Saigon: A Novel Part 42

Gary stopped writing and listened when a long burst of what sounded like distant machine-gun fire broke the silence; but it went on and grew rapidly louder and he recognized then the rapid thump of helicopter engines. One of the other three Birmingham companies was obviously returning from an operation, and he listened absently until all the choppers had landed.

"I was going to say I hope your shoulder's mended," he continued when the last helicopter engine had cut.

But I guess it must be okay if you felt well enough to "walk up the aisle" at Caxton Hall. If you're embarking on a critique of our Vietnam policy in book form, as you say in your letter, you must be in fairly good shape, I guess - so I'll wish you luck with that too. A book of that kind from someone as knowledgeable as you on the subject must be a.s.sured of considerable sales no doubt the libraries at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon will be ordering advance copies to see what you say about their masters. As for myself, I feel I could contribute a few lines of "critique" myself right now about the situation here. (This will obviously have to be mailed clandestinely through civilian channels to reach you intact now that I've gotten onto this subject.) We've just done three missions in a week, and we're going out again at the crack of dawn tomorrow. We're badly under strength and morale among the remaining men is very low. Whether we'll have any more luck this time is open to serious doubt and I'm afraid I'm feeling pretty down in the mouth about it all. I find myself torn now between a strong desire to resign my commission and get the h.e.l.l out, and a sense of duty that tells me that I ought to stay and do what I can to curb some of the worst things going on here. For instance, there's a rule that any Vietnamese who doesn't stop and identify himself in a village should be shot. Many run away out of sheer terror and then it's a question of "shoot first and ask questions afterwards." This, as you can imagine, leads to a lot of indiscriminate killing. Also you never know when you go into a village whether you're going to find just women and children, a few hidden snipers or a whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned battalion of VC. So we've taken to laying down a heavy barrage of rocket and artillery fire every time just its case. It's madness, really. Civilian casualties on a big scale are unavoidable and "winning the hearts and minds of the people," as we're supposed to be doing, is impossible under these circ.u.mstances Gary stopped writing and glanced at his watch again; only five minutes remained before the briefing began, and he reluctantly shuffled the pages of the letter together. "I've got to dash now to yet another 'war council,' " he added hurriedly at the foot of the page on which he'd just been writing. "So I'll just add for now those immortal words beloved by magazine serial writers, 'to be continued.'

Without looking over what he'd written, he folded the pages together and slipped them into one of his breast pockets.

When he stepped out of the bunker, the darkness outside was moist and warm against his face and because of the heat he walked slowly towards base headquarters where the officers of the four companies were beginning to a.s.semble. To take his mind off the dismal prospect of the briefing, he let his thoughts stray back to his father's letter and he found himself wondering as he walked how his brother Mark would cope with the problems of readjustment to freedom after his terrible imprisonment. He tried to imagine too what kind of life his father was leading with his new English wife, and it occurred to him suddenly that the lives of his brother, his father and himself had all been marked deeply by Vietnam. As he mused on this, the image of the game animals shot in the jungles of Cochin-China and Annam by his grandfather an(l his dead uncle forty years before flashed unbidden into his mind; he remembered how his father had tried to explain his aversion to the tableau during their unhappy meeting in the museum and the halting words he'd used then came back to him. "...Too often, Gary, we get carried away with the idea of wanting to win at all costs. . . We're all of us likely, G.o.d knows, to fall prey to the worst sides of our natures For some reason the memory brought hack the vague sense of foreboding he'd felt earlier on learning that he would have to go out again so soon with his exhausted draftees, and the feeling grew rapidly as he approached the briefing room. By the time he reported to Birmingham's colonel his mood had become deeply pessimistic.

As the American briefing got under way, fifteen miles to the north in the village of Quang To, two hundred guerrillas of the 42nd Light Force Battalion of the Liberation Army were settling clown for the night in thatched "hootches" that all had concealed entrances leading into the network of subterranean pa.s.sages beneath the village. The tunnels, which were two or three kilometers long, led to outlets on the seash.o.r.e, and the guerrillas had many times rehea.r.s.ed rapid withdrawal through them to test the speed and thoroughness with which they could vacate the village. On these occasions wives and families invariably stayed behind, and as the senior commissar of the battalion went from hut to hut that night giving whispered orders to the fighting men to retreat to the beach, he also warned their families to remain where they were on pain of punishment; they were told that spies at Firebase Birmingham had learned that an American raid was expected at dawn and they were instructed not to cooperate with the imperialist troops in any way. Then their meal was finished the Viet Cong guerrillas took leave of their families without fuss and slipped down into the tunnels. By midnight only women, children and old men beyond military age remained in Quang To.

Next morning Gary flew in the lead helicopter when Task Force Birmingham took off at first light. Looking back, he could see the rest of the first wave of the force strung out behind, a dozen wasp-like silhouettes seesawing in Indian file against the orange flare of the rising sun. Ahead of them he could see brilliant flashes and smoke bursts spreading all across the half-dozen hamlets of the target village, and Cobra guns.h.i.+ps were plunging and rearing through the smoke, pouring rocket and machine- gun fire into the thatched huts. Although there was no sign of firing from the ground, the door gunners of all the troop- carrying helicopters opened up with their M-6os too, as they neared the selected landing zone in a paddy field two hundred yards to the south of Hamlet One. The two soldiers Gary had reprimanded the night before were flying with him in his lead helicopter alongside other members of their platoon; all of them were strained and tense, and they clutched their M-16s tightly in front of them, peering through the open door searching for signs of the 42nd Light Force which by reputation was a crack Viet Cong unit that hit hard and ruthlessly when it chose to engage.

