CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

ADMIRAL RABORN BARELY MADE it a year as DCI before he ducked out to be replaced by Richard M. Helms. I knew Dick from the Bay of Pigs and had run into him from time to time since. Former OSS during WWII, he had the appearance of a very successful businessman—tallish, handsome, with dark, slicked-down hair and a straightforward look in his piercing eyes. We would get along.

“Bone,” he said, “the Defense Department and the White House might think the CIA has been put back in its place. But they’ll come running back on their knees.”

Although CIA’s role in Vietnam had been minimized, we weren’t completely cast out. “Knuckle draggers” were still in demand to counter communist efforts at world domination. Communists never seemed to stop pushing and probing, instigating unrest and discontent and bringing death and destruction. I found it difficult to understand what deep pathologies must drive an ideology that led to famine, gulags, blind subjugation, and mass executions.

The DCI kept me busy. One month I might be slipping operatives into El Salvador, the next in India or the Philippines. Accompanied by a former EOD man, I slid overboard from a freighter in the Caribbean and SCUBA’d with my swim buddy toward the green outline of Nicaragua. We towed a marker buoy full of nitro, dynamite, and plastic C-4 for use by insurgents combating the country’s communist takeover.

In the Philippines I met with representatives of newly elected President Ferdinand Marcos to advise on maritime operations against Muslim fanatics influenced by communist insurrectionists.

Anti-Semitism ran high all over the Middle East as fanatics preached the destruction of the state of Israel and the rise of a new Ottoman Empire. Arab states led by Egypt attacked Israel across the Sinai Peninsula. The war lasted six days. Arab casualties were many times those of Israel—less than one thousand Israelis killed, compared to over twenty thousand for the Arabs.

Israel tripled its area of control, taking in the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Nearly a half million Palestinians and Syrians fled to become refugees across the Arab world. The Middle East was becoming a hellhole with repercussions that promised to continue for decades.

Not only in the Middle East but all around the world global chess pieces were lining up and taking sides. Events seemed to be unfolding as part of a grand picture, a scheme of things in which the world was slipping deeper into danger, in which both foreign and domestic affairs were interconnected and part of an enmeshed tapestry of violence and conflict.

The stench that began the Cold War lingered on in Frankfurt where the Auschwitz trials got under way to try mid- to lower-level Nazi officials who helped run the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camps.

China tested its first nuclear weapon. Put another nuke in the commie corner. Mao Tse-tung launched his “Great Leap Forward” to preserve “true communist ideology” to the tune of slaughtering millions of his own people.

America joined the chaos. In San Francisco, Anton LaVey formed the Church of Satan—to worship the Devil! Colleges held teach-ins and snake-dances against the Vietnam War. Race riots boiled up in the Watts neighborhood, resulting in thirty-four deaths during six days of looting and arson. Additional riots broke out all over the nation—Tampa, Detroit, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Durham. Hippies dropped out and dropped acid and smoked anything, including banana peels. Drugs, sex, and rock ’n roll.

Where the hell was this nation—this planet—bound?

My personal life was just as chaotic.

While I was running off to Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, Central America, or whatever other hot spot that required my attention, poor Mary, like wife Elinor before her, was stuck at home without attention. She should have known better than to marry me.

I came home from a job in Central America to discover she had packed up and left for parts unknown, the only clue to her whereabouts a note on the kitchen table saying simply that she had had enough and was leaving. No “kiss my ass,” “sorry.” Nothing. Just gone. Her lawyer served divorce papers.

Face it, Bone: my life didn’t call for a wife. Like the ground pounders in the Army put it: “If Uncle Sam wanted you to have a wife, he would have issued you one.”

I vowed not to make the same mistake again.

* * *

Mary’s side of the bed hadn’t even cooled off properly before I met my third wife-to-be. Her name was also Mary. I called her “Mary II,” but not to her face. Call me a fool. But, hell, a man got lonely. This time the marriage lasted less than a month before, whoops! She was gone.

“You fucking dunderhead,” Boehm said. “You do understand? You don’t have to marry them.”

The same evening that Mary II left I walked the late night streets of Washington, another anonymous tourist tossed among the monuments. I collapsed on the cold stone steps of the Jefferson Memorial and gazed at the Capitol Building at the other end of the Mall. I was so damned tired of fighting America’s “shadow wars.”

I got up presently and trudged home to an empty house.

The next week I found a new fixture added when I walked into the CIA rotunda and took the stairs to the SOD floor where my Maritime Office was located. A tall, willowy blonde on temporary assignment as an analyst. She introduced herself as Barbara.

I stared like the fool I knew myself to be when it came to pretty women.