The General sat on the leather armchair for a moment, staring at the Secretary of Defense. Then he rose slowly from the sofa and straightened his suit jacket, smoothing its front with his palms. He walked across the room and stood in front of the Secretary's desk. He leaned forward at the waist, placing his palms on the desk to support his weight. He stared at the Secretary of Defense as only the General could—a wide-eyed, half-smiling stare, like a mean dog's.
“I want you to listen very closely to what I've got to say, Mr. Secretary, because I'm only going to say it once.” The General intoned his friend's title slowly and deliberately, making the point that while he understood their respective positions, he'd been there before.
“I want you to remember a day about twenty-five years ago, the day I got my orders in North Africa that would take me and my division across the Mediterranean to Sicily, and from there to Anzio and up the boot of Italy to Milan and from there to Marseilles. I was in Tunis, and I received a letter from you that had been sent over in the Chief of Staff's pouch from Washington. In this letter, you asked me to do what I could to secure your steel holdings in Italy and France, and you were good enough to remind me, on two subsequent pages, where each and every one of the Hamilton Steel plants was located. Do you remember that letter, Mr. Secretary?"
The Secretary of Defense nodded.
“You knew I'd do what I could to safeguard your steel holdings overseas, didn't you, Mr. Secretary?"
The Secretary of Defense nodded.
“We had been friends for—what?—twenty years at that time? About that?”
The Secretary of Defense nodded.
“We played polo together at the Gates Mills Polo Club for every one of those twenty years, every summer.
The Secretary of Defense nodded resignedly. He knew what was coming.
“And I proceeded to establish my command headquarters in a dozen of your plants over there. We swept wide of your largest plant outside Milan, avoiding the artillery barrage that would have been inevitable if we'd gone the other way. We established military government headquarters in your other plants. No, it was eight. Is my recollection correct?”
The Secretary of Defense nodded, looking down at his feet, which were pigeon-toed on the deep blue carpet of his office.
“I've still got the letter you sent me, Mr. Secretary. And I've got a very strong memory of the work your company did for the Agency in ‘48, before the Italian election. I talked to George Marshall and got you into your post on the Committee on European Reconstruction, a position that couldn't have done any harm in your efforts to get your companies going again over there.”
“Are you threatening me, Matt?”
“Hell no, I'm not threatening you. You ought to know me better than that. I'm reminding you of a favor, a very significant favor I did for you a number of years ago. Now I need a favor. I want the boy out of the stockade, and I want him out now.”
The Secretary of Defense looked at his friend and spoke slowly. “This could go very badly for you and me both, Matt,” he said. “What I asked you to do wasn't wrong. You know that as well as I do. And neither was what you did for me. That was a different time.
A different war. But it would make a difference for both of us if you were to bring this out now. I'd probably lose my job, as I'm sure you know. And your reputation for integrity would be besmirched forever. What you're asking me to do for Matt just isn't possible. I can't go into it right now, but when I can tell you, I will. And you'll understand. I'm sure you will. National security is involved, Matt.”
“I'm not sure you're getting my message,” said the General, standing up. “I don't give a good goddamn what the fallout is. I want that boy out of the goddamn stockade, and I'm not leaving this office until you give the order.”
The Secretary of Defense studied the General's face for a moment. He was looking for some glimmer of understanding, some recognition of the value of twenty years of friendship. There was none.
“You really are the son of a bitch they've been saying you are all these years, aren't you, Matt?”
The General didn't answer the Secretary of Defense for a moment. He stood in the front of the Secretary's desk, impassive, silent, fists clenched, his whole body a club ready to strike at any moment. Then he took a deep breath of resignation and stepped back and collapsed into the armchair. He nodded at the Secretary of Defense, indicating he should sit down across from him. He did.
“You know, Sam, you spend your whole life trying to find a way to live on this earth that fits. Do you know what I mean?”
The Secretary of Defense looked puzzled.
“I'm not sure I do, Matt.”
“You spend your life trying to find a way to make yourself and your family . . . comfortable. You try and you try and you try, and I'll be goddamned today if I know any more than I knew forty years ago. Sometimes I sit alone in my study, looking out at the garden, and I wonder where it was exactly that I went wrong. What path I could have taken that would have made things turn out differently. And I'll be goddamned if I know where it is, or where it was. I just don't know. I really don't, Sam.”
The General stared off out the window at the Washington Monument for a moment, then took a sip of bourbon and looked at his friend.
“I'm still not sure what you're getting at, Matt,” the Secretary said.
“It's family, Sam. You're talking about national security, and I'm talking about my family. You know, Sam, you wear a family like a suit of clothes. They keep you dry and warm, and your family conceals the essential truth that from the day you're born until the day they lay you in the ground, you stand naked before the world. It's taken me sixty years to admit this to myself, Sam. Sixty years to admit to myself what a goddamn fool I've been all these years. How much I have owed and how little I've repaid them.”
The General took a deep breath and looked into his friend's eyes.
