Annapolis, page 74
As the call-up of reserves and the draft reached deeper into American homes, the resistance to this faraway adventure grew greater. And then came the Tet offensive. Americans and South Vietnamese had beaten back every attack, but the world had seen enemy infiltration into every corner of South Vietnam. A lot of Americans thought that they smelled a rat, and one of them seemed to be Beck Stafford, now a student at George Washington Law School.
She had greeted her husband at Dulles International wearing some kind of flowered peasant shirt, bell-bottoms cut just above the crack in her ass, and a ratty fatigue jacket that looked like something some GI had thrown away.
Jimmy had tried to hide his shock. But a lot had changed in six months. When they got to their Plymouth Duster, on the third level of the parking structure, he had even noticed a blue bumper sticker with a yellow daisy on it: “McCarthy for President.”
But before he could say anything she had slipped in behind the wheel and pushed the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour into the eight-track.
And he had said, “Your hair… it’s different.”
It was parted in the middle, long and straight, with an almost ethereal sheen.
“You like it?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“It’s magic.” Her fingers had slipped into the luxuriance of it and returned a moment later holding a badly rolled cigarette. His golden angel had fallen.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Come on, Admiral. Don’t be so straight. Take a toke.”
He might have been able to fight the marijuana, but if it was the path to what he had been dreaming of since he left San Diego… well… the parking level was deserted, and the Beatles sounded stoned in their Strawberry Fields, and what the hell…
He noticed no effect from the grass, except that it burned. But it sure loosened her up. Right there on the front seat of the car, with the jets roaring overhead, she had managed to twitch a leg out of those silly pants and straddle her husband in his dress khakis, then press her lips to his in the longest kiss of his life. There was no thought of protection. No thought of discovery. No thought of anything but their two hungry bodies fitting together as perfectly as a plug and a socket.
And when it was over, her lips still on his, he had begun to giggle.
“Pretty cool, isn’t it? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
“Yeah. Cool. But what I want to know is… is…”
She had pressed herself against him and he had started to respond again. “What is it you want to know?”
“Is Paul the Walrus… or the Eggman?”
“Coo-coo-coo-choo.” And she had slipped onto him again.
By the time they got back to the Patuxent, the excitement had worn off. It was clear that Beck was a very confused and frustrated young navy wife, not entirely certain that she wanted to be a navy wife. “So, what’s Operation Game Warden?” she asked.
“It’s my own command.”
His father nodded. “It’s the fastest track to promotion that a junior grade lieutenant can hope for.”
“Don’t be so worried about moving fast,” said Betty. “The navy’s a long career, just so long as you’re around to enjoy it.”
“But what the fu… What the heck is Operation Game Warden?” demanded Beck.
“It’s the navy’s program of supply interdiction in the Mekong delta,” said Jimmy.
“Four thousand square miles of mangrove swamps, mud flats, canals, and rice paddies. Few roads, fewer bridges. Home to five million of South Vietnam’s fifteen million people.” The captain rattled off the figures like a machine gun. “An absolute logistical nightmare.”
“Oh, I have those,” Beck said sarcastically. “Really far out, when I can remember them in the morning.”
That brought a glare from her father-in-law.
She turned to her husband. “So what kind of command do you get?”
“A PBR—fiberglass, thirty-one feet long, with a GM engine running two Jacuzzi water jets for propulsion, two fifty-cals forward, one at the stern, and a grenade launcher in the cockpit.”
“And you shoot all those things?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“At Vietnamese?”
And six months of pent-up fury and frustration exploded from Jimmy Stafford, all of it directed at the girl he had married. “Of course we shoot them. We shoot them at gooks, at dinks, at VC Communists who want to kill anybody in the country who doesn’t think like them. We shoot them at Charlie, because Charlie is shooting at us.”
And she just shook her head, as though the worlds that they inhabited had grown so far apart she could not imagine them ever coming together again.
“Uh… perhaps we should have dinner,” said Betty.
