A Dangerous Friend (3 page)

I must leave on Monday, he said.

So short, she said, her tone of voice again disapproving; perhaps he had confused Paris with Philadelphia. Will you be returning to Belgium?

I'm going to South Vietnam, he said.

Oh, my goodness, she said. Why?

That's where I'll be working. It's all arranged.

I can't see you in uniform, she said. Then she remembered that he had taken some kind of degree in military history or the history of modern Europe and did speak some French, though with an execrable accent, painful to listen to.

No, no, he said. It's civilian.

She said, I don't know anything about it. We have troops there now, don't we? There was discussion in the senior staff meeting last week, an argument I didn't follow. I don't know the geography. The politics are a mystery to me. Is it about oil? Monsieur Pelliard thought the Americans were crazy to get anywhere near Indochina. He thought the Germans should be given that opportunity, it was their sort of thing. He was quite emphatic. All the senior staff agreed with him.

The Europeans aren't in any position to lecture us, Sydney said.

They don't learn from their mistakes, she agreed, bending forward and looking at him closely as if there were something she had missed. Except bankers, she went on. And my bank took a bath when the French were involved out there. We lost millions. So we're cautious.

Understandably, he said.

You didn't say who you'll be working
for.
Is it government? You're not with the spooks, are you?

No, no, he said, laughing though he disapproved of the word "spooks," signaling as it did a lack of respect for honorable men doing dangerous work. I'll be in the countryside, administering foreign aid. Building schools, getting the rice to market. Economic development, building democratic institutions. When she looked at him doubtfully, he added, We call it nation-building. Such was the word from Dicky Rostok when Dicky had recruited him in New York. Nation-building was the velvet glove that complemented the army's iron fist, and everyone knew that the war would be won or lost by the caress of the glove. In the last analysis, as the President said, the Vietnamese had to fight their own war. They were good people who needed help, not only on the battlefield against the Communist enemy but against poverty, disease, and corruption. Such a simple thing as getting the rice to market or the smallpox vaccine to the clinic would prove decisive. A stable currency was worth a regiment of marines. This was what Ros had learned after a year in-country. An unimaginably complex society, the experts said. You could never learn it all, and in the beginning you had to take care not to learn the wrong things. So much misinformation, so widely broadcast. That was why they had set up the Llewellyn Group, a group separate from the aid bureaucracy already in place, with its own mission and chain of command and communications with Washington. Llewellyn Group was both inside and outside the apparatus. It's important work, he said to Missy. And we'll make it succeed.

Missy put away the coffee things while she half listened to Sydney talk on and on, something about duty and responsibility. Her sister had told her about the breakup, a loose, painful, squalid, careless business. Sydney was not cut out for marriage. In that respect, her sister had said, the apple had not fallen far from the tree. And Karla was worse; but that was another story. Still, Sydney looked well. She thought he had filled out some since she had seen him last, at Christmas when his marriage was falling apart, but probably that was the masculine thrill of wartime duty. They loved it so. They loved it because the women were watching but not nearby.

I don't know anything about it, Missy said again.

While she dozed he watched the countryside slide by through dusty windows, the fields and farmsteads monotonous and unremarkable, the villages somnolent in the afternoon. The fields were utterly empty, as if a great epidemic had carried off the durable peasantry, leaving only farm animals and buildings behind. Stands of trees blocked the horizon, though now and again he caught sight of a château on its hilltop. These pastoral scenes unfolded like pictures at an exhibition, but pictures that gave no hint of the life beneath the skin of the canvas. Sydney had never been to Europe, in fact had never traveled outside the United States. There was always so much to see at home, a whole continent. He had let one opportunity after another slip by and was determined to seize South Vietnam.

He had no idea what to expect. The books he had read were written by Americans, French, and English. The Vietnamese in them were elusive, rarely speaking, seen in silhouette. The terrain itself was no less fugitive, seen through Western eyes. He imagined it now, closed in and thick with heat, its agriculture not far removed from the Middle Ages. The fields would bristle with human life. For Romanesque churches, Buddhist temples; for fields of grain, fields of rice stalk-deep in stagnant water. In Indochina time would be measured on an ethereal scale, and still important in the general scheme of things. A herd of cows, motionless in a flat field, appeared for a moment and then vanished as the train leaned into a curve. Suddenly he was in a tunnel and the train's wheels squeaked to a halt.

Rostok had made his pitch to the senior staff of the Foundation, everyone gathered around a refectory table with pads and pencils before them, carafes of water on a tray in the center. Sydney was invited because he was the director's assistant and because he was younger than the others; he was the youngest man in the room by twenty years, though this was not immediately apparent because he wore the same long face as the others. He knew Rostok through mutual friends, often dining together, Rostok running the table like a college professor turned talk-show host. He was then posted to the U.S. mission to the U.N., an institution he called The Building. A year ago he had been recalled to Washington and dispatched to Vietnam. Now he was back in New York, scanning the faces that were ever alert to nuance, the sweat and glitter of the well-polished fact that led to the rosy scenario; Rostok was looking for accomplices.

He was eloquent. Rostok began in a pessimistic vein and only got more so as he went along, stressing the novelty and mystery of the effort. Americans had never interfered in this way, except for a few small-scale operations, the Philippines, Central America, Cuba twice, never on a national scale, never in-country, hand in glove with the elected government. That was on the civilian side. On the military side the only comparison was to the Indian wars of the century before and that analogy broke down quickly enough, for a dozen reasons, not least the tenacity, skill, and coherence of the Communist insurgency in Vietnam. The Indians had no ideology, no Lenin, no Marx, no Hitler, no Ho, only Tecumseh and the various holy spirits that had let them down at important moments. The American Indians led a filthy life and could not see the future before them. They did not believe Tecumseh's vision of an entente cordiale among all the tribes; unite and prosper. All they wanted was to preserve what they had, forgetting that time never reversed itself, never, no exceptions. And on a more practical level there was the terrain. Vietnam was thickly forested, the forests broken here and there by rice fields; and the rice fields were bordered by wiry hedgerows, ideal for ambush. And the allegiance of the peasants was in doubt, allowing the guerrillas a base of operations that rendered them invisible. They don't wear war bonnets. They don't carry bows and arrows.