"We're gonna get us a whole rack of yellow a.s.s today, man," said the beefier of the Iwo Indiana steelworkers, slapping the stock of his rifle loudly with his hand. "And it's about G.o.dd.a.m.ned time, too."

His companion, who was dark and sparely built, nodded his agreement. "That's for sure - if the Alpha boys can drive the gooks our way, we'll turn them all into strawberry jam." He turned around and grinned at Gary. "We'll do that for YOU, captain - and for all the Bravo guys who got burned already,"

Gary nodded curtly in acknowledgment, then turned his attention to the ground as they began dropping down into the landing zone. To get the task force's blood up, the colonel at the previous night's briefing had ordered his officers to stress the prospect of avenging dead friends. Gary had gone along reluctantly, unable to find any other way of repairing the shattered morale of his company, but he was still worrying at the problem, wondering if he had done right, as the ground rushed up to meet them. Then suddenly it no longer mattered, the men were pouring out through the open doors of the helicopter into the waist-high gra.s.s, racing frantically for cover, and the sole thought in everybody's mind was survival.

Bravo's first job was to secure the -landing zone, and Gary barked orders to his platoon lieutenants to spread the force in a wide circle. During the next fifteen minutes, helicopters roared in and out, ferrying in the a.s.sault companies, the thump of their rotors sending great waves racing through the tall gra.s.s whenever they landed and took off. Gary watched the troops of Alpha, Charlie and Delta swarming out of the choppers, as tense and jittery at the moment of landing as his own men had been; their pinched faces, too, bore telltale signs of fatigue, and they stared apprehensively at the ground ahead of them, watching for b.o.o.by traps as they moved onto the paths leading into Hamlet One. Then the helicopters' engines faded into the distance and the sounds of the soldiers moving deeper into the hamlet lessened too; something approaching quiet descended Over Quang To, and gradually the light of the rising sun changed from orange to a paler yellow glow.

Gary had begun moving his force in an arc to its blocking position in the southern quarter of the village when they heard the roar of an explosion and saw a fountain of black earth shoot up above the distant tree line. The detonation was followed by a lazy drift of smoke that climbed into view more slowly above the treetops. - "Motherf.u.c.kin' b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," whispered the dark-haired boy from Indiana, who was moving in a crouch at Gary's side. "Another G.o.dd.a.m.ned mine!"

A flurry of shots followed the explosion, and Gary ordered his men to freeze. The sound of shooting continued but it remained scattered and didn't develop into the heavy, sustained pattern of exchange lire that denoted two forces settling into an engagement, By the time Bravo Company was in position, the crackle of flames was audible and smoke from burning thatch began to blur the sky.

"They've found some G.o.dd.a.m.ned action at. last," breathed the Indiana boy beside Gary. "At last we're zapping yellow a.s.s, captain."

The officer frowned; the radio of his RTO was crackling with messages, but no coherent picture of the sweep was emerging. "You'd better go take a look and see what's happening - then get straight back here," he told the youth sharply.

For a moment the young draftee looked dubious; then he loped off obediently into the trees. It was five minutes before he returned, and then Gary noticed immediately that the expression on his face was a mixture of elation and horror. "Alpha Company's shooting up the whole f.u.c.kin' village, captain," he said in an awed voice. "They're just shooting every d.a.m.ned kind of gook and pus.h.i.+n' 'em into a ditch. They're burning the huts, and killin' the cattle. They're just wiping' the whole place out - kids, babies, women, old guys, the chickens, everythin'!"

Gary stared- at him in disbelief. "Are you sure of what you're saying? Are there no VC?"

The boy shook his head rapidly from side, to side.

"Who's doing the shooting?"

"Everybody! Sergeants, a lieutenant, all of 'em! They're rapin' the women too."

The young steelworker had been talking loudly and excitedly, and other men of the company, hearing what he was saying, came running over to listen. When Gary noticed this, he swung angrily on them. "Get back to your G.o.dd.a.m.ned posts, all of you! This is a disciplined blocking force and we're staying here to do our job." He beckoned one of his lieutenants to him. "Take over here. I'm going into the village." Motioning to the two Indiana draftees to follow, he led them at a run into the trees.

In the first hamlet he approached through the scrub, Gary saw two Americans firing into a cowering crowd of women and children herded together, near a ditch. One of the Americans was a lieutenant, the other a sergeant, and the screams of terror of the Vietnamese peasants died abruptly in their throats as bullets from a machine gun and an M-i6 smashed into them. The moment they crumpled to the ground, another GI began kicking and knocking the bleeding corpses over the lip of the ditch; a movement among them caught Gary's eye and, turning, he saw a small boy burrowing into a pile of bodies either in search of somebody already dead or to hide from the bullets. When the sergeant noticed this, he fired repeatedly at the boy until he too rolled over and lay still.

Dry-mouthed with horror, Gary unslung his Armalite from his shoulder and fired a long burst above the heads of the two Americans. "Drop your weapons now -- or I'll kill you both!" he yelled and lunged out of the trees towards them. The sensation of flying in the air was the next thing he felt and only when his body stopped rising and began to topple head first into the geyser of black earth being thrown up all around him did he realize he had detonated a mine. By then the whole front of his chest had been laid open by the blast. When his body came to rest on the ground, the two GIs from Indiana stared down at it in horror. They could see all his organs ..- his heart, his liver, his lungs - pumping and pulsating inside his cloven chest and his blood was gus.h.i.+ng into the earth around their feet. It took five minutes for him to die, and they could only watch helplessly as he lay writhing and screaming on the ground. At last one of the steelworkers ran back to the lieutenant in charge of Bravo and all the men left their blocking positions to gather around the dead body of their company commander.

