Once an Eagle

  I said my understanding was that Hoanh-Trac quite simply wanted those Chinese Kuomintang divisions off his back, where they’d been ever since the Burmese booted them out, after footing the bill for them as long as they could. He tossed his head. “Pure poppycock, Samuel. Feints and falderal. It’s merely a pretext for bringing the Chinese Reds in, en masse: that’s what he wants. He’s only been deterred from that because of our presence here in Cau Luong. I want you to talk to Frederick Brokaw, he’s our top CIA man here and a crackerjack.” The smile again. “I take it you have no objections to talking with him?” “Of course not,” I said; one good smile deserves another. “I’ll listen to anybody.” He nodded. “Yes. You always would. It’s your gravest fault. No: next gravest.” I nobly resisted the temptation. He went around behind his desk and rested his knuckles on the blotter as a symbolic gesture that the interview was being brought to a close. I got up. He gave me the quick, piercing glance—the one that Ben used to call the Jehovah-Daddy Look, then all at once tilted the jade holder skyward between his teeth, like FDR in a facetious mood. “Only this time, Samuel, don’t make up your mind too fast.” “I won’t, General,” I said.

  The briefing over at MACK Hq just about what I expected. Graulet handled it. He has changed. Most of the humorless officiousness is gone: he is smoother, more circuitous and deft. He’s learned a lot. Nothing much I hadn’t dug up on my own hook except for a whole bagful of personal data on some of the principals. Hoanh-Trac is something of a hedonist, according to reports: opium and women. Rather depressing sensation in those gloomy old French barracks: cool and dim, blinds shuttered against the harsh light, officers in quiet rows, smoking, participants and viewers of a film that bears very little relation to the life it is seeking to depict. But everyone fervently agreed on its being a great picture: colossal, gigantic.

  A relief to get out into the streets afterward, moving through the crowds, the girls like the most exotic birds in their white silk trousers and gold and green jackets, the pedicab drivers gliding solemnly, the women haggling crablike with the fish vendors in the crazy stalls. It made me think of Manila, those lean years. The teeter-totter, with Massengale at one end and Joe Brand at the other. The years when my life changed. Colonel Fahrquahrson and Monk Metcalfe. Jarreyl and Lin Tso-han. All the opposites. Past and future, acceptance and denial, yang and yin.

  But this too was wrong: it felt all wrong in another way—as unreal as the briefing room in the old French barracks. The chic, slender girls in their ao-dais, the rich kids, sons of Vu Khoi’s clique, batting around in their Renaults (why aren’t they up north, on patrol? or even doing guard duty in the Delta? It’s their regime that’s keeping them on top of the heap), the big brass in their Chryslers and Citroëns. On the spur of the moment took a pedicab out the Cao Binh Tra road toward the airfield, past the paddies, with the farmers bent under their limpet hats, barelegged, working, the golden light pouring over the fields and water, the carabaos moving like black ponderous engines and the kids prancing around them waving bamboo switches. The real world. Felt a seething, despondent rage at all of us with our plans for them—Communists and counterinsurgents, guerrillas and Mobile Forces: all of us seeking to bend things our way. Even now, hours later, sitting here writing in this overupholstered, air-conditioned brothel I feel it: the despondency, the rage. Who the hell do we think we’re fooling? We are just like the French: sitting jauntily in our sand castles, prattling of vertical-envelopment and strategic hamlets and logistics patterns, while the tide sweeps gently, remorselessly around us. We give up nothing. We are so certain, so utterly certain …

  Being alone in a vastly foreign town fills you with melancholy. So far from home. You see all your faults so clearly, so implacably. Tommy, I want to cry, forgive me my inflexibility, my predilection for judgment, my romantic extravagance, my willfulness—above all my unabated conviction that I must do great things—

  An explosion. Two, three hundred yards away, maybe more. That dense, reverberant crump that only means trouble. Plastique, probably. Someone is dead, someone else is hideously disfigured, someone else is trying desperately to make his escape.

  War is cruelty and you cannot refine it. W. T. Sherman.

