5

Jessica Castillo and Harry Partridge were drawn instinctually to each other the first time they met in Vietnam—even though the meeting was antagonistic. Partridge had gone to USIS seeking information that he knew existed but that had been refused him by the United States military. It concerned the widespread drug addiction of American troops in Vietnam.

Partridge had seen plenty of evidence of addiction during his travels through forward areas. The hard drug being used was heroin and it was plentiful. Through Stateside inquiries made at his request by CBA News, he learned that veterans’ hospitals back home were filling up alarmingly with addicts sent back from Vietnam. It was becoming a national problem, rather than just military.

The New York Horseshoe had given a green light to pursue the story, but official sources had clammed up tight and would provide no information.

When he entered Jessica’s cubicle office and broached the subject, she reacted in the same way. “I’m sorry. That’s something I can’t talk about.”

Her attitude offended him and he said accusingly, “You mean you won’t talk because you’ve been told to protect somebody. Is it the ambassador, who might be embarrassed by the truth?”

She shook her head. “I can’t answer that either.”

Partridge, growing angry, bored in hard. “So what you’re telling me is that you, in this cozy billet, don’t give a goddamn about the GIs out in the jungle who are shit-scared, suffering, and then—for an outlet, because they don’t know any better—destroy themselves with drugs, becoming junkies.”

She said indignantly, “I said nothing of the kind.”

“Oh, but you said exactly that. “His voice was contemptuous. “You said you won’t talk about something rotten and stinking which needs a public airing, needs people to know a problem exists so something can be done. So other green kids coming out here can be warned and maybe saved. Who do you think you’re protecting, lady? For sure, not the guys doing the fighting, the ones who count. You call yourself an information officer. I call you a concealment officer.”

Jessica flushed. Unused to being talked to that way, her eyes blazed with anger. A glass paperweight was on her desk and her fingers clenched around it. For a moment Partridge expected her to throw it and prepared to duck. Then, noticeably, the anger diminished and Jessica asked quietly, “What is it you want to know?”

Partridge moderated his tone to match hers. “Statistics mostly. I know someone has them, that records have been kept, surveys taken.”

She tossed back her brown hair in a gesture he would later become used to and love. “Do you know Rex Talbot?”

“Yes.” Talbot was a young American vice-consul at the Embassy on Thong Nhut Street, a few blocks away.

“I suggest you ask him to tell you about the MACV Project Nostradamus report.”

Despite the seriousness, Partridge smiled, wondering what kind of mind dreamed up that title.

Jessica continued, “There’s no need to have Rex know I sent you. You could let him think you know …”

He finished the sentence. “… a little more than I really do. It’s an old journalist’s trick.”

“The kind of trick you just used on me.”

“Sort of,” he acknowledged with a smile.

“I knew it all the time,” Jessica said. “I just let you get away with it.”

“You’re not as soulless as I thought,” he told her. “How about exploring that subject some more over dinner tonight?”

To her own surprise, Jessica accepted.

Later, they discovered how much they enjoyed each other’s company and it turned out to be the first of many such meetings. For a surprisingly long time, though, their meetings remained no more than that, which was something Jessica, with her blunt, plain speaking, made clear at the beginning.

“I’d like you to understand that whatever else goes on around here, I am no pushover. If I go to bed with someone it has to mean something special and important to me, and also to the other person, so don’t say you weren’t warned.” Their relationship also endured long separations, due to Partridge’s travels to other parts of Vietnam.

But inevitably a moment came when desire overwhelmed them both.

They had dined together at the Caravelle, where Partridge was staying. Afterward, in the hotel garden, an oasis of quiet amid the discord of Saigon, he had reached for Jessica and she came to him eagerly. As they kissed, she clung tightly, urgently, and through her thin dress he sensed her physical excitement. Years later, Partridge would remember that time as one of those rare and magic moments when all problems and concerns—Vietnam, the war’s ugliness, future uncertainties—seemed far away, so all that mattered was the present and themselves.

He asked her softly, “Shall we go to my room?”

Without speaking, Jessica nodded her consent.

Upstairs in the room, with the only lighting from outside and while they continued to hold each other, he undressed her and she helped him where his hands proved awkward.

As he entered her, she told him, “Oh, I love you so!”

Long after, he could never remember if he told her that he truly loved her too, but knew he had and always would.

