“What’s going on?” His voice sounded testy.
He heard the shocked voice wrestling with the words.
“Kennedy. President Kennedy. Shot. Dead.”
Henry yanked at his seat belt, stood up, one steadying hand on the bulkhead, the other on the shoulder of the steward.
“What did you say?”
He just nodded, as in a daze, moved to ease Henry’s hand away from his shoulder, and stepped forward to the next row of seats. There he shook a sleeping soldier. Henry stared at this man, transformed into a death courier. He was mouthing the words when suddenly all the lights in the large cabin flared up and the voice of the captain came through the loudspeaker.
“Ladies and—” No, that wasn’t right. There was a little static, the sound of the voice clearing itself. “I have news. The radio reports that President John F. Kennedy is dead. Shot by a sniper in Dallas. I’ll fill you in when more details come in. Ladies and gentlemen”—the captain had recovered his bearing—“the President of the United States is dead.”
The passengers were instantly awake, mostly mute, were staring at one another, repeating, “Dead?… dead … dead?” And going on to, “How? Who did it?”
After what seemed an eternity the captain’s voice came on again. “The President’s body has been taken to Air Force One. A judge has administered the oath of office. Lyndon B. Johnson has been sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States.”
The steward and the stewardess were summoned to the pilot’s cabin. They emerged with instructions to open the bar, in the captain’s words, “to give everybody anything they want.” Henry turned to Marguerite Higgins. He could think only to say, “It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it.”
“Yes,” she said. She made it plain she didn’t want to talk about it.
Henry had to talk with someone. He made his way to the seats opposite where an army captain, a glass of Scotch in his hand, was staring down at his drink. Henry couldn’t think what to say, and could not believe it when he found that he had actually spoken the words, “Did you know him?”
The captain looked at him, startled.
“Sorry. I meant, Did you ever lay eyes on him?”
The captain shook his head. “No. But my father did. Dad was on the PT boat with the President.”
So it went during the long four hours. Before the plane landed, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested.
Henry walked down the gangway, shielding his eyes from the bright sun. Than Koo was there. His face was stern.
“Now Americans will know how we felt.” Henry had never before heard Koo sound bitter.
They shook hands. Than Koo took the typewriter from Henry. They walked silently into the terminal. The whole airport was silent, except that over the loudspeaker an organ played sacred music. It was a more resonant stillness than that of twenty days earlier when Diem was killed. Even the dispatcher out front hailed the cabs without blowing on his whistle. What mattered was decorum, even as decorum sometimes matters on the battlefield.
Book Three
Twenty-three
BEFORE LEAVING on his trip into the northern sector, Henry slipped a sheet of paper into his typewriter and addressed a cable to Richard Clurman, his boss. He knew Dick well and trusted him. But he didn’t want to reveal the nature of his anxiety—not to Dick, not to anyone. The tangled domestic situation had something of a scandal value: Danny O’Hara was bordering on being a public figure now, having quietly advertised his availability for the Democratic nomination for Senator.
When Bobby Kennedy, nine months after the assassination of his brother, announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination in New York, Danny was grown up enough to get the message, which was, roughly, Get lost. But, having ventured into the race, Danny was widely accepted as a political contender, the young, glamorous hotel tycoon, grandson of the most towering figure in United States politics—well, there were those who felt that John F. Kennedy, for all that he had only one thousand days in office, had moved FDR over on the historical stage.
Still, Danny had got a fair amount of publicity, and in some of it a reference could be found to his brother-in-law, Henry Chafee, whose own reputation as a dogged and lucid foreign correspondent was rising as the U.S. commitment in Vietnam occupied more and more of the public’s attention. Dick Clurman would notice it if Henry spoke of family problems, because, among other things, Clurman noticed everything.
So Henry wrote to him: “I’m a little ashamed, and also a little sorry, to be asking to go home after only fifteen months. But if it works out, I’d like a tour in Washington or New York, or for that matter, anywhere in the States, New York being best. The reason for this request is personal, but it has to do, also, with the feeling that I need to whiff firsthand U.S. air on the whole Vietnam business. So much has happened, between the death of Diem and the Tonkin Bay business in August and then LBJ’s bombing of North Vietnam installations. I could use time at home to sharpen my perspectives.
