Missing Man
The first time I met Bill Motto was on the street outside the Veterans' hall in Santa Cruz. He was holding forth on some book or newspaper article or recent event that, to him, was yet another confirmation of the depths to which U.S. imperialism had sunk in the 20th century. His talk was brilliant, informed, and delivered so fast that even those of us who read a lot and pretty much shared his judgments about U.S. foreign policy had a hard time keeping up with him. Jesus Christ, I thought as I listened to him, this guy's wound too tight for his own good.
We got to be friends. But like most of the other vets, I could only handle being with Bill in limited doses. He didn't live anywhere; he "crashed around": he'd stay at a friend's house, keeping as low a profile as possible and helping with chores where he could, but finally just being too jarring a presence in a person's, or a family's, life. He'd either be asked to move on, or would get the hints and do it on his own. Sometimes he'd disappear for a few days or weeks, hang out in San Francisco or his old haunts up the coast around Guerneville, then show up again. I let him crash at my place for a few weeks, but it was a tiny three room rented house and when Bill was camped out in the living room, it wasn't even mine anymore.
"Bill," I said to him one day, "this...."
"It's time, huh?"
"Yeah."
He nodded, smiled a resigned smile, thanked me, and took off.
One night a few weeks later I came home from a late night in town, and there was Bill, in his sleeping bag, on my living room floor. He was awake when I turned the light on. He shrugged. "I tried," he said. "There wasn't any other place. I'll be gone tomorrow."
Bill and I were in a Vietnam vets' rap group. There were seven of us, plus a counselor named Greg Anderson who coordinated the group. Greg had been a Marine Sergeant in Nam.
Once a week, we sat in a little upstairs room in the Vets' Hall and poured our guts out: combat, nightmares, alcohol, drugs, sex, relationships. A man listening as his lover took hours to die screaming in a foxhole under a mortar barrage. Bill, who was an airborne medic with a deeply ingrained ethic about saving lives, telling about walking across the top of a bunker and being shot in the back from within it, to find out after the bunker was blown up that he'd been shot by a North Vietnamese Army nurse who looked a lot like his first lover, a Filipina girl in East Los Angeles. The nurse died when the bunker was blown. One vet told of killing his first man before he even went to Nam, in a fight with another soldier in a holding cell after a wild weekend pass from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I told about Tho An (see above, Prologue and chapter “Tho An”), and about the Marine radio operator who blamed me for his friend's death (chapter “You’re Too Late”).
We talked about the years since the war, about the forms our rage took, against ourselves and those we loved, or those we wanted to love but couldn't, or those we didn't even know; about too much alcohol, too many drugs, never wanting to be without a weapon; about not being able to sleep, or sleeping with one eye open and a pistol under the pillow, about checking every room you entered for dangerous people and exits, about always preferring a seat in a restaurant with your back in a corner and a door nearby. We learned that we'd lost more vets since the war than the 58,000-plus who were listed as killed there: self-inflicted gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, single car crashes... the Medal of Honor winner who committed suicide by holding up liquor stores with an unloaded gun until one of the owners finally killed him.
By the end of each rap session, the eight of us would be wound as tight as if we were about to go on patrol in enemy territory. As we got to know each other better and better, sharing our weaknesses and rage, one thing that kept coming up was how many guys we'd all seen go down because of alcohol, and how most of us faced that danger too. So in letting one another see parts of ourselves we'd mostly kept from others, we became closer, really tight after awhile.
So we went drinking together.
Most often, we'd walk out the front door of the Vets' Hall after a rap session, cross the street and turn a corner and walk up a flight of stairs to the Teacup, a dark, cozy little bar attached to the Chinese restaurant owned by Don Yee. Sometimes we were pretty wild in the Teacup, sometimes we'd just get drunk and morose. But we talked a lot, letting our defenses down, with the help of alcohol, even more than we did during the rap sessions.
During those drinking sessions, Bill and I would often gravitate toward each other. We were the readers of the group, the ones who would devour history books about Vietnam and other wars in U.S. history, and come up with more and more reasons for our anger, convincing ourselves that it wasn't we who were fucked up, it was the world we lived in; and that any sane person who'd seen what we'd seen would be as crazy as we were.
