Chapter 57

Angela Gets the Runaround

 

Angela threw down the magazine she’d been staring at without seeing. She got a new cigarette going off the old and tried again to sort out how she would begin if they ever finally let her into the general’s office.

She had been trying to get this interview for three weeks. Now here she was in command headquarters of northern I Corps, surrounded by color-coded pin-dot maps, and she hadn’t a clue what she should say.

It wasn't easy, the task she had set for herself: a single reporter with no backup help and few if any well-placed sources.

But she was determined.

Determined to nail down that the Army was flying its Chinooks knowing full well they were flawed.

She had tried everything she could think of, but she was stymied at every turn. The days had dragged into weeks. Tramping from one battalion headquarters to the next, racing to crash sites. She had talked to so many mechanics at Da Nang that MPs started running her out of repair hangars.

So she was more than hyped to tackle the commanding general here at Bien Hoa Air Base, just north of Saigon.

“OK, miss, you're on,” said the young airman, rising from behind his desk where he’d been banging away at an old Royal typewriter.

As she followed him down the short corridor to the general’s office, she flashed for a moment on Nantucket Bay. Searching for the memory, she studied the airman’s straight, military back in his short-sleeved, blue-trimmed khakis. She grinned. His rigidly starched, perfectly creased pants sounded with every step like the luffing of racing sails tacking into a breeze.

The general, who stood up as she entered, had the short barrel-chested body of a hawk, a warrior, and a small head with the quick owlish eyes of a scholar. Without a word, he nodded his head and waved her to a chair across from his broad, uncluttered desk.

She bent to take a notebook and pen from her canvas bag, straightened and smiled.

“Yes?” the general said.

Frontal attack was her only hope.

“I have personal knowledge, sir,” she said, taking the plunge, “that at least two Chinook crashes have been blamed on small arms fire when, in fact, their own rotors banged into each other.”

It was a long shot, but surprise didn't work. The general seemed unperturbed. He asked no details, he didn't inquire how she came by such startling information, nor did he appear to be stalling for time. He simply said, “That’s very interesting. Something I’ve heard nothing about. When you can pin that down further, let me know.” He rose from behind his desk in dismissal.

So much for that. Angela gave the general a small, you-win grin, shut her notebook, and stood up to leave. As she leaned to shake his hand across the desk she said, “Since your command stretches to the border, would it be safe to assume that secret incursions into Cambodia are originating here?”

“I wouldn't make that assumption, if I were you,” he said, jerking his head up slightly, his owl eyes squinting smaller. “I think I'd be the first to know something like that. And I haven't heard a word.”

“General, sir, I was with a search-and-destroy patrol that not only was in Cambodia, but was part of a coordinated effort.”

“Really? That’s very interesting,” he replied with a faint smile. “You certainly get around. Well, it’s been nice talking to you. Let me know when I can be of further help.”

“By all means,” she said.

 

****

A few nights later, she thought she was finally on to something when she spotted a kid whom she thought she had seen at Bien Hoa. She was having dinner with two women cable clerks from the Embassy who had been helpful on other stories, but seemed to either know nothing, or wouldn’t tell anything, about the Chinooks. They were eating in Jimmy’s Kitchen, a French/American restaurant a few doors up the Tu Do from her hotel.

“Excuse me for a moment, I see someone I think I know,” Angela said to the women, and approached the kid sitting at the bar. He was a long skinny drink of water with black frizzy hair and John Lennon glasses, wearing civvies – chino pants and a dark denim shirt. She made some small talk right away, but did identify herself as a reporter. He said he was a Spec 4 from California. Finally she popped the question. “Have you heard this thing about the Chinooks’ problems with their gearboxes?”

“Oh sure, it's common knowledge,” the kid replied. “They're having a bitch of a time with those choppers.” He was a third-year mechanical engineering student from Berkeley who’d gotten drafted because he hadn't made his grades. He rambled on for half an hour about vectors and gear ratios, all the while sketching projections on a damp paper napkin. As the evening wore on, she realized that from a news standpoint it all boiled down to less than zilch – she couldn’t use him or his information in print. She thanked him and returned to her friends.

