“I understand only too well, General. That man’s life was at stake then, too. He made an understandable mistake, under the circumstances, which happened also to be a crime. Your grandson seems to have gotten himself in similar trouble. You sent the soldier in Sicily to the gallows. Now you want me to intervene in some way on your grandson’s behalf. I will not do it. The law is the law, General. There is no difference.”
“There’s a big goddamned difference, a blood difference, Jake. You know that. Damn it.”
“All lives are equal in combat, sir. All men are equal under the law. Apparently your grandson did not understand this, and you have certainly forgot it.”
“You don’t sound like the Jake Rousseau I knew,” said the General.
“I am not the same person you knew. You are no longer my boss. I am the CIA station chief in Saigon. I will not involve myself or the Agency in matters which are currently being prosecuted by MACV. Neither would you, when I was your aide. You would not risk either the Agency or yourself for personal gain. That was your rule. It is still my rule.”
The General stared out the back window of his room at the VIP Villa. The waterfall cascaded down its fiberglass path over painted rocks, but it made no sound. Neither did the two men on the telephone for what must have been a full minute.
“You are a great, great disappointment to me, Jake,” said the General, choosing his words carefully, coughing each syllable as if it were his last.
“And so are you to me, General. I am sorry our friendship had to end this way.”
“We never had a goddamned friendship, Rousseau. We depended on each other, that’s all.”
He hung up the phone and walked back into the bathroom. He filled the sink with cold water and dipped his face into the water for a long time. When he came up for air, he looked in the mirror. The man he saw staring back at him wasn’t his friend, either. He was just someone he had depended on.
The General slowly put on his khakis, every motion an effort. His brown shoes felt as if they weighed ten pounds each. He had just finished dressing and was heading for the door when he heard a knock.
“Come in,” he growled, not really meaning it.
“General, it’s me,” said Lieutenant General Pelton.
“Ahhh, Brownie. Just the man I want to see,” said the General, genuinely relieved that it was his old compatriot, a man he knew he could trust.
“I’ve got some word on young Matt, sir. Do you want to eat breakfast? We can discuss what I’ve found out downstairs in the garden.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep anything down,” said the General.
“What’s the matter, sir?”
“Jake Rousseau is the goddamn matter. I just talked to him. He refused to get involved. He refused any help at all for Matt. I’ve never heard any man talk as coldly as he talked to me. And I’ve known some goddamned cold ones.”
“I’m not sure we need Rousseau, sir.”
“I don’t care if we need him or not. He owes me. There is something he knows about II Corps operations that he isn’t telling us. He’s covering something up. I can smell it.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“The Agency is always privy to intelligence that no one else has. He could pick up the phone and make one call and determine what in hell is going on up there in II Corps, and he probably did. He’s hiding something. He was insubordinate and disrespectful. I could hear it in his voice. That man is so frightened of this thing with Matt, he wouldn’t drive over here and look me in the eye when he told me to go to hell.”
“Didn’t they call him Happy Jack Rousseau during the war, sir? The other young men on the staff, I mean. Wasn’t that his nickname?”
“Yes, and I never understood how he got it. He never acted happy around me. He was the most driven individual I ever had the misfortune to come across, I’ll tell you that.”
“And now he’s got his station.”
“Now he’s got his station. By the looks of things around here, he hasn’t done much with it. We’re going to lose this war, Brownie. Mark my words. We’re going out of here with our tail between our legs. I may not live to see the day when that happens, but it’s in the cards. These Vietnamese peasants are going to nibble at us like mosquitoes until we scratch ourselves to death.”
“Unfortunately, I think you’re right, General,” said Lieutenant General Bruce Pelton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Military Affairs. “I don’t know how we got into this war, and I don’t know how we’re going to get out of it. But what we’re doing over here makes Korea look like Normandy, and the truce at the 38th Parallel like a gift from God. I don’t think it’s possible to prevail militarily in Asia in the classic sense, to achieve the victory we won in Europe. We won the war with Japan only when we dropped the bomb. Short of that unacceptable move, we’ll never contain them here in Vietnam. Never. They will fight us until we leave. It’s as simple as that.”
The two men left the General’s room and went to the garden to have coffee. The General looked at the fiberglass waterfall. You could hear the electric motor driving the circulatory system for the water. It sounded like a gas pump.
“You know what is wrong with the way we’re fighting this war?”
“I’d like to hear what you have to say on the subject, sir. Maybe I’ll include it in my report to the Secretary when I get back.”
“We’re letting technology drive tactics, instead of the other way around. The almighty helicopter is a good example. First, we bought thousands of them. Then the challenge seems to have become, now that we’ve got them, what can we do with them? So the airmobile concept was born. Ride the helicopter to battle in the morning, ride it home in the evening, and eat a hot meal and sleep between sheets that night. Is that any way to fight a war?”
“No, sir.”
