by Mendy Sobol
Chapter Twelve: Paul
As soon as Meg and I saw the pictures from Vietnam, we knew what we had to do. We had no choice.
Before the seasons turned again, we said our goodbyes, leaving Broadway Joe in New Jersey to live out his days as my parents’ faithful companion and protector, leaving our old lives and families forever, leaving for Vietnam.
We volunteered with Healing Hands, a communist-front charity that was building medical clinics throughout the war-ravaged country. Vietnamese doctors didn’t want us there, arguing that foreigners with no medical training would be more of a burden than a benefit. Communist Party officials overruled them, hoping the arrival of remorseful Americans would lead to a propaganda bonanza and a torrent of foreign cash. They assigned us to the Mekong River Delta People’s Clinic and forgot about us.
For months the clinic wasted time and money treating Healing Hands volunteers for malaria, snakebites, and dysentery. Most returned home, sadder but wiser. Meg and I adapted to our new environment, and proved to be, if not quick studies of medical knowledge, at least eager ones. Meg, with her background in nursing studies and volunteer work at the Applewood VA hospital, won the doctors’ trust by day and taught me basic first aid by night. No one expected us to stay, but we did, spending our days fighting losing battles against leukemia, lymphoma, birth defects, napalm burns, and a hundred other horrors. As the clinic’s reputation grew, nuclear blast and radiation victims came from everywhere in Vietnam, some walking hundreds of miles. Though prevailing winds saved the Delta from the worst of the radioactive fallout, the place where we lived and worked was still a poisoned land. During the war, the American military saturated the Delta with Agent Orange herbicides sprayed from the air and jellied gasoline napalm bombs dropped from high altitude by B-52 bombers. Their goal was to defoliate vast areas of jungle, depriving the enemy of cover while poisoning its food and water sources. The programs failed, but the tragic legacy of the American chemical weapons campaign lives on. Over half the clinic’s patients suffer from Agent Orange-related illnesses or the horrific pain caused by decades-old napalm burns. Thousands of American war veterans, doused indiscriminately from the air, share these afflictions with their former enemies.
So the doctors were correct about us being a burden, at least at first. But the politicians were correct too. Healing Hands became a propaganda goldmine, and its international fundraising efforts brought in tens of millions in hard-currency donations. And there was one more windfall no one had foreseen.
Meg.
In months, her duties progressed from applying Band-Aids to assisting in surgery. She learned everything about the clinic, and everything about Vietnamese history, culture, and politics. She taught herself the intricacies of international fundraising and public relations. While I was struggling with the basics of first aid, the clinic’s doctors asked Meg to become its Executive Director. Vietnam discovered Meg; the global media transformed her into an icon. She won the Nobel Prize for Peace. And then she turned it down.
When Meg’s not combating bureaucrats in Moscow, Washington, Ho Chi Minh City, or some international relief agency, she tends her patients in the Mekong Delta clinic, her hair, more silver than onyx, roughly cropped around her sun-scrubbed face, her beauty maintained with purpose and commitment rather than lotions and makeup. They call her simply, The Mother. Each day they come from the poisoned rice paddies, and she assures them in ever more fluent Vietnamese, “Doung caw louw. Co houng ca seaw. Theaw louw cha co.” Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. I’ll take care of you.
The Vietnamese people survive the way they always have. Like Boxer, the horse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, their response to every setback is, We will work harder. They accept me because they see, like them, I’m damaged but go on.
Another lasting legacy of Toby’s infamy is Section 17 of the United States Code, the Computer Access Security Statute. It sailed through Congress with little political or popular opposition, perhaps because of Toby, more likely because people didn’t understand what they were giving up. It barred from that day forward all but a few select corporations and government agencies from developing, possessing, or using computers, allowing access only to those with top security clearance. Within six months, every university in America not involved in defense-related research, voluntarily shut down its computers. Ironically, nothing in that law would have stopped Toby.
Signing the Access Bill was President Agnew’s last official act. Two days later, he plea-bargained away the Oval Office in return for dismissal of charges stemming from kickbacks he solicited when he was Governor of Maryland.