  Or is it someone trying to steal some medical supplies?

  Have made up my mind to go north to see Hoanh-Trac on my own. CSM will not be overjoyed. But I am going anyway.

  3

  The rain battered down tremendously. It was exactly like a wall, curtaining the room from the rest of the world; another set of walls of teeming water, streaming in silvered sheets from tiled eaves, glittering in the light from the lamps. Like the lamplight back home, Damon thought, glowing in the kitchen and dining room windows on Merivale Street. But this interior was very spare. In place of the sofa, the platform rocker with its antimacassars, the chairs and cabinets and huge oak table, there was only a low couch in lemon brocade, a small table of inlaid teak, the mat he and his host sat on, and a screen depicting cranes flying above a marsh. The screen bore a pleasing relationship to the couch and table; and placed on the table was a striking little figurine traced in an electric blue on a pure white base. A sparse room: one couch, one mat, one table, one screen, one piece of statuary. But placed with care, with a love for beauty and order. Everything is placement, he thought absently. Furniture, forces, ideas, affections. Everything.

  His bowels convulsed again in a series of mounting spasms and he tensed himself, waiting for them to subside. Aloud he said: “Very beautiful. Yüan Dynasty, is it?”

  Hoanh-Trac inclined his head with the quick, delighted smile of the Indo-Chinese. “A copy, merely—work of the Annamese sculptor Heng-Bo. But he studied with the Yüan masters.” He was a little man of perhaps fifty-five with a lithe body and a birdlike, volatile manner. He was dressed in an open-necked army shirt of tropical worsted and a pair of slacks; he wore no ribbons or insignia. “How is it that you know Chinese sculpture?”

  Damon smiled. “I don’t know it, really; it was just a guess.”

  “But an extraordinarily good one.” Hoanh-Trac gazed at the American thoughtfully. “That was a long journey you have made up here to Plei Hoa. You must be quite weary.”

  “A little, yes. I’m not a young man any longer. Not even middle-aged.”

  “That is true.” The Khotianese General’s face was perfectly bland now, without expression. “It is so far up here.” He cocked his head again, and his voice fell into a whimsical, crooning tone, as though he were tracing the route in his mind’s eye. “Up the great Hong Cua River across the Dai Pha Plateau, where the Kor live, and the Meos. Very fierce.” His gaze became all at once ingenuous and bright. “Were you not afraid, General Damon?”

  The tea was murderously hot. Damon kept his lips from quivering by an effort of will, and carefully set the little porcelain cup down on the tray beside him. He knew he was being interrogated, tested, perhaps baited a bit. All during the meal, whose rigors he had only just survived, Hoanh-Trac had been frivolous and reserved by turns, and the talk had been general. Now that the two of them had retired to Hoanh’s private room and left the others, it was only to be expected that the Khotianese leader’s manner would change. But it was not pleasant.

  Damon said quietly: “In my life I have only known one man who was afraid of nothing; and in my opinion he was worthless as a human being.”

  Hoanh-Trac clapped his hands in glee. “That is pleasing,” he exclaimed softly. For a moment he rocked back and forth, his eyes narrowed, his head cocked in that comical, avuncular manner. “Curious that you should say that. You are a very curious sort of American soldier, are you not?”

  Damon smiled. “Yes. Fairly curious.”

  “I know some things about you. A few things. You have been in trouble with your superiors a great deal during your career. You have even been called”—Hoanh’s lips curled in quick glee—“a Bolshevik. Are you one, in truth?”

  “No. I can’t say that I am. Sorry.”

  “Do you kn
ow that you are the only American officer who has come to Plei Hoa to confer with me? A singular circumstance, wouldn’t you say? A Lieutenant General, one not connected with either the Embassy or the Military Advisory Group. A brave soldier, I am informed—but not a particularly favored one …” His large oval eyes took on a mischievous glint. “Why do you suppose they sent you all the way out here, to this wretched, inhospitable corner of the world?”

