I was trying to concentrate on his explanation—which made perfect sense, on the map—but the strange mix of realities on that afternoon of what would soon prove to be the next to last Saturday of the Vietnam War made concentration difficult. For one thing, I had never been west of San Francisco until I’d arrived in Saigon about ten days earlier—just after the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) had been routed on worldwide TV in the “battles” for Hué and Da Nang.
This was a widely advertised “massive Hanoi offensive” that had suddenly narrowed the whole war down to a nervous ring around Saigon, less than fifty miles in diameter . . . and during the past few days, as a million or more refugees fled into Saigon from the panic zones up north around Hué and Da Nang, it had become painfully and ominously clear that Hanoi had never really launched any “massive offensive” at all—but that the flower of the finely U.S.-trained and heavily U.S.-equipped South Vietnamese Army had simply panicked and run amok. The films of whole ARVN divisions fleeing desperately through the streets of Da Nang had apparently surprised the NVA generals in Hanoi almost as badly as they jolted that bonehead ward heeler that Nixon put in the White House in exchange for the pardon that kept him out of prison.
Gerald Ford still denies this, but what the hell? It hardly matters anymore, because not even a criminal geek like Nixon would have been stupid enough to hold a nationally televised press conference in the wake of a disaster like Da Nang and compound the horror of what millions of U.S. viewers had been seeing on TV all week by refusing to deny, on camera, that the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam had died in vain. Even arch-establishment commentators like James Reston and Eric Sevareid were horrified by Ford’s inept and almost cruelly stupid performance at that press conference. In addition to the wives, parents, sons, daughters, and other relatives and friends of the 58,000 American dead, he was also talking to more than 150,000 veterans who were wounded, maimed, and crippled in Vietnam . . . and the net effect of what he said might just as well have been to quote Ernest Hemingway’s description of men who had died in another war, many years ago—men who were “shot down and killed like dogs, for no good reason at all.”
My memories of that day are very acute, because it was the first time since I’d arrived in Saigon that I suddenly understood how close we were to the end, and how ugly it was likely to be . . . and as that eerie chorus about “Bye bye, Miss American Pie” kept howling around my ears while we picked at our Crab St. Jacques, I stared balefully out across the muddy Saigon River to where the earth was trembling and the rice paddies were exploding in long clean patterns like stitches down the sleeve of a shirt. . . . Carpet bombing, massive ordnance, the last doomed snarling of the white man’s empire in Asia.
“Well, Murray,” I asked him. “What the fuck do we do now?”
He drained the last of a tall bottle of fine French Riesling into our crystalline flutes and languidly called for another. It was somewhere around lunchtime, but the penthouse dining room was empty of cash customers, except us, and we were not in a hurry. “We are surrounded by sixteen NVA divisions,” he said with a smile. “The enemy is right out there in that smoke across the river, and he wants vengeance. We are doomed.”
I nodded calmly and sucked on a corncob pipe full of steamy Khymer Rouge blossoms, then I leaned over the map and made a wet red circle around our position in downtown Saigon.
He looked at it. “So what,” he said. “Those people are cannibals,” he snapped. “They will hunt us down and eat us.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I am a personal friend of Colonel Vo Don Giang. We will be put in cages for a while, then set free.”
One Hand Clapping
I knew a Buddhist once, and I’ve hated myself ever since. The whole thing was a failure.
He was a priest of some kind, and he was also extremely rich. They called him a monk and he wore the saffron robes and I hated him because of his arrogance. He thought he knew everything.
One day I was trying to rent a large downtown property from him, and he mocked me. “You are dumb,” he said. “You are doomed if you stay in this business. The stupid are gobbled up quickly.”
“I understand,” I said. “I am stupid. I am doomed. But I think I know something you don’t.”
He laughed. “Nonsense,” he said. “You are a fool. You know nothing.”
I nodded respectfully and leaned closer to him, as if to whisper a secret. “I know the answer to the greatest riddle of all,” I said.
