Ellsworth Bunker

Conversation with Holden’s History teacher, Mr. Spencer

  “Well, you could see he really felt lousy about flunking me.  So I shot the bull for a while.  I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff.  I told him how I would’ve done exactly the same thing if I’d been in his place, and how most people didn’t appreciate how tough it is being a teacher.  That kind of stuff.  The old bull.

  The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull.  I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South.  I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go.  I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over.  I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something.  Or if they just flew away.

  I’m lucky, though, I mean I could shoot the old bull to old Spencer and think about those ducks at the same time.  It’s funny.  You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to a teacher.”

-The Catcher in the Rye-

J.D. Salinger

6:00 AM, and I’m just getting a round tuit even though I’ve been up for an hour and a half already.  The delay was caused by my obsessive need to read all the new postings on my Facebook page.

A newly added friend is yet another ‘share’ addict.  After scrolling listlessly through endless ‘shares’ expressing this person’s political and religious preferences, all points being personally obnoxious to me, I finally came to yesterday’s stuff and was mercifully able to close the tab.

The preface quote from Catcher speaks to me; as, I think, it must speak to many of us.  Facebook is the village green where we all come to shoot the bull, isn’t it?

Among the ‘shares’ exhorting one and all to get Jesus, love one presidential candidate and hate another was a legal disclaimer (from another friend) exhorting us to post on our individual timelines;  so’s nobody can indiscriminately steal your Facebook stuff and use it for their own devices.

It explains that since FB is now on the Big Board as public stock, the barn door is open, it’s now Free Range, anyone and everyone…yada-yada-yada.  Can this be real?  Do we have to shout that our stuff is inviolate and can’t be diddled with by any Tom, Dick and Harry?

I wonder if this person was thinking of where the Central Park ducks go when the lagoon freezes over.  I think, in light of how the Ethernet has become our global village, that Chicken Little admonitions about how someone can steal our written material on Facebook is as relevant as the winter destination of Holden’s ducks.

You wanna plagiarize my shit?  Oh, please! Abdul or Enrique or Mrs. Blurt; please have at with my complete acquiescence!  God knows I’m a blatant plagiarist coming and going in my own write!

Well, I’m burning daylight now; time to get the hell on with today’s ‘share’:

Now back to the next exciting episode of Golden Boy and his stalwart Skimmers:

Here’s a pop quiz for the kiddies and a prick teaser for the oldies:

Who was Nguyễn Cao Kỳ?

Good, kiddies, if you guessed he was Vietnamese.

Boo, oldsters, if you thought he was the Asian Colonel Sanders.

I have scoured my cobwebs for an analogous historical figure to Ky; and the closest hit in my mind is Hermann Goering.

Like Goering, he was a hotshot pilot who rose to Air Marshal of his country’s Air Force.  Like Goering in the twenties and thirties of Germany, Ky was instrumental in the never-ending plots and coups that were the political environment of South Viet Nam for the final eleven years of its existence.

Like Goering, he believed in brutal overwhelming air superiority and used his air force to frightful effect against his opponents (not so much against Charlie, you understand).

Like Goering, he was participant in murder, assassination, imprisonment of political rivals, plotting coups, executing coups and thwarting coups he did not support.  In his day, Saigon must have resembled the Medici Court for all the intrigue and power plays in constant motion.

He rose to prime minister and then agreed to be vice president under a democratic government with General Thiệu as its figurehead. In 1966 in a rigged general election, Thieu ran for President with Ky as his running mate and they won by a landslide (duh).

Both men wanted the top job, but agreed, under American pressure, to have a secret military junta led by Ky to formulate policy.  It was good old democratic compromise in action.

He thus became the deal maker behind the throne, very much like Goering’s role as Reich Marshal of the Third Reich.

With the collapse of the Saigon regime in April 1975, Nguyen Cao Ky fled to the United States where he settled down in California and managed a liquor store until his death earlier this year, at the ripe old age of 80.

We were going to hang Reich Marshal Goering, but der dickey took a cyanide cap in the choppers while awaiting his execution.

General Ky’s ability to maintain power was in no small degree the product of American intervention by first Johnson’s, then Nixon’s administrations. 

While Johnson’s American Boys were being held up as the defenders of Viet Nam Democracy, the intelligence communities, hand in hand with the State Department, were frantically working to prop Ky’s regime up with a Machiavellian playbook of tricks, money, armaments and shrill propaganda.

WTF?

I have mulled over these perplexing historical facts and finally rested on the historical axiom of Barbara Tuchman and other notable historians: wars are fought using the last war fought as a template.

What happened in Korea was that dichotomy of the DMZ; a sort of Hadrian’s Wall, if you will.  Unable to annihilate the Commie Yellow Hoard of the North, an uneasy stalemate was established that persists to this day.  In 2012, American armed forces are still guarding the Korean DMZ, keeping dirty Commie North Korea out of clean Democratic South Korea.

I conclude that some blockhead (or more likely, blockheads) thought to recreate a similar morass in Viet Nam.  But before this third-world dream-world could be brought to fruition, South Viet Nam had to become a lasting democracy, to justify the expense of holding Hanoi at bay. (Reference ‘expense’ under cost to maintain an armed guard presence in Japan, Taiwan and Korea)

While this miracle was being brought about, U.S. forces would be doing their bit, by turning the Ho Chi Minh Trail (that would be most of Cambodia and all of Laos) into a parking lot; and constructing some kind of magic rabbit fence across the DMZ.

