Laughter in the Shadows (15 page)

A young girl in Meo costume stepped out to drape a garland of yellow poppies around my neck as I continued walking toward the village. I turned to look over my shoulder and could see that the villagers had fallen in behind me, following
the Langley pied piper. I wished the director and Henry could have been there. It was their show and I was taking the bows.

Pang Vao stood waiting under a red and white parachute canopy, next to a faded red carpet with a shiny anvil standing in the middle. After a welcoming speech, Pang Vao, the village chief, and I took our seats on a long wooden bench. A Meo shaman appeared and began chanting and sprinkling buffalo blood from his goatskin chalice over the anvil.

After the anvil had been blessed, the ceremonial drinking of “horns” began. Water was poured into large jars filled with fermented rice, jars from which long bamboo straws protruded. The honored guest was invited to drink the first “horn.” When I had finished, water was poured from a buffalo horn into the jar to replenish the “horn” of wine that had just been drunk. The village chief then sat down, drank a horn, and passed the straw back to me.

It was my turn again, this time to drink a horn with Pang Vao. Then another horn with the clan chief, another with the blacksmith, and the village chief’s wife, after which I began to lose count. I was so full of rice wine my eyes were watering and my stomach was turning. I would probably have keeled over and passed out if Pang Vao hadn’t rescued me by taking me away for a tour of the village. At first I reeled unsteadily beside him, but the cold air soon revived me and I could walk straight and see better.

Nong Het was much as I remembered it from the air—clusters of stilted huts strung out along the stream running past the village, goats and sheep grazing on the slash-and-burn plots, and fields of yellow poppies backing up to the forest. It was an idyllic setting for a village so isolated—and so vulnerable.

The following day Pang Vao and I rode ponies out of Nong Het, taking a rocky trail that led father into the mountains. After little more than an hour, we came out on a mesa overlooking a deep valley. We dismounted and sat on the ledge looking over into North Vietnam.

Pang Vao told me his people were very thankful for the airdrop. With the sweaters and blankets and the rice, they would be able to get through the winter. There was, however, a serious security problem. Pathet Cham guerillas with Vietnamese advisers had begun to operate in the area around Nong Het. Local hunting parties had been ambushed and outlying villages raided, and although the Meo were good fighters and were not afraid, they were outgunned, their flintlocks and French fusils no match for the enemy’s AK-47s. Pang Vao added that well-armed Meo could not only defend their villages but also drive out the Pathet Cham and North Vietnamese.

Pang Vao hadn’t given up trying to persuade me to provide arms for his Meo. I reminded him I wasn’t authorized to supply him with the weapons he needed. He nodded, but I knew he didn’t believe me.

The Opium Poppy

During my last day in Nong Het, I watched a bullfight between an aging bull and a Meo matador. The makeshift arena was a stubble field that backed up to a tapestry of yellow opium poppies. Sitting there watching, I remembered a conversation I had had with the then chief of staff, General Ouane. Ouane told me that if we were really interested in winning over the montagnards, we should take a leaf from the French. Buy up the opium crop. Some they shipped to France for “medicinal purposes,” and the rest they dumped into the South China Sea. For a million dollars a year, the French gained the loyalty of the montagnard chiefs and had no trouble recruiting their followers as maquis to operate in the highlands.

I cabled Ouane’s recommendation to Headquarters, but there was no reply. I had to wait until I returned to Headquarters to learn why.

In Headquarters, I heard that the director had apparently thought Ouane’s suggestion about buying up the opium had merit and raised it with the director of the Bureau of Narcotics. The latter became so apoplectic at the suggestion, the director changed the subject and dropped the matter.

In an ironic twist, a decade later, when the drug problem was endemic in the United States, the government embarked on a massive program to buy up the worldwide opium crop, a big portion of which came from Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” and Afghanistan. By that time, however, the price of opium had gone up a hundredfold, and there weren’t any takers.

The next day I left Nong Het with the same guides who had escorted me earlier. Pang Vao, the village chief, and the tribal elders walked out with me to the path leading into the forest. Before saying good-bye, Pang Vao took me aside, reminding me “not to forget the guns.” Pang Vao eventually got his guns, enough to arm the largest “clandestine army” in history.

Nation Building: The Collapse

There is a point in everything beyond which it is dangerous to go, for once you do so, there can be no turning back.

—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY,
Crime and Punishment

Back in Viensiang, the specter of the Red Prince still haunted us. To exorcise his ghost, we recommended establishing a CUBS chapter in the capital of the prince’s home province, Phong Saly.

A nervous province chief convoked the local populace. Oudone and one of our officers who knew the province chief flew to Phong Saly in the helio, which was loaded with civic-action kits, a flag, and pins for the new chapter. Before landing, the pilot circled over the airstrip and pointed to the provincial headquarters building where the Cham flag was flying upside down. Dropping down lower, the occupants of the helio could see that trenches had been dug across the airstrip, exposing bangalore torpedoes probably primed to explode when the plane landed.

