Sean Dillon was closeted with his deputy director for JCS matters, his assistant chiefs of staff for technical application and for targets, the chief
of the Southeast Asia Task Force and the chief of the Field Activities Division. Various other experts and analysts came and went from the DIA conference room as their viewpoints were required.
Dillon had called this meeting because of an unusual piece of human intelligence that had come in the day before. A Communist doctor who treated senior Hanoi officials, and who also served as a deep-cover DIA agent, had sacrificed his position to come out with his urgent report. The elite NVA 304th Division, which had led the assault on Dien Bien Phu and which had since served as the heart of the home guard around Ho and the other rulers of North Vietnam, had suddenly been withdrawn from its quite visible posting in the capital. Not only was the inner core of the government left vulnerable by this maneuver, but the famous division itself had all but disappeared.
When this word had come in the day before, Dillon had ordered a special new analysis of data from all sources that tracked the movements of troops from North to South. The most recent reports from the ground reconnaissance teams—SOGs—were not available yet because MacAuliff, in Saigon, still controlled them, but the evidence of aerial photography, infrared radar directed from airplanes, NSA signal intercepts that snatched the radio communications of Communist commanders out of the air and even the acoustic needle sensors sown along the Trail all suggested—but at most—a slight uptick in the levels of movement. Even that was occurring only along the northern stretch of the Trail.
"Khe Sanh," the JCS general said at one point. "Westmoreland is certain the Reds are preparing to take the bait at Khe Sanh."
A Marine Corps general, Bailey, snorted. The marines manned the remote garrison in the far northwest corner of South Vietnam. He objected not to the reference to the marines as bait, but to the fact that it was true.
Dillon eyed the marine. "This is the trap Westmoreland has been laying for months, hoping to draw the NVA into a big-unit siege once and for all. He wants Dien Bien Phu all over again. But this time we win."
The others said nothing.
Dillon toyed with a pencil. "Our job is not to second-guess General Westmoreland's strategy but to provide him with the intelligence he needs to make it work."
The JCS general said, "MacAuliff's urgent request, endorsed by
General Wheeler, is for a redeployment of all-source collection to the Khe Sanh sector. They want us to focus on the DMZ, the area east of Tchepone and the routes into the valley itself."
"To do that we lose coverage of the Trail farther south, leading into the Central Highlands, II Corps and III"—this was General Hickox, the Southeast Asia Task Force chief—"exposing the populated heart of the country. We'd have to pull infrareds and eyeballs off the Sihanouk Trail, leaving Saigon a question mark. Why is Westy stuck on Khe Sanh?"
"Khe Sanh is crucial," Bailey said.
"Then why did the French abandon it without a fight, and why has it been ignored for years? It's an old outpost, high on a plateau hundreds of miles from anything that matters."
"Quang Tri matters."
"Gentlemen," Dillon said impatiently, "Khe Sanh matters because General Westmoreland says it does. It's where he wants to take on the enemy. Our question is simple. Has the enemy begun to accept the invitation?"
"What if it's a feint? We look toward Khe Sanh and he comes the other way."
Dillon nodded, and he touched the stack of briefings on the table in front of him. "First data suggests that the upsurge, if that's what it is, is restricted to the North. Here is what we do. We give the whole Trail a once-over, from Tay Ninh in III Corps to Dak To in II Corps. Eyeball, signals, sensors, everything. If there is still no change in movement south, then we go with MacAuliff, all the way. We move everything but the skeleton into I Corps, concentrate on routes into Khe Sanh. Westmoreland's strategy, gentlemen, depends on us. If Khe Sanh is it, and if there's going to be a difference between the Americans and the French, it's going to be that we could tell the soldiers on the ground well ahead of time exactly what the enemy was doing. And there are fliers in the air waiting on us as well."
