Kingdom of Fear (26 page)

HST: I’ve always had and still do have an ambition to write fiction. I’ve never had any real ambition within journalism, but events and fate and my own sense of fun keep taking me back for money, political reasons, and because I am a warrior. I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, as much as going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on The Proud Highway.

March 1990

To: John Walsh / ESPN
June 21, 2002

JOHN.

Things are savage here, but I think of you constantly & thanx for yr. elegant assessment of Jann & the hideous world as we know it.

But I fear no evil, for the Lord is with me. Yea though I walk in the shadow of death, I fear no Evil, for the Lord is with me. . . .

You bet. He is our ace in the hole . . . Or maybe not. Maybe John Ashcroft is greater than God. Who knows? Ashcroft is the new point man for Bush Inc., yet he is dumb as a rock. He is like some Atavistic endeavor on speed—just another stupid monster as Attorney General of the U.S.A., a vengeful jackass with an IQ of 66.

How long, O Lord, how long? These Pigs just keep coming, like meat oozing over a counter . . . And they keep getting Meaner and Dumber.

Yeah. Trust me on this, Bubba. I knew
Ed Meese
in his prime, and I repeatedly cursed him as the murderous pig that he was—a low form of life that hung on the neck of this nation like a crust of poison algae. He was scum. Ed Meese was a Monster.

But he was
nothing
compared to John Mitchell, the anal-compulsive drunkard who was Nixon’s Attorney General in the terrible time of Watergate. He was the weirdest act in town.

John Mitchell was a big-time corporate lawyer and his wife was a serious drinker from Arkansas who squealed on him by accident and brought down the whole structure of the U.S. federal government. . . . It was wonderful. Those animals were forced into the tunnel, one by one, and destroyed like offal.

That is the nature of professional politics. Many are called, but few survive the nut-cutting hour—which appears to be coming down on our goofy Child President these days. . . . Ah, but it was ever thus, eh? Vicious thieves have always ruled the world. It is our
wa.
We are like pigs in the wilderness.

HUNTER

Gambling on a football game with Ed Bradley (HST archives)

My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a definite technique. A campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. First, the people are worked upon. By clever tales the people’s suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is desired. Make the nation suspicious; make the other nation suspicious. All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no conscious and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will be benefited by war. Then the “overt act” will soon appear. It is no trick at all to get an “overt act” once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch.

—Henry Ford

There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times,” which was told to me by an elderly dope fiend on a rainy night in Hong Kong near the end of the War in Vietnam. He was a
giddy old man, on the surface, but I knew—and he knew that I knew—of the fear and respect he commanded all over Southeast Asia as a legendary Wizard in the far-flung Kingdom of Opium. I had stopped by his shop in Kowloon to get some advice and a chunk of black medicine for my friends who were trapped in the NVA noose that was inexorably closing in on Saigon. They refused to leave, they said, but in order to stay alive in the doomed and dysfunctional city, they needed only two things—cash money and fine opium.

I was no stranger to either one of these things, at the time—and I was, after all, in Hong Kong. All I had to do to get a satchel of green money and pure opium delivered to the
Newsweek
bureau was make a few phone calls. My friends trapped in Saigon were Journalists. We have a strong sense, people of my own breed and tribe, and we are linked—especially in war zones—by strong bonds of tribal loyalty. . . .

So bye bye, Miss American Pie,
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry,
Them good ole boys were drinkin whiskey and rye,
Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die,
This’ll be the day that I die . . .

I had never paid much attention to that song until I heard it on the Muzak one Saturday afternoon in the rooftop restaurant of the new Palace Hotel, looking down on the orange-tile rooftops of the overcrowded volcano that used to be known as Saigon and discussing military strategy over gin and lime with London Sunday
Times
correspondent Murray Sayle. We had just come back in a Harley Davidson—powered rickshaw from the Viet Cong’s weekly press conference in their barbed-wire enclosed compound at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, and Sayle had a big geophysical map of Indochina spread out on the table between us, using a red felt-tipped pen as a pointer to show me how and why the South Vietnamese government of then-President Nguyen Van Thieu had managed to lose half the country and a billion dollars’ worth of U.S. weaponry in less than three weeks.

I was trying to concentrate on his explanation—which made perfect sense, on the map—but the strange mix of realities on that afternoon of what would soon prove to be the next to last Saturday of the Vietnam War made concentration difficult. For one thing, I had never been west of San Francisco until I’d arrived in Saigon about ten days earlier—just after the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) had been routed on worldwide TV in the “battles” for
Hu
é and Da Nang.

This was a widely advertised “massive Hanoi offensive” that had suddenly narrowed the whole war down to a nervous ring around Saigon, less than fifty miles in diameter . . . and during the past few days, as a million or more refugees fled into Saigon from the panic zones up north around Hué and Da Nang, it had become painfully and ominously clear that Hanoi had never really launched any “massive offensive” at all—but that the flower of the finely
U.S.-trained
and heavily U.S.-equipped South Vietnamese Army had simply panicked and run amok. The films of whole ARVN divisions fleeing desperately through the streets of Da Nang had apparently surprised the NVA generals in Hanoi almost as badly as they jolted that bonehead ward heeler that Nixon put in the White House in exchange for the pardon that kept him out of prison.

