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I Am the River Page 6


  “Are we going to talk about winning this thing?”

  Chapel wasn’t even sure he said this out loud, because he’d been saying it inside his head for months, and probably years. But with the laughter silenced, and every shiny face at the table turned toward him, he knew it had finally passed his lips.

  “What do you think we’ve been doing here the past three days?” A rear admiral spoke up. Chapel knew him a little bit. A decent guy, but severely lacking as a strategist. All of these men knew about fighting, and some of them knew about killing, but very few of them knew fuck-all about the delicate dance of war.

  “You mean aside from grab-assing?” Chapel said.

  There was a silence. Rank and pedigree narrowed eyes and raised noses. Chapel didn’t care. He moved between the ranks, the military branches, like Fred Astaire stepping between raindrops. He didn’t have much time for any of them aside from using them as rooks and bishops while lying in the cut like a queen.

  “Yeah, aside from the grab-assing,” the brigadier general said.

  “Okay, aside from that, you’ve spent the last three days missing the goddamn point.”

  An Air Force general sighed, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “What the fuck is he doing here, anyway?”

  “You know what he’s doing here,” The brigadier general didn’t need to drop the names Bill Lair and Ted Shackley, or mention Operation Momentum and the Raven Forward Air Controllers. Operation Palace Dog. Chapel was deep in with it all, and these secret operations in the Laotian wilderness were essential to fighting and killing the North Vietnamese in large numbers well away from established boundaries—and complicating strictures—of war.

  “No, my question is why is he here?”

  “You know the answer to that, too.”

  The man shook his head and brought his glass to his mouth like a pacifier. “Goddamn spooks.”

  Chapel smiled. Many of his colleagues hated that term. “Spooks.” “Spooky.” “The Spook Factory.” Chapel loved it, because he knew what the power of that term meant. He knew what fear could do that a million bombs and a billion bullets never could. You terrify a man when the blood gets up, you don’t have to break his nose, and risk breaking your own hand. A clean victory. Everyone wins when fear does the work.

  “Okay, Chapel, you got all the answers.” The brigadier general sat back in his chair, letting his middle-age paunch breathe a little. “What point are we missing?”

  “How to end this war.”

  “How to win this war, you mean.” Air Force again. They never could keep their goddamn mouths shut. First to talk, first to run to their flying machines and skedaddle the fuck out of Dodge.

  “No one wins wars,” Chapel said, not meaning it to sound so melodramatic, because he wasn’t that kind of guy. Not usually, but these days he wasn’t so sure anymore. “No one that matters.”

  “Okay, semantics, but I ain’t playing. How do we win this war?”

  “You win the war by winning the war. You don’t win the war by merely fighting the war.”

  “Is he drunk?” Another USAF. They tended to stick together, Chapel mused. “I haven’t seen him drink much, but is he drunk?”

  “Nah, he always talks like that,” the Brigadier General said.

  The man got to his feet. “Jesus H Christ. I’m taking a squirt.”

  “No, you’ll want to stay for this, General. I mean, if you want to end the war.”

  “We ain’t here to end any war. We’re here to win it, or nothing.”

  “You have the first part right. You’re not here to win this war. You’re here to fight it, yes. You’ve shown the willingness to go all in on fighting it—well, mostly in—earning your paycheck, giving your job meaning, and your orders the weight of history being written with each signature. But winning it? What would be the point? What would all of you do if there was no war to fight?”

  “You’re talking like an asshole.”

  “He’s talking like a longhair.”

  “Does longhair mean faggot?”

  Chapel stared at the man, making a mental map of each lethal entry point that would kill him with a deftly applied salad fork.

  “What do you suggest, Augie?” asked the brigadier general.

  He was a good guy. Brave in battle. Thoughtful behind a desk. Always measured. Unfortunately, one is judged by the company they keep, and in this case…

  “We make them not want to fight.”

  “We talking leaflets here? Leaflets again? Spook radio? A game of telephone?”

  Snorts from the men.

  “How would we do this?” The brigadier general hadn’t taken his eyes off of Chapel. He knew him well enough to know when he was just spitballing and when he was bloodhounding.

  “What do you think we’re doing?” a new voice interrupted. Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps. A real hard ass who wasn’t good at politics, but played it anyway because he was too old to fight and it sure beat golf. “We’ll killing them by the truckload every single goddamn day. Hell, we greased 75,000 the Easter Offensive, in case you haven’t heard out in that campsite of yours.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard. I’ve heard a lot. Seen a lot, too. More than you probably know. You’re killing them. Yes, indeedy and you betcha. Killing a lot of them, although not as many as you might think, what with the game of telephone that takes place for confirmed and probables. But we are killing a lot. Sure enough. Look at Laos, where all of this started anyway. We’re on track to drop two million pounds of ordnance by the end of next year. A half a million sorties, gentlemen. A half a goddamn million. We’ve dropped more bombs on Laotian real estate per capita than any other nation in the history of this planet, and the Pathet Lao are still running free, hosting a VC boom-boom party and enough resupply lines along the Ho Chi Minh to arm up Charlie until the year 2000. We literally cannot drop more bombs and kill any more people than we already are, and where has it gotten us?”