  Damon took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. A prankster. He had flown and ridden and walked and waded and climbed two hundred and seventy-five miles to meet up with a jungle comic, facetious and nasty. Graulet was right: what was facing him was an epicene mama’s boy with delusions of grandeur, who was currently amusing himself—hugely, it appeared—with the cumbersome white man, whose day was past. Well: maybe it was. His mission was already a total failure and he knew it. And his gut was griping at him again, more insistently. Gastroenteritis, with bells. He’d taken a bucketful of this new Polymagma and this was all the good it had been; he’d have done better to stick to the old standby paregoric. In one of the other rooms he could hear laughter as Gene Villarette told a story in Khotianese to some of Hoanh-Trac’s staff. The Khotianese General was still watching him with that sly, gleeful expression. Of all the rotten, blasted, filthy, no-good, miserable luck. He resisted the temptation to get up and walk out of the room and hunt up a toilet where he could relieve his misery, at least temporarily.

  Instead he shook his head slowly and said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve never had any experience of a diplomatic nature, I’ve never drawn any assignments as an attaché … Perhaps I was chosen because of a tour I served as an observer in China, a long time ago.”

  “Ah.” Hoanh nodded, as though that solved everything. “The Yangtze front?” he asked politely.

  “No, General. In the North. With guerrilla groups, mostly.”

  “I see. And what conclusions did you draw from your observations?”

  Damon folded his arms, watching the faintly derisive smile. “That Japan would never subdue the inhabitants of Shansi. That their fight was a just fight, and one involving new and immensely important tactics. And that they would ultimately be the victors.”

  “You said those things in your report?”

  “I did.”

  “But the Japanese held the towns, the strong points, the railroads. They had all the weapons and equipment.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And your own nation was supplying them with munitions.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “And still you thought that …” Hoanh shook his head in delighted bewilderment. “General Damon, you are a very, very singular American soldier.”

  “—Yes,” the Nebraskan said, finally stung to anger by the air of mischievous raillery, “yes, I’m singular enough to believe that power has its obligations, and that a soldier—provided he is a soldier—owes a certain allegiance to his countrymen.”

  “Ah. That is interesting.” Hoanh-Trac straightened, and the mobile, mocking features slowly turned solemn. The impression was of another, tougher man’s face melting through the dandy’s: a man capable of great determination and fortitude. “General, you are a soldier, you have gone to war again and again. I too have been at war for a long, long time. Longer than I would have believed possible. When the Japanese came I did not run away to Karachi and Paris and Antibes, like certain others of my class. I stayed in the Beng Lau and fought them. And when the Japanese left and the French came back I went on fighting the French. For my countrymen. And after Lap Khe, when we were fleeing across the Hong Cua, the French came over in planes and bombed and strafed us as we paddled. The Hong Cua is very wide, as you know. Very few of us reached the far shore. And those of us who did bore souvenirs of the crossing. Such as this.” With a quick, angry gesture he wrenched the open-necked shirt from his shoulder and twisted where he sat, revealing a great jagged scar that ran down the side of his neck and into his back. He nodded, replaced the shirt and drew up his trousers, and Damon saw a maze of healed cuts and the dead white oval scars of yaws. “My only decorations from that war. Oh yes, I am a soldier.” He picked up his teacup, set it down untouched. “I am sick of war—sick unto death of stealth and violence and fear and vengeance. Only … I am not quite so sick of it as I am of certain other things.—Tell me: do you think it was right for the French to come in and gut our country?”

  Damon shook his head. “No, I don’t. But the French are gone.”

  “Yes. The French are gone.” Hoanh-Trac raised his hands before his face—a strange gesture, half-priestly, half-professorial. “Yes. Over one hundred years ago Prince Naphong was sorely pressed in his struggle against the Emperor Tu Duc, and the French asked him if they could be of service. And Prince Naphong in his fear and pride said yes. One word. And we had the French on our necks until at last we drove them out. With our blood … Now you are offering your services.”

  “But not for territorial concessions, political control—only to assist in the establishment of a free government …”

  The smile reappeared. “For nothing, General? Out of pure altruism? For no advantage whatever?”

  “None. For a free Khotiane. Free of Communist control. To put an end to a disastrous civil war.”

