Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “I’ll see you downstairs once we’re settled,” said the General to his former aide.

  “Righto, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton. Both men were tired, and they both had a lot to think over before they got started.

  The two generals were shown to their quarters by one of the white-jacketed Filipino house staff. General Blue’s room was at the back corner of the house on the second floor, overlooking a tropical garden that had goldfish ponds and a stream cascading down an artificial waterfall that appeared to be constructed of fiberglass and painted rocks. The General picked up the phone extension next to his four-poster mahogany bed, and when an operator came on the line, he barked, “Give me the goddamned embassy.”

  “One moment, sir. To whom would you wish to speak?”

  “That’s my goddamned business. Ring the goddamned embassy.”

  The operator rang the embassy.

  “Put me through to Rousseau,” the General growled.

  “Who may I say is calling, sir?” asked an officious female voice.

  “Put me through, goddammit.”

  The phone clicked a couple of times and rang through.

  “AID,” said another female voice.

  “Give me Rousseau,” said the General.

  “Who may I say is calling, sir?”

  “General Blue,” said the General.

  “One moment please, sir.”

  “Jake Rousseau, sir,” said a voice.

  “Jake, goddammit, I want to know what in hell is going on over here.”

  “General Blue, sir, it’s good to hear from you, sir. Where are you?”

  “I’m inside some kind of goddamned compound looking at a goddamned waterfall and a bunch of flowers. Come and get me, Jake. I want a goddamned briefing on this situation over here, and I want it now.”

  “When did you get in, sir?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “Get yourself a shower, sir, and I’ll be there in twenty.”

  The General hung up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed, exhausted. Silently he blessed the day he had stolen one of De Gaulle’s young staffers from him in Tripoli before the attack was launched against Sicily. Lieutenant Jacob “Jake” Rousseau was then in the Free French Army and served as a logistics specialist on De Gaulle’s personal staff. He was one of the few people working for De Gaulle who spoke passable English. The General demanded the services of Rousseau ostensibly as a liaison officer. The real reason he stole him had nothing to do with “liaison.” The General simply liked the cut of his jib. Rousseau was loud, profane, and so completely shot full of his own adolescent genius that he reminded the General of himself at age twenty. Rousseau stayed with the General through the end of the war and, after receiving U.S. citizenship, was the General’s personal aide when he took over deputy directorship of the CIA to run European operations in Berlin from 1947 to 1955.

  He was a giant of a man, standing a good half-foot taller than the General. He had coal-black hair and black eyes and a crooked smile from nerve damage suffered in a fistfight as a child in Marseilles. His father and his father’s father had been fishermen, and his mother’s father was a shadowy figure who never seemed to have a job but managed to command the respect if not the fear of every man on the Marseilles waterfront. When she met him after the war, the General’s wife, Carey Randolph, said Jake Rousseau had been born an aide. He was another on the list of what she called “Grandpa’s boys.”

  Of all of “Grandpa’s boys,” she liked Rousseau the least. Perhaps like the General, Rousseau reminded her of a time when her husband was as coarse and unmannered as he was loud and profane. His wife never let on why she didn’t like Rousseau, but she made a point of warning her husband never to trust him.

  “He’ll be loyal to you so long as it’s in his interest,” she cautioned. “He’ll be smiling like a cat the day he walks away from you, and you’ll never see it coming.”

  The General dismissed the warning from his wife as one of her delusions. He figured, she misunderstood the truths of what went on between men. This came from her upbringing in a culture that had long been dependent on the work of slaves, and without them crumbled into a well-mannered heap of disappeared dreams and lost illusions.

