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CHAPTER 1

The Effort

I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story. There have been plenty of those and will be many more, appalling stories of nineteen-year-olds breaking down, frightened out of their wits, or engaging in acts of unimaginable gallantry; and often all three at the same time. The war stories were from a different period, later on, when the war became an epidemic, a plague like the Black Death. Society was paralyzed by fear. Order broke down. Duty and honor were forgotten in the rush to survive. Commanders deserted their units, friends turned their backs. Among the population, individual burials were replaced by burials en masse. The American morgue was expanded again and again. Aircraft that brought fresh troops returned with coffins. I remember watching a doctor perform an autopsy while humming through his teeth, the identical note repeated monotonously. His fingers were rigid as iron.

When he saw me, he looked up and whispered, Bring out your dead.

But that time was not my time. That time was later on, when things went to hell generally, and the best of us lost all heart. My time was early days, when civilians still held a measure of authority. We were startled by the beauty of the country, and surprised at its size. It looked so small on our world maps, not much larger than New England. We understood that in Vietnam Americans would add a dimension to their identity. Isn't identity always altered by its surroundings and the task at hand? So this is a different cut of history, a civilian cut, without feats of arms or battlefield chaos. If love depends on faith, think of my narrative as a kind of romance, the story of one man with a bad conscience and another with no conscience and the Frenchman and his wife who lived in the parallel world, the one we thought was a mirage from the century before, a bankrupt colonial milieu that offered — so many possibilities, as Dicky Rostok said.

We went to Vietnam because we wanted to. We were not drafted. We were encouraged to volunteer and if our applications were denied, we applied again. We arrived jet-lagged at Tan Son Nhut airport where someone met us and hurried us off to wherever we were billeted, usually a villa on one of the wide residential boulevards that reminded everyone of a French provincial city. Even the plane trees looked imported. And later that day we showed up for work at one of the agencies or the embassy or Lansdale's outfit or the Llewellyn Group and briefed — an exercise that had much in common with initiation into a secret society, Skull and Bones or the Masons. We learned a new language, one that excluded outsiders. We lived with one eye on Washington and the other on Hanoi, and the Washington eye was the good eye. The effort — that was what we called the war, The Effort — was existential, meaning in a steady state of becoming. War aims were revised month to month and often week to week, to keep our adversary off balance.

There were thousands of us recruited from all over the government, from foundations, think tanks, and universities, too; even police departments. Sydney Parade had worked for a foundation while Dicky Rostok was a foreign service officer, as was I. A few of us went at once to the countryside, where we administered various aid programs in collaboration with our Vietnamese counterparts. We worked harder than we had ever worked in our lives, or would ever work again. We were drunk on work. Work was passion. We were in it for the long haul, and from the beginning we swam upstream.

We reorganized their finances. We built roads, bridges, schools, and airstrips. We distributed medicine and arranged for army doctors to vaccinate the children and conduct clinics for the sick. Our agronomists devised new ways to cultivate and harvest rice and then introduced a miracle strain that grew beautifully but did not taste the way Vietnamese expected rice to taste; so it was grown and harvested and left to rot or exported to India. We performed these chores every day, all the while trying to discover what it was that kept the war going, even accelerating, month to month. The success of the enemy seemed to defy logic. We had so much and they had so little; our nineteen-year-olds were supported by an arsenal beyond the imagination of the guerrillas facing them. Or so we imagined, as we knew next to nothing of their personalities, their biographies, where they had gone to school, where they were born, whether they were married or single, what animated them beyond the struggle for unification, a political ideal that could not account for their tenacious will; think of Brady's photographs of the Union infantry. So we wrote letters home describing Buddha's face. We described Vietnam as we would describe the character of a human being we had never seen but was famous nonetheless, an introverted personality replete with legend, rumor, and innuendo.

After a few months, friends and family dropped their pretense of polite curiosity. They had their own urgent inquiries. How are things actually? The reports on the evening news are so confusing, we can't make head nor tail of them. Are we winning this war or losing it? Give us your opinion. Your letters are ambiguous! Please give us the straight story, what's happening out there really? What's the story behind the scenes? And later still, We hope you know how much everyone here is behind you boys and what you're doing in Vietnam. It sounds awful. We all appreciate the effort. Is everything all right with you? Keep your head down. Hurry home.

