by John Lawton
He turned to me, took a few steps across the room, stuck out his hand and smiled. I knew him at once.
A little guy, shirtless, lean and slim. Clean-shaven, short-haired, looking nothing like Frank Zappa. A purple heart ribbon, profanely tacked onto the fly of his faded blue Levi’s.
‘I’m Notley. But you know that.’
I knew him at once. Not from any photo of the New Nineveh Nine, but from the streets of Chicago the year before. Add the war paint, the Commanche headdress and the bucket of shit. This was the Moondog I’d seen in my last few minutes in Chicago. I knew him. And he knew me.
‘Chicago? Right?’
One finger tapping the side of his head as if to prompt memory to speak.
‘The plaza, you were the guy with the pig. Right?’
‘Right. Turner Raines. And you were the guy in the feathers. Why Commanche? I thought this was where Geronimo’s Apaches hung out.’
‘Apaches didn’t go in much for fancy headdresses. Commanche’s much prettier. And it was Cochise, by the way, not Geronimo. They say he’s buried somewhere around here, but no one’s ever found the grave.’
‘You guys been here long?’
‘I’ve been here since I got out of the army, but there are Moondogs who’ve been here since the beginning, since ’64.’
‘So there were Moondogs here while you were in Vietnam?’
He eyed me quizzically, discerning precisely what I’d meant.
‘Point taken, Mr Raines. But if I really were Moondog, I wouldn’t be Moondog—if you get my drift. It’s kind of a moveable feast. And yes there were Moondogs here while I was in ’Nam, and there were Moondogs here while I was studying to be an architect at Santa Barbara in ’64.’
‘Is that how the army got you? You lose your graduate deferment?’
‘No I got that. I got that. I was safe till they abolished it. But, as a matter of fact, I volunteered.’
‘Good God. Why?’
He shrugged, waved a hand to show me we should sit down. Big cushions to sit cross-legged at a low table.
‘Seemed like the place to be. At the time.’
‘At the time?’
‘I wasn’t the only one, Marty Fawcett volunteered too. There are more of us than you might think.’
‘His mother thinks he was drafted.’
‘Well—that’s probably what old Marty told her. Take it from me, the kid volunteered. He was itching for action. Maybe it was a way for a skinny guy with acne to show the world what he was made of.’
He sprang up again.
‘Now—can I get you some tea?’
I said yes, and began to feel that this was a warm afternoon in the suburbs with an aunt, not the baking heat of the Arizona desert with the uncrowned king of the hippies.
He came back with a tray—more like the maiden aunt than ever—poured out green tea from an iron pot into wide bowls. He said nothing for a minute or two until his tea had cooled. Then he took it up, sipped at it and said, ‘Try some. You might like it.’
It was fine by me, a little oily, faintly aromatic like the Earl Grey stuff Rose habitually served. I had gotten to like that, I could get to like this.
‘You’ll have a question or two I imagine,’ he said.
I had. I just didn’t know what they were.
‘I guess I do. I suppose it comes down to asking if what Mouse said happened did happen, and I don’t mean by that that I doubt Mouse’s word. I just . . .’
‘That’s OK. Why don’t you tell me what Mouse told you.’
He was a good listener. I was a surprisingly good talker. I skipped the geography lesson—after all he’d been there, I hadn’t—but it still seemed to take an age to get through even the gist of what Mouse had told me. Notley occasionally closed his eyes, but when he opened them never looked away. The man was focused. It was as though he were taking notes. He could not have been less like the out-of-it hippie Mouse had recalled for me.
I got to the point where Mouse is in his own backyard burning his uniform—I thought Notley would somehow want to know this—and I stopped.
‘You known Mouse long?’ he asked.
‘All my life.’
‘He’s a great guy.’
‘The best.’
‘But not the brightest?’
I shrugged it off. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Mr Raines, there’s nothing factually wrong in what Mouse told you. That, pretty well, is what happened. We killed a hundred and thirty-four unarmed Vietnamese women and children—and a few men. It’s the interpretation and moreover the lack of interpretation that’s wrong. Mouse was new to ’Nam. We all were, but Mouse more than the rest of us. Mouse just isn’t asking the right questions.
‘Let’s begin with Jack Feaver. A Green Beret, a colonel who breezed into Mighty Joe Young waving his orders and recruiting us grunts. I never saw those orders, Mouse never did, and I don’t know anyone that did. Mouse saw rank and assumed authority. We all did. We were wrong. Jack wasn’t on any mission with orders from Saigon. He was acting alone. If Mouse still thinks we were acting for the United States Army it’s because he hasn’t added it up, hasn’t arrived at the big picture. We were unwitting renegades. Feaver chose us because we were greenhorns, even our officers were greenhorns. He knew we’d do what we were told.
‘Think about it. If Feaver was acting officially all sorts of conditions apply that never came into play.’
He began to count off points on his fingers. All the precision of an academic from a shirtless hippie. I could not but be impressed by his powers of analysis—and I began to wonder if he’d run out of fingers.
