Laughter in the Shadows

by Stuart Methven

  On the first two passes, we kicked out the sweaters and blankets. then we made additional passes for the fifty-kilogram sacks of rice. When we had shoved out the last sack of rice, we braced our feet against the door and looked out.

  The drop zone was a sea of olive-drab bundles scattered over the field. Several had broken open, leaving sweaters dangling like scarecrows from nearby trees. One goat, with a blanket draped over it, looked like the midshipmen’s mascot trotted out for the for the Army-Navy football game. Other goats and sheep grazed on the field unfazed by the bundles raining down around them.

  Two blasts on Wilson’s Model-T horn warned us to get the anvil ready, and when the green light slashed, we pushed the oilskin bundle out the door. As Wilson had predicted, the parachute opened just above the ground, but a sudden gust of wind lifted it back up, carrying it off toward North Vietnam. Then, just as suddenly, a downdraft collapsed the parachute, and the anvil careened down into the ravine. As the plane pulled up, we could see figures scrambling down to retrieve it.

  Wilson made a final pass over the DZ to signal that the drop was over. Pang Vao stood on a pile of blankets, pointing to the oilskin bundle brought back up from the ravine. He saluted, recognition of a commitment fulfilled.

  Several days after the drop, Pang Vao sent a message asking me to come to Nong Het. He would send an escort to meet me in Ban Ban.

  I flew into the new Ban Ban “airport” on the helio. The airstrip was already paying off. A lieutenant from Pang Vao’s garrison, along with two Meo guides armed with flintlocks, were waiting outside Wang Si’s office. After exchanging greetings with Wang Si, we left for Nong Het.

  At first I had little trouble keeping up with my escort, but once we began to climb into the mountains, I began to flag. After several hours, we finally stopped. A toothless old Meo stood in the middle of the trail holding out a gourd of sum-sum. Following the example of the lieutenant, I crooked my elbow and drank. The potent Meo homebrew burned down through my esophagus, then hit my stomach with such a jolt it made my eyes water. The jolt did, however, revive me, and I was able to continue our trek into the mountains.

  At dark we stopped in a Meo village. We were invited to stay with the chief and his extended family, including a dead uncle propped up in a corner of the hut with a rice bowl in his lap. I was told he would remain there until they finished hewing out his coffin.

  I slept soundly over the pigs and chickens, and the latter’s cackling awakened me in time to have a bowl of rice before setting off again. Around noon we emerged from the forest onto a rock ledge. The ledge overlooked a deep gorge with a river rushing along a series of white-water rapids. The view was spectacular, almost as spectacular as the monkey bridge spanning the gorge.

  The monkey bridge was a long tress of plaited vines, anchored at either end by gnarled saplings rubbed bare by the straining sinews, which gave them the appearance of dislocated femurs. Two vine handrails completed the bridge’s “V” silhouette.

  My hope that there was another way around the gorge was dashed when I saw one of the guides step onto the bridge. He grabbed the handrails, steadied himself, and began lithely walking across the bridge as effortlessly as a Wallanda walking the tightrope. When he stepped off onto the other side, the second guide followed him making his way across the bridge as effortlessly as the first. Then it was my turn.

  The winds had picked up, causing the bridge to sway. My feet were shaking as I grabbed the handrails, causing the bridge to sway and vibrate even more. I was sure it was going to turn upside down and drop me into the gorge, but suddenly the wind stopped gusting and I was able to put one foot in front of the other and make my way slowly across the bridge. I held so tightly onto the handrail that my palms were blistered by the time I stepped off onto the other side.

  There were to be more monkey bridges along the way, but getting across them became easier each time, with the periodic infusions of sum-sum. On the third day, the trail began to widen, and we broke out onto a dirt road. Nong Het lay just ahead.

