A Dangerous Friend

by Ward Just

  I give you Americans a year; he'd said.

  But he lives in a different Vietnam than we do, Sydney went on. His Vietnam is governed by his trees and by the seasons, weeding and plowing in April and May, planting in June and July, tapping the latex during the dry season. I have no idea how many trees he has, nor how many laborers. I was told that it takes one laborer to tend one hundred and fifty trees, so if we discover the number of trees we'll know his workforce. Sydney watched Rostok write a few words in the notebook he always had with him.

  I don't know what good that will do us, Sydney said. And I have no idea of the precise location of the plantation.

  We probably ought to leave them alone, he added.

  Unless we can persuade his wife to see the plain light of day.

  Really, I doubt if they can help us. They don't know much. They know less than they think they do, Ros.

  So why not stop bombing his rubber trees?

  But Rostok did not think that would be practical.

  Finally, and with reluctance, Sydney described the scene in the market, Dede Armand in pain, the young VC with his carbine, the boys arguing—and when he looked up they were already across the field and disappearing into the forest. Armand's wife did not seem frightened, only in pain and nervous about the American clinic. She insisted on the hospital in Saigon. She issued her instructions and took it for granted that she would be obeyed. She behaved like a colonial, too.

  But Claude knew the VC. He said they were local boys, harmless. He spoke of them as if they were friends, or anyway not enemies. I confess I don't know what to make of the Armands.

  They are mediocre people, Rostok said.

  Big Dumb Blond

  AT TEN they gathered around the oval mahogany table in the former dining room of the whitewashed villa in the near suburbs of Saigon, an hour's drive from Sydney's house in Tay Thanh. A patchy lawn surrounded the house and a low wall surrounded the lawn. Bougainvillea grew at the base of the wall. Gardeners tended the bougainvillea when they weren't leaning on the wall, gossiping and looking into Nguyen Phan Street at the traffic, or feeding mice to Tom J., the indolent python in the wire cage on the rear lawn. At lunchtime the gardeners collected under the giant plane tree next to the front gate, the tree a souvenir of one of the gallant French admirals who had arrived with the fleet in the 1850s, and stayed on for a time as proconsul. He had caused the tree to be brought from a grove at his country house in Normandy. He wanted something to remind him of home.

  The men around the table rarely looked out the windows, thrown open to the air and protected by curvy wrought-iron bars. They were absorbed in the documents in front of them, statistics concerning rice deliveries, vaccinations, dikes, schools, roads and bridges, along with after-action reports from the military, intelligence summaries from CAS, embassy appraisals of political conditions in the countryside and, naturally, the press scrapbook from USIA. They had been instructed to read the dispatches carefully, though in practice they rarely did; enough difficulty trying to construct a narrative from the statistics in front of them.

  From Washington material arrived by pouch or by cable, important personnel changes in the government and additional rules and regulations owing to congressional action, and always a thick stack of classified requests—"action this day"—from the Pentagon and the White House, inquiries into the most minute business, the status of the market at some forgotten hamlet in Hau Nghia province or the condition of the road network in the Camau mangrove swamp or the children's brass band at Ban Me Thuot, the instruments donated by the Junior League of Cleveland. Did they get their saxophones? Many of these requests came to Llewellyn Group because Rostok was known to have a quick reaction time; request today, answer tomorrow. Added together, all these statistics were intended to give a reliable estimate of the situation. How went yesterday's struggle for the hearts and minds of the population? Are we better off today than we were yesterday? Fresh proposals, please.

  Always among the cables were the itineraries of the many visitors, assistant secretaries of this and that, congressional delegations, think-tank bigwigs, industry supremos, and the academic specialists, linguists, economists, sociologists, military historians, agronomists, nutritionists, and newspaper publishers eager to see things themselves, firsthand. They all had to be cared for, fed and watered, billeted comfortably in a room with air conditioning. They had to be shown the world-famous terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel and ferried to a hamlet and briefed aboard the colonel's personal helicopter. They had to be given lunch at Cheap Charlie's and dinner at the Arc en Ciel; and there were other entertainments as well, but those had to be requested specifically.