‘Why us? Why a bunch of new guys. We had “Lerps”—Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols—trained and equipped for the trip he put us through. There was no need to come recruiting.
‘There were no Vietnamese along—now that’s odd. We always worked with locals. A patrol of that length with no native guides or native speakers?
‘There were no choppers in support. We could have been flown into that village, we could have been flown out. Didn’t happen. At any one of half a dozen points on the way out Feaver could have summoned aerial support and he didn’t. He could have whipped up a Huey with a single radio call—till we lost the radio that is.
‘Radio silence? What was that about? Feaver just bullshitted Sputnik. There was no necessity for silence. It was Feaver’s way of keeping it all quiet till he’d done what he came to do. Same reason he didn’t call in the choppers.
‘There were no Corpsmen—that is paramedics—why? One would have been virtually standard. None volunteered and he didn’t ask for any. Why? The only reason I can come up with is that some of them—maybe most of them—were conscientious objectors and Feaver did not want any potential whistleblowers along.’
‘But he got you.’
‘Yeah—he guessed wrong.’
‘He could have killed you.’
‘I don’t know why he didn’t. If I’d moved I think he probably would have done.
‘Now—Mouse wonders what the mission really was. I find it hard to believe he still doesn’t know. The mission was to wipe out that village. That’s all. We weren’t diverted by it, we didn’t get lost, and it wasn’t simple vengeance for Sputnik getting killed. In fact I’d say that if Sputnik hadn’t gotten killed Feaver would have had to shoot him himself. He needed to motivate us. He needed a death. Stanley getting blown away was perfect. He could not have hoped for a better way of whipping us up to bloodlust. And when we got to it he headed straight for his target. Why else did he bypass that first village only to hit the second? We didn’t stumble into Village 77, we followed a carefully mapped-out plan. We didn’t know it but we were a bunch of renegades out to commit a massacre. That is about as plainly as I can put it.’
I
knew it would sound stupid but I asked the obvious. ‘Why?’
‘Remember when it was. It was a matter of days after Tet ’68. The VC had made it all the way to Saigon, even got into the grounds of our embassy and taken potshots at GIs. They’d taken Hué and held it the best part of a month. To a man like Feaver it made perfect sense to strike deep into VC-held territory. It was tit for tat for Tet.’
‘But that village wasn’t VC. Mouse said you found nothing.’
‘Of course it was VC. When we first hit the ville there were no young men anywhere. And when a couple of dozen came off the fields I doubt there was anyone between sixteen and sixty among them. A ville with no young men, no teenagers? They’d all gone for soldiers. We just took ’em by surprise by coming at them from the wrong side. They regrouped soon enough—how else could they get so close to wiping us out at the Hershey Bar Stockade? No—it was VC, enemy territory, and I’ve never doubted it. That we found nothing says a lot about our lack of thoroughness and everything about the art of concealment. They were Cong. Feaver was right about that.’
‘I don’t get it,’ was all I could say.
‘That’s OK. It took me a while. The motive is the hardest thing of all. Asking for reasons why a trained killer should kill is like pissing into the wind. Why are bears Catholic? Why does the pope shit in the woods? But, consider what Mouse said Feaver said to Gurvitz. “Let’s take the war to them”.’
‘Mouse is certain he said it.’
‘He did, I heard it too. Word for word that is what the man said. Now, Mouse is right about what Feaver said, but he has no sense of what the man was really saying. “Let’s take the war to them” wasn’t just his way of dismissing Gurvitz—it was his statement of policy, it was what he meant to do. And he said straight after, while Norman was still huffing and fluffing at him, he said, “Does it really matter if ten men violate the neutrality of Laos when our bombers do it three hundred times a day, when we send Lerps in there for weeks at a time?” Odd that Mouse should forget that. I couldn’t. I knew we were bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail, zapping the shit out of a neutral country that was never going to fight back, but I’d no idea it was on that scale. In that light Feaver was right—what did it matter? But it remains—what Mouse missed was the key to the whole mission—“Let’s take the war to them”?’
‘It sounds almost . . . personal.’
‘Maybe it was. The man is driven. There is no other word for it. It was something between him and his people back in Saigon. Of that I’m certain. You remember the part where Mouse said we torched the ville?’
I nodded.
‘In war, in terms of combat, that deep into enemy territory, it made no sense, no sense at all. It alerted the VC to our presence as surely as if we’d hoisted the Stars and Stripes. But that wasn’t its purpose, that was just a risk worth taking. Feaver did it to alert our people to what he’d done. He was sending a message home. Two messages. The first message was “Fuck you!” and the second was “Look at the map!”’
‘Look at the map? For a village with no name?’
‘Oh, it had a name all right. We just didn’t know it. Norman dubbing it Village 77 was convenient, helped us to think of them as less than human. The fact that it wasn’t named on his map doesn’t mean it hasn’t got a name. Everything in Vietnam’s got a name. It’s called Phuong. I know, I asked around when we got back to Joe Young. A couple of the Vietnamese knew the place, and they said it was called Phuong.’
‘Does that mean something?’
