—Okay, he heard the captain say.
All clear . . . okay, funny kind of death sentence, wasn’t it? He hadn’t been in Vietnam three months and already he understood one crucial aspect about its character, that certainties weren’t part of the landscape. If you cherished waking up to the same world in which you’d fallen asleep, you would soon find your reason stretched to a gossamer thinness, stretched and twisted and maybe just broken. Somehow Kip had got that within the first month of being in-country. You have to stay loose and strong at the same time, you can’t get stiff—you’ve got to remember that in heavy gales the stiff branches of a tree are the ones that break. And when he banked away to let the artillery barrage come in, he recognized the shadow of a doubt about that third hut and the possibility of there being some civilians inside, so he told himself, Stay loose. It was afternoon, wasn’t it? What kind of farmers would be hanging around in their hut on a hot afternoon like this? And as he watched the scene, not a thousand feet below him and out toward the north, boil in orange and then black, he recognized at once what you do with such doubts is to lay them to rest right down there at the epicenter of the flames, to see them for the stiff dry tinder that they are, and place them so they incinerate themselves rather than scorch you. This was how he learned to stay limber.
Kip passed over the site and saw the structures were collapsed and on fire, as were several acres of the surrounding tract. He may or may not be seeing figures in the paddies just east of the hamlet. They couldn’t be there. He saw them, he didn’t.
The captain was requesting assessment.
Wake up, he told himself. And what he said was as outrageous as it was common. He wanted the captain to feel good; he wanted to feel good. He said, —Your BDA, sir. We got three bunkered command posts destroyed here.
BDA, bomb damage assessment. Lies, as often as not. It is what they also called a WAG, a wild-assed guess, the sheerest sort of fiction. But Kip wasn’t guessing, of course.
—Thanks much, said the captain.
—See you, said Kip.
War. A WAG’s war. And Kip would fly himself back to base and the hotel and there would be some small satisfaction in having at least seen a pantomime of action from the air. By the time he touched down, those figures would be gone, if not from the rice paddy at least from his memory. And before they were gone they would be altered. They probably weren’t children, or women, or innocent rice farmers. They might have been water buffalo. Or else they might have been nothing more than phosphenes, those little squirming lights that can crawl across your field of vision when you are fatigued.
Two weeks after that, Kip had his first real experience, and would discover that the process of mentally revising the war to fit his own spiritual needs might be harder than expected. One of the army personnel came into the hotel and reported that they had troops in contact at a certain coordinate—TIC as it was called, an antonym to TLC—and he asked, —Can you go over and take a look? Here’s the radio frequency we’re working with in there.
Kip flew over the coordinate and was told by the man on the ground, —Some bad guys over here about a hundred yards, can you get some air?
—We’ll see what we can do, Kip radioed back, got on another channel to the Airborne Command Post and asked if fighters were available. At any given hour there were aircraft aloft on combat air patrol, killing time, waiting for orders. As it happened, two Phantoms were nearby, and were ordered in.
—Where do you want it? the flight leader asked, and Kip gave them geographical coordinates, went in, launched his marking rockets, and radioed, —Okay, hit my smoke. From eight thousand feet the two-ship descended and once again the earth metamorphosed from stable green to cascading reds and blacks.
Kip watched the pyrotechnic display from the window of his slow craft. This wasn’t artillery practice, and he could physically feel the difference, the heavy low thud impacted his chest, like a sonic boom, a profound thump, the tightening of the shoulders and neck, the punch and ferocity of the bombing below, the stunning detachment of those voices coming into his ears when one of the pilots announced he’d taken a hit. Kip meantime flew over the target to assess damage. The pilot who wasn’t hit had simply stepped up his focus so that now he engaged at the same time with the ground, with the other fighter, and with Kip as well. The man’s voice could not have been more calm. On the ground there was evidence of continued activity about a quarter mile to the east. —What’ve you got? he asked Kip, and Kip told him, gave him the landmarks and some estimated meterages. The crippled jet, leaking fuel, headed back to base. His wingman banked, made a second run over target, and a new salvo rocked the earth accompanied by a fresh concussion of flame and rolling smoke. Then they were gone, both of them. Kip heard the jargonized acknowledgment of thanks from the calm man, but it made little impression upon him. That is, there were so many other thoughts going through his head that the five, six, seven words signing off were just so much background noise to the percussive din, the heavy cacophony of voices that troubled him just then.
He circled the burning fields both at a lower altitude and more times than he should have. He knew very well that under fifteen hundred feet he was vulnerable to small-arms fire. Maybe he was inviting someone to play a game of peppers with him—a tactic that forward air controllers did employ here sometimes, it was known as trolling—offering whoever was left down there to send up some fire, and give away their hiding places. Like fishing, with yourself both hook and bait. He was drifting along low to the earth, carving such a lazy circle, not making an erratic flight pattern that might protect him. He himself didn’t know what his intentions were. He even ventured close enough to get the vaguest sense of what one of the faces of the dead looked like, charred but not so burnt that its features weren’t still evident. The burned body woke him up from his aerial stitching. He took on altitude, and set a course toward Ca Mau. So this was the war, he thought. He never found out whether or not the disabled plane made it back home. He cared, but he didn’t care. He’d never felt so far adrift from the world, and when he landed he remembered thinking how spongy soft the soil under his feet seemed. It was like he wasn’t much anyone doing anything anywhere. And rather than being a strange moment, memorable for its spectral, delusory augur of the void, the void for a while took a fancy to him and decided to move into his heart and head, take residence in Kip. He could fight an enemy, but not this undefinable emptiness.
