You thought you had seen a star there, shooting by.
Not falling, but shooting.
You realized how starved you were. Your procreational abilities came one hundred percent back on track. They were turbo-charged. And you gave birth, Jubilee, in 1958—not once, but twice. You bore fifteen puppies in total. You gave birth twice more in 1959. Twelve more puppies. Then, in 1960, you managed to give birth one last time in what could only be considered a super-advanced-age pregnancy. At the same time, in the vast lands up north, on the same continent—in another communist state by the name of the USSR—a wolfdog named Anubis with an erection strong beyond his years kept forcing it into bitches, planting his seed. He was a father beyond his years. You, Jubilee, were a mother beyond your years. This time you gave birth to four puppies. When all was said and done you had brought thirty-one puppies into the world.
In winter 1958, your first litter gave birth to another generation.
In spring 1959, your second litter gave birth to another generation.
By autumn 1959, the children of the dogs in your first litter were themselves getting it on. Their numbers increased. Your bloodline thrived. And over time your descendants proved the superiority of your lineage, its wonderfully modern superiority, and they were urged, males and bitches both, to get raunchy. Finally, in 1963, the day came when the entire platoon was composed of dogs belonging to your family tree. Their number: 801.
And how was Mao’s China doing?
It becomes necessary to touch on the nuclear issue. China’s strategic vision required that it possess nuclear capability. The decision had been made. This was a perfectly natural stance for Red China to take; it was, after all, the third player in the game, along with America and the Soviet Union. In 1958, a telling incident took place: the so-called “Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.” In August, China, under Mao’s direction, initiated a large-scale shelling of the small island Quemoy that belonged to Taiwan. Quemoy was located in Amoy Bay, off the coast of Fujian Province, and the Kuomintang had stationed members of its regular army there. Chiang Kai-shek’s forces intended to use it as the base for their counteroffensive against China. At the time, the only China America recognized as a state was the Republic of China on Taiwan, led by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces and the Kuomintang government. Obviously America couldn’t allow this reckless violence. Mao’s China was red. If Red China were to expand, red patches would start bleeding onto the rest of the Asian page in that ideological coloring book. Warning! Beware of Mao Zedong! The situation became critical. From summer to autumn, the United States considered the possibility of using nuclear weapons. The American military had spread nuclear arms across the entire Pacific. Bases on Guam, Okinawa, and Taiwan had been outfitted with secure installations to handle them. All right, then, why don’t we use these things? To contain Maoist China! America had boiled the complex situation down to a simplistic vision of “communism vs. capitalism,” and if nuclear weapons were what it would take, well, gosh darn it America was ready to do it. Mao, on the other hand, had summed up the situation in his own simplistic way: “Chinese socialism vs. American imperialism.”
That, basically, was how Sino-American relations stood.
In the end, actual conflict was avoided. But Mao had learned his lesson: fight nuclear with nuclear. There was simply no other way to push back against the American menace. And there was more. In an earlier age, when China had been on good terms with the USSR, it had been solidly protected by the Soviet Union’s “nuclear umbrella.” Yes—it had been a satellite nation. But now?
Can’t rely on ’em, Mao thought.
In fact, my dear Khrushchev, Mao thought. Nikita…your nuclear bombs are a menace from behind!
Khrushchev, for his part, wondered what Mao was getting all worked up about.
What’ll you do if nuclear war actually breaks out? What then? Man, this guy’s unbelievable. Here I am blahblahblahing about “US-USSR cooperation” to make sure we don’t end up stumbling into a full-scale war, and look at you. Idiot.
Look, Khrushchev thought—though he never voiced his thoughts. Look. Just leave world domination to us and the Americans. You can just chill, okay?
Khrushchev may not have said anything, but his actions showed very clearly what he was thinking. How wary he was of Mao. As a matter of fact, in 1956, China had already made up its mind to develop nuclear weapons. In 1957, the Soviet Union had at least outwardly projected a willingness to support China’s nuclear program by signing the “Sino-Soviet Agreement on New Technology for National Defense.” But the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis had made Khrushchev apprehensive about Mao. I mean, look at this guy, he’s actually doing this stuff! It’s dangerous. In 1959, Khrushchev scrapped the Sino-Soviet Agreement on New Technology for National Defense. The next year, he recalled the USSR’s nuclear specialists from China.
He completely cut off all nuclear technological support. If that led to a split between China and the Soviet Union, well, so be it. You can’t have everything.
Sorry, Mao.
Then, in 1963, something happened that brought about a definitive change in the situation. Astonishingly, the three nuclear powers—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. The point of this action was to impress upon the rest of the world that that was it, no one else was going to get these things. And that was the last straw. Mao blew his top. China reacted by releasing a statement explicitly criticizing the Soviet state.
1964.
Two pieces of good news made China giddy. First, on October 14, Khrushchev was ousted. Mao howled with glee. Hah, serves you right, Nikita! Second, just two days later, on October 16, China’s first nuclear test was a success. We did this on our own! Mao cried. Eat our dust, losers!
Now China was a superpower too.
