After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  Guard officers were dreamy, ecstatic, and characteristically muddled about what the Laird Memorandum would mean in terms of Guard recruitment—but they were unanimously certain that it would mean better arms, M-16 rifles instead of the old M-1s, helicopters, planes, perhaps missiles, the best technology. “We’re tickled to see the Laird Memorandum,” Major General Winston P. Wilson—known throughout the Guard as Wimpie, and, since 1963, chief of the National Guard Bureau—said on the morning General Westmoreland arrived. “We’re going to have progress from the fallout of troop reduction in Vietnam. We’re going to get rid of the Korean-vintage equipment. Why, out West, sometimes someone still has to bring their own shotgun. Now we’re going to have a smooth escalation.”

  Asked about equipment for civil disturbances, General Wilson, who has served forty-one years as an Arkansas National Guardsman, twenty of them rising through the Bureau in Washington, said that he thought the Guard’s equipment for such duty was adequate. “But we would like to have anything,” he added vaguely. “We didn’t really wake up at Watts. Now we would like to have batons, water cannons—you know, bulletproof vests, a little better dispensers for gas, bullhorns, bird shot, face masks that go on the helmet.” He paused. “But on the local level there still is a judgment factor. There’s a lot of sympathy just now for batons, but”—he paused again—“the rifle is still primary.”

  Asked whether the zero draft might result in zero motivation to join the National Guard, he explained, as Guard officers often explain, that the Laird Memorandum would simply restore the National Guard to the “first line of military reserve” status it held before the draft exemptions of 1948. Asked whether the Guard had opposed the draft exemptions of 1948, he explained that the Guard had in fact supported them. “You see, at the time, we had a recruitment problem,” he said. Asked whether it was not precisely that recruitment problem that might now recur, he explained, as Guard officers often explain, that the National Guard was frequently accused of being the haven of the draft-dodger, whereas, on the contrary, it was a place where “draft-motivated” young men could perform their military obligation without being subject to the draft. This line of questioning among Guardsmen is never a productive one, and General Wilson returned with evident pleasure to an anecdote he had been telling all day, about his visit the evening before to the Persian Room of the Plaza, where he had witnessed a performance by Joey Heatherton. “She invited us to her room,” he said amiably to anyone in sight, “and she gave me a great big buss . . .”

  By five o’clock on the last afternoon of the convention, a small group of demonstrators were quietly picketing opposite the entrance to the Americana on Seventh Avenue. It was rumored, inside and outside the convention, that Vice President Agnew might attend the States Dinner, the formal closing banquet of the convention, that night. General Wilson had flown to Washington, to return with Senator Stennis in time for the dinner. Earnest discussions among younger Guard officers were taking place in the Americana’s bars. Whether an army of mercenaries, supplemented by a force of citizen-soldiers, was really what the Constitution had in mind. Whether, as someone suggested, if a “Seven Days in May” situation should arise, with the professional army holding the President captive, the National Guard might prove the country’s only defense against its mercenaries, in the Laird Memorandum’s terms. Whether, with a zero draft, anyone but rednecks and martinets would join the Guard at all. How curiously characteristic of the American system it is that no branch of the military cares to confront civilians in civil disturbances. Whether an army composed in part of draftees was not a greater restraining and liberalizing force than a combination of mercenaries and citizen-soldiers. There was talk of an anecdote from Dr. Curtis W. Tarr’s speech of the day before. “A small minority question why they should do anything for their country,” the director of the Selective Service System had said. “One young man put his question bluntly: ‘If I don’t want to go into the armed forces, don’t want to try to argue that I am a conscientious objector, don’t want to go to jail, and don’t want to go to Canada, what can I do?’ My answer did not please him one bit: ‘Somewhere you must find a society to which you will feel willing to contribute.’ ”

  By six-thirty on the last night of the NGAUS convention, most of the officers were in full dress uniform—black for Army Guard, white for Air Guard—and their wives were in evening dresses. Many of the older men had medals from World War II, but the invitation to the States Dinner, in a bungle perhaps typical of the Guard in things military, omitted a rather important “hours.” “The President of the Association,” it said, “earnestly requests all guests to be seated by 1930.” Guardsmen and their wives, looking like figures from the antebellum South, occasionally wandered, drinks in hand, onto the steps of the Americana to look at the demonstrators, under police surveillance, across the street. One lady said she preferred to watch through a window. “Come on, Joanie,” another lady said. “Don’t be chicken.” A photographer from the New York Post photographed a Guard sentry outside the banquet hall, sound asleep.