‘I’ll get to that. The day after we got back we all got summoned to Da Nang and discharged. The cover-up was immediate. Can’t blame anyone for not asking too many questions—it was a lifesaver. Saved my life, might even have saved Pete Chambers if it had been a tad quicker. Mouse told you I was out whoring the night Pete was killed? Such cynicism. I was trawling the bars in Saigon, looking for Green Berets. I found them, two guys with far too much booze inside them, two guys who’d worked with Jack Feaver, two guys who’d been part of the same operation. They called it Operation Phoenix. I’d never heard of it. They said it was a CIA-run hit squad—infiltration, assassination, slaughter. There’s been next to nothing about in the press. I did some research—it exists. Oldest reference I found was a piece in the New Yorker about this time last year.’
Notley got up, rummaged around on his workbench, and came back with a bunch of newspaper clippings and a torn and battered hardback.
‘I doubt there’ve been half a dozen mentions in the press all told.’
He flourished the clippings.
‘New Yorker, New York Times and there’s one only a couple of months old from the Wall Street Journal. You’d really have to be following foreign policy to know about Phoenix—and you’d have to be reading between the lines to know what it really is. But, then, these days I do both.
‘Now, Mouse says he was shocked by what happened out there—maybe he should be, but when he says that sort of thing is almost commonplace—happens all the time—he doesn’t know the half of it. These Green Berets had been on dozens of hits, worked in free-fire zones—did Mouse tell you what that is? It’s the assumption that any Vietnamese in a designated area is Cong, and you kill ’em. But if you don’t kill ’em . . . if you don’t kill ’em at once you get inventive with torture . . . electrodes on the balls . . . well that’s traditional isn’t it? . . . but being forced to swallow white lime? And best of all . . . their favorite trick, blindfolding suspects, sticking them in a chopper hovering three feet off the ground and throwing them out. Until the time comes when the chopper is three thousand feet off the ground. There was a lot more. They were drunk and they were revelling in it. They loved telling me this. They weren’t like Feaver, and they were like Feaver.
‘I’d heard enough. I shook them off and went to find Pete. As you know, I got there too late. All I got of Pete was the book he’d been reading.’
He pushed the book across the table to me. I looked at it. The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
‘I started to read it on the plane coming over. Turn to the first page. There’s a woman character. Name of Phuong. Greene translates it for you. It was like an epiphany when I came across it.’
I opened the book. There were bloodstains spattered across the title page, seeping in from the cut edges. I found the word Phuong.
‘Phoenix,’ I said. ‘He translates it as Phoenix.’
‘You get the message?’
‘I think so. As you said. He was sending a message to his own people, the massacre, the fire . . .’
‘But you don’t know why. And for a while neither did I. I’ve spent a lot of time on this. I’ve asked a lot of questions. This is what I think happened. Feaver was part of Operation Phoenix. They killed thousands of people—no arrests, no trials, just wiped out on suspicion. My source reckons that maybe as many as 20,000 people have been killed by the Phoenix program in the last two years. I say killed. My source said “neutralized”. May not be the same thing.’
‘Your source?’
‘Guy at the Pentagon. Answered a lot of questions. Albeit some of his answers were couched in Penatagonese.’
‘The Moondogs have sources in the Pentagon?’
‘Don’t sound so surprised. We’re not a bunch of hicks. We’re organized. Weren’t you guys organized? Didn’t you and Rubin and Hoffman plan to stitch up Chicago? But the best is yet to come. It’s so simple it’s brilliant. My source tells me that Operation Phoenix was suspended some time before Tet. Some internal conflict within the Company over its value. I shouldn’t think for a second it was a moral issue. And there’s your motive. Jack was telling the CIA in Saigon that it was time to start up again. Time to take the war to them. He picked Phuong because it was VC and because of the name. He could not have made the message bigger if he’d used a skywriter. We were just the tools he used. Could have been anybody.
And that doesn’t absolve us.’
‘You didn’t kill anyone.’
‘Nor did Mouse. But we did nothing to stop it. Doesn’t absolve us either.’
I let it sink in. He poured hot water over the tea leaves and brewed a second pot.
I said at last, ‘That’s your theory?’
‘That’s a fact.’
‘A fact?’
‘It ceased to be theory when I put it to Jack.’
‘You talked to Feaver?’
‘No—Feaver wrote to me. Not long after Chicago. He wrote to me. I wrote back.’
‘Wrote back where?’
‘Vermont. He’s back home in Vermont.’
‘Discharged?’
‘Apparently not. Leave, a sort of semi-permanent leave. I don’t quite understand I have to admit. But whatever he was hoping for, he didn’t get. They got us all out of the army, broke us up, sent us home. It was the safe thing to do. Except Jack. Jack is still in the army. I’d say he didn’t get what he wanted. Phoenix was revived. He won that one—he just isn’t going to be part of it stuck out on the family farm in Vermont. Why they didn’t just kick him out, I don’t know.’
‘I think perhaps I do. I studied some military law in college. If the army discharges Feaver, honorably or not, then he can’t be indicted for anything he did as a soldier.’
‘I think it’s my turn to say I don’t get it.’
