Page 71 of Cry Havoc
Before Tom opened the rear passenger door, he looked down at the card in his hand. In the upper right were the initials “NS” for Nick Serrano, under which was a number with a “w” for “work” in front of it and a second number labeled with an “h” for “home.” He flipped the card over between his fingers. There was something else inscribed on the back.
We deal in lead, friend.
CHAPTER 21
TWILIGHT HAD ENGULFED SAIGONby the time Dan Eldridge left the six-story embassy on Thong Nhut Boulevard. Still shaken by the events of the afternoon, his palms remained clammy, but not from the humidity.
He had showered in his flat and asked the embassy’s driver in a black Plymouth sedan to wait even though it was only a ten-minute walk. Upon arrival, he had been ushered directly into a spacious office where Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker waited.
A hawk on the war, Bunker was well liked and respected in military and intelligence circles. A blue blood born to American nobility, he had graduated from Yale and risen to run the National Sugar Refining Company, which was started by his father, before turning to government service. He was appointed ambassador to Argentina and then Italy under Truman, then India and Nepal under Eisenhower. Now he was America’s lead diplomat in Vietnam under Johnson. A two-time recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he was a shrewd and aggressive negotiator, his actions tempered by a cool head and impressive intellect. Tough, knowledgeable, and experienced, Bunker was serious about the work of governance, and an advocate of incursions into Laos and Cambodia by MACV-SOG. Eldridge thought his policies only served to prolong the conflict.
William Healy Sullivan, the ambassador to Laos, on the other hand, was a man Eldridge respected. Maybe things would have been different hadhe been ambassador to Vietnam. Sullivan graduated from Brown University with an advanced joint degree from Harvard and the Fletcher School. He was a former Navy man who had been in Yokohama Harbor when the Japanese officially surrendered in 1945. As a foreign service officer, he had extensive experience in Thailand, Japan, India, the Netherlands, and Italy. As ambassador to Laos, he frequently butted heads with Bunker on Vietnam policy. Sullivan had final approval over all missions into Laos, and with Cambodia severing diplomatic ties with the United States in 1965, he also had de facto approval over missions into that kingdom. He was detested by the rank-and-file SOG operators who were routinely denied operations and air support.
Eldridge was unsurprised to find that Bunker was not alone in his office. He was flanked by Edward Lansdale and Daniel Ellsberg, two men who frequently had an audience with the ambassador.
A Second World War veteran of the OSS, Lansdale had been instrumental in assisting the Philippine government and its intelligence services to combat and defeat the Hukbalahap and Kamlon rebellions in the 1950s. Rumor had it that he had directed the Philippine intelligence services to drain the blood from a deceased insurgent and leave the body to be found by his comrades. Most of them had a genuine belief in theaswangsof Philippine myth, jungle demons that survived on human blood. Lansdale understood the power of psychological operations.
Though officially Lansdale was attached to the Department of State, Eldridge suspected that he was very much still in the employ of, or acting at the behest of, the CIA. The United States government wanted Lansdale to do the same thing in Vietnam that he had done in the Philippines, a goal that remained elusive.
In Eldridge’s assessment, the Vietnam War was lost as soon as the CIA recalled Lansdale in 1956. His absence left a vacancy that sealed President Diêm’s fate. The president and his brother were executed in the back of an armored personnel carrier in a coup d’état in November 1963, less than amonth before an assassin’s bullets killed Kennedy. Lansdale had returned to Vietnam in 1965, but by then it was too late.
There were hawks, there were doves, and then there was Ed Lansdale. Eldridge found it interesting that he had accomplished so much without having a grasp of languages. With all his time in the Philippines, Lansdale did not speak Tagalog, nor did he speak Vietnamese or French. He was not an intellectual, did not come from money, and he had not attended the universities more commonly associated with the CIA and State Department elites. What he did have was a genuine interest in the well-being of the people of Vietnam. Unlike many diplomats and think tank contractors, he would leave Saigon, with Ellsberg in tow, venturing out to the hamlets and villages. He remained hopeful that the United States could influence the outcome of South Vietnam’s future. What he failed to grasp was that the battlespace had shifted. This was clear to Eldridge, but that was because he came from a different generation. In the Philippines there had not been a draft of United States citizens, no protests to speak of on college campuses, no six o’clock news running reels of America’s sons in combat half a world away, no kids coming home in body bags, no families torn apart as the result of misguided policy.
Eldridge had been a fixture at the parties Lansdale hosted at his French-style villa near the Dakao Bridge at the edge of the city. He had clapped along with the other guests as Lansdale played the harmonica to a captivated audience. Eldridge kept the fact that he played guitar to himself, fearing Lansdale might haul him in front of the crowd to play, a crowd that consisted of foreign service officers, State Department officials, military officers, USAID workers, journalists, U.S. Information Agency bureaucrats, and others who could only be CIA, along with an assortment of girlfriends and “girlfriends.” The parties had become legendary. Eldridge always thought it was interesting how Lansdale seemed to have such strong relationships with foreign leaders and the various agenciesand organizations on the ground but struggled in his dealings with the policymakers in the Washington, D.C., establishment
Admittedly, Ellsberg was more of an enigma. A former Marine, he had gone to Harvard and studied at Cambridge, though at a different college than Eldridge. Ellsberg attended King’s College, while Eldridge was a Trinity man. Now a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, a think tank, research, and consulting firm with extraordinary political capital, his analysis had strong influence over U.S. foreign policy objectives. Eldridge had gotten to know him socially at Lansdale’s parties. People at the embassy were always confusing the two because they shared the same first name and their surnames were similar.
