Memorial Bridge (51 page)

"Yes," Sean said to Cass, "I saw it too."

"I wanted to ask you something. Can I?"

Sean simply looked at her, not answering. He had yet to fully admit to himself how demoralized he felt, how confused about the meaning of his own situation. He was surrounded by addled headmasters of his own now, and it was far from clear he was going to be able to change their minds. He thought of the great bronze robed figure of the thirteenth century's greatest mind, sitting on a cracked modern toilet. But nothing in him now thought the figure humorous in the slightest.

"The President said they're going to double the draft calls every month." As Cass lowered her coffee cup her hand shook, and when she placed it on the saucer the china rattled.

"More than double," Sean said quietly, almost to himself. "Seventeen thousand to thirty-five."

Then she asked a question some version of which parents all over America were asking but which, in all honesty and to his instant shame on hearing it, had yet to occur to Sean Dillon. "How will the increased draft affect Richard?"

Dillon's heart sank at the thought of his son in jeopardy, like those Air Cav rookies. His son, the football player at St. Anselm's; his son, Dillon's own football. He remembered running with the boy bundled inside his arm, Rickie squealing "Touchdown!" How they would pretend to be in the end zone then, and would sing together the Redskins fight song.

He forced himself to shrug. "Richard's still in college. He has another year."

"But then?"

"A lot can happen in a year."

"Could this war be over?"

"He won't be drafted, Cass. Once he has his degree, he's a shoo-in for OCS, if it comes to that."

Cass sat there, solemn and rigid, her eyes fixed unblinking on her husband.

"Has he said something to you? Is he worried about it?"

She shook her head. "It's me. I'm the one who's worried." She smiled then. "But that's my job, isn't it?"

More than half a year later, Dillon's airplane crossed over the lush Mekong Valley which formed the soft belly of the country, separating it in the south from Cambodia. The craft was, even if temporarily, his own C-54, outfitted as a command plane, with a communications center tying him to ISIC in Washington. The plane also featured a dining salon that doubled as a conference room, a main cabin with a dozen rows of standard passenger seats and, aft, a section of six individually curtained-off berths for Dillon and his senior staff. In this airplane Dillon, his chief of staff, his field detachment chief, the assistant director for special activities and the assistant director for plans and programs, all flag officers, had traveled thousands of miles. In the sealed-off, fabric-on-metal world of that stainless steel tube the infinite ambiguities of the war bureaucracy did not exist, for Dillon alone held power here, over his commodore, his colonels, his brigadier generals, and even over the rated fly-boys at the controls. When, for example, they had taken off from Bangkok that morning Dillon had given the navigator his course, directing them inland, despite procedure that required unarmed aircraft to circle south and come in on Tan Son Nhut from the sea. Instead, they were making a beeline over the most hotly contested terrain in the country. He felt his stomach lurch as the plane dropped at the point where he'd told the pilot to swoop down across the Delta wetlands,
overriding the air traffic controller if necessary with a claim of fuel-line problems. Now that Sean Dillon was finally here he was going to see as much of Vietnam as he could.

"Look at this, Mike." His gesture drew Packard over. Packard was the only one in civvies. His white suit had not stood up nearly as well as the military khaki the others wore, and now it was whipped-looking, his tie limp as a noodle, his shirt open above the wrinkled knot. On this trip his face always wore the shadow of his beard, as if the tropics made it grow too fast. His by now slovenly appearance was deceiving, though, because he was the one man on the plane with ready access to Dillon. There had been no need to make explicit the understanding according to which, from Andrews Air Force Base on, the others had sat at the far rear of the cabin, leaving the seats next to the director and those immediately behind him vacant. Packard's seat was in Dillon's row, but across the aisle. Periodically, at Dillon's gesture, he joined him, as now. He craned past the boss for the window.

"Jesus."

An unwavering column of intense black smoke rose into the still air from a neat angled cut in the green nubby carpet of the jungle canopy thousands of feet below. The fires that generated the smoke had peaked some time before.

