THE CORNERSTONE OF the White House was laid on October 13, 1792. It was completed in 1800, the first public building in the new capital of the new country. It was built to reflect the spirit of the great experiment upon which the country was embarking. The leaders of this new creation were adamant about avoiding even the trappings of monarchy and so it was definitely not to be a palace. Yet they wanted something fine and noble and expressive of their ideals.
In spite of time and weather, fire and smoke, additions and reconstructions, the mortal flaws and human frailties of its occupants, the White House remains an elegant expression of the aspirations that motivated the age of revolution and rationalism.
The cab that inconspicuously carried David Hartman in from Dulles International Airport offered the passenger a series of views of the White House before it brought him to the entrance gate. He’d seen them all, as we all have, countless times, in movies and on television, on the news, in newspapers, in magazines, in cartoons and comics. Still, it had an impact. Hartman didn’t know if that was a result of some aesthetic that infused the setting or it was because he was about to enter the seat of the Imperium as a player.
It was one of those days when the president had a lot of meetings. Nothing earth-shattering or especially newsworthy but very busy. They slipped David in a little before 9:00 A.M. The president’s appointment calendar would show “Sec. of Com. & D. Hartman.” There would be memos that the subject discussed was the importance of entertainment software as the number-two export of the nation, just after aviation. There was nothing in the memos to indicate that the commerce secretary left almost immediately and that Hartman stayed.
When he was alone with the president, Hartman explained what Saddam Hussein wanted. He wanted access to Western arms and arms technology. He wanted money. Up front, even before they had a deal. Neither of those, Hartman suggested, should be a deal breaker. It wasn’t a lot of money. At least not yet. A few billion dollars. And it didn’t have to appear in the budget.
Bush was relieved by that. The whole budget fantasy was out of hand. It was a fictoid or factoid ten times the size of a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There was nothing that anyone said about it that seemed to actually connect with reality, yet every time it went up, everyone made a lot of noise.
The money would go to Saddam as a loan. “We don’t even have to make the loan,” Hartman said. He’d already lined up several Swiss and Italian bankers happy to do that. “We just have to guarantee it.” David was going to get a couple of points from both sides. Banking was an exciting new vista. “I would suggest the Department of Agriculture,” Hartman said. He was virtually quoting Pandar’s screenplay. “Guarantee the loans for agricultural credits. That looks like the money goes to our farmers—which it very well might—Iraq does have to buy butter as well as guns. It’s obscure and wholesome at the same time.”
Then he got to the main items. Win, lose, or draw, Saddam wanted a guarantee of his personal survival; his country intact, at least to its current borders; sufficient military force to maintain those borders as well as to suppress any attempt at a coup or any attempt at rebellion by dissident minorities. Actually, Saddam had compared his need for armed forces to keep the Kurds in line to the way America used its armed forces to keep blacks in line. He had said it in a buddies kind of way, a remark designed to engender camaraderie, one put-upon head of state to another. It was an unfortunate correlation, but understandable, since an Iraqi would see the police, the Army, the national police, and the National Guard as single facets of one force, not as distinct entities in the way that Americans do. Nonetheless, Hartman didn’t think the insight would help and didn’t pass the comparison on.
There were, finally, some smaller points. One—the worldwide price of oil should rise. It didn’t have to be abrupt, but it had to be certain. Two—Saddam wanted direct access to the media—world media means American media—right through the whole war. He wanted to be able to get on TV at prime time and deliver his message to the American people, to the Arab people, to the world.
Hartman had already consulted with Beagle about the second item on a scrambled line from the U. Sec. office in Rome.
Beagle had fallen in love with the idea. “It’s totally Capraesque,” Beagle said. Frank Capra had been in charge of creating America’s propaganda films during World War II. His sources for the footage with which he created images of the Japanese and the Germans as monsters were their own films. Both people had been proud of their blitzkriegs and swift conquests, their sense of racial pride and purity. They worked very hard and with great success, especially the Germans, to get those feelings on film. Capra was delighted by the idea of using their own tools against them.108
“Give it to him,” Hartman said to the president. “Saddam’s understanding of television is worse than Michael Dukakis’s. He’s from another century. Trust me. The more he uses TV, the more he’ll harm himself. Beagle loves it. He visualizes seeing Saddam strut, with his stormtroopers, through the burning ruins of a conquered country.”