  Had one of the team thought to look up, daydreaming in the drowsy Saigon heat, he would see only an ordinary street beyond the low wall that surrounded the villa, and the life on the street. Of course they were laughed at, condescended to, and derided by those on the frontier of the war, the soldiers, intelligence agents, and journalists. Llewellyns were the boys in the green eyeshades, bean counters, master bureaucrats and movers of paper from IN box to OUT box or the reverse, depending on the seriousness of the document, meaning its weight. The more musclebound it was, the less likely to languish in the IN box. If asked, the members of the Group would have said they believed in the principles of the Enlightenment, a thirst for knowledge, a reverence for science, and a conviction in the perfectability of societies, even primitive societies with scant experience of democratic government. With knowledge came mastery. The salient question was simple: Was there time enough to gain an accurate estimate of the situation, and then to bring it into line, and then to act. And finally to convince the newspapers and the networks that they had turned the corner at last. So it was inevitable that the indolent python in the wire cage on the rear lawn was named Tom J.

  They were often irreverent.

  Fuck the hearts and minds of the people, Pablo Gutterman said. We require the hearts and minds of the New York Times.

  They were eight, sometimes ten around the heavy table, everyone dressed monotonously in short-sleeved white shirts and white cotton trousers and loafers except for Sydney Parade, who wore worn blue jeans and a Lacoste tennis shirt. Rostok presided, and in his absence his deputy Blind Pablo Gutterman, whose eyes were so weak he often used a magnifying glass to inspect the small type of the cable traffic; and on bad mornings he had someone read them to him. With his slouch, his bad eyes, and his Panama hat, Pablo looked like a dissipated academic exile, someone who had unaccountably washed up in Southeast Asia after some low campus scandal.

  The former dining room was enormous, a rectangle with a high ceiling and powder-blue walls, wainscotting where the walls met the floor. Rostok insisted on retaining the admiral's etchings of French provincial life—a Romanesque church at dusk, vaches grazing in a symmetrical field—that decorated the walls; to remind everyone of those who had gone before, he said. Between the etchings were photographs of the President, the ambassador, and the commanding general of American forces, these men supervising the room with severe expressions. Magenta tiles on the floor sweated in the heat and at some point each morning someone stepped wearily to the window and closed the blinds against the sun's desiccating rays. Everyone smoked cigarettes except Pablo Gutterman, who smoked a pipe. Two electric fans moved the air about but by midmorning the atmosphere was torpid, the men frustrated and thinking of lunch.

  The room had a history. The admiral passed the villa down to the colonial administrator, and then it was occupied by a succession of civil servants, the last a functionary who attempted to hold things together during the tumultuous postwar era. What his precise function had been, no one knew or would say; something to do with the economy, perhaps tax collection. He was fondly remembered by his many Vietnamese protégés, Monsieur Gosse, strict but fair, always dressed in a white linen suit and a floppy hat, a heavy onyx pen at attention in the breast pocket of his jacket. A little blue stain announced the Mont Blanc's leak. All his jackets had the
stain. Monsieur Gosse never arrived at the office before ten and left it promptly at twelve-thirty, to lunch on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel. If there was a race meeting at the track in Cholon, he attended it, always returning at six P.M. after the heat had begun to dissipate. He was always fresh, having taken a slow swim at the Cercle Sportif following the races and a citron pressé following the swim. Monsieur Gosse was careful to pace himself to the wretched climate, even at the racetrack.