“One of these days, I’m afraid this fascination with technology will bring us to the point where men are obsolete on the battlefield. War will be fought by robots, by remote control. But men will die. When that happens, we’ll be in big trouble.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“When you remove men from the battlefield, you inevitably make war more and more of a logical option in the furtherance of policy, because you reduce the cost of lost lives. It’s happening over here. You take the influence of the helicopter on this war. We let the helicopter dictate tactics, when we should have formulated tactics and made use of the helicopter in their furtherance. We’ve got it ass-backwards. The same goes for the base-camp concept and the strategic hamlet concept and every other goddamned concept they’ve come up with. And most especially, the same goes for the body count as a measure of whether or not we’re winning the war. You do not count bodies and add them up and allow arithmetic to determine strategy and tactics. To do so is to deny the truth about war. Wars are fought by men, but they are fought over land. Warfare since the beginning of time has measured men against territory. You need the one to get the other. One’s ability to take and to defend land is the gauge of military strength and, ultimately, the measure of victory. You cannot count bodies and expect a raw number on a piece of paper in some rear-area headquarters to suffice as a rhetorical declaration of victory. There is no substitute for victory over the ground. None. Without domination of the land, we have done nothing here but waste lives in the pursuit of a corrupt policy in a futile quest for a hollow victory. It is criminal, what’s going on here. The way this war is being fought, the reasons we’re fighting it—it’s a criminal enterprise, and it makes me so sad to see what they’ve done to our Army . . .”
The General’s gravelly voice trailed off in a harsh, hacking cough. He pulled out a handkerchief and spat into it. When he recovered, his eyes were red and he had trouble getting his breath. Lieutenant General Pelton averted his eyes and waited.
The General took a sip of water and sat back against his cast-iron chair.
“What have you got on Matt?”
“Not much, sir
. They preferred charges six days ago, instituted the Article 32 two days ago. The Article 32 investigation is proceeding now.”
“Where is he?”
“The stockade at Long Binh, sir. In isolation.”
“When can I see him? Can we get up there this morning?”
“No, sir. No visitors are allowed, other than those permitted under the UCMJ—his attorney and any medical personnel that might be requested.”
The General reddened.
“You mean to tell me they’re going to refuse admittance to the man’s grandfather, a retired General?”
“Yes, sir, they are.”
“And you? You’re the Assistant Secretary of State. You too?”
“Even if I could get in to see him, sir, it wouldn’t be proper. It would be tantamount to command influence.”
“I know. I know,” said the General, dejected.
“It’s a capital charge, sir. Desertion in the face of the enemy is punishable by death.”
“Who’s the attorney? Maybe we can talk to him.”
Lieutenant General Pelton shuffled through a sheaf of papers and extracted one.
“Captain Terrence W. Morriss, sir. He’s a JAG stationed at Long Binh.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“They say he’s the best they’ve got up there. All the men charged with serious offenses put in to get him. He’s got a reputation as a lawyer who will do almost anything to defend his man. He’s an ROTC man doing a four-year hitch in the JAG Corps. He’s won some pretty big cases, sir. Last month he won a rape case. Seven men in a squad were charged with raping a civilian woman while they were on a combat operation. He took on all seven of them and got acquittals for all seven. Matt must have heard about him in the stockade.”
“Or the lawyer heard about Matt.”
“I doubt it, sir. They’ve got the lid down tight. No one even knows he’s in the stockade at Long Binh but us and the lawyer.”
“No doubt. What about him? The lawyer, I mean. Anything else?”
“He graduated from Southern Illinois University and went to Harvard Law School. He was drafted right out of law school and took the JAG option right away. He went through Advanced Individual Training at Knox, then he went to the JAG school in Charlottesville and was commissioned a reserve captain, like all JAGs who start out as draftees. He served a year at Fort Carson, and he’s been over here for six months, with six months to go. He’s unmarried and he likes expensive cigars and Jack Daniel’s whiskey. He has no known associations with dissident groups in his intelligence file, and his OERs from Carson are in line for a non-regular-Army JAG officer of his background. In short, he’s a typical twenty-seven-year-old American male who would probably rather be back in New York getting his paychecks from a three-name law firm than from Uncle Sam. He is good at what he does, and he doesn’t care who knows it. If I were charged with a capital offense, sir, I’d want him at my side.”
“Well, at least the boy’s in good hands,” said the General, staring across the garden at the fiberglass waterfall.
“Can you think of anything else? Anything we could do for Matt without violating any protocols or laws?”
“No, sir. I can get a message to him. That’s about it, sir. There’s not one hell of a lot we can do.”
“Then do it, goddammit. Let’s get with the program!”
“Sir, I have to make a command appearance at a reception at the embassy.”
“A reception for who?”
“The board of directors of the Association of the United States Army, sir. The AUSA. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
“Of course I have. It’s a loose consortium of Army officers and defense industry executives that spends all of its time and money trying to get the United States of America to buy more gadgets and doohickeys and popguns and helicopters and God only knows what-all. A consortium we could well do without. I have never approved of the illicit bump-and-grind that is done daily between the military and its civilian military hardware contractors. The dance that goes on between us and them is entirely too cozy for the good of the Army or industry. I’ll wager the reception tonight at the embassy will provide more evidence of the kind of systemic whoring I’m talking about.”