In the California hills Magdalena Lazlo awoke, before dawn, sky just turning light, with an empty space beside her. She reached out, knowing he wasn’t there, and put her hand on the pillow where his head had rested. A sentimental gesture. It felt so good to have a man to miss.
Holding that mood close, arms held so as to literally cradle it to her breasts, she slipped into a robe and went down toward the kitchen. On the way downstairs she heard noises. She felt chilled and the feeling—holding dreams of a protector-lover against her body—left her quick as a ghost in the daylight. But then a beat, a moment, after that, she smelled the aroma of coffee brewing. And other smells. Bacon in the pan, bread in the toaster. Then the sound of a black man speaking softly and laughing.
She moved silently so that she could look and listen without being seen. She didn’t know, at first, what prompted that. Then she realized she wanted to see a father with his son. She wondered about herself and touched her belly. She had used birth control, on and off, since she’d been sexually active. But not always. She did not get pregnant easily. If she did, there would have been more than one accident by now. There hadn’t been. Even with her husband. Was that why it had been so easy for her to say “Yes, come inside,” that she wasn’t really afraid, at least not of pregnancy and its consequences—interrupted career, stretch marks, sagging breasts and belly, widening of the hips, squaring off of the buttocks, and responsibility? And of course that companion that then clings to you for twenty or thirty years. She should have been afraid—she pushed her hair back with her fingers—it was madness not to be afraid, of the other thing. The disease. Was that a matter of sheer denial? Or was it that other streak in her, the one that meant it when she said “Let it be birth or death with us,” liked it that way, because otherwise it didn’t seem worth doing.
She had a name for that part of herself. The way some men have pet names for their penises and for the same reasons, because the part often led the whole and the person took pride in where the piece took them, stupid and dangerous places included. Mary Magdalene was her obvious but secret name for that side of herself, and Maggie liked to let Mary out in front of the camera, the sainted whore, saucy, wicked, vulnerable, dangerous. Dangerous to herself most of all. It was that quality, that sense of working without a net, that gave her performances magic. Not the craft, not the cheekbones, not the tits. Daring to be ugly, rude, pathetic, stupid, scared, domineering, vicious, a bitch, a cunt, an ice maiden, a saint, daring to find the line in the air that could not be sustained and sustaining it.
Martin Joseph Weston, eighteen, looked over toward the door and saw her standing there, her robe pulled tight at the waist, her hair tousled with sleep, just finger combed, and nothing on her feet, and it was all he could do not to whistle and say things that went down just fine in the streets in L.A. but which he knew would just sound all wrong here in this ultrafresh other world. Then she smiled at him. It was a shy smile, like she was intruding on their house and was worried what they would think of her. And he fell in love with her, his heart truly stricken.
His father wanted to laugh out loud just looking at the look on his son’s face. But he knew how dumb and tender a boy’s pride is in puberty, especially in front of his father and a Goddess. So Steve just said, “Morning, Miss Lazlo, how do you like your eggs?”
She said good morning to Steve and to Martin, told them to call her Maggie. She didn’t want the eggs or the bacon, but if there was enough coffee, she’d take some of that and a piece of toast off the unsliced loaf of sourdough rye. Steve poured her the coffee. She took it black, as most women whose shape is their fortune do. He put a slab of bread, beside his, in the toaster oven. Maggie sat down at the table by Martin. He already had soft-scrambled eggs, a thick hunk of Canadian bacon, and toast in front of him. But with her that close he had the unsavory feeling that he didn’t quite know how to eat right and that chewing would make him look like a dog. “So this is what you looked like when you went into the Marines,” Maggie said to Steve.
“Spittin’ image.”
“You were a good-looking boy.”
“You bet. Had all the young girls just chasing me all over Macon. It was different in them days. A girl got pregnant, you was expected to marry her. Made you cautious. A little bit. And they didn’t have this AIDS thing.”