  Now “Grandpa’s boy” was no longer an aide. For twelve years Jake Rousseau had been CIA station chief in Saigon, using the Agency for International Development as a front. It was a job he had trained for all his life, the equivalent of the General’s position at the top of the Agency heap in Europe after the war. All CIA operations in Asia were coordinated by the station chief in Vietnam because, presumably, what was done behind closed doors in Bangkok or Singapore or Tokyo was bound to have its effect on the ground in Vietnam. But the practical dictates of CIA Asian policy were only a minor source of Jake Rousseau’s wide sweep of influence. What lay behind the enormous scope of his power were the years he had spent under the General in Europe. The entire top floor of the CIA’s present command structure at Langley had cut its teeth in Germany after the war. They had all worked for the General, and because Jake Rousseau was the man closest to him, he was the man in the position to do the most good for the most people. Jake Rousseau had a pile of IOUs from those early days in Berlin that he had only begun to dig through. The net effect was, what Jake Rousseau wanted, Jake Rousseau got.

  Now his mentor the General had come calling. Rousseau knew it wouldn’t take the General long to let him know why.

  Rousseau drove himself from AID headquarters to the Chateau, as the VIP quarters were called. He knew the General would appreciate the fact that their meeting was being kept private. When he arrived at the compound, he found the General standing in front of the main house wearing the same khakis he had been wearing the last time he had visited the General’s for cocktails in Georgetown almost a year ago. He could see the General’s gray eyes squinting under the brim of his panama. He remembered when a flicker of those eyes in his direction had sent shivers of fear down his spine. Rousseau parked the jeep and stepped out. The General didn’t move, but he followed Rousseau with his eyes. They still sent shivers, Rousseau was less than amazed to learn. Even twenty years later, he still wilted under their gaze.

  “Sir, it’s good to see you,” said Rousseau with a nervous half-salute.

  The General still didn’t move. He waited until Rousseau was standing exactly in front of him, only a foot or two away.

  “I want to know what in hell is going on over here, Jake. Either this is the most fucked-up theater of operations I have ever had the misfortune of seeing, or I’ve lost my grip. And just between you and me, I don’t think I’ve lost my grip, despite the noises you may have heard emanating from the most recent occupant of the Oval Office.”

  “Well, sir, we’ve got our hands full over here, that’s for sure,” Rousseau said nervously, his voice losing its American tone, slipping back into its French accent.

  “Looks to me what you people have got your hands full of is your own dicks,” said the General. He wasn’t grinning.

  “Yes, sir. I get your point, sir,” said Rousseau. “There is certainly some of that, sir.”

  “More than some, Jake. I just saw the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. They were loading goddamned coffins on a cargo plane headed back to the States. Coffins, goddammit! They’re shipping the bodies of our boys back to their hometowns, wasting time, wasting money, wasting men, wasting materiel . . . God only knows what else they’re wasting. But more than anything else, goddammit, they’re wasting lives! Over here, those lives count for something. They died here, goddammit. You send those bodies home and you may as well tell Ho Chi Minh his boys count for more than our boys. You may as well tell him we’re all going home. He won.”

  Jake Rousseau looked at the old man. The General was seething with rage. His teeth and his fists were clenched, and his khakis were stained at the armpits, dark brown around the neck, wet down the chest, dripping at the cuffs. Everything he had spent his life believing had
been violated before he’d even put a foot on Vietnamese soil, and it showed.

  Rousseau didn’t know what to say. Things were different now? That wouldn’t hold any water with the General. Political considerations made the shipment of KIAs home necessary? The General hadn’t given a good goddamn for politics all the way through World War II, through hundreds of battles in a dozen countries, through twenty years in the CIA. He had told the politicians not what they wanted to hear but what the General wanted them to know. And judging by the events of the last week, he hadn’t stopped. He’d just been fired by the White House. He wasn’t any more inclined to cosset politicians right now than he’d ever been.

  “I don’t know what to say, General,” Rousseau said haltingly, his tongue thickening in a familiar way. He felt like a lieutenant again, tall and skinny and shuddering under the General’s withering gaze.