He chuckled. “And what is that?” he said. “And you’d better be Right, or I’ll kill you.”
“I know the sound of one hand clapping,” I said. “I have finally discovered the answer.”
Several other Buddhists in the room laughed out loud, at this point. I knew they wanted to humiliate me, and now they had me trapped—because there is no answer to that question. These saffron bastards have been teasing us with it forever. They are amused at our failure to grasp it.
Ho ho. I went into a drastic crouch and hung my left hand low, behind my knee. “Lean closer,” I said to him. “I want to answer your high and unanswerable question.”
As he leaned his bright bald head a little closer into my orbit, I suddenly leaped up and bashed him flat on the ear with the palm of my left hand. It was slightly cupped, so as to deliver maximum energy on impact. An isolated package of air is suddenly driven through the Eustachian tube and into the middle brain at quantum speed, causing pain, fear, and extreme insult to the tissue.
The monk staggered sideways and screamed, grasping his head in agony. Then he fell to the floor and cursed me. “You swine!” he croaked. “Why did you hit me and burst my eardrum?”
“Because that,” I said, “is the sound of one hand clapping. That is the answer to your question. I have the answer now, and you are deaf.”
“Indeed,” he said. “I am deaf, but I am smarter. I am wise in a different way.” He grinned vacantly and reached out to shake my hand.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “I am, after all, a doctor.”
Zorro at work, Woody Creek, 2002 (Anita Bejmuk)
The Invasion of Grenada
TRIAL RUN FOR PANAMA AND AFGHANISTAN . . . SPRINGBOARD FOR IRAQ AND KOREA—SEE THE NEW WORLD ORDER IN ACTION . . . WHY NOT? HITLER HAD SPAIN, WE HAVE GRENADA. . .
I believe the government has not only a right but an obligation to lie to the people.
—Jody Powell, Nightline (ABC News), October 26, 1983
There are some interesting attitudes on the street these days, and not all of them come from strangers. Old friends call me late at night from places like Nassau and New York and Bangkok, raving angrily about suicide bombers in Lebanon. They call me from the Blue Lagoon Yacht Club on the south side of St. Vincent, offering big boats for hire to run the blockade around the war zone in Grenada, only 100 miles away. I get collect calls from Miami and from federal prison camps asking me who to vote for. The janitor at the Woody Creek Tavern wants to join the U.S. Marines and kill foreigners for a living.
“They have a buddy system,” he said. “We could join together and go to the Caribbean.”
“Or Lebanon,” I said. “Any place with a beach.”
He shrugged. The difference between Lebanon and Grenada was not clear in his mind. All he wanted was some action. He was a dope fiend, and he was bored.
Five years in a trailer court on the fringe of the jet-set life had not agreed with him. His teeth were greasy and his eyes were wet and he was too old to join the Marines. But there was excitement in his voice. In late afternoons at the Tavern, he would stand at the bar with the cowboys and watch the war news on network TV, weeping openly and cracking his knuckles as Dan Rather described combat scenes from Grenada, leathernecks hitting the beach, palm trees exploding, natives running for cover, helicopters crashing into jagged mountainsides. I called the Blue Lagoon Yacht Club on the south side of St. Vincent the other day and asked for the manager, Mr. Kidd. Another man came on the line and said Mr. Kidd was gone to Barbado
s for a while, with some people from the CIA. Well, I thought, why not? We will all work for them sooner or later.
“So what?” I said. “I need a boat. Who’s in charge there?”
“I am,” he replied. “There are no boats, and Mr. Kidd is gone.”
“I need a boat tomorrow,” I said. “For seven days, to Grenada.”
“To Grenada?” he said. “To the war?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I need something fast, around forty feet, with radar and triple sidebands. I have plenty of money. Mr. Kidd knows me well.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Mr. Kidd’s gone.”
“When do you expect him back?” I asked.
“Maybe never,” he replied.