  I looked down the road and saw that both sides were lined with Meo. Pang Vao had turned out the entire village to welcome us. The villagers were all ages and sizes; withered crones, grizzled patriarchs, warriors armed with cross bows, women with silver neckpieces, and papooses peeking over their shoulders. They all had one thing in common: they were all wearing olive-drab GI sweaters. Some had their sweaters on backwards, some had tied them around their waists. Ancien combatants stood proudly, with their medals pinned on next to toddlers with the sleeves of their sweaters touching the ground.

  A young girl in Meo costume stepped out to drape a garland of yellow poppies around my neck as I continued walking toward the village. I turned to look over my shoulder and could see that the villagers had fallen in behind me, following the Langley pied piper. I wished the director and Henry could have been there. It was their show and I was taking the bows.

  Pang Vao stood waiting under a red and white parachute canopy, next to a faded red carpet with a shiny anvil standing in the middle. After a welcoming speech, Pang Vao, the village chief, and I took our seats on a long wooden bench. A Meo shaman appeared and began chanting and sprinkling buffalo blood from his goatskin chalice over the anvil.

  After the anvil had been blessed, the ceremonial drinking of “horns” began. Water was poured into large jars filled with fermented rice, jars from which long bamboo straws protruded. The honored guest was invited to drink the first “horn.” When I had finished, water was poured from a buffalo horn into the jar to replenish the “horn” of wine that had just been drunk. The village chief then sat down, drank a horn, and passed the straw back to me.

  It was my turn again, this time to drink a horn with Pang Vao. Then another horn with the clan chief, another with the blacksmith, and the village chief’s wife, after which I began to lose count. I was so full of rice wine my eyes were watering and my stomach was turning. I would probably have keeled over and passed out if Pang Vao hadn’t rescued me by taking me away for a tour of the village. At first I reeled unsteadily beside him, but the cold air soon revived me and I could walk straight and see better.

  Nong Het was much as I remembered it from the air—clusters of stilted huts strung out along the stream running past the village, goats and sheep grazing on the slash-and-burn plots, and fields of yellow poppies backing up to the forest. It was an idyllic setting for a village so isolated—and so vulnerable.

  The following day Pang Vao and I rode ponies out of Nong Het, taking a rocky trail that led father into the mountains. After little more than an hour, we came out on a mesa overlooking a deep valley. We dismounted and sat on the ledge looking over into North Vietnam.

  Pang Vao told me his people were very thankful for the airdrop. With the sweaters and blankets and the rice, they would be able to get through the winter. There was, however, a serious security problem. Pathet Cham guerillas with Vietnamese advisers had begun to operate in the area around Nong Het. Local hunting parties had been ambushed and outlying villages raided, and although the Meo were good fighters and were not afraid, they were outgunned, their flintlocks and French fusils no match for the enemy’s AK-47s. Pang Vao added that well-armed Meo could not only defend their villages but also drive out the Pathet Cham and North Vietnamese.

  Pang Vao hadn’t given up trying to persuade me to provide arms for his Meo. I reminded him I wasn’t authorized to supply him with the weapons he needed. He nodded, but I knew he didn’t believe me.

  The Opium Poppy

  During my last day in Nong Het, I watched a bullfight between an aging bull and a Meo matador. The makeshift arena was a stubble field that backed up to a tapestry of yellow opium poppies. Sitting there watching, I remembered a conversation I had had with the then chief of staff, General Ouane. Ouane told me that if we were really interested in winning over the montagnards, we should take a leaf from the French. Buy up the opium crop. Some they shipped to France for “medicinal purposes,” and the rest they dumped int
o the South China Sea. For a million dollars a year, the French gained the loyalty of the montagnard chiefs and had no trouble recruiting their followers as maquis to operate in the highlands.

  I cabled Ouane’s recommendation to Headquarters, but there was no reply. I had to wait until I returned to Headquarters to learn why.

  In Headquarters, I heard that the director had apparently thought Ouane’s suggestion about buying up the opium had merit and raised it with the director of the Bureau of Narcotics. The latter became so apoplectic at the suggestion, the director changed the subject and dropped the matter.