  “We ain’t done shit in Laos,” the assistant commandant said.

  Most of the table chuckled, raised eyebrows and exchanged glances, except for the old marine and Chapel.

  “You’re not in front of a microphone, sir. We all know the score here.”

  “Do we?” he snorted. “Do we all know the score, because it seems to me that you’re looking at the wrong fucking scoreboard.”

  “Scoreboards lie. Stat sheets lie. I’m looking at the play on the field.”

  “Then what’s the problem? You losing your spine?”

  Marines hated spooks most of all. First in, last to leave didn’t have much time for those who skulked in the shadows. Chapel expected it, but the dig at his bravery did raise his normally rock-solid heart rate a few beats. Still, he kept his voice even and unchanged when he continued. “I have no problem with killing men, killing people. I’ve done it plenty, from miles away, and just a few inches. I know you have too.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “It’s unpleasant, isn’t it?”

  “Depends.”

  “Yes, it always depends. That great rolling wave of ethical morality.”

  “Augie.”

  Chapel turned to the brigadier general.

  “How do we make them not want to fight?” he asked.

  “We scare them.”

  “Pardon?”

  “We scare them.” More chuckles from the table, draining away the tension in the air and rebuilding every defensive bunker each man brought to the officer’s club that day. Some outright laughed, checking out of the conversation. Chapel was used to this, too, so he pressed on. “Not with cluster bombs. Not with dead bodies, or even atrocities. We’ve done all that, and what has it gotten us? No, we go deeper. We get into the core of each man, woman, and child fighting for the Communist cause, and we scare the living daylights out of them.”

  The brigadier general was still listening, as was the old marine.

  “You can’t kill an idea. You can’t kill a person enough to change their mind.”

/>   “Worked on the Germans,” the marine said.

  “And the Japanese,” the brigadier general said, his eyes following their waiter, who couldn’t hide his glance at the table as he walked past.

  “That was different. They were fighting for a country, the idea of a country ruled by a supreme leader that offed himself in one case and was castrated by two mushroom clouds in the second. It was all gone, the dream was over, the supremacy was a sham, the armies were decimated, so they gave up. Now out there,” Chapel pointed to the southwest, not at the god awful wallpaper, “in Vietnam, fed by the surrounding regions of sympathetic support, they’re fighting for an idea. We’ll never take their country, seize their land. We’re not here for that. Don’t have the capability, nor the desire, and they know this. We want to break them, shatter their will, not colonize and exploit.”

  A few of the brass had excused themselves, but a few had stayed, and they weren’t laughing anymore.

  “They own the countryside,” Chapel continued, “and always will, so they’re fighting and willing to die for an idea, a belief that approaches the religious. This is just another stage in their drawn-out independence day, from the French, from an aristocracy and government in bed with every new-style colonizer that doesn’t give a good goddamn about the rice farmer stepping through buffalo shit in the Mekong Delta. We’ll never bomb or shoot that out of them. We’ll have to kill every single North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and ICP sympathizer in the country. The British couldn’t do it to us, so why do we think we can with them?”

  “Give us enough time,” the marine said, “and we will.”

  “No, you won’t. You can’t. It’s impossible. So the war will never be won, and because of that, without us declaring defeat, it’ll never end. We’ll be throwing our boys into the meat grinder from now until the Rapture.”

  “The United States doesn’t lose wars,” said a new voice, an army four star.

  “It does now. It is every day. Don’t believe what you read in the papers. I know you have better intel than that. We’re losing this war, and allowing it to happen.”

  “That sounds real close to treason,” the army general said.

  Chapel jabbed his finger into the table, his blood up. “I love my country. I’d die for my country and I’ll probably get the chance. I love it so much that I don’t want to see it lose any more of its sons on a war that can’t be won, and won’t be won, not the way we’re now doing it. We need to rethink the whole thing, from the top down. Go asymmetrical, fight sideways and upside down, just like they do, but do it our way. Take our tactics from the secret war and institute them country-wide. Get weird, dig down into the myths and gods and spirit realm and fuck with their heads, because we sure as hell aren’t fucking with their hearts. It’s the only way we win.”

  There was silence, stunned and otherwise.

  “I’m talking a piss.” The four star got up from the table so abruptly that his chair fell backward onto the floor. “Oh,” he added over his shoulder. “And fuck you, Chapel.”

  The rest of the group was glaring at him, disgust and something worse breaking through the blear of bloodshot eyes, except for the assistant commandant and the brigadier general.

  “Major, I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “You haven’t even heard my idea.”

  The brigadier general got to his feet and put his hand on Chapel’s shoulder. It was friendly, but had a little extra heat in the grip. “We’ve heard enough ideas for one day.”

  Chapel looked at each face in turn of those who remained at the table. These were the men tasked with managing this war. Not fighting it like the Vikings fought or the Trojans fought or the Zulus fought or the Lakota fought or the Army of North Vietnam fought, but managing it, and they couldn’t even call it what it was, let alone win the goddamn thing. Either all-in, by whatever means, or go the fuck home. No one at this table was all-in anything except their third bottle of Johnnie Walker and fifth trip to the bathroom. It was a travesty. It was an abomination, every bit as much as that fucking Martinique wallpaper. The stand-in jungle for the stand-in leadership, starting with Nixon and Westmoreland and traveling on down, like shit dropped on a dusty red hillside.

