Jannick wondered what Dupuy was up to, knowing that it couldn’t be any good for anyone other than himself. Dupuy had been in-country for six months and this was the first Jannick had heard of him going any farther from the safety of Saigon than an occasional helicopter jaunt to the ersatz beach resort at Vung Tau. He resolved to meander by MACV headquarters later in the day, perhaps in time for the famous Five-O’clock Follies, the chest-thumping press briefing that so amused the collected media cynics every afternoon. Dupuy bore close attention, if only because the bastard functioned as a foolproof weathervane indicating only ill winds, the kind of shit-storms that could land you—but not Alvie Dupuy—in mud up to your neck with sand blowing in your face. Jannick wondered how a place as down and dirty as New Orleans could produce the grand Fats Domino and then turn around and squat out Alvie Dupuy. Next time he got home, he resolved to ask his mother. She’d know. She might have been raised in the far rain forests of the working-poor Ninth Ward, but she sure knew her shit from Shinola when it came to uptown jerks and phonies. She had changed diapers and wiped asses for two generations of them as a uniformed maid. She knew from experience where the Alvie Dupuys of this world got on and got off. Yes indeed.
Jannick pulled on white painter’s pants and stuck his feet in a pair of ten-cent flip-flops. He tucked the envelope in his pocket, grabbed a T-shirt with FILLMORE EAST on it, and headed out the door. He didn’t leave much behind. Mama-san would comb through his goodies and make sure he wasn’t saving anything for tomorrow that could be put to better use today. That was the thing about the Vietnamese. They had a mañana attitude that made Mexican siesta-junkies look industrious by comparison. The national mania for procrastination extended to every phase of life except theft, which was regarded more as an obligation than as a crime. If it was there, you took it. Nothing was wasted. A tin can could turn into a stove . . . or a grenade. A belt buckle into a can opener . . . or a shell casing. A length of iron pipe into a drum . . . or a mortar tube. It was all in how you looked at things.
In Vietnam, nothing was as it seemed.
He hit Phuc Do Street and raised a finger. A bicycle taxi appeared out of a fog of exhaust smoke. The driver was wearing aviator shades and a fifty-mission crash pilot’s hat. He had betel-nut-stained teeth and fingernails like bear claws.
“You go MACV, Continental, embassy, I take. Cheap-cheap. Twenty piaster. Cheap-cheap. Quick-quick.”
“MACV.”
Jannick climbed onto the taxi seat and gripped the handrails. Into the fog of exhaust they sped.
Ah! Saigon! Jannick thought as the three-wheeled taxi rounded a corner on two wheels.
Was this the future?
Would he live long enough to find out?
Did it matter?
He gritted his teeth and held on as the bicycle taxi passed an oil-spewing bus with six chickens and three pigs sticking out the window. The bus driver screeched something at the taxi driver, and he screeched back. There was a mutual shaking of fists and baring of stained teeth, and the taxi took another corner on two wheels missing a fruit stand by inches.
That was the thing about Saigon.
With ten bucks in your pocket and a snootful of adrenaline and a decent tip to follow up, you could hire a bike-taxi and be king for a day.
Who could tell you no?
Not your editor back in Frisco. He wasn’t around to look over your shoulder.
Not General Creighton Abrams, commander of MACV. He didn’t care about pipsqueaks like you.
In Vietnam, no one cared.
The bike-taxi stopped outside the gate of the well-fortified MACV compound. This was where everything was happening. Tan Son Nhut Air Base was just down the road, and huge olive-drab C-141 Starlifters could be seen taking off and landing, two a minute, on the six constantly busy runways that operated twenty-four hours a day. They said Tan Son Nhut had more takeoffs and landings than Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, the busiest airport in the continental United States, and Jannick believed it.
Jannick paid the bike-taxi driver and walked over to the gatehouse. An MP checked his press credentials and had him sign the visitors’ book. He was in. The main MACV headquarters building was an old French colonial stucco affair that had once housed the myriad bureaucracies that administered French rule in Southeast Asia. Since then, the compound had undergone a U.S. military bastardization. Temporary buildings in a half-dozen shapes and sizes surrounded the headquarters, housing the nerve center of the American military presence. You could stand at the gate of MACV and in a single glance take in the real lesson of Southeast Asia. The Americans had simply taken up where the French left off. They hadn’t even built another headquarters.
No one, after all, had learned anything.
For the occupiers, there was no history.
Today was all that mattered.
This was an attitude that fit Jannick’s mind-set precisely, because his approach to life was that of the journalist. He lived in the present tense. Nothing counted but right now.
Jannick shook his head and headed across the compound to a Quonset hut behind the headquarters. He was looking for Calhoun. If his guess was right, Calhoun was holding out a vital piece of information, as he usually did. Jannick wanted Calhoun’s poop. All of it. He was like a junkie who needed to score. He could smell Calhoun’s little game. His ears pricked up and his eyes gleamed and his fingers tingled. This was what it was all about. Poop. Data. More goodies for the chow-chow monster.
