21

April 1971

The seven American soldiers were flown by daylight from Kunming to Chengtu in the Szechwan Province, about 600 miles, in a battered, gallant DC3. At Chengtu they were transferred to a railway train which took them 480 miles northeast to the big junction at Pao-chi, then by another train northwest for another 390 miles to Hsi-ning, capital of the Tsinghai Province.

“You gotta say one thing about these people,” Teel said to Kranak during the rail journey, “they sure don’t worry about comfort.”

The Tsinghai Province, in the far west of China, on the Plateau of Tibet, which is the loftiest highland area of the world, had an average elevation of 13,000 feet, sustaining about 12 percent less oxygen than at sea level. The mountains of the Tsinghai Province descended in broad steps from The Roof of the World at Ch’iang-t’ang, down to mountains that ranged at about 6,000 feet, then, at the eastern part of the province, at the Kansu border, down to only 3,000 feet.

The Tsinghai Province had the smallest population of all the states of China; 2,000,000 people in 278,000 square miles; eight people to the square mile. (The Kuang-Tung Province, in south China, had an area of only 87,000 square miles and a population of 42,800,000 people.) Perhaps the Mongols and Tibetans—45 percent of the people of Tsinghai—were responsible for the small population because of their tradition of having one son from every family enter a lamasery. Tsinghai had come under Chinese control in the third century B.C. It was made a province of China in 1928. Summers were intensely hot and dusty here; winters dry, cold, and windy with temperatures averaging 12 degrees below freezing.

The eastern part of the province was a high plateau between the complex Ch’i-lien and Nan-Shan ranges on the north and the Pa-yen-ku-la range in the south. These were broken by a series of ranges with their axes running northwest to southeast. The mountains reached 11,000 feet and enclosed the basin of the 70-mile-long, 45-mile-wide Lake Kokonor.

“Lissen, I’m tellin’ ya something,” Buckley said. “I gotta get outa here. Who ever saw so many Chinks? It suffocates me.”

“So—mail yourself home to Mommy,” Kranak said.

“Mail?” Buckley snorted. “Where’s the mailbox? Where’s the telephone? Where’s the Daily News?”

“You can’t even buy a fuckin’ samwitch. On a fuckin’ train platform, you can’t buy a samwitch,” Fingus keened.

“Aaaa, shaddup!” Kranak said.

“How many days we been traveleen?” Reyes said rhetorically. “What they gonna do—hide us someplace? What kinda job ees thees gung be, hombre? I tell you what I tell them when I see them. Shove you job up you ass. I quit. Get me outa here.”

“Listen—fellas—” Dawes said quietly. “Now you might as well take it easy because any operation that is as long and elaborate as getting seven Americans into China, then keeping them traveling for days, sure sounds to me like we’re in for a long, long stay.”

“How long?” Buckley said harshly.

“How do I know? I mean—well, say, maybe a year—who knows?”

“A year?” Fingus sounded really frightened.

“I can’t take it in any kind of army for like even a month,” Anderson whined. “I just cain’t take any army. I mean, I wasn’t meant to be in any army.”

“You been in prison?” Teel asked abruptly.

“Course I been in prison. What that got to do wid anything?”

“This is better than bein’ in prison, ain’t it?” Kranak asked. “I mean, you got travel, you got twenty-five grand to fall back on, you got mystery, excitement and—”

“Better than prison? Man, are you crazy? What’s wrong with a good prison? What the hell good is my twenty-five thou out here with a buncha people who talk like they won a free two weeks in a zoo? Travel—this travel is breakin’ my ass—”

“Lemme tell ya something. No fuckin’ around on this thing. Sooner or later we got to get where we’re going,” Buckley said, “and I’m gonna lay the facts on The Man. These are The Facts: I’m gettin’ out of this fuckin’ country, if I gotta walk all the way out.”

“These goddam people out that winda all look alike!” Dolly Fingus said wildly.