“I’m about to take off for Hoile Lang Miet. ARVN maintains a small unit there, and the gooks keep up sniper fire, even though the area has been swept three or four times. It’s a good illustration of what we need to get a handle on: If ARVN doesn’t succeed in absolute pacification, then we have a situation in which a single Vietcong sniper can keep a platoon of ARVN immobilized. I’ll try to get you some good copy on this.”
What accelerated Henry’s thinking on the request to go back had been yesterday’s letter. Caroline had closed by saying, “There is something going on, something of a corporate nature I don’t understand, and Danny is not about to explain it to me, but he is on the phone what seems endlessly, mostly to Cutter Malone and to Mr. Martino’s lawyer. He is terribly distracted, and leaves home sometimes for periods of four or five days without letting me know that he’s going or when he’s coming back. If I need him (I try not to bother him) I have to call his office and try to track him down. Say a special prayer for Danny, as I think he needs help.”
Henry was not a churchgoer but he believed in prayer, and did as his sister requested, except that his prayer sought help not for his brother-in-law but for his sister.
He got up and walked over to the air conditioner to turn it off. It would stay off for as long as he was away. Now the usual plunge into the hot, wet air of Saigon. Always he would put on his sunglasses—that helped to prepare him psychologically for the shock of moving from fairly dry 80-degree air to very wet 100-degree air.
He walked, briefcase and typewriter as ever in hand, to the driveway outside the office building, now guarded by two ARVN soldiers with automatic rifles.
Than Koo was ready, the baggage was in the station wagon. They made their way through the mopeds and motorbikes and jeeps and trucks, through security at the airport, and boarded the plane. Once again Henry found himself in Hué.
Nobody was a better guide in Hué than Than Koo. On the other hand, at this point Henry was willing to say that nobody was a better guide anywhere than Than Koo. In the past year he had become fluent in English. He and Henry still spoke together in French, but only out of habit. Beginning in the spring, Henry had given his dispatches to Koo to read and pass judgment on. Henry admired the shrewd appraisals. From time to time Koo would recommend including this or that datum, or putting greater (or lesser) stress on this or that development. He remembered the deferential smile on Koo’s face when months earlier he had returned the dispatch in which Henry wrote of the ascendancy of Tran Kim Tuyen as the new security head. “Tran will get nowhere,” Koo said simply. “Nhu does not trust him.” A few weeks later, Tran was deposed.
Two hours after landing in Hué, they checked in at Lang Miet. It was a “strategic hamlet,” in the formal designation. But in the past year its resident military population had evolved from a single soldier per hamlet to a full platoon. This was the dismaying change in equilibrium on which Henry wanted to report.
He was given a hut to share with an ARVN lieutenant, a wi
ry young grizzled veteran of three years in the field. His name was Tu Da, and Henry was gratified that he spoke French. This, Tu recounted, was his third tour of duty at Hoile. “The first time I was here with two soldiers, we were told to hunt down a sniper who, at night, was firing into the village rather lackadaisically. I got the picture after talking to a dozen villagers. They contradict themselves, you know. But it came down to this. Over a couple of weeks, this sniper had fired forty, fifty rounds of rifle fire.”
Lieutenant Tu’s face was grim now as he described the demoralizing effect of this random firing into Hoile. “It meant that after dark no one could walk from any place in the village to any other place because there was always the possibility of a stray bullet. Have you ever been in London?”
“Yes,” Henry said.
“It must have been like that in London at the time of the V-2 rockets, you agree?”
Lieutenant Tu, it transpired, had learned recent European history from a Frenchwoman who had fought in the resistance in Bordeaux during the war. Tu spoke with animation about the great events in England, France and Belgium in the closing months of the war.
“So your mission when you first came was what?” Henry asked, taking notes on his pad.
“To find the bugger.”
“Did you?”