I thought I'd read a lot. But Bill Motto flabbergasted me with his knowledge. He hadn't even been a Marine -he'd been with the army's 173rd Airborne Brigade for one of his tours in Vietnam and in an armored unit for the other - but he was the one who first told me the other side of Smedley Butler's story: that, after retiring as a Lieutenant General with 34 years of the most illustrious service in Marine Corps history, Butler had written a book titled War Is a Racket. He had gone on a lecture circuit, using his status as a war hero to denounce U.S. imperialism, saying that during his years of service he had spent most of his time being a strongarm for Brown Brothers Bank and other U.S. corporations.
Bill told me something else about the History and Traditions of the Marine Corps that I hadn't learned in boot camp. The Battle of Chapultepec, commemorated by the crimson stripe down the trouser leg of officers' and NCOs' Dress Blues – I could have worn such a stripe, had I wanted to spend the money for the uniform - was fought against boys, cadets of the Mexican military academy at Chapultepec - and was thought by some in the U.S. forces to be so unjust that a number of men from an Irish unit in the U.S. Army, the Saint Patrick's Brigade, switched sides and fought for the Mexicans. Some of them were captured and hanged. A friend of Bill's and mine, Chris Matthews, wrote a play about the incident called "A Flag to Fly"; it's been produced in Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
It was from Bill that I first heard about Bohemian Grove. In the Teacup one night, we both already had several beers aboard, and were swapping historical anecdotes. Bill told me about Shell Oil trucks being able to drive freely about Vietnam without being ambushed because they paid off the VC, and about other U.S. and international corporations that supported the war because they had interests there. He recalled Eisenhower's speech justifying aid to the French in their efforts to retain Indochina as a colony. Eisenhower noted the value of Vietnam's tungsten, rubber, and other resources that would be lost to the West if Vietnam fell to the communists. I'd come back with my story about Cho Lon and the "five o'clock follies."(see chapter “Cho Lon”). Bill would come back: "Oh! Oh! Have you read this book? The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia? By this guy...." He snapped his fingers to engage his memory. "McCoy! That's it!" He leaned in close with his wildeyed intensity. I took a deep breath. Bill was wired now; it could only end when the bar closed at two a.m.
"Alfred..W..McCoy...you gotta read this book. You won't believe this book. Well. Of course you'll believe it. It was, get this, the guy's fucking Ph.D. thesis. The guy went to Nam, went to Laos, went to France. He interviewed all these people. The thing is rigorously documented...." He launched into a synopsis of McCoy's book, beginning with the U.S. Army's deal with Lucky Luciano, the Mafia boss, during World War II. According to McCoy, the Army sprung Luciano from prison and gave him his freedom in exchange for Luciano's use of his connections to provide intelligence and other assistance to pave the way for the allied invasion of Sicily. After the war, the recently freed Luciano went back to heroin dealing, organizing a route that began in the poppy fields of Indochina and ended on the streets of New York, with Marseille as its hub.
Still according to McCoy, Luciano's network hooked up with French military intelligence in a Mephistophelean bargain: the French officers turned a blind eye to the drug trade in exchange for help against the communists. That help began with using mob thugs to break up dockworkers' strikes in Marseille, then spread to Vietnam and Laos when the drug traffickers showed themselves able to provide intelligence about Ho Chi Minh's independence movement. Then after the French were defeated at Dienbienphu in 1954 and the United States took over the anticommunist crusade there, U.S. intelligence operatives inherited, from their French counterparts, an in-place network of intelligence sources. Later, during the 10-year American chapter of the Vietnam story, pilots for Air America, the CIA's covert air operations company, tacitly admitted hauling opium for the Hmong tribesmen in Laos who made up their mercenary army there(
). In a similar mood another night, Bill began with, “You know who Archimedes Patti is, right?”
