A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  No one said a thing.

  When they made the turn into traffic at the end of the drive he half expected to see noodle restaurants beside the cinema with its cheap imported karate thriller—but there were record shops and farmacias instead and the street vendors sold roasted nuts and empanadas and the city smell was of cigars and pomade and dust instead of fish sauce and incense and bougainvillea.

  Some things were the same though. The empty stares, the demented traffic—even the newly built bus station had about it something of the curving hand-me-down art deco of downtown Saigon. There were beggars clustered about its doors with little paper cartons full of cigarettes or chewing gum and fruit or sometimes only brown outstretched open palms. And the markets would be behind the bus station, where they always were, in Tecan as in Danang or Hue.

  “As close to the bus station as you can get,” Bob Cole said, “will suit me fine.”

  “You’re not trying for Extremadura tonight?” Marie protested. “You’ll get there in the wee hours. You’ll have no place to sleep.”

  “My little red book says there’s a through bus in two hours,” Cole told her. “I’ll wander around town a little and get it.”

  When they pulled up at the bus station both Tom and Marie turned around to check that their car was out of traffic.

  “Stay the night with us,” Marie said. Tom, beside her, was nodding.

  “No, thanks,” Cole told them. “Look,” he said to Tom Zecca, “maybe someone from the consular office should know I’m up there. If that’s the case, you tell them. O.K.?”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Zecca said. “That’s the advice of the consular office. As conveyed by me.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Cole said. He climbed out of the car and started into the crowds in front of the bus station. The beggars were on him at once.

  “How do you like that?” Marie said. “He’s out of his mind.”

  Carefully Zecca pulled the car into traffic again, and rounded the bus station block.

  “He broke up with his wife,” Tom said. “I think I remember him telling me that.”

  In the market behind the station the stalls were beginning to close. The streets at this end of the city were very like the streets at the lakeside with their mud roadways and high broken curbs. The same morose groups were gathered at corners.

  “Shit, the guy’s crazy,” Zecca said. “He’ll get macheted up there. And he better not wander off from the bus station or he won’t even get that far. This is no town for midnight strolls.”

  The Zeccas lived in a house high on the slope above the town, a street of middle-class houses with little stucco walls in front of them. At the end of their comfortable street, the shacks began, cut off from the bourgeois fortress by a barricade of barbed wire, rusted road signs and sheet metal: as they drove the Honda into their garage and began unloading their gear, a chorus of unseen dogs set up a cry from one end of the street to the other.

  A smiling young maidservant met them at the door. She took as many of their cases as she could manage and led them into the living room.

  The house was new but tasteful and pleasant in a severe colonial style. The tiles looked as though they might have come from Spain, the oak beams were weathered and supported at their moldings by metal studs. Oak beams were not just for fun in Tecan—the number and mortality of her earthquakes was appalling.

  It was a small house, by no means sumptuous, with a homely American smell.

  Marie argued the maid out of making them dinner and sent her back to her quarters to watch television. The television was in the maid’s room and her opportunity to watch the dubbed soap operas had made her the foremost storyteller in her barrio.

  “Well, we can go out or I can make us up something simple. Like ham and eggs.”

  “There’s a big production of a place, La Finca, a few blocks from here,” Tom Zecca said. “Steak in the local style. Muy Auténtico. Lots of music and red bandanas flapping.”

  “Speaking just for me,” Holliwell said, “I’m not very hungry. But I’ll go along with anything.”

  “Well, I’m not too hungry myself,” Zecca said. “Don’t know why.”

  “Maybe no one’s hungry,” Marie said.

  “Looks like no one is,” Tom said. “But I think everyone would like a drink.” Holliwell nodded gratefully.

  They took margaritas in a small garden, closely bound by vine-covered walls and banana trees. There was barely room in it for the green metal table and the chairs that had been set around it. Marie put out glasses and two large blenders full of margaritas.