“Come on, Dad.”
Steve slid his eggs out of the pan onto the plate next to the ham. He took the toast, Maggie’s and his own, from the oven, found a plate for hers, and buttered them both. There was a fancy jar of ginger marmalade in the refrigerator that’d caught his eye. He got that, plus the two plates, utensils, and his own cup of coffee, and sat down at the table.
“You were with Joe, in Vietnam.”
“Um-hmm.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“What do you want to know?”
“There’s this man, Taylor. He hates Joe. Do you know why?”
“Joe didn’t tell you?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“Well, if he didn’t tell you . . .”
“I just didn’t ask. Steve”—She gave him a look that asked for help in a special kind of way—“I love Joe. Please.”
In the early dawn two men from the Sacramento office of Universal Security sat in a van. One poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos. The other climbed out to take a leak off in the brush. Nothing had happened all night long. It’s hard to watch nothing. But it’s easier than digging ditches.
In the early dawn Joe, Dennis, and Hawk watched the house from three different positions. Joe to the east and Dennis to the north were hidden among the rows of grapes. Hawk, to the south, was in the shadow of some apricot trees.
Dylan, who normally woke with the dawn, stood up in his crib and cried for attention. The nanny came and picked him up. From where he was, Joe could see when she turned on the light and then saw her pass, in silhouette, holding the boy, in front of the window.
They were the first ones up. Nanny got Dylan his bottle. Then she let out the dogs.
“Once Joe got to be sergeant, he could run things,” Steve said. “With him running things, everythin’ starts to get better. People stop dying. We stop losing guys to booby traps and all of that. And ambushes. Nobody ambushes Sergeant Joe Broz. It’s like he’s got one of them sixth senses or mystical powers. But he don’t. He used to explain it to me. How he done it. And to Joey. Joey was his bes’ friend, from where he come from. They’s like this, Joe and Joey. He had a whole set of rules for ambushes: terrain, expectations of the enemy and such like. And they worked.
“What you had to do was work hard. Go the long way around, cut your way through brush and stay off’n the trail. Wear your helmet and flak jacket no matter how hot it get. Dig deep when you digs in. Camouflage. Stick some damn leaves in your helmet, and paint your face, especially white guys.109
“You ever seen that movie The Dogs of War? Chris Walken, he’s got this motto: ‘Everyone goes home.’ Well, we wasn’t that good. But we was good. And after a while, Joe Broz, he gets to be like, like a star. Almos’. He was proud. Real proud. Takin’ care of his boys, you know how it is. Make you take care of your feet, gets you clothes, make you do everything you gots to do but write home to your mama.
“We gets this new lieutenant Gelb. Jew boy from Atlanta. I remembers that because I’se from Georgia myself. Anyways, he was alright. He seen that Joe’s got it all in hand and the bes’ thing he can do, for hisself and for all concerned, is to leave well enough alone.
“We’re up in I Corps, tha’s up north, near the DMZ, mountain country a lot of it, you know. These officers, they come. To this day, I don’t know who these people is or why’s they there. One of them, he’s this Marine captain. Captain Tartabull. And this Army captain. Captain Taylor, he’s there as an observer. The Marines is showing the Army how they get it done. Some bullshit like that. We don’t know who this Tartabull is. Nobody never seen him before. But he’s acting like he’s the captain and is out in the bush commanding us all day and night and backwards and forwards. Captain, he a motherfucker.
“He done get us all fucked up.
“There’s twenty-seven of us, including the three officers. We go into the LZ—the landing zone—in two CH-46s. Alright. Everything’s alright. LZ is cold. We’re out of the choppers. Hit the ground running, like Joe insists his boys do, and into the treeline. Form a perimeter. One, two, three guys out on the flanks.
“The two captains, Tartabull and Taylor, stroll outta the choppers, you know, motherfuckers trying to outcool each other. Like ‘Look at me, I ain’t ’fraid o’ no NVA.’ So then this Tartabull, he say we’re going into this here valley, that’s right in front of us, to the next valley, to find Charlie, ’cause we’re gonna get some bodies today. Yes, sir, we’re gonna get body count, take home some ears.