"A box," Dillon said, referring to what they'd both heard described a hundred times in target briefings. A flight of six or eight B-52s in wingtip-to-wingtip formation unloads its bombs simultaneously on a "box," wiping out everything in a sharply defined rectangular area the size of downtown Washington, from the Mall to Dupont Circle, from the Capitol to Griffith Stadium.

"It seems like nowhere," Packard said. "What were they hitting?"

Dillon pointed to an area in the distance where the jungle thinned and ribbons of lights flashed along the silver dot-to-dot of canals and ditches branching out from the river proper. The rivulets fed paddies, the sure sign of settlement. "Chau Phu," he said. "So right below us must be the top of Ca Mau. There are NVA regulars positioned all through Ca Mau."

"It makes me nervous, Sean. I have to admit, looking down on the real thing. I've never seen a war."

Dillon looked over at his friend. "Admit it to me. Not to the others."

"You haven't either."

Without batting an eye, Dillon answered, "It doesn't make me nervous, Mike." He raised his hand to show Packard his palm. Dry. Once, his palms had become wet just in flying. He smiled. "You get to a certain age."

Packard looked out at the welt of cut jungle again. "It's like the slash of a lumber harvest. Look, there's another. An old one without smoke. And there's another."

The two men stared in silence as the plane went steadily lower. Soon other details of the terrain were distinguishable, so that more than the bombed swaths were evident. Along the banks of the river itself the earth was charred, having been stripped by defoliants and the flamethrowers from navy riverboats. The spikes of jungle vegetation, thickets of bamboo and leafy pole trees, shot up from the undifferentiated green. Dillon squinted down as if to look for the menace in the air, but saw only dikes, wet paddies and, once the jungle broke, carefully laid-out fields. He recognized the farming region above Can Tho.

The villages of the Mekong Delta came into view, shadowless in the hard sun, at once alien and familiar to Dillon. He knew the Delta from the air like this as well as he knew the carpet of the yard behind the house at Boiling, pebbles marking the path, Cass's flower beds and strawberries, the pleasantly turned soil, the square of Richard's sandbox—

The sandbox had been gone for years now, long replaced by a terraced brick barbecue. It startled Dillon to have called to mind the tidy rectangle in which his child had so loved to play. Dillon had often watched him, marveling from the second floor, and what he saw now was his son banging his toy shovel violently, an act of impatience that made Dillon want to scoop his son up, bind him in the thatch of his arms, stopping him and consoling him at the same time. He could not help for a second seeing his own father bringing his hammer down with like impatience on a recalcitrant machine. His father had been so unhappy with his dark little life in the South Side car barns, and it shocked Dillon to sense his son's capacity, despite the sunshine in which he lived, for an unhappiness of the same kind. In Dillon's memory such moments of his own acute longing and worry were often associated with Richard. They came unsummoned, a wound so secret that Dillon hardly understood it himself. His son was like a book that always fell open to the same page—a page, he admitted now, that he himself had bent back years before; his own father had bent it back before that.

He had studied hundreds of photos of the Delta terrain far more carefully than he'd ever looked down from the second floor on the yard behind his quarters, but now it struck him that the recon photos were always sepia. He had never seen the Delta colors, the dozen vivid greens as different from one another as red is from blue, the soured browns of bomb craters and scorched riverbanks and, everywhere here, the silver-blue blades of water sparkling in the dry air of the time without rain.

Packard interrupted him. "Here's the briefing book on Lodge." He handed over the thin black folder. "You probably know it all, but you may want to refresh yourself before the meeting. I'm not sure what it means for us, him running the embassy now instead of Taylor."

"I knew Taylor. I don't know Lodge."

"That's to the good, though. Right?" Packard smiled. "It means he won't know you. DIA wasn't in the lineup when he was here last. He won't know where we fit in."

