Saigon (80 page)

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 Washington, 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 title 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 Washington, puffing on his cigar and smiling confidently at the camera until the credits had finished rolling. 

Scores of buses parked bumper to bumper 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 Washington, through the driving midnight hail and sleet of Friday, November 14, 1969, came a silent column of mourning Americans carrying guttering candles shielded inside little plastic drinking cups. They marched to the slow doleful beat of muffled 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 embassy. 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 assembled 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 analysts 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 pass a conversational remark about the weather or the landmarks they were passing, 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 passionate 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-class 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 Washington by road, rail and air were due to bring the demonstration to its climax with a rally around the Washington 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 butting across the windy Memorial Bridge on the first leg of their pilgrimage, shielding their guttering candles with their bodies as they went. Their four-mile trek took them along Constitution 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 hoarse 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 extinguishing 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 damned 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 embarrassment 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 Washington 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 attitude of crucifixion against the floodlit façade 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.”