“You know what’s comin’, right. We all sees it comin’. Joe Broz, sergeant, he says, ‘ ’Scuse me, Captain. That’s ambush country in there. Don’ go that way.’
“Captain says, ‘Tha’s where we going. Those are the orders.’
“ ‘Sir, that’s a mistake, sir. Maybe if we went over on the left . . . left flank—’
“ ‘Sergeant! You afraid to go in there, in the valley there?’
“ ‘Yes, sir. Because that’s what Charlie wants us to do—they waitin’ for someone dumb enough to do that.’
“ ‘Sergeant, you are relieved.’ Then he calls up the lieutenant.
“ ‘Lead your men, Lieutenant.’ LT takes the captain aside, speak to him personal, but everyone can tell he’s trying to say something about Joe and his experience and shit. Tartabull is all tired up and pissed off, because they’s questioning his judgment in front of this Army captain. Just ’cause he’s wrong and he’s gonna get us killed, tha’s not gonna stop him.”
Joe had expected dogs. You always did in the country. He had laid down scents that were supposed to lead the mutts away from the men. A bitch in heat, which was the best thing for males, and fox in case the dogs were females. It was hard for the men, who couldn’t smell the packaged aromas—and if they could have probably wouldn’t have appreciated them the way the dogs did—to have confidence in the product. So they froze when the dogs came out.
The dogs, two beagles named Ford and Nixon, came racing out of the house, clearly enthralled by exciting new scents. They raced in a circle trying to pick out the track to follow. They didn’t seem dangerous, by themselves, but discovery certainly was. The three men were armed and on the property of a very rich celebrity. They could each imagine the arrival of the local and state police, cars, bloodhounds, and helicopters, turn the whole thing into some crazed John Landis film, like The Blues Brothers, cop cars in record-setting numbers roaring across California to converge on the Beagle vanity vineyard. Or turning into First Blood, maddened pigs against demented vets, live at five, tape at eleven.
Suddenly, Ford and Nixon put their twitchy black noses down close to the ground. Heads low, tails high, they ran like little madmen, following an invisible line.
It took them right between Joe and Hawk and far from both of them.
Both scents, fox and bitch, led to a bunch of bones, meat still on them, which would keep the dogs busy once they got tired chasing smells that went nowhere. There was a little bit of sedative in the meat, the sort that they give dogs to make them sleep in their portable kennels during airplane flights.
Joe waited for the rest of the household to wake up.
Taylor checked in with the couple watching Beagle’s house from their vantage point on the road. He asked them if they’d seen anything. They said no.
“Sure it was an ambush. We done lost five guys in the first minute, less’n a minute.
“They’s dug in. We’s pinned down. They in bunkers, with machine guns and mortars, they got the bunkers camouflaged. A B-52 strike ain’t gonna blow them suckers outta their holes. We pinned down good. They done been preparing for this for a long time, and every night they say this prayer, Lord, send us some Marine dumb enough to walk through the Valley of Death.
“The captain—this Tartabull—is trying to call for air support. Anything, choppers, Puff the Magic Dragon, fuckin’ B-52s if he can get ’em. But he cain’t. Nothing available.
“The way we is, is like in a half circle. There’s this steep mountainside on what was our right flank comin’ in, but now tha’s sort of our rear. What was our forwardly direction, that’s now the right flank. We’s got four guys there, Joe with Joey and two others, both brothers. I’m in the center with three other grunts and Taylor. Taylor got balls, pardon me, but no question about it. Man ain’t no coward. And he’s doing the best he can. The LT, he’s on the left, what used to be our rear, the way out, if they is a way out. Tartabull, he’s behind a fallen tree and some rocks, near the steep part. We got fifteen, sixteen guys down already.
“They’s maybe fifty, sixty of them out there. If something don’ happen soon, we gonna be overrun, we be dead meat.
“You never been in combat. I don’t know how to tell what is like. I don’. It’s loud, it’s like being inside a barrel of noise, screaming and explosions and gunfire. Noise, noise, noise.