The charred face came back to visit him during the nights that followed. He almost welcomed it, this odd recurrent nightmare, because it was something that was palpable, more concrete than half of what he experienced during the course of a given day.
In the dream the charred face spoke, saying, Tên tôi lá Kip. Mây giò rôi? Xin cho tôi zem bán thúc don? Vietnamese from his primer. Black teeth and black tongue moving, black lips quite near, saying over and over, My name is Kip. What time is it? Can I see the menu, please? I like that. How much does that cost? And a black finger would then point to Kip’s foot. The dream always ended the same way, with Kip failing to find the words in Vietnamese to tell the charred face that his foot was not for sale.
These were climaxes, then, blessed crises that shattered for the briefest hours the prodigious, overwhelming ennui that ruled the routine of Ca Mau.
They weren’t enough. If anything, they served to intensify the boredom by providing a comparative. For Kip, highs and lows were tolerable. It was experience of the middle he found unbearable. That middle was where the void dwelled. It had to leave, this had to stop, he begged himself.
One morning, before dawn had spread its tropical whiteness through the maze of the hotel-monastery, Kip rose, had some coffee, and drove himself out to the airfield in a jeep loaded with radios and sprouting so many antennas it resembled a metal insect. He had been down here for only eleven weeks and three days, not counting the day that was just emerging, but he knew it was time to make a move. He preflighted his plane, fired it up. The runway had upon it
a light skein of mist, and he sailed through it and up into the high air. Over east the yellow sun brimmed while along the western horizon the purple lip of night still clung. He set a course north toward Can Thó.
During his first in-country briefing, the operations officer in Saigon had paused in the middle of the lecture about rules of engagement and procedure, had fixed the new men with a peculiar, wicked look and said, —If any of you gentlemen don’t get enough excitement where you’re going and you want to jump things up a notch, then you come on back after your tour and there are some people here who’ll be happy to talk to you about a program we got.
—What kind of program, someone asked.
—Steve Canyon program.
—What’s that?
—As I say, it’s for those of you still intact and wanting a little adventure in your life.
Get off it, Kip thought at the time. Where do they get these people? Dropouts from drama school who had learned just enough about theatricality to make a nuisance of themselves. The briefing had continued without further definition of the program.
But it had come up elsewhere. Others mentioned it, but weren’t quite sure what was the nature of the enterprise. Around it was an aura difficult to define—some scoffed at the mystery in which it was shrouded, others sensed it was too dangerous even to consider—but to Kip with each day wasted in Ca Mau, the Steve Canyon program became more and more the focus of his thoughts. He assumed the designation for the program was an ironic smoke screen meant to disguise a serious agenda, despite the briefing officer’s insipid delivery. Steve Canyon, a comic-strip superpatriot and ace flyer. Just the kind of marginal folk hero they would go and use as a mascot. Kip remembered Steve Canyon well, and how after the war he founded his own one-plane firm, Horizons Unlimited, used a Navajo double-eagle design as his emblem, and traveled around the globe on perilous missions. Steve once was one of Kip’s heroes, too. But time had passed. Now he thought, Steve Canyon—give me a break. It was resonant of the absurd, Milquetoast term “the Gadget” that Oppenheimer used whenever referring to the bomb. “The Gadget” was meant to make it easier for those on the Hill who were involved in building the bomb to talk about it and not feel quite so guilty about its intended destiny. Just what was “Steve Canyon” meant to mask? he wondered.
Up in Can Thó it was overcast and getting sticky. Still morning but the day was heating up. He found himself referred from one officer to another until, in a cool room whose ceiling fan purled the air, he encountered the group operations officer he had been looking for. After half an hour Kip was surprised by a sudden forthrightness from the officer.
—I’m going to take you into my confidence, the man said, and the deep vertical furrows at either side of his mouth deepened. The program was “over the fence,” outside Vietnam. He wouldn’t say where but he would say it was the most secret operation in the war. More paramilitary than military, more maverick than paramilitary. —The loss rate is high, quite high, he said. —That’s the downside. The upside is freedom of action, nobody tailing your kite and dragging you down. Rules of engagement there are, but like I say, freedom of action, if you get my drift. No boredom and no bullshit, guaranteed.
—What do we do exactly once we’re there? Kip asked.
—Does it matter?
Kip supposed it didn’t.
—Anyway, that’s privileged.
—How are you supposed to know whether you want in or not?
—Did I ask you to come here?
—No, sir.
—You want in?
—Yes, sir.
—Then you don’t need more information right now, do you.
—No, sir.