Nick laughed when he found out later she’d even bothered to keep the napkin.

“For Christ sake, the kid's a clerk in the quartermaster’s office,” Nick said. “He doesn't have enough authority to place an order for GI underwear.”

When she’d first started her search, she hadn't bothered with press information officers, figuring they wouldn't know anything and certainly wouldn’t tell it if they did. But as she got more and more desperate, she started making those rounds.

About the 10th time she used her frontal assault, it worked. Bingo. A slight rent in the know-nothing canvas.

“I hear they’re planning to ground the Chinook for rotor gearbox problems,” Angela had announced with no preamble as she walked into a refrigerated military assistance office that resembled a library, with its rows of wooden shelves filled with files behind a long Formica counter. “Is that effective immediately, or do they plan to stall around?”

The young PIO captain looked flabbergasted.

“Well, I don't know. I ah ... I thought that was all over. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

Angela was more stunned than the PIO. Her heart was thumping so loud, she was afraid he’d hear it.

But she managed to keep her voice even and her face straight as she said as matter of factly as she could manage, “Fine. I'll just wait. My story’s already written and I've got to file. It would be good, though, to have the Army’s response that they plan to act immediately.”

The PIO looked startled again. “That’s funny, I was thinking it was the Marines, not the Army.”

While he went off to search through the file stacks and make some phone calls, she retreated to the hall to try to calm down, chain-smoking, pacing the corridors of the high-ceilinged, ornate colonial building the French Army had occupied before the Americans.

“I was right,” the captain said when she got back. “It was the Marines. And it was their Sea Knight, the CH-46. But it’s back in action. Everything’s fine now. They grounded it last September, but it resumed flying several months later. February, to be exact.”

Angela’s heart stopped its thudding. Shit. Two months ago!

“But that's the Marines,” she said. “What about the Chinook?”

“No problems there. Not that I know of,” the young captain replied.

“They're basically the same ship,” she said. “Both made by Boeing. Both with double rotors on top. You can't tell them apart in the air.”

“The Sea Knight was also grounded for a couple of months in 1966. That's everything I know,” the PIO said.

“What was the Sea Knight's flaw?” Angela persisted.

The captain picked the file folder back up from the counter and leafed through its pages.

“Reduced power and compressor stall in ‘66,” he read. “Caused from dirt and junk stirred up by the rotors getting in the engine,” he explained. “Last time, it was something structurally wrong with the rear pylon.”

Pylon! Her heart resumed its thumping. She finally knew for sure she was on the right track. Pylon was the word George had used. And she knew from her own study that something called the “combining gearbox” was housed in that rear pylon.

It was enough for a spot story, the first thing she’d done in a couple of weeks. But it was no big deal. The information on the Sea Knight was old, the problem had been solved, or so the military said. The real advantage to the story was that it would alert reporters and politicians that there was a potential problem. Cause them to keep their eyes open a bit. What the story ideally would have been was her being able to say that somebody, almost anybody with some authority or expertise, had warned that the Chinook had the same problems, or the same potential for problems.

But she couldn’t write that because no one had said it. No one except her and a dead pilot and a third-year mechanical engineering student who worked in the quartermaster’s office. The best she could do was simply say that the Sea Knight was the Marine version of the Chinook. That was fact. Let readers make their own inference.

She and Nick wracked their brains for some way to somehow get more. Harry, of course, pounced instantly when she finally filed the story. “If the goddamned Sea Knights are so similar to the Chinooks, why haven’t they grounded them? How many of them are crashing? Why the hell are you sending me a story with a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through?”

When Nick replied that Angela was stumped on the Chinook, even though she was certain the rotors were hitting each other, Harry’s comment was so outraged and unprintable that Nick blanched to the color of bread dough. Angela, watching, knowing that Nick’s usual color for emotion was some shade of red, got a pretty good idea of just how bad it was.

