The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2
Page 50
Commentator
Patriotism takes many forms. Is it significant, though, that the flag of the Liberation Front is the Union Jack, long-standing symbol of the union of Britain’s major provincial areas – a symbol now hated and feared by the government supporters? To what extent can the government itself provide any prospects for unity?
INTERVIEW WITH BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
A former Labour Prime Minister recalled to office, to lead the all-party coalition, he sits uneasily inside a sandbagged Downing Street, literally ducking every time a shot is heard. He is surrounded by armed guards, but looks shifty and dispirited. All too clearly he is at the Americans’ mercy, and has no ideas for bringing the war to an end.
Commentator
Could I ask you first, Prime Minister, are you hopeful at the moment at the outlook for peace?
Prime Minister
Well, it depends very much on what the other side wants to do. The latest offensives – attacks against the ordinary people of this country – don’t suggest that they’re particularly sincere in their talk about wanting a settlement.
Commentator
Do you envisage that the departure of the American troops will create problems? If one travels around London one sees that a large part of the local economy is geared to serving the GI. When the GI is gone, won’t there be problems for those people who presently are …
Prime Minister
Well, this contains the same problem shared by all those countries that have had large American forces on their soil – Germany, Japan, Vietnam. I think it will be a good thing because we shall be back to normal and a lot of people will have to look for a living within their means. They’ll have to give up a lot of windfall benefits which come from the war and create social problems. We’ve now got in this country a class of people created by the war, and I think it’s a good thing that this will stop.
Commentator
Childhood for most of the children in London has been a strange life with the American dollar, hasn’t it? The American dollar has been the way they passed their childhood. When that in the form of the GI goes, are they not going to have a lot of problems?
Prime Minister
I’m sure they will. They’ll be economic problems mainly. I think we’re all going to have to find ourselves, so to speak, a painful process whether it’s an individual or a nation. I think there’s going to be a period of readjustment, possibly of turbulence, but they must go through the process. Perhaps if they’d gone through it twenty years ago there wouldn’t be a war now.
GENERAL VIEWS OF PEOPLE HANGING AROUND ENTRANCES TO AMERICAN BASES
Commentator
Can the British people find themselves? Can they go through the painful process of re-establishing themselves as a single nation? With 70 per cent of the economy tied to the war, with the revenues from North Sea oil long since sold off to the Germans and Japanese, will ordinary people be able to make the adjustments necessary to living with the other side? In short, do they want the war to end at all? World in Action visited a village in the front line to see how the bulk of the population is facing up to the reality of the war.
GENERAL PICTURE OF SMALL TOWN IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
Barbed wire, road blocks, troops and armoured cars. Gunfire in the distance.
Commentator
Here at Cookham, only twenty miles or so from the centre of London, the ‘windfall benefits’ of the war are more likely to be a sniper’s bullet or a barrage of enemy mortar shells. This is one of the so-called pacified villages. By day the British and American forces occupy the bunkers and pillboxes. In the evening they withdraw with the local administrators to a fortified enclave near the American base at Windsor. At night the Liberation Front moves in. At this moment their advance positions are no more than two hundred yards away, their sentries watching us through binoculars. None of these villagers will talk to us. All are assumed to be Liberation Front sympathizers, but in fact they are professional neutrals, living on the edge of a giant razor that could cut them down at any moment. They farm the fields, work in the garages and shops, and wait for the Americans to leave. Strangest of all here, there is no one between the ages of four and forty.
TANK APPEARS, FOLLOWED BY BRITISH AND AMERICAN SOLDIERS
Commentator
A special task force arrives, part of a self-styled Pacification Probe that will advance ten miles into country recently occupied by the Liberation Front. One tank, ten GIs of the First Cavalry Division, and thirty British soldiers are under the command of Captain Arjay Robinson. World in Action is going with them to see what happens.
CAPTAIN ROBINSON BRIEFING HIS UNIT IN THE VILLAGE HALL
The GIs, heavily armed with flak jackets and radio-equipped helmets, sit at the front, the British troops with two elderly officers at the back.
Captain Robinson
The primary mission of Alpha Company is to conduct a reconnaissance and pacification. Circles indicate supply caches within the area, also known parking areas, primarily wheeled vehicles and larger trucks. There are also some small yellow dots, these indicate known positions where we have seen tanks. There are tanks in the area definitely. As I see it right now we’re going to have two companies controlling the fire base. We’ll play it real loose, play it by ear pretty much as to where we’re going and the times that we’ll go. We’re going down there and kill the enemy where we find him and come back.
