Tucker's Last Stand

by William F. Buckley

  And, departing from the usual procedure this time, press copies would not be distributed until after Goldwater had begun speaking. Word had got out that the speech would be challenging, and, accordingly, President Johnson had directed that discreet cable connections bring the speech live on television into the Oval Office, where he sat with his principal aides.

  “Handsome bugger,” somebody said.

  Johnson stared at him. He might as well have said it: You queer or something?

  Goldwater’s ovation was prolonged. He made the necessary remarks about being in Toledo, told the famous story about Toledo, Spain: during the Civil War, he said he had been sent a souvenir from Toledo, Spain, a little steel letter opener, and was able to discern the fine print on the blade, “Hecho en Toledo, Ohio.” Made in Toledo, Ohio. Roars.

  There was a lot of steel traveling across the oceans these days, he said—unfortunately, not all of it being used to make letter openers. There was a lot of Soviet steel going into the radar and antiaircraft devices being installed along the coast of North Vietnam. What did they intend to do with those installations? Whose airplanes were they planning to shoot down? India’s? Sweden’s? What was the United States doing about those installations, so clearly aggressive in character and so clearly designed to hinder any attempt by the United States to help South Vietnam maintain its sovereignty?… When President Kennedy died there were sixteen thousand U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam. What has been their mandate? To do nothing?… Nothing is a lot better than what has been done, when you count five military coups in about as many months. And that happened while a Republican served as ambassador to South Vietnam. How many more coups can we expect—

  Goldwater looked up, as though addressing his question to a remote authority—to President Lyndon Johnson:

  —when a Democrat succeeds him?… If the Ho Chi Minh Trail is being groomed as a superhighway for the infiltration of South Vietnam, what exactly are we doing about it? Hadn’t Ambassador Averell Harriman, on behalf of President Kennedy, concluded a treaty with Laos—to which the Soviet Union was a signatory, along with thirteen other nations including North Vietnam—guaranteeing the sovereignty of Laos? And how do you reconcile the sovereignty of Laos with the use of Laos by the North Vietnamese to wage a war of aggression against the South?… Hadn’t the Tonkin Gulf become a North Vietnamese lake under our do-nothing Administration?… President Johnson talks a very good line about resisting the forces of aggression, but how is he doing?… Fidel Castro continues to try to undermine countries in Latin America, and he is absolutely secure under Lyndon Johnson. The only Cubans the government is prosecuting are the Cuban-American members of the Alpha Cuban liberation team in Miami.… Lyndon Johnson is a nice man and means well, but he tries to please too many people. He wants to appeal to isolationists who want no responsibility for containing communism.… He wants to appease the Harvard professor types who spend a lot of time studying but never quite enough to learn the differences between Ho Chi Minh and George Washington. They have a lot to learn, but there isn’t anything Lyndon Johnson can teach them!…

  Et cetera.

  Standing ovation.

  LBJ used the little remote control on his desk to silence the television set. There was silence in the room. Finally he spoke up. “Some son of a bitch is talkin’.” To Valenti he said, “Get me J. Edgar Hoover.” To Bundy he said, “Let’s have another look at the draft of that congressional resolution.” To McNamara: “Work up a plan—a contingency plan—for the South Vietnamese to get the kind of ships necessary to stop the Gulf traffic south and also to knock out those radar installations.” He inclined his head in the general direction of the television set, murmured again, “Somebody’s talkin’,” and left the room.

  10

  June 15, 1964

  Saigon, South Vietnam

  Abe Strauss shook his head as Blackford came around with the large coffeepot, and came to the conclusion of his analysis: There was no alternative to a land operation. “I’ve looked carefully at your report and your photos and sketches,” he pointed to Blackford, “and what you have, any way you look at it, is a trail over four hundred miles long reaching into the Mekong Delta in the south, and then you have six hundred miles of off-shooting trails into South Vietnam’s northern sectors. And all these are being used.”

  “Are there operative bottlenecks? Points, or passages, through which they need to go before they reach the offshoots?” Rufus asked.