Though discussing Cambridge with Ellsberg was a way to connect through shared common ground, it was also difficult and emotional. Eldridge was studying at Cambridge when he received word that his younger brother had been killed in Vietnam. A school administrator had pulled him from class and told him there was an emergency at home. He knew at once that his brother was dead. He would come to find that he was one of the 237 U.S. soldiers killed in the Ia Drang Valley. Against the wishes of his parents and brother, the younger Eldridge had enlisted in the Army right out of high school. And now he was dead.
It was not the politicians who would end this war. As his professors at Dartmouth and Cambridge had preached, war in the latter half of the twentieth century was a machine, an ecosystem of politicians, defense companies, and lobbyists, all in on the racket. At least Eisenhower had supported Vietnam with a limited commitment of U.S. forces. Eldridge could understand that. Then that traitor Kennedy had escalated it. After Kennedy’s death, fucking Johnson had vowed in speech after speech to “not send American boys to do an Asian boy’s job.” Johnson had lied, and Eldridge had watched as the United States was pulled deeper and deeper into the quagmire that was Vietnam. America was not goingto win, no matter how many “Lansdales” the CIA sent over. Vietnam belonged to the Vietnamese. Let the Asian boys fight this one.
Following his brother’s funeral, Eldridge returned to Cambridge for final exams, an academic tradition unique to Cambridge called Triposes. His contemporary foreign affairs professor, whom he greatly admired, asked to see him after office hours to discuss the classes he missed while back in the United States. After expressing his sincere condolences, the professor naturally turned the discussion to American involvement in Vietnam. Eldridge had voiced his interest in helping formulate U.S. foreign policy in the future. He mentioned that he had interned at the State Department the previous summer and was scheduled to take the Foreign Service Officer Test and Assessment in January following an early graduation. He conveyed his desire to be an ambassador one day so he could have a meaningful impact and keep other families from going through the ordeal of losing a loved one due to misguided policies.
Eldridge remembered every detail of his recruitment, the office in disarray with stacks of papers everywhere, the professor’s tweed jacket, his graying beard.
What if I told you there was a way to affect policy without having to wait twenty or thirty years for an ambassadorship? You can have more influence than you think, a lot sooner than you think. What if you could affect the outcome in Vietnam and keep other boys from coming home in boxes like your brother? Would you be interested?
The professor had invited him to dinner at his flat and introduced him to a man from the Soviet Embassy in London. His training began the next day.
That had been just over two years ago.
Eldridge accepted a scotch and sat on a small couch in Ambassador Bunker’s office. He walked the three men through the events of the day before an hour of pointed questions.
Ambassador Bunker had concluded the meeting by telling Eldridge to get some sleep. Eldridge promised he would.
Now beyond the confines of the embassy, a modern concrete eyesore topped by the Stars and Stripes that stood out from the French colonials flanking it, Eldridge walked for two blocks and then crossed the street, dodging scooters, pedicabs, and rickshaws through the incessant honking of horns. He ducked into a faded yellow and blue Renault taxicab going in the opposite direction. He watched to see if anyone followed him, just as he had been taught in England. He bought a loaf of French bread at a bakery on the edge of Tu Do Street, using the stop as an opportunity to assess the crowd. He then took a tuk-tuk, a motorized three-wheel rickshaw with an open-air cabin, to Bui Vien Street, where the evening’s festivities in one of the more popular red-light districts was just gearing up. Though it could be hard to tell in the chaos of Saigon, he did not notice a tail. He strolled past the bars, brothels, nightclubs, massage parlors, and saunas that were sustained by a constant flow of American GIs, many of whom, Eldridge was sure, would be dead before the year was out. Every night in Saigon was a Saturday night. He resisted the urge to get a drink and ignored the enticing calls of the bar girls who beckoned like the Sirens of Homer’sOdyssey. There would be alcohol and female companionship at his destination.
At the end of the street, he took another tuk-tuk to Le Thanh Ton Street before redirecting his driver to the Ch?L?n district on the western side of the Saigon River. He paid his fare and crossed the street again, darting past a group of kids playing soccer in the day’s last light, chickens and roosters scrambling to avoid the ball. Smells of roadside cooking stands burning wood mixed with the evening air, their coals glowing below sizzling meats. The Ch?L?n district dated back to the Le Dynasty of the sixteenth century and supported a thriving Chinese community. He walked past the Quan Am Buddhist temple and Bình Tây Market.
Almost there.
Confident that he had not been followed and therefore was not under suspicion, he turned down a narrow alley. The aroma of jasmine and bougainvillea crawling up the walls calmed him, and helped offset the stench emanating from the sewage ditch that ran along one side.
Eldridge felt the bite of a mosquito at his neck and slapped it away.
He twisted his head to see if anyone turned down the alley after him. Nothing.
He continued toward a semi-detached home that shared a single wall with its neighbor at the end of the dead-end alley. Tall and narrow, each of its three floors was a separate apartment. Eldridge’s destination was the middle floor. He had been there many times.
