War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  ‘Thank you,’ Ryan said, and surreptitiously checked his watch.

  ‘I especially enjoyed what you said about Vietnam. I think it was so important what you and your fellow news correspondents did. It meant a lot to the boys over there.’

  ‘I like to think so. But think people see the war in a different perspective now.’

  ‘You must have been so relieved when it was all over.’

  ‘Not really. I was a bit sorry, to be honest.’

  It was out of his mouth before he could stop himself. She stared at him, stunned. ‘You cannot mean that.’

  ‘I’d go back there tomorrow if they decided to have a rematch.’

  ‘Why would you want to go back to a place like that?’

  ‘I had a good time. We got to play with guns, ride in helicopters, see things getting blown up. If you’ve never done a combat landing in a C-130 you haven’t lived. Major pucker factor. It’s like riding the biggest rollercoaster in the world with the most fantastic firework display ever staged going on around you. To be brutally frank with you, I loved every minute of it.’

  ‘My son died in Vietnam,’ the woman said, and walked away.

  Mickey emerged from the ladies’ rest room. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I’m fine. Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Who was that woman? She’s crying. What did you say to her?’

  ‘Let’s just get out of here.’

  Why did I say that? You don’t have to tell people you enjoyed it. Maybe you did, but it wasn’t the only reason you were there. You and Spider and Cochrane and Croz and the rest, you made a difference. Someone had to be there to show up the lies and turn the tide of opinion back home.

  Why did you want that woman to hate you?

  Chapter 55

  He threw back the bedclothes, swung his legs out of bed and padded across the carpet to the window. The street lamps were still lit, but the sun was creeping up the sky, pale and wintry. On Wisconsin cars were heading towards the parkways and train stations. Washington was getting ready for another day.

  Mickey was dead to the world. She had worked another overtime shift at the hospital. God alone knew why. They didn’t need the money; he had told her that.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her sleep. She always slept in a T and scrub pants. She said that when she first got to Vietnam she was posted to the 71st Evac at Pleiku, and one night they had come under mortar fire. She had leaped out of bed and run straight into the nearest bunker, and had to spend the entire twenty minutes of the bombardment crouched in the dark stark naked, surrounded by a dozen sweating soldiers. Since then she had never slept in the raw again.

  She was grinding her teeth again. He brushed a lock of hair from her face. Her eyes blinked open, and she looked startled. Then she frowned, rolled onto her side and went back to sleep.

  He kissed her on the forehead and slipped on his dressing gown. He went downstairs and made a cup of strong black coffee. While it was filtering he stripped the Washington Post and the New York Times from their plastic wrappers.

  US CONSIDERING EMERGENCY ARMS FOR EL SALVADOR

  IP A, Washington: Secretary of State George Schultz said today the Reagan administration is considering giving El Salvador emergency military aid, without waiting for Congress to act, so its army can maintain pressure on the insurgents in the coming election period . . .

  He threw the newspaper on the breakfast bar in disgust. Whoever had written the story, or whoever had edited it, had made no attempt to balance Schultz’s view of the world. Why didn’t they just print the press releases? It wasn’t journalism, it was propaganda.

  No matter what they thought in Loudon County, he and his fellow correspondents had changed nothing, and nothing had changed. They were still going down the same road, making the same mistakes, killing the wrong people, committing the same unpardonable sins. Here was a country founded on the principles of democracy, yet it was exporting murder and oppression because its leaders didn’t believe democracy was enough on its own.

  He went back upstairs to shower. He stood with his back against the cold tiles and let the hot needles of water play on his scalp. He thought about his day: Larry Speakes’ office, 9.15, for the press briefing; rest of the day digging around for the real story, everything Speakes hadn’t told them. Just like the Five O’clock Follies.

  I’d rather be back at Quang Tre. At least I knew who was shooting at me.

  * * *

  They had just got through another mas-cal; Mickey stumbled bone-weary from the ER into the room where they put the expectants. It stretched forever, row upon row of gurneys, jungle boots, and tom and bloodied fatigues. She looked down at one of the litters and there was the Vietnamese boy the paramedics had brought in from the street. His eyes blinked open and he smiled. He was holding a grenade.

  … She sat bolt upright in the bed, her body slick with sweat. It took her a few moments to remember where she was. She looked out of the window at the dawn creeping up the Georgetown sky.

  She swore softly and lay down again.

  She heard the thud of rotors overhead. There was someone in the hallway: Mickey, hurry, mas-cal. She swung her legs out of bed and threw open the door, expecting to see the other nurses rushing past in their olive-green uniforms. But the landing was empty.

  She heard Ryan in the shower.

  Fuck. Her heart was racing. She leaned on the banister at the top of the landing and took a deep breath. Calm down.

  She went downstairs to the kitchen. Ryan had left coffee on the range. She poured some, straight and black, into a china mug and took two muffins out of the refrigerator. Her head was pounding. She felt as if she hadn’t slept all night.

  Why were the dreams coming back now, after all these years? She thought she was through all that. The war was years ago.

