Last Man Out (37 page)

I went down to see my family every ten days or so, often leaving directly from the field and arriving home in my dirty and bloody field clothes. Brenda would know when I was coming and started a homecoming ritual with the children. Each kid had his own group of light switches to turn on so that, when I came in, every light in the house was on. The house would be aglow, and tunes from Walt Disney musicals would be playing on the reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was wonderful, coming in the front gate, the kids excited, Brenda smiling, the dog barking, the lights, and the music. Home from the hills. Home from the fighting. All I could do was stand there and smile.

Mim and I developed a particularly close bond. It was her job to take my boots off, and that seemed to give her first rights to my attention. She snuggled up to me on the couch, sang along with
the Disney songs, and told me about things that had happened while I was away. Brenda sat nearby with Joseph on her knees, both of them listening, laughing.

What other citizen/soldier in our lifetime could have it so good? Fighting a winning war, coming home nights. On every family visit I said to myself, I am the luckiest man in the world.

The war in Vietnam, that odd, politicized, hackneyed, never-ending embarrassment to America, was coming to an end. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was making deals. After years of U.S. support—the last ten years with up to half a million GIs in-country—the South Vietnam government still did not rule the countryside. The Saigon leaders, most of them French- or American-educated Catholics, had little in common with the unsophisticated Buddhist farmers in the provinces. The North Vietnamese Army remained strong. Every year, two hundred thousand young men in the North came of military age. Although they might be killed by the tens of thousands, the North Vietnamese leaders were prepared to deploy every one until the South fell. They knew that the Saigon government would never control the hearts and minds of South Vietnamese peasants, and they knew the United States would not stay forever.

The United States and Kissinger simply wanted to get out, but leaving South Vietnam to its own destiny was difficult, and it would require, at minimum, a decent interval between the withdrawal of American forces and the certain collapse of the country so as not to implicate the United States as a fair-weather friend.

Disengaging from Laos, however, was easy. A “secret war” did not require a decent interval. A cease-fire was called in early 1973, negotiations ensued, and, in short order, the Communist Pathet Lao, hosts to the North Vietnamese, overflew Long Tieng to quarters in Vientiane. Although the government that was created was ostensibly a joint pro-West/Communist coalition, Pathet Lao soldiers stood on every street corner of Vientiane, making it clear that the Communists were in control.

Up-country at the CIA base in Long Tieng, we said among ourselves: “Hey, wait a minute, what the hell have we been doing here for ten years?” “Why did we fight so hard?” “Who gave it all
away?” “How could they do that?” “What was the value of all those young men dying?”

A new CIA boss came up-country and told us to get on with disbanding the Hmong and sending the volunteers back to Thailand. Pack up your base, he said, and go on to something else. It’s over. Air America understood and left without a word.

So did we, finally. In November 1973, Hog drove me down to the ramp where I was to catch a plane south. I was going to pack the family out of Vientiane, go back to the States for some home leave, and return to Indochina. I had requested and received orders to Vietnam.

Hog parked his Jeep in the shade of the air ops building and squinted into the sun. In his slow Montana drawl, he reminded me what our chief had said, that the fighting was all over. He thought a tour in Vietnam was after the fact.

“Nope,” I said, “it’s my war now. It seems to me the Americans on the scene there now don’t understand what we’ve gone through fighting this war—the human price we’ve paid. To them, it’s just some other man’s war. Someone who was around early on ought to be there now to speak for the Americans who died. Don’t you think?”

Hog, tough and unsentimental, shrugged.

We sat side by side in silence. I had requested an assignment to Vietnam because I was frustrated with the way things had turned out in Laos and, as naive as it might sound, felt I could make a difference in Vietnam. There was no question that I enjoyed paramilitary work, but I was also motivated by a sense of unfulfilled duty. Perhaps my feelings had been fostered by General Heintges when, at my OCS graduation, he had said that I was among a group chosen to uphold the dignity of our country. Perhaps it was because I had gotten out of the military when our country was still at war. Maybe because I had come to realize that I had a lot invested in the war: Memories of my friends and compatriots who had died—Patrick, McCoy, Goss, Ayers, Castro, Slippery Clunker Six, the Hmong, the Thai mercenaries, the Ravens, the Air America pilots—stayed fresh in those baskets at the back of my soul, where I had put them so I could get on with my life. Sometimes when I was alone I would take down one of the baskets and look at the contents, and then put it back. I felt a
soulful obligation to ensure that the sacrifices of my friends in this war were not overlooked.

“Just something I got to do, I reckon,” I told Hog. “Just got to do it.”

Hog looked away, but smiled. “The dreaded Mule,” he said.

On the way back to the States, Brenda, Mim, Joe, and I stopped in Hawaii and stayed in a beach bungalow at the Kahala Hilton. Bob and Linda Dunn were living on Oahu at the time, and they showed us the island as if they owned it. We went on to Los Angeles, California, where we made the obligatory two-day Disneyland visit. Then we drove a car across the southern United States for a company that transported cars from coast to coast. It was an almost new Mercury that was being repossessed from a sailor in San Diego. We returned it to a car dealer in Charleston, South Carolina, and then went on to North Carolina in time for Christmas. The kids assumed that everyone traveled around the world the way we had.

