Wag the Dog (38 page)

For some people Phoenix was a lot of fun. This was tropical Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Dressing up in native garb, eating indigenous foods, setting up ambushes, sneaking into villages at night to kill silently, committing bizarre yet colorful acts like hammering custom-made calling cards into the third eye of their victims and cutting out their livers because you can't get into Buddhist heaven without one. Actually, it was better than the Lawrence scenario, especially for heterosexuals—instead of veiled females covered in layers of robes, there were the accommodating girls of Indochina in their
bao dais;
instead of eating goat bits and rice with their fingers, these western warriors in mufti had steak and ice cream from the States or Vietnamese cuisine which, combining the traditions of France and Southeast Asia, is among the most enticing in the world; there was no prohibition of alcohol; the drugs were of superb quality; and to be an American was to be very rich.
⁸⁴

With all this—the cowboys, the profiteering, the moral corruption of participating in torture and assassination—the truly strange thing was that Phoenix worked. It hurt the Viet Cong very badly. Combined with their losses in the Tet offensive, it crippled them to a degree from which they never recovered.
⁸⁵

Taylor brought in two men to intercept Kitty. They were waiting outside her house. They knew what time she was supposed to meet Joe Broz and how long the drive took, so they knew approximately when she was expected to leave. They had photos of her for identification purposes. She was very attractive in the photos, smiling, bright-eyed, voluptuous. Both of the watchers were graduates of Phoenix. Their names were Charles “Chaz” Otis and Christian “Bo” Perkins. There are a lot of ways to describe both of them, but bottom-line and the simplest is to say that Bo was a sadist and Chaz was a rapist.

 

 

 

⁸⁰
Of course, the VC can say
“He did it to me first—I only hit him back.”
And that's true too. State terror—a concept discussed at length in
The Terrorism Industry
by Herman and Sullivan and in the works of Noam Chomsky—can be, and frequently is, more murderous and less discriminating than any guerrilla group. Certainly, Diem and the imperialist French before him ruled by force, not consent, which is to say
through terror.

⁸¹
Oddly enough, the U.S. failed to make very good use of enemy atrocity stories in the Vietnam war. This was partly deliberate. Johnson did not want to whip the American people into a war frenzy. Later the Nixon administration did push the atrocity line, at least a little, but only about the treatment of our own POWs.

⁸²
. . . one form of psychological pressure on the guerrillas which the Americans do not advertise is the PRU. The PRU work on the theory of giving back what the Viet Cong deals out—assassination and butchery. Accordingly, a Viet Cong unit on occasion will find the disemboweled remains of its fellows among a well trod canal bank path, an effective message to guerrillas and to non-committed Vietnamese that two can play the same bloody game.” (Chalmers Roberts,
Washington Post
, 2/18/67)

⁸³
“By analogy,” said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, “if the Union had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the Mayor of Macon, Georgia.” (The Phoenix Program)

“The Phoenix operation aroused an outcry from American antiwar activists, who labeled it ‘mass murder.' But several Americans involved described it instead as a program riddled with inefficiency, corruption and abuse.” (Stanley Karnow,
Vietnam: A History
[Viking, 1983])

⁸⁴
“The CIA people were the worst. I was appalled at the kind of people the CIA had out in the provinces . . . these guys loved to ride through the streets and down the country roads in their Jeeps with all manner of weapons strapped to them, gun belts and helmets and all of it. They had lots of booze, lots of women, the best furniture, and the nicest places to live. They had their own private airline, Air America, to take them anywhere they wanted to go on a moment's notice. They played the Terry and the Pirates game, swashbuckling, lots of bravado. Some killing, too. They were after the VCI, the Viet Cong infrastructure. This is where you get your assassination squad.” (Robert Boettcher quoted in Harry Maurer,
Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975: An Oral History
[Henry Holt, 1990]).

⁸⁵
In 1969 according to the wonderfully precise statistics released by the American mission in Saigon, 19,534 Viet Cong organizers, propagandists, tax collectors, and the like were listed as having been neutralized—6,187 of them killed.” (
Vietnam: A History
) Karnow was at first very skeptical of these numbers and “the claim, advanced by William Colby . . . that the program . . . eliminated 60,000 authentic Viet Cong agents.” After the war, however, Viet Cong and NVA sources confirmed to Karnow that Phoenix had hurt them very severely.

Obviously, they won anyway. But they did so with North Vietnamese forces, mostly regulars, and without the local guerrilla forces.