By the time the Bravo medic reached the scene and began trying to wrap Gary's shattered body in a poncho, many of his troops were sobbing openly. Others shrieked obscenities at the heavens like men insane, then gradually, one by one they moved off deeper into the village to join in the carnage. Many of them continued sobbing and screaming as they helped hunt down the rest of the Vietnamese villagers. They murdered them singly and in groups,, burned and pillaged their homes and stabbed their cattle and buffalo to death with bayonets; a few recoiled in horror from what was happening and either hid themselves or tried to save an isolated peasant girl or an old woman, but their efforts had little effect on the rest of the men in the two companies. The slaughter went on without letup for several hours, and at the end of it, the heaps of bodies in and around Quang To were numbered in hundreds.

18.

The anchorman of Panorama, Britain's most prestigious television current affairs program, held the newly published book aslant in his lap so that one of the studio cameras could switch its focus to a tight dose-up of the picture on its dust jacket. As the screens of television sets in homes all over the country filled with the image of an agonized American Marine wounded in the Battle of Hue, the anchorman began to read an extract from the book's preface that rolled slowly across a teleprompt machine beneath the camera facing him.

"At the opening of the const.i.tutional convention of the United States of America in 1787, George Was.h.i.+ngton said, 'Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair.' Since then most American leaders have aspired to govern our country in accordance with those simple principles but the standard that we're fighting under in Vietnam today has been raised and held aloft by successive American presidents over the last decade largely for reasons connected with their own personal vanity and a misplaced sense of pride. That same standard today flutters over the heads of more than half a million American troops in the field in Vietnam - but it's becoming clearer every day that honesty and wisdom have played little or no part in the decision- making process which led us into the war and keeps us fighting there although there's obviously no prospect now of ever winning any creditable victory. Instead of honesty and wisdom, shame and disgust are now widespread in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world because of what we're doing in Southeast Asia. The time has come, I believe, for all 'wise' and 'honest' men inside and outside the government to call a halt. We should terminate immediately our calamitous military involvement in Vietnam and stop the terrible hemorrhage of American lives and treasure that otherwise will continue indefinitely without any benefit whatsoever to the United States and the West.

The face of the anchorman, stern, square-jawed and caked with flattering makeup, came back on camera, and he paused for a moment to let the dramatic import of the words sink in. "Those are the views of Joseph Sherman, author of this new book on the Vietnam war, ent.i.tled The American Betrayal, which is fast becoming the bible of the antiwar movement at present convulsing America. Mr. Sherman, a foreign correspondent in Asia in the 1950s and later a professor of Asian studies at Cornell University, resigned from his post as a special government adviser in Saigon just over a year ago to write this book, which is published here in London this week. On publication in America recently it sparked off enormous controversy, attracting bitter criticism from supporters of the United States role and winning high praise for its courage from the war's opponents .

The camera pulled back from the anchorman to reveal Joseph seated beside him; he sat awkwardly in the studio chair, the shoulder wounded fourteen months before in Hue hunched unnaturally in a position which caused him the least discomfort. As the introductory statement continued, the director of the program, seated before a bank of monitors in the control gallery, switched the transmission picture to Joseph alone, and keeping pace with the grave and sonorous tones of the anchorman, the camera moved steadily into a very close shot that finally framed only his features from jaw to hairline; still noticeably gaunt from the pain and stress of his wound, Joseph's face was set in a grim, tight-lipped expression.

"Mr. Sherman recently married the British television journalist Naomi Boyce-Lewis and came to live here in England - but he's no detached armchair critic of America's Vietnam war. He was himself wounded in the shoulder during last year's Tet Offensive in Hue, and in fact his family's involvement in the conflict has been perhaps as tragic as that of any family in America." The anchorman paused, knowing what he was about to say could cause distress to the American sitting beside him. "Mr. Sherman's elder son, an infantry captain, died last year in a jungle ambush, and his younger son, an air force pilot, was until recent release held prisoner for three years in Hanoi: In addition, a brother working for the State Department was killed by Viet Cong guerrillas during their Tet raid on the U.S. emba.s.sy - so Mr. Sherman is perhaps uniquely qualified to comment on the agony Vietnam is causing America The searching close-up shot of Joseph's face detected a c1uick movement of his jaw muscles and a narrowing of his eyes; millions of viewers saw him swallow hard under the bright glare of the studio lights, then his face became composed again.

"But perhaps nothing is more indicative of the way the Vietnam war is dividing the American nation," the anchorman continued, "than the fact that the author's own father has become one of the book's most prominent critics. And the dispute takes on more than usual significance because his father is none other than Nathaniel Sherman, Democratic senator from Virginia for the past forty-nine years, the senior member of the Upper House and one of America's most colorful and widely renowned political figures . . . Senator Sherman is at present in our Was.h.i.+ngton studio waiting to join us by satellite transmission, and he has kindly agreed to partic.i.p.ate in our discussion .

While the anchorman was speaking, a big screen above him came to life, revealing the head and shoulders of Nathanial Sherman seated in the BBC studio in Was.h.i.+ngton and listening carefully to the introduction. Although in his eighties, he was still of impressive appearance; his craggy features were florid but alert and his snowy-white hair and bushy eyebrows gave him a stern, patriarchal air. Dressed in an elegant suit of white linen, he clearly relished the role of venerable elder statesman, and the fact that he had lost his left arm was no longer noticeable since he had taken to wearing an artificial limb.