  “Yes,” Colonel Strauss said. Again he turned to Blackford: “It seems to me that the Nape Pass and the Mu Gia Pass don’t permit detours. We’re going to need more intensive photography of the Nape Pass—”

  “You’re not going to get it, Abe,” Rufus said. “There’s no way to penetrate the overhead cover. If we send photographers by land, think in terms of a fighting battalion because there’s no way to anticipate the strength of the North Vietnamese army columns headed south. Besides that, your photographer, shooting from the ground, isn’t going to give you the perspective you’re looking for.”

  Colonel Strauss paused. “I get the point. Still, we know we’re talking about a canyon. They have got to go down over Nape, unless they go airborne, and that’s a narrow stretch of land. And then, about … sixty miles south of there is Mu Gia, which stretches twenty-two miles and isn’t going to let anybody around unless they’re prepared to scale this”—he pointed to the rugged mountain on the east, “or that”—another such mountain, on the west. “You could get individuals to scale those mountains—they’d better be Swiss, and maybe they’d get through with a pack on their back—but they’re never going to get supplies into South Vietnam of any quantity, certainly not the heavy stuff, unless they transport it. And if they transport it, they’ve got to go over Nape first.”

  Colonel Strauss leaned forward and read aloud its coordinates, as if to infuse it with reality: “Eighteen degrees 18 minutes North, 105 degrees 6 minutes East—that’s my deduction, Blackford, from the coordinates you gave on either side. Mu Gia is at 17.4 North and 105.47 East. We have to put these passes out of action. But I don’t see how we can keep them out of action without sending people there to set up a Maginot Line. Those two places are perfect for Maginot Line strategy. But that kind of operation has got to be done by human beings on the ground.”

  Blackford agreed. “There’s no other way.”

  Tucker Montana slouched, puffing on a small cigar, as he liked to do when the air was very still and he could blow his smoke rings, at which he was proficient. “Trouble is,” he commented, “that means an on-the-ground war, which LBJ ain’t about to authorize, and you can’t just keep bombing blindly, can you? They can go right back to moving the stuff when you’re not there.”

  “There’s another problem,” Rufus said. “The Geneva Accords. The passes are in Laos, and Laos is supposed to be neutral—never mind that it isn’t, but it’s supposed to be. Which, after all, is why all our aerial work is being done by Army aircraft coming in from Thailand, or naval aircraft coming in from the Gulf, disguised as South Vietnamese—”

  Blackford half-laughed. “That’s what we call being neutral?”

  Rufus accepted the jibe. “Your point is obvious, Blackford. But after the pact was executed, the North Vietnamese, a party to the agreement, withdrew exactly forty men. The South Vietnamese pulled out nine thousand. The whole purpose of the Geneva Accords was to end the war in South Vietnam. In fact it is proceeding exactly as before, but with greater intensity, through Laotian territory.” He recovered the line of thought in which he had been interrupted and gave its conclusion. “The kind of sustained operation you would need would first require Washington to rescind the treaty, or simply to declare it null and void—on the grounds that all parties are not respecting it.”

  “Well, Rufus,” Blackford said, “that’s Washington’s problem, no? Our job is to figure out how it could be done, theirs to decide whether they want to do it and what diplomatic or military means are appropriate to th
e realization of that end.”

  “Yes. But we must recommend something we think can work, and simply to recommend the bombing of the two passes seems to me to leave unanswered, as Tucker says, such questions as just how to bomb. That is: How to know where and when to bomb; how to strike targets, not mountains; how to develop an intensity of aerial coverage that would really make the difference.”

  It was at this point that Tucker, finally aroused, spoke up. “Rufus, can I have the floor a minute? Abe?”

  He opened his briefcase and took out a large sketch pad. From his pocket he fished out a small metal container. He lifted its cap off and plucked out two large thumbtacks. He ripped the first sketch from the pad and fastened it on the wooden wall behind them.