The seven Americans had no layover in Hsi-ning, the only large city in the province. They were hustled out of the train and into an ancient but immaculately kept Reo sedan and driven to the local military airport where they were put into a Japanese-built Sikorsky S-62A helicopter, which could be pushed along as fast as a cumulus cloud, about 105 miles per hour.

“Where we going?” Kranak asked the bald, middle-aged Chinese who had been assigned to them. Kranak spoke very slow, probably very broken, P’u-t’ung-hua, the most universal Chinese speech. He seemed to get through. The man answered. “Ssu-hsin.”

“How far?” That was an impossible question because the man didn’t understand distances in miles. Only in changs. Kranak couldn’t figure changs. It took 154 minutes to get to Ssu-hsin, so Dawes later figured the camp must be 200 miles west of Hsi-ning.

“How did you ever pick up the lingo?” Dawes asked Kranak.

“Hell, it’s the basic speech of Southeast Asia as well as China. These people trade everywhere. I been out in Asia a long time, like maybe six years before I went in the army. That’s how I made Special Forces. I always had an ear. Well, not an ear, you know. I was never afraid of wadin’ right into these languages.”

Everything turned back into Armyland when they alighted at the training camp. A spit-and-polish, parade-ground major of Chinese regular infantry was waiting for them at the chopper pad. He spoke California American, all diphthongs and drawls with R sounds as hard as diamonds and a two-note lilt. He shook their hands like an insurance salesman let loose in a fold of lottery winners. He motioned to three Chinese enlisted men to take the American gear.

“I’ll hang on to my rifle if you don’t mind,” Kranak said nervously.

“In a pig’s ass,” the major said. He snarled at one of the soldiers who pulled the rifle off Kranak’s back. “It’ll be a long time before you need a rifle,” the major said sweetly.

He led the way toward a gaggle of wooden buildings saying, “This is Camp Cody.” It looked like most forward military reservations around the world. It had barracks, offices, classrooms and an officers’ club grouped around a central common. Scattered over the electrically fenced 495 acres, some of them wooded, there were weapons ranges, jump towers, a maze of metropolitan city streets complete with sewers and underground conduits just as if this were the old back lot at Metro. Away in a different direction from these central and sprawled facilities were heavily guarded off-limits sites, used for the heavy clandestine work, simulating super-secret projects such as training an important agent from the enemy side, or for torture techniques expansion, or for de-briefing a recent defector. The more painful side of brainwashing was done out in these areas; called “psychological de-briefing.” Every trainee had to undergo fourteen weeks of this rigorous experience beginning the second day after his arrival.

Classes from each country were shown films of city problems of their own country four times a week. These films directly applied to the courses of study so that the students could relate the abstracted problems to the terrain with which they were familiar, right down to traffic patterns, lighting, uniforms, and the people they would be expected to destroy. Specific films showing interiors of various government buildings in many important cities of the world had been obtained to provide clear lessons in assassination opportunity.

“How many trainees you got here?” Dawes asked.

“About sixty right now,” Major Wong said. “Now-hear this! This is the general rule. You fraternize with the other trainees at night—if you can still stand-at the Officers’ Club. There is no Enlisted Men’s Club because there are no enlisted men. Every trainee here is going out of here to become an important, high-ranking guerrilla leader. But you are going to earn it. All day long, from six ayem forward, we work your ass off and you better believe it.”

“We’re back in the fuckin’ army,” Kranak said.

“Right. Now—practice calling me Cal—not Major Wong, repeat, not Major Wong—because psychological studies say the use of a given name makes everything easier for Americans, Australians, and Irish. Each man has his own room. Each man has an orderly. Each man gets four American magazines and comic books a week and a copy of the Albanian edition of Playboy, called Po, with whom we have a special deal. Each man gets forty minutes with a woman each week, on a staggered schedule, and an option, not compulsory, for another forty minutes on Sunday afternoon between four and six.”

“I thought you guys had outlawed prostitution,” Dawes said.

“Prostitution? These are female non-coms from our Western Army! They’re entitled to a little recreation, too, you know.”