Lieutenant General Pelton watched the General in rapt fascination. He was a man who never failed to fascinate. In war, he was intense, demanding, unrelenting in pursuit of the enemy. He had proved himself one of America’s true battlefield tactical geniuses. He was unafraid to take risks that other commanders would dismiss as too costly.
Not the General. He was supremely confident of himself and of his men and their ability to carry out what he demanded of them. If it meant double-timing, running the entire length of Italy, then that is precisely what they did. They ran where others walked. He moved the Infantry at a speed that Armored divisions couldn’t match. By the end of the war, they said there was nothing he could not do with an Army, and Lieutenant General Pelton, then a colonel who had served under the General for three years, believed it.
“I’ve got to get over to the embassy, sir. They’ve prepared a dozen briefings for me, and I can’t disappoint them.”
The General turned to his friend with a cheerless look on his face.
“This is what it’s come down to. Right here.” He pointed at the fiberglass waterfall and shook his head. “Here we sit, two old soldiers who came over to Vietnam expecting to enter a combat zone, and they’ve got us in goddamned Disneyland.”
Lieutenant General Pelton nodded, and a white-jacketed waiter arrived to clear the table. He placed a sterling silver coffeepot in the middle of the table and stood at attention.
“Can I get you a Bloody Mary, sir, or perhaps a vodka and orange?”
“What time are we going to the embassy?”
“Twenty-one hundred,” said Lieutenant General Pelton. Nine P.M.
“I’ll tell you what you can get me, young man,” said the General. “Come twenty-one hundred hours, you can get me the hell out of here.”
At 2100 hours, the American embassy was floodlit by two M-60 tanks with xenon spotlights. They were parked across Thong Nhut Street, swiveling their turrets, raising and lowering their gun tubes, splashing icy light across the U.S. Embassy as if it were a movie theater, giving downtown Saigon the feel of Hollywood the night a major motion picture opened on Sunset Boulevard.
At the embassy gate, lieutenants scurried from one arriving car to another, checking identification, rechecking, monitoring the flow. Captains monitored lieutenants. Majors stood around in groups of three, critiquing the captains. Somewhere a colonel hovered on the edge of the lights, worried about his majors. It was a very big night on Thong Nhut Street.
The reception was one of those open-necked-shirt affairs that embassies throw once or twice a month in Third World countries where it would be considered bad form to black-tie it in the presence of the hunger and poverty nibbling at the edges of the capital city. Saigon in the fall of 1969 differed from the Third World norm only in that Vietnam was a combat zone and the starving proles out there were carrying guns along with their empty rice sacks. The Tet offensive of the previous year may have left its mark. The embassy was still pockmarked with bulletholes in the stucco walls, and the compound fairly bristled with troops and weaponry, but nothing was going to disturb the feeding and watering of the AUSA directors and their minions.
When Lieutenant General Pelton and General Blue arrived at the gate, their staff car was met by a phalanx of MPs, rifles at the ready. As he stepped from the car, the General could see the dim outlines of snipers atop the embassy roof.
“They’re not taking any chances, are they?” he said as they brushed past the wall of MPs.
"It wouldn't look good if an embassy reception turned into a bloodbath,” said Lieutenant General Pelton.
“That's probably the extent of the Ambassador's concern, too. How it would look.”
“Probably.”
The generals were guided int
o the main reception room of the embassy by the captain who had met them at the airport. Along the walls of the room, curtained booths displayed weapons systems from various defense contractors. This one displayed the Infantry soldier's best friend, the M-16, and you could pick one up and fire light beams at little VC targets, just like in a booth on a carnival midway. Over there was a mockup of a Phantom F-4 cockpit you could climb into and make mock bombing runs on North Vietnam on a television screen inside the cockpit. Another booth displayed the interior of an M-60 tank, and next to it you could actually climb into an M-113 armored personnel carrier that had been driven into the room through the folding French doors leading to the rear of the embassy compound.
A white-jacketed waiter brought the generals a drink, and Lieutenant General Pelton was directly pulled away by an aide to the Ambassador.
“I'll be back in a moment, sir. Official duties,” he said apologetically.
General Blue smiled and lifted his glass of bourbon in a toast.
Just then he spied Jake Rousseau stepping out of the mock Phantom F-4 cockpit. Climbing out of the cockpit's rear seat was a Vietnamese woman a good thirty years younger than Rousseau. Her hair was coiffed into a beehive and she was wearing an embroidered silk ao dai slit to her navel. The General averted his eyes, but Rousseau had noticed him watching them.
He walked over to the General's side.
“General Blue, I'd like you to meet Miss Dzu. Miss Dzu, this is General Blue, from the United States. He is a very important man over there.”
The girl bowed her head, closing her eyes, in an Oriental gesture of respect.
“Get me a drink, dear, and get one for the General, too.”
She scurried in the direction of a bar.
“I didn't know embassy protocol allowed the display of in-country mistresses,” said the General.
“Many things have changed since your day, General.” Rousseau towered over the General and was smiling crookedly as he spoke.
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