As soon as Mao’s relationship with Khrushchev came to an end—and as fraught as it was, it was still a relationship—he formed another, and this one, too, moved history. Mao developed a personal connection with Ho Chi Minh. This one wasn’t bad. Mao had been Ho’s only supporter during the First Indochina War, when Vietnam, which is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, founded in 1945, battled for its independence from France. “Down with Imperialism!” Red China shouted, and made the Vietnamese army a present of 160,000 small arms. It trained some fifteen thousand Vietnamese to fight, turning them into professional guerrillas. It did Ho some other favors too. Ho remained grateful for this until the end of his life. He continued throughout to show his respect for Mao.
Naturally, the warm personal bond between these men affected Sino-Vietnamese relations, and this in turn had an effect on Sino-American and Sino-Soviet relations.
So what happened?
The chaos of the Vietnam War, aka the Second Indochina War.
Yes, at last we come to the Vietnam War. The infamous Vietnam War. A limited war fought on the Indochina peninsula: America’s quagmire. In 1964, John F. Kennedy was no longer the American president. He had been assassinated in Texas on November 22 of the previous year, almost a year before Khrushchev exited the stage. There was a crack, turbulence in the air, and he was gone from the world. Kennedy had been disinclined to get into a full-scale war, but not Johnson. Not Lyndon B. Johnson, former thirty-seventh vice president of the United States, now thirty-sixth president of the United States. On August 2, the Tonkin Gulf Incident took place. An American destroyer, claiming to have been attacked by the North Vietnamese Navy, which was part of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s military and was thus led by Ho Chi Minh, conducted a retaliatory strike. In fact, the original attack had been fabricated by the Americans.
1965. On February 7, the American military began bombing North Vietnam. As the bombing continued, the targets moved progressively farther and farther north…
So what happened?
Naturally, Mao-led China grew suspicious. What, ultimately, was America’s goal?
Where did it really want to end up?
What’s just above Vietnam to the north?
We are.
That was it. Mao decided that America was taking aim at China. American encirclement all over again. Ho sent out the SOS. On March 22, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, popularly known as the Vietcong—short for Vietnamese Communists—announced that it was “prepared to accept aid from its friends around the world.”
Mao was Ho’s friend.
And so the policy of “support Vietnam, resist America” was established. Mao had made up his mind. We’ll push back against America’s war of imperialist aggression, put people on the ground in support of North Vietnam. Some thirty-five hundred US Marines had begun landing near Da Nang on March 8, so the land war was already under way. They had moved ahead into “direct intervention.” Warning! they yelled in Beijing. Beware of the US! This war could easily expand into mainland China!
Send in the PLA!
And so it happened. On June 9, 1965, a substantial support force from China crossed the border. The soldiers marched through Friendship Pass onto the Indochina peninsula and into Ho’s Vietnam. Only the main forces of the People’s Liberation Army, the true elites, had been called to serve. Prior to deployment, they underwent two months of special training.
These efforts to support Vietnam were conducted in total secrecy. Still, by the second half of 1965, more than a hundred thousand troops had been shipped off to the peninsula to “support Vietnam, resist America.”
Humans. And dogs too. Seventy-five dogs from the Military Dog Platoon had been sent over the border as an extremely modern and practical fighting force. All were descended from Jubilee. They moved south, down the peninsula.
Southward…southward…
Had America noticed?
Of course. The US had, by and large, figured out what was happening. It was the leading power in the West, and it had the best, maybe the second best, information-gathering network in the world. But the US kept silent. Johnson’s administration had learned of China’s covert intervention in the conflict, but it kept this knowledge secret. Because it was kind of at a loss. What the hell is China doing? it wondered. Are they trying to turn our limited war into a total war? They seem to see things sort of differently from Moscow, but…is this, like, a trap or something? Washington, in other words, was stymied by its own insistence on viewing two different shades of red, Soviet and Chinese, as though they were the same. And its provisional solution to the problem was to battle secrecy with more secrecy. As long as both sides didn’t make what was happening public, China and the US wouldn’t yet be at war.
The important thing, Washington decided, was to avoid direct confrontation.
The Indochina peninsula was split into North and South. The line was drawn at the seventeenth parallel north, along a buffer zone created by the Geneva Accords, which had ended the First Indochina War in 1954. This region was known as the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. In 1967, Quang Tri Province, which abutted the DMZ on the south, was the scene of a series of ferocious battles between the American military and the joint forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong.
In summer, the direct confrontation with China that the US had been trying to avoid finally broke out in Quang Tri.
The participants in the battle were not human.
You were the soldiers.
Yes, you were the ones battling it out. Dogs vs. dogs.
Among the American dogs who came to Vietnam, shipped over from mainland America, was one named DED. In November 1963, President John F. Kennedy, JFK, exited the scene. In March 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson announced in his State of the Union address that he would not be running for president in the next election, and he, too, left. Goodbye LBJ. And hello DED. The dog was sent to the front in the summer of 1967 and kept fighting there for a year, until he himself left in summer 1968.
JFK, LBJ, DED. That, from a dog-historical perspective, was the progression.
And so there you were.
ME?
Yes, you.
Woof.
