Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  Richard took off. He ran as fast as he could, back toward the main body of the demonstration in the parking lot. The soldiers were scrambling after protesters, who were still scampering toward the Pentagon, not away from it, and so they ignored him. He cut through the crowd, more a halfback to himself than ever. By the time he hit the parking lot, the demonstrators there had turned their focus toward the battle on the embankment, and Richard was struck by the uniformity of expression on their faces: horror and anger. The huge crescent-shaped edge of the crowd stood watching the whacked-out Yippies take their beating.

  Richard pushed through them toward the platform where the band had been playing, and he took up a position near the stage, amid a small and relatively tranquil group of demonstrators. There were older people here, men and women both, professors in corduroys and Wallabees, ministers in tweed coats and clerical collars, women in wraparound khaki skirts instead of blue jeans, as well as a sprinkling of long-haired earnest young men, hard-core pacifists who no doubt disapproved of the tactics of confrontation that threatened now to turn the entire rally into a violent rout. A minister was on the platform, speaking as if the soldiers and radicals were not battling each other a mere hundred yards away.

  Richard tried to listen. Now that he had stopped, he realized how his heart was pounding and how his breath was coming in gasps. His legs were trembling. He felt nauseous. But he was surrounded here by people who seemed rooted, calm and serious. Gradually he felt their steadiness coming to him, and he found it possible actually to understand what the minister was saying.

  "We are not here to defy the rule of law. . . "He was speaking from note cards, not ranting or extemporizing but presenting a firm, thought-out position. His voice was powerful above them, and to Richard the minister's evident self-possession seemed an antidote to his own inner quaking. "...but to redeem the system of constitutional government. We will no longer let the vulnerable young expose themselves alone to its fury, and that is why we join them in committing this act of direct resistance to the war and the draft. There are twenty-seven young men representing Resist groups from all over the country. They will come forward now to present to us the draft cards turned in locally by those groups, so that we in turn may present them, by prearrangement, to the chief marshal here at the Pentagon, and through him to the court of the United States. Those others of us who want to include their own draft cards are encouraged to do so. We will thus, in a simple ceremony, make concrete our affirmation of support for these young men who are the spearhead of direct resistance to the war and all of its machinery."

  The group applauded, a subdued, polite reaction in marked contrast to the pitched battle still in progress on the slope between the parking lot and the river entrance.

  The minister received several bundles of cards from the representatives who came forward solemnly, as in church. "Ceremony," he had said, and it was true. Richard felt that he was witnessing a holy ritual.

  "Who is that?" he asked a woman next to him.

  "Bill Coffin, the Yale chaplain. He just read Mitch Goodman's statement."

  "Mitch Goodman?"

  "The poet, the head of Resist."

  Reverend Coffin held up a cloth sack into which the draft cards had been so liturgically placed. He announced, "Section Twelve of the National Selective Service Act commands that we shall not aid, abet or counsel men to refuse the draft. But when young men refuse to allow their conscience to be violated by an unjust law and a criminal war, then it is necessary for their elders—their teachers, ministers, friends—to make clear their commitment, in conscience, to aid, abet and counsel them against conscription. We too must be arrested, for in the sight of the law, we are now as guilty as you are." Coffin leapt from the stage to stand in front of it.

  A second, more spontaneous procession began as other young men, and older men too, the professors and old lefties, filed forward to add their draft cards to those collected in advance. They dropped their cards into the bag with due solemnity; a few felt compelled by emotion to make brief, halting statements, but most carried out the act in silence.

  Richard could hardly breathe, watching them. He stood on the edge, hugging his chest, which still ached from the exertion of his flight and from the pounding it was taking from his heart. No one looked at him, for which he was grateful. He felt quite naked and helpless, and like everyone else in that corner of the mad, desperate apocalypse of a demonstration, he was riveted by the sight of American men putting their entire futures in jeopardy for the simple sake of conscience.

