"Not now, he isn't, when he has unanimous NSC meetings. But he'll howl later when his policy is a disaster. Ask General Taylor. He was at bat when the JCS didn't tell Kennedy the truth about the Bay of Pigs. None of the military chiefs believed the CIA plan would work, but they never warned the President because they thought he'd bought it already. And now it's happening again. Not a flag officer in this building thinks the way to go in Vietnam is the piecemeal build-up the President described, and very few think stabilizing the regime in Saigon should continue as our priority. Saigon won't be stable until we get the North Vietnamese off its back. The working group is unanimous on this—hit Hanoi and Haiphong, now and hard. Preempt the Chinese. Push ARVN aside and take over in the South, a quick victory, in and out. It's the only way."
"You heard the speech. On the President's scale that's the extremist way."
"Right. I forgot. The Goldilocks principle: one too soft, one too hard and one just right. The President champions the moderate course midway between the peaceniks and the warmongers."
"Not only the President, General. A unanimous NSC."
"Unanimous in seeing what Johnson wanted and giving it to him. There's a long tradition of that here. I know all about it, the goddamn chain of command, and 'chain' is right. Every military man's mind is shackled by it. His fate depends totally on pleasing the guy just above him, so the system rewards dishonesty and cowardice. People who finally make chief are just more adept at it than anybody else."
Basset shrugged again. "That's not Mr. McNamara's problem. Or Bundy's. Or Rusk's. Or Rostow's. None of them are military, but when the crunch came they saw things the way the President did at that meeting. In fact, General Dillon, that's how our system works. The President decides. The rest of us execute."
"Execute." Dillon nodded slowly. "Is that the word you'll use in drafting the secretary's personal letters of condolence to the families of KIAs? You'd better cut some stencils, because you're going to have to start using a mimeographed form letter when the Air Cav rookies hit the zone."
"Anything else, General?"
"Just tell the secretary I want to see him."
"He's very busy. You can understand."
"Funny thing, Basset. That is exactly what General Wheeler's exec said to me yesterday. Of course, he feels entitled, since by his lights, despite my uniform, I belong to the Office of the Secretary of Defense."
"Maybe you should get the message then."
"What message?"
"We all get DIA reviews and estimates. On Southeast Asia they have become utterly predictable, all too consistently negative. You glorify Ho Chi Minh's abilities, and denigrate Nguyen Khanh's."
"And I denigrated Big Minh's before him, and Ngo Dinh Diem's before him, and pretty soon I'll be denigrating a tin soldier named Nguyen Cao Ky. Khanh won't survive no matter what we do for him. None of them will. If we keep our chips on Saigon's racketeer-politicians, we lose. It's that simple. DIA estimates are not what's negative. What's negative is what's happening over there."
"You should know that Taylor and Westmoreland both have recently disparaged DIA analysis. Mr. McNamara is worried that your inflexibility is costing you your effectiveness."
"I hear regularly from my air force colleagues how my reports let them down, but they are the only ones. Is it too much to ask why other critics of DIA don't bring their complaints to me?"
"In fact, Mr. McNamara, when I spoke to him this morning, asked me to raise the issue of negativity with you. He said he would hate to see you shut out."
Shut out. Dillon recognized the words for the threat they were, the ultimate threat for men like him. It's time to get on board, General, or the train will leave without you. Johnson himself—that's what his news conference had really been—calling down the track, All aboard! The men of the NSC had heard, Basset had heard, and now Dillon was hearing. Get aboard or else you'll be shut out. This was the first time in eighteen years Dillon had heard that threat directed explicitly at himself. Year after year he had been brought in, not shut out, and by no one more powerfully than McNamara. Yet here it was McNamara's own flunky delivering the tickle, and he knew that the process of his being eased aside had already begun, even if he was just getting the message now. He knew that, because he wasn't getting it from McNamara or one of the chiefs, or vice chiefs even, like Davidson, but from this punk Ivy League whiz kid. For the first time Dillon saw the condescending Basset the way his fellow generals always had: the temple eunuch whose specialty was introducing others to his own state of emasculation.
