Trinity Fields (34 page)

In a hangar at the edge of the airstrip was an old high-wing monoplane whose identification markings had been stripped away so that it looked more like a private craft than a government plane. The officer said, —Got a dollar on you?

Kip went along with what he took to be a travesty, or like the first line of a joke. —You want a dollar from me, he said, playing straight man.

—I do. And I want you to sign this.

It was a scrip that transferred ownership of the airplane from the government to William Calder Jr. for the consideration of one dollar. The scrip seemed authentic.

—All right, said Kip, more unwilling than ever to request some explanation for such abnormalities. —Where do I sign?

His destination was Udorn, in Thailand, and he flew there the following evening, still in the dark about what to expect. He tried to empty himself of hope or presumption, knowing that whatever he encountered would then be free of useless comparisons. Instead, he worked on bundling together in his mind his experiences in South Vietnam, and began to fold them again and again just like he had his first combat frights (while folding, the word went from
frights
to
fights
to
fghts
to
fts
) until they were reduced to a very small wad, and once he felt he'd accomplished that, and was sure there were no stray moments that might return to stalk him down, he forced himself to bring that wad of experience out through his forehead into his fingers, where he clutched it and then tossed it out, just before crossing the Mekong, which divided Viet from Thai.

He landed at night, and was met at base ops by a lieutenant colonel. The deference displayed by his superior—not deference so much as brusque respect—disconcerted him, as he sat across from the man in an air-conditioned office on the second floor of a building in a remote part of the base. The officer, however respectful, was at first no more informative than anyone else had been. Kip began to believe that the men back in Can Thó who had inducted him into this secret society didn't in fact themselves know what the Steve Canyon program was.

—So you're going to be a Raven, the colonel said.

—That's what they tell me. Whatever a Raven is.

—Tomorrow morning I want you to report to the office—we got a place for you to stay tonight—and there we'll want you to surrender your dog tags, your uniform, ID card, all your personal belongings.

—Can you tell me where I'm going? he finally asked.

—Up-country.

—You mean China?

—I mean up-country.

—What happens with my airplane?

—What airplane?

—The one I flew over here, the one I own.

—You don't own any airplane, sir. You ferried a private aircraft over here is all. Forget about it. Now, we'll give you some money to get some new clothes, some jeans, shoes, that sort of thing. Get yourself a jacket of some sort, but low profile, and not a word to anybody. Take a few minutes, write your parents a letter and tell them you're on a special assignment, tell them not to worry. You'll be just fine.

If Kip's father were alive, and if he were here, how strong a sense of déjà vu would he have experienced hearing the lieutenant's instructions? Was he running away from or toward his childhood? He concluded that he was probably doing both, and that these questions had no value at this stage of the game. The directive to write a farewell letter of sorts begged several other questions, too. Given his continued ignorance of pertinent details, what could he betray even if he wanted to? Which he didn't. He said nothing, kept his possible riposte as cards firm to his chest. Treated with respect, he accorded respect as best he could in return.

The transport left early morning the day after and it wasn't until they landed at tiny Wattay airport where he was met by a civilian man in a jeep and taken in along the brown, lethargic upper reaches of the Mekong into Vientiane, the capital of Laos, to an American compound, that all the veils of intrigue would begin to lift—but not before one final conundrum was set forth.

Vientiane was a city more slumberous than the wide river that drifted along, mute and laggard, at its southern limit. Stupas and shacks and centuries-old wats with their swooping roofs and gold-leaf doors stood here and there, bicycles and motorcycle taxis called tuktuks moved in the streets. Girls walked arm in arm, in threes and fours, along Fa Ngum, the road along the river. A teenage boy sat in the shade of a doorway plucking the feathers off a lifeless duck and smoking his cigarette with dignity. An air of calm seemed to have settled with the dust in every corner. What was most conspicuous here was the absence of war, even any hint of war. It seemed on first impression a dreamy, pleasant, backward, uninspired place, steeped in a blend of French, Chinese, Thai, Lao. The city was neither prosperous nor populous. This was not Saigon.