  She put the muffins in the toaster.

  They wouldn’t go down. They wouldn’t go down. The fucking muffins wouldn’t go down!

  * * *

  Ryan stared at the orderly rows of suits and shirts hanging in his wardrobe, a regiment of respectability arrayed for his inspection. We become what we hate.

  He heard a crash from downstairs, the sound of breaking crockery. He took the stairs two at a time, launched himself into the kitchen, thinking she had fallen. Mickey stood in the middle of the kitchen in her T-shirt, arms folded. The toaster lay at her feet; the coffee percolator had been swept from the counter and lay in a litter of glass and coffee grounds on the tiled floor.

  ‘What happened?’ he said.

  ‘The muffins wouldn’t go down,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand it when the muffins won’t go down.’

  He tip-toed through the shards of glass and wrapped his arms around her. It was like holding a storefront manikin. ‘The muffins won’t go down,’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, but he knew that it was not all right. Perhaps it was just hormones, because of the baby. He hoped so. Because if this was about Vietnam, then Mickey was in big trouble.

  Chapter 56

  They had built the press room over what had once been President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s indoor swimming pool. Over the years the press contingent had expanded and now the room was very cramped indeed. All the networks had booths at the back, they had originally been designed for two people, but now they accommodated at least four, seated side by side along narrow counter tops crammed with typewriters, word processors, printers, newspapers, press releases, make-up kits, books, televisions, radios and empty coffee cups. Every morning the reporters and their crews had to pick their way over video cameras, television cables and recording equipment to find a seat in the briefing room.

  Normally it was bedlam, but when Ryan got to work that morning there was a funereal hush around the room, knots of journalists sitting around talking in huddles. He found his soundman, Larry Norstadt. ‘Wh
o died?’ he said.

  ‘Nobody died. Yet.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s Lee.’

  ‘Cochrane? What happened?’

  ‘He’s in ICU in Mount Sinai. Massive coronary. They had to shock him five times in the ER.’

  ‘Oh Christ.’

  Larry shook his head. ‘He’s only thirty-nine. Same as you and me.’

  Ryan looked at his watch. Larry Speakes would be holding the first press briefing of the day just after nine and Ryan wanted to nail him on the El Salvador situation. ‘I’ll call the office and make sure someone sends him some flowers,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to work.’

  * * *

  Reagan always held his press conferences in the evening. It gave him a larger, more immediate audience and prevented the networks from putting it on the early evening news with their own analysis. Reagan made the most of his folksy style; it was only later, when you reviewed the tapes, that you realized he hadn’t actually said anything. Ryan always said it was like a Chinese meal; it tasted great at the time but half an hour later you were hungry again.

  The demands of television meant that the room was lit like a sports stadium. There was a battery of lights across the top of the stage, and two more banks on aluminum standards to the left and right of the rostrum. There were twenty rows of seats in front of the lectern. Ryan took his place in the very front row, which was reserved for the media VIPs: the talking heads from the major television networks and the reporters from the four major wire services, Reuters, AP, UPI and IPA. It also included other luminaries such as Sam Donaldson, Andrea Mitchell and Bob Scheiffer.

  Ryan kept thinking about Cochrane. He had phoned his assistant at the network office and arranged for her to send him a packet of Marlboro and a Big Mac along with a get well card. Inside the card he told her to write: You’re fired above Ted Turner’s name. Hell, if it was him lying in hospital the last thing he would want is sympathy.

  Still, the news had shaken him. As Larry had said, Cochrane was the same age as he was. Dying in a war was one thing; that was just fate. But a heart attack was different. What was the point of dodging all those rounds just to die of something so mundane before you forty?

  Where would he be when it happened? Standing on a White House lawn doing stand-ups to a nation that didn’t give a damn about anything except abortion and lower taxes? On the way to work, worrying about the mortgage and where to put the new baby furniture?

  He forced his attention back to the job at hand. There was an air of expectancy in the room. It would be a poor night if they could not rely on the Teflon President for at least one major gaffe.

  A voice boomed over the loudspeaker: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.’

  Reagan entered the auditorium along a long carpeted hallway, through a set of double doors. It was wonderful theatre.

  He delivered his address faultlessly, if he was good at anything, it was learning his lines. His speechwriters painted Latin American politics as a shooting match between the cowboys and the Indians.

  When the President indicated that he would field questions, Ryan patiently waited his turn. Reagan finally smiled and pointed in his direction.

  He stood up. ‘Mr. President, why is this administration supporting a regime in El Salvador that routinely terrorizes and murders its own civilians and leaves their bodies lying in the street?’

  He heard a sharp intake of breath from the reporters around him. It was not the sort of question any president wanted leveled at him on live prime-time television. Reagan’s minders looked like they would like to terrorize him themselves. But they were stuck with freedom of speech, however much they might wish it were otherwise.

  Reagan stumbled on his answer, as he often did, responding with the usual mumbling, incoherent phrases that the American electorate loved. He mentioned the forthcoming national elections in El Salvador and quantitative progress in human rights and the threat posed by Cuban-backed guerrillas. Ryan felt his frustrations boiling over. He did the unthinkable.