"Good evening, senator," said the anchorman, turning towards the screen. "Thank you for consenting to join us."

"The pleasure is wholly mine, sir. I'm delighted to have the opportunity of talking to you and your English viewers." The senator smiled and inclined his head a fraction in an aristocratic gesture of acknowledgment and as Joseph glanced up at the magnified image on the studio screen he realized that his father, ever the showman, was instinctively exaggerating his southern drawl for the benefit of the British audience.

"We'll be asking for your comments shortly, senator," said the anchorman respectfully, "but first I'd like to begin by putting a question to your son here in London." He turned to Joseph, glancing down at his clipboard list of prepared questions as he did so. "First, Mr. Sherman, I'd like to ask you to spell out in detail why you believe so ardently that America should get out of Vietnam. And perhaps you could also tell us whether this conclusion is based solely on a detailed a.n.a.lysis of the situation on the ground - or has it been influenced in any way by the personal suffering Vietnam has caused you?"

Joseph didn't reply immediately, and the anchorman, fearing suddenly that his first question might have been too blunt and unfeeling, glanced up anxiously at his American guest. To his surprise he found Joseph was still staring distractedly at the satellite picture of his father, but after a moment he seemed to gather himself and he turned to face him. "To lose one son blown up by a b.o.o.by trap and have the other subjected to torture and degradation for three long years certainly helps focus the mind," said Joseph in a tight voice. "But the conclusion in my book that withdrawal is our only sensible option and the reasons that led me to it are based on knowledge and insights I've gained over many years of a.s.sociation with Vietnam. It's now painfully obvious that we, the people of the United States, let our country drift into our present nightmare because we didn't keep a close enough eye on our political and military leaders and their motives. None of us has been vigilant enough - but since I've known Vietnam intimately for most of my life, I came to feel my own negligence very keenly after the Tet Offensive. And because I've suffered a great deal of personal grief too, I felt an extra compulsion to try to redress the balance with this book."

Above Joseph's head the enlarged face of his father had been darkening in evident disagreement as he spoke, and as soon as he'd finished, the senator cut in smoothly without waiting to be invited. "If I may be allowed to offer a comment on that, sir," he said, addressing the anchorman in a voice that was at once both sorrowful and elaborately polite, "I'd like to make my standpoint clear from the very outset. I'm against all forms of 'bugging out,' whether they're advocated by the so-called doves in the United States Congress here in Was.h.i.+ngton - or by my own son sitting beside you there in England."

"I understand, senator, that you're very anxious to give your side of the argument," replied the anchorman quickly in an apologetic tone, "and we're equally anxious to hear it, but if you'll be kind enough to bear with us, I'd like to put one or two more questions to your son first. I'll come back to you in a moment." He swung in his swivel chair to face Joseph again. "It's very honest of you, Mr. Sherman, to admit that you Can't entirely separate your emotional involvement from your objective arguments about Vietnam - but isn't there a danger that your belief that the war can't he won might have grown directly out of the double bereavement you've suffered - and the anxiety of having to stand by helplessly while your younger son languished as a prisoner of war in Hanoi?"

Again Joseph didn't reply immediately; his father's silky tones and the feigned regret in his voice as he spoke had not disguised the implacable hostility of what he said. When agreeing to take part in the program with him, Joseph had harbored a vague hope that perhaps the private grief they shared might help to personalize for outsiders the agony that Vietnam was causing in their country. At the same time, he realized suddenly, he had hoped that perhaps a public discussion of the issues which had such painful personal significance for them 1)0th might somehow draw them closer together, might lead them at this late stage in their lives to some kind of better understanding. But the tenor of the Senator's intervention and the labored reference to his own presence in England made him suspect that his father had already planned and prepared his remarks with the same care that he gave to his calculated speeches in the Senate. These thoughts chased one another through his mind as he prepared to answer his interviewer's question, and when he finally spoke, his tone was more coldly dispa.s.sionate than it might otherwise have been.

"There's no danger at all that I've confused the deep sadness I feel at the deaths in our family with the glaring political miscalculations that have brought them about," said Joseph quietly. "We've created and we support a government in Saigon that's supposedly democratic but which in fact is brutal and detested by the people it governs. The men who run it are natural successors to the hated mandarins who ruled under the French, and they wouldn't survive five minutes without American financial support. In comparison the austere, self-sacrificing methods practiced by the Viet Cong in the areas they administer seem highly attractive to the peasants of South Vietnam - so it's a fraud to pretend we're defending a democratic government. It's too late to try to change it now - that's why the war can't be won."

Joseph deliberately kept his eyes averted from the screen on which his father's face was visible and sat back warily in his chair, waiting for the next question. The anchorman, however, glanced up to check the senator's reaction and, seeing the look of impatience growing on his face, decided the moment had come when he might draw him into the discussion with maximum impact.

"Perhaps you'd like to tell us now, senator," he said crisply, "why it is you don't share your son's views about the impossibility of victory in Vietnam."