“Oh yes. My men and I hid out late in the afternoon, nicely concealed. The hills surrounding Lang Miet are of course ideal for the single, hidden sniper. But I calculated that he was firing from between one hundred and one hundred and fifty meters away, so we took stations two hundred meters back, and waited. It was a good wait; we saw nothing on the first night. But on the second night I heard a shot. It came in at about ten o’clock, but a little closer to me than to my corporal over on the left. So I began to crawl toward him, hoping he would keep firing. I knew that my corporal would be advancing from his other side. Well, we were successful.”
“You caught up with him?”
“Oh yes,” Lieutenant Tu said, drawing deeply on his cigarette. “Yes, I crawled up to within firing range, made out his profile and fired a bullet into the back of his head. We searched him, no papers; usual thing. He was maybe nineteen years old.”
“Mission completed?”
“Well, Mr.… Chafee?”
Henry nodded, Yes, that was his name.
“Yes, that mission was completed, and I went back and joined my unit, and exactly five days later we had radio word from the chief here: another sniper. Exactly the same fucking thing. So the captain sent me back, not with three men, but six men. Our mission now was not to kill him on the spot, but to track him back to the village or the military unit he came from.
“So we did. Just after daybreak the sniper headed back; walked from the edge of the field, coming out of the forest, across the field, into Khe Sanh, several kilometers to the east. He was wearing black pajamas. We were on his tail.
“How would you like the assignment, Mr. Chafee, of isolating one twenty-year-old Vietnamese from a band of thirty or forty of about the same age? Most of them wearing pajamas? Exactly. So, what we did was plant one of our men in the village, to try to ferret out the Vietcong insider.”
“Any luck?” Henry was writing swiftly.
“If you want to call it that. Our man reported after a month that he figured the Vietcong cadre had maybe four people in it.”
“So you arrested them all?”
“Hell, we shot them all. The trouble was that two months later the sniper fire resumed. So this time the captain sends a full platoon with orders to go through the four villages that surround Lang Miet, offer rewards, make threats, that whole business. We’ve been doing that for over four weeks.”
“Successful?”
“Well, we’ve lined up a lot of suspects, shot a bunch of them, sent some of the kids to a prisoner camp. But as of a week ago—the sniper firing again. So we have no alternative. We’ve got to keep men here and go after the snipers, one by one.”
“Will you permit me to go with one of your sentries?”
“Risky business, Mr. Chafee.”
Henry did not comment. Instead he asked, “Will any of tonight’s sentries speak French?”
Tu paused for a moment, his mind going down the duty roster. “No.”
Than Koo spoke. “I will accompany you, Mr. Chafee.”
“No, Koo. As they say in the States, this is beyond the call of duty.”
Koo smiled. “If you do not take me along, I will follow you fifty meters behind. That would be more dangerous for me, and I would not be very useful to you as a translator.”
Henry turned to Tu. “Okay?”
He cocked his head up, snuffed out his cigarette. “That’s up to you.”
Shortly before dark Henry and Than Koo applied the blackface, beginning at the hairline down to below the neck, and then on their hands. They were each handed a carbine. Henry had his own binoculars. The duty soldier was a corporal, Vo Dung. Lieutenant Tu briefed the three stalkers, indicating the positions they should take while awaiting sniper fire.
They filed out at dusk, gratefully feeling the relief of a fallen sun. They made their way through the field, then into the wood, climbing up the gentle hill, headed for the hollow dug up over a year earlier behind the far end of the forest. They carried three days’ supply of food. One sentinel stood watch, the other two lay in the hollow. The silence was total.
Henry, on watch at midnight, stared at the stars. He wondered, might he—conceivably—succeed in identifying the Arno star? The star that, twenty years ago, had guided him and Danny in the assault against the Nazis? At Hué, he calculated, their position was approximately twenty degrees north latitude. Twenty years earlier when he and Danny had fixed their eye on a star to guide them, the north latitude was more like fifty. Henry had never paused to study the star cycles, but he had a good eye for configurations, and, yes, he thought he spotted it! Just there, under Cassiopeia and to the right. What were those twenty years in the lifetime of a star? So brief as not to be susceptible to measure. For Henry those twenty years, he hoped, had worked a decisive change in him. It was inconceivable to him that his courage, if tested, would now fail him.