I was silent for too long a second. “Fuck! How come nobody knows about Archimedes Patti? ... Oh! Shit! This guy..." He leaned closer. His intensity was always high, yet could always be doubled: “...this guy... was a fucking Captain in the OSS – you know, the Army guys in World War II who were clandestine operators, the precursor to the CIA? His job was liaison with General Giap and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese in World War II... he wrote this book, man...Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America’s Albatross(16). You gotta read this book. Oh shit man, you gotta gotta gotta read this book. There’s a photo(
) in there, in a jungle clearing in 1945, with Ho’s officers declaring national independence, and their declaration of independence is based on ours ‘cause Thomas Jefferson was a fucking hero of Ho’s, and all these guys are saluting an American flag! Giap, OSS guys, the whole fuckin’ nine yards...”
Patti had worked with Ho’s Vietnamese to rescue downed Allied pilots and to conduct anti-Japanese operations in Indochina during WWII, and had an acute sense of the politics of that time and place. He writes that Ho Chi Minh knew his independence movement couldn't survive without his siding with one or the other of the two behemoths already jockeying for position in the post-war world, and tried to ally himself with Uncle Sam.
I came back and told Bill about hitchhiking through Laos, bumping into Air America pilots, and having some of that material censored in an article I wrote for the Colorado College Magazine(
). I was told it might offend some of our alumni.
Giap, of course, was the general who later commanded the forces which defeated both the French and us Americans in Vietnam.
Bill went on to say - this is borne out in Patti's book -that the Declaration of Independence read by Ho on September 2, 1945, was modeled on our own, and that Ho appealed to Harry Truman to accept his government as legitimate. But countries which had been major allies of ours during the war - especially Britain, France, and the Netherlands - wanted their Asian colonies back after the war. Truman sided with the colonialists - and the war Bill and I and two and a half million other Americans fought in grew out of that choice.
I couldn't match Bill's intensity, or his speed at spitting out facts, names, dates. But in my thirst to know more, and in my anger upon learning it, I was right with him.
By then, we were reeling on our barstools. We talked about the men who had led us into that mess, and how much we hated them: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, the Bundys, the Lodges (we spoke of the latter name in the plural because of roles played by Henry Cabot Lodge's relatives in such adventures as Eisenhower's CIA-led coup in 1954 against the elected president of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company).
Our drunkenness and our anger reached a point where they began to converge, and we began to wish that there were some justice in the world, that the rich old men like those who sent poor young men like us off to fight their wars, lying to us to get us to do it, could be made to suffer some of the same things that they had caused us to suffer, that our comrades whose names were on the Wall in Washington had suffered.
Bill began telling me about Bohemian Grove, the retreat not too far up the California coast where rich and powerful men, the country's power elite, gathered once a year for their secret self-congratulatory shenanigans.
"They're all there," Bill said, "every fuckin' one of 'em." He started counting fingers: Reagan, Bush, Meese, Kissinger, McNamara, Schultz, Weinberger, plus the corporate heads whose names we didn't know but who had such influence on our lives. Heads of oil companies, tire companies, auto companies, insurance companies, banks, investment firms....
"Wouldn't it be great to hit that place? To kill all those bastards in one nice, clean operation?" Bill was leaning in close again, his eyes glittering with the deliciousness of his thought.
I allowed as how the security must be pretty tight.
"Hunh! No shit...." He went on to say they had guards all over the place, with submachine guns and walkietalkies and leashed guard dogs.
Still, it could be done, he said. There's no place that can't be busted, if you have the right people and equipment and you plan it right.
We talked about how it could be done. You'd have to have intelligence. You'd have to bribe one of the prostitutes or strippers they hired to come in and amuse them. It wouldn't be easy; they paid them a lot and made them sign a secrecy oath and threatened dire consequences if any of them ever talked to outsiders about what went on at Bohemian Grove. But it could be done, with patience and money. Let's say we had the money. Here's the other thing. People like that always screw over people. That's what you'd hafta do, find somebody they really fucked over, take your time, get 'em to talk: what's the layout of the place? What's the electronic security setup? What gates, what wire, what sensors? How many security patrols, how many men each, what weapons, when does the guard change? And what are the billeting arrangements. Where, exactly, does Nixon sleep? Kissinger? Too bad LBJ's already dead.
We discussed weapons, silencers, equipment, camouflage. Bill, as I remember, was partial to a certain model of Hechler and Koch submachine gun: superb workmanship, reliability. I remember thinking about the problem of being given away by noise, and saying, "What about just a few intense people with knives?" I told Bill about the Randall fighting knife I'd carried in Nam, that I'd since given away.