"I would indeed, sir." The older man leaned forward belligerently in his seat and cleared his throat in a theatrical fas.h.i.+on. "Things like death in the family affect different people in different ways. With some it knocks the stuffing out of them, makes them want to give up. With others it stiffens their will and makes them more determined than ever to fight on to final victory." He paused dramatically, and his head jutted forward on his wrinkled neck. "During nearly five decades of public service I've been proud to serve on the Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate, and I'd like to remind your viewers that today we've got the greatest army, the greatest navy and the greatest air force in the whole world! But despite this fact we're still bogged down in Vietnam, suffering two thousand casualties every week because we're strangling our war effort with self-imposed restrictions. If we were to kick off our shackles and release the full strength of our air and sea power, Ho Chi Minh would very quickly be forced to halt his war of aggression. The word 'victory' doesn't frighten me like it does some folks - but to achieve it we need to exert our national will to its fullest extent. just because we've suffered a setback or two, there's no reason to abandon in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, the principles of greatness, freedom and courage that have marked this country since its birth As his father continued to elaborate his views with ringing phrases, Joseph was seized with a sudden urge to rise from his seat and excuse himself from the rest of the interview. Because he had flown directly to London to see Naomi after his discharge from the hospital in Saigon and stayed until they married, he and his father had not met for well over a year, and the discovery on the air that the senator's views and att.i.tudes had not been modified in the least by the deaths of Guy and Gary shocked and saddened him. He found himself wondering illogically whether the senator remained resolutely deaf to the growing body of antiwar opinion out of real conviction or because he couldn't bear to concede that the son with whom he'd been at loggerheads all his life might this time have right on his side. As the resonant drawl of his father's voice continued, Joseph began to fear too that the three-way interview might in the end reveal more about the lifelong differences between them than about his advocacy of disengagement in Vietnam, and as he turned his attention back to what was being said from Was.h.i.+ngton, he realized to his horror that the senator's reply had already become acutely personal.

Perhaps I should make it clear that my son Joseph and I haven't always seen eye to eye," he was saying, still smiling engagingly to take the sting from his words. "Vietnam isn't the first topic we've fallen out on. Temperamentally Joseph has always been more inclined to compromise than I have, so the line he's taken in this book doesn't really come as that much of a surprise - although I'm sorry to find a son of mine advocating that we should cut and run from a war in a way that will bring humiliation down on our country."

The anchorman, sensing the tension that had been growing in Joseph during his father's response, decided to interject no question. Instead he merely raised an eyebrow and turned arm open palm in his direction, indicating that he was free to reply.

"I'd like to try to confine my comments to the issues," said Joseph in a strained voice. "And I think the most dangerous idea of all is the one that says we should try harder militarily. If we put a million American troops into South Vietnam, they would cause even more devastation and destroy what's left of the country. Our air attacks against North Vietnam don't contribute anything at all towards military success in the South, they don't protect our troops in any meaningful way, and they've made the people of North Vietnam even more determined to endure and defeat us Before the British journalist had time to intervene, Nathaniel Sherman cut in sharply. "My disagreement, sir, with those remarks is total. If we're to confront Communist aggression successfully, we need to be resolute and call on all the strength of our great land. The people of Virginia whom I represent, like the vast majority of the American people, are patriots. Many thousands like me have lost sons and grandsons in Vietnam. Like me they don't believe it's wrong to oppose Communism, like me they believe the Vietnamese aggressors should be punished." He paused again, and his eyes glittered with the ardor of his words. "They aren't like my son! To them, pride in their country isn't a sin!"

Joseph stiffened in his chair, glaring up at the screen on which his father's picture was projected. "I've never condemned anyone simply for being proud of their country or opposing Communism," he said sharply. "But the kind of false, stubborn pride which makes it impossible for a man or a nation to admit they're wrong should be seen for what it is - a recipe for disaster!"

In Was.h.i.+ngton, Nathaniel Sherman drew thoughtfully on a long cigar that he'd just lit arid considered its glowing end for a moment or two when the Panorama anchorman invited him to make a concluding comment. Then he glanced up at the camera again and the sorrowful smile that had flitted across his face throughout the discussion returned. "Sir, it won't be lost on anybody who reads The American Betrayal that all references to the enemy leaders Ho Chi Minh and General Giap are couched in respectful terms. The book also points out how its author met and worked alongside those men during his time with the OSS in Indochina in 1945. Some reviewers here in the United States have concluded that these influences have remained stronger in the writer's mind than more recent events, and others have pointed out that the book was published at a time when its author had already left the United States to live in Britain. One, I believe, even suggested the t.i.tle referred more appropriately to the author's decision to turn his back on his own proud national heritage than to anything America was doing in Vietnam to halt the spread of Communism across the world." The senator paused and drew long on the cigar, then smiled into the lens of the camera once more. "As the author is my son, I'd like to be able to refute the accusations of those critics - but in all honesty I have to confess that on the face of it, they seem to have a point or two."

Because he was seething with anger, Joseph found himself unable to look at the screen which showed the still-smiling face of his father; knowing the camera was on him, he tried to hide his feelings, but his face turned pale and his knuckles whitened on the arms of his chair.

"Do you wish to reply to that very briefly, Mr. Sherman?" asked the anchorman hurriedly as the floor manager signaled to him that the fadeout signature tune of the program was about to begin.

Joseph shook his head grimly. "I've got nothing to add."

Before the anchorman could stop him, Joseph rose abruptly from his chair and strode away across the studio into the shadows. Naomi Boyce-Lewis, who had been watching the live transmission anxiously from a position inside the studio door, reached out a consoling hand towards him as he came up to her but he brushed it aside. Flinging the studio doors back on their hinges with a crash, he continued angrily into the darkened corridor outside without breaking his stride.