Part Two
PACIFICATION PROBE
Commentator
A Pacification Probe prepares to set off. It’s 6.35 a.m., and the thirty British soldiers who will do the major part of the fighting – and the major part of the dying – wait quietly in the background as the American tank crew and radio specialists prepare their equipment. The American weapons and communications are now so sophisticated that the British troops can barely understand them. Many of these men will defect on this mission, many more will die. What are they up against? Last month a Swedish film crew smuggled itself through the front lines. Their brief film shows what life is like within the Liberation Front.
NEWSREEL OF LIBERATION FRONT AREAS
Mountains, tunnel entrances guarded by young soldiers and armed young women. Union Jacks flying. People working in factories. Alternative technology, windmills, small-scale smelting works, machine shops, hand-looms. Children everywhere, thin but healthy. Kibbutz atmosphere, young mothers in khaki miniskirts with babies and rifles. Slit trenches, men with rifles move through fields around burnt-out American tank. Callisthenics in drill-hall, communal singing around flag. Indoctrination sessions, 18-year-old political commissar addressing doctors and nursing staff in hospital. Children taking part in people’s theatre, 4-year-olds dressed in parody US military uniforms miming bombing attacks on sturdy villagers. Everywhere slogans, loudspeakers, portraits of George VI.
Swedish voice-over
The mountains of Scotland and Wales are the main strongholds of the National Liberation Front. In the four-year war against the British central government hundreds of underground schools and factories have been built. From here supplies and equipment go out to the front line. By now all the agricultural areas of England are under control of the Liberation Front. The soldiers and peasants are organized in communes, the women farming and looking after the children while the men are fighting. Their leaders are young. There are few old people here. Everywhere morale is high, they are confident that they have won the war and that the Americans must soon leave. They are Scottish, Welsh, people from the northern and western provinces of England, West Indians, Asians and Africans. For four years they have been bombed but they are still fighting.
COOKHAM
Cut to Captain Robinson on the turret of his tank.
He scans the empty fields. Nothing moves. In the compound below the soldiers have finished readying their weapons and equipment. The World in Action commentator puts on US combat clothing, strapping a gun around his waist, trying out heavy boots. A helicopter clatters overhead.
AFN radio announcer
... in the southern outskirts of London last night a guerilla unit fired a 107 mm rocket, killing one civilian and wounding four others. First Air Cav. ground elements in Operation Pegasus killed 207 enemy in scattered contacts yesterday, with friendly casualties light. First Division Marines killed 124 in two separate battles in Northern Province. The leathernecks ambushed enemy elements, calling in support by artillery and air attack. The marines took no casualties while killing 156 communists …
Commentator
Half an hour from now the forty men of Alpha Company will set out from Cookham. As we move off across this guerilla-infested countryside two companies of combat engineers will have flown in to the target area by helicopter. They will deal with any local opposition. The main function of Alpha Company, this so-called pacification probe, is to re-establish the government’s authority. The thirty British soldiers and the District Administrator will stay on after the Americans have left, recruiting local militia, setting up a fortified hamlet and redirecting the area’s agriculture. The target area is at a key point on the M4 Motorway to the south-west. To keep this road open the government forces are setting up a chain of fortified villages along its 200-mile length.
CAPTAIN ROBINSON CHECKING HIS MEN’S EQUIPMENT
Commentator
Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Arjay Robinson, is already a veteran of this war. Thirty-two years old, he comes from Denver, Colorado, and is a graduate of West Point. He is married to a clergyman’s daughter and has three children, none of whom he has seen in the two years he has been here. A career soldier, he has already decided to stay here until the Americans leave.
SERGEANT PALEY CHECKING TANK TREADS
Commentator
His second-in-command is Sergeant Carl W. Paley, a 26-year-old bachelor from Stockton, California, where he was general manager of a local radio station owned by his father. Like Captain Robinson, he has had almost no contact with the ordinary people of this country. To him they form a grey background of blurred faces – girls he meets in the bars outside the base camps, old men who clean out the barracks or serve as waiters in the sergeants’ mess. Apart from the prostitutes, the only young English people he will see are likely to be in the sights of his guns. Last month Alpha Company was involved in a major action in which over 250 enemy soldiers were killed, a third of them women auxiliaries. But to Sergeant Paley they are merely ‘Charley’ – a blanket term carried over from Vietnam, or ‘the gooks’.