The Supreme Court rejected the ACLU’s Access Law challenge by a 5–4 vote. Justice Douglas, dissenting, called the law, “...the most grievous limitation of free speech in our nation’s history,” and, “...a blatant attack on the First Amendment.” Justice Rehnquist, Agnew’s only Court appointee, wrote for the majority, calling computers, “enhanced adding machines” and commenting, “Surely, not even Mr. Justice Douglas would argue that adding machines have First Amendment rights.”
Britain and Japan followed suit. They were scared. Everyone was scared. Soon computers were as rare in the Free World as they had always been behind the Iron Curtain. Computing became the sole province of the military and a handful of corporations. I haven’t seen a computer since 1972.
Perhaps these events, the deadly rhythms of history, explain the dream. And why, when it comes, it always leaves me shaken. For thirty years it has remained the same, insisting Toby came to a meeting he never attended, insisting this phantom Toby turned Meg, me, and the other students from our purpose with a single ridiculous sentence, insisting he paid for this intervention with his life.
Despite sporadic media reports of Toby’s covert CIA detention, or execution, or death in an accident or by his own hand, I think he’s still out there hiding somewhere. If he is, I know he shares the dream with me the same way we shared our dreams in college, and wonders at its meaning like I do.
There’s one other dream that comes almost as often. It’s a lot like one Toby and I dreamed together in the ‘60s, only in far more elaborate detail. We’re sitting at the Beef ‘n’ Bun counter. The smell of cheeseburgers sizzling on the greasy grill fills the room. George dumps two plates of crisp, crinkle-cut French fries in front of us. Toby looks up at me, ketchup staining his beard. “Einstein,” he says, talking through a mouthful of half-chewed fries. “Definitely, Einstein.” He holds up a shiny palm-sized device, and begins sliding an index finger vertically across its shimmering screen. I stare, as images scroll upward with the motion of Toby’s finger. First, the iconic photo of the brilliant Jewish physicist, silver hair askew, smiling enigmatically, captioned with the words, “Greatest Genius of All Time.” Then six equations that changed the world: Einstein’s Nobel Prize-winning photoelectric equations, the basis of quantum mechanics, which led to the development of semiconductors and integrated circuits.
I’m stunned, but recover quickly. “Yeah? Well that’s their opinion. But Tesla….”
Toby removes his finger from the device’s screen, silencing me with a wave of his hand. Then, his smile mirroring Einstein’s, he looks past me into the Beef ‘n’ Bun’s crowded dining room. I turn, following his gaze.
At every table, diners sit holding devices similar to Toby’s. Some, as Toby had done, are scrolling through text. Others appear to be typing with their thumbs. Still others are speaking into them or listening absentmindedly through tiny earplugs. That’s when it hits me. They’re computers! Impossibly tiny computers linked in some way that allows them to communicate with each other and share data at near light speed.
I look at Toby in delighted disbelief. His smile broadens into a grin.
“Einstein,” he says. “Definitely, Einstein.”
I love this dream.
Meg has grown impatient with my retellings of the dream where Toby stops our three-decade-old crime, but never tires of hearing the computer dream. Nerds
in Paradise, she calls it. When we walk along the Mekong at sunset looking up at the South Asia sky, I often tell its high-tech story. And when I see the Southern Cross’s first star shining in the dusk, I always wish the same wish. Silently, upon the star, I wish that wherever Toby may be, he shares this dream.
After all, we always dreamed that one day, we’d change the world.
PART THREE
MELORA
Chapter Thirteen: Melora
My war began a lot like the one in Vietnam. I didn’t know it, because back then I didn’t know shit about Vietnam.
Professor Sherman tried to warn me. “I’m telling you, Melora, this Indonesian war, it’s turning into a quagmire. Before it’s over, we’ll all have blood on our hands!”
I had no fucking clue what he was talking about.