The program director, taken aback at first by Joseph's abrupt departure, recovered in time to order a cameraman to continue filming Joseph's dramatically empty chair; behind it loomed the satellite-borne image of Senator Nathaniel Sherman, and he remained resolutely under the glare of the studio lights in Was.h.i.+ngton, puffing on his cigar and smiling confidently at the camera until the credits had finished rolling.

19.

Scores of buses parked b.u.mper to b.u.mper had been drawn up around the curbs outside the White House like covered wagons formed into a ring of siege in the old West. But instead of screaming Red Indians advancing on this barricade of transports in the heart of Was.h.i.+ngton, through the driving midnight hail and sleet of Friday, November 14, 1969, came a silent column of mourning Americans carrying guttering candles s.h.i.+elded inside little plastic drinking cups. They marched to the slow doleful beat of m.u.f.fled drums, the last of forty thousand peace demonstrators taking part in a forty-hour "March Against Death," each one wearing around his or her neck a hand-lettered placard bearing the name of an American who had been killed in the war in Vietnam or a Vietnamese village that had been destroyed. Mark Sherman walked stiffly among them, moving like a zombie, his mouth open, a glazed and vacuous expression fixed on his face; the expression could have been interpreted as either a smile or a grimace of pain, and one of the anxious march organizers, noticing this, developed a worried frown when he saw a television cameraman filming the marchers up ahead. He hurried to the side of Mark's mother, who was walking with him, and whispered urgently in her ear. After he had moved away, Tempe put an arm gently around her son's shoulders and talked to him soothingly for several moments as though to a child; gradually, as he listened, his features slackened and he walked on, gazing expressionlessly ahead through the freezing rain.

On the placard hung with string around Mark's neck, the hand-painted letters of his brother Gary's name had begun to run and blur in the wet; Tempe's placard was daubed with the name of "Quang To," the village where he had died, and Joseph Sherman marched stolidly at his younger son's other shoulder, carrying a sign bearing Guy's name in full and the date of the raid on the Saigon emba.s.sy. Never by nature a political activist, Joseph had agreed to travel from England to take part in the rally only after Tempe had contacted him to say that because the event was likely to turn into the biggest political demonstration ever a.s.sembled in the United States, Mark was insisting on taking part. She had told Joseph she was worried about Mark's mental state, which had been deteriorating steadily since his release twelve months before; because he was the grandson of Senator Nathaniel Sherman and the son of the author of the most celebrated anti-Vietnam war book, he was being taken up with increasing enthusiasm by some activists in the peace movement.

Mark had gone to live with Tempe and her second husband on his return home, and his moods, she had told Joseph, were now fluctuating sharply between withdrawn sullenness and sudden lapses into half-demented rages. When he spoke of the war, he invariably condemned it in terms reminiscent of the confessions broadcast while he was still a prisoner in Hanoi, but he had steadfastly refused to reveal anything at all about his imprisonment, either to air force a.n.a.lysts or the several psychiatrists called in by Joseph and Tempe after his discharge from the service. He had adopted the practice of accepting all the invitations he received to attend peace rallies and flew into uncontrollable fits of temper if anyone tried to stop him; as a result he had become an enigmatic and tragic public figure, and his presence at a number of peace demonstrations had been exploited to the full. From time to time as he strode along beside his son, Joseph glanced round at him ready to give a friendly smile of encouragement, but Mark showed the same indifference to him that he had done ever since his release and kept his head turned to the front. Even when Joseph tried to pa.s.s a conversational remark about the weather or the landmarks they were pa.s.sing, he continued pointedly to ignore him.

Mark, Tempe and Joseph, along with a small group of other people related to men who had died in Vietnam, were marching in a special delegation around the angular, silver-haired figure of Dr. Benjamin Spock; a celebrated pediatrician who through his famous book on child care had counseled a whole generation of parents on how to bring up their young, Dr. Spock had become a prominent and pa.s.sionate critic of the war that was claiming the lives of thousands of those young male adults he had helped guide successfully through the dangers of infancy. Now in the fall of 1969 he had suddenly become a symbolic father figure to the peace movement that was attracting growing numbers of young, white middle-cla.s.s demonstrators and since dusk the previous day he had been leading the nonstop "March Against Death" through the nation's capital. Half-a-million other demonstrators who were flooding into Was.h.i.+ngton by road, rail and air were due to bring the demonstration to its climax with a rally around the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument the next day, and Joseph had agreed to address the throng alongside other celebrities from show business, the arts and politics; the somber, two-day protest march was being staged as a dramatic prelude to that rally, and for more than thirty hours little files of up to one hundred peaceful demonstrators had been setting out every few minutes from the Arlington National Cemetery on the southern bank of the Potomac River and b.u.t.ting across the windy Memorial Bridge on the first leg of their pilgrimage, s.h.i.+elding their guttering candles with their bodies as they went. Their four-mile trek took them along Const.i.tution Avenue to the fence bordering the South Portico of the White House, and there within earshot of President Richard Nixon they were pausing to call out the names of the dead Americans written on the placards around their necks. This act of mourning for men who were total strangers to most of the demonstrators had caused tears to mingle with the rain on the cheeks of many of them, and they plodded on along Pennsylvania Avenue, visibly moved, before their eyes turned towards their next goal - the floodlit dome of the Capitol that floated like a pale ghost in the icy darkness above the city. Beneath the rotunda on the west lawn, twelve unvarnished pine-plank coffins were drawn up on trestles under floodlights, and there the marchers were stopping to remove the placards from their necks and place them reverently in the caskets in a poignant act of remembrance; at the same time they were also snuffing out the individual candies they had carried from Arlington to commemorate the forty- five thousand American lives that had been lost far away in Asia, and often the finality of this act caused fresh weeping among the men as well as the girls and women taking part.