Regrets for the boring history lesson, but I need (OCD replenishment!) to place the little people on the ground in the context of The Big Picture.

Today, I will talk about two of the little people: our Blonde Hero being the first; the second being a diminutive elder statesman named Ellsworth Bunker.

Before I get into my pathetic recollection of me and Ellsworth, allow me to rip into him and demonize the dead—neither the first time nor the last time I will take the historian’s license in these monographs.

Ellsworth Bunker (May 11, 1894 – September 27, 1984) was an American businessman and diplomat (including being the ambassador to Argentina, Italy, India, Nepal and South Vietnam). He is perhaps best known for being a hawk on the war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s.

There it is---Wikipedia’s thumbnail bio on the man.

It goes on to say that Johnson appointed him in 1967 as Ambassador to South Viet Nam.  He continued his post under Richard Millstone Nixon until the bitter end in April 1975, at the American Embassy, in soon-to-be Ho Chi Minh City.

One day, there came a call from HQ China Beach.  For once, it wasn’t the first class bozo who usually called; this time it was Chief of Staff himself, to speak at his Skimmer Coxswain(Senior officers only speak at, not to enlisted scum). 

Although I have seen some men standing at attention when the Captain was on the lima-lima to them, I felt no such compunction.  I did pay rather close attention—there were no ducks-off-the-frozen-lagoon thoughts in my head just then.

I was informed that, due to the shallow draft of the Admiral’s Barge, Mr. Bunker, the American ambassador, would be picked up—at precisely 1730 hours (Don’t be goddamned late was the unspoken undertone)--at Stone Elephant landing and taken out in a skimmer to the Barge, lying in deeper water.

As it was already late in the day, I ran double time to spit polish my boots and my boat.  As I hurried through my preparations, I had a flying duck thought.  Why all the added fuss of this elaborate transportation scheme?  Why didn’t they just lift him off in a Huey to wherever he was going?

Then, it came to me: a Huey lift-off would make this an Army show, not a Navy show.  Hoo well!  Couldn’t have the frigging Army in a one-up on this little deal, now could we?

But for the trivial part that I was to play in this pageant, you would have thought it was the frantic two hours before the bride’s wedding. 

One small slip, like the ring boy wetting his pants, would cause the bride, at the end of her tether after six long months of making ready for her Big Day, to go into melt-down and wet her own pants while the organ boomed The Wedding March; necessitating a furtive early departure from the reception and the futile respite of the honeymoon to forget her mortification.

(Ask any married woman if I’m a liar on this here point) 

First Class Bozo called back to tell me that I MUST wear a life vest and that I MUST help the Ambassador into his.  No ifs, ands or buts about it.  He HAD to wear a life vest!  End of line.  And don’t firewall the goddamn skimmer either! Nice and slow out to the barge! And make him sit on the forward bench, for crissakes!  And above all else, MAKE NO SMALL TALK WITH THE MAN, even if he initiates it!

(So, if he says something to me, I'm to remain stone silent like Deaf and Dumb?  If he were the one doing a D&D, I might have to slap him hard enough to make snot fly from his nose.)

Now standing out there on Stone Elephant landing, I pondered all of these last minute instructions.  If I fucked up, oh! if I should, someone down at China Beach was going to wet his pants; and I would stand a good chance of ending up in Cua Viet on the DMZ or some other comparable hellhole.

Like snot flying out of my nose, that could be me.

As I mused about ducks and shit, I heard a grunting sound behind me.  I turned to see Lt. Rambo, come in one of MY other boats, wearing a life vest and nervously smoking a cigarette.  Like the ass licker lifer I knew him to be, he had come to observe the transfer.

No one was supposed to be on that landing but me; that was the Staff's other explicit order.  And Rambo knew it; he damned well did.

Perhaps he felt compelled to be there, to bask in the celebrity of our sudden dignitary.  More likely, he was there to witness my flawless performance; or else he too, could see some time in a reassignment shithole.

At last, a limo pulled up (A Lincoln Continental?  Here in the ‘Nam?) And the Pope of Saigon emerged, to walk the walk of an old man, towards the waiting skimmer. 

I stood at rigid attention like a Swiss Guardsman, stiffly holding up the brand new life vest for the Great Man to don.

He momentarily suspended his own revelry of ducks and took a quick look at me holding forth the proffered vest. “I don’t need that damn thing!”, he gruffed, and stepped into the boat, promptly sitting down on the console pew instead of his designated throne.

Rambo, acting the part of bridesmaid, hurried and stooped to untie the bow line (Was it a stoop or a curtsy?—I couldn’t tell)  I stepped into the boat and sat to start the motor, Bunker once again retreated into the Grave Matters of State and the disposition of winter ducks.  Not another gruff out of him.

In twenty seconds, it was all over.  We trolled alongside the Admiral’s Barge and the Power Incarnate of the Western World deftly hopped aboard.  He didn’t make the traditional boarding salute, but all hands on deck made the effort for him.

The Barge got underway…and he was gone.

It wasn’t until I was back in the world that I learned what part Ellsworth Bunker played in the American War debacle.  He took his John Foster Dulles hatred of the communists to push for the escalation of the war.  He was one of the chief proponents of our incursions into Cambodia and Laos.

If I had known all that at the time I might have pushed him over the side of the skimmer, or at least pulled away from the Barge to give him a nasty scare.

Hang the goddamned consequences; it would have felt so good.

It would have been the right thing to do.