  Richard's hand went to his back pocket for his wallet. The movement was subtle, sly almost, but he was fully aware of it, and aware of its implication. Without fumbling in the slightest he withdrew the small stack of cards he carried, his library card, his UVA ID, his driver's license, his social security card and, on the bottom, his draft card. "Classification," he read, "2-S."

  He was in law school, he admitted for the first time, only for the sake of that very number and letter, the precious exemption it offered. He felt ashamed of himself for the glib self-righteousness of his rejection of the war till then. It had cost him nothing, and he had risked nothing, while Vietnamese and Americans both were dying now in droves. His very acknowledgment of that disparity seemed itself a new kind of conscription, drafting from within him at last a rare sacrificial impulse.

  He had joined the procession and found himself at the head of it, faced with the stern but steady-eyed Reverend Coffin, who was extending the sack toward him. Richard hesitated. The minister nodded and looked at him for an instant with such compassion, and also with such confidence, that his doubt evaporated. He dropped his card into the bag, then walked away feeling, despite having literally discarded something, more as if he had received, much more than he ever had at the communion of the Mass.

  His path away from the platform took him toward the Pentagon for some yards, and his gaze quite naturally lifted to the place where before he'd imagined the Cyclops eye. The eye was gone. He no longer felt afraid. Not giddy either, or high, as he had on the bridge. He had never felt like this before, yet the feeling was familiar. How does it feel?

  Like I am Richard Dillon, not someone's son.

  For a while Richard would revel in the apparent contradiction—as if he were not meant to be both himself and his father's son—and he would love his sense of freedom from it.

  If Richard had been able actually, from that distance, to single out the window of his father's office, he'd have seen that, like most windows on that side of the Pentagon, it was blank. Early that morning custodians had gone through the offices on the mall side, dropping Venetian blinds. In the VIP suites, like the DIA director's, there were also heavy serge draperies to draw across the windows, and in those rooms the outside world was thoroughly sealed off.

  Since it was Saturday, General Dillon and his colleagues were dressed in mufti. They had begun the morning affecting a weekend nonchalance, but as the hours passed, even if they could barely hear it, they knew the huge demonstration was building to a climax. But the real urgency they felt had nothing to do with Jerry Rubin's psychopathic exorcism, or with the frenzy with which green, frightened GIs were holding off the ragtag army of nut-case radicals and spaced-out flower children outside.

  Sean Dillon was closeted with his deputy director for JCS matters, his assistant chiefs of staff for technical application and for targets, the chief of the Southeast Asia Task Force and the chief of the Field Activities Division. Various other experts and analysts came and went from the DIA conference room as their viewpoints were required.

  Dillon had called this meeting because of an unusual piece of human intelligence that had come in the day before. A Communist doctor who treated senior Hanoi officials, and who also served as a deep-cover DIA agent, had sacrificed his position to come out with his urgent report. The elite NVA 304th Division, which had led the assault on Dien Bien Phu and which had since served as the heart of the home guard around Ho and the other rulers of
North Vietnam, had suddenly been withdrawn from its quite visible posting in the capital. Not only was the inner core of the government left vulnerable by this maneuver, but the famous division itself had all but disappeared.

  When this word had come in the day before, Dillon had ordered a special new analysis of data from all sources that tracked the movements of troops from North to South. The most recent reports from the ground reconnaissance teams—SOGs—were not available yet because MacAuliff, in Saigon, still controlled them, but the evidence of aerial photography, infrared radar directed from airplanes, NSA signal intercepts that snatched the radio communications of Communist commanders out of the air and even the acoustic needle sensors sown along the Trail all suggested—but at most—a slight uptick in the levels of movement. Even that was occurring only along the northern stretch of the Trail.

  "Khe Sanh," the JCS general said at one point. "Westmoreland is certain the Reds are preparing to take the bait at Khe Sanh."

  A Marine Corps general, Bailey, snorted. The marines manned the remote garrison in the far northwest corner of South Vietnam. He objected not to the reference to the marines as bait, but to the fact that it was true.