Those years had certainly changed Danny. Though he wondered, Was Danny, after all, the same person now that he had always been? Henry remembered his agony on learning that Danny had put him up for a decoration. At the time, he succeeded in putting the episode behind him, as nothing more than an act of misdirected playfulness—pulling the tail of history. He was no longer so certain. There was a trace of cruelty in what Danny had done—after saving him first from a court-martial, then from dying of a self-inflicted wound.
Henry put it out of his mind and forced himself to listen attentively for any sound of rifle fire. For any sound at all, for that matter.
It came toward the end of the watch, a single rifle shot. It appeared to have been fired by someone directly ahead of them, somewhere between their own position and the hamlet. If the sniper was in the forest, he might have needed to climb up a tree to get the desired angle. Either that, or he might have been prepared merely to fire up into the air, satisfied that the bullet would fall down into the compound, even as a rocket would come down. It would be almost as lethal brought down by gravity as at the end of a bullet’s life, fired horizontally.
He looked to the corporal, instantly awake, instantly in charge.
Vo Dung said nothing, not a word; there was only the incessant sound of the crickets. Vo simply moved up out of the hollow and began to make his way forward, traveling at a snail’s pace, body bent over, his torso horizontal to the ground. Above all, sound was the enemy. Henry waited until the distance between him and the corporal was about twenty meters. Before moving forward, following Vo, he turned his head and whispered to Than Koo, “Keep same distance.”
At this rate, Henry thought, it would be an hour or more before Vo Dung reached the middle of the forest, two hours before he got to the end of it, where the field outside the village began.
The night was dark but not black; visibility extended the distance between him and Vo. Looking up at the trees, most of them dense with foliage, he could see only up to where the branches began. He was sweating now and it seemed almost as though the surrounding trees were weeping into him. If the sniper was perched on a tree branch it would be impossible to spot him until he was directly overhead.
Henry began to conclude that this was a mad, suicidal mission, but then remembered that Lieutenant Tu had twice apprehended a sniper. They had to hope that the sniper would be incautious. At least they knew this, that he would eventually have to crawl away in order to return to his own village. Maybe that was the witching hour.
When would it be? Nearer to dawn? But that of course would depend on how frequently the sniper would fire his rifle. The conventional pattern had been a half-dozen shots in the course of the night, though the psychological impact of the earlier shots greatly exceeded the later ones when the villagers, except for the guards at the gate, were asleep. Henry felt the full, raw taste of terror. It was so much easier to do that—to feel the danger—in the dark. Especially when crawling, a few inches at a time, in total silence, the ear blocking out the crickets’ monotonic chirp.
A shot rang out again. The man in front of him rose and began to run. Vo must have spotted the sniper and elected to charge him. Henry stood up and turned his head back to alert Than Koo. But he did not see him. He turned and walked back a few paces. Still no Than Koo. He began to jog back, even as the exchange of fire ahead began. He was carrying his carbine. Sheltered by such noisy cover, Henry could afford to call out. It was an audible husky whisper. “Koo! Koo!” He stumbled over a body. He threw himself down.
“Koo. Koo!” He shook Koo’s head, slapped him on the cheeks. He knew suddenly the presence of the killer. He yelled a strident savage yell, swung the butt of his carbine with a boxer’s swiftness at the human frame in front of him, felt the heavy thud, righted the automatic and fired three rounds. He reached now into his pocket and yanked out the flashlight. The pajama-clad young man lay gasping for air, his right hand clutching a large knife. Henry fired into his mouth. Then he shined the light on Than Koo and saw the blood on a throat slashed ear to ear. Koo’s lips were parted, framing a disoriented smile, one eye peering to one side, the other eye in the other direction. When Corporal Vo arrived on the scene Henry was on his knees, his hand on Than Koo’s chest, sobbing quietly, his flashlight still lit.
William F. Buckley Jr. Page 19