  “I don’t know what to say either, Jake. But some goddamn body better start knowing what to say to me, and they better do it quick.”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “I want to know what in hell’s going on with my grandson up in II Corps. I want to know what this court-martial shit’s about, goddammit. That boy didn’t desert in the face of the enemy any more than you did, goddammit. I want some answers, and I want them quickly, Jake. Uncork your minions. Call in your goddamned markers. Get on it. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jake Rousseau. “Give me the afternoon, sir, and I’ll be back to you by dinnertime.”

  The General stepped forward and put his arm around his former aide and squeezed the big man tightly.

  “It’s good to see you, Jake. Makes a man proud.”

  “Yes, sir. Good to see you, sir,” Jake Rousseau said stiffly.

  His body was rigid. He glanced over the top of the General’s hat and saw that he’d left his jeep idling on the gravel drive. He hoped the General hadn’t noticed.

  There was nothing the General hated more than a subordinate in a hurry.

  8

  * * *

  * * *

  The C-141 Starlifter courier touched down at Tan Son Nhut. The Colonel was braced against a wall of olive-drab webbing, seated on a stack of military film cans on their way back to MACV from the Department of Defense. He was staring at another wall of webbing with more film cans strapped down on its far side. Somewhere down there in the bowels of the Pentagon, in a dark screening room, generals had reclined in armchairs and watched last week’s home movies from the front. It was almost too ridiculous to imagine. The Colonel wondered if they served popcorn, if they cheered when the choppers came in low with their miniguns blazing, the stereo sound of a 105mm artillery battery’s support fire cruuuump-cruuuump-cruuuump-cruuuumping all around them.

  The Colonel had picked up the courier flight forty-eight hours ago. It made three stops on its way East—Frankfurt, Teheran, Bangkok, then Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon, Vietnam. The C-141 taxied to a stop and lowered its rear cargo door. The wet heat of the tarmac curled into the open cargo door like a wave. The Colonel unstrapped himself from his web seat and stretched.

  “Told ya you’d git here sooner ’er’ later, suh,” drawled an Air Force technical sergeant wearing a blue-gray crew jumpsuit. The Colonel looked around for his duffel.

  “Gotcher duffel rightcheer, suh,” said Tech Sergeant Brewster. “Looks like a downright purty day out there, suh.”

  “Every day’s a good day if you wake up on the right side of the bed, Sarge,” said the Colonel. “But I’m not sure I had a web seat in the belly of a 141 in mind when I thought up that particular little kernel of wisdom.”

  “I hear that, yes, suh, I do,” said the tech sergeant, guffawing deeply from the vicinity of his considerable belly.

  “The last time I arrived here, it was on a damn troop ship,” said the Colonel. “They supply only one side of the bed on board one of those merchant marine luxury liners.”

  “They evah try ta git me on one a’ them tubs, I’ll cash in mah stripes, that’s fuh damn sure, suh.”

  “It’s been good talking to you, Sarge.”

  The tech sergeant blushed and turned his head.

  “We ain’t nevah had no colonel fly this here courier flight with us, suh. Been a real, real pleasure havin’ you aboard, suh.”

  “You do that coffeepot justice, Sarge. Best damn coffee I ever had at five hundred miles an hour.”

  “Glad ta serve ya, suh . . . yes, suh,” said Brewster. “Have yersef a real fine stay in Saigon, suh, and don’t fergit to tell ol’ Minh Cao that Sergent Brewster said hey.”

  “I won’t, Sarge.”

  The Colonel took his duffel from Tech Sergeant Brewster and started down the ramp into the heat. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, because this wasn’t that kind of trip. He was wearing a pair of Levi’s, a tan polo shirt, and an old pair of rough-out cowboy boots. A floppy-brimmed golf hat covered his salt-and-pepper crewcut and a pair of cheap dark glasses concealed his steel gray eyes.

  As he started across the tarmac, an old 707 taxied to a halt and began disgorging a load of replacements. The Colonel stopped to watch. They came down the mobile stairs from the plane in a sea of khaki, each man shouldering his duffel as he reached the ground. A young sergeant wearing starched jungle fatigues and a racy-looking black baseball cap organized the men into two ranks and started calling names.