“Tartabull is screamin’ into the radio and he’s finally got through and they’re gonna give him something. I don’t know how Joe hears what Tartabull is doing. But he knows that the captain is fucking up. Captain giving the fly boys the wrong coordinates. Captain givin’ them—I don’t know this at the time, Joe tells me later—captain givin’ the wrong coordinates. Captain calling in an air strike right on top of us.”
Nanny took Dylan outside. They called for the dogs, but they didn’t come. Dylan was disappointed. Nanny was more concerned with distracting the boy than figuring out where the dogs had gone.
A little while later Beagle and Jackie woke up. They waved from the window at Dylan. He held his little hand up, opening and closing it, which was his way of waving. It was adorable and his parents cooed. Then he saw a really great stone and needed to pick it up and throw it at Nanny.
Hawk had the best view of the front of the house and the road. It was Hawk that spotted the U. Sec. company car coming up the driveway. He whispered the news into the microphone that he wore on his wrist, the other two heard it on earpieces. Though it came from a different manufacturer, it was essentially the same communication system that the Secret Service uses.
“Joe crawls over to the captain. All the way over he’s yelling, ‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong.’ Captain ignoring him. Yelling into the radio, coordinates over and over. Wounded guys are screamin’ what they’re screamin’. Screamin’ for a medic, morphine, their mamas. Screamin’ and firing.
“Joe finally gets to Tartabull. Screamin’ in his face. Wrong coordinates. Give me the radio. Calling him names. All that shit, everything he can think to say. Tartabull screaming back at him. Then Joe takes his M-16, he points it at the captain.
This is weird, ’cause with all the screamin’ and all the shit, suddenly everybody looking at Joe and the captain. Including me and Taylor, who’s right next to me, practically. Joe holds the gun. Captain holds the radio. Clutching it. The LT, he’s over there with them. Captain’s got a .45. He points it at Joe. Somethin’ comin’ in over the radio. The NVA ain’t stopped, they’re still at it. Suddenly, Joey gets hit. Joe looks over there. Looks back, says somethin’ to the captain. Captain says somethin’ back.
“Joe shoots him. Once.”
The man from U. Sec. stayed ten minutes or less. Joe guessed that he told Beagle that he was there to sweep the house for bugs, but that he was really there to pick up the day’s tapes.
The three watchers waited patiently. Around nine o’clock Jackie and Beagle went down to the stable. It was clear that Jackie could ride well and also that she thought she looked good doing it. Beagle could barely stay on and just didn’t have the knack of moving with the horse’s movement. Rather, he moved against it even at a walk, ensuring that his buttocks thwacked into the saddle every other step the horse took.
They headed up toward the apricot grove. Hawk willed himself to invisibility. The horses smelled him and whinnied. But their riders assumed that the noises were over horsey business and yanked on the reins and rode on past.
Next to leave was the cook, for the market.
About a half hour after that the nanny put Dylan in a stroller and started walking up the road.
Unless there was someone they didn’t know about, the house was now empty.
“Joe gets on the radio. He’s screamin’ new coordinates. Taylor screamin’ at him. The LT gets hit. Stupid fuck is out from cover.
“Joe lays down smoke grenades, purple, maybe yellow too, I don’t know.
“Not more than two, three minutes later, it seems like, the F-4s come screamin’ out of the sky. And they’re laying down napalm. It’s one, two hundred yards from us. We can feel the heat. There’s this wall of flame. Couple hundred yards we woulda been refried Marines. Barbecued. Turned into crispy critters.
“We use that, that’s our cover, to run our asses out of there.
“Joe is carrying Joey. I catch up to him. Joey’s dead. I tell him that. Then suddenly I’m hit. Joe is crying. I never seen Joe show nothin’. He’s crying. I’m on my knees, somethin’s wrong. It’s all goin’ away. Then Joe, he puts his buddy’s body down and he lifts me up and he carries me on out of there.