"Where do we fit in, Mike?" Dillon asked the question absently, leafing through the pages. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., his schools, his clubs, his jobs, his family and friends, his political connections, his money—everything Sean Dillon was not. Yet Dillon had taken Lodge's reappointment to the ever more crucial post of ambassador as a measure of Johnson's growing desperation. The Brahmin's embodiment of everything the Texas-bred poor-boy President so patently wanted to be obscured the fact that Lodge's mistake during his first tour in Vietnam was his nation's mortal one. Sean Dillon knew that, more than anybody, Lodge had sponsored the coup d'état against Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Diem's assassination—the crude American attempt to take control of the Saigon government itself—was the miscalculation from which every subsequent miscalculation had derived. Three coups later the government of South Vietnam was proving to be America's black hole. Dillon was no spiritualist, but he was still a Catholic, and Diem's murder loomed for him as the original sin. Even at the time, when he had yet to assemble DIA's fully staffed Southeast Asia Task Force, the assassination had sent an ominous shiver up his spine. It had occurred on All Souls' Day, the day of the dead, and when Diem's corpse was found it was garbed bizarrely in the robes of a Catholic priest. Diem's blood had seemed to splash back on America itself, an almost biblical moral consequence, for three weeks after approving Lodge's plan to eliminate Diem, Kennedy was himself eliminated. The gyre down into the abyss
was set winding just as his successor, with the blood-spattered widow standing next to him, swore his oath.

"This bastard," Dillon said to himself, slapping the folder, "what is this bastard doing back here?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Lodge." Dillon tossed the briefing book back at Packard.

"He never committed to an appointment for you. It's the first thing we'll have to arrange. We've sent three cables. The Saigon embassy acknowledges, but they haven't picked up."

"That's good news, Mike. We don't need an appointment with Lodge."

"But that's our rationale."

Dillon's trip, now in its second week, was an exhausting tour of U.S. embassies in Asia, from Tokyo to Manila to Seoul to Taipei to Jakarta to Bangkok and only now to Saigon. From here he was scheduled to go on to Delhi, Teheran and Tel Aviv before heading home. The official purpose was formally to effect the assumption of DIA control over the military attachés who were assigned to the major embassies, a recently won extension of the agency's mandate. Such attachés had always been intelligence operatives, although they were known around embassies mainly for the flair their formal uniforms brought to parties. Naval attachés, air attachés and military attachés were now to be known as defense attachés, and as spies their orders would come from Dillon, not the individual branches in which they served. Dillon might anyway have decided to personally visit each embassy, meeting his new men and briefing the ambassadors, but he had been confirmed in his impulse when he realized such a trip would provide a cover for his journey to Vietnam. Vietnam was all he really wanted.

"Lodge can only cause me trouble, Mike. More than Taylor even, he'll be looking out for the company's interest against us. You know how CIA would like to keep us out of here, as much as those G-16s at State. I'm sure Lodge takes his cues from Hilsman and Bundy."

"But Christ, Sean, he's the ambassador. If you're not coming here to brief him, what are you doing here? How do you justify it?"

"We're covered because we sent the cables. We'll use the bureaucracy's rules against itself." Dillon smiled and shook his head. "It's like threading a mine field. Here's what we do." He ticked his fingers. "Don't take any further initiatives with Lodge. Fold the embassy attachés into a larger briefing with the DIA detachment at MACV. I'm here to see my men."

"Even if they don't know they're yours?"

"Arrange the session for this afternoon. I want it to take place before Westmoreland can stop me."

"But I'll have to do it through MacAuliff's office. You don't have line authority over DIA-MACV."

"Leave General MacAuliff out. He's supposed to be the link between us and MACV, but he's Westmoreland's man, pure and simple. I want this meeting, Mike, and I want it before Lodge or Westmoreland can stop it. DIA men, the collectors, the interrogators, the debriefers, are the sources of all our human intelligence on this war. They carry credentials with my signature. They may never have taken an order from me, but they know who I am and they know I wear three stars. That's what will count in the end. I outrank MacAuliff."

"You don't outrank Westmoreland. He'll be ripped when he finds out."

Dillon smiled. "In the seminary we used to have an expression: It's easier to get forgiveness after, than permission before. If I wanted to get MacAuliff's point of view, I could have stayed in Washington."

"You may wish you did."

"Just call the session when we get in, Mike. General MacAuliff and Westmoreland are busy men. We don't need to bother them."

"Westmoreland's another one, like Lodge."

"Another what?"