From that day on, the various intercept devices and systems continued sending back signals of gradually increasing movement in the jungles of the North, nothing untoward in the South. Within weeks, SOGs confirmed the NVA 304th itself, a force of fifteen thousand crack soldiers, massed in the hills just across the Laotian border from Khe Sanh. In late November Sean Dillon authorized a fifty-thousand-dollar bribe to bring across from Hanoi a long-cultivated defector, who reported, among other things, that General Vo Nguyen Giap, vanquisher of France, had moved into Laos to take command of the forces of which the 304th was the spearhead. Its only conceivable target was Khe Sanh. That was enough for Dillon. Now mirroring Westmoreland, he deployed every available intelligence asset to I Corps, where fully half of the American maneuver battalions had been sent. In December President Johnson had a sand-table model of the Khe Sanh plateau and the surrounding valleys set up in the White House Situation Room. The President, his high-toned civilian advisors and his generals were agreed in believing that the trap of Khe Sanh was finally going to justify the two and a half years of Vietnam agony.
The siege did not commence. Christmas came and went. The concentration of the American military leaders was more focused than at any prior point in the war. They had a strategy at last that showed every sign that it would work. Now if Giap would only move.
Not even the increasingly outrageous acts of antiwar protesters—Roman Catholic priests pouring ducks' blood on draft files!—could usurp the generals' attention or undermine their conviction that the surest way to the peace they longed for too lay in convincing Ho Chi Minh he could not prevail. Nor was Sean Dillon's attention diverted by the effective disappearance from his life of his son. Richard's absence, frankly, was a relief. As the weeks passed, Dillon was as obsessed and became, perhaps despite himself, as hopeful as anyone in the Pentagon—or in Pentagon East, for that matter. He presided with scrupulous, tireless devotion over the reception and analysis of data from all sources, the radar, the sensors, the signal intercepts, the airborne eyeballs, the face-painted recon teams. Each bit of hard intelligence had registered individually at first, as the movement of a single truck, say, then as the movement of a unit, then as a larger force, up to the size of a battalion. Then the incoming data along the northern leg of the Ho Chi Minh Trail registered as something else. After the new year—it was January 1968 now—the tempo of signals suggesting movement suddenly increased, like the first rapid clicks of a Geiger counter sensing radiation, pushing a needle up a dial, toward the danger zone, the red.
Through the night-reflecting prism beads of rain and the
slap-slap
of windshield wipers, Richard saw the figure of the air policeman step out of the spotlighted gatehouse. The white of his peaked hat was clouded
by the plastic rain cover, and his long blue raincoat reached to below his knees, which gave him the silhouette, in Richard's mind, of a German storm trooper.
Richard slowed his car, reaching to the dash to notch his headlights down to the parking lights.
Instead of waving him through, the AP raised his hand.
Richard cursed. He hadn't thought of this when he'd scraped the base sticker from the bumper of his car. The three silver stars had always elicited heel clicks and salutes from these guys.
He rolled the window down.
The AP leaned to him, a neutral, acne-scarred face. He wore two stripes on his sleeve, an airman second, a kid, younger than Richard was himself.
"Good evening," the air force cop said noncommittally. "Would you state your business, please?"
"Hi. I'm General Dillon's son. I'm visiting my parents." Richard smiled in a friendly way, but he sensed that the airman knew how false it was. He noticed the AP's eyes checking out his hair, which was way too long for this place.
"May I see your ID, please?"
"I'm not his dependent anymore, I'm just his son." Richard hadn't thought of this either when he'd thrown out his air force ID card. He hadn't thought of a lot of things.
The air policeman nodded, then straightened up. "If you'll wait a moment, please. I have to call for authorization."
"Call who?"
"General Dillon's quarters."
"Wait a minute, wait." The rain was coming in Richard's window. He felt the cold drops on his face as he looked up at the AP. "It's a surprise," he said. "I haven't been home in a while. They don't know I'm coming."
The AP shook his head. "Without ID, I'm required—"
"Is Sergeant Briggs around? Does he still work the gate?"
"Sergeant Briggs is off duty."
"I know him, and I know Sergeant Kaiser."
The AP hesitated. "Sergeant Kaiser is on the other gate tonight."
"Could you call him? Tell him Rich Dillon just wants to surprise his folks. He knows me. He knows this baby." Richard patted the wheel of his car, the blue Fairlane.