“I don’t know, firsthand, too much what happened after. But what I understand happened was this—we got ten men out. Ten of the original twenty-seven. Got the LT out. I think Joe went back for him, that’s what someone tol’ me. They also tol’ me he weren’t never gonna walk no more. Never again. Maybe tha’s true. I don’t know. Taylor got out.”
Back at his motel, a Super 8, Taylor attached his scrambler to the telephone and waited for David Hartman to call him from the Washington office. In the waiting he thought about Vietnam, which he didn’t like to do. It hadn’t worked out the way it was supposed to work out, not at all.
He’d been in the top half of his class at graduation. High enough. Top of the class never meant a whole lot in the military. Top of the class turned into, more often than not, armed nerds, paper pushers, planners, think-tank types, never get higher than colonel. Also, Taylor had lots of athletics—football, boxing, golf. Golf had been the difficult one, half the time with his hands swollen, his arms aching from blocking punches, the other with that slightly concussed feeling when his head hit the football field at full wallop. But there had been generations of Taylors in the military. All officers. The live ones told him boxing and football for respect, they’d get you an assignment. However, no general was going to get in the ring with you, or let you slam your shoulder into his thigh, wrap your arms around his legs and toss him to the ground. If you wanted the sort of social association with older men that could help you up the rungs of the ladder, you played golf and learned to hold your liquor.
The good news was there was a war on.
It was a bit of a pussy war. Against a dip-shit little country. It wasn’t NATO against the Warsaw Pact, the barely subnuclear armored warfare—millions of men, tanks, the air filled with fighters and bombers, across the plain of Central Europe—that military men on all sides had dreamed of for so long. But it was a war. The military, responsive to its people and understanding the desire of every ambitious officer to get combat time—far and away the most important single credit on any officer’s résumé—had developed a quick rotation scheme. Everyone was going to get a shot at combat, wear the appropriate combat badge on their uniform and probably a medal or two as well.
It was a bureaucratic response, the needs of the members of the organization superseding the ostensible mission of the organization. The organization never really considered the consequences to the war, that they would lose it; or to the men, that more of them would die due to always being led by inexperienced officers; or even to itself, that being responsible for their own short term instead of for the duration, any sensible officer would, almost every time, put the appearance of short-term success ahead of the hard news of what was needed to ultimately win.
Taylor was well connected. His father had died in combat in Korea. He had an uncle still active in the service, a colonel. He instantly got posted to Saigon in a staff position. It was, for a young officer, heaven on earth, gratifying to every sense and to his sense of self-worth. He was bright, attentive, social, kept his uniform perfectly pressed, and very quickly got his captain’s bars. Ambition and manliness both cried out for combat. So, at every opportunity, he pressed for combat. His superiors were not annoyed by that. Every young officer was supposed to press for combat. It was part of the shtick.
He finally got sent out to see some action. It was as an observer, but in the thick of things.
It was a weird war. Nobody had bothered to figure out what winning was. There was no bunch of guys in funny green uniforms and hard hats formed up in regiments and battalions that could be thrown back beyond the line of scrimmage. Nor were we going to march into the enemy capital, arrest the bad guys, find good guys, and teach them democracy. We weren’t even going to put down insurrection. But if you have people working for you, you need to score and grade them. So they came up with body counts and kill ratios. Which seemed to make some sense, since Westmoreland was operating on his theory of attrition.
Taylor’s general, who had been up in I Corps, which was mostly Marine country, had run into some outfits with terrific kill ratios. Just terrific. Better than almost any Army group of similar size and makeup. There was Taylor, screaming combat, combat, combat, all the time. So his general said: “Here’s some combat. Your assignment is to find out why they’re doing so well.” Then a nod and a wink. “If, of course, it’s true.”
The general’s opposite number, in the Marine Corps, was hardly stupid in the ways and means of bureaucratic infighting. He put his own captain, who’d been screaming combat, combat, combat on it. And said, “Get him lots of bodies.”
Guy named Tartabull. A total fuckup.