  The States Dinner itself passed like any other convention banquet in the Americana’s Imperial Ballroom. There were speeches, a clatter of butter plates, reunions of old friends, some tipsy conversations. Then, just before Senator Stennis spoke, there was an apparently annual ceremony. The sergeant at arms announced the presentation of “the various flags of our Union, in order of admittance,” and the state flags were brought in, with appropriate music (“Maryland! My Maryland!” for Maryland, “East Side, West Side” for New York), one by one. People sang along with the songs they knew, but as the flag-bearers came in (many of them presenting also the first black faces of the convention), the officers from each state rose to their feet or stood on their chairs to cheer, waving their yellow Americana napkins over their heads. Hawaii, which gives the best parties, got a standing ovation from everyone. (So did the chaplain-escorted wife of an Air Guardsman missing in action over Vietnam.) But Mississippi, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Wisconsin, and Oregon were also roundly cheered. Yellow napkins were waving everywhere. Then Senator Stennis spoke, rather hawkishly about Vietnam and rather doubtfully about the Guard’s capacity to recruit with a zero draft. The banquet became solemn again. Vice President Agnew did not appear. Outside the Americana, by 11:30 P.M., the demonstrators had long disappeared, but there were an inordinate number of horse-drawn carriages of the sort that go through Central Park. Asked whether so many hansoms were normal even for a convention of tourists at the Americana, a New York cabdriver said they were not. “I’ve never seen so many of them,” he said. “What’s going on in there?” Told that it was a convention of the National Guard, he said that explained it.

  The New Yorker

  October 3, 1970

  Originally titled “A Reporter at Large”

  LETTER FROM BIAFRA

  IT IS ALMOST impossible to fly into Biafra now, or out of it. The relief organizations (Caritas, World Council of Churches, Nord Church Aid, Canadian Air Relief) that still fly to Biafra from the Portuguese island of São Tomé have formed a single operation, Joint Church Aid, which flies about five planes a night, sometimes two flights per plane, sometimes three, depending on the availability of pilots and the condition of planes. Always at night. Ever since a plane of the International Red Cross was shot down on June 5, by day, by Nigeria, and the International Red Cross suspended its relief flights to Biafra entirely, Joint Church Aid has decided not to fly into Biafra with anyone who, if a plane were to be shot down again, might appear to be on a mission other than church relief. The island of Fernando Po, once a base for Red Cross flights, has been closed off by Equatorial Guinea. The French Red Cross still flies a single plane, sometimes once, sometimes twice a night, from Libreville, Gabon, but it, too, is reluctant to take in passengers; and Biafra, worried that observers might spot incoming flights of arms, does not like to issue visas by way of Libreville. Well-meaning eccentrics used to fly to Biafra from time to time (Abie Nathan, the maverick I
sraeli pilot, who cooked what food he brought in for refugees himself; an anonymous lady who gave one iron pill to every child she met), but journalists and even doctors are now turned back in São Tomé, to catch the twice-weekly flight to mainland Angola and home again. It is possible that the blockade will soon cut off not only food coming in but reports coming out of this unprecedented war.