“Young Matt is in trouble, big trouble. I know it and you know it. But that's not why I'm here, Sam. I'm here because of my son. My son has been like a pair of shoes that I never broke in, that bound and blistered my feet for years, and I always blamed the shoes, not myself for not breaking them in. All these years, Sam, I've blamed my son for problems between us that I have caused. Well, this time I'm not going to make the mistakes of my past. Nothing anyone can do to me now can ever compare to what I've done to myself and to my family. If I'm going to take some heat about young Matt, then so be it. I don't give a goddamn anymore. I'm an old soldier whose time has come and gone. Nothing convinced me of this more than my brief trip to Vietnam. We're fighting a war over there that is wrong, Sam. We're fighting it the wrong way, we're fighting it against the wrong people, and we're losing that war, Sam. It's almost as if we're punishing ourselves for all the indiscretions we've committed since the last war. Now young Matt has run afoul of that war in some way I don't understand. But I'll tell you one thing I do understand. I'm going to stand by that boy, and I'm going to stand by my son and see this thing through. And damn the goddamned consequences. I'm pleading with you, Sam, but I'm also telling you this: you can stand with me, Sam, or you can stand against me.”
His friend studied the General's face. He drank his bourbon to the bottom of the glass, then stood up and grabbed the decanter and poured each of them another stiff shot.
“All right,” said the Secretary of Defense. “I'll give the order. I'll get him released from the stockade. But I'm not sure it will do him any good, Matt. He's in the kind of trouble that is bigger than both of us. Nothing I do, nothing you do, can help him get out of this. Of that much I'm sure.”
He walked over to his desk and punched a button on the intercom.
“Get me Arthur,” he said, referring to General Clifford Arthur, the Army Chief of Staff.
The General stood in front of the desk at attention. He had gotten what he had come for. He had used the force of his personality to get the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America to bend to his will.
But he could threaten and cajole no longer.
The easy part was over.
Now he would have to deal with his son.
14
* * *
* * *
Catherine Joice had always found a refuge in facts, in the process of research itself, in the mounds of data that could be accumulated and pawed through and fussed over and analyzed and organized and reorganized until finally you did not understand a subject as much as you absorbed it, allowing the data to shower over you like cool rain on a hot day, cleansing, refreshing, restorative . . . pure.
That was the thing about facts. They were more than separate bits of data. Brought together under the rubric of a story, facts were chewy little bursts of energizing soul food that satisfied you like rich, dark chocolate poured over a vanilla ice cream sundae bought with money lifted from your mother's purse the day you cut French and biology with your best friend who had a Ford convertible with a floor shifter and didn't mind driving around on a sunny afternoon until the tank ran dry.
And there was something else about gathering and organizing and reporting facts. If you surrounded yourself with enough facts, she knew, you could forgo the bother of feelings.
This was, of course, what had driven her into journalism. Pursuit of facts wasn't a means to an end, it was an end in itself. So when the story of Lieutenant Matthew Nelson Blue IV presented itself to her nearly devoid of facts yet so front-loaded with emotion it was flammable, Cathy Joice knew what she had to do, but she didn't know how to do it.
She had to get to Lieutenant Blue because he had all the facts. This made his story different from any she had ever worked on. Usually in journalism what you did was run around and collect facts, and then you confronted the object of your story with the assortment of facts you had collected. Afterwards, you retreated to a room somewhere to lash together the facts and the interview into some kind of cohesive whole.
But this time, where could she run to collect facts? What facts were out there to collect? Besides Lieutenant Blue, from whom? They had the lid down so tight on Lieutenant Blue it made your eyes bulge. So what was left? She had a room, but she had no facts. This made her extremely nervous. It also gave her a headache.
She was lying in a tub full of lukewarm water, resting her neck on a rolled towel at the lip of the tub, when the phone rang.
Wouldn't you know it!
She hauled herself out of the tub and wrapped a dry towel around her torso and dripped into her room and picked up the phone.
“This better be good, because I'm in no mood for small talk,” she announced to the caller. The anger in her voice was trip-wire taut, on the edge of control. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the phrase “mad as a wet hen” jumped into her mind and she covered the receiver and giggled.
“Who is this?”
“Terry Morriss.”
“How did you get my number?” Cathy Joice was standing in her room with the phone crooked into her shoulder, toweling her hair with one hand and grabbing for a notepad and pen with the other.
“It wasn't hard. I called the desk.”
Cathy Joice laughed and dropped her towel on the floor. She sat naked on the edge of the bed and looked out the doors to her balcony and across the rooftops of Saigon into the acid-black Southeast Asian night. Somewhere out there was a story that contained the answer . . .
“As a matter of fact, I'm across the street at the Caravelle.”
“Listen. Give me a few minutes, and I'll meet you downstairs in the bar.”
“I understand you're good at that.”
“At what?”
“Meeting lawyers at bars.”
“Oh. That.”
“I'll treat you to a martini, but I can't promise it'll match the one you had at the club.”
“I know what you mean about the martinis at Tan Son Nhut,” said Cathy Joice. “Ten minutes. Downstairs in the bar. We'll see if we can get my friend Nha Sang the bartender to improve his technique.”