  “That’s a Sonobuoy. We use these to keep track of Soviet submarines. Up here,” he pointed to the upper end of what looked like a slim bomb, “you have this little detachable buoy, corklike material. Its function is to keep that little ten-inch antenna up there on top of the water and to maintain the capsule with its microphone at the desired depth. So: The reconn plane drops the Sonobuoy. The little bomblike thing here sinks just deep enough to provide equilibrium for the antenna.

  “The Sonobuoy is a sensor, very sensitive. When a submarine passes within a dozen miles of it, the sub’s sound registers and a signal is sent to the antenna. That antenna has the power to transmit its signal fifty miles. Nondirectional, so you can pick it up over an area of maybe 175 miles. Now, the crystal on that Sonobuoy is, let’s say, Radio Frequency A. The crystal on the Sonobuoy five miles south is B. The crystal on the Sonobuoy five miles west is Frequency C. As those signals come up, the reconn planes can triangulate in and figure out pretty close where the submarine is, what its heading is, and how fast it’s traveling. Or, they can project from the passage of the sub and the progressive alerts sent out what direction it’s going and at what speed.

  “Now, I don’t see any argument against taking that technology and adapting it to our problem—”

  “What kind of a sound or vibration is made by men making their way over a trail?”

  “Hold it, Abe! Hold that for a minute. What do we know in 1964 that we didn’t know twenty years ago? Well, we have computers, and they will do the triangulation work for you in maybe one second. But we also have acoustic devices that are a hundred times as sensitive as the Sonobuoy’s. Human voices, yes, and not only the buzz and hum of human voices: what they are actually saying.

  “We want sound,” he said reflectively, “and we want sound waves. We need to build a version of the Sonobuoy—an acoustical buoy, ‘Acoubuoy,’ if you like—that will come down all over those two passes and will transmit—sound. The actual noises will include conversations by NVA foot soldiers, though that would be incidental. Primarily the aim is sounds of vehicles, and our ability to particularize will tell us whether we’re dealing with jeeps or trucks or tanks. Now, those signals could go up to orbiting aircraft and be relayed to our proposed facility at Nakhon Phanom. Over there we would need analysts to sort out what the noises all mean. If they add up to an opportunity for aerial attack, we shoot that information over to the airfield, or to the reconn planes.

  “Now, if Rufus is right—that we aren’t going to be allowed to use our stuff to drop down on these gentlemen—we might as well go home. But we do have the technology to take those two passes and convert them into electronic highways. Wherever we have Acoubuoys we would see their registrations on a huge situation display—to light up the locations where the sound is being picked up. And the instrumentation in those sensors”—Blackford was staring at Tucker Montana in amazement; he had heard nothing before from him that suggested he had any background in science—“shouldn’t have any problem in giving out signals that will show up in different colors on our screen, depending on whether it’s infantrymen or tanks, jeeps, trucks, whatever. And then we send out the right kind of signal to the right kind of airplane, which drops the right kind of stuff in the right place.”

  “How would you get those sensors where you want them?” Strauss asked.

  “You’d drop them from airplanes or helicopters. And they can be dropped in daylight—at least they can do that up until the NVA sets up radar and antiaircraft stuff, which can’t be long delayed, Black and I figure.”

  He took the second page from his scratch pad and fastened it alongside the first. “Here is my idea of a cross section of a revised Sonobuoy. I call it, for the hell of it, a Spikebuoy. You need to protect the delicate acoustic and seismic sensor from the impact of striking the ground. I calculate,” he pointed at the second drawing, “a 2.5-foot average penetration, with the sensor then sitting, camouflaged, right on the ground with its little antenna. Now, keeping equipment from being destroyed after a drop is something the parachute people have been working on for years. Our Spikebuoys should be of two kinds. One would come down by parachute and hang from the upper branches of trees where they’d be hard to notice. But most of them we’d want to come right down near and parallel to the Trail. Impact could be absorbed by collapsible cushioning elements in the Spikebuoy. What the paratroop guys do is make adjustments that depend on the weight of the object and the distribution of that weight. They spread about collapsible material which, on impact, itself crushes, absorbing the impact energy. It’s very carefully done, so that the force of the crash is almost entirely absorbed by the collapse of the cushioning layers, which are variously tiered.

