Tucker's Last Stand (8 page)

“Abe,” the colonel said.

Rufus brought the meeting quickly to order and Blackford began, here and there consulting his notes.

He described the dismaying problem. From the point northwest of Khesanh, where it crossed over into Laos, to Tayninh, fifty miles northwest of Saigon, the Trail stretches over four hundred miles. “We've surveyed only about eighty miles. Obviously there's no way to close the entire Trail. All we can hope to do is interdict traffic coming down it. The point will be to select a section long enough to make a detour by the North Vietnamese effectively impossible, but short enough to give us the kind of concentrated target we'll need if we're going to keep those”—in deference to Rufus, Blackford sanitized the language he would ordinarily have used at this juncture—“gentlemen and their supplies back in the Communist world.”

They devoted an hour to studying aerial photographs—which proved all but useless: the planes saw only the green carapace that sheltered the entire area like an endless awning. The photographs Blackford had taken, and had then developed and blown up at Savannakhet, suggested the nature of the problem. The twists and the turns of the Trail, the offshoots to the target areas in the east, the difficulty of access from the air … Staring at the photographs, Rufus and Colonel Strauss could almost feel the asphyxiating heat, the dampness, the awful luxuriant growth of myriad trees, vines, shrubs which they needed to penetrate.

“Well,” Blackford said, “are you here, Abe, to design what we need?”

“Here to help,” said Colonel Strauss, looking once again through his thick glasses at one of the pictures.

Rufus said, “Colonel Strauss—Abe—is an electrical engineer by training. He helped design the South Korean barrier at the 38th parallel.… You should know, Abe, that Blackford here is a graduate engineer.” He looked up at Tucker Montana. “Major Montana is with us from Army Special Forces. He is an expert on antiterrorist operations. Fought the Huks. I'm sorry, I don't know whether you have a technical background, Major.”

“Tucker, please. My background is in Spanish and history.”

Abe Strauss suggested that they should lunch, then disperse and meet again late in the afternoon. It would take him, he said, several hours to assemble his thoughts on the kind of facilities the military needed. Rufus suggested “about five o'clock,” which meant five o'clock. Tucker said that under the circumstances, unless he was needed, he could usefully take the time to visit someone he had promised the day before to spend a little time with. Blackford was glad for the opportunity to go off with Rufus. He wanted to catch up on the home front.

They walked down the Rue Pensif, away from the broad boulevards with their grinding noises from the motorbikes and the honking of the taxis and jeeps. The little street, which took them to the family owned and operated restaurant Blackford had heard about, was calm. Old trees—when might they have been planted? By the French, surely: a hundred years ago? Blackford noticed that they gave signs of evanescence—did they miss their Gallic patrons? Still, they gave some shelter from the sun, and approaching the restaurant you could smell the fresh bread fifty yards away, and admire the sweetness of the neat arrangements of geraniums and poinsettias and the orange nasturtiums.

The home front, he learned as they set out on their French fixed four-course menu beginning with the onion soup and ending with the blueberry tart, was confused, and confusing. “The President's moods,” Rufus said, “evidently oscillate from high belligerence to heavy reliance on diplomatic negotiation.”

“Is he afraid of Goldwater?”

“The polls last week report that one half of the people who voted for Nixon in 1960 will nevertheless vote for LBJ in 1964.”

Blackford whistled. “Landslide stuff. Why, I wonder?”

“Goldwater's campaign hasn't been very reassuring. Plus he's being undermined by the liberal wing of the Republican Party. Plus the American people—conservative Americans, in this one sense, regardless of party—don't much welcome the thought of a third President in twelve months. Assassinate JFK in early November and then a year later assassinate his successor at the polls—in order to bring in someone who's being painted as a renegade Republican, a quick-triggered conservative fundamentalist.”

“But Goldwater does have some strength as a candidate, doesn't he?”

“Great strength. In Houston last week, a few miles from the district that first sent LBJ to Congress, he was mobbed by enthusiasts. And his book has sold over a million copies.”

“
The Conscience of a Conservative
?”

“Yes. Have you read it?”

“No. I intend to.”

“It is entirely unambiguous, among other things, about the nature of our responsibilities in Vietnam.”

“But that's no different, is it, from JFK and Johnson? Their commitments are unambiguous.”