Yes!
Jannick opened the front door and felt a rush of icy air. Ah, the rear-area desk jockeys. They knew how to fight a war.
Calhoun’s cubicle was the third one down on the right. Jannick slipped into a chair next to Calhoun’s desk before the spec-4 could look up. He tossed an envelope on the desk.
“What have you got, dude?” he asked. “This rascal’s half-empty.”
Calhoun looked over his shoulder and around the edge of his cubicle. He stood up.
“C’mon. Let’s go over to the commissary. They don’t like you coming around.”
“Well, fuck them. Fuck the Army.”
“Yeah, and fuck you,” said Calhoun, smiling widely.
They walked out the back door of the Quonset hut and headed for a clump of bougainvillaea bushes near the fence. Calhoun sat down under one of the bushes and wiped his brow.
“Man, when does this heat let up?” he asked.
“It doesn’t,” said Jannick.
“Listen,” said Calhoun, glancing around the compound to see if anyone was coming. “This thing I’ve got for you—you’ve got to be careful with it. Don’t write anything for a while. Can you do that? Sit on it for a couple of weeks?”
“Sure. I’ve got no deadlines. You know that.”
“Okay, man. But you’ve got to swear to it.”
Jannick looked at him as if he were crazy, but raised his hand anyway.
“Okay, man, I swear on a stack of Rolling Stones. I won’t do shit with your poop until you say so.”
“Your boy Dupuy is into something big. Real big.”
“That right?”
“He’s running an Article 32 investigation on some dude they’re charging with desertion in the face of the enemy.”
“What’s the big deal? They’ve sent guys away on that one before.”
“It’s an officer.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah. Lieutenant Matthew Blue. I saw Dupuy’s orders. They gave them to me to deliver to Dupuy. I peeked.”
“No. You don’t say,” Jannick teased.
“They’re being real hush-hush about this thing. I don’t know why. Article 32 shit is routine. But not this one.”
“Well, keep your ears open and your eyes peeled. I think I know why they’ve got the lid on.”
“Yeah?”
“If he’s the right Blue, he’s got a four-star for a grandfather.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I’m sure they’re not real eager for the political fallout
from this one.”
Calhoun whistled through his teeth.
“You going to talk to Dupuy?” Calhoun asked.
“No. I think I’ll hang back and watch for a while. Where’d they send Dupuy, anyway?”
“Dak To.”
“A real garden spot.”
“Yeah. You going up there?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
Calhoun stood up.
“I’ve got to be getting back. We’ve got a new deputy G-1 watching us. You’ve got to damn near ask permission to take a shit.”
Jannick walked with him to the Quonset hut, then headed for the gate. He signed out and waited on the street for another bike-taxi.
So Dupuy was investigating a Lieutenant who had a famous grandfather and who’d been charged with desertion in the face of the enemy, huh? Tasty little assignment. He was sure Dupuy saw opportunities for several levels of suck-ass in this one. If he could carry this one off discreetly, turn over as few rocks as possible, focus the investigation right on Lieutenant Blue and not let the thing wander around and get out of hand, Dupuy knew he’d be sitting pretty.
Yeah, Dupuy? That’s what your sorry ass thinks.
A bike-taxi pulled up and Jannick climbed on.
“Hotel Continental,” he commanded.
The bike-taxi eased into traffic, the driver screamed something, shook his fist, and they were off. Traffic and exhaust fog enveloped them like a flu. The bike-taxi drifted toward the river, ignoring traffic lights, stop signs, and the demented hand signals of every traffic cop at every intersection they passed through. That was the thing about Saigon.
No one was in charge.
Careening through the traffic, Jannick got a whiff of the madness, a tiny glimpse of the future.
Saigon was the future. The future was now.
Yes!
Jannick held on as the bike-taxi made a two-wheeled corner, the driver screeching his head off, shaking both fists in the air.
Yes, indeed! Bring it on, Lac To, you wild-ass taxi-man!
Bring it on!
5
* * *
* * *
Hey, Cathy? Want to get some lunch?”
Catherine Joice was a correspondent for a CBS television affiliate in Kansas City that had sent her to Vietnam to begin building star quality for an anchor slot on the local evening news. She was sitting on her balcony at the Continental Hotel having a cup of coffee and reading Time magazine. She looked down. Danny Jannick was standing in the middle of Le Loi Street, holding a copy of Rolling Stone over his head, shading his eyes from the midday sun.
“Go away, Jannick. I’ve got no use for you today or any other day for that matter.” Jannick had been asking her out at least three times a week every week since she had arrived in Vietnam, six months before. He wasn’t the only one who wanted a date with the dark-haired TV news reporter. Half the staff of the American Embassy, at least a third of all the lieutenants in MACV headquarters, and most of the foreign correspondents in Saigon had asked her out at least once, many twice. But Danny Jannick was by far the most persistent of her suitors. He was the kind of guy for whom “no” was not an answer but a challenge. She peered over the wall of her balcony. He was still standing down there in the middle of Le Loi Street. Trucks, buses, mopeds, scooters, jeeps, and bike-taxis streamed by him in a cacophony of honking horns and shaking fists. He took no notice of the madness around him. He just stood there in the middle of the broad boulevard that ran from the railroad station to the National Assembly, staring up at her.