“What?” I said. “What’s happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “He went to the war. Maybe he got killed.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was thinking.
“All hell broke loose around here,” he said finally. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that.”
“It’s big business,” he said. “Mr. Kidd even sold his own boat. They had seabags full of hundred-dollar bills. I’ve never seen so much money.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you have any planes for hire?”
There was another pause, then he laughed.
“Okay,” he said. “Give me a number and I’ll get back to you.”
Indeed, I thought, you treacherous sot. There was something odd in the man’s voice. I said I was between planes in the Dallas airport and would call him back later.
“Who is this?” he asked. “Maybe I’ll hear from Mr. Kidd.”
“Tell him Dr. Wilson called,” I said, “from Texas.”
He laughed again. “Good luck,” he said.
I hung up, feeling vaguely uneasy, and called a travel agent.
. . .
Forty hours later, I was on a plane from Barbados to Pearls Airport in Grenada. There was no need for a boat after all. LIAT Airlines was flying again, running four flights a day into the war zone, and every seat was taken. There was no such thing as a secure reservation on the Liberation Shuttle once the blockade was lifted. It was an ugly ride with a long sweaty stop in St. Vincent, and most of the passengers were edgy.
News reports from Grenada said the invasion was over and the Cuban swine had surrendered. But there were still snipers in the hills around the airport and along the road to St. George’s. The Marines, still reeling from the shock of 289 dead from a single bomb in Beirut a week earlier, were not getting much sleep on this island.
THE WRONG IS ALWAYS WRONG
—Grenadian Voice, November 26, 1983
The pros and cons of bombing the insane—even by accident—was only one of the volatile questions raised by the invasion of Grenada. It was a massive show of force by the U.S. Military, but the chain of events leading up to it was not easy to follow. Some people said it was a heartwarming “rescue mission,” 2,000 Marines and paratroopers hitting the beach to pluck 400 or so American medical students out of the jaws of death and degradation by bloodthirsty Cubans. Others said it happened because Castro had loaned his friend Maurice Bishop $9 million to build a new airport on the island, with a runway 10,000 feet long and capable of serving as a Cuban military base on the edge of strategic sea-lanes in the south Caribbean. And still others called it a shrewd and finely planned military move, a thing that had to be done once the neighboring islands asked formally for American help. “We did the right thing for the wrong reasons,” a ranking Democratic Party official told me on the telephone just before I left for Grenada. “You know I hate to agree with Reagan on anything at all, but in this case I have to go along with him.”
Well, I thought. Maybe so. But it was hard to be sure, from a distance of 4,000 miles, so I decided to have a look at it. The trip from Woody Creek to Grand Junction to Denver to Atlanta to Miami to Barbados to Pearls Airport on the north shore of Grenada took two days, and by the time I got there I had read enough newspapers in airports along the way to have a vague grip on the story, at least on the American side of it.
A crowd of local Stalinists had run amok in Grenada, killing everybody who stood in their way and plunging the whole island into terrorism, looting, and anarchy. The murdering swine had even killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada’s answer to JFK, and after that they’d planned to kill, capture, or at least maim hundreds of innocent American medical students who were trapped like rats on the island. A battalion of U.S. Marines, en route to Lebanon in response to the disaster two days earlier at the Beirut airport, was instead diverted to Grenada, along with a U.S. Navy battle fleet and the 82nd Airborne, to crush Communist mutiny and rescue American citizens.
This task had been quickly accomplished, without the burden of any civilian press coverage, and Defense Department film of the actual invasion showed U.S. troops in heroic postures, engaging the enemy at close quarters and taking 600 Cuban prisoners. It was a fitting response to the massacre at the U.S. Marine compound in Lebanon, except that it happened 7,000 miles away and the Arabs called it a bad joke. “It was just another cowboy movie,” a Syrian diplomat told me several weeks later in the lounge of the United Nations Plaza Hotel. “All it proved was that Americans would rather shoot than think.”