“The difference is that Goldwater is hammering home the kind of thing the Democrats don't like to hear discussed.”

“Such as?”

“One: The assassination of Diem and Nhu in November—clearly an operation sanctioned by the White House, three weeks before JFK was assassinated. And look at the mess—I am quoting Goldwater now”—Rufus was always careful to detach himself from political analysis done by others, which he was merely reporting—“in Vietnam since then, with governments that go in and out as in the so-called banana republics. Two: Whatever happened to Laotian neutrality? That deal, made in 1962 by JFK, is being blatantly violated. We wouldn't be here worrying about the Trail if the independence of Laos, guaranteed under the treaty, were being respected. Three: Democrats are lousy at preventing wars (you know the line—World War One, World War Two, Korea, now Vietnam, all happen when a Democrat is in the White House); and four: Democrats are lousy, once the wars begin, at concluding them successfully (and you know
that
line—Versailles, Yalta, Potsdam, Cuba, the Berlin Wall, the loss of China, the ambiguous victory in Korea leaving us with the necessity of maintaining two divisions there).

“Put it this way: Goldwater is scoring and, more and more, what happens in Vietnam is the yardstick by which the competence of LBJ is being judged. I don't see how the President can lose the election, but there is every reason to assume, from the Richter-scale meters in the White House, that Lyndon Johnson is acting as if he might actually lose.”

“Lose Vietnam?”

Rufus returned Blackford's smile.

“I think you are right, basically LBJ is ambiguous on Vietnam. But I don't think he would let Indochina go without a major struggle.”

“When LBJ makes major struggles he sets out to win, doesn't he?”

Rufus replied, “He sets out to win, but he doesn't always win. He wanted the presidential nomination in 1960, after all.”

“But this time he is Commander in Chief of the delegates—he virtually owns the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and, incidentally, you and me.”

“I am not saying he could not win in Indochina,” Rufus said, rising from the table. “We both have work to do. I'll see you at five.”

8

June 15, 1964

Saigon, South Vietnam

Tucker had no problem in getting a taxi. He was driven toward 17 Henri Brevard and reminded himself for the twenty-seventh time that normal people should carry earplugs in Saigon, where you would think that car mufflers were a federal offense. The noise from the cars, motor scooters and bikes was deafening, and of course the hot, awful air made it necessary to keep windows open. Happily, Lao Dai's apartment had an electric fan. When he was first there, a few days before he met Blackford and flew with him to Savannakhet to begin their survey, he had found the fan—not working. He was delighted! A nonworking electric fan! While she looked on, after pouring the two glasses of wine, he impatiently opened this drawer and that one, trying to find tools or, if not, kitchen instruments that would do the work of tools. Lao Dai finally caught his attention, raised her hand gently to indicate that he should stop his frenetic search, and then glided off.

She always glided. Tucker studied her: there could not be a centimeter's difference in the high-low elevation of her head when she walked, though perhaps he was taken in by the whole of Lao Dai, that regal air that had caught his eye from the first, the night he spotted her at La Tambourine, the dark hair so neatly coiffed, the delicate gold earrings, the calm, enticing smile, the animated breasts that seemed to accompany her vibrant conversation. She came back from the bedroom, a little tool kit in hand, which she unzipped. The fan's problem was slightly more complicated than expected, but he had rewired the rotor to eliminate the short circuit, screwed everything back together, and smiled up at her. It is fixed, he said. He liked it that she frowned skeptically as she took the electrical cord to press the plug into the socket. And her smile had been radiant when the current of air began.

He had promised to get away from his “meetings” as soon as he could, unhappily not always in time for dinner. But at whatever time in the evening, he would take her to La Tambourine, and they would talk and drink champagne and listen to the music and to the singer. Tucker had said that if she did not hear from him over the telephone, she could expect him between 9 and 9:30—“My companions,” he said, “like to dine early.” Tonight he was there at 9:30, and when she opened the door she overwhelmed him—the scent, yes, but also the arresting poise of that beautiful face and figure, from her ankles to her eyebrows a model of Asian delicacy, everything about her dainty and fine, though her breasts were more pronounced than those of some of the scarecrow beauties who were modeling the latest French fashions in the shops. He had never seen in any other woman eyes that communicated such tender intelligence, and her lips were warm, softly framing her special, private smile. His impulse was to kiss her deeply, but instead he gave himself almost equal pleasure by bowing slightly, taking her hand and touching it to his lips.

