‘I’m sorry you were shot, Carl.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said, squeezing her tight. ‘By then I was sick of soldiering and this was what we called a million-dollar wound. I was sent away to an Army hospital and after a while I was offered a desk job in Sacramento, working on the base newsletter. I took it and found I had a knack for writing, which got me to the Globe and to this apartment and this lovely reporter from merry old England in my bed.’ He touched her lips. ‘If I had known then that getting shot would have ended me here, I wouldn’t have yelped as loud.’
She smiled. ‘You’re being gallant again.’
‘Does that mean being knightly? If so, my armor is rusting in a few spots.’
‘Oh, rubbish. Can I ask another favor?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your book. I’d like to read it.’
‘Tonight? Right now?’
‘Why not?’ She tickled him for a moment. ‘Unless you have something better planned, my handsome stallion.’
‘It’s not finished. Won’t be finished for a while.’ The lights came back on then and he blew out the candle, a thin wisp of smoke rising up to the cracked plaster ceiling.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, damn it, I’m being forward again. Earlier on, you said it would never be published in the United States. But there are always English publishers. They’re hungry for American material, since so little of it gets abroad, and I have some friends in publishing. No promises, though.’
He closed his eyes, wondering how in God’s name someone like her had come into his safe and gray life, had turned everything upside down, and along the way, had made him do things that he otherwise would never have done. Like that midnight climb into Merl’s apartment.
‘That’s a generous offer, and it brings up a subject that you and I have yet to discuss.’
‘My going back to England? Let’s not spoil this evening, Carl. I’m here for at least another two weeks. Let’s make the most of those fourteen days.’
He moved his other arm, grasped his hands together so that she was encircled. ‘All right. Deal. You can read a sample chapter, tell me if you like it. Just don’t laugh at the typos and the bad spelling.’
‘Promise, no laughing.’
He got up and went into his office, knowing the chapter he wanted her to read, one that had set everything up, ten years earlier. He came back and she was there, sheet now wrapped about her, looking up with a steady smile, a gaze that said things were fine, everything was possible, and he lay down next to her, passing over the small pile of papers.
Carl said, ‘One quick question before you get to reading my life’s work.’
‘Go on,’ she said, rearranging some of the typewritten sheets.
‘Do you know most of the people at the consulate?’
She grimaced and snuggled up against him. ‘Sort of. When I first got to Boston, I had to meet everyone there, as part of an orientation session. Christ, it was dull.’
He tried to keep his voice calm. ‘Did you meet a Stewart Thompson there?’
Sandy turned to him, amazement in her voice. ‘Carl Landry, how on earth do you know that man’s name?’
He looked into her eyes, wondered what he could say, how much he could trust her. ‘It came up in the story I’m working on. And I hope we can keep it just between us. Who is he?’
She dug an elbow into his ribs. ‘Oh, I shan’t be telling your tales to the consulate, don’t worry. Us press people have to stick together, especially when we’re faced with censors, no matter what they call themselves. And now I know why you got into trouble with your editor, if Stewart Thompson’s involved.’
He couldn’t move. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Because Stewart Thompson is an assistant agricultural attaché, but everybody in the consulate—and I imagine your local FBI—knows his real job. He’s with MI6.’
‘British intelligence,’ he said, finding it hard to say those two words. My God, Merl Sawson must have gone to them after he met me outside of the Globe.
‘Exactly. He was at the reception. Tall, dour fellow, with a big mane of white hair. Looks like he spends his free time eating limes and lemons so he can get that sourpuss look just right. Funny thing is, Dougie Harris—the press attaché—said that Stewart was having a terrible time a few weeks ago, over that general’s death, the one called Sheffield. It was causing him a tremendous headache with his superiors.’
‘The one found in bed with the prostitute?’ he asked.
‘The same,’ she said, holding up the typewritten pages of his book. ‘And here’s my chance to tell you a little secret, so we’re even for the night. Apparently this retired general was more than just some Army officer with a taste for teenage girls. It seems he had quite an interesting past, as military attaché in Washington before the war.’
‘Here? That general was the military attaché in 1962?’
Sandy smiled, picked up a single sheet of paper. ‘Of course. I didn’t mean the Korean War. Luckily for him he got out of Washington just before it was bombed. And how ironic, he comes back to this country for the first time in ten years, and dies of a heart attack in bed with a prostitute.’
Ironic, he thought. In the space of a week in Boston you have the death of the British military attaché in 1962 and the death of an aide to President John F. Kennedy—men who probably knew each other back then—and the name and number of the local MI6 officer is found in the possession of the murdered aide.
‘Yes,’ he said, not believing a word he was saying. ‘How ironic.’