They were given the rest of the day to get settled. “Feel free to wander around the compound but no farther,” Major Wong said. “Beginning tonight and for the next three years you’ll be messing at my table, Little America. Chow at six peeyem. Only me or the doctor can get you out of chow.”

“What’s the food like?” Jonas Teel asked.

“You’ll be so hungry after a day’s work, you’ll love it.”

“But what’s it like?”

“It’s army chow. Does that answer your question, mister?”

“I got a coupla questions myself,” Tom Buckley said. “What the hell is this? Whatta we doon here?”

“Yeah!” Anderson said. “Nobody told us we gone end up wid a buncha fuckin’ COMMnists! What you guys trine do here?”

Major Wong looked at them with elegant distaste. “You have been paid—each one of you—enough money to keep this entire province eating for some time.” He walked slowly to stand in front of Anderson. “When you speak to me, you will ask my permission to speak, then you will stand at attention as you speak.” Anderson began to mumble. Major Wong struck him across the face so hard that he spun almost entirely around. Every American gasped.

“Attention! All of you!” Wong barked. They came to attention.

“You are here to be trained. Fortunately for you it is going to be easy and pleasant for you and you are going to look forward to each day when you awaken because you are going to be indoctrinated—debriefed—then, if you reach the standards that have been set by your American leader, you will become important military commanders in your own country. If you fail in this matter of adjusting to what we require of you, you will be considered psychologically useless and you will be shot.”

“Sir!” Dawes said smartly.

“You may speak, Lieutenant Dawes.”

“The basic question that seems to be repeated by the men, sir, is—how long can they expect to be on this duty?”

“Four years.” There was a strangled sound from the men. “But, you have your revenge,” Major Wong said smiling. “I will be required to be here with you. When you have dismissed the men, Lieutenant Dawes, they will go to their quarters and you will remain here and Private Teel will remain here.”

“Yes, sir. Dis-miss!” The five men tumbled out of the area to sit down and talk the catastrophe over.

When they had gone, Major Wong said, “I have all the dossiers. I know you are a West Point graduate, Lieutenant Dawes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is your opinion of these men?”

“They have no morale, Major Wong.”

“Don’t worry about their morale. Our modern techniques, based on ancient studies, will take care of reconditioning them. Are they healthy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are they murderous and deeply violent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those are the things we cannot instill in them, so that is good news indeed. Private Teel,” he smiled. “Mr. Teel, I should say. You will be leaving to spend the next three years away from these great and good friends,” he smiled more broadly, “working with our nuclear scientists in the Hupeh Province. Very international there, Teel. You’ll be able to use your French.”

The five other men gathered in Kranak’s room. “Okay, democracy rules,” Buckley said. “I move we conk the Chink and hijack that helicopter and then make him fly us out to Hong Kong.”

“I’m witchew!” Dolly Fingus said.

“I’m the one who gits to do the conkin’,” Anderson said, “’cause I’m the one who hadda take his shit.”

“Well, I theenk you guys is crazy—but—” Reyes shrugged—“eet’s the only game in de tonn.”

“What you say, Sarge?” Buckley asked Kranak.

He looked at them blankly. “Say? Say what?”

“Say let’s conk the Chink and hijack a plane outta here.”

“Oh, fahcrissake!”

“Whatsamatta? You chicken.”

“That’s it. That’s right. Exactly right. I am chicken.”

“Whut the hell you talkin’ ’bout, man?” Anderson said aggressively. “You jes’ do whut you told and maybe even then you won’t be all raht.”

“I’ll do what I’m told. Every time that major tells me. Did you happen to notice the Permanent Party here or did yiz find some blow someplace and you are too stoned to see? There are about three hundred Chink soldiers inna Permanent Party here an’ they run with nice, new Russian automatic weapons. Does that tell you something, Dr. Einstein?” he said to Anderson. “There is a doctor inna balcony, Captain Marvel,” he said to Buckley.

“Oh, shit! We stuck,” Dolly Fingus moaned.