As the Spock group approached the circle of bus barricades around the White House just after midnight on Friday, Tempe shot an anxious warning look at Joseph and moved close to Mark to take his arm. Joseph moved closer too and took his other elbow; Tempe had earlier confided to Joseph her fear that the calling of Gary's name might prove to be a moment of high emotional intensity for Mark, and they had agreed to do what they could to distract him. Flurries of icy rain were blowing in their faces as they approached the spot opposite the second-floor windows of the White House where other demonstrators ahead of them were already calling out names of the dead; the male voices tended to be hoa.r.s.e and angry, those of the girls and women, softer, more restrained, but as the sad rhythm of the chants and the funeral drumbeats grew louder, Joseph felt his son grow tense at his side.

At first Mark complied with the strict orders of the march organizers; he stopped at the appointed place in the single-file line and turned to face the White House. He yelled "Gary Sherman! Charles County, Virginia!" in a loud, despairing voice then fell obediently silent while first Joseph then Tempe stopped o call out the names of Guy Sherman and Quang To village. But when one of the marshals supervising the protest motioned to Mark to move on, he appeared not to hear; the marshal called again more loudly and stepped towards him, but Mark would not turn and march away. His refusal immediately disrupted the steady, disciplined flow of the line, and the rhythm of the protest broke down. Both Joseph and Tempe tried to urge him on with gentle words, but suddenly he broke free from them and began screaming Gary's name over and over in a high- pitched, hysterical voice. At the same time he flung himself towards the White House railings and leaped to grab hold of the spikes at the top. For a moment or two he swung there, still screaming, then somehow managed to turn to face the other marchers, hanging by his arms from the top of the fence; several marshals converged rapidly on him and tried to pull him down, but he kicked and fought savagely to drive them off, and continued to hang spread-eagled from the top bars, his writhing body silhouetted against the backdrop of the floodlit White House.

Television kliegs added their glare to the scene as camera crews and news photographers arrived to record the incident and the marshals gave up trying to pull him off the fence by force. Joseph tried quietly to persuade his son to come down, but Mark ignored his efforts completely; Tempe also pleaded with him unsuccessfully for several minutes before giving up. In the end three policemen had to hammer repeatedly at his fingers with their nightsticks to break his grip on the railings and when he finally fell sobbing to the ground, only the intervention of a senior march marshal, who explained quietly to the police who Mark was, prevented his arrest.

Tempe, watched helplessly by Joseph, tried to talk Mark out of completing the march when he'd recovered, but with a sullen insistence he continued along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, occasionally sucking his bleeding fingers as he stumbled through the rain. In front of the pine caskets he had difficulty untangling the placard with Gary's name from his neck, and the white board became daubed with blood from his hands. Tempe, with tears in her eyes, finally lowered the placard into the coffin for him, and he stood staring at it for a long time. When his mother gently touched his elbow, he remembered the candle he carried for Gary and snuffed it out very slowly with his own fingers. Tempe tried to lead him away then, but he insisted on staying, and as fresh lines of marchers arrived at the coffins, Mark stepped forward to snuff out each of their candles in turn. He held his fingers in the flames longer each time before extinguis.h.i.+ng them, and when Tempe finally was able to persuade him to leave, the skin of one hand had become blackened and charred.

"There's an awful lot, Tempe, that I'd have to apologize to you for if I ever got started," said Joseph sadly as he looked down at Mark's sleeping face. "If I hadn't been so d.a.m.ned stupid, maybe none of this would have happened."

"What do you mean?" Tempe asked the question in a barely audible whisper.

"If I hadn't left you, I don't think either of my sons would have chosen the careers they did. Perhaps Gary wouldn't be dead and Mark wouldn't be His voice trailed off, and they both stood looking down at Mark's pale, pinched face.

They had arrived back at his father's old Georgetown mansion just before two AM., and a doctor close to the family had been summoned immediately to tend Mark's hands and administer a heavy sedative. The senator had been staying at the plantation house in Charles County for several weeks, and Joseph had suggested taking Mark to Georgetown after the demonstration to avoid the embarra.s.sment of his meeting Tempe's husband. Before leaving, the doctor had told him that the sedation he had administered would ensure that Mark slept for at least twelve hours, and he had agreed to return later to examine him again. As he lay asleep before them, the gaunt, unnatural cast of Mark's features and his unhealthy pallor made him look more of an invalid than ever before, and Tempe had to close her eyes to blot out the sight.

"You put too much blame on yourself, Joseph," she said quietly as she turned away. "Haven't you ever thought that Gary's temperament made the army an ideal choice for him - and that Mark might have wanted to fly in the beginning because you were a pilot?"

"But that was something forced on me - I would never have gone in for flying if the war hadn't come along."

"I know," said Tempe, "but those old 'Flying Tiger' pictures that he saw all over the house when he was a boy caught his imagination. And one day he found this in a drawer and asked me if he could have it." She turned towards him, opening her hand, and Joseph stared at the old rabbit's foot lying on her palm. "He never went anywhere without it -. and he was still carrying it with him tonight.

Joseph gazed at her in astonishment, and when she turned and walked from the bedroom he followed her in silence. In the drawing room she sank down wearily on a chesterfield and closed her eyes. In middle age her hair had begun to turn gray and her face was pale with fatigue, but she was still a handsome, composed woman, and despite her obvious distress Joseph couldn't help noticing that her air of calm good sense hadn't deserted her.