WWII-2-V,
BEAGLE WROTE
it down. He could read it, but to anyone else it looked like
scribble-II-
√. That was not a marquee title—it was a working title, a project name. Other titles starting running through his head:

He wrote them down under
scribble-II-
√, but even as he did so, he realized that he wouldn't find a final title until he actually picked who we were going to have a war with.

Where? What war?

There was no shortage of wars around the world. They were going on all over the place all the time. Should he tap into something ongoing? Or start his own. He knew there was a list somewhere. He swung over to the workstation in the corner. It was an alternate way to tap into the Fujitsu and easier for print-based information. He typed in
“War, Current.”
An alphabetical list began to scroll up the screen.

He hadn't stopped the videos. When he looked up, by fate or coincidence, there, obviously misfiled, was Rommel. America's favorite Nazi. Why did we like him so? Desert warfare? It was hot, but hot and dry is OK. It's the wet with the hot that makes for sex and disease. Tanks? Machines do the killing and the goal is to kill machines.

It was time to check with that parallel universe: reality. Reality said yes. The desert was the best place for armored warfare, and it was the one place where air power was really decisive. The documentary series
The World at War
had been very clear about that.

That was it then.
WWII-2-V
would be a desert war—hot and dry, air power and tanks.

Oh! He had it! What a thought! What an image. He started pushing buttons on the console—he was sure of the title—
Bombardier.
It's 1943. Pat O'Brien is trying to show why Americans should bomb people from way high up. As opposed to dive bombing. To prove his thesis he stages a demonstration and literally drops a bomb into a barrel from twenty thousand feet. Later one of the bombardier candidates at bombardier school is freezing up over the target. “When I look at the target, I see people. Women and children. Those letters . . .” They're from his mom. “She says I'm making myself into a murderer.” But the chaplain (not Pat O'Brien—he's the head bombardier this time) explains: “The enemy's targets are everywhere. But yours are clear and confined. Not women and children. . . . That's why the American bombardiers are trained to hit the target.” The boy believes. His conscience is clear. He can go on to drop bombs. Which he does. In the climactic scene they fly over a Jap munitions factory.

 

CREWMAN:
Put one in the smokestack.

BOMBARDIER:
Which one?

CREWMAN:
The center one.

BOMBARDIER:
That's easy.

Beagle knew he was going to use that. He didn't know where he was going to find a smokestack in the desert, but he was going to use that scene. Our war was going to be so surgical, we would drop our bombs right down the enemy smokestack. Never touch woman nor child nor noncombatant of any kind.

It brought him back to the big problem. Who would attack America? Even an American outpost. Didn't we have Falkland Island-type places? Puerto Rico? The Virgin Islands? Guam? One of the Pacific Islands? It was pitiful. Nobody was going to attack America.

Maybe that wasn't necessary. It was going to be a remake of World War II. He knew that. What if—what if, instead of appeasing Hitler, we'd stood up to him early. Hitler invades Poland. Maybe we've learned from the Second World War and
we do it better this time.
We stand up to him when he invades Poland. That was great. Nobody has to attack the United States. We just have to find a Hitler and have him invade Poland.

Was that doable? Yes. He thought so. There were lots of Hitlers around and lots of Polands.

Was that enough? Was that it? Yes.

Beagle rose and stretched. He walked out of the control room, feeling immensely satisfied with himself. Without being conscious of it, he swaggered—it was a walk familiar to anyone who had watched classic Westerns—he swaggered just like big John Wayne.

Agnes Przyszewski hugged her mom. Even though Agnes had been raised on television, where if someone lost a job or quit their job they always had a new and better job by the time the thirty sitcom minutes were over, it had gradually penetrated that what her mother had done, and was doing, was a remarkable gesture of support. It was bringing mother and daughter closer than they had been for years.

They picked out clothes together for Kitty's upcoming interview with Joe Broz. “I'm not going to take the job,” Kitty said, “unless it means I can do something for you.” When Kitty stood in front of the bathroom mirror and started to do her hair, Agnes offered to brush it for her, something she had loved to do as a little girl but hadn't done since she was seven. It was all Kitty could do not to cry.

Chaz and Bo were about half a block away. The car they sat in was stolen, as were the plates, acquired separately at long-term parking at LAX. They had decided to take the Przyszewski woman right when she reached her car, where it was parked out on the street. That was the quickest, cleanest way. Once someone is in a car, stopping them can be very complicated, and, once stopped, it can be difficult to get them out.