The AP stepped back, looked the car over, then turned and went into the guardhouse. A moment later he came back out.
Richard's shoulder was wet from the rain coming in his window.
"Okay," the AP said, and he waved Richard through without saluting.
Once on base, it amazed Richard how instinctively the turns on those streets came, even at night, even in the rain. On one side, the theater, the bowling alley, the USO, the chapel, the commissary. On the other, the back ends of hangar after hangar, the Base Ops Building, the barracks, the headquarters of the air force band. As he gunned up the hill toward the Officers' Club—he saw the shrouded swimming pool and remembered those summers when he'd been a lifeguard—he stopped resisting the powerful flood of his nostalgia. This crisp, ordered world had once been so much his; he remembered feeling like a prince in a privileged kingdom. What hit him now, as he rounded the last curve into Generals' Row, was not the loss of the perfect order but the loss of the absolute sense of virtue he had so long associated with this world. The people here had been the guardians of the world's freedom, but now they—
He remembered listening from his lifeguard seat that last summer to a knot of laughing young fighter jocks lounging by the pool. One had been describing his first sortie over Vietnam with dramatic hand motions and sound effects. Every time he'd used the word "gook," he'd said "fucking."
Even in the months since he had been here, a number of the names on the signs in front of the generals' houses had changed. Senter was gone, so was Davis. Basel too. New names that meant nothing. The endless rotation of their neighbors had always seemed unfair to Richard growing up, how he had forever stayed behind at Boiling—his father alone never getting transferred, the great General Dillon, indispensable at the Pentagon—while other kids moved in and out. Now what reminders of that rotation evoked in Richard was anger at how the war machine just used up endlessly its supply of faceless, soulless men, who came and went without effect, doing what they were told.
As he approached number 64, he slowed down. Was he really going to do this? Did he really have to?
He stopped his car in front of the house, turned the engine off and slumped over the wheel, at the mercy of his despair. Yes, he had to do it. Yes, he would.
Moments later he was inside. He had opened the door quietly. His
parents were in the enclosed porch beyond the living room where the television was. He heard the sound of the late night news. A weather forecaster was talking about the winter rains. He crossed the living room to the threshold of the porch.
Neither his mother nor his father had noticed him yet. He stood there for a moment behind them, studying them. They were on the couch, close to each other but not touching. His mother was wearing her glasses because she was knitting; his father sat with the sports page spread open on his lap, but he was looking at the TV screen.
"Hi," Richard said at last.
His mother was the one he was watching. The one he could bear to look at. Her eyes came right to his, and danced with surprised delight. "Richard!"
Her knitting fell as she started to get up, but she checked herself, glanced at Sean and sat back down. "Richard," she said again, but forlornly. The last time she saw him she had slapped him.
His father folded the newspaper.
"I'm sorry I've been so out of touch. I had a lot to get straight about."
His father said coldly, "Are you all right?"
"Yes. I'm fine."
His father stood and crossed to the television, to snap it off. He faced Richard.
Richard was surprised to find himself taller than his father. He'd been taller for years now, but he never pictured it so. "I can't stay long. I came by to tell you something."
"Of course you can stay," Cass said. "Where are your things? Here, sit." She made room for him on the couch.
"No, really. I'm only here to tell you something. I tried to write..." Richard's eyes went directly to his father's. Half a dozen yards of open space separated them, pale blue air force–issue carpet.
"What?" Sean Dillon asked.
"I've been drafted."
"Drafted?" Dillon said, genuinely surprised. "Did you quit law school?"
"No. They reclassified me anyway. I've been 1-S since around Thanksgiving. I got my induction notice ten days ago. I'm supposed to report tomorrow."
"Where?"
"Anacostia." Richard laughed. "Up the river, like they say in prison movies."
Sean gestured at the chair in the corner. "Have a seat, Rich. Let's figure this thing out."
Richard did not move from the threshold. He thought of how, in earthquakes, the threshold is where it's safe.
Since his son didn't move, Sean didn't either. He was paying close attention to him, looking for signs of his distress, as if he were standing on a ledge. But Sean could read very little in his son. He seemed to be in some kind of shock.