Kip arrived at the address he was given in a deeper state of confusion than before. Vientiane was civilian in the extreme, at least upon its surface. It would take a long night with the modest, subtle whores in Les Rendezvous des Amis, a complete induction the morning after into the purgatory of the secret wars—which here were numerous and quite diverse and altogether unknown to those on the outside—as well as a wild flight the day after, with its unauthorized side trip over the Plain of Jars, to convince Kip that he hadn't made the mistake of going from a dull war to a duller nonwar. He need not have worried, as he would come to discover. Whether or not he knew it, Kip was about to find what he had always been looking for.

We stand, we walk a little. My stories have begun to twine into his if only because I had my war to fight, too. From a grassy flat in the chapel park I can see the church above us, and the dormer window over the sacristy glints and stirs the memory of a night I hadn't thought about for a good long time. Not the night when Kip and I crawled through that window on our way into the church and what we presumed would be a new life. I remember the darkness of the nave, leaping down into the candlelit sanctuary—but, as I say, that isn't the memory it has shaken loose now.

I see the window and am transported back to a young man among hundreds of other young people and we have just marched from a construction site in Morningside Park, where we'd gone to protest the university's plan to build a gymnasium on public property there, a gym that was to have lavish facilities for Columbia students and a separate, much smaller gym for Harlem community residents. Racism and the war were the two prominent issues of the day in the country, and we abhorred the implications of this project. We'd torn down a fence around the excavation site, one of us was arrested, and we marched back to the sundial on campus to figure out what next to do. The anger and spirit and fever had never been higher. I knew that this day something significant was going to happen. Whatever rules there were surely would be broken.

The university had a policy that prohibited indoor demonstrations. In the spirit of defiance we decided to take Hamilton Hall.

We were together an organic gesture, a tumult and turmoil inspired by what we believed was right. Idealism, rough élan, a spirit of tough good spread through us. It was our moment to seize. The SDS leadership walked side by side with the leaders of the Students' Afro-American Society, the SAS, and several hundred of us marched with them.

Events unfolded with a manic slowness at first. The dean of the college challenged us to leave, but was instead held hostage in his office well into the next day. In the middle of the night we splintered into two groups, the blacks asked us to leave Hamilton Hall, said Hamilton was theirs and would remain theirs until the university agreed to discontinue work on its racist gymnasium. They told us to do our own thing, take a building for Vietnam. The blacks had a problem with Vietnam, too, but they had this other problem to work with first, and we heard them, they were brothers, we were behind them.

We caucused. Eighteen hours we'd been at it and here we were with nothing to show for our trouble. What we decided to do was take Low Library. Not just Low, but the office of the president of the university. That was going to be ours before dawn broke.

When we advanced together in the darkness—it must have been five in the morning—up the steps in the quad, we hadn't an idea what would come of our action. We pried loose a red brick from the walkway, which were laid out like latillas, broke the window of the heavy door down at the southeast corner on the first floor of the building, and we were inside, our cries echoing through the vaulted marble corridors. Dim oil paintings of presidents and college dignitaries long since deposited into their tombs lined the hallways above our heads, the grave faces in the portraits staring down at us with inanimate horror as we streamed along. A frightened security guard was allowed to leave, but not before we informed him that this was the beginning of an all-out strike, that President Kirk could telephone and make himself aware of what were our objectives and demands if he so chose.

—He'll know the number, someone said.

The president's suite was located, as it is now, on the second-floor corner of the massive, ornate, colonnaded library. It faces out toward Dodge Hall, across gracious grounds of hedged walks and great plane trees. The suite was possessed of baronial detail, it emanated wealth—there was a Rembrandt on the wall—though I remember thinking how seedy some of the appointments in the office itself really were.

How we hated him. Hated what he stood for. We urinated in his wastebasket. We opened the humidor that was on his long desk, and with delight passed out his cigars, lit them up and smoked them.

—Not bad, someone said.