Taylor relived that day over and over and over again. It was the great what I shoulda done. I should have calmly stepped up to Tartabull and pointed out the error of his ways. But of course, Taylor excused himself, Tartabull wouldn’t have listened. Well then, I was on the boxing team. One right cross. He goes down, out cold. I save two squads. Then I get court-martialed.
I shoulda stopped Sergeant Joe fucking Broz. Shot him between the eyes. Then told Tartabull he’d lost it and helped him through it.
“Taylor, he seen Joe kill the captain. First thing he wants to do is file charges. Killing a captain, tha’s a pretty serious thing. Even in Vietnam.
“Meantime, the LT, Gelb his name was, Lieutenant Nathan Gelb, he puts in for a medal for Joe. Doesn’t actually mention that Joe wasted the captain. But all ’bout how Joe called in the right coordinates, took over after the captain died and the lieutenant was wounded. Carried men out of the ambush. Went back and got Joey’s body too. Now I know that he didn’t do that thinkin’ Joey was alive. That happens, guy is carryin’ a dead man and he don’t know. But I know that Joe knew Joey was dead, ’cause he put him down to pick me up. See what I’m sayin’.”
There was a shit storm to end all shit storms.
Taylor put in his report. How the hell was he to know that Gelb also put in a report. Put in for a medal for Broz. Rumor had it that originally the sorry son of a bitch was so grateful to have his life saved he was going to put in for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Talk about a travesty. Put in for a Silver Star. Gelb’s report didn’t mention anything about Broz shooting Tartabull. Later on when Taylor had gone to the hospital to confront Gelb about it, Gelb said it didn’t matter if Joe shot the captain, Tartabull would’ve napalmed himself to death in five minutes anyway.
Taylor should have prevailed. He had the rank, he was regular Army, he went to church on Sunday, not Saturday. But above and beyond all that was the principle: The military does not hold with shooting officers. No matter how wrong they are. This is basic to the existence and survival of armies.
But what he hadn’t reckoned on was the media. Goddamn media.
His general had explained it to him. They would have to court-martial Sergeant Joe Broz, hero, who saved ten men from being napalmed by our own planes. His own lieutenant’s going to wheel himself into the witness stand, in uniform, decorations on his chest, his mother, flown in from Atlanta, sitting there crying, telling the televisions all over America that Joe Broz did the right thing, sent her boy home alive to her, and the other nine boys home alive to their mothers. Including his accuser. “See, America doesn’t like this war, son, and we can’t afford this particular court-martial.”
Taylor was certain of his own righteousness. Also, there was his name on a report that said he’d seen an enlisted man kill an officer. If that enlisted man was not prosecuted, it said something was very wrong with Mel Taylor’s report. His first time in combat. So he pushed for a court-martial.
They found a place to hide Broz away. Some friend of his in the CIA wanted him. So the Marine Corps let him go. Not even a dishonorable discharge. Just signed him over or something.
Now the Army sort of wanted to hide away its share of the embarrassment, which was Mel Taylor. He never got his combat command. He never got back on the fast track. Or even the steady track. It took him a while to figure it out. No one ever confronted him or told him or even said a word about it. It just was. Then he knew he was never going to be a general. Then he figured out he wasn’t even going to make colonel. Major was going to be his dead end.
Joe Broz, who had violated the most fundamental law of the military and of humanity and got away with it, was responsible.
The phone rang. It was Hartman in D.C. Taylor switched the scrambler on. He reported what he knew: That everything at Beagle’s house was quiet. That the tapes went on a shuttle flight from Sacramento to L.A. by ten-thirty every day and were being transcribed there. Broz had some people with him. He wasn’t sure what it meant. There was no audio surveillance. But all the roads were being watched. “Plus,” Taylor said, “I have an ace in the hole.”
“What’s that?” Hartman asked.
“Ace of spades,” Taylor said.
“Tell you somethin’ funny,” Steve said to Maggie. “Joe, he says Taylor was right. He says you cain’t have no army with officers getting fragged. That’s the end of the army. Of course, it’s up to the upper ranks to make sure that the lower-ranking officers are competent and remove the assholes. But it don’t matter if they don’t—man frags his commanding officer, they should fry his ass. That’s what Joe says.”