"One further item, Mr. Basset, that you can pass on to the secretary for me." If Dillon had been a different man, a politician, say, he'd have found it possible to smile ingratiatingly here, cloaking his hostility while nursing it. But his face was wooden. Inside he felt raw. He stepped toward the door, then paused to say, "The four Chinese soldiers captured in Songbe..."
"Yes?"
"All four of them are dead, each one with a bullet to his head, executed before my people could interview them."
"Christ, who did that?"
"Tran Kim Don, the ARVN chief of staff in Phuoc Long. He did it himself."
"Jesus."
"Oh, and tell Mr. McNamara another thing. They were not Red Chinese."
"What?"
"Ethnic Chinese, from Cholon probably, but they were Vietnamese citizens. Most Chinese in Cholon are third or fourth generation. Khanh had them killed so we would not discover that they were mannequins."
"But you discovered it anyway?"
"The four were wearing People's Republic uniforms all right, but also ARVN-issue underwear and dog tags. It was a setup, a little sweetener from Khanh for the President's press conference, evidence that the Red Horde is coming."
"Jesus Christ, CIA had given him the report before you did, but as hard fact: four Chicom officers, serving as advisors to the VC, captured, debriefed, confirmed. The President was primed to use it in the Q-and-A if Red China's involvement came up."
Dillon nodded slowly. "That's what I love about this place. I had 'Dubious' stamped all over the DIA report. Dubious, Mr. Basset. Dubious."
He made it home in time for dinner. In twenty-four hours his impulse had reversed itself. He did not want now to talk to Cass about any of it. They sat in the dining room opposite each other, too far away to touch, not speaking except when Sergeant Mack came in to serve or clear. Then they both made the usual effort, the push for chat that social events in Washington often required.
— The Eastern Shore an hour closer, what with the new Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Crabs cost less on Maine Avenue now.
— Zinnias, the Officers' Wives' Club Garden Committee, the plantings at the chapel, brutal dry weather.
— Abe Fortas, who first refused the appointment to the Supreme Court, then accepted. No one refuses the President. Arthur Goldberg hated to resign from the Court for the UN.
—Maintenance should check the spot on the ceiling upstairs. The air conditioner is clanking.
Finally, when Mack came in with the coffee, Cass said, "Leave it here, Sergeant. I'll pour."
"Yes, ma'am."
And Dillon added, "You can go, Sergeant. Leave the rest."
"Thank you, sir." He collected the butter dish and the salt and pepper, then nodded at Cass. "Good night, ma'am."
"Thank you, Sergeant."
The door slapped repeatedly after him, foop, foop, on its swinging hinge.
At last Cass brought her eyes up and waited for Sean to look at her. "I watched the President's news conference yesterday."
Dillon stared mutely across the table, thinking how unlike her it was to introduce a subject that touched on his work.
Perhaps simply to deflect his mind from whatever it was his grave wife was going to say, he thought of Richard just then, of the time years before when he was expelled from the Benedictine prep school for some prank—that toilet bowl, wasn't it? How he and another boy had moved it under the chair of the statue of St. Anselm. The great Do
ctor of the Church taking a crap on the grassy circle in front of the school. Sean had had to leave the Pentagon in the middle of the day to meet the livid headmaster at the school on the far northeast side of Washington. The monk had actually begun by telling Dillon that his son would not be readmitted, and at first Sean thought surely Richard had done some heinous thing. But a toilet bowl under the grimacing saint! Richard was a boy who often failed to think things through. Sometimes Dillon thought their son had an undeveloped sense of the link between acts and consequences. But this time, despite himself, Sean Dillon had wanted to laugh, laugh out loud. A toilet bowl under a saint—it seemed more than a prank, a kind of parable, a lesson about human life, a good one. But the monk was adamant: this was a grievous violation, not just the desecration but theft, theft of the toilet. Sean couldn't believe what he was hearing. He knew already that the toilet was from a junkyard. Richard and his partner had paid a dollar for it. Every volt of the anger he'd felt toward his son all the way across Washington leapt now at the ridiculous priest. "Come, come, Father," he'd begun at one point, and within minutes he had cowed the headmaster, who relented. After the meeting, but still in the headmaster's presence, Sean had, as the situation required, sternly admonished Richard for his impudence. But also he had winked.