There was no shortage of conflicting opinions on the invasion of Grenada. It was called everything from “hysterical gunboat diplomacy” to a long-overdue assertion of the Monroe Doctrine, a swift and powerful warning to any other so-called revolutionaries who might try to seize turf in the American Hemisphere. “We taught those bastards a lesson,” said a businessman at the Ionosphere Club in Miami International Airport. “Fidel Castro will think twice before he tries a trick like this again, and so will the Sandinistas.”
In Grenada with Loren Jenkins, 1984 (Laura G. Thorne)
. . .
Wisdom is cheap in airport bars and expensive Third World hotels. You can hear almost anything you want, if you hang around these places long enough—but the closer you get to a war zone, the harder it is to speak with strangers about anything except the weather. By the time I got to Barbados, only an hour away from Grenada, not even my fellow passengers in the standby line at LIAT Airlines had anything to say about the invasion or what they were doing there. I did the last leg of the trip without saying a word to anybody. About half the people on the plane, a hellishly hot DC-4 that stopped for a while in St. Vincent’s, were white men of indeterminate origin. Some, carrying locked attaché cases of expensive camera equipment, wore faded T-shirts from long-lost hotels in the Orient. I recognized Al Rakov, from Saigon, but he pretended not to know me and I quickly understood.
Things got worse when the plane touched down in Grenada. The seedy little airport was a madhouse of noise and confusion, jammed with sweating immigrants and American troops carrying M16s. People with odd passports were being jerked out of line and searched thoroughly. Cobra helicopters roared overhead, coming and going like drone bees, and the whole place was surrounded by rolls of sharp concertina wire. It was very much a war zone, a bad place to break any rules. A typewritten “notice to journalists” was tacked on a plywood wall by the immigration desk, advising all those with proper credentials to check in and sign the roster at the military press center in St. George’s, on the other side of the island.
It was dark by the time I cleared Customs. A man named Randolph helped me load my bags into the back of his old Chevrolet taxi, and we took off for the St. George’s Hotel. The road went straight uphill, a series of blind S-turns with a steep drop-off on one side and wet black cliffs on the other.
It was an hour’s drive, at least, and the road was scarred every six or eight feet with deep, teeth-rattling potholes. There was no way to relax, so I thought I might as well ask Randolph how he felt about the invasion. He had not said much since we left the airport, but since we were going to be together for a while and I wanted to stop somewhere along the way for a cold beer,
a bit of conversation seemed in order. I did it more out of old journalistic habit than anything else, not expecting any real information, but Randolph surprised me.
“You are asking the right person,” he said sharply. “You are talking to a man who lost his wife to the Revolution.”
Whoops, I thought. There was something in the tone of his voice that caused me to reach into my satchel for a small tape recorder. Randolph was eager to talk, and he had a story to tell. All I had to do was ask a question now and then, to keep pace with him, as we drove in low gear through the darkness.
It was a narrow country road, the main highway across the island, past Grenville and Great Bay and over the steep volcanic humps of Mt. Lebanon and Mt. Sinai, through the Grand Etang Forest. There were small houses along the way, like a back road in New England, and I settled back to listen as Randolph told his tale. At first I took him for a CIA plant; just another eloquent native taxicab driver who happened to be picking up journalists at the airport when they finally emerged from the Customs shed and looked around them to see nothing more than a cluster of wooden shacks in a palm grove on the edge of the sea. Pearls Airport looks like something that was slapped together about fifty years ago in the Philippines, with a dirt road bordering the airstrip and a few dozen native functionaries hanging around the one-room Bar & Grocery.
The population of the whole island is 110,000, about the size of Lexington, Kentucky, and population density is roughly one person per square mile—compared to one person per square foot in Hong Kong. This is clearly an undeveloped island, nothing at all like Barbados or Jamaica or Trinidad, and it is hard to imagine anything happening here that could make headlines all over the world and cause an invasion by the U.S. Marines.
Kingdom of Fear Page 19