  “Perhaps … But it is our civil war!” the little man cried softly. “Ours. To settle our way, for better or for worse. In 1863 the British were eager to help your Confederacy. For reasons that were not completely altruistic. They came perilously close to intervening—do you remember? And what would have happened? The North would still have won—and you would never have forgiven Great Britain. Never. That was your civil war, to fight to bloody conclusion. And you did. Without ‘assistance.’” He paused and rubbed the side of his face. “And Ch’en Pu Kou with his Chinese stragglers, in the hills—he would like to help us, too. Even Marshal Thanarat of Thailand has expressed his concern. How engaging it is: all these foreign powers so anxious to assist us in our hour of trial …” He dropped his hands and there was a short silence. “General, what would you have me do?”

  Damon said: “Sir, I would hope that you could maintain your position of neutrality with regard to the civil war now raging in Khotiane.”

  “Neutrality.” Hoanh-Trac peered skeptically out at the silvery curtain of rain. “Your government is preparing to fight the Hai Minh on an ever broader scale, but you wish me to remain neutral. But you see, it becomes increasingly more difficult to remain neutral. Sooner or later, one is forced to choose.” He watched the American officer calmly. “Surely you can understand that? …”

  Damon took a breath. The clutch in his belly had come back, redoubled, and with it now a faint surge of nausea. “General, I have none of the diplomatic graces, such as they are. I’d like to talk with you, if you will permit it, about these Chinese divisions. My government earnestly hopes that you will not move to oust them from Pao Xieng. My government’s feeling is that they pose a—”

  Hoanh-Trac stopped him with a sharp, peremptory gesture. “I know what your government thinks. And what it hopes. And even what it plans, perhaps … Do you know a man named Lyman Beemis?” Damon shook his head. “Pity …

  “We do not like the Chinese,” he went on in the calm, implacable voice. “We do not like them within our borders. We Khotianese have been invaded from the north times without number. The Emperor Wu Ti conquered us at the beginning of your Christian era. We ousted him two centuries later, and Ma Yüan came down and put us under the yoke for nearly a thousand years.” He gave an exasperated laugh. “You had troops stationed on your soil for less than seven years—your own countrymen at that!—and you rose in revolt. You possess such a summary attitude about war, about international relations, you Americans. A republic not two centuries old, you have never gone to war for more than six years—and that was only once, your own war for independence—and you have never lost a war … though you have had a few rather uncomfortable scrapes. So brief! Of cours
e you seek the quick solution, the apocalyptic victory. Whereas we have been invaded by the Hindus, the Chinese, the Mongols and Chams and Khmers. And the French … And they always wanted something. Something of ours. And they took it, too.”

  He paused and looked directly at his guest. “And you, General Damon: what do you yourself want?”

  Damon set down his cup. Why was Khotianese tea always so bitter—? He clasped his hands together, fingers over knuckles. All these past days of hiking along the dark trails, over mountains, up the riverbeds over stones greasy with moisture and débris, like round, treacherous stairways for some agile fifteen-foot giant; the little green leeches dropping on your arms and neck from the branches as you swung by, like stealthy drops of water; the touch of a cigarette’s coal would dislodge them, but only if you located them, and then only after they’d sucked an unbelievable amount of blood swiftly and painlessly from your sweating body. On over the rickety, swaying bamboo bridges with their handrails of creepers, the streams roaring away thirty feet below. Across the paddies where the rice thrust upward in a furry, pale green stipple, over which the dawn light flung a shimmering mosaic of azure and emerald and marble dust … A wild goose chase: was it? He thought he had seen heavy jungle in Papua and Palamangao, but he’d seen nothing to match this. Here was jungle so high, so deep the sky itself did not exist; time itself hung in confusion and the only metronome was the occasional bird that shrieked his metallic two-note cry, hour after hour after hour … So vast. He had not encountered such distances since China—and in China you knew at least where you were: there you were above the land, moving on its broad brown earth, the high blue mountains. Here you were an insect among insects, sunk deep in the grasses, plodding nowhere …