  Dillon eyed the marine. "This is the trap Westmoreland has been laying for months, hoping to draw the NVA into a big-unit siege once and for all. He wants Dien Bien Phu all over again. But this time we win."

  The others said nothing.

  Dillon toyed with a pencil. "Our job is not to second-guess General Westmoreland's strategy but to provide him with the intelligence he needs to make it work."

  The JCS general said, "MacAuliff's urgent request, endorsed by General Wheeler, is for a redeployment of all-source collection to the Khe Sanh sector. They want us to focus on the DMZ, the area east of Tchepone and the routes into the valley itself."

  "To do that we lose coverage of the Trail farther south, leading into the Central Highlands, II Corps and III"—this was General Hickox, the Southeast Asia Task Force chief—"exposing the populated heart of the country. We'd have to pull infrareds and eyeballs off the Sihanouk Trail, leaving Saigon a question mark. Why is Westy stuck on Khe Sanh?"

  "Khe Sanh is crucial," Bailey said.

  "Then why did the French abandon it without a fight, and why has it been ignored for years? It's an old outpost, high on a plateau hundreds of miles from anything that matters."

  "Quang Tri matters."

  "Gentlemen," Dillon said impatiently, "Khe Sanh matters because General Westmoreland says it does. It's where he wants to take on the enemy. Our question is simple. Has the enemy begun to accept the invitation?"

  "What if it's a feint? We look toward Khe Sanh and he comes the other way."

  Dillon nodded, and he touched the stack of briefings on the table in front of him. "First data suggests that the upsurge, if that's what it is, is restricted to the North. Here is what we do. We give the whole Trail a once-over, from Tay Ninh in III Corps to Dak To in II Corps. Eyeball, signals, sensors, everything. If there is still no change in movement south, then we go with MacAuliff, all the way. We move everything but the skeleton into I Corps, concentrate on routes into Khe Sanh. Westmoreland's strategy, gentlemen, depends on us. If Khe Sanh is it, and if there's going to be a difference between the Americans and the French, it's going to be that we could tell the soldiers on the ground well ahead of time exactly what the enemy was doing. And there are fliers in the air waiting on us as well."

  From that day on, the various intercept devices and systems continued sending back signals of gradually increasing movement in the jungles of the North, nothing untoward in the South. Within weeks, SOGs confirmed the NVA 304th itself, a force of fifteen thousand crack soldiers, massed in the hills just across the Laotian border from Khe Sanh. In late November Sean Dillon authorized a fifty-thousand-dollar bribe to bring across from Hanoi a long-cultivated defector, who reported, among other things, that General Vo Nguyen Giap, vanquisher of France, had moved into Laos to take command of the forces of which the 304th was the spearhead. Its only conceivable target was Khe Sanh. That was enough for Dillon. Now mirroring Westmoreland, he deployed every available intelligence asset to I Corps, where fully half of the American maneuver battalions had been sent. In December President Johnson had a sand-table model of the Khe Sanh plateau and the surrounding valleys set up in the White House Situation Room. The President, his high-toned civilian advisors and his generals were agreed in believing that the trap of Khe Sanh was finally going to justify the two and a half years of Vietnam agony.

  The siege did not commence. Christmas came and went. The concentration of the American military leaders was more focused than at any prior point in the war. They had a strategy at last that showed every sign that it would work. Now if Giap would only move.