—Cuba libre, someone said.

We barricaded the door to the suite. We began rifling through his personal correspondence, and looked around in his file cabinets for documents that might incriminate him. What we didn't crumple we tore in half.

It was the beginning of a siege that would last a week. By the end of the day administrators were forced to order all the buildings on campus closed, but this didn't prevent seizures by some graduate students of Fayerweather Hall and later of Mathematics Hall. A group of counter-demonstrators took the old gymnasium and demanded that the administration do something to stop all this or they would take matters into their own hands.

Below our window, members of the faculty formed a human barricade to prevent the antiprotest forces from climbing the heavy black iron grates and entering our headquarters from the outside. Just beyond the faculty queue were the jocks, themselves shoulder to shoulder, their backs to us except to turn every so often and shout some imprecation up at where we sat on the window ledge, defiant and decided. The jocks lined up to keep any sympathizers from joining us. Beyond the jocks many people just milled, some heckling the jocks, some trying to toss food up to us—sandwiches, bananas—most doing nothing, only watching and waiting for something to happen. I knew that Jessica was out there somewhere in that farther crowd, and I can remember spending time looking out across what used to be the epitome of an Ivy League campus, with its stone plazas and polished white stone benches, marveling at what we had prompted.

During the night, strikers managed to sneak in and out of the building. The administration had shut off electricity and water in the hope of forcing us out, but they underestimated our tenacity. We slept on couches or on the floor. We weren't budging until our demands were met, among them that the university end its association with the Institute for Defense Analyses and that all work being conducted in Pupin Hall on the electronic battlefield cease. Our position was simple. It was black as night at new moon and white as frost at first light. If they wanted to have their university back, they would have to make just a few changes, reorganize it in such a way that its students could attend it without shame. Civilize it, acculturate it.

Rumors ran like light, faster than the sounds that carried them, it seemed. What we demanded was rejected. We demanded that every student who took part in the protest be granted amnesty. No, word came back. No amnesty. We demanded that the police not be allowed onto the campus, and that the leaders of the strike not be made into scapegoats. The answer was no.

On the sixth night I decided I had to slip out. Failure of nerve, concern that another arrest was going to ruin my chances of being admitted to the bar, exhaustion, worry about Jessica, there were a host of reasons behind the decision. Several of us ducked out under cover of darkness, even as others arrived. I walked past the chapel and over toward the law school, curious about the rumors that upward of a thousand police were gathering there.

The rumors were true. Wielding blackjacks and nightsticks, the cops thrashed their way through a phalanx of students sympathetic to the protest, bloodying noses in their progress toward justice. Once inside Low, they broke down the door to the occupied office and arrested all the strikers within. Elsewhere on campus, matters got even worse. Fire broke out on the sixth floor of Hamilton, then too in Fayerweather. Police swarmed through tunnels under the campus, emerging to arrest protesters in one building, and taking axes to break down the doors in Mathematics, where they discovered students chanting “Up against the wall, motherfuckers.” Students who had soaped the steps to prevent the cops from climbing them were now dragged, face down, out of classrooms and down those same marble stairs. Thousands had built barricades, thousands had torn them down.

I wandered, for days, from College Walk to South Lawn. I tried to get back into Low, but couldn't. I felt that I had let myself down, my principles. I thought of Kip—he was over there fighting as he believed, and here was the closest to warfare I would ever experience and somehow I had failed. Some three weeks after the strike had begun, I got what I'd been looking for. Standing on South Lawn with a number of others, heckling a group of officers, we were suddenly rushed by plainclothesmen who'd been hiding behind bushes at the perimeter of the lawn, such as little children playing games do, and though everyone around me scattered, I stood dead still and looked into the blue eyes of the one cop who had set his sights on me. He came, slowly it seemed, running. I kept thinking, Brice? Why aren't your feet moving? It was a dream, I was sure. And I remember that the look on his face, as he bore down, fifteen, ten, five feet in front of me, expressed the same thought. Why aren't you running?