~ * ~
A SOLDIER’S STORY
* * *
by
Carl Landry
CHAPTER THREE
It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
—President John F. Kennedy
October 22, 1962
I
n October 1962, I was one of several thousand advisers in South Vietnam. Most of us were forming training cadres, trying to get the South Vietnamese armed forces into some sort of shape. We were ‘advisers,’ which on paper meant that we were supposed to stay on base and supervise the training of the ARVN troops before sending them out to deal with the Viet Cong, but that was nonsense. We all went out into the field, and we all went out with enthusiasm. We wanted to be with our troops when they came under fire, we wanted to show them we were partners they could depend upon, and being young and foolish and full of spirit, we wanted to prove to each other that we could be out on the front lines, fighting communism.
It’s hard to write these words, seven or eight years later. Fighting communism. It sounded so noble, and yet this noble undertaking took us down some dark roads at a very high cost.
Part of the cost were three advisers who were killed just before the Cuban War, their spotter aircraft shot down by the Viet Cong insurgents while they were providing tactical information for some nearby ARVN units. I’m sure they are forgotten now, except for their families, but this is who they were: Army Special Forces Captain Terry Cordell, Air Force Captain Herbert Willoughby Booth, and Technical Sergeant Richard Fox.
On Saturday, October 20, 1962, there was a memorial service for them at the Ton Son Nhut airfield in Saigon. It was another hot, steamy day, and being on that flat landscape was enough to fry your brain. Our adviser units were there, with a South Vietnamese honor guard, and a chaplain who read some verses from the Bible. You could hardly hear him for the sound of the helicopters and aircraft, and I remember standing there with that odd mix of feelings that all young soldiers share. Sadness at seeing dead comrades. Pride at what they were doing for their country. A self-assurance that it would never happen to you because you were too smart, too lucky, just too something to get killed. And a sense of duty, seeing those flags fly, being in a foreign country and knowin
g you were there, helping them fight against an outside force of communists.
Another contingent on the field that day were some reporters, one from the New York Times, because even in such a small war as this one, even in Laos, there was a sense of a global mission going on, of being in the front lines, sent here by a young and cocky JFK, to hold the line and ‘pay any price and bear any burden’ for the cause of freedom.
We were sure that’s what we were doing, and for the most part, the press agreed. This ceremony was reported in the major newspapers, and it was duly noted that the crew who were killed in the spotter aircraft were the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth Americans killed in service in South Vietnam.
As we marched off the field that day and headed for the bars, none of us knew those three men were destined to be the last Americans killed in South Vietnam.
The Cuban Missile Crisis—before it became the Cuban War—became public shortly thereafter. Being twelve hours ahead of Eastern standard time made it challenging to keep up with the news of what was going on in Moscow, the United States, and the United Nations. To put this into perspective, as an American family watched President Kennedy’s speech at 7 P.M. on Monday, October 22, some of us were trying to listen to it on shortwave at 7 A.M. on Tuesday, October 23. Which meant that news got passed along, from one person to the next, along with some rumors and speculation. Plus we were all busy with our training and trips out to the bush. We didn’t have the luxury of catching the Voice of America or the BBC every chance we got.
And it sounds arrogant, but in our minds we were already at war with the communists, and for those of us in the Army at the time, it was intolerable that Eisenhower and Kennedy had allowed a communist regime to set up shop ninety miles from Florida. Many a beer was shared over the general conversation of ‘why in hell are we here, ten thousand miles from home, fighting the Reds, when we’ve got our own Reds back home in our own neighborhoods.’ We had been fighting them so long in South Vietnam that it’s fair to say most of us cheered when we finally saw Kennedy exhibit some backbone in Cuba, demanding that the missiles be removed. None of us thought that Khrushchev and his boys would get the missiles out, so we knew that eventually, Kennedy would be sending in the Airborne and the Marines to get them out.
And of course, we were all struck by the arrogance that the Russians—the damn Russians!—had managed to sneak bombers and medium-range missiles into Cuba. Most of us thought Kennedy should have sent in the bombers first and not bothered with the negotiation and blockade route. After all, there were promises from the Russians that they would never install offensive weapons of any kind in Cuba, and we saw this as another sign of treachery from the Reds.
I don’t think many of us—if any at all—talked about the American missiles in Turkey and Italy, and our bombers in Great Britain and West Germany and Japan and South Korea. After all, everything was black and white. We were good, they were bad. Our nuclear weapons were good, theirs were bad. And of course, we ringed the Soviet Union with bombers and troops and spy planes and missiles and submarines because we were going to ‘contain’ them. Remember, too, that this was a scarce twenty years after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and killed tens of millions of its soldiers and civilians. One could see how the Soviets would put missiles into Cuba, to give the United States a dose of the fear that the Soviets had always tasted.
But this is no excuse for what happened, and what had happened earlier with the Soviets. The Katlyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps in World War II. Stalin’s own labor and concentration camps from one end of the Soviet empire to the other. And Hungary in 1956, crushed under Soviet tanks because they had the temerity to choose their own government.