Of course there was no straight story in the sense of a narrative that began in one place and ended in another. Nothing was deliberately withheld; very little was known. This was exhilarating, as if we were explorers in a land at the very margins of the known world. We argued all the time, unraveling the legend from the rumor and the rumor from the innuendo; and it was Parade who suggested that we were imprisoned in our own language, tone deaf to possibility. Parade thought the VC led the charmed life of the unicorn, the beast of myth that could be neither caught by man nor touched by a weapon. Rostok scoffed at that. There was no such thing as a charmed life. There was nothing on this earth that could not be tamed, given money enough and time.

We ventured far afield to discover the logic to events. Perhaps all occupation forces find themselves at odds with their hosts, knowing at once that they are but a veneer to another, more natural life, a life in-country that goes on as it has gone on for centuries, a life as teeming and fluid and uncontrolled as the life beneath the surface of the great oceans. We came to understand that there was a uniform world parallel to the artificial world we inhabited. Ours was swarming with shadows, dancing and fluctuating day to day while the parallel world was symmetrical and anchored, prophetic in a way that ours was not. It was this world we had to enter in order to discover the nature of the resistance, meaning a reliable estimate of the situation. We only wanted to know where we stood, not so much to ask.

In the meantime there was an infrastructure to be built and a bureaucracy to be put in place. The first was impossible without the second, and it was the second to which Rostok devoted his energies. He wanted his lines of authority to be unequivocal. Sooner or latere Llewellyn Group, generously funded, superbly organized, and staffed with the best minds, would discover a means to infiltrate the parallel world and decipher it — so many possibilities, as Rostok said.

He had a flattened nose, perhaps evidence of a youthful fistfight, and an unpleasant high-pitched laugh. He was always in motion, his hands describing arcs, his head turtling forward as he inquired, Huh? Huh? His memory was phenomenal, always an asset in management, but he seemed unaware that an overactive memory often blinded one to the circumstances of the present. Rostok was not at all bookish, but that's often the case with men of action. Those books he had read he invested with an almost mystical significance; probably he believed that the mere fact of his acquaintance gave them a kind of grandeur. Voodoo, Sydney Parade said.

One of his favorites was Joseph Conrad, not the Conrad of the African jungles but the Conrad of the open Asian seas, the coming-of-age Conrad who was always conscious of the shadow line between youth and maturity. Rostok believed that Conrad had a particular purchase on the delusions that attended men organizing themselves in difficult or dangerous situations. He liked to recall Conrad's story of the marvelous sailing ship Tweed, a vessel heavy and graceless to look at but of extraordinary speed. In the middle of the last century she bested the steam mailboat from Hong Kong to Singapore by an astounding day and a half. No one knew what there was about the Tweed that accounted for her exceptional spank, perhaps the shape and weight of the keel, perhaps the placement of the masts, perhaps the ratio of sail to the length and breadth of the hull. She was built somewhere in the West Indies, teak throughout, the best of her breed and soon to be left behind by the iron steamers. Such was her fame, and such her mystery and allure, that officers of British men-of-war came aboard to look at her whenever they shared a port. They took meticulous measurements, they interviewed all hands, but no one ever discovered her secret.

The Tweed's former skipper, Captain S — —, thought he knew. When Conrad met the captain he had transferred from the Tweed to another ship, but his former command continued to hold his allegiance. Captain S — — told Conrad that she never made a decent passage after he left her helm. It was obvious that his superb seamanship was the reason for her great success and without him the Tweed was just another lumbering coaster. This was the mystical union between ship and skipper, each ennobling the other. Captain S — — looked on the sailing ship Tweed as Rodin looked on a fat block of granite.

Something pathetic in it, Conrad observed.

And perhaps just the least bit dangerous.

But Rostok held with the captain.

My first posting abroad was in the consular section, Saigon, and it was there that I met Dede Griffith, as she was known then. Dede was already seeing Claude Armand, in effect dividing her time between the tiny USIA office on Nguyen Hue Street and Plantation Louvet. When Claude was occupied I used to take her to dinner at Guillaume Tell or Ramuncho, and in due course we became good friends. Everyone liked Dede. When she and Claude were married, I gave her away — and never was a woman happier to replace one name with another. Thereafter she was Dede Armand and very quickly she dropped from sight, at least from the sight of the American community, growing each day. Of course I am the moron who failed to notify the lads upstairs when Dede came to renew her passport.