  “Stevens!”

  “Here!”

  “Dobrowski!”

  “Yo!”

  “Brown!”

  “Here, Sarge!”

  “Bernstein!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Tomilson!”

  “Here!”

  The sergeant called off ninety names and marched them across the tarmac to the in-country processing station. The Colonel headed for the passenger terminal. As he passed through the gate in the chain-link fence around the terminal, he could still hear them, unloading from another tired old 707 with the Flying Tigers logo on its tail.

  “Anson!”

  “Here!”

  “Bronstone!”

  “Yo!”

  “Jaworski!”

  “Yay!”

  Farther away down the flight line he could see the ranks of khaki figures forming below a third plane. Faintly, he heard but couldn’t see another group double-timing in the distance:

  “I don’t know

  But I been told,

  Streets of Saigon

  Paved with gold,

  Sound off,

  One, two,

  Hit it again,

  Three, four,

  Take it on down,

  One, two,

  Three, four,

  ONE . . . TWO!”

  The Colonel shuffled through Immigration and followed a crowd past a makeshift counter made out of old packing crates with a hand-lettered sign above it reading Customs.

  Outside the terminal, the Colonel put his duffel on the curb and waited. Taxis in various forms rattled past carrying everything from human cargo to crates of chickens. Finally an old diesel Mercedes screeched to a halt next to him, and a brown face with a cigar stuck in it like a fencepost showed in the window.

  “You go Caravelle . . . Continental?”

  “Sure,” said the Colonel, not knowing where he was headed exactly. He climbed in the backseat shoving his duffel ahead of him.

  The brown face turned around and grinned. The fencepost cigar was stuck in a row of corn kernels.

  “You pay dallah? Big-time cheapy-cheapy, dollah!”

  “How much?”

  “Two dallah . . . two dallah, cheapy-cheapy.”

  The Colonel looked at a sign posted on the dash. In piasters, the fare amounted to five dollars. He pulled a folded wad of dollars from his pocket and showed them to the driver.

  “Cheapy-cheapy,” said the brown face, nearly ejecting the fence-post from his smile.

  He dropped the Mercedes into gear and with a great grinding of gears and slipping of clutch and spewing of rancid exhaust and screa
ming of epithets, the taxi entered the traffic flow. The driver kept his left hand on the horn, and it yelped like a drowning dog all the way into the city.

  The Colonel hadn’t spent much time in Saigon when he’d commanded a Mechanized Infantry Battalion down in the Delta in 1966. Saigon had been the headquarters that disgorged a neverending flow of action memos and field directives, each more incredible than the last. There was a shifting cadre of generals and colonels serving on various division, corps, and command staffs, all of whom saw their jobs as improving the manner in which “their war” was being fought. In each of their minds, Vietnam was definitely “my war,” for every last one of them had a proprietary sensibility when it came to “the only war we’ve got,” as had been said more than once about Vietnam, most prominently by the recently departed occupant of the White House.

  According to the Saigon generals, there were simply an infinite number of ways that the fighting men of the U.S. Army could improve their battlefield performance. The Colonel remembered one command improvement directive as if he’d read it yesterday.

  The Colonel had a little tent fly his driver had set up behind his M-113 armored personnel carrier. He used it like an office, and he sat on a folding camp chair under the tent fly at the end of the day, reading the stack of poop sheets that had arrived from Saigon while he was out crushing boonies somewhere with the Battalion. Every day the poop-sheet pile deepened, and every day the flurry of directives from on high grew more and more amazing.

  “I didn’t know you couldn’t fight a war without paper, Top,” the Colonel said to his battalion sergeant major one evening. “Look at this.”

  He held up a fistful of mimeographed lunacy and shook it.

  “Damn stuff weighs a couple of pounds, did you know that?”

  The Sergeant Major stubbed out his cigarette with his boot toe and chuckled.

  “Wisht we still had us some mules, sir. We could feed ’em that shit,” he drawled.