After the holidays, I went to CIA headquarters in Langley. I spent a month on the Vietnam desk and read up on the deteriorating situation there.

On 3 March 1974, we departed for Taipei, Taiwan, where Brenda and the kids would stay while I served in Vietnam. The wife of a man whom I had known in Laos and a CIA support officer met us at the airport and delivered us to our quarters in a comfortable housing enclave in downtown Taipei. A neighbor said the name of the development was “Mortuary Manor,” after a funeral home at the head of our street.

The kids were not sure that this was the best place in the world. When I left for South Vietnam, Brenda was in the process of moving to another development of forty or fifty houses on Yangmingshan Mountain, which overlooked Taipei.

At Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, a CIA station driver met me. He drove to the U.S. Embassy through streets clogged with traffic—motorbikes darting in and out among the larger vehicles, bikes, and pedicabs with passengers sitting in front all competing for road space.

Standing in front of the main gate of the embassy, I remembered that Duckett and I had stood in the same place seven years
before. We had been intimidated by the embassy then and reluctantly gone inside, only to jump out of the way when embassy staffers came by. It seemed less forbidding in 1974.

I met with the CIA’s deputy chief of station, who told me that I was assigned as a case officer to the Mekong Delta, which included all of the area below Saigon. He said, in the way of an overview, that what was happening in the Delta countryside was of extreme interest to policy makers in the States. I was to work hard at developing new sources of information on enemy political and military activities, get as many reports as I could from the existing agents whom I would be handling, and work closely with the Special Branch of the South Vietnamese police, but I was not to let them lead me around or recruit me to report the war the way they saw it. My job was to work on building up unilateral—not liaison—operations. He said that I was needed and there was much work to be done. “Plus,” he said, “your presence out there reassures the South Vietnamese that the United States is still at their side.”

Later I took a pedicab to the Duc Hotel, a residence hostel used exclusively by the agency. Sitting in the front of the three-wheeler with the wind in my face, I smelled the city, the exhausts, the cooking odors, and the ripe human smells brought out by the tropical sun. Horns blew. Bikes whizzed by. The street noises induced a sense of excitement and vitality. Most of the people did not look at me or show any expression—hundreds of thousands of Americans had come that way before.

  SEVENTEEN  

In mid-March 1974, almost four months after I had said good-bye to Hog in Laos, I jumped off a helicopter in Chau Doc, South Vietnam, a Delta province capital bordering Cambodia. My new boss, Don K., was waiting on the tarmac. A tall, lean, goateed intellectual in his early thirties, Don K. was a career intelligence officer who had been busy in another part of the world when he was drafted into the CIA’s clandestine corps to serve in Vietnam. He had little in the way of a military background, but he knew people and he was adaptive.

Don drove me to our downtown office/living quarters compound on the Bassac River. By the standards of the Lao program, we had palatial accommodations as well as a large service staff, mostly Chinese, of cooks, maids, mechanics, and drivers. Our guard force was all Nhung, descendants of Chinese mountain tribes, who had served with the CIA for years. Several interpreters and translators worked in the office. The office staff was multilingual, and English, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese were spoken.

Among my assigned contacts was a squat and unusually quiet Cambodian, “Ros” [alias]. He had been a CIA agent for years and had done everything asked of him. If he understood what his agency case officer wanted him to do, he did it. He traveled on intelligence missions into Cambodia under a number of guises, often as a hawker selling sundries he had purchased in the local market. Ros lived by his wits. He carried a knife, among other weapons, and had killed when cornered and questioned about his activities.

His reports of missions into Cambodia were detailed and informative. Initially it took me hours to debrief him because I had no
background on the interplay among the various groups in Cambodia, which included the Khmer Rouge, Khmer Krom, North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and Cambodian government forces. But Ros was patient and I soon became conversant with the border situation and the stark, brutal realities of life in Cambodia.

On the South Vietnam side of the border, the Chau Doc office collected both military and political information from a variety of agents. The military information was straightforward. North Vietnamese forces dominated the countryside. They moved with impunity from sanctuaries in Cambodia through Chau Doc Province and throughout the rich farming region of the delta. The Government of South Vietnam (GVN) forces held all of the cities south of Saigon, as well as the lines of communications, roads, major waterways, and other components of the infrastructure, but the GVN’s influence in the countryside was limited. In some areas it was restricted to the ground under the feet of its Army.

For the most part, the farmers around Chau Doc didn’t care about the war or, for that matter, the government in either Saigon or Hanoi. If they took sides they were at risk of being killed. The farmers wanted to farm, and they had no interest in politics. Their traditions were nondemocratic. They didn’t understand the reasons for U.S. involvement, and they didn’t make eye contact with soldiers moving through their areas. The country people did what they were told by whatever force was around at the time.

I liaised with the military and, because I knew most of the Air America pilots, became the outrider for the office. Often I went to Ha Tien on the coast. Once, while waiting to talk with the district chief there, I walked out to a cemetery on a windswept knoll overlooking the ocean. On some of the tombstones were names of Frenchmen, most with military rank. French Foreign Legion perhaps. “Mort pour La France” was inscribed on the tombstones. A beautiful place that country, that hill overlooking the ocean. Vietnam was a country worth fighting for. But what was that Kipling poem the cavalry sergeant quoted about Westerners making war in Indochina?