"I'm truly glad, Tempe, that you found happiness with someone else," he said quietly. "You deserve it."

She didn't, reply or open her eyes to look at him, and at that moment a maid entered the room bringing the late edition of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post that was always delivered direct to the house from the Post's plant by private messenger on the senator's orders. As she laid the newspaper on a low table, Joseph caught sight of the photograph on the front page, and he rose hurriedly to pick it up so that Tempe wouldn't see it.

The stark image of Mark spread-eagled in an att.i.tude of crucifixion against the floodlit facade of the White House had been blown up to cover four columns, and the caption writer hadn't missed the tragic symbolism inherent in the picture. Joseph turned aside from Tempe and stood staring at the photograph, scarcely noticing the sound of a telephone ringing in the hall; when the maid came back to tell Tempe that there was a call for her, he didn't look up. A few moments later she returned to the room and came to stand beside him.

"That call was from the plantation house, Joseph," she said shakily. "It's your father - he's had a stroke. The doctor says he won't live more than a few hours, and he's asking for you to go to him."

Joseph stared at her blankly and said nothing.

"My car's outside," said Tempe softly. "I'll drive you there if you want."

20.

Senator Nathaniel Sherman lay dying in the Robert E. Lee bed when Joseph and Tempe arrived at the plantation house overlooking the James River just after live o'clock in the morning. The left side of his body had become partially paralyzed as a result of the stroke, and his face had been affected, but he had remained aware enough of his surroundings to order the household staff to carry him to the east river view bedroom and put him in the historic four-poster in which the celebrated Confederate general had often slept.

"Taking his chance to play to the gallery for the last time, I suppose," commented Joseph grimly when his sister, Susannah, who greeted him at the door, directed him up the great staircase of carved walnut.

Susannah had frowned even while embracing him, then she'd led Tempe away to the drawing room so that he could go up alone. Although the news that his father was dying had not moved him unduly in Was.h.i.+ngton, the sight of the stricken body propped up on a bank of white pillows in the canopied bed shocked him when he entered the room. The old man's eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, hut the stroke had dragged down the left side of his face, making it grotesque; his cheeks were shrunken yellow hollows, and in comparison the old tentacles of scar tissue from the hunting accident stood out white and livid on his face and neck in the dull glow of a single bedside lamp. To Joseph they looked like grasping fingers spreading up from the wound that had severed his left arm, and the new facial disfigurement on that same side made him think that whatever malevolent force had inflicted the original injuries was flow reaching out to s.n.a.t.c.h away the Final prize that had eluded it SO many years before.

Joseph shuddered at the thought and sat down on a chair already in place beside the bed; the nurse who had been on duty in the room tiptoed out, closing the door soundlessly behind her, and as he sat alone staring at the piteously sunken face, he wasn't surprised to find that the natural compa.s.sion he would have felt for any dying man was mixed, in the case of his own father, with feelings of anger. The memory of their hitter clash on television only months before was still painfully fresh in his mind and a clear sight of the hunting scars brought back with surprising force the sense of outrage he'd experienced on learning the true story behind Chuck's death.

During the drive from Was.h.i.+ngton, lie had wondered several times whether he would find his father conscious; he had wondered, too, whether lie would have one last chance to do what he had always failed to do before, confront him with his knowledge of Chuck's death. He had always felt vaguely that he owed it to Chuck, to the memory of his courage and good sense, to force some admission of guilt or regret from his father, and his failure to act on this impulse over the years had sometimes weighed heavily on his conscience. In the coldest moments of his anger he had also contemplated revealing the truth about Guy - but loyalty to his dead mother and the promise he'd made her had always stopped him. As the minutes ticked by at the bedside, he found himself wondering again whether he would have the courage to speak the truth if the dying man regained consciousness.

Lost in his own thoughts, Joseph failed at first to notice when his father's eyes opened, and it was the sound of his trying to speak that brought him back to the present with a start. Then he saw that his left eyelid, because of the paralysis, drooped over the iris, forcing him to squint at him with his right eye. The left side of his mouth drooped too, making clear speech difficult, and his first words were strangled and incoherent.

'Don't try to talk," said Joseph quietly. He was appalled by the disintegration taking place before his eyes, and he searched his mind frantically for some shred of comfort that he might offer. "Trust you to take to the old Robert E. Lee," he said, forcing a smile to his lips. "I guess you figured they'll have to rename it the 'Nathaniel Sherman Bed' now, huh?"

He didn't think his words had been heard at first, but suddenly the misshapen features on the snowy pillow lit up with an expression of delight and the head nodded feebly in agreement; then the smile faded as soon as it had come. "I'm going, Joseph.

I know it." His speech was still slurred, but by bending closer, Joseph could make out his meaning. "That's why I wanted to talk to you." He lifted his remaining hand slowly from beneath the sheet and held it towards him, and Joseph took it reluctantly in both his own. "We've had our differences, Joseph," he continued in a croaking voice, "but I asked you to come because I wanted you to know . . . before I go, that I don't hold it against you . . . for disagreeing with me in public. . . There's no bad blood. . I didn't want you to have that on your conscience."

Joseph stared wonderingly at his father. The fingers of his hand felt cold and limp, as if they might already be dead, but even the imminence of death had not dented the senator's una.s.sailable arrogance. He had called him to his deathbed to offer forgiveness when he himself had condemned his own son in public with unpardonable and illogical bitterness.

"We've always had our differences, Father," said Joseph grimly.