  Not even the increasingly outrageous acts of antiwar protesters—Roman Catholic priests pouring ducks' blood on draft files!—could usurp the generals' attention or undermine their conviction that the surest way to the peace they longed for too lay in convincing Ho Chi Minh he could not prevail. Nor was Sean Dillon's attention diverted by the effective disappearance from his life of his son. Richard's absence, frankly, was a relief. As the weeks passed, Dillon was as obsessed and became, perhaps despite himself, as hopeful as anyone in the Pentagon—or in Pentagon East, for that matter. He presided with scrupulous, tireless devotion over the reception and analysis of data from all sources, the radar, the sensors, the signal intercepts, the airborne eyeballs, the face-painted recon teams. Each bit of hard intelligence had registered individually at first, as the movement of a single truck, say, then as the movement of a unit, then as a larger force, up to the size of a battalion. Then the incoming data along the northern leg of the Ho Chi Minh Trail registered as something else. After the new year—it was January 1968 now—the tempo of signals suggesting movement suddenly increased, like the first rapid clicks of a Geiger counter sensing radiation, pushing a needle up a dial, toward the danger zone, the red.

  Through the night-reflecting prism beads of rain and the slap-slap of windshield wipers, Richard saw the figure of the air policeman step out of the spotlighted gatehouse. The white of his peaked hat was clouded by the plastic rain cover, and his long blue raincoat reached to below his knees, which gave him the silhouette, in Richard's mind, of a German storm trooper.

  Richard slowed his car, reaching to the dash to notch his headlights down to the parking lights.

  Instead of waving him through, the AP raised his hand.

  Richard cursed. He hadn't thought of this when he'd scraped the base sticker from the bumper of his car. The three silver stars had always elicited heel clicks and salutes from these guys.

  He rolled the window down.

  The AP leaned to him, a neutral, acne-scarred face. He wore two stripes on his sleeve, an airman second, a kid, younger than Richard was himself.

  "Good evening," the air force cop said noncommittally. "Would you state your business, please?"

  "Hi. I'm General Dillon's son. I'm visiting my parents." Richard smiled in a friendly way, but he sensed that the airman knew how false it was. He noticed the AP's eyes checking out his hair, which was way too long for this place.

  "May I see your ID, please?"

  "I'm not his dependent anymore, I'm just his son." Richard hadn't thought of this either when he'd thrown out his air force ID card. He hadn't thought of a lot of things.

  The air policeman nodded, then straightened up. "If you'll wait a moment, please. I have to call for authorization."

  "Call who?"

  "General Dillon's quarters."

  "Wait a minute, wait." The rain was coming in Richard's window. He felt the cold drops on his face as he looked up at the AP. "It's a surprise," he said. "I haven't been home in a while. They don't know I'm coming."

  The AP shook his head. "Without ID, I'm required—"

  "Is Sergeant Briggs around? Does he still work the gate?"

  "Sergeant Briggs is off duty."

  "I know him, and
I know Sergeant Kaiser."

  The AP hesitated. "Sergeant Kaiser is on the other gate tonight."

  "Could you call him? Tell him Rich Dillon just wants to surprise his folks. He knows me. He knows this baby." Richard patted the wheel of his car, the blue Fairlane.

  The AP stepped back, looked the car over, then turned and went into the guardhouse. A moment later he came back out.

  Richard's shoulder was wet from the rain coming in his window.

  "Okay," the AP said, and he waved Richard through without saluting.

  Once on base, it amazed Richard how instinctively the turns on those streets came, even at night, even in the rain. On one side, the theater, the bowling alley, the USO, the chapel, the commissary. On the other, the back ends of hangar after hangar, the Base Ops Building, the barracks, the headquarters of the air force band. As he gunned up the hill toward the Officers' Club—he saw the shrouded swimming pool and remembered those summers when he'd been a lifeguard—he stopped resisting the powerful flood of his nostalgia. This crisp, ordered world had once been so much his; he remembered feeling like a prince in a privileged kingdom. What hit him now, as he rounded the last curve into Generals' Row, was not the loss of the perfect order but the loss of the absolute sense of virtue he had so long associated with this world. The people here had been the guardians of the world's freedom, but now they—

  He remembered listening from his lifeguard seat that last summer to a knot of laughing young fighter jocks lounging by the pool. One had been describing his first sortie over Vietnam with dramatic hand motions and sound effects. Every time he'd used the word "gook," he'd said "fucking."