When Harry calmed down after a few days, he conceded it was a story that begged for a whole team of reporters. He put his staffer covering the Pentagon to check there, and sent someone to Seattle to see what he could learn at Boeing. The onus, somehow, was still on Angela. But Harry refused to cut Nick loose to see what he could dig up in Nam.

“We got to fill this paper every day,” Harry had screamed from halfway around the world. “I can’t have you out farting around.”

When Harry’s regulars ultimately turned up nothing, the foreign editor claimed the whole thing existed only in Angela’s head. “Just like a broad,” he pronounced. “Fucking dreaming.”

Finally, in a totally foolhardy move, Angela marched one afternoon into Kevin Leahey’s office at the Embassy.

“To what do I owe this singular pleasure?” Kevin asked with his usual smarmy inflection as his secretary ushered Angela into his large, comfortable office.

“I expected more surprise than that, Kevin,” Angela said, matching his unctuous tone. “For all you know, I’m dead after you gave Braeford Curtis a phony list of pacified villages. We both were nearly killed, you know.”

“I was really sorry to hear you had a problem,” Kevin said, sounding terribly sincere. “But that’s the way war is, you know. The pacification program has been highly successful, but now and again the Cong slip in under the cover of night.”

“You're a spook, Kevin, and everyone knows it. You don't give a damn about helping the peasants. But the one thing the goddamned Central Intelligence Agency should have is some intelligence about which villages are friendly and which aren't.”

“I’m a USAID adviser, Angela. The Agency for International Development.” Kevin used his most condescending tone. “Is this supposed to be a joke? We're doing a lot of good in the countryside, with the farmers, the peasants. The Cong are terrorists, it isn't easy to make inroads against fear and intimidation. But pacification is working.”

“Pacification, bullshit!” Angela exploded. “It’s the program that’s a joke. It consists of either showing USIA propaganda films, handing out toothbrushes or putting an entire village behind barbed wire with the bizarre notion that the Viet Cong can’t get through.”

“You peaceniks are all alike, aren’t you,” he said not bothering to hide his sneer.

“I'm not a peacenik, Kevin,” Angela said quietly. “I'm a reporter whose job is to report accurately what I see with my own eyes and let someone else decide the issues of war and peace. You’re so obsessive in your myopic vision of the world that you’re willing to lie and cheat to enforce your personal opinions and politics.”

“Perhaps it's your own myopia,” he snapped back, “that causes your failure to recognize the truth when it’s handed to you.”

“Fair enough,” Angela said. “Here’s two questions of truth or falsehood for you: I personally have been in Cambodia with a search-and-destroy patrol. And I’ve seen two Chinook crashes that I suspect, but can’t prove, were caused by a gear malfunction that banged the overhead rotors into each other. Why do I keep getting stonewalled on both those issues?”

“My expertise is agriculture,” Kevin replied.

“You know President Johnson ordered that Cambodia’s neutrality is to be respected,” Angela persisted. “He even ruled out crossing the border in hot pursuit of Cong retreating into sanctuary there.”

“Lyndon Johnson's a lame duck,” said Kevin. “Or don't you keep up with the news? He's stopped the bombing in the north and he’s stepping down. You peaceniks ran him out.”

“He's still the president,” Angela said, all but yelling as she struggled to keep her voice down. “There won't be another for nine months. And he said we’re not supposed to be in Cambodia. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Why should it? We’ve got a war to fight, and just as you said, you leave the issues of war and peace to others, I leave the fighting to the military.”

“The CIA may leave the fighting and dying to someone else, but it sure doesn't have a hands-off policy on strategic planning. It was the CIA that decided this very small place was the spot for us to take a stand against communism.”

“This conversation seems less than pointless,” he said.

“Kevin, that Chinook that took Ford and me into your so-called pacified village was not brought down by small arms fire. Two crewmen were killed. You may think that Asian lives are expendable, but surely you don’t want to see Americans killed needlessly.”

“Angela, I really must ask you to leave. I’ve got work to do. We’ll talk another day . . . when you’re calmer.”

“God, Kevin, can’t you get SOMEBODY to do something? The hell with whether I get a story. People are being killed because of this, and you know it.”

Kevin just laughed.

~~~~~~