  The population of São Tomé is one-tenth Portuguese police. The other citizens are mostly contract labor, imported not entirely voluntarily from the Cape Verde Islands, farther off the coast of Africa. A Portuguese island is, in any case, an incongruous place to fly to Biafra from, and there is something about the discontinuity of events and the day-to-day reporting of news that always seems to make either too simple or too mystifying the altogether anomalous predicament of Biafra. Meaningless datelines (Owerri, Emekuku, Awomama, Mbano), scarcely mapped and incessantly changing war fronts, strange friends (Haiti, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Zambia, Gabon), strange enemies (England, Russia, Egypt, Chad), pictures and statistics no longer automatic in their meaning or credibility, the muddy, bungling, endlessly preoccupying catastrophe in Vietnam, even a sense of Africa derived from Kipling and Waugh—the narrative line for Biafra gets lost. Biafrans do not easily fit any stereotype of martyrdom or ideology. I asked a young Biafran just whose children it is who are dying, and he replied quite seriously that it is the children of villagers who are not strong enough to trek nearer the front to buy what food there is more cheaply and trek back to market to sell it more dearly, for a little profit to support their families. It takes a high tolerance for the sheer, bitterly comic ugliness of human suffering to care much for these survivors out of Bertolt Brecht. Editorial writers for the Western press, unlike reporters on the spot, often treat the Biafran position as morally ambiguous, as though the years from 1939 to 1945 had never existed, and as though killing and dying existed on a single plane of atrocity. It is possible that another ethnic population will be decimated before modern intelligence completes its debate about the extent to which the greatest crimes can be said to be the fault of the victims.

  The relief flights from São Tomé take off just before dark, fly with lights off in the darkness over Federal Nigeria, and approach Uli Airport (a widened stretch of what was once a road) in the dark. The blue lights of the runway are flashed very briefly, and then turned off again as the planes begin to land. This is the rainy season in Biafra, but Uli, according to James W. Anderson, one of Joint Church Aid’s hired pilots (who earn between $4,000 and $5,000 dollars a month), is “the only place in the world you can fly into and you hope the weather’s bad.” On clear nights, Nigerian planes, flown by Egyptian or East German pilots, attempt to bomb the runway. They have never hit it yet, and it is a disputed question whether they really want to hit Joint Church Aid planes, but even relief flights quite often miss the darkened landing, and take off abruptly to approach again and again. The pilots, whose professional history usually includes assignments like flying personnel to oil fields in ice storms in Alaska, or flying arms to Israel in 1948, seem fairly sanguine about risk. Last month, a Canadian plane crashed when it apparently received signals, by mistake, from another, more camouflaged Biafran airport. A second crew forgot to lower its landing gear and, when landing without wheels jammed the doors, had to slide down from the cockpit by means of emergency ropes. A few weeks ago, Joint Church Aid headquarters in Geneva made a last-minute exception to admit Eric Pace, of The New York Times, and since it seemed that two reporters would no more compromise a single relief flight than one, and since bad weather had limited bombings by what is euphemistically called the Intruder, the local church workers decided to let me go in as well.

  On Saturday night, Captain Anderson’s plane approached the runway at a right angle (a compass was broken), missed twice, and then landed smoothly in lightning and drenching rain. These trips are entirely calm, perhaps because they lack the unspoken agreement on commercial airlines (the meals, the movies, the silence of engines) to pretend that one has been on the ground all the time, or because they fly into a place suspended from one’s personal experience so utterly. The plane, an American C-97, was cleared of its cargo of stockfish and corn-soya-milk extract in seven minutes, and took off for two more trips to São Tomé. The crews were planning three flights that night in order to have one less on Sunday, when they were hoping to hold a barbecue at the rather grim hotel where they are based. Stockfish is now Biafra’s main source of animal protein. It was popular before the war in the land that is now Biafra; but when the blockade began, consumption of stockfish was so drastically reduced that the currency of Iceland, a major exporter, had to be devalued, until the United States, by purchasing stockfish for Biafran relief, gave the currency some support.