She hung up the phone and finished drying her hair. The call from Captain Morriss was a sign. It had to be. The facts were starting to flow her way.
Cathy Joice put on a white cotton short-sleeved blouse, a tan skirt, and a pair of white sandals. Blow-drying her hair had left it tousled. She wore a light pink lipstick that matched her nails, and enough eyeliner and mascara to lend some mystery to her pale blue eyes. It was almost nine o'clock. It was still cocktail hour in Saigon, where pretty much any hour you could find a reason for a cocktail, but what hour was it back home at the Joice house? What were they doing over at the Phelans? Was the President still pushing papers across his desk at the White House? Hanoi was in the same time zone, but was it time for a drink in Hanoi, too? She wondered what they were doing up at Long Binh Jail. Eating a cold supper off aluminum plates, she presumed.
She wondered what they had served Lieutenant Blue, how he could even stand to eat in a cell inside the stockade, facing the charges he was facing . . .
Wait a minute.
What was she doing, thinking about the diet of a Lieutenant charged with desertion in the face of the enemy? He was somebody she didn't even know, and if she did know him she'd probably hate him. Sure, she was obsessed with getting her story, but this was different. This time she couldn't get the image of the Lieutenant out of her mind. At odd moments, like right now, he would reappear in her mind's eye and she would massage the memory to keep him there.
What was this shit?
She leaned over and shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair, teasing it into a neat bundle of contradictions. It was flying every which way, unkempt, alive.
That was the way she wanted to look—a little disorganized, but focused on the matter at hand. It had helped her occasionally, being seen as something of a ditzy girl when beneath the surface was a cunning woman. You use what's available, thought Cathy Joice. You do what you can with what the good Lord gave you.
But now there was a problem. Every time she thought about the Lieutenant up in Long Binh, she lost focus and she floated . . .
She started imagining what his cell looked like, she wondered what he was feeling, alone and adrift from everything he had spent his life believing in ...
That was the problem. He was the problem.
Every time she thought about him, all she got was a jumble of feelings. His feelings. Her feelings.
And no facts.
Captain Morriss was already standing at the hotel bar when she walked in.
She slid onto a barstool and lifted her hand for the bartender.
“I didn't see you come in,” said Captain Morriss, also signaling the bartender. “I'm sorry. I should have been looking for you.”
“Nha Sang? About that last martini you mixed for me . . .” she began.
“Sorry, missy. Got new martini mix for you,” said the bartender, smiling a little too sheepishly to be totally believable.
“Oh yeah? Let's see what you've got, Nha Sang.”
The bartender reached for a bottle of Bombay Gin, and Cathy Joice turned to Captain Morriss.
“Anything new you tell me about Lieutenant Blue—about his case, I mean?”
“What makes you so interested in my client? There are other stories around. I heard about a fragging in the 25th Division yesterday. It's a little unusual. You might be interested.”
“Oh? What makes it so unusual?”
“They killed a black platoon leader. Somebody told me he's the first black fragging victim.”
“That is something new,” said Cathy Joice. “But I'm still interested in your platoon leader. What can you tell me?”
“They're out for his ass, I can tell you that much. This whole thing is coming from very, very high up. He claims he was set up, and I believe him.”
“Set up? How?”
“Er ... uh ... here's to the war effort,” said Captain Morriss, raising his glass. Cathy Joice reached for her martini and matched his toast.
“What is it the flyboys yell all the ti
me out at Tan Son Nhut? Nuke ‘em!” She clinked glasses and smiled and sipped her martini.
“You were asking about my client,” said Captain Morriss. He was a thickset man who looked as out of place in civilian clothes as he had in uniform. He was wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts and a golf shirt that wasn't tucked in. On his feet were the black Army-issue lace-ups he had worn with his khakis all day. They were unshined, scuffed, and dusty. His socks were also Army issue, and one sock had slid down his heel into the shoe. He wore a pair of gold-filled Ben Franklin glasses on the end of his nose, which was bulbous and red from the sun. He had a contagious smile, and behind the granny glasses his sparkling eyes shone with a mischievous delight that belied his image as a cynic. All in all, he looked about as much like a lawyer as he looked like a captain.
Cathy Joice studied him. He was a familiar type, probably Law Review at Tufts or Harvard, maybe Yale. He had spent so many years in the bowels of a law library that he had completely missed the sixties and was getting ready to miss the seventies. A few young men like him had clerked for her father when she was growing up. They were allergic to the sun, and every time she had met one of them, the young clerk had avoided her eyes, too embarrassed to speak. This one wasn't having any trouble talking, however. He was about as sure of himself as you could be at twenty-seven, twenty-eight years of age, which she figured he was. She took a guess.
“Let me see, you're Harvard Law ‘67, right?”
“Sixty-six. How'd you guess?”
“Just lucky.”
“And you're . . . Smith College ‘65, am I right?”
“Yes. You are.” She blushed and turned her head and took another sip of her martini. She made a face and slid the martini across the bar.
“Nha Sang? Take this away and bring me a gin and tonic.”
Army Blue Page 27