  He shouted him down.

  ‘Mr. Reagan, this is all bullshit and you know it. We are going down the same blind alley as we did in Vietnam. We are backing a blatantly fascist regime for our own imagined short-term political gains. Is this or is this not true?’

  A breathless moment, flashbulbs popping, consternation on either side of the podium. Reagan blinked at him, looking for all the world like an old man being asked to get off the bus because he did not have enough money for the fare. A senior press aide took a Secret Service agent aside and pointed to him. They were going to try to throw him out. Well, that would make good television, especially if he resisted.

  ‘You’ve really screwed up this time, Ryan,’ a print journalist from the Post muttered somewhere behind him.

  ‘This is all horseshit,’ he said, loud enough for the microphones to hear, and walked out of the room. He knew he would never come back. He didn’t think he would miss it at all.

  * * *

  Mickey stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the television. She was still in her scrubs. She backed into the kitchen, keeping her eyes on the screen. NBC had crossed live to Reagan’s press conference, and she knew Ryan would be there somewhere. She took the cap off a bottle of Stoli. She recognized her husband’s voice, heard the badgering tone creep into it, saw the consternation on the President’s face.

  Mr. Reagan, this is all bullshit and you know it.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said.

  She heard a commotion off camera, but the news editor kept with the President. She couldn’t watch any more. She flicked off the remote control and went upstairs to the bathroom.

  She turned on the hot tub and undressed.

  It had happened to her again, in the People’s Drug on Wisconsin. She had heard a car backfire in the street, and immediately threw herself on the floor, waiting for the mortar rounds to hit. When she finally looked up the rest of the customers and staff were staring at her, mouths open.

  This was the World that everyone over there had dreamed of getting back to; mortgages and trim lawns and shopping malls and singles bars and loneliness, a place where no one really gave a damn about anyone else. No one really wanted to listen to her war stories, and they were the story of her life. She had hated Vietnam, but now she would give anything to be back there.

  Chapter 57

  When Ryan got home he found Mickey in the hot tub, an empty bottle of vodka rolling across the green marble tiles. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and her cheeks flushed. ‘Way to go, you son of a gun,’ she said, slurring the words.

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘Just like High Noon. The gunfight in the Okey Dokey Corral between the bad guy in the grey suit and the good guy with the notebook and the harassed expression.’

  ‘I really showed him, right?’

  ‘You sure got him good and pissed. We’ll probably get nuked in our sleep.’

  ‘Fuck Reagan.’ He dropped his jacket to the floor, looped his tie over his head, and sat down on the edge of the jacuzzi to rip off his shoes and socks.

  ‘Think you better send in your I quit letter before the acceptance letter gets here.’

  ‘I already did.’

  ‘What did Lee say?’

  ‘Lee wasn’t there. He’s in Mount Sinai hooked up to a machine.’ Ryan peeled off his shirt and pants and shorts. ‘Why do they call it a cardiac infarct? I hate that word. Why not a heart attack? Then everyone knows what they fucking mean.’ He got into the scented and bubbling water, put both arms along the cool marble and put his head back, resting it on the rim.

  ‘You’re kidding me, right?’

  ‘They don’t joke about heart attacks, not even in Washington. Especially not in Washington.’

  ‘Christ, he was ...’

  ‘Yeah, same age as me. The point’s been made.’

  ‘Is that what this evening was all about?’

  ‘Partly.’

&nbs
p; He felt her toes stroke his groin under the water. ‘I was proud of you tonight.’ When he did not respond she added: ‘I like a man who can stand up to the President of the United States.’

  He pushed her foot away.

  ‘Uh-oh. I did something wrong again.’

  ‘It’s not you.’

  ‘Why do guys always say that when they can’t get it up for you anymore? If it was Nastassia Kinski lying here in the hot tub naked and you couldn’t get it up for her, would you still say “It’s not you” in that condescending voice?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘I don’t need this.’

  She splashed water onto her face. ‘I have a confession.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘My pregnancy test came back negative. Sorry. Hey, maybe we should have a little celebration. You got what you wanted, I got what I didn’t need.’ She fumbled for the bottle of Stoli. ‘Shit, it’s empty. Story of my life. A stud who can’t get it up for me, an empty bottle of Stoli, and sterility. Life doesn’t get any better than this, does it? Unless you count having your husband fired from a top-rating network news program. How the hell are we going to pay the mortgage?’

  ‘We’ll survive.’

  ‘How?’

  He wouldn’t look at her.

  * * *

  He had told her that many times, breaking house rules in the White House was the same as knowingly walking into an ambush. You’d only do that if you wanted to draw fire away from somewhere else.

  ‘Who have you been talking to, Sean?’

  ‘Croz was in town last week.’

  ‘Croz?’

  ‘Dave Crosby. We knew each other in Saigon. He’s at IPA these days. They want someone to go to Afghanistan for them, cover the war.’