No, we didn’t have much feeling of charity for the Soviet Union. Which—at the time—is why it made so much sense for us to be in South Vietnam. The struggling governments and democracies, we felt, needed our help, and that’s what we were there to provide.
Even a day or two after the missile crisis broke out into the news, I found that my own day-to-day thoughts were more mundane. I would catch a news broadcast or read Stars & Stripes, and find out bits and pieces of news. About the blockade. The preparations for invasion going on in Florida and Georgia and Alabama. The meetings at the UN and the attempt by Secretary General U Thant to get both sides to cool down. But I would just nod and think that the ‘guys upstairs,’ the ones at a higher pay grade than mine, would figure it all out. Meanwhile, I had my own problems.
At that time I was a training officer with a company of South Vietnamese regulars, who we were training to go out in the bush and fight the Viet Cong on their own terms, instead of sitting tight in guarded villas and hamlets. My counterpart was a South Vietnamese lieutenant, Nguyen Van Minh, who was about my age, though almost a foot smaller and fifty pounds lighter. If he ever had problems of being a lieutenant and taking ‘suggestions’ from an Army sergeant, well, he always kept them to himself. I would like to think that in the months we worked together, that we formed a cautious friendship—me, a working-class kid from a North Shore town in Massachusetts, he the son of a wealthy rubber plantation owner outside of Pleiku.
Unlike some of my counterparts in the advisory group, I actually took the time to read up on the history of Indochina, about the French colonials who ran the country, the Japanese who took it from the French in the 1940s, and the revolution and civil war that began under Ho Chi Minh. Funny thing, which I didn’t believe but which an old ‘Vietnam hand’ told me one day: that Ho Chi Minh wrote his own country’s Declaration of Independence, based it on our document of 1776, and that he was willing to accept American advisers and American aid, if we would only support him against the French.
Of course, we couldn’t upset the French, our noble allies from just-concluded World War II, and Ho Chi Minh took to the jungle, until he defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu and the United Nations got involved. By the time I was there, there were two Vietnams, a North and a South, and we were supporting the South while the Soviets and the Chinese supported the North.
Nguyen taught me a lot about his country, and I like to think we were fortunate in being assigned to each other. In getting me (or so I’d like to think) he got an adviser who knew something about the history of the region, and who didn’t look down on the ‘natives’ or ‘little brown brothers,’ as they were sometimes called. Some of our advisers, mostly the older, drunken ones from the South, even called the allies we were sent to train ‘rice niggers.’ Even if these words were spoken late at night in bars among other Americans, word got back to the South Vietnamese. It always did.
I was fortunate, too. I got a reasonably trained soldier who wasn’t in the Army to gain influence or to make money on the side, through rigged concessions to the armed forces, and who was serious about his job. One night, sharing beers, he looked at me and said, ‘Carl, my grandfather fought the Japanese, my father fought the French, and now it is my turn. But I fear I have the much worse job. I must fight my own brothers, just like you did a hundred years ago. I feel sorry for you, my friend. This is not a war of lines and campaigns. It is a civil war, a guerrilla war, and that is a hard war to fight. And one more thing!’
And what was that, I asked.
He pulled himself together, as drunk as he was. ‘You must let us fight our own battles. If we cannot defend this country on our own, then we do not deserve it. You take that message back to your superiors.’
I probably promised to do just that, but that was one promise I was never able to keep.
Through the time of the crisis I worried about other things, too, working with Nguyen. One was getting enough ammunition. Nguyen’s unit had gotten some M-ls, a great infantry weapon, though pretty heavy and unwieldy for a force that was considerably shorter in stature than the average American soldier. But before sending them out into the bush, I wanted Nguyen’s company to get enough ammunition to practice on, until they were confident with what their weapons could do. Only makes sense, ri
ght? But it took a lot of begging and work on my part, driving around Saigon to different depots and bases, looking for cases of that damn .30 caliber ammunition.
I guess it’s pretty funny, that in the last few days of peace, as missiles were readied in silos, B-52 and Bison and Bear bombers were patrolling the skies, the naval blockade was in place around Cuba and submarines were deep in the oceans, closing in on their targets, this particular soldier in Uncle Sam’s Army was trying to scrounge a few cases of ammunition.
I stopped scrounging the weekend of October 27.
On Saturday, the twenty-seventh, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba and I got word, heading off to breakfast, that in retaliation, Air Force units were bombing the SAM missile sites that had opened fire on the U-2. One old Army vet, Kyle Secord was his name, was listening to the shortwave radio we had set up in a little lounge area in our headquarters building. He was from Florida—Key West—and he was all smiles as he passed on the news. ‘That old JFK finally found his balls, boys,’ he said, in a Southern drawl. ‘Jus’ you wait, the Marines and the paratroopers will be hittin’ the shores, soon enough.’
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