  “Someday,” she told Holliwell, pouring the drinks into the frosted glasses, “I’ll tell you about the day I was sitting out here and an iguana fell in my lap.”

  Tom took his drink. “And me—goddamn it—I missed it. I was at the office. I have to reconstruct the whole scene in my imagination.”

  “As I remember it,” Marie said, “the cops came. People poured into the street, crossing themselves.”

  They drank and after a moment Tom said: “What about that Cole guy? Now there’s a questionable character.” It struck Holliwell as odd that Captain Zecca would raise the matter of Cole’s question-ability with him. He looked across the table and saw that Marie was shaking her head sadly. Perhaps they were just relaxing.

  “I suppose the question about Cole,” Holliwell said, “is who he thinks he is and what he thinks he’s doing.”

  “Do you mean does he think he’s Régis Debray?”

  “No,” Holliwell said, “I mean beyond that.”

  “Beyond that?” Zecca asked. “Beyond that isn’t necessarily my business. Beyond that he’s a Vietnam burn-out. A pilgrim.”

  “There’s a lot of us,” Holliwell said.

  “You see yourself as a burn-out?” Marie asked. She turned to her husband. “I wouldn’t have described him that way.”

  “Maybe just badly seared,” Holliwell said.

  “Everyone that ever saw that place is a little fucked up,” Tom said, leaning his stocking feet on the delicate table. It was easy to picture him at the Diplomat Hotel or some BOQ bar, a younger man, harder case, second-generation tough, hungry. “It was the dumbest damn thing we ever did as a country, no question about it.”

  “Well, we told them so at the time,” Marie said. “Nobody listened until it was too late.”

  “No,” Holliwell said, “we told them and they didn’t listen.”

  “AID?” Zecca asked. “That was your cover?”

  Holliwell became afraid. It was a misunderstanding.

  “It wasn’t a cover,” he insisted. “I wasn’t an intelligence specialist or even a contract employee. I mean, you know how it is.” He was staring at his drink. The Zeccas watched him. “They come to you. Someone has a girlfriend in Saigon, he wants to stay there, so he has to make work for himself, he has to make up a report to file. So what an anthropologist knows—family relationships, the relationship of an uncle to a nephew, a younger cousin to an older cousin—it all goes into the hopper. Nobody gives a shit about it—maybe nobody ever looks at it. But it ends up—pardon the expression—intelligence.”

  “We know exactly what you mean,” Marie Zecca said.

  “Did you learn the language?” Tom asked him.

  “I picked up a certain residue. No,” he said. “I never really did. I depended on a few local people and we spoke mainly in French.”

  The thought came to Holliwell that he had spent much of his life depending on a few local people, speaking some lingua franca, hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate. That was his relationship with the world. And he himself—more and more losing touch with the family he had made, a bastard of no family origin, no blood or folk. A man from another planet forever inquiring of helpful strangers the nature of their bonds with one another.

  “I don’t know how I got into family structures,” he heard himself tell the Zeccas. T
equila. Insidious. “It was archaeology I liked. The ruins, the traces, you know. I would have liked, I think, to dive. To dive for galleons.”

  “Maybe you will yet,” Marie said.

  “The family,” Holliwell said. “It’s so strange, you know. I never had a family of my own to speak of. And the one I’ve raised I don’t believe I understand at all. As far as other people’s families go—I’m absolutely ignorant.”

  “Christ,” Tom Zecca said. He was relaxed now, merry with the end of the drive. “With guys like you in the shop no wonder we lost the goddamn war in Nam.”

  They all laughed.

  “No,” Zecca said, touching his arm to reassure him. “I’m kidding you, bro. You’re O.K. You’re a straight shooter.”

  “I hope our friend Cole comes down O.K. He worries me a little.”

  “How about it, Holliwell?” Captain Zecca asked. “You think he’s a spook?”

  “You’d probably know more about that than I would,” Holliwell said warily.