Partridge was also deeply moved by the discovery that Jessica had been a virgin. Then, as time went by and their lovemaking continued, they found the same delight in each other physically that they had in other ways.

In any other time and place they might have married quickly. Jessica wanted to be married; she also wanted children. But Partridge, for reasons he afterward regretted, held back. In Canada he had had one failed marriage and knew that marriages of TV newsmen so often were disastrous. TV news correspondents led peripatetic lives, could be away from home two hundred days a year or more, were unused to family responsibilities and encountered sexual temptations on the road which few could permanently resist. As a result, spouses often grew away from each other—intellectually as well as sexually. When reunited after long absences, they met as strangers.

Combined with all that was Vietnam. Partridge knew his life was at risk each time he left Saigon and, though luck had been with him so far, the odds were against that luck enduring. So it wasn’t fair, he reasoned, to burden someone else—in this case Jessica—with persistent worry, and the likelihood of heartbreak later on.

He confided some of this to Jessica early one morning after they had spent the night together, and he could not have picked a worse occasion. Jessica was shocked and jolted by what she perceived as a puerile cop-out by a man to whom she had already given her heart and body. She told Partridge coldly that their relationship was at an end.

Only much later did Jessica realize she had misread what, in reality, was kindness and deep caring. Partridge left Saigon a few hours afterward, and that was the time he went into Cambodia and was away a month.

Crawford Sloane had met Jessica several times while she was in Harry Partridge’s company, and saw her occasionally in the USIS offices when he had queries that took him there. On all occasions Sloane was strongly attracted to Jessica and longed to know her better. But recognizing she was Partridge’s girl, and being punctilious in such matters, he had never asked her for a date, as others often did.

But when Sloane learned, from Jessica herself, that she and Partridge had “split up,” he promptly asked Jessica to dine with him. She agreed to, and they went on seeing each other. Two weeks later, confiding that he had loved her for a long time from a distance and now with closer knowledge adored her, Sloane proposed marriage.

Jessica, taken by surprise, asked for time to think.

Her mind was a tumult of emotions. Jessica’s love for Harry had been passionate and all-consuming. No man had ever swept her away as he had done; she doubted if anyone ever would again. Instinct told her that what she and Harry had shared was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And she still loved him, she was sure of that. Even now Jessica missed him desperately; if he came back and asked her to marry him she would probably say yes. But, clearly, Harry wasn’t going to ask. He had rejected her and Jessica’s bitterness and anger lingered. A part of her wanted to … just show him! So there!

On the other hand, there was Crawf. Jessica liked Crawford Sloane … No—more than that! … She felt a strong affection for him. He was kind and gentle, loving, intelligent, interesting to be with. And Crawf was solid. He possessed—Jessica had to admit—a stability that Harry, while an exciting person, sometimes lacked. But for a lifetime, which was how Jessica saw marriage, which of the two loves on different levels—one with excitement, the other with stability—was more important? She wished she could be positive about the answer.

Jessica might also have asked herself the question, but did not: Why make a decision at all? Why not wait? She was still young …

Unacknowledged, but implicit in her thinking, was the presence of all of them in Vietnam. The fervor of war surrounded them; it was all-pervading like the air they breathed. There was a sense of time being compressed and accelerated, as if clocks and calendars were running at extra speed. Each day of life seemed to spill in a precipitous torrent through the open floodgates of a dam. Who among them knew how many days remained? Which of them would ever resume a normal pace of living?

In every war, throughout all human experience, it had been ever thus.

After weighing everything as best she could, the next day Jessica accepted Crawford Sloane’s proposal.

They were married at once, in the U.S. Embassy by an army chaplain. The ambassador attended the ceremony and afterward gave a reception in his private suite.

Sloane was ecstatically happy. Jessica assured herself that she was too; determinedly she matched Crawf’s mood.

Partridge did not learn of the marriage until his return to Saigon and only then did it dawn on him, with overpowering sadness, how much he had lost. When he met Jessica and Sloane to congratulate them, he tried to conceal his emotions. With Jessica, who knew him so well, he did not wholly succeed.

But if Jessica shared some of Partridge’s feelings, she kept them to herself and also put them behind her. She reasoned that she had made her choice and was determined to be a good wife to Sloane which, across the years, she was. As in any normal marriage there were some midway conflicts and disruptions, but they healed. Now—incredibly, it seemed to all concerned—Jessica and Crawford’s silver wedding anniversary was less than five years distant.