That night, in a televised speech, Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation by declining to run for a second term. The war had taken its most famous casualty. This happened about three hours after Jimmy Stafford realized that his marriage had been a mistake. Or perhaps the mistake was his choice of career.
Before he headed for California, Jimmy visited his great-aunt Katherine for the last time, but she barely knew him. He said good-bye to his parents. Then he and Beck drove to New York to visit his brother Willie, who was studying at N.Y.U. Law School.
Willie wore a flowered shirt, hair down to his collar, a drooping mustache, and bell-bottoms that made him look like some kind of new sailor. He said “man” a lot and told his brother he was planning to practice public interest law. “You know, defending tenants against greedy landlords, class action suits against greedy polluters, stuff like that.”
“Just thank God for that heart murmur,” said Jimmy, “or you’d be defending your ass.”
“I do, man. Every day.”
• • •
WITHIN A FEW months, Jimmy Stafford was back in that green, green land where, strangely, things were beginning to make more sense than they did at home. Martin Luther King shot dead with a high-powered rifle. Robert Kennedy taken out in a hotel passageway. Riots every night. College uprisings…
Beck had met him in San Francisco to say good-bye. They had stayed at the Fairmont, courtesy of his parents. A bouquet of flowers had been waiting for them in their room, with a note from Betty and Captain Tom: “The Fairmont has joyous memories for us. We hope it will have the same for you.”
At the Fairmont, they had smoked marijuana and screwed for three days straight. Sometimes Beck put in her diaphragm, sometimes she didn’t. Then she had flown east for the demonstrations at the Chicago convention. Jimmy had boarded a commercial flight in California, routed through Honolulu, to Saigon, with the San Francisco Chronicle on his lap.
A Dispatch from Chicago
by Jack Stafford
“The whole world’s watching.”
That’s what the demonstrators were chanting in the streets last night, as the Chicago police, who wear those funny checkers on their service caps, like they were glorified taxi drivers, acted the way no self-respecting cabbie ever would.
Last night those cops rioted, plain and simple, shooting tear gas like fireworks, beating kids who did no more than run away from them. They demonstrated an unprofessional rage that was frightening to behold, especially in a city with such big shoulders and so much muscle to put behind those nightsticks.
And tonight, inside the convention hall, Hubert Humpty Humphrey Dumpty, the saddest happy warrior of them all, will take the podium. While the nightstick-crazed horses and men of Mayor Richard Daley are doing their damnedest to push him off the wall, while they stamp on a few of the fundamental principles of democracy, like the right of free assembly, and while the dark cloud of LBJ hovers above, Humpty will accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for president.
This has to be some kind of booby prize in 1968. The victory cigar that blows up in your face. The blue ribbon pin that sticks into your chest and gives you blood poisoning.
I saw this country live through a depression. I covered the first year of World War II in the Pacific. But I’ll say this straight out. The last four months have filled me with more fear for my country’s future.…
That was where Jimmy Stafford stopped reading. He believed in the future.
And it was good that he did, because two months after his arrival in the Mekong delta, a letter came from Beck. It was not the Dear John letter he expected. It was joyous news instead. He was going to be a father.
He was ready, because by then he had earned himself the black beret of the riverine forces.
RUNG SAT SPECIAL Zone was an area fourteen miles south of Saigon that belonged hook, line, and sinker to the navy. The reason was simple. There were no roads for anybody else to do any fighting. Things here traveled by water. And it was the job of the river patrol boats to see that only friendly things did the traveling.
Each PBR team comprised two boats. A lieutenant commanded the lead boat and the unit; a chief petty officer commanded the second boat.
When Jimmy was introduced to his CPO, the name Horace Church did not register. Jimmy was more impressed by the size of the big black chief, the crisp salute, the steady gaze.
“I been on the river six months, Lieutenant. I know it good,” said Horace.
“I’ll count on you, Chief,” said Jimmy.