  “I’ll tell you something, Doc Holliwell … I don’t know much until I read my mail—that’s the situation we’ve got working here. Maybe there’s a line on him in the pouch tomorrow.”

  And maybe, Holliwell thought, a line on me.

  “Well,” Marie said, “he’ll be up there tomorrow wandering about among all those disgruntled macheteros. Feel for him, guys.”

  “We do,” Holliwell said.

  “Poor useless bastard,” Zecca said, pouring out his creamy margarita. “He doesn’t know who he works for and he doesn’t know what side he’s on. Even if he’s ours, he’s not a hundred percent sure. You take a dude like that and the next thing you know you’ve got a double agent, the most dangerous goddamn creature walking.”

  “They have short life spans,” Marie said, “that’s one thing about them.”

  “That’s the only good thing,” Zecca said.

  Marie moved the second blender into position.

  “But damnit, those people up there are screwed. They’re getting dumped on in the most incredible fashion.”

  “You better believe it,” the captain said. “For untold fucking generations they’ve been living on beans and lizards to grow coffee for the bastards that run this country. Now we’ve found copper up there and the idiot greedhead generals who own it are throwing them off the land—sending them down here to beg or starve. Nah,” Zecca said, “who am I to knock Cole? It’s no wonder they’re righting back.”

  “Are they?” Holliwell asked him.

  “Are they seriously fighting back? I wish I knew. I’m supposed to. I can’t depend on dip-shits like Cole. One of these days I’m going to have to exercise my ass and go find out. I go up there in a chopper and they’ve got the weaponry, I’ll know in a big hurry.”

  “It’s not worth worrying about,” Marie said. “If this place goes, they know where to find us. We’re fatalists. That’s what you’ve got to be, see. You’ve got to be a fatalist.”

  They drank from the second blender.

  “How much do you know for sure?” Holliwell asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”

  “O.K.,” Zecca said. “There’s a basic, quite justified piss-off all over the country. It’s particularly strong up in the Sierra where the Atapas live and the Atapas have a history of banditry and trouble-making. They can handle modern weapons but we don’t really know if they have any or if they have, what sort. If they’ve got, say, ground-to-air missiles—El General is in big trouble. Likewise if they’ve got a big cache of AKA’s. Here in town, anyone with a brain or an honest buck to turn hates the government but probably won’t move. Here the trouble is students, rich kids most of them—they’re divided into factions, Fidelistas, Trots, Maoists—the usual spectrum. Over on the east coast people tell you time stands still, nobody expects trouble over there. In my opinion that’s complacent because if anybody lands armament it’ll be over there, not on the Pacific coast. And it’s hard to fly stuff in here because we gave them an outrageous air force and we trained them in radar detection.”

  “Sounds sort of standard,” Holliwell said.

  “It’s not, though. Because now the morons who run this joint have given every anti-government faction a common cause with that copper grab. The unemployment rate is like sixty percent here. The streets are full of teen-age kids with nothing to do but rip off what-ever’s handy and go to the karate movies. You could make a tough little army out of those kids. Inept, disorganized, sure. But you’d have to kill whole bunches of them—they’d be the cannon fodder. El General would stink worse than usual in the nostrils of the world. Bad scene,” Zecca said. “The question is—does the Guardia stay loyal? Answer—probably.”

  “And when the Guardia goes in—we advise them?”

  “Mr. Holliwell,” Zecca said. “Doctor! We put this government in for our own interests. We trained the Guardia. Our ambassador thinks the Pres and his family are American-type people.”

  “There’s a grain of truth in that,” Marie Zecca said.

  “You’re a Communist,” Captain Zecca told his wife. “She sings ‘Guantanamera’ at embassy lawn parties.”

  “Under my breath,” Marie said. “Fat Frank wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it anyway.”

  “O.K.,” Zecca said, “the Guardia will have American weapons and support. The support will be mealy-mouthed and covert but it will be there.”

  “And what do honest folk like ourselves do then, Captain Zecca?” Holliwell inquired.

  Zecca put away another margarita.