DED barked.
June 1967. You had crossed the Pacific, but you weren’t yet in Vietnam. You were on Okinawa, about to be separated from your sister. That’s why you barked. You had both passed a screening test at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, in California, and then they had shipped you off to this distant island. You had undergone six weeks of special training. You were siblings by different mothers, born of the same seed. The difference between your ages was two years and four months. You were descended on your father’s side, some seven generations earlier, from Bad News. Five generations back, your great-great-great-grandfather had had, as his aunts and uncle, Jubilee, Sumer, and Gospel.
What kind of training did you undergo on Okinawa? Your handlers took advantage of the extreme similarity of the Okinawan environment to that of the Indochina peninsula to teach you specialized techniques for fighting against the Vietcong. First you had to get used to the jungle, with its oppressive heat and humidity. Then you had to learn to find hidden tunnels. Because the elusive communist guerrillas hid out, generally, in a vast network of underground passageways they had constructed. You had to hone your ability to navigate minefields. You had to be able to detect ambushes before they happened and respond to surprise attacks.
That’s what these six weeks were for. To turn members of the American military dog elite into Vietnam War professionals.
Specialists.
Ten dogs in addition to DED and his sister had been brought in from the mainland, along with another forty-six from a base in the Philippines and twenty-nine specially selected from a platoon at a base in Korea. Unfortunately, seventeen out of the total of eighty-seven dogs were unable to become fully capable specialists. DED’s sister was among these. And so, DED, you barked. Because while you would be sent off to the Indochina peninsula, your sister would be shipped back to Oahu, Hawaii.
You sensed, somehow, that you would never see her again. That you would never again be able to play with her. And so, DED, you barked.
Your sister’s name was Goodnight. Though she had failed the screening test on Okinawa and was shipped off to a military installation on Oahu to serve as a sentry dog, she was still an outstanding dog—they wouldn’t have used her if she wasn’t—and in time, she would have her own rather complicated role to play in your history. For now, we will set her story aside.
To focus on you, DED.
ME?
Yes, you.
Think of your name. DED was an acronym for “dog-eat-dog,” and it had been given to you in the hope that you would become a tough fighter worthy of the phrase. Do you get what that means, DED? Giving you a name like that was in poor taste, yes, but there was more to it than that. And as it happened, in the end, your name suggested your destiny.
You would consume canine flesh.
And soon.
That was the fate that awaited you.
MINE?
Yes, yours.
Woof!
Seven days later you were prepared to ship off to Vietnam. This was still June 1967. You and your sixty-nine fellow specialist anti-Vietcong dogs departed Okinawa and landed on the Indochina peninsula. One by one, the dogs were assigned to their new units. None was assigned to the IV Corps Tactical Zone, which was farthest south. Forty-four were assigned to the III Corps Tactical Zone. Half that number were assigned to Tay Ninh Province in the west, along the border with Cambodia. Four dogs were assigned to the II Corps Tactical Zone, and the rest—twenty-two in all—were assigned to the I Corps Tactical Zone, up north. Of the latter, eight went to Quang Ngai Province, four to Thua Thien-Hue Province, and ten to Quang Tri Province, all the w
ay up north.
July 1967. DED was among the ten dogs sent to Quang Tri.
They went by helicopter.
They swooped down from the sky into a landing zone that had been cleared in the forest, into the thick of war.
The northern border of Quang Tri butted up against the seventeenth parallel. Against the DMZ. That summer, the DMZ was far from demilitarized—it was the site of intense fighting. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff had given permission to start shelling the DMZ a year earlier, though naturally this fact had not been made public. The Americans had one simple slogan in the border area, where the two states and the two sides in the conflict met: “Keep the Commies Out!” Seven months earlier, permission had been granted to return fire across the DMZ. Shooting back could be considered a form of invasion. Five months earlier, permission had been granted to carry out preemptive strikes. This was…well, obviously a form of invasion. They were doing all this and still had no results to show for it. Then, three months earlier, they started constructing a defensive wall. This time they were going to try closing off South Vietnam. This was the beginning of the “McNamara line,” which required an incredible investment of manpower and involved the use of all kinds of equipment: barbed wire, mines, observation towers, searchlights, and so on. They carried all this stuff in using CH-54 heavy-lift helicopters, commonly known as sky cranes, and conducted frequent flyovers to protect the project.
Did the wall work? Was it impermeable?
It was not.
At all.
True, they were still building it, but this was kind of ridiculous. Not infrequently the enemy would actually slip past the McNamara line and turn up behind the US forces. And then they would run around doing whatever the hell they felt like, launching surprise attacks on the Marine Corps advance base, demolishing the McNamara line even as it was being constructed.
Clearly something was going very wrong.
The reason for this lay underground in that highly developed network of tunnels. Vietnam had begun preparing for an all-out war of resistance in March 1965, and in the major cities all the crucial facilities had already been moved underground. Underground passages and shelters had been dug early on, and the digging had continued ever since. Naturally the DMZ was no exception. Over the course of the two years previous, an extremely intricate system of tunnels had come into being below the seventeenth parallel.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 19