  “So that work has been done, and done well after the war. It was done, interestingly enough, under the guidance of a foundation sustained by people—family, sons—who mourned a race car driver who died because his crash helmet didn’t protect him. Safety helmets lined with sponge rubber are deadly. What happens is the foam collapses under impact, allowing the strike force to hit the head or even to transmit right through the collapsed rubber a jolt that reaches the head and then—the rubber having absorbed the incoming energy—release it back as the outside force disappears. The rubber then kicks back in the opposite direction and delivers a whiplash blow that, at the right frequencies, can create a bad nerve-tissue problem.”

  “You are talking about helmets already developed?” Rufus wanted to know.

  “Oh yes. The helmet that works we can borrow from, borrow the basic design to shield a Spikebuoy. It’s lined with a rigid but collapsible foam which, on taking an incoming blow, absorbs the energy by collapsing its own rigid structure. The structure, now disintegrated, can’t deliver the energy backward. The force is dead.

  “It takes careful engineering, but that’s what created the Snell Foundation–approved safety helmet.”

  “Wouldn’t that suggest the need of a very large circumference in the Spikebuoy?” Blackford asked.

  “Good question. Depends on the weight. But the weight of the sensors is always diminishing, just as the size of the batteries is down to about one tenth of what it used to be. The Spikebuoy could have just that amount of protection it needs. We could very quickly establish how much. An aspect of how high off the ground the plane is when it’s dropped, among other factors. With a few thousand of those peppering those passes, on the ground, on trees and vines, and replenished every month or so—that’s how long the batteries would last—and besides, we’d be blowing them up along with the stuff in between them—we’d have a pretty good chance, seems to me, to find the best places to block that Trail …” he paused, for the first time “… without senseless, random bombing.”

  There was silence for a minute. Colonel Strauss spoke: “You believe you could design the Spikebuoy, and also the other receiver—the acoustic buoy that would transmit sounds of Trail activity and yield exact targets to appropriate receiving stations?”

  Tucker Montana said, “Give me a lab and a few assistants who speak science, and the answer is, sure. Only thing I’d need to brush up on is the size and weight of components and the latest computer capabilities. And I’d need to know something about our aircraft and aerial ordnance capabilities as they
stand these days, to recommend the right kind of airplane—that kind of thing. It can’t be done overnight. But there just isn’t any problem about designing something. We got to design it, then we got to manufacture it, then we got to build up that Nakhon place, then we get some sound analysts, then we get permission from Lyndon Johnson or from God or whoever is in charge to use the Spikes, preferably before the South is inundated with the stuff that’s going down that crazy Trail. Blackford and I saw enough of it getting by as it is. Unless we block them, that’s only the beginning.”

  Rufus spoke slowly. “Gentlemen, I have reflected on what Tucker has said and on our other conversations. We must meet very soon again. But in Washington. Blackford will arrange the details and inform you of flight schedules. We should try to leave on the eleven P.M. flight to Honolulu.” He looked over at Blackford, who nodded.

  Tucker spoke. “Gee, Rufus, sorry, but not tonight for me. Just plain can’t. Absolutely unbreakable engagement, a matter of personal honor.” He looked up at Blackford. “Make my flight tomorrow, okay?”

  Blackford nodded. And suppressed a smile. He’d as likely have denied a request by Thomas Alva Edison.

  Riding in the Army sedan with Rufus, Blackford turned to him. “Why in the hell wasn’t I told about that guy’s background?”

  “For the very good reason that I knew nothing about it. Special Forces sent him over to us as an expert fieldman with an antiterrorist background.”

  “I’m surprised our friend Tucker hasn’t invented a bomb that aims only at terrorists.”

  “Or a bomb that eliminates dumb personnel in Special Forces who send Wernher von Braun types out to the field to do guard duty.” Rufus was annoyed. Blackford wondered: Was Rufus angry? Could that ever happen to a man so professional?