“You bet you ass we stuck,” Reyes said. “But not oney that, hombre.”

“What?” Fingus asked, always ready with the straight line.

“We stuck for four years, amigo.”

Dawes and Teel came in. “What goes?” Buckley asked.

“Teel goes,” Dawes answered, grinning. “He’s being sent to nuke school.”

“Nuke school? You mean bombs?” Anderson said blankly. “When did we give up the secret of the bomb to foreigners?”

Dawes said, “It’s not going to be too bad, fellas. I can tell. This is a good, professional operation.”

“It’s sure isolated, even for China,” Kranak said. “Do they keep it out here just to age it, then send it in to the Middle West? Or do they keep it here so we can’t get out?”

“We know there’s a town only two hundred miles or so away,” Dawes said. “There’s got to be a road to it.”

“Some town,” Buckley said. “Metered yaks.”

“At least you guys’ll have each other’s company and hear American. I’m goin’ out there into Babel,” Teel told them.

“But, Jesus,” Kranak said, “could you screw a Chinese non-com?”

“Jes’ make it another famous first, Eddie, you be all right,” Teel chuckled.

Major Wong appeared twenty minutes later to take them to meet the Commandant. “You look fine,” he said. “Real soldiers. The Commandant will like that. He’s new here.”

They walked in pairs to the headquarters building. They were shown into the commandant’s office.

“Sir!” Major Wong barked, saluting.

The Commandant came out from behind his desk where, because he was so tiny, it had appeared that he was sitting down. He shook hands with each man. “I am Colonel Ho,” he said. “Welcome to Camp St. Patrick and call me Paddy if it puts you more at ease.”

“This is the new American group, Colonel,” Major Wong said.

“Aaaah. So. Our first American group. Well, well, well. Welcome to Camp Cody.” He walked to a fireplace, turned abruptly to face them, teetering on his boots, his hands clasped behind his back. “Psychological tests show that each national group enjoys calling this camp by a familiar, nationalistic name,” he said. “To our Latin Americans it is Camp Cantinflas. To the French it is Camp Moi. To the English it is simply called The Teabreak. And so on. Tomorrow begins your psychological de-briefing. That de-briefing will last for fourteen weeks. It was designed to indoctrinate trainees into the most unwavering concepts of world revolution as expressed by Chairman Mao. It was also designed to uncover imposters, if any, because the entrenched society beyond China would very much like to place their agents in here. Also, the de-briefing will recover from your minds a knowledge of your attitudes, skills and other factors which will permit us to make the most of you. Some men complete the de-briefing in seven weeks. Some men have taken as long as eighteen weeks to yield anything useful. We have shot two agents. You will be more valuable soldiers and more valuable human beings if you can last through it. In four years you will lead the finest revolutionary program we have ever seen, itself the creation of your leader. You will return to your country highly trained to destroy its counter-revolutionaries by terrorizing and destroying your petit-bourgeoisie to create an international society of safety for your people. Major Wong is your link to me, but you must call him Cal. That is all. Enjoy your dinner, gentlemen.”

The food wasn’t bad. They couldn’t recognize a lot of it, but it was better than just army food. Cal kept up a lively patter throughput the meal. There was a small American flag at the center of the table. At other tables, each with up to ten men and one or two Chinese officers, there were other small identifying flags. A lot of the world was represented: black men from Central Africa being trained to go into Rhodesia and South Africa; Arabs learning how to demolish Israel; Irish learning how to kill the Irish; stolid groups of Japanese, Dutch, Czechs, Italians, French and Pakistanis. One table at the far side of the room was long and rectangular. Its diners seemed to be a cross-section of all nationalities in the room.

Major Wong identified them as Upperclassmen who were about to move out to advanced studies at the Guerrilla War College in the north.

“How come no women?” Reyes said. “Women are always a big part of the people where I come from.”

“There is a women’s camp. It’s just like this one.”

“If we gone work with them, I don’t see why we don’t learn with them,” Dolly Fingus said.