  In an ironic twist, a decade later, when the drug problem was endemic in the United States, the government embarked on a massive program to buy up the worldwide opium crop, a big portion of which came from Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” and Afghanistan. By that time, however, the price of opium had gone up a hundredfold, and there weren’t any takers.

  The next day I left Nong Het with the same guides who had escorted me earlier. Pang Vao, the village chief, and the tribal elders walked out with me to the path leading into the forest. Before saying good-bye, Pang Vao took me aside, reminding me “not to forget the guns.” Pang Vao eventually got his guns, enough to arm the largest “clandestine army” in history.

  Nation Building: The Collapse

  There is a point in everything beyond which it is dangerous to go, for once you do so, there can be no turning back.

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Crime and Punishment

  Back in Viensiang, the specter of the Red Prince still haunted us. To exorcise his ghost, we recommended establishing a CUBS chapter in the capital of the prince’s home province, Phong Saly.

  A nervous province chief convoked the local populace. Oudone and one of our officers who knew the province chief flew to Phong Saly in the helio, which was loaded with civic-action kits, a flag, and pins for the new chapter. Before landing, the pilot circled over the airstrip and pointed to the provincial headquarters building where the Cham flag was flying upside down. Dropping down lower, the occupants of the helio could see that trenches had been dug across the airstrip, exposing bangalore torpedoes probably primed to explode when the plane landed.

  Phong Saly was not in friendly hands, and the helio returned to Viensang and Phong Saly remained colored red on Henry’s map.

  The Election

  You think that … you are the pursuer … that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool, it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman

  Election day finally came, and we crossed our fingers. I sat in the back of the press center set up for the foreign correspondents monitoring the election. The first returns posted were from Phong Saly, the Red Prince’s province and the one farthest from Viensiang. The posted results gave 8,535 votes for the government candidate, 140 for the Pathet Cham candidate.

  The improbable results were so lopsided in favor of the government candidate that the correspondents assumed there was the usual “communications glitch.” When the next returns came in from Sam Neua, another remote province and Pathet Cham stronghold, giving 4,302 votes to the government candidate and only 380 for the Pathet Cham, it was obvious there was more than a communications failure. The correspondents jumped up, shouting “fix” and “foul,” but the board remained unchanged. There was so much commotion that no one noticed when I slipped out the back and ran over to Colonel Sipo’s office.

  Colonel Sipo, a half-caste Vietnamese, was disliked and feared by his military colleagues. He was an ambitious officer and had persuaded General Ouane to put him in charge of “election security,” a job none of the other officers wanted. I was certain the lopsided returns were Sipo’s doing.

  When I burst into his office, Sipo was standing in front of his desk, smiling. Sipo recognized me at once and asked me how I liked the results. I told him they were a farce and I suspected he was behind it.

  Sipo was nonplused. “I don’t understand. Your CUBS candidates are winning, the Pathet Cham are losing. That’s good, isn’t it? C’est bon, n’est-ce pas?”

  I angrily replied that because of the lopsided returns, the journalists were calling the election a fraud. Sipo didn’t comment, changing the subject to ask me when I was born! The election was a shambles and here the security chief was calmly asking when I had been born. I was still furious with Sipo but knew it was no use trying to reason with the pigheaded colonel. I turned and went out the door, shouting over my shoulder as I left, “And if you must know, I was born on September 3, 1927.”

  The election center was in a state of bedlam when I returned. The clamor abated only briefly when the returns from Khamouane, another Pathet Cham stronghold, were posted and gave an unexpected 3,927 votes to the Pathet Cham candidate. “3 9 27.” My birthday! Sipo was trying to make amends.

  He couldn’t go all the way however. The government candidate got 4,108 votes.

  In the end, it did not matter, because it was too late. The correspondents had already filed their press releases describing “the death of democracy in Cham.”

  *Campbell alleged he spent the next ten years “pissing on it.”

  CHAPTER 7: Cham Coup d’Etat

  “We have done with hope and honour …

  We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung!”