I knew the members of Llewellyn Group. It was hard to miss them, Rostok swaggering about the city like a Roman proconsul, though it was difficult to know exactly what he did, his specific brief, his place in the bureaucratic scheme of things. I got to know Sydney Parade very well because I was the one detailed to drive to Tay Thanh to tell him that his father had died. He was terribly upset at the news, it was obvious they were very close. Sydney had his father's photograph on his desk next to the IN and OUT boxes. He invited me to stay for a drink and dinner and we spent the evening talking about his father and about the Armands. In the course of that evening and other evenings, I learned what he and Rostok were up to. Sydney spoke openly with me, probably because I was a junior consular official with no friends in high places and no motive to tell tales; not that there were many to tell. Also, Sydney was short. When his father died, he had only one month remaining incountry. Or, as he peevishly reminded me, twenty-eight days, seven hours, and umpty-ump minutes. I was short, too, but I wasn't counting the days.

I returned to the State Department after three years in Saigon. And by 1974 I was back there, a little more seasoned now after tours in Foggy Bottom, Morocco, and the Philippines. I was assigned to the political section of Embassy Saigon — a kind of morbid practical joke, since by 1974 there were no politics, only the promise of more war despite the secretary's personal assurance: "Peace is at hand." In a way he was right, but it wasn't the peace he had promised and it wasn't at hand. At last, with American troops mostly withdrawn, the civilians were in charge once again. That meant we occupied the wheelhouse as the ship drifted toward the shoals.

It is the simple truth that I was one of the last Americans to leave from the roof of Embassy Saigon on April 30, 1975, our day of dishonor and of rough justice, too. We had been at it for so long, and when the end came it was almost with relief; we don't have to do this anymore. For as long as I live on this earth I will remember the bitter odor of smoldering greenbacks. I thought of burning fruit. I stood at the door of the strongroom watching an overweight marine sergeant feed the stacks of currency into a makeshift fire, the smoke of thousands of dollars filling the corridor. He whistled while he worked. I hoped the stench would reach Washington, D.C., and remain there for a generation. I remember the patience and courtesy of the staff crowded on the narrow stairs leading to the roof, the dark jokes and hesitant laughter, everyone listening to the crash of explosives advancing from the northwest. We knew we were present at the end of something momentous, and not only a lost war or lost innocence, either. That's a European idea, and they're welcome to it. I believe we knew on that day that our choices had been reduced to two: fear of the known or fear of the unknown, and for the rest of our lives we would fear the known thing.

Vietnam. You kept meeting the same people as you moved from post to post, diplomats you had served with, and of course the foreign correspondents. We were all connoisseurs of Third World adversity. I remember vividly a party I gave a few years ago. We sat up very late, about a dozen of us, diplomats and journalists; all of us had served in Vietnam during the early days. We made our bones in Vietnam, as American gangsters like to say — and none of us went home. It is equally true that none of our careers suffered, far from it. Service in the war gave you a leg up the ladder, even though, as seems so obvious now but wasn't obvious then, we were searching in a dark room for a black hat that wasn't there. And the same was true for the soldiers, at least for the officers. We survived and our reputations survived with us, and we, most of us, went on to succeed handsomely in the wider world. There is some irony here but no need to dwell upon it. The ironies of the effort are well known.

Yet for some of us the episode was only that, a brief wrestle in a dark room, a distant memory, so distant that whatever pleasure or pain there was has been forgotten. The foreign correspondents went on to other wars in other regions — and we, too. We were there with them. Some of them and some of us finally gave up on the Third World — we had been at the roulette table for too long, unsuccessfully playing the same number — and moved on to senior positions in London or Paris or Washington, or out of the business altogether, into banking or public relations, lobbying, consulting, where we could use the friendships we'd made and the valuable knowledge we'd gathered. The wars and famines were for younger men and women with faster feet and uncrowded personal lives and a powerful appetite for the unknown thing.

I was always surprised at those who were able to move on easily from Vietnam, the war one more experience in a lifetime of experiences, neither the worst nor the least. So vivid then, it receded, leaving only fugitive souvenirs and a few friendships. This was evident that night in my villa when we fell to talking of the early days of the Effort, the mid-1960s, before things went to hell and the plague arrived. Naturally we reminisced about our many blunders and about personalities, both the living and the dead. Six of us in the room remembered everyone mentioned, looks, job, eccentricities. Anecdote followed anecdote. I opened another bottle of cognac.

When someone said, Whatever happened to Dicky Rostok, I did not reply. I wanted to hear what the others knew, because Rostok had gone to considerable trouble not to make himself the black hat in the dark room.

One of the journalists laughed, not unkindly. He said that Rostok had stayed on in Vietnam until early 1968. Then, with his usual exquisite sense of timing, he resigned from the foreign service and went home. About two days before the Tet Offensive. Can you believe it?

Yes, I said.

You mean he knew?

Rostok had a nose, I said.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Dangerous Friend"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Ward Just.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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