  He moved his gaze back to the wallpaper, where the four star was talking to an aide, gesturing in his direction.

  Chapel dropped his white handkerchief onto his uneaten plate of food and rose from his seat. “Listen up, Little Foxes. There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, and other people who just stand around and watch them do it.”

  He walked out of the officers’ club, disappearing into the shadows like the spook he was and would always be. Not one pair of eyes watched him go.

  12. Poison in the Hangar

  Chapel strode across the tarmac, frustrated, furious, cursing the bloodline of each red face at that table in four different languages. Sometimes English just didn’t take you to the right place.

  A blaring horn stopped him short, saving him from walking nose-first into a friendly-fire death under the wheels of a convoy. Chapel’s maledictions were drowned out by the chug of engines as transport trucks rumbled by, beds full of barrels stamped MONSANTO and painted with a bright orange band, the agrichemical razor blade sent from a factory in Grand Island, Nebraska, to shave off the hiding spots of the entire North Vietnamese Army and any other creature that dared shrug at the national anthem. They’d been dumping this stuff on the country for years, and they’d keep right on until the entire subcontinent was a desolate wasteland of mud and sticks. And they still wouldn’t have won the war, which would just go deeper underground.

  Chapel watched the last truck disappear into a hangar, and the door shut behind it. He stood that way for a long time, taking measure of the building and what was housed inside it. So many barrels. Enough to last a lifetime.

  The rage that had been playing with the lines on his face altered, shifting into the more familiar sketches of grim determination, lit by the wonder of possibility that forever played in those shiny gray eyes.

  Chapel began to walk again, this time almost jogging, formulating a flow chart of every favor owed to him in every branch of the military and intelligence service from Da Nang to DC. His loose pockets were filled with chits that he’d cash in at a dozen tellers. Nothing was out of reach if you knew who to ask, and how. Thirty years of bootlegging built up quite the black book.

  By the time he reached his chartered Beechcraft, the formula was worked out. Chapel was going to end this war.

  13. The Nightmare Factory

  The inside of the bunker was surprisingly spacious and dry, even comfortable, in the minimalist style of a monastery. The floor was lower than the outside ground, carved out of the stone and squared off in the corners. The furniture was functional but fine, showing strength in complement to taste. A sturdy mahogany table was littered with maps, data sheets, various odd pieces of equipment, and books on Vietnamese history, folklore, and religion. Oil lanterns burned, which cast everything in a warm yellow glow. The room looked more like long-term living quarters for an overly organized eccentric than a temporary field office for the U.S. military.

  Chapel stood behind the table and regarded each man in turn, looking them up and down and lingering on their faces, probing their eyes. “It’s good to see you all at last, in the flesh.”

  The men glanced at each other. Everyone was at a loss for words.

  “My name is Augustus Cornwallis Chapel, but everyone in the outside world calls me Augie. But we aren’t in the outside world, are we? Pretty goddamn far from it, so you can call me Chapel. My rank isn’t important. Hasn’t been important for a long time. So Chapel it is. The man behind me to my right—” He cocked his head in that direction to a tall, lean man wearing headphones adjusting the controls of a reel-to-reel playback device mounted on a wheeled cart. “—is Morganfield.” Morganfield nodded to the men as Chapel continued. “That’s not his real name, so don’t bother looking it up when you get ba
ck to Boise or Des Moines, because it doesn’t exist. I did this for his protection, but I am most definitely Augustus Cornwallis Chapel, because I need no protection.” He gestured to the chairs arranged around the table. “Now that introductions are out of the way, please, have a seat.”

  The men sat down, joined by Morganfield. Chapel remained standing.

  “I’m sure you all have many questions,” Chapel said, “and I will answer all of them in due course. But first, please allow me to explain why you are all here.”

  “Sir?”

  “Specialist Broussard.”

  “I don’t mean to interrupt, but…” Broussard hesitated, not sure if he should continue.

  “Speak freely.”

  “Well, sir, what’s been bothering me since I arrived at base camp is, well, this team doesn’t make sense.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, I mean, this isn’t your normal fire team, is it? Render’s a Marine. Darby, too. McNulty, Medrano, and I are Army. I don’t know who or what Morganfield is, but he looks like Air Force.”

  The men laughed. Chapel smiled and crossed his arms. “He is most definitely not Air Force.”

  “So, how did we all get here? Together, I mean.”

  “I chose you. All of you.” Chapel’s eyes moved across each of the men. “You were selected.”

  “But why?”

  A smile played across Chapel’s lips. A grunt who needed to know why raised the dander of any officer, but Chapel also appreciated a soldier who took the risk to question, to judge motives, looking for truth and suspicious of abuse of power. He was the same sort of grunt, way back when. “Because I believe in second chances,” Chapel said. “Third and fourth, even, in the case of Lance Corporal Darby.”