“We tried it,” Major Wong said, “but it made too much trouble. It creates too many personality mysteries. A very bright Italian guy got killed and two guys had nervous breakdowns from all the screwing. So we had to reorganize.”

“Are they near here?” Dawes asked mildly.

“I really have no idea where they are,” Major Wong responded. “But you’ll meet them in the fourth year at the War College.”

“Who do they screw on Sunday afternoons between four and six?” Buckley asked. “Male non-coms from your Western Army?”

“Oh, I imagine some of them get the occasional officer,” Major Wong said.

On their first morning at Camp Cody they were awakened by batmen at 5 A.M. After a hearty breakfast they were moved out through the Weapons Area into the vast off-limits site, into the Psychological De-Briefing Area. They were separated. Each man was taken into a separate building, each building approximately ninety yards from the next. The buildings themselves seemed to be tiny two-room arrangements, but the rooms were only for interviewing and early sedation. After that they were dropped sixty feet into the ground by elevators to a large common hospital area that had six cubicles on each side and two projection rooms at each end: four in all. By the tune the men reached the lower level they had fallen into an ambulatory hypnotic state from the chemicals that had been contained in their breakfasts. The men were put into separate silent cubicles where two technicians to each cubicle stripped them down and strapped them firmly to steel stretchers, which were capable of lying horizontal, standing vertical, or achieving any angle in between, with the patient either right side up or upside down. The stretcher could be whirled centrifugally by an electric motor or could be turned end over end.

Feeding tubes leading to bottles containing Chinese-developed preparations (some perfected over centuries, some in recent years), which opened the doors of consciousness and led the interrogators to the truth locked inside the minds of each of the men, shadow-thin layer upon shadow-thin layer, were inserted into nostrils, into veins at wrist, thigh, and ankle so that the saturation of the unlocking mechanisms could begin.

The American recruits seemed to be sleeping. The technicians checked their body temperatures, breathing rates, blood pressure and REMs constantly on the monitor dials. The saturation process took forty-one hours, tended by two twelve-hour teams for each patient. The interrogation began. Each man was taken through his childhood, his adolescence, into his young manhood. Routine areas were investigated and painstakingly checked off: political background, governmental connections, sabotage experience, espionage backgrounds; skills, loyalties, resentments, hostilities, ability to love and accept self; ability to welcome authority to find solution, teamwork capabilities; sexual drives, sexual malarrangements, sexual relationships with Areas 1 and 2 and 3 (life background; group background; emotional responses).

The processes of interrogation required ten weeks of twenty-hour days with chemical stimulation and sedation. The interrogators were, in every case, women.

The terminal process was the re-educative process. This took four weeks, was enormously painful, both physically and emotionally—continuously, unendingly painful because it required that negative lessons be laid down which, if the subject deliberately chose to transgress the necessities of those lessons, caused extraordinary, instant electrical pain to be induced into the central nervous system. Some men took longer than others. Those totally anti-authoritarian must have felt, before the end, that they had been fractured everywhere by sledgehammer and taken the burns of corrosive acids into hundreds of knife wounds throughout their body. A man like Dawes, however, accustomed to discipline, went through the negative lesson period with minimum intensity of suffering. Lurky Anderson remained in that twilight zone of agony for three days longer than the others.

When the negative lessons had been mastered and each man was ready to welcome authority as he would welcome love and attention, the positive lessons, to be a fixed part of their characters forever, were firmly addressed. These fixed characteristics were largely identical: The men existed to serve their Leader, an unknown face and form somewhere in the United States, whom they would never meet but would always obey. They were in China to be taught how they could develop as soldiers of the revolution, as great and model leaders themselves who would accept the responsibility for taking hundreds of thousands of Americans into battle. They had ascended to the highest level. They adored Authority, Discipline, Service and The Team. They were as one intricate, self-involved body, which helped itself to triumph over social and political wrongs. They would willingly labor to learn how best to kill millions of the enemy so that the revolution would overcome the status quo and American glory would once again rise up to the heavens like a great and shining light, even if it were necessary for all of them to die to bring it there—if their Leader wanted it there.

