“You know what he’s doing here,” The brigadier general didn’t need to drop the names Bill Lair and Ted Shackley, or mention Operation Momentum and the Raven Forward Air Controllers. Operation Palace Dog. Chapel was deep in with it all, and these secret operations in the Laotian wilderness were essential to fighting and killing the North Vietnamese in large numbers well away from established boundaries—and complicating strictures—of war.
“No, my question is why is he here?”
“You know the answer to that, too.”
The man shook his head and brought his glass to his mouth like a pacifier. “Goddamn spooks.”
Chapel smiled. Many of his colleagues hated that term. “Spooks.” “Spooky.” “The Spook Factory.” Chapel loved it, because he knew what the power of that term meant. He knew what fear could do that a million bombs and a billion bullets never could. You terrify a man when the blood gets up, you don’t have to break his nose, and risk breaking your own hand. A clean victory. Everyone wins when fear does the work.
“Okay, Chapel, you got all the answers.” The brigadier general sat back in his chair, letting his middle-age paunch breathe a little. “What point are we missing?”
“How to end this war.”
“How to win this war, you mean.” Air Force again. They never could keep their goddamn mouths shut. First to talk, first to run to their flying machines and skedaddle the fuck out of Dodge.
“No one wins wars,” Chapel said, not meaning it to sound so melodramatic, because he wasn’t that kind of guy. Not usually, but these days he wasn’t so sure anymore. “No one that matters.”
“Okay, semantics, but I ain’t playing. How do we win this war?”
“You win the war by winning the war. You don’t win the war by merely fighting the war.”
“Is he drunk?” Another USAF. They tended to stick together, Chapel mused. “I haven’t seen him drink much, but is he drunk?”
“Nah, he always talks like that,” the Brigadier General said.
The man got to his feet. “Jesus H Christ. I’m taking a squirt.”
“No, you’ll want to stay for this, General. I mean, if you want to end the war.”
“We ain’t here to end any war. We’re here to win it, or nothing.”
“You have the first part right. You’re not here to win this war. You’re here to fight it, yes. You’ve shown the willingness to go all in on fighting it—well, mostly in—earning your paycheck, giving your job meaning, and your orders the weight of history being written with each signature. But winning it? What would be the point? What would all of you do if there was no war to fight?”
“You’re talking like an asshole.”
“He’s talking like a longhair.”
“Does longhair mean faggot?”
Chapel stared at the man, making a mental map of each lethal entry point that would kill him with a deftly applied salad fork.
“What do you suggest, Augie?” asked the brigadier general.
He was a good guy. Brave in battle. Thoughtful behind a desk. Always measured. Unfortunately, one is judged by the company they keep, and in this case…
“We make them not want to fight.”
“We talking leaflets here? Leaflets again? Spook radio? A game of telephone?”
Snorts from the men.
“How would we do this?” The brigadier general hadn’t taken his eyes off of Chapel. He knew him well enough to know when he was just spitballing and when he was bloodhounding.
“What do you think we’re doing?” a new voice interrupted. Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps. A real hard ass who wasn’t good at politics, but played it anyway because he was too old to fight and it sure beat golf. “We’ll killing them by the truckload every single goddamn day. Hell, we greased 75,000 the Easter Offensive, in case you haven’t heard out in that campsite of yours.”
“Yes, I’ve heard. I’ve heard a lot. Seen a lot, too. More than you probably know. You’re killing them. Yes, indeedy and you betcha. Killing a lot of them, although not as many as you might think, what with the game of telephone that takes place for confirmed and probables. But we are killing a lot. Sure enough. Look at Laos, where all of this started anyway. We’re on track to drop two million pounds of ordnance by the end of next year. A half a million sorties, gentlemen. A half a goddamn million. We’ve dropped more bombs on Laotian real estate per capita than any other nation in the history of this planet, and the Pathet Lao are still running free, hosting a VC boom-boom party and enough resupply lines along the Ho Chi Minh to arm up Charlie until the year 2000. We literally cannot drop more bombs and kill any more people than we already are, and where has it gotten us?”
“We ain’t done shit in Laos,” the assistant commandant said.
Most of the table chuckled, raised eyebrows and exchanged glances, except for the old marine and Chapel.
“You’re not in front of a microphone, sir. We all know the score here.”
“Do we?” he snorted. “Do we all know the score, because it seems to me that you’re looking at the wrong fucking scoreboard.”
“Scoreboards lie. Stat sheets lie. I’m looking at the play on the field.”
“Then what’s the problem? You losing your spine?”
Marines hated spooks most of all. First in, last to leave didn’t have much time for those who skulked in the shadows. Chapel expected it, but the dig at his bravery did raise his normally rock-solid heart rate a few beats. Still, he kept his voice even and unchanged when he continued. “I have no problem with killing men, killing people. I’ve done it plenty, from miles away, and just a few inches. I know you have too.”
“Yes, I have.”
“It’s unpleasant, isn’t it?”
“Depends.”
“Yes, it always depends. That great rolling wave of ethical morality.”
“Augie.”
Chapel turned to the brigadier general.
“How do we make them not want to fight?” he asked.
“We scare them.”
“Pardon?”
“We scare them.” More chuckles from the table, draining away the tension in the air and rebuilding every defensive bunker each man brought to the officer’s club that day. Some outright laughed, checking out of the conversation. Chapel was used to this, too, so he pressed on. “Not with cluster bombs. Not with dead bodies, or even atrocities. We’ve done all that, and what has it gotten us? No, we go deeper. We get into the core of each man, woman, and child fighting for the Communist cause, and we scare the living daylights out of them.”
The brigadier general was still listening, as was the old marine.
“You can’t kill an idea. You can’t kill a person enough to change their mind.”
“Worked on the Germans,” the marine said.
“And the Japanese,” the brigadier general said, his eyes following their waiter, who couldn’t hide his glance at the table as he walked past.
“That was different. They were fighting for a country, the idea of a country ruled by a supreme leader that offed himself in one case and was castrated by two mushroom clouds in the second. It was all gone, the dream was over, the supremacy was a sham, the armies were decimated, so they gave up. Now out there,” Chapel pointed to the southwest, not at the god awful wallpaper, “in Vietnam, fed by the surrounding regions of sympathetic support, they’re fighting for an idea. We’ll never take their country, seize their land. We’re not here for that. Don’t have the capability, nor the desire, and they know this. We want to break them, shatter their will, not colonize and exploit.”
A few of the brass had excused themselves, but a few had stayed, and they weren’t laughing anymore.