"Yes," Sean said to Cass, "I saw it too."
"I wanted to ask you something. Can I?"
Sean simply looked at her, not answering. He had yet to fully admit to himself how demoralized he felt, how confused about the meaning of his own situation. He was surrounded by addled headmasters of his own now, and it was far from clear he was going to be able to change their minds. He thought of the great bronze robed figure of the thirteenth century's greatest mind, sitting on a cracked modern toilet. But nothing in him now thought the figure humorous in the slightest.
"The President said they're going to double the draft calls every month." As Cass lowered her coffee cup her hand shook, and when she placed it on the saucer the china rattled.
"More than double," Sean said quietly, almost to himself. "Seventeen thousand to thirty-five."
Then she asked a question some version of which parents all over America were asking but which, in all honesty and to his instant shame on hearing it, had yet to occur to Sean Dillon. "How will the increased draft affect Richard?"
Dillon's heart sank at the thought of his son in jeopardy, like those Air Cav rookies. His son, the football player at St. Anselm's; his son, Dillon's own football. He remembered running with the boy bundled inside his arm, Rickie squealing "Touchdown!" How they would pretend to be in the end zone then, and would sing together the Redskins fight song.
He forced himself to shrug. "Richard's still in college. He has another year."
"But then?"
"A lot can happen in a year."
"Could this war be over?"
"He won't be drafted, Cass. Once he has his degree, he's a shoo-in for OCS, if it comes to that."
Cass sat there, solemn and rigid, her eyes fixed unblinking on her husband.
"Has he said something to you? Is he worried about it?"
She shook her head. "It's me. I'm the one who's worried." She smiled then. "But that's my job, isn't it?"
Eighteen
More than half a year later, Dillon's airplane crossed over the lush Mekong Valley which formed the soft belly of the country, separating it in the south from Cambodia. The craft was, even if temporarily, his own C-54, outfitted as a command plane, with a communications center tying him to ISIC in Washington. The plane also featured a dining salon that doubled as a conference room, a main cabin with a dozen rows of standard passenger seats and, aft, a section of six individually curtained-off berths for Dillon and his senior staff. In this airplane Dillon, his chief of staff, his field detachment chief, the assistant director for special activities and the assistant director for plans and programs, all flag officers, had traveled thousands of miles. In the sealed-off, fabric-on-metal world of that stainless steel tube the infinite ambiguities of the war bureaucracy did not exist, for Dillon alone held power here, over his commodore, his colonels, his brigadier generals, and even over the rated fly-boys at the controls. When, for example, they had taken off from Bangkok that morning Dillon had given the navigator his course, directing them inland, despite procedure that required unarmed aircraft to circle south and come in on Tan Son Nhut from the sea. Instead, they were making a beeline over the most hotly contested terrain in the country. He felt his stomach lurch as the plane dropped at the point where he'd told the pilot to swoop down across the Delta wetlands, overriding the air traffic controller if necessary with a claim of fuel-line problems. Now that Sean Dillon was finally here he was going to see as much of Vietnam as he could.
"Look at this, Mike." His gesture drew Packard over. Packard was the only one in civvies. His white suit had not stood up nearly as well as the military khaki the others wore, and now it was whipped-looking, his tie limp as a noodle, his shirt open above the wrinkled knot. On this trip his face always wore the shadow of his beard, as if the tropics made it grow too fast. His by now slovenly appearance was deceiving, though, because he was the one man on the plane with ready access to Dillon. There had been no need to make explicit the understanding according to which, from Andrews Air Force Base on, the others had sat at the far rear of the cabin, leaving the seats next to the director and those immediately behind him vacant. Packard's seat was in Dillon's row, but across the aisle. Periodically, at Dillon's gesture, he joined him, as now. He craned past the boss for the window.