Gerald Ford still denies this, but what the hell? It hardly matters anymore, because not even a criminal geek like Nixon would have been stupid enough to hold a nationally televised press conference in the wake of a disaster like Da Nang and compound the horror of what millions of U.S. viewers had been seeing on TV all week by refusing to deny, on camera, that the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam had died in vain. Even arch-establishment commentators like James Reston and Eric Sevareid were horrified by Ford’s inept and almost cruelly stupid performance at that press conference. In addition to the wives, parents, sons, daughters, and other relatives and friends of the 58,000 American dead, he was also talking to more than 150,000 veterans who were wounded, maimed, and crippled in Vietnam . . . and the net effect of what he said might just as well have been to quote Ernest Hemingway’s description of men who had died in another war, many years ago—men who were “shot down and killed like dogs, for no good reason at all.”

My memories of that day are very acute, because it was the first time since I’d arrived in Saigon that I suddenly understood how close
we were to the
end,
and how ugly it was likely to be . . . and as that eerie chorus about “Bye bye, Miss American Pie” kept howling around my ears while we picked at our Crab St. Jacques, I stared balefully out across the muddy Saigon River to where the earth was trembling and the rice paddies were exploding in long clean patterns like stitches down the sleeve of a shirt. . . . Carpet bombing, massive ordnance, the last doomed snarling of the white man’s empire in Asia.

“Well, Murray,” I asked him. “What the fuck do we do
now?”

He drained the last of a tall bottle of fine French Riesling into our crystalline flutes and languidly called for another. It was somewhere around lunchtime, but the penthouse dining room was empty of cash customers, except us, and we were not in a hurry. “We are surrounded by sixteen NVA divisions,” he said with a smile. “The enemy is right out there in that smoke across the river, and he wants vengeance. We are doomed.”

I nodded calmly and sucked on a corncob pipe full of
steamy
Khymer Rouge blossoms, then I leaned over the map and made a wet red circle around our position in downtown Saigon.

He looked at it. “So what,” he said. “Those people are
cannibals,”
he snapped. “They will hunt us down and
eat
us.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “I am a personal friend of Colonel Vo Don Giang. We will be put in cages for a while, then set free.”

I knew a Buddhist once, and I’ve hated myself ever since. The whole thing was a failure.

He was a priest of some kind, and he was also extremely rich. They called him a monk and he wore the saffron robes and I hated him because of his arrogance. He thought he knew everything.

One day I was trying to rent a large downtown property from him, and he mocked me. “You are dumb,” he said. “You are doomed if you stay in this business. The stupid are gobbled up quickly.”

“I understand,” I said. “I am stupid. I am doomed. But I think I know something you don’t.”

He laughed. “Nonsense,” he said. “You are a fool. You know nothing.”

I nodded respectfully and leaned closer to him, as if to whisper a secret. “I know the answer to the greatest riddle of all,” I said.

He chuckled. “And what is that?” he said. “And you’d better be Right, or I’ll kill you.”

“I know the sound of one hand clapping,” I said. “I have finally discovered the answer.”

Several other Buddhists in the room laughed out loud, at this point. I knew they wanted to humiliate me, and now they had me trapped—because there
is
no answer to that question. These saffron bastards have been teasing us with it forever. They are amused at our failure to grasp it.

Ho ho. I went into a drastic crouch and hung my left hand low, behind my knee. “Lean closer,” I said to him. “I want to answer your high and unanswerable question.”

As he leaned his bright bald head a little closer into my orbit, I suddenly leaped up and bashed him flat on the ear with the palm of my left hand. It was slightly cupped, so as to deliver maximum energy on impact. An isolated package of air is suddenly driven through the Eustachian tube and into the middle brain at quantum speed, causing pain, fear, and extreme insult to the tissue.

The monk staggered sideways and screamed, grasping his head in agony. Then he fell to the floor and cursed me. “You swine!” he croaked. “Why did you hit me and burst my eardrum?”

“Because
that,”
I said, “is the sound of one hand clapping. That is the answer to your question. I have the answer now, and you are deaf.”

“Indeed,” he said. “I am deaf, but I am smarter. I am wise in a different way.” He grinned vacantly and reached out to shake my hand.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “I am, after all, a doctor.”

Zorro at work, Woody Creek, 2002 (Anita Bejmuk)

TRIAL RUN FOR PANAMA AND AFGHANISTAN . . . SPRINGBOARD FOR IRAQ AND KOREA—SEE THE NEW WORLD ORDER IN ACTION . . . WHY NOT? HITLER HAD SPAIN, WE HAVE GRENADA. . .