Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (20 page)

That, basically, was how Sino-American relations stood.

In the end, actual conflict was avoided. But Mao had learned his lesson: fight nuclear
with nuclear. There was simply no other way to push back against the American menace.
And there was more. In an earlier age, when China had been on good terms with the
USSR, it had been solidly protected by the Soviet Union’s “nuclear umbrella.” Yes—it
had been a satellite nation. But now?

Can’t rely on ’em, Mao thought.

In fact, my dear Khrushchev, Mao thought. Nikita…your nuclear bombs are a menace from
behind!

Khrushchev, for his part, wondered what Mao was getting all worked up about.

What’ll you do if nuclear war actually breaks out? What then? Man, this guy’s unbelievable.
Here I am
blahblahblahing
about “US-USSR cooperation” to make sure we don’t end up stumbling into a full-scale
war, and look at you. Idiot.

Look, Khrushchev thought—though he never voiced his thoughts. Look. Just leave world
domination to us and the Americans. You can just chill, okay?

Khrushchev may not have said anything, but his actions showed very clearly what he
was thinking. How wary he was of Mao. As a matter of fact, in 1956, China had already
made up its mind to develop nuclear weapons. In 1957, the Soviet Union had at least
outwardly projected a willingness to support China’s nuclear program by signing the
“Sino-Soviet Agreement on New Technology for National Defense.” But the Second Taiwan
Strait Crisis had made Khrushchev apprehensive about Mao. I mean, look at this guy,
he’s actually doing this stuff! It’s dangerous. In 1959, Khrushchev scrapped the Sino-Soviet
Agreement on New Technology for National Defense. The next year, he recalled the USSR’s
nuclear specialists from China.

He completely cut off all nuclear technological support. If that led to a split between
China and the Soviet Union, well, so be it. You can’t have everything.

Sorry, Mao.

Then, in 1963, something happened that brought about a definitive change in the situation.
Astonishingly, the three nuclear powers—the United States, Great Britain, and the
Soviet Union—signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. The point of this action was to impress
upon the rest of the world that that was it, no one else was going to get these things.
And that was the last straw. Mao blew his top. China reacted by releasing a statement
explicitly criticizing the Soviet state.

1964.

Two pieces of good news made China giddy. First, on October 14, Khrushchev was ousted.
Mao howled with glee. Hah, serves you right, Nikita! Second, just two days later,
on October 16, China’s first nuclear test was a success. We did this on our own! Mao
cried. Eat our dust, losers!

Now China was a superpower too.

As soon as Mao’s relationship with Khrushchev came to an end—and as fraught as it
was, it was still a relationship—he formed another, and this one, too, moved history.
Mao developed a personal connection with Ho Chi Minh. This one wasn’t bad. Mao had
been Ho’s only supporter during the First Indochina War, when Vietnam, which is to
say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, founded in 1945, battled for its independence
from France. “Down with Imperialism!” Red China shouted, and made the Vietnamese army
a present of 160,000 small arms. It trained some fifteen thousand Vietnamese to fight,
turning them into professional guerrillas. It did Ho some other favors too. Ho remained
grateful for this until the end of his life. He continued throughout to show his respect
for Mao.

Naturally, the warm personal bond between these men affected Sino-Vietnamese relations,
and this in turn had an effect on Sino-American and Sino-Soviet relations.

So what happened?

The chaos of the Vietnam War, aka the Second Indochina War.

Yes, at last we come to the Vietnam War. The infamous Vietnam War. A limited war fought
on the Indochina peninsula: America’s quagmire. In 1964, John F. Kennedy was no longer
the American president. He had been assassinated in Texas on November 22 of the previous
year, almost a year before Khrushchev exited the stage. There was a crack, turbulence
in the air, and he was gone from the world. Kennedy had been disinclined to get into
a full-scale war, but not Johnson. Not Lyndon B. Johnson, former thirty-seventh vice
president of the United States, now thirty-sixth president of the United States. On
August 2, the Tonkin Gulf Incident took place. An American destroyer, claiming to
have been attacked by the North Vietnamese Navy, which was part of the communist Democratic
Republic of Vietnam’s military and was thus led by Ho Chi Minh, conducted a retaliatory
strike. In fact, the original attack had been fabricated by the Americans.