Horace Church smiled. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Six months down, six months to go, and not dead yet, sir. I hope to keep it that way.”
“Where you from, Church?”
“Annapolis, sir. Born and bred.”
“Annapolis. Are you any relation to… Hey, I know your brother.”
“Simpson. Yeah. Hardworkin’ man. Works in the nursin’ home by day, works in a transmission shop at night. Hopin’ to have a family.”
“What about you?”
“Sir?”
“Any family.”
“The navy, sir.”
“Me too. From way back.”
“My grandma tell me I got an ancestor sailed on the Essex a long time ago, ’fore they decided we weren’t good enough for anything but messmen.”
“Well, mister, it was my grandfather who recommended Dory Miller for the Navy Cross after Pearl Harbor,” Jimmy said proudly.
“That’s good, sir.” And a smile crossed the chief’s face. “Now who in the hell is Dory Miller?”
At the Academy, leadership seminars taught that the man to count on in a pinch was the chief petty officer, the navy’s equivalent of the top sergeant—tough, smart, practical, experienced. And Horace Church was the best, even if he didn’t know who Dory Miller was.
Privately, Horace offered advice and experience, always with a deferential sir at the end; publicly, he was the bridge between a green lieutenant and a veteran crew including two tough black guys from New York, both with the last name Washington (the big one called George, the little one Martha); a beefy black kid from Mississippi named Lester Thurlow, who always had his nose in a book; a pair of career navy engineers, Ben Bennett and Jack Little; a smart-ass from the North End of Boston, Frankie Donatello; and two farm boys named Johnson and Trager, who said they joined the navy to see the world.
In the first week, the TOC—Tactical Operations Center—gave the newcomer easy duty—two twelve-hour night shifts on the widest part of the Mekong, where the chance of VC ambush or river contact was small; then two day shifts stopping sampans heading for Saigon. In that week, Jimmy developed his operating patterns, got to know his crew, and looked forward to those cold beers awaiting him back at their base, a hamlet at the spot where the Long Tau River emptied into the Mekong.
Then he was expected to pull his weight.
Across the delta, PBRs under Game Warden were searching up to 100,000 small craft a month, and since there were only 120 PBRs, that came to over eight hundred stops per boat, per month, or twenty-seven a day.
In addition to the PBRs, the delta was covered by a hundred larger and more heavily armored PBFs, for Patrol Boat, Fast, and monitors, which looked like old Civil War vessels and were nicknamed Zippos, after the cigarette lighters, because they carried flamethrowers that could shoot a jet of gasoline a hundred yards.
And the logistical support for all these vessels was typically American.
In some places, five-hundred-foot tenders were anchored in the middle of the Mekong to become floating docks and secure barracks. Some units were based on barges protected by patrol rings on the bank. And some, like Jimmy’s unit, were based in hamlets that were considered secure. But nothing was truly secure in-country.
To improve security along the waterways, American planes had been spraying a chemical defoliant called Agent Orange, and that astonishingly green land looked, from the PBR, like a land in retreat. Now, along many of those rivers of living brown water, there was a dead strip of lighter brown vegetation, and in the distance, the green. Sometimes the middle band was not light brown but a charred black, after the Zippos came through and burned off the dead growth.
But Agent Orange had not denuded the landscape, not by a long shot. Most of the waterways were still lined with elephant grass, and mighty mangrove swamps still could be found in the Mekong delta. And the best security was still that PBR.
It had a covering called a T-top over the cockpit, to keep the skipper out of the sun, and it could turn, at full speed, in a thirty-foot circle, one second heading upstream, the next going down. This feature came in handy when an ambush erupted on two sides of a river at once, although sometimes nothing helped in a firefight but firepower, as an event in the third month proved.
THEY HAD FOLLOWED an oversized sampan into a canal that was only about twenty yards wide, with nothing but tall elephant grass on either bank.
Jimmy thought it was running pretty low in the water to be carrying nothing but baskets of fish, so he came up alongside and told the oarsmen at the stern to stop. Horace Church stayed fifty yards behind in the covering boat.