  The Vietnamese had bought the villa from the French authorities after the colonial administration collapsed following the debacle at Dien Bien Phu. And after a suitable interval the Americans had leased it from the Vietnamese, the contract negotiated by the wife of a general in the Ministry of Defense, a formidable personality whose many commercial activities nicely paralleled the government's. The villa came fully furnished, even to the bistro glasses and cutlery in the pantry, the fluffy blue towels in the bathrooms, and the wooden filing cabinets in the study. Madame Vinh prudently removed the extraordinary scroll painting in the foyer, Fan K'uan's Scholar's Pavilion in the Cloudy Mountains, the mountains and the clouds above and beyond the mountains ominous and discouraging. The peaks seemed to rise to the heavens, the gorges to the depths of hell. The pavilion could be swept away at any moment, and the tiny figure under the crooked tree beside the cloud-filled gorge as vulnerable as a pebble in an avalanche. Madame Vinh made her decision the minute she met the American negotiator, Boyd Lllewellyn. She did not find Monsieur Llewellyn agreeable, and her astrologer told her Llewellyn had entered a particularly susceptible phase of his life. The scroll painting was not valuable; the eleventh-century original was somewhere in Taiwan. This one was a clumsy copy. But Monsieur Llewellyn was certain to be an American influenced by allegory, the sort of American who found omens everywhere underfoot. The artist had meant a celebration of humility^ but an Anglo-Saxon would find much to ponder, and to fear.

  Still, the villa was suitable in most respects. The dimensions of the former dining room were somehow French and the chandelier in the ceiling, that was French, too. When the lads from CAS came to sweep the place they found a tiny microphone in the crystal, the cord winding back through the walls to a recorder in one of the wooden filing cabinets in the study; but a mouse had eaten through the cord so the device was inoperable, and the tapes were missing in any case. This caused much amused speculation. Was it the Vietnamese bugging the French? The Reds bugging the Vietnamese? The Vietnamese bugging the Americans? Madame Gosse bugging Monsieur? No one knew.

  The wooden filing cabinets were a mighty nuisance because the drawers stuck in the humid weather. The locks were insecure. Rostok had cabled personally to Administration to send metal cabinets soonest but nothing came of the request, not that Ros was prepared to let it go. He had turned the problem over to Pablo Gutterman, who had slid it to Sydney, who had passed it on to George Whyte, who supposedly had a friend at Highest Levels in Washington. Each week George sent a fresh cable but there was never any response from Administration. Meanwhile, the team used screwdrivers to pry open the swollen drawers.

  And it wasn't only filing cabinets. They were short of manila envelopes and stationery, legal pads and memo pads. They were short of ballpoint pens and paper clips. If anyone needed a dictionary or a thesaurus he had to borrow one from Rostok's surly secretary. They had scores of typewriters but the typewriters were useless because they were French, unaccountably left behind in the general confusion, with the French keyboard, AZERTY instead of QWERTY, only four transposed keys but those four could ruin a report. Of course the Vietnamese secretaries could use them; that was the keyboard they had been taught. But many reports were too sensitive for the secretarial staff, loyal as they might be and no doubt were. Sensitive reports had to be typed personally, and with the perverse French keyboard the ordinary thirty-minute typing chore turned into an hour or more with dozens of errors; and if the document was classified Secret or Confidential the encoding was a nightmare. Administration had sent a hundred new IBM electric typewriters but those had been rerouted at once to the embassy under heavy marine guard; and a hearty laugh all around because Administration had neglected to send converters, AC current to DC. A CAS lad helpfully offered to pick up a hundred dozen on his monthly visit to Hong Kong but those had gotten tied up in Vietnamese customs because he had foolishly sent them through the mails from Hong Kong—through the ordinary god damned mail, can you believe it? And no one knew whom to bribe to get them out of customs in a timely manner; so there the converters sat, in their boxes, useless.