It all started when some psycho Indonesian general named Hasan got tired of waiting for the elected president to finish her term, so he arrested her. The CIA backed Hasan because the president was a socialist, but Indonesians backed the president because they’d elected her. China backed her too, so they could stir up some shit. No one believed General Hasan when he promised, “…new elections as soon as our homeland is stabilized.”
Demonstrators filled the streets outside the presidential palace—the Istana Merdeka, or “Freedom Palace”—in Jakarta. After a couple of weeks, that cabrón Hasan got tired of the demonstrators keeping him awake at night and ordered riot police to clear them out. The demonstrators threw rocks at the police, so the police tear-gassed them, and when they tossed tear gas canisters back at the police, the police opened fire. When it was over, twenty-two protesters and three cops were dead. At least those are the official numbers.
On the record, U.S. officials called for restraint. But the tear gas choking the crowds? Made in the U.S.A. The rifles fired by Hasan’s thugs? Pentagon-issued M-16s. The bullets mowing down the protesters? As American as apple pie. The general was making a lot of Americans rich. Powerful Americans. So he wasn’t worrying about U.S. calls for restraint. Why the fuck would he?
Next came arrests of opposition leaders, suspected agitators, and anyone who’d ever pissed off Hasan. That’s when the opposition went underground, got a bunch of AKs and RPGs from China, took the name Red Path, and launched a rebellion. Hasan held a press conference. “My government and the Indonesian armed forces will crush Red Path,” he said, “and unlike those traitors, we will achieve victory without the need for foreign assistance!”
His speech was on TV. Somewhere. But I didn’t watch it. No one did. I do remember TV’s talking heads laughing the whole thing off, calling it the “Rumble in the Jungle.”
Then the rebels attacked three provincial capitals, Medan, Pekanbaru and Jambi, Hasan asked the U.S. for help, and President Harriman ordered the Pentagon to deploy a few hundred military advisors. Harriman said, “We have a moral obligation to help the Indonesian people protect their democracy from Chinese-sponsored aggression.” That “…after losing Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Chile to communism in the ‘70s, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador in the ‘80s, Somalia, Malaysia, and Venezuela in the ‘90s, and with Indonesia the next domino waiting to fall, it’s time America takes a stand!”
As soon as they got there the advisors called in U.S. air strikes against the rebels, so the rebels ambushed the advisors. Killed a bunch of ‘em, too. That’s when Harriman sent twenty thousand American boys and girls to protect them. Then sixty thousand. Then a hundred sixty thousand. And finally, Operation Righteous Sword, the Allied Expeditionary Force, an occupying army of half a million.
No one’s laughing now.
Sure, there were critics. I remember Senator Wayne filibustering “War Hawk Harriman’s” defense spending bill, pounding her fist on the podium, saying, “This war, like every modern war, is about oil!” She kept it up for three days, but when she crumpled into her seat the Senate voted 98-2 to give Harriman the money and let him fund his war.
I wasn’t into politics. Still, when Harriman said our security was at stake I believed him. I may not be all red, white, and blue, but I am a U.S. Navy veteran, and I am an American. I was afraid that without our boots on the ground, China would be tempted to use nukes like the Russians did in Afghanistan. And how could America bitch about a couple of tactical nukes shoved up General Hasan’s ass? I mean we’re the ones who let that genie out of the bottle—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Haiphong, Danang.
Pacifists, liberals, and old hippies screamed that Indonesia would become the next Vietnam. They’d been screaming that every time Uncle Sam went to war since Vietnam. But they were wrong about Panama, wrong about Haiti, wrong about Kuwait, wrong about everything. Wrong because the White House and the Pentagon learned some important lessons in Vietnam: keep the airpower overwhelming, keep the American body-count low, keep the media rooting for our side. And most important? Keep our all-volunteer military so it’s always someone else—or someone else’s mother, father, son, daughter, husband, or wife—who has to do the fighting.
