They could have had plane trouble, I suppose.”

  “I don’t like this, Chief. It feels goofy. Let me go over to the message center and check it out.”

  “We’ll give them a little longer,” he answered.

  “You’re the general.”

  He finished the dregs of his drink. The others had wanted brandy and soda, but on an impulse he’d ordered a vermouth-cassis—and with the first sip of the sweet, flat, dense apéritif the Riviera had swept back, and with it the first twinges of the melancholy that now gripped him. He had sat at a café then with the father, filled with bitterness and confusion; now he sat with the son in another café halfway around the world, and the comparisons and contrasts were unavoidable. Rock-and-roll music blasted from radios across the street, two different tunes competing stridently, and shoeshine boys in ragged yellow T-shirts ran beside a passing soldier, begging cigarettes; he mopped his face with the big red handkerchief he always carried, and picked at his nails.

  He could not shake off the depression that had dogged him all afternoon. Earlier, on receiving the coded radio from the Undersecretary, he had been elated. He had—somehow, unpredictably and in complete defiance of all the odds—stopped this lunatic design for a mammoth war on China, at least temporarily. Now, a day later, killing time, still wobbly from dysentery and waiting for the plane, he was assailed by doubts and despondencies. He had said what he had to; he’d spoken his piece and retarded the ominous drift of things. But he was unable to escape the sense that wily and powerful forces were moving against him with sure stealth, while he sat here twiddling his thumbs. Massengale would get rid of him one way or another, and they’d crank up the Khotiane war to their hearts’ content. Only the other day he’d overheard Usher on Fowler’s staff telling reporters—off the record, of course—that from one point of view it wasn’t desirable to be too successful here; that the invaluable lessons to be learned by troops up to battalion level made it well worth prolonging things …

  Well: they didn’t have a thing to worry about. It would prolong itself just as long as those in power wanted it to.

  “—swung around this bunch of rocks and there it was—a jeep and two trucks and an M-39, all squashed together,” Forbes was saying to Joey. “And that did it. The minute we stopped all hell broke loose—machine guns, automatic rifles, mortars, the works. The Chinks had it interdicted from the west slope. And cold! I want to tell you, it was a bitch. They died in the road, in the trucks, on the tanks, they were hiding behind boulders and running up and down the road screaming. And the fire just kept right on pouring down.”

  “Man, that’s bug-out time!” Giandoli chortled.

  “Shut up, Gee,” Krisler told him.

  “Yes-sir.”

  “It was awful,” Forbes went on, his smooth, rather handsome features pinched with reminiscence. “I could see one of the Chinks up there, directing fire, waving his arm and hollering. I thought: There’s only one thing to do. We’ve got to go up and get those guns. I crawled over to where three or four GIs were lying in a gully and said: ‘Let’s go. Let’s go get the sons of bitches. Who’ll come with me?’ No reaction. Then one of them said, ‘You want it, you go get it, Jack.’ I said: ‘You want to lay here and get slaughtered, is that it? What’s the matter with you people?’ No answer. And then another one—a thin guy with a lot of teeth gone on one side of his mouth—said: ‘You go take it and then shove it up your ass … ’”

  “Interesting command problem,” Joey said. “How’d you play it?”

  Forbes spread his hands on the table. “It’s not in The Armed Forces Officer, I can tell you that. I had this pint of bourbon I’d been savi
ng for two months. I figured now was the time. I hauled it out and took a good long slug and then I said to the guy without the teeth: ‘Here’s twenty minutes’ worth of courage, you stupid bastard. Pass it around. And then God damn it, let’s go!’” The two officers laughed. “And it worked. I got them up and we started climbing that pass. Some other people had got the same idea, and we got one gun with grenades. They all wanted to sit down and call it a day then, the bottle was gone and I had a hell of a time. But I signed up three more warriors with a promise of another drink after we’d got the gun—I guess that comes under the heading of flagrant misrepresentation—and we dragged ourselves on up. It got colder every step of the way, it was so cold you couldn’t think. Literally. And on top of all that it started snowing. About halfway up, the gun quit. He’s sucking us in, I figured, he’s running low and he’s waiting. Well, I could see the gun’s muzzle stuck in a little notch in the rocks, and that was all. Perfect field of fire, just about no cover at all for the last fifteen, twenty yards. I still had two heroes with me and we got up as close as the cover lasted. By now it was snowing like a bastard. I was so cold I couldn’t lie there any longer, I just couldn’t, and I waved the other guys up and we rushed it. Utterly ridiculous. Still no fire. I came up over the rocks, stumbling and staggering like an old drunk—and there he was, all alone, sitting straight as a ramrod, his hands on the grip, staring right at me, the snow in his nose and mouth. Frozen stiff.” He shook his head, staring. “The guts that took! Up there in that wind in that ragged beat-up old quilted jacket, no gloves, canvas shoes. Stayed right at the gun till he froze to death. I remember I thought: Jesus, we’re going to be lucky to get out of this—any of us at all …”

  Damon felt his lips move in a wry, sad smile. Fifty years ago he had sat and listened to the old soldiers; now he was listening to the young ones. He had traced the great circle, as Tommy called it. Some things had remained the same; but more had changed. On Memorial Day back home there had been the parade, led by George Verney and Old Emil Clausen in their fine, broad-brimmed hats and dark blue uniforms, striding right behind the band. Old Emil had walked very stiffly, carrying his sword with his forearm hooked under the hilt, but Mr. Verney had smiled around him, and now and then waved to friends. Behind them came the Spanish War veterans, the First Nebraska Volunteers, and there was Uncle Bill, if he was home, sweating in his tight-fitting khaki and looking bowlegged in his gaiters; and then the horse-drawn float from Shurtleff’s with several of the prettiest girls sitting on the heaped banks of flowers, giggling furtively. And later, back at the house, the veterans would gather on the porch and George Verney would set out the big dark square bottle—he only got it out twice a year, Memorial Day afternoon and Christmas Eve—and the little glasses with the knobs all over them, and offer them all a drink. They would seat themselves deliberately, the older men and the officers on the chairs and settee, the younger men on the steps, their choke collars unbuttoned, their hats tilted back. The ridges where their hats had been made firm red lines low across their foreheads. Mr. Verney would stand in the center of the porch then and raise his glass—he called it a pony—and say, “Here’s to the Republic, boys—may she always have men worthy of her in her hour of need.” And they would all solemnly down their drinks. After a suitable interval George Verney would pass the bottle along, and the talk would begin, brief and monosyllabic at first, and then gathering pace and passion in reminiscence. He himself would be sent up to bed then, but for hours afterward he would lie awake, listening to the voices drifting up to him with the cigar smoke and the sharp, burned-clean odor of whiskey, talking of Shiloh and Missionary Ridge and El Caney and Balangiga and Punta Grande.