  The tons of fish, in burlap bags, were loaded quickly into lorries. A bearded English relief worker named Graham dashed about in the dark and cold rain, which fogged his glasses. He picked up the passengers and their baggage (distinguishable on the runway by dim strips of yellow masking tape), and drove nearly blindly, with dimmed headlights, among a series of checkpoints manned by armed Biafrans and each consisting of a thatched hut and a branch extended across a road to a steel drum. One of the branches was lifted and the car drove to a building called State House for entry formalities in earth-floored rooms, by the light of four kerosene lamps. An important shipment of something was clearly expected from Libreville, because Arthur Mbanefo, a Biafran government official, and Professor Ben Nwosu, a Biafran nuclear physicist educated in California and now head of the Biafran Directorate of Research and Production, were gathered in the office of a Major Akigabu, who is in charge of immigration at State House, and who was once a teacher of Virgil in secondary school. Major Akigabu, a middle-aged man in battle fatigues, was quoting in near darkness from Book II of the Aeneid. “When you read it, you will shed tears,” he said. “You have to shed tears.”

  The sense here is of a people about to die in isolation and pretending not to know it—convinced in any case by their recent history that they have no choice. Victims are seldom pure, or even entirely attractive, and a case can certainly be made against any victim of murder before some higher court of absolute irrelevance. But Biafrans, fighting a war, in a sense, for a position argued in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, are determined to avoid at least the accusation of passive complicity in their own destruction and resist, trusting their own interpretation of what the risks of capitulation and the costs of survival might be. Once the foremost advocates of Nigerian unity, they have been persuaded by a series, both before and since the war, of broken accords, systematic exclusions, and outright massacres, both total and selective (including the killing of all males over ten years old in a captured Biafran town whose civilians did not leave), that Nigeria intends to eliminate the peoples of the region that is now Biafra, and that the intention of genocide is not one that you test, passively, until the last returns are in. In the massacres of summer 1966, nearly a full year before Biafra’s secession from Nigeria, thirty thousand natives of the Biafran region were murdered.

  “I have just been reading Exodus,” Professor Nwosu told a group of friends, some time after his night of waiting at State House. “Before the war, a novel to me was a trivial thing. But I should have known the West would not be impressed by thirty thousand. Some of you literary people should have told me.”

  In 1966, pressure to withdraw from Nigeria came mainly from the Ibo people, who make up the majority of the population of the Biafran region, and it was the Ibo intellectuals, spread out over Nigeria and the world, who wavered. Now the situation is different. The intellectuals have returned from their jobs in the outside world to Biafra, to extremity, and to a people with whom, in their own worldliness, they were not even entirely familiar. An Ibo civil servant, educated elsewhere in Nigeria, when he is asked the word in Ibo for a sash in which local women carry their babies on their backs, does not know, until it is pointed out to him, what you are talking about. He certainly do
es not know the word. English has always been Biafra’s intertribal language, but conversations even in Ibo are interspersed now with English expressions, and the Biafran fondness for euphemism has a British ring. The war is everywhere referred to as “the crisis,” areas of Biafra destroyed or occupied by Nigerian forces are always called “disrupted” or “disturbed.”

  The elite are leading now, as perhaps in war they always do. But Ibo society is, by tradition, individualistic and ruled by tribal consensus. The leaders and their ministries are unprotected to a degree uncommon in a country at war. If the people did not support their leaders, they could, being armed almost to a man, overthrow them. Biafrans now prefer the bush to the risks of Nigerian occupation, and Nigerian troops entering Biafran towns now find them empty. What defections there are, like that of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Ibo who was once president of Federal Nigeria and who recently turned from the Biafran to the Nigerian side, preoccupy Biafrans continually—perhaps because there have been so few of them. A betrayal in 1967, by Brigadier Victor Banjo, who had been put in charge of all Biafran forces in the Midwestern Region, recurs in war-inspired songs all over Biafra. (Dr. Azikiwe’s case is complicated by the fact that he had spent several months in London, in a state that his physicians described as “delayed shell shock,” before going to Lagos and, when his extensive Nigerian properties had been returned to him, denouncing Biafra.) The favorable reaction in the American press to Dr. Azikiwe’s claim that Biafran fears of extinction are a “fairy tale” presumably gave the Nigerians confidence to resume, a few days after the first editorials, their civilian air raids, bombing and strafing an orphanage at Ojoto. Dead: one nurse and fourteen children, miles from the nearest battle zone.