A family was running the sampan—an old grandfather, his wife, his son, and two rather pretty granddaughters.
The grandfather smiled at them and gestured Jimmy aboard.
On the radio, Horace told Jimmy, “Bum setup, lieutenant. Be careful.”
And Horace was right. As soon as Jimmy Stafford had one leg aboard the sampan, both banks erupted with machine-gun and rocket fire.
An explosion on the sampan blew a little girl off the stern and knocked Jimmy back onto the PBR. The sampan was protecting his boat from the right bank, so he shouted, “Left bank!”
And his men knew exactly what to do.
Lester Thurlow swung the fifty-caliber machine guns and started mowing down the tall grass. Frankie Donatello launched a belt of thirty-six grenades. Johnson drilled fifty-caliber fire from the rear of the boat. Ben Bennett took the M60, while Horace Church and his men sprayed the right bank.
And in the midst of it all, Jimmy saw the old man pull the pin on a grenade.
Yes. Now throw it at those VC sons of bitches! Fight back, old man!
But… the old son of a bitch was turning to drop the grenade onto the PBR.
Jesus!
Jimmy hesitated an instant, but that was all. He turned his M16 on the old man and blasted him backward, into his own boat.
There was the muffled crump of a grenade exploding in the sampan, and then it was over: VC driven off; one family of weapons smugglers wiped out; engineer Jack Little nicked in the buttocks and furious at Jimmy Stafford for leading them into an ambush.
The encounter left Jimmy shaken for days, because in a land of death, these were the first people he had killed.
But Horace Church led him on the first step toward the six-month river religion, so called because it never took more than six months to get it, and then you had to practice it for just six months more.
“You did good in that firefight, sir,” said Horace the night after it happened, “but there’s times when it’s best to just let ’em go.”
“We’re supposed to interdict. And I was right. That boat was carrying AK47s.”
“There’s a lot of right guys out here who’s dead. We supposed to get home alive, sir. And you got more to live for than most, with that little baby on the way and all. You see a sampan headin’ up a narrow canal like that, let the motherfucker go. Nobody won’t know any different.”
iv
Meeting Bob Hope
Horace Church gave good advice; but after three months of interdiction, all Jimmy could see when he drifted off to sleep was that old man pulling the pin on his grenade. It seemed now that every little boat looked suspicious; every Vietnamese smile seemed false; and the green, green land looked browner every day.
So why not interdict their supplies at the source? Stop the infection before it spread. Mine Haiphong and dare the Russians to do something.
Damn all spineless politicians.
Jimmy’s father had always said, “When all else fails, serve with honor.” Horace Church now said, “When all else fails, get home alive.”
And the picture Jimmy now carried inside his helmet, of Beck with her expanding belly, caused him to hear Horace’s advice more clearly than his father’s.
Why die for some spineless politician when that little child was waiting at home, along with a wife who liked having sex with him and might love him after all?
Then one afternoon they received orders to report to a base some twenty miles south of their usual patrol area. Lieutenant Jimmy Stafford’s unit had been requested as an insertion force by a team of navy SEALs.
“Sheeyut,” said Horace Church when he saw the order.
“What?”
“This SEAL commander. He got a bad rep. One crazy motherfucker. They call him Bob Hope.”
“Bob Hope? Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Then Jimmy looked at the name and laughed. He knew Bob Hope.
THEY WENT SOUTH, cutting through canals in Vinh Long province, and came into the Hau Giang near Can Tho.
The SEAL barge looked like a big slab of rust baking in the sun. PBFs and little STABs (SEAL Team Assault Boats) were moored all around the edges. Two Sea Wolves, modified Huey helicopter gunships, sat on the deck, and right in the middle were four Quonset huts. From one of them, someone was piping some very serious rock and roll onto the PA. It sounded like something from Wheels of Fire. Eric Clapton going crazy on “Crossroads.”