Steve laughed when he said that. A big knee-slapping kind of laugh.
His son grimaced. He was embarrassed around his father. The man tried hard, but he was hopelessly country. Twenty years of living in L.A. hadn’t helped him at all. He should’ve stayed down in the cotton fields.
Another thing he hated about his father was his twenty years on the line at GM. Had a union. Big fucking deal. Because when GM shut down, that made his father a sucker, a patsy.
But at the same time, he envied his father’s war. The bloods with M-16s! Fraggin’ white fuckin’ officers. Fightin’ in the jungle. Now that was manhood. Come back from that no gangbanger gonna dis you, not with no M-16 in your hands and maybe some souvenir grenades.
People were casual in the country. A ground-floor window was left open. Joe put his gear through, men followed it.
Hawk and Dennis stayed outside, waiting, watching, ready to call Joe if anyone seemed to be coming.
Inside, Joe stood still. He waited and he listened. He took a directional mike out of his bag. He plugged it into an amplifier and from there to a headset, a high-tech, high-price version of a Walkman. With it he was able to pick up sounds down to about one-twentieth of what the human ear could hear. He swept it in an arc, listening for any human presence. He heard nothing except small scurrying feet. Mice in the wall or squirrels on the roof.
The room he was in was a reading room. Feminine, with a window seat, lots of books and magazines.
He took a CMS-3 out of the kit.
There was a microphone in the overhead light.
The reading room opened into the living room. It too was wired. That was good. It meant that Joe didn’t have to put in mics, he could parasite, just find wherever U. Sec. was making its recordings and hook in ahead or behind. The question was where. Hidden well enough that no one would stumble over them by accident, but with easy access for changing the tapes and servicing. Most of the time that defined the attic or the basement.
108 Capra’s most significant project was the seven-part Why We Fight series. He discusses obtaining Axis footage in an interview in the “Propaganda” segment of Bill Moyers’s A Walk Through the 20th Century.
109 This does not suggest that Joe Broz is some sort of superhero. Others report exactly the same experience, including H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
In his autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (Bantam, 1992), Schwarzkopf discusses what happened when he finally got “his” battalion in Vietnam. They were in terrible shape, incapable of inflicting damage on the enemy and constantly taking casualties from vastly inferior forces. Schwarzkopf got them “in shape” by making them do what the book said they should do: patrol properly, wear helmets, dig holes, etc. He turned things around and the VC began to avoid his sector. He writes: “Our intelligence people sent us a captured enemy report that warned Vietcong units to stay away from LZ Bayonet. The report said a strong new American battalion [it was the same force retrained by Schwarzkopf] had moved in. The enemy had paid me the greatest compliment I ever received as commander of the 1/6.”
At the time he was interviewed for Harry Maurer’s oral history Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam, Walter Mack was the head of the organized-crime division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District, New York. He had been the commander of a rifle company: “Little by little you learned how to fight the war. The test is small-unit leaders—the sergeants, corporals, lieutenants, captains. Can they learn the lessons and train their troops so they’ll survive? Because it’s not the popular thing to do. Americans are lazy, unless they have somebody kicking their ass. . . . They don’t like to put greasy paint all over themselves in the hot sweaty daytime. They don’t like to wear flak jackets. They don’t like to wear helmets. They don’t like to take care of their rifles. . . . They don’t like to use fire discipline, which is essential. They don’t like to take care of their feet.
“. . . a large percentage of the people who were wounded and killed in Vietnam were hurt because of mistakes made by small-unit leaders. . . .
“I’m talking about professionalism, the willingness to stay up that extra hour the night before the patrol to do your homework. Like taking the time when you’re extremely tired to do your map study and plot out where you’re likely to be ambushed. To have the discipline not to walk along a treeline, or a trail, or a road, at a time when you’re likely to get ambushed. To check with your intelligence officer. . . . To check with the person responsible the next day for air operations. . . .
“After a while, the company got a reputation, and we stopped getting hit.
“. . . You should never be ambushed. . . . being ambushed is always the result of not thinking or being rushed, [emphasis added).”