A week dragged by before Kip heard from Can Thó that he had been accepted into the program. He was ordered to present himself at the base the next day. Having no friends in Ca Mau made his departure a simple business. He packed his single bag, left his Vietnamese records in the dining room, and hitched a ride on the daily courier flight. In Can Thó he was given a final chance to change his mind about volunteering. This was called a back-out briefing. Kip did not back out. Once that was settled, matters took a turn toward the peculiar.
In a hangar at the edge of the airstrip was an old high-wing monoplane whose identification markings had been stripped away so that it looked more like a private craft than a government plane. The officer said, —Got a dollar on you?
Kip went along with what he took to be a travesty, or like the first line of a joke. —You want a dollar from me, he said, playing straight man.
—I do. And I want you to sign this.
It was a scrip that transferred ownership of the airplane from the government to William Calder Jr. for the consideration of one dollar. The scrip seemed authentic.
—All right, said Kip, more unwilling than ever to request some explanation for such abnormalities. —Where do I sign?
His destination was Udorn, in Thailand, and he flew there the following evening, still in the dark about what to expect. He tried to empty himself of hope or presumption, knowing that whatever he encountered would then be free of useless comparisons. Instead, he worked on bundling together in his mind his experiences in South Vietnam, and began to fold them again and again just like he had his first combat frights (while folding, the word went from frights to fights to fghts to fts) until they were reduced to a very small wad, and once he felt he’d accomplished that, and was sure there were no stray moments that might return to stalk him down, he forced himself to bring that wad of experience out through his forehead into his fingers, where he clutched it and then tossed it out, just before crossing the Mekong, which divided Viet from Thai.
He landed at night, and was met at base ops by a lieutenant colonel. The deference displayed by his superior—not deference so much as brusque respect—disconcerted him, as he sat across from the man in an air-conditioned office on the second floor of a building in a remote part of the base. The officer, however respectful, was at first no more informative than anyone else had been. Kip began to believe that the men back in Can Thó who had inducted him into this secret society didn’t in fact themselves know what the Steve Canyon program was.
—So you’re going to be a Raven, the colonel said.
—That’s what they tell me. Whatever a Raven is.
—Tomorrow morning I want you to report to the office—we got a place for you to stay tonight—and there we’ll want you to surrender your dog tags, your uniform, ID card, all your personal belongings.
—Can you tell me where I’m going? he finally asked.
—Up-country.
—You mean China?
—I mean up-country.
—What happens with my airplane?
—What airplane?
—The one I flew over here, the one I own.
—You don’t own any airplane, sir. You ferried a private aircraft over here is all. Forget about it. Now, we’ll give you some money to get some new clothes, some jeans, shoes, that sort of thing. Get yourself a jacket of some sort, but low profile, and not a word to anybody. Take a few minutes, write your parents a letter and tell them you’re on a special assignment, tell them not to worry. You’ll be just fine.
If Kip’s father were alive, and if he were here, how strong a sense of déjà vu would he have experienced hearing the lieutenant’s instructions? Was he running away from or toward his childhood? He concluded that he was probably doing both, and that these questions had no value at this stage of the game. The directive to write a farewell letter of sorts begged several other questions, too. Given his continued ignorance of pertinent details, what could he betray even if he wanted to? Which he didn’t. He said nothing, kept his possible riposte as cards firm to his chest. Treated with respect, he accorded respect as best he could in return.
The transport left early morning the day after and it wasn’t until they landed at tiny Wattay airport where he was met by a civilian man in a jeep and taken in along the brown, lethargic upper reaches of the
Mekong into Vientiane, the capital of Laos, to an American compound, that all the veils of intrigue would begin to lift—but not before one final conundrum was set forth.
Vientiane was a city more slumberous than the wide river that drifted along, mute and laggard, at its southern limit. Stupas and shacks and centuries-old wats with their swooping roofs and gold-leaf doors stood here and there, bicycles and motorcycle taxis called tuktuks moved in the streets. Girls walked arm in arm, in threes and fours, along Fa Ngum, the road along the river. A teenage boy sat in the shade of a doorway plucking the feathers off a lifeless duck and smoking his cigarette with dignity. An air of calm seemed to have settled with the dust in every corner. What was most conspicuous here was the absence of war, even any hint of war. It seemed on first impression a dreamy, pleasant, backward, uninspired place, steeped in a blend of French, Chinese, Thai, Lao. The city was neither prosperous nor populous. This was not Saigon.
Kip arrived at the address he was given in a deeper state of confusion than before. Vientiane was civilian in the extreme, at least upon its surface. It would take a long night with the modest, subtle whores in Les Rendezvous des Amis, a complete induction the morning after into the purgatory of the secret wars—which here were numerous and quite diverse and altogether unknown to those on the outside—as well as a wild flight the day after, with its unauthorized side trip over the Plain of Jars, to convince Kip that he hadn’t made the mistake of going from a dull war to a duller nonwar. He need not have worried, as he would come to discover. Whether or not he knew it, Kip was about to find what he had always been looking for.
Trinity Fields Page 26