"Jesus."
An unwavering column of intense black smoke rose into the still air from a neat angled cut in the green nubby carpet of the jungle canopy thousands of feet below. The fires that generated the smoke had peaked some time before.
"A box," Dillon said, referring to what they'd both heard described a hundred times in target briefings. A flight of six or eight B-52s in wingtip-to-wingtip formation unloads its bombs simultaneously on a "box," wiping out everything in a sharply defined rectangular area the size of downtown Washington, from the Mall to Dupont Circle, from the Capitol to Griffith Stadium.
"It seems like nowhere," Packard said. "What were they hitting?"
Dillon pointed to an area in the distance where the jungle thinned and ribbons of lights flashed along the silver dot-to-dot of canals and ditches branching out from the river proper. The rivulets fed paddies, the sure sign of settlement. "Chau Phu," he said. "So right below us must be the top of Ca Mau. There are NVA regulars positioned all through Ca Mau."
"It makes me nervous, Sean. I have to admit, looking down on the real thing. I've never seen a war."
Dillon looked over at his friend. "Admit it to me. Not to the others."
"You haven't either."
Without batting an eye, Dillon answered, "It doesn't make me nervous, Mike." He raised his hand to show Packard his palm. Dry. Once, his palms had become wet just in flying. He smiled. "You get to a certain age."
Packard looked out at the welt of cut jungle again. "It's like the slash of a lumber harvest. Look, there's another. An old one without smoke. And there's another."
The two men stared in silence as the plane went steadily lower. Soon other details of the terrain were distinguishable, so that more than the bombed swaths were evident. Along the banks of the river itself the earth was charred, having been stripped by defoliants and the flamethrowers from navy riverboats. The spikes of jungle vegetation, thickets of bamboo and leafy pole trees, shot up from the undifferentiated green. Dillon squinted down as if to look for the menace in the air, but saw only dikes, wet paddies and, once the jungle broke, carefully laid-out fields. He recognized the farming region above Can Tho.
The villages of the Mekong Delta came into view, shadowless in the hard sun, at once alien and familiar to Dillon. He knew the Delta from the air like this as well as he knew the carpet of the yard behind the house at Boiling, pebbles marking the path, Cass's flower beds and strawberries, the pleasan
tly turned soil, the square of Richard's sandbox—
The sandbox had been gone for years now, long replaced by a terraced brick barbecue. It startled Dillon to have called to mind the tidy rectangle in which his child had so loved to play. Dillon had often watched him, marveling from the second floor, and what he saw now was his son banging his toy shovel violently, an act of impatience that made Dillon want to scoop his son up, bind him in the thatch of his arms, stopping him and consoling him at the same time. He could not help for a second seeing his own father bringing his hammer down with like impatience on a recalcitrant machine. His father had been so unhappy with his dark little life in the South Side car barns, and it shocked Dillon to sense his son's capacity, despite the sunshine in which he lived, for an unhappiness of the same kind. In Dillon's memory such moments of his own acute longing and worry were often associated with Richard. They came unsummoned, a wound so secret that Dillon hardly understood it himself. His son was like a book that always fell open to the same page—a page, he admitted now, that he himself had bent back years before; his own father had bent it back before that.
He had studied hundreds of photos of the Delta terrain far more carefully than he'd ever looked down from the second floor on the yard behind his quarters, but now it struck him that the recon photos were always sepia. He had never seen the Delta colors, the dozen vivid greens as different from one another as red is from blue, the soured browns of bomb craters and scorched riverbanks and, everywhere here, the silver-blue blades of water sparkling in the dry air of the time without rain.
Packard interrupted him. "Here's the briefing book on Lodge." He handed over the thin black folder. "You probably know it all, but you may want to refresh yourself before the meeting. I'm not sure what it means for us, him running the embassy now instead of Taylor."
"I knew Taylor. I don't know Lodge."
"That's to the good, though. Right?" Packard smiled. "It means he won't know you. DIA wasn't in the lineup when he was here last. He won't know where we fit in."
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