When it was over, when they came out the other side of the mysteries and found themselves seated in the small reception room of the little building of the Psychological De-Briefing Area where they had first entered, none of them remembered anything that had happened, what they had suffered, or how much time had passed. They all looked worn and thin and each man had deep restraint marks on his arms and legs. When the entire group had reassembled, they met in a small, wooden building known as the American University. It was a classroom with blackboards all around and swivel seats at small desks for thirty.

Major Wong arrived eleven minutes after they had seated themselves. They had been sitting quietly waiting for him.

“Good morning,” he said. They did not answer.

“You must answer—Good morning, Cal,” he said gently.

“Good morning, Cal,” they said in unison.

“I am happy to see you all together again and pleased to read your outstanding reports from the de-briefing. We begin. You are at Camp Cody because you are revolutionary specialists at war who will become supremely skilled at guerrilla war. As Chairman Mao wrote in December 1936 in the uncompleted study called Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War: ‘War, this monster of mutual slaughter among men, will be finally eliminated by the progress of human society and in the not-too-distant future, too. But there is only one way to eliminate it and that is to oppose war with war, to oppose counter-revolutionary war with revolutionary war, and to oppose counter-revolutionary class war with revolutionary class war. History knows only two kinds of war—just and unjust. We support just wars and oppose unjust wars. All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just. Mankind’s era of wars will be brought to an end by our own efforts and, beyond doubt, the war we wage is part of the final battle.’

“But also beyond doubt,” Major Wong continued earnestly, “the war we face will be part of the biggest and most ruthless of wars. The biggest and most ruthless of unjust counter-revolutionary wars is hanging over us, and the vast majority of mankind will be ravaged unless we raise the banner of a just war. When human society advances to the point where classes and states can be eliminated and private possessions are abandoned, there will be no more wars, counter-revolutionary or revolutionary, just or unjust; that will be the era of perpetual peace for mankind. Each country, especially a large country, has its own characteristics; therefore the laws of war for each country also have their own characteristics. Those applying to one cannot be mechanically transferred to another.

“In the great Chinese revolutionary struggle, because of the nature of our country, Chairman Mao chose not to drive to seize the big cities. You come from the American industrial society. In the coming revolutionary struggle which you will wage, the immediate goals will be changed. You will fight inside the cities, ignoring the vast countryside. By bringing ruin in their name to the people of the cities you will cause them to overthrow the counter-revolutionary forces, demanding to be allowed to live their lives—which will of course never be the same again.

“In the next three years at Camp Cody we will experience together how this will be accomplished—this chain of limited urban wars—within all vital parts of the American nation. But allow me to tell you how Chairman Mao expressed protracted, limited war: ‘Enemy advances, we retreat; enemy halts, we harass; enemy tires, we attack; enemy retreats, we pursue.’ It is all waiting for us to study—for whether guerrilla warfare is fought in the mountains, in a pasture land, or in the mazes of a great modern city—it still uses the same strategy: Guerrilla war is the finest possible way to fight this kind of war.

“We will carry with us one golden rule: ‘The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.’”

The men, now six, minus Teel, who had left for the nuke school, were taught the basic applications, in actual practice and in theory, of what Agatha Teel was then, at home, working to provide for them: The Plan, the great weapon they would use when the Thirty Cities’ War began with a trained army of 700,000 men and women, white and black, students, preachers, junkies and dropouts, loosely 25,000 in each of the cities (depending on its size), drilled, organized, equipped guerrilla troops to fight a conventional opponent, the government forces, trapped in a maze. Their army would be equipped with modern weapons, from nuclear devices to light automatic rifles and small arms and including artillery, bombs, grenades, dynamite, gelignite, bacterial weapons, fire extermination systems, propaganda and poison gas. Munitions, weapons, food, and medical supply dumps and depots would be dispersed and concealed as caches; secured hideouts, hospitals, money cut-outs, plus a habitually bribed opposition within the government would be available to every commander on Army Corps, Divisional, Brigade, Regimental and Company levels. Battle plans for each individual city were currently being developed by seasoned professionals of international guerrilla war which would, during the first seven months, give an 8 to 1 advantage in any revolutionary struggle, fitting to the nature of big city warfare, of surprise. No quarter would be asked or given and, for the first time better-than-adequate financing over an indefinite period would be available, more than enough financing to exhaust establishment forces, to reduce the American population by ten to twenty million people, until a new world could be entered and all lives (remaining) fulfilled.