Phong Saly was not in friendly hands, and the helio returned to Viensang and Phong Saly remained colored red on Henry’s map.

The Election

You think that . . . you are the pursuer . . . that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool, it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,
Man and Superman

Election day finally came, and we crossed our fingers. I sat in the back of the press center set up for the foreign correspondents monitoring the election. The first returns posted were from Phong Saly, the Red Prince’s province and the one farthest from Viensiang. The posted results gave 8,535 votes for the government candidate, 140 for the Pathet Cham candidate.

The improbable results were so lopsided in favor of the government candidate that the correspondents assumed there was the usual “communications glitch.” When the next returns came in from Sam Neua, another remote province and Pathet Cham stronghold, giving 4,302 votes to the government candidate and only 380 for the Pathet Cham, it was obvious there was more than a communications failure. The correspondents jumped up, shouting “fix” and “foul,” but the board remained unchanged. There was so much commotion that no one noticed when I slipped out the back and ran over to Colonel Sipo’s office.

Colonel Sipo, a half-caste Vietnamese, was disliked and feared by his military colleagues. He was an ambitious officer and had persuaded General Ouane to put him in charge of “election security,” a job none of the other officers wanted. I was certain the lopsided returns were Sipo’s doing.

When I burst into his office, Sipo was standing in front of his desk, smiling. Sipo recognized me at once and asked me how I liked the results. I told him they were a farce and I suspected he was behind it.

Sipo was nonplused. “I don’t understand. Your CUBS candidates are winning, the Pathet Cham are losing. That’s good, isn’t it?
C’est bon, n’est-ce pas?”

I angrily replied that because of the lopsided returns, the journalists were calling the election a fraud. Sipo didn’t comment, changing the subject to ask me when I was born! The election was a shambles and here the security chief was calmly asking when I had been born. I was still furious with Sipo but knew it was no use trying to reason with the pigheaded colonel. I turned and went out the door, shouting over my shoulder as I left, “And if you must know, I was born on September 3, 1927.”

The election center was in a state of bedlam when I returned. The clamor abated only briefly when the returns from Khamouane, another Pathet Cham stronghold, were posted and gave an unexpected 3,927 votes to the Pathet Cham candidate. “3 9 27.” My birthday! Sipo was trying to make amends.

He couldn’t go all the way however. The government candidate got 4,108 votes.

In the end, it did not matter, because it was too late. The correspondents had already filed their press releases describing “the death of democracy in Cham.”

*
  
Campbell alleged he spent the next ten years “pissing on it.”

CHAPTER 7:
Cham Coup d’Etat

“We have done with hope and honour . . .

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung!”

—RUDYARD KIPLING,
Gentlemen–Rankers

O
ur program was a shambles. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, had ridden back into Cham. An angry young parachute captain had staged a coup d’etat in Viensiang and installed the neutralist Prince Souphanna as chief of state.

The Station was caught off guard. We had been so occupied with our own program that we had taken our eyes off the opposition, forgetting that our Soviet alter egos were not about to cede their Cham fiefdom to interlopers from Langley.

Since the time was not yet ripe for the Soviets to intervene openly, they had scouted around for an agent of influence to keep their hand in. They found one in Prince Souphanna through their unwitting access agent, a young parachute captain.

The coup was a victory for the anti-CUBS neutralists and spelled finis to our political action program. It was an ignominious end to a promising undertaking. The unforeseen climax left us stunned and frustrated, but we had no time for hand-wringing or recriminations. The first priority was damage control, getting rid of the evidence.

Printing presses had to be dismantled, foreign technicians spirited out of the country, thousands of CUBS pins melted down or dumped in the Mekong. The “four horsemen” were then summoned to the same office where Henry had fired them up for the great crusade that now lay in tatters.

Headquarters had decided that the four CUBS case officers should leave Cham immediately before they were declared personae non gratae by the new neutralist government. Henry said we were to leave with the “nonessential” embassy personnel who were also being evacuated. Henry tried to put a good face on our leaving, telling us it was a “temporary measure” and we would return to Cham once the situation stabilized.

We did eventually return to Cham, although not to Viensiang. Henry, however, was no longer there when we returned.

Evacuation #1

If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world it is not worth leave-taking.

—W. SHAKESPEARE,
Antony and Cleopatra

Evacuations are benchmarks in the case officer’s family chronicle. In Bangkok, after the first evacuation, Laurie won a track meet, Kent’s first tooth came through, Gray came down with the mumps, and Megan rode in the gymkana.

We were sad to be leaving Cham, the kingdom the world passed by. Memories of swimming with water buffalo in the Mekong, cheering on the Dutch honorary consul in the betcha (rickshaw) race, listening as the British ambassador tuned our piano, watching our offspring go off to school with their pet gibbons, leaving the mongooses in the yard to warn off cobras and constrictors. Most of all we would miss our Cham counterparts and families.