She was twenty-seven years old, she came from Ipswich, Massachusetts, on Boston’s North Shore, she had shag-cut brown hair, and she was so thin and bony she looked like a teenager. She had a narrow, aquiline nose and hooded, mischief-filled eyes and a crooked, wry smile. When she looked at you, she looked at you only one way: skeptically. She had a degree in drama from Smith College, but she was born a reporter. There were a few other female reporters covering the war, but two of them worked for newspapers, and the third had a foundation grant that supported her while she contributed to left-wing magazines like The Nation and Dissent. All three of them had that driven, studious look that marked them forever as straight-A students who never got invited to the prom, an oversight on the part of their male classmates they would never forget.
To say that Cathy Joice had high visibility in the rumor-strewn bloodthirsty battleground of the news media in Vietnam didn’t do justice to the attention she attracted. Catherine Joice could stop traffic on Tu Do Street with a toss of her head. When she attended the Five-O’clock Follies, the daily briefing at MACV headquarters, which wasn’t often, briefing officers were known to have dropped their pointers and stop in midsentence when she entered the room. Very few Army officers were ready for female reporters in a combat zone. None were ready for the tall woman with a cameraman and soundman who could stand there with a mike in her hand and ask questions and put your awkward answers on TV back home. Despite the flustered reaction she got from most of the brass at MACV, nobody thought to ask the most obvious question about Catherine Joice: What was she doing in Vietnam? What made her so special that she became the first female television news journalist to cover the war?
She was being groomed for an anchor slot back home in Kansas City, of course. That was the answer her bosses at the station would give you. The professional answer. One of her bosses, an enlightened sort, would even question in return: Why not a woman as a TV news reporter? Why not Vietnam?
They were begging the question. The real answer was far stranger. And more devious.
Cathy Joice was born into the trade of gathering information from reluctant sources. She was a State Department brat, the daughter of Nicholas K. “Nick” Joice, an Irish-American kid from Boston’s South Side who had gotten a scholarship-fueled Harvard education, and Michele Phelan Joice, daughter of a North Shore family of Brahmin bankers that owned its own island off Martha’s Vineyard. It was a family with a past that gave its daughter something of a leg up in the present. For as long as his daughter could remember, her father had been a “cultural attaché” at embassy after embassy as the family was posted from one country to another around the world. Though it was always said that Daddy worked for the State Department, it was understood differently around the house. Daddy worked for the State Department in name only. His real boss went to work every day out in McLean, Virginia, at CIA Headquarters. Nick Joice had been Chief of Station in every hot spot around the globe since 1947, the year the Agency was formed.
Daughters of men who lead secret lives grow up with a different way of looking at the world. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is as it seems. The world, for Cathy Joice, far from being a great big child’s playground, had been throughout her childhood a menacing battleground in the war between good and evil. Wars were not things you read about while you did your history homework after supper. Wars were discussed at the dinner table. Wars had reasons for being fought. Wars had uniformed troops, and wars had troops who had no uniforms. Wars had the victors that history taught you about, and then wars had the real victors. Cathy Joice’s father worked in the world that lay between the two realities, between what was acknowledged and what really was, deep in the shadows between light and dark.
She knew the shady places too. She brought to her job a natural skepticism, and more. She stood before the camera less than five percent of the time. It was what she did with the other ninety-five percent that counted. She moved easily in the swamp of shifting allegiances that was Saigon in 1969. The war was going to be wound down. Everyone could feel it, from the desk men at the embassy to the bar owners on Tu Do Street, from the “laundresses” camped out on the fringes of the base camps to the messengers who rode scooters between the Saigon government and the government hidden in bunkers and tunnel systems in the countryside. The American “presence” in Vietnam would end sooner or later. The American “commitment” wasn’t forever. Nobody knew when it would end, so everyone covered his o
r her ass accordingly. There were many Vietnams, which, of course, caused the need for many allegiances. But the two allegiances that counted most were those demanded by light and dark, by Vietnam during the day and Vietnam at night.
For Cathy Joice, to live in Saigon was to live at dusk. This made her very happy, for she had grown up in a house where it was always twilight, where it was always cocktail hour, and where, Lord knew, there was always a reason to drink.
“Cathy! Come on! Have lunch with me. I’ve got something for you!” Danny Jannick’s voice broke through the din of Le Loi Street again. He was still down there, staring up at her. She folded her paper, took a sip of coffee, and stood up, leaning on the balustrade of her balcony. She was wearing khaki walking shorts, a pair of Keds, and an old blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She gazed down at Jannick through a pair of aviator Ray-Bans.
Army Blue Page 11