  Finally Sydney surrendered and walked over to MACV headquarters where he knew a colonel in Procurement. Groveled, did his dance, wheedled, promised—but what could he offer an army colonel? The military was up to its eyeballs in creature comforts, whiskey, Kansas City steaks, percale sheets, stereo equipment, tennis racquets, wristwatches, and Leica cameras. Of course they did not have Western women but Sydney didn't either. So—did the colonel have children? The colonel did. Was one of those children perhaps a son? He was, age ten. Well then, two tickets behind the dugout for Opening Day, 1966, by which time the colonel would be rotated home to Bethesda. The Senators and whomever the Senators were playing, with luck the outfit that featured Mickey Mantle. The colonel smiled and cocked his head, thinking. With some spending money, Sydney said, enough for beer and hotdogs and Coke and popcorn for the boy, and a hat and a Louisville Slugger. The colonel put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his swivel chair; thinking some more. And an autograph, Sydney said, playing his last card. Mantle's, Berra's, on an official American League baseball, something for the boy to treasure his entire lifetime. In the silence that followed, the colonel yawned and said at last, Deal. And before the close of business that day six Royal typewriters, manuals, arrived by truck along with fifty reams of paper and ribbons enough to wrap a tank. That night Sydney wrote a letter in longhand to a man he barely knew, a member of the board of his old foundation who happened also to be a minority stockholder in the New York Yankees. Would you do a favor for a brave soldier far from home?

  So at ten hundred hours they assembled around the mahogany table with cups of coffee or tea. Rostok and Blind Pablo took pho, the aromatic vegetable broth favored by peasant Vietnamese. Almost at once Sydney's attention began to wander; to the listless world beyond the barred windows, the bougainvillea at the base of the low wall, and the admiral's plane tree at the entrance to the drive. Occasionally when he was looking at it a great leaf fell, feathering patiently to the lawn, where a gardener retrieved it and placed it in a burlap sack. In the thick heat of midday everything moved in slow motion, even the gardeners staring blankly into space, leaning on their rakes, waiting for a leaf to fall.

  Inside the conference room, the men around the table yawned and attempted to concentrate on the business at hand. Rostok rapped for order. Everyone was aware of the coming visit of the undersecretary, his first visit in-country. It was imperative that he be given the facts with the bark off. The embassy will try to keep him under wraps, Rostok said, so that their agenda will be the controlling agenda. But he is a friend of mine so I have arranged for a long afternoon in Tay Thanh, an afternoon off-piste as it were, an afternoon of enlightenment for an official visiting for the very first time. Sydney and I will brief him on the progress we're making. And then we will deliver him to MACV, who will brief him on the progress they are making; and they will be two different kinds of progress. But Syd and I will get there first, in order to establish the context of things.

  Question is, how to put a human face on nation-building.

  They have the body count, we only have hearts and minds.

  They can talk about the battalion they annihilated. We can talk about the school we built and the vaccinations we administered. But we can't show the happy face of the farmer whose field we irrigated. Because maybe we didn't win his heart, only his mind. To indicate he was making a joke, Rostok smiled unpleasantly.

  You are all invited to contribu
te, Rostok went on, if you think there is some special point that Syd and I should make. Something vivid. Something convincing. One side of one piece of paper only, please.

  Next, Rostok said, there were indications—nothing firm, nothing set in concrete—that budget would increase. He smiled at the sudden show of enthusiasm around the table. To that end, it was necessary for each man to draw up a wish list with supporting documentation. Rostok spoke at length of the various possibilities, along with the appropriate, meaning effective, descriptive language required to satisfy the accountants...

  About the safe, George Whyte said.

  We'll get to the safe later, Rostok said.

  Around noon, someone complained about the frequency of the meetings, so many meetings that no work got done. Statistics were going uncompiled; they floated free, aimless as insects. Unorganized, they were invisible. There was also a certain injustice. None of the group members in distant regions were commanded to attend weekly meeting. The one in Camau had not been seen for months. His evening radio message was the only evidence that he was alive. There was another, somewhere along the mountainous border in II Corps, whose numbers were entirely unreliable yet he was untouchable because a reporter had written an admiring article about him in a newspaper; and one of the TV networks followed up. This Llewellyn had emerged as such an intelligent and sympathetic character that one of the National Security Council assistants in the White House wrote him a pat-on-the-back letter for LBJ's signature. "We need more fine young Americans like you..." This one spent his days in his office and his evenings in a squalid Montagnard village taping the songs they sang to each other and to their children, strange hypnotic songs that brought tears to his eyes as he listened to them. He was in his second year in the province and would surely reenlist. The experience of my life, he told the reporter; describing his encounters with "my Montagnards." In his spare time he was writing a book about the Montagnards and their music.