TANK ENGINE STARTS UP
American soldiers climb aboard, the British form up into a column behind it.
Commentator
As for the British troops who will go with them – like all the Americans here, Sergeant Paley holds them in little more than contempt. Underfed and ill-equipped, the British troops have to provide their own food and bedding. During the next six hours the Americans will ride to the battlefield on their tank. The thirty British will walk. Mostly men in their forties, with a few younger men drafted from the penal battalions, they represent the residue of the armies conscripted by the government three years ago, armies now decimated by casualties and desertions.
MAJOR CLEAVER
A thick-set man with British army moustache climbs on to the tank beside Captain Robinson. He wears American boots, fawn trousers, brown leather jacket and carries US Army revolver.
Commentator
The only Britisher to whom the Americans pay any attention is Major Cleaver, the District Administrator who will be in charge of the pacified village. A former regular army officer, Major Cleaver is one of several thousand DAs sent out by the British government to run the civil administration of the recaptured areas. Part political commissar, part judge and jury, Major Cleaver will literally have the power of life and death over the people living under his rule, a power that he and his fellow DAs have been quick to exercise in the past.
THE CONVOY MOVES OFF
The infantry spread out ahead and to the side of the tank. They follow a road through wooded terrain with meadows and abandoned farms on either side. Now and then there is a halt as the tank is brought up.
Captain Robinson
Helicopters are the thing that’s happening these days. You can get in there real fast with heavy suppressive fire, and if you need to be pulled out you can get out real fast.
Sergeant Paley
It’s definitely the way to fight a ground war.
Captain Robinson
As I see it now we’re going to have two companies controlling the fire base, Bravo and Charley, who will go in by helicopter. They’ll clear the landing zone by the time we get in there, so the tactical side of the operation should be finalized. It’s also better from the psychological aspect that we don’t get involved on the tactical side too much.
Commentator
You mean the actual fighting around the village?
Captain Robinson
That’s correct.
RADIO OPERATOR PASSES MESSAGE TO CAPTAIN ROBINSON
Tank halts.
Commentator
But for Bravo and Charley Companies, who are supposed to be going in by helicopter, today is not the day for fighting a war. The weather in the target area has closed in, and the helicopters have returned to base. Alpha Company gets ready to move on alone, every man here hoping that the weather will clear.
Sergeant Paley
This country, weather’s the main thing. It rains a lot and you’re very wet most of the time, but you know as a soldier you can’t ask for a certain territory to fight on because you just have to make the best of what terrain you have.
Commentator
Sergeant, what do you think of the chances of peace here?
Sergeant Paley
Well, I think they’re … I don’t know, as I see it as long as Charley’s got a weapon and some ammo and using it he’s not going to give up. I think he’s pretty much got his heart in it, giving his own people a hard time here.
Commentator
How do you feel it’s all going?
Sergeant Paley
Well, it’s going well for the Cavs, I know that. Wherever we go we run into Charley – I know he doesn’t last very long.
Commentator
Tell me, sergeant, why are you in England?
Sergeant Paley
Why am I in England? Well, curiosity, I guess. I just wanted to know what the war was like.
Commentator
What is the war like?
Sergeant Paley
Well, it’s all right, I guess. For a year I’d say it’s a good experience. You really learn a lot from it.
Major Cleaver
Naturally one hopes that peace will come to the country as soon as possible. Positions have become very entrenched during the past year, there’s a legacy of bitterness on both sides. This is not the kind of civil war that resolves anything.
Commentator
What about the fighting itself? Don’t you find it difficult to be shooting at your own people?
Major Cleaver
They’re not our own people any longer. This is the whole point of the war. They’re the enemy now, and peace isn’t going to turn them overnight into our friends.
Commentator
But aren’t there a lot of desertions from the army?
Major Cleaver
Not as many as there used to be. Most of the men realize that conditions here are a lot better than they are on the other side. The bombing has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Sitting here eating C rations is a lot more comfortable than being boiled alive in napalm.
THE COLUMN MOVES ON
Slow penetration of forest on either side of the road. We see the tank stuck in a small stream. Cameo shots of individual American and British soldiers. Fade to early afternoon.
A long shot of farmland and the motorway on the left, the village to the right. Nothing moves. The camera turns and we see the American and British troops dug in along the edge of the fi
eld facing the village. It has been raining but the sky has cleared. Everything is very quiet. Machine-guns and weapons being set up. The tank is hidden in trees. Captain Robinson scans the low sky through binoculars.