Sure enough, we closed down the Teacup. I got home, beery-eyed but in one piece. I stumbled into my bedroom and there, on the desk I'm now using to write this piece, was a bouquet of flowers from my new lover, Annie, who would become my wife of fourteen years. She'd left a note signed "Yer sweetie, A." with a heart beside her initial.
At times, over the years, I’ve thought that Annie might have saved some lives that night, though probably only mine. Bill and I would never really have done it. We wouldn't have been able to pull it off, and wouldn't have tried even if we'd thought we could. Not once we were sober. But there was another outlet for my rage that she might well have saved me from. I became increasingly angry about U.S. interventions in Central America, especially in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. And I became frustrated that so little of the truth about those situations was known – or acknowledged - by the American people, and further frustrated that probably no amount of truthtelling would make any difference. Reagan and his cowboys just did what they wanted anyway, Congress and public opinion be damned. I even considered going to Central America to fight, this time on the right side. I was just that frustrated, that angry. It had a logic to it: if it truly was as wrong as I knew it to be, and was so deadly to so many innocent people, and if I knew about it and nothing else was working, wasn't I duty bound to put my life where my ideas were?
A tourist saw his body on the rocks at the base of West Cliff. The autopsy said heart attack. (Bill was in his late 30s or early 40s.) We learned from his mother, when she came up from Los Angeles for the funeral, that he'd had a history of medical exams showing some mild dysfunction of the heart. But it hadn't been enough to keep him from the Army, or from coming home from Nam with two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts (or the other way 'round; I'm not sure which).
Anyway, Bill was dead. His body was cremated, and a group of us – including his mother, a sweet lady in her late fifties who immediately adopted us - took his ashes out past the cliff where he'd died to Natural Bridges, to scatter them in the surf. A wooden fence had been erected several feet back from the cliff’s edge, and a sign on the fence said that crossing the fence was prohibited. The State Park Ranger on duty there explained that some people had fallen down the cliff onto the rocks below, and had been badly injured or, in one case, died. We told the Ranger our story and begged him to let us go out to the cliff’s edge.
Amazingly, he gave his permission. We climbed the fence, tenderly boosting Mrs. Motto over into several pairs of waiting hands. We walked out and sat on the rocks at the top of the cliff and looked down past our dangling feet to where the surf came in and pounded the rocks and eddied around them.
Shit. Were we blue. Bill had been a pain in the ass at times, always wanting to crash at our houses, always in your face or in your ear with his intensity. But we all knew that some precious, deeply buried part of each of us had been taken by Bill and lived right out in the open, on the edge of life, to the nth degree. We loved him, and all we had now were a few photos, and the painting Kenny Walker had done of Bill, in long hair, beard, shades and beret, showing off the Combat Medic's badge and jump wings he’d pinned to his leather vest.
And we had these few handfuls of ashes, with their obscene/holy pieces of charred but recognizable bone. It was a clear, bright afternoon, with little wind. As we tossed the ashes out from the cliff, we could see them float down to the rocks and spume below, taking a long time because of the updraft, swirling about and finally descending like little clouds of autorotating butterflies.
Then, for a couple of long minutes, we just sat, silent except for the occasional shit! - which was all any of us could come up with to express how we felt.
Something moving to the right, northwest of us up the coast, caught my attention. I turned to look. It was a flight of pelicans, moving toward us, surfing easily along the updraft that climbed the cliff in front of us. "Here comes the honor guard!" I shouted into the wind.
The pelicans, flying in as perfect a V as those clumsy/graceful birds can pull off, passed directly in front of us, right at the height of our heads, so close we could see the individual feathers on their wings, even their eyes. I could hear, as one or two birds made just enough wing movement to maintain both steady altitude in the updraft and their position in the formation, a slight sibilance as feathers slipped across one another.
As the leader came abreast, I yelped: "Missing Man! Look! They're flying the Missing Man formation!" And so they were, a good V formation with one bird's place vacant on the seaward leg of the V, signifying, when it's flown by military aircraft, the absence of a comrade who's crashed or been brought down by enemy fire.
We cheered as they passed.