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, Gentlemen–Rankers

  Our program was a shambles. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, had ridden back into Cham. An angry young parachute captain had staged a coup d’etat in Viensiang and installed the neutralist Prince Souphanna as chief of state.

  The Station was caught off guard. We had been so occupied with our own program that we had taken our eyes off the opposition, forgetting that our Soviet alter egos were not about to cede their Cham fiefdom to interlopers from Langley.

  Since the time was not yet ripe for the Soviets to intervene openly, they had scouted around for an agent of influence to keep their hand in. They found one in Prince Souphanna through their unwitting access agent, a young parachute captain.

  The coup was a victory for the anti-CUBS neutralists and spelled finis to our political action program. It was an ignominious end to a promising undertaking. The unforeseen climax left us stunned and frustrated, but we had no time for hand-wringing or recriminations. The first priority was damage control, getting rid of the evidence.

  Printing presses had to be dismantled, foreign technicians spirited out of the country, thousands of CUBS pins melted down or dumped in the Mekong. The “four horsemen” were then summoned to the same office where Henry had fired them up for the great crusade that now lay in tatters.

  Headquarters had decided that the four CUBS case officers should leave Cham immediately before they were declared personae non gratae by the new neutralist government. Henry said we were to leave with the “nonessential” embassy personnel who were also being evacuated. Henry tried to put a good face on our leaving, telling us it was a “temporary measure” and we would return to Cham once the situation stabilized.

  We did eventually return to Cham, although not to Viensiang. Henry, however, was no longer there when we returned.

  Evacuation #1

  If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world it is not worth leave-taking.

  —W. SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra

  Evacuations are benchmarks in the case officer’s family chronicle. In Bangkok, after the first evacuation, Laurie won a track meet, Kent’s first tooth came through, Gray came down with the mumps, and Megan rode in the gymkana.

  We were sad to be leaving Cham, the kingdom the world passed by. Memories of swimming with water buffalo in the Mekong, cheering on the Dutch honorary consul in the betcha (rickshaw) race, listening as the British ambassador tuned our piano, watching our offspring go off to school with their pet gibbons, leaving the mongooses in the yard to warn off cobras and constrictors. Most of all we would miss our Cham counterparts and families.

 
; It was an ignoble departure. We left like caravans in the night, a convoy of trucks and jeeps loaded with wives and children, dogs, cats, diapers, and four dispirited case officers, “baci” strings still tied around their wrists by Cham friends and counterparts during wrenching farewell ceremonies.

  Buses were waiting when we disembarked in Bangkok to drive us to the Erawan Hotel, at the time one of two large hotels in Bangkok. The maitre d’hotel was waiting out front to welcome us, buoyed by the unexpected increase in the hotel’s occupancy rate, which had dropped recently because of fears about the situation in neighboring Cham.

  We stayed in the Erawan for more than two months. When we finally left, the same maitre d’hotel was there to see us off, only by then he had had enough of the “refugees” who were not the preferred clientele for a grand hotel like the Erawan.

  During our stay in Bangkok, the four case officers were ordered to check in daily with the station chief in Bangkok, who only grudgingly accepted our presence, resenting all the attention the smaller country next door was getting back at Headquarters.

  Each day when we checked in, the reply was the same: “Nothing for the exiles.”

  By the end of the second month of diaper changing, escorting wives to the floating market and Jim Thompson’s Thai silk shop, and visiting the Bangkok zoo, we became convinced that Headquarters had forgotten us.

  Then a cable arrived, assigning a case officer named Jack as base chief in southern Cham, where the antineutralist General Novasan had set up his headquarters. A week later two other CUBS case officers got assignments, one to northern Thailand to run cross-border operations into Cham, and the other to work with Jack in southern Cham.

  I was the last to be assigned. My orders were to set up a base in Luang Prabat in northern Cham. A radio operator was already en route to accompany me to the royal capital.

  The “four horsemen” were no longer “nonessentials.”