Rostok paused for water, not a theatrical sip but one, two, three deep swallows, as if he were chugging beer. He smacked his lips and resumed, speaking of course without notes, moving his eyes to communicate with each member of the audience.

Along the spine of the Annamite Cordillera in South Vietnam the mountains were rugged and covered by triple-canopy jungle with ravines deep enough to conceal a regiment. He quoted from the great French sociologist Paul Mus. He quoted from Camus's
Myth of Sisyphus.
He quoted from General Vo Nguyen Giap's monograph on Dien Bien Phu, a document only recently available.
Our people's war of resistance was an all-out war waged by the whole nation ... a protracted war full of hardship but ... certainly victorious.
And as he looked out over the polished table at the fountain pens racing across the bone-white pads—the racing had begun with the words "novelty and mystery of the effort" and had not paused—he said quietly, But we are not French. We are not colonialists. We have no territorial ambitions. And if we do not hold in Vietnam, the dominoes will tumble from Danang south to Singapore.

Rostok wanted to give half a million dollars of the government's money to the Foundation for research into the psychology of the Vietnamese, independent research to ensure integrity, product the property of the government. Why was the Saigon administration unable to hold the allegiance of the people? The Vietnamese seemed unable to choose—and what was it about their anima that locked them in irons? The hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people were—terra incognita. Rostok gave an exaggerated shrug at the problem, mute acknowledgment that while solution was difficult, solution was also within grasp, given time and money and the sort of resources that the Foundation could bring to bear. We, too, require an all-out effort waged by the whole nation. He said then that what followed was classified; those who were taking notes must put their pens aside and agree to abide by the rules of deep background.

Rostok was a menacing figure, always disheveled. He gave the appearance of just having returned from some unspeakable bivouac, and of course his brain was stuffed with secrets, more secrets than it could comfortably hold, so it would not be surprising if one popped out from time to time, owing to inattention or simple forgetfulness. So the group assembled before him, many of them years older, quietly put down their pens and prepared to listen, though what had come before did not give them confidence.

He confided that the government had established a special group that was loosely tied to Embassy Saigon but not responsible to it. Llewellyn Group would report directly to the office of the secretary of defense, with a collateral brief from the office of the national security adviser in the White House. Obvious to everyone that the effort required a team outside the normal chain of command, not for intelligence or counter-insurgency—the CIA already had more people than the embassy, and its plate was full—but for research and rapid reaction when the usual channels broke down. The bridge that didn't get built, the medical team delayed, the market terrorized, the road cut—and the research to determine the effect on Vietnamese morale. Half a million dollars wasn't so much, and the knowledge it would bring would be worth that regiment hidden in the ravine. Public money without strings was essential for an effort of this kind. It ensured independence at a time when everyone had an ax to grind. In another sense it ensured the integrity of the process; let the facts fall where they may. Universities were already collaborating in the common effort. The nation was reaching the hour of maximum danger, Rostok concluded, quoting the late President.

And then, before the polite applause had passed away, he made this observation.

You have no idea how little we know.

Sydney and the director spent an hour with him afterward. Rostok allowed that counter-insurgency in all its aspects was a slovenly business, not congenial to the straightforward can-do American spirit. Vietnam might well be a bridge too far, a war that could not be won by the means to hand. But that did not mean that the cause was hopeless. It did not mean that the war was not worth fighting. In fact, quite the reverse. What if it were the model for the future, in the way that Antietam was the model for the infantry tactics of the world wars of this century? And if America failed to learn its lessons, well then, America would fall behind. We'll see what we are made of as a people and as a government. Nothing in the national life was more important, nothing would have a greater effect on the generations yet to come. No less important was the confidence of the government
in itself as
guardian of the Union. We need the collaboration of the private community, its expertise and good sense. We need the best men, men who are unafraid of paradox, men who are eager to understand our Asian Antietam, and master it. Then Rostok had a fresh thought.

Our situation is the opposite of the northern armies, who sought to bleed the South white and reduce it to poverty. What did Sheridan say? Enemy civilians should be left with "nothing but their eyes to weep with." And who did he say it to? Bismarck. And Bismarck listened. As we have done. We are in South Vietnam for the protection of innocent civilians, and that is why we need your support, Rostok said, and was not at all surprised when Sydney Parade enthusiastically backed him up. Time for the Foundation to become
engaged,
Syd said, not from the sidelines but from the front lines.

But the director declined. He found Rostok—intellectually incomplete.

Not our line of country, Mr. Rostok.

The government would be grateful, Rostok said.

That's not our line of country, either, the director said. He wondered momentarily exactly how grateful the government would be, and how it would make its pleasure known. But he thought he knew the answer to that, and on the spur of the moment decided to hedge. He offered Sydney instead. He offered a year's leave of absence if Sydney wanted to see for himself the...

Modern world, Rostok said.

And report back, the director said.

Sydney agreed at once, with an alacrity that caused the director to look up sharply, the expression on his face so dismayed that Sydney was quick to assure him that he was fit, much fitter than he looked, and would be quite safe in the war zone, where the dangers were exaggerated.

I meant, I thought you'd want to talk this over with your wife, the director explained with a pained smile.

I will, of course, Sydney said. He was embarrassed at his misapprehension. Karla will understand what all this is about. She'll get it right away. She's been through the mill herself.