  “It’s too late. It’s too late, understand. The usual shit will go down. You and I, Doc, maybe we know something about the country. But it’s too late. If we don’t back them now, we’ll have a Russian submarine base in Puerto Alvarado—maybe a missile base this time. See how that goes over in Dubuque, in Congress, in the White House, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Fucked again,” Holliwell said.

  “I’ll be gone,” Zecca said. “My tour is almost up. Then they can send in the types who like the Guardia’s style. The headhunters, the Cubans, the counterinsurgency LURPS’s. And the guys who enjoy saluting animals in tailor-made pink uniforms.”

  “And where will you be then?”

  “I don’t know,” Zecca said. “Not some place like this. They owe me.”

  “It’s not all one thing or another, you know,” Marie said. “It’s not us being bad guys all the time. Only assholes think that. Pious assholes.”

  “Don’t call him a pious asshole,” Captain Zecca commanded his wife.

  “I don’t mean him,” Marie said, and Holliwell thought she was beginning to cry. “I don’t mean you,” she assured him. “I agree with you. I don’t even mean Cole and Cole really is a pious asshole.”

  “You have to go on hoping for the best,” Zecca said.

  Marie nodded. “You have to have faith.”

  “Only pious assholes have faith, Marie,” the captain said.

  “Up yours,” Marie told him. Holliwell drank another margarita. It was all in fun.

  “Let me tell you something,” the captain said suddenly to Holliwell. “In Nam I spent two years in combat intelligence. In that time I interrogated maybe hundreds of prisoners and chieu hois and I never once let the Arvins get away with torturing any. I’m speaking of torture in the strict sense. I never did, in any of the time I was in that place, anything I thought was cruel or dishonorable. You believe me?”

  “Of course,” Holliwell said.

  “I never sat still for shooting up civilians, not even up north. I never clipped an ear or set fire to a hootch and I never countenanced it. I conducted that fucking war honorably and so did my people. I did that to the greatest possible extent, sir, and it wasn’t easy in my position. Moreover, I thought it was a crock, a stupid hopeless crock. It was dumb and it was inhuman by its nature. But me,” Zecca said, turning his fingertips inward and tapping his heart, “I’m not. I make that claim.”

  “It’s true,” Marie said.


  “I don’t claim virtue,” Zecca declared. “I don’t claim to be a kindly man. I claim to be capable of honor.”

  “I also claim that,” Holliwell said.

  “I took an oath,” Zecca said. “I fulfilled it and I fucking fulfilled it without compromising myself. Takes a little working at.”

  “Surely,” Holliwell said.

  “The Army didn’t send me down here to be a chaplain to the peasantry or to feed the birds or conduct an agrarian reform. It sent me down because I’m supposed to know about the lay of the country from a military point of view. In terms of intercontinental defense.”

  “Of course,” Holliwell said, “intercontinental defense. And you’re beginning to feel compromised?”

  “No,” Zecca said quickly. “Not at this point.”

  “Excuse me,” Holliwell said. “Do you expect to conduct your career in one American-sponsored shithole after another, partying with their ruling class, advising their conscripts in counterinsurgency and overseeing their armaments, and not compromise your oath or your honor? Because that sounds very tricky to me.”

  “You don’t know the facts, mister,” Marie said.

  “I know a few,” Holliwell said. “Beyond that I know what you tell me.”

  “I know what you know,” Zecca said. Holliwell folded his hands on the metal table. In the circumstances, he had gone too far. “And this is what I tell you—that when they evict those people over the mineral rights, I hope to Christ we’ll be on our way to another posting. O.K.—that’s a cop-out, it’s a quease. But you’ve got to think in terms of the larger scale, the …”

  “The Big Picture.”

  “The Big Picture,” Zecca said with a grim smile. “Thank you, sir. But you don’t know what’s really going on here. Neither does Cole. He thinks he does but he doesn’t. He knows more than me but I know more than him, do you follow me?”