Each night the Americans at Camp Cody fell into an exhausted sleep from the exertions of their studies, which highlighted:

Mountain climbing (for later translation into ascent of the exteriors of high buildings and chimneys);

Metropolitan fire equipment operation and instant disablement;

Advanced karate and aikido (Tomiko);

Familiarization with layout and superficial techniques of television and radio station operation and their semi-permanent/permanent destruction;

Speaking, reading, and writing knowledge of the second languages of the regions of their country: Spanish, Yiddish, German and the New York dialects;

Certified qualification in Gr-1, the favored assassination technique;

Proficiency in the major studies of American city street universities: astrology, pot cultivation, I-Ching, the Druid religion, palmistry; Ouija, group sex, women’s liberation, etc.;

Water main destruction, river bridge demolition, underground transportation paralysis, stadium, theater and church firing during performance for maximum loss of audience; efficient mass child murder; the uses of throwing acids by power hoses, etc.;

Proficiency with small arms, grenades, own-made bombs and devices, flame-throwers, ropes, clubs/sticks, and knives;

Techniques of bribery, coercion and corruption; spread of venereal disease, spoliation of children;

Memorization of dry and wet sewerage systems for cross-city passage of troops, couriers and assassination teams;

Wreckage of elevator systems, electrical generators, water supply systems, food distribution, garbage disposal;

Forgery: counterfeiting money, ID cards, automobile licenses, passports, evidence, military credentials, credit cards, general evidence;

Advanced arson;

Destruction of crowds: the American leader was determined that no crowds should be allowed to form whether civilians or government troops, and to discourage this at its source all congregations of people whether shopping, walking, marching, rioting, or worshipping at church carried DESTRUCT signals;

Inducing dependency on the occult; promotion of auguries, omens, and reliance on their infallibility;

Education in the basic requirement: execution, out-of-hand and on-the-spot, of anyone in uniform: Boy Scouts, nurses, policemen, priests, park employees, soldiers, nuns, athletes, etc., so that people could not judge to whom they could turn for assistance;

Random Death Planning: people must return home to find pets slaughtered; baby carriages shoved into street traffic; high floor falls for crowded elevators especially in the first three weeks of warfare; car bombings in crowded areas; heavy accent on random slaughter with greatest display of blood and dismemberment;

Emphasis on follow-up action in all conquered and unconquered suburbs;

Detailed attention to principles of propaganda; improvement in rumor spreading, causing rumors during first three years of warfare of a profoundly optimistic nature, constantly giving “inside information” of early future dates when the war would be over to cause hope to vanish systematically as those dates retreated;

Overall objective: inability of 85 percent of the citizenry to dare to leave their homes.

“Even though you have been expertly indoctrinated at your de-briefings,” Major Wong said, “I have noted from some of your expressions that you find these tactics difficult to accept even though all of you have lived lives of crime and violence. However, that is how you feel now. You will accept these tactics in time as you gain calm understanding, just as the American people watched death on television each night at dinnertime throughout much of the Vietnam war, accepting it, finally, as they became so bored with the war it had to be taken off the air for lack of a sponsor.

“Let me ask you this: is it a wholly different thing to you, when a formal war is declared by old men in a capital city, a war which implements instant nuclear strikes and megadeaths, laying cities or villages—because sizes in terms of human death don’t really matter—to waste without any offer to capitulate?”

The female non-coms turned out to be a sensational bunch of kids. Everyone had a marvelous time except Kranak. Kranak would not fuck a Chink.