“Hello, Mr. Tucker. It has been lonely without you since this afternoon. But”—she pointed to the desk at the end of the room—“there were all those papers to correct. I must return them tomorrow to my students.”

The taxi had been kept waiting. At La Tambourine, the recessed little table was reserved and Toi, the grandfatherly sommelier, had their champagne waiting. The nightclub had once been turn-of-the-century gilt and the velvet was still there, though badly worn, and only one chandelier hung where obviously three had once decorated the room with its thirty-odd tables. The air was heavy with cigar smoke against which two standing fans and a ceiling fan vainly contended. The piano played, awaiting the singer, a middle-aged misty-eyed Frenchwoman who sang songs first heard in French movies made during the thirties.

They spoke as if it had been months, not hours, since their last meeting. And yet they had been together only a half-dozen times, three of them within the last twenty-four hours, but these communions, as Tucker thought of them, at first physical and then something more, had generated a mutual excitement about every detail of their lives, their interests, their ambitions. She told him a great deal. Lao Dai was twenty-two. Her husband, a captain in the South Vietnamese army, had left her pregnant when he went off on a mission to Khesanh, where—Lao Dai had lowered her head on telling Tucker this—he was killed the day of his arrival by a sniper bullet. Her eyes were moist, but Lao Dai was not a woman to weep, at least not with strangers. She departed suddenly from her narrative. “You
are
a stranger. Yet you don't seem to me a stranger. Very odd—what is the word?—unprecedented.”

Tucker held her hand. “So you went back to teaching?”

Oh no, she hadn't
gone back
to teaching. She had never missed a single day at the school, “not even when Nguyen and I were married. Our honeymoon was from ten
P.M
., when the guests left here”—she pointed in the direction of the private dining room of La Tambourine—“to eight the next morning, when he reported to his regiment and I reported to the Lycée.” Tucker winked. “Did that give you time to become pregnant?” She smiled: “As a matter of fact, yes. Or—it might have been the following weekend, when he came back for two days, after maneuvers. But I never saw him again after that. It is not very safe, in Vietnam today, to be married to someone in the army. It is not very safe in Vietnam to do anything, never mind Saigon. That is why I—had the abortion.” The little smile was gone.

Of course she had wanted to know about him. He wasn't certain of how much to say. Tucker had had similar experiences of instant attraction. With Rosita in Manila, Aleka in Seoul, and—well, back to that night at the motel in Newport when that dormant hunger had been so irrevocably awakened. That appetite, so long …
sublimated
was the word he wanted to use, but couldn't bring himself to do so—it didn't fit well with his preoccupation, which had been to build a nuclear weapon—had been satisfied often enough that now he could count more readily the brief intervals when he had not been in love with a woman than the women he had loved. He was, quite simply, never happy except when in the company of a woman, and although he loved, deliriously, the sexual exchanges, he loved his women as much after as before; and his women in turn found that his nearly unique postcoital exuberance—in conversation, in the sharing of workaday tasks and pleasures—made him especially exciting. “What I do not understand,” Lao Dai was saying, “is why you stay in the Army. You say you are thirty-eight years old. Even in South Vietnam, with full conscription, you do not have to serve in the military if you are more than thirty-five.”

That same question had been asked before, and as with the narrative of his life, he had a packaged answer which was honest, even if it left certain things untouched. Lao Dai knew by now that Tucker had been raised by his mother, that he had gone to the University of Texas, that after that, in the later stages of the World War, he had had some training in what he called “the Signal Corps” but that he had never seen action in World War Two. That after a year or so during which he had had several jobs, including grounds supervisor at a monastery and Spanish teacher in a parochial school in Hartford, Connecticut, he had been called up to serve again, this time in Korea. When that war was over he was asked to volunteer for service in the Philippines as a military adviser to the army of President Magsaysay, who was fighting to put down the insurrection of the Huks, which had begun as a kind of anarchist-terrorist operation “until our friends the Commies got involved, and then it became serious.” It had not been intended that Colonel Lansdale's specialists, of whom he was one, would themselves engage in combat, but there had been no way of avoiding combat on that day in May of 1954.