So this time, like with the boy who cried wolf, everyone ignored the peaceniks. A march here, a demonstration there—they couldn’t even get covered on the nightly news. Only this time they were right. With its heat, humidity, jungles, snakes, bugs, and malaria, Chi-Com supplied guerillas and U.S. supported dictator, Indonesia wasn’t the next Vietnam, it was Vietnam all over again. More U.S. soldiers and Indonesian rebels killed each other every day, and every day more Americans realized what Harriman and the Pentagon couldn’t admit—no matter how you spun it, none of America’s victories had prepared us for a full-scale civil war in the jungles of Asia.
When the Indonesian war began, the network evening newscasts instant-replayed the fighting on videotape. Now, thanks to IPI technology, they broadcast it on TV in real-time. They always start with the bag count—
At dawn, Red Path guerillas killed sixteen AEF Troopers in a savage ambush twenty kilometers south of Jakarta. IPI Operations Officers and RITA are responding with air strikes, and sources report over two hundred militants killed. The following real-time video is the exclusive property of IPI, official sponsor of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
War’s expensive. So the only surprise was that it took the Pentagon so long to come up with the idea of selling corporate sponsorships. It works for football stadiums and NASCAR, so why not sell ads for war? IPI’s happy to pay for the privilege of plastering its logo on the uniforms of America’s fighting men and women, selling patriotism and software in one package. Best of all, they make way more money from the war than they spend supporting it. So what if Vegas lays odds on the daily bag count? Who cares if underground gamers stream the live feed on black-market consoles, keeping score? What difference does it make if a bunch of pervs get their rocks off watching history’s first live snuff flick? IPI’s making money off that, too.
Good ol’ IPI—thy Net is America’s salvation!
IPI is shorthand for Integrated Processing International. Hardly anyone uses its real name anymore. Hardly anyone remembers it. But everyone knows the United States couldn’t fight the first remote-control war without computers. And ever since the ‘70s when Congress passed the Computer Access Security Statute, or C-ASS, as programmers like to call it, there ain’t no computers without IPI.
And RITA? Well, that’s on me.
An all-volunteer professional military made it easy for the politicians to get us into this mess without much opposition, but it couldn’t have continued for seven years—and counting— without the Temporary Reinstated Draft. Nixon got rid of the draft so he could cut the legs out from under Vietnam War protesters on college campuses. If I don’t have to go get killed, who gives a shit, right? And for a while after Vietnam there was no draft. Then in the ‘70s, President Carter started Selective Service back up, telling teenagers they had to register, promising they’d never be called because there were plenty of volunteers.
Under C-ASS—no computers for anyone except the military—it look
ed like local draft boards would be making their lists the old-fashioned way. On lots and lots of paper. Then Congress started handing out exemptions to everyone from university researchers to uniform designers, anyone who could show a link between their work and homeland security. Next came banks, stockbrokers, and credit bureaus that could show a link between their work and big fucking campaign contributions. With IPI lobbying Congress, Selective Service, an agency with no job and no purpose, had no trouble getting its C-ASS exemption plus a billion dollar budget to carry out its non-mission. And what did IPI get? The whole shooting match outsourced to it as a private contractor. Oh, and $122,900,000. Working for IPI’s Selective Service Division in those days must have been great. No draft, so nothing to do all day except collect your paycheck and play with your fuckin’ hard drive.
In the first Iraq war, with no help from draftees, Desert Storm volunteers kicked Saddam’s ass. When the volunteers came home sick, the VA doctors stuffed Prozac down their throats and told them it was all in their heads. They called it Gulf War Syndrome, and it was a big deal. Then the media forgot about it, and so did everybody else. In the next Iraq War, Operation Iraqi Freedom volunteers kicked Saddam’s ass again, way worse than the first time. But some Iraqis had other ideas, and the war dragged on for years after Bush’s aircraft carrier “Mission Accomplished” photo op. Soldiers, sailors, pilots, marines, reservists, and National Guard volunteers who’d completed their service were forced back into combat by catch-22s. I mean, who knew you actually had to read all that shit the recruiters made you sign? As long ago as that war everyone knew we couldn’t protect our friends—or spread our empire— without a draft. But no one, and certainly no politician, wanted to admit it.