1965. On February 7, the American military began bombing North Vietnam. As the bombing
continued, the targets moved progressively farther and farther north…

So what happened?

Naturally, Mao-led China grew suspicious. What, ultimately, was America’s goal?

Where did it really want to end up?

What’s just above Vietnam to the north?

We are.

That was it. Mao decided that America was taking aim at China. American encirclement
all over again. Ho sent out the SOS. On March 22, the National Front for the Liberation
of South Vietnam, popularly known as the Vietcong—short for Vietnamese Communists—announced
that it was “prepared to accept aid from its friends around the world.”

Mao was Ho’s friend.

And so the policy of “support Vietnam, resist America” was established. Mao had made
up his mind. We’ll push back against America’s war of imperialist aggression, put
people on the ground in support of North Vietnam. Some thirty-five hundred US Marines
had begun landing near Da Nang on March 8, so the land war was already under way.
They had moved ahead into “direct intervention.” Warning! they yelled in Beijing.
Beware of the US! This war could easily expand into mainland China!

Send in the PLA!

And so it happened. On June 9, 1965, a substantial support force from China crossed
the border. The soldiers marched through Friendship Pass onto the Indochina peninsula
and into Ho’s Vietnam. Only the main forces of the People’s Liberation Army, the true
elites, had been called to serve. Prior to deployment, they underwent two months of
special training.

These efforts to support Vietnam were conducted in total secrecy. Still, by the second
half of 1965, more than a hundred thousand troops had been shipped off to the peninsula
to “support Vietnam, resist America.”

Humans. And dogs too. Seventy-five dogs from the Military Dog Platoon had been sent
over the border as an extremely modern and practical fighting force. All were descended
from Jubilee. They moved south, down the peninsula.

Southward…southward…

Had America noticed?

Of course. The US had, by and large, figured out what was happening. It was the leading
power in the West, and it had the best, maybe the second best, information-gathering
network in the world. But the US kept silent. Johnson’s administration had learned
of China’s covert intervention in the conflict, but it kept this knowledge secret.
Because it was kind of at a loss. What the hell is China doing? it wondered. Are they
trying to turn our limited war into a total war? They seem to see things sort of differently
from Moscow, but…is this, like, a trap or something? Washington, in other words, was
stymied by its own insistence on viewing two different shades of red, Soviet and Chinese,
as though they were the same. And its provisional solution to the problem was to battle
secrecy with more secrecy. As long as both sides didn’t make what was happening public,
China and the US wouldn’t yet be at war.

The important thing, Washington decided, was to avoid direct confrontation.

The Indochina peninsula was split into North and South. The line was drawn at the
seventeenth parallel north, along a buffer zone created by the Geneva Accords, which
had ended the First Indochina War in 1954. This region was known as the Demilitarized
Zone, the DMZ. In 1967, Quang Tri Province, which abutted the DMZ on the south, was
the scene of a series of ferocious battles between the American military and the joint
forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong.

In summer, the direct confrontation with China that the US had been trying to avoid
finally broke out in Quang Tri.

The participants in the battle were not human.

You were the soldiers.

Yes, you were the ones battling it out. Dogs vs. dogs.

Among the American dogs who came to Vietnam, shipped over from mainland America, was
one named DED. In November 1963, President John F. Kennedy, JFK, exited the scene.
In March 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson announced in his State of the Union address that
he would not be running for president in the next election, and he, too, left. Goodbye
LBJ. And hello DED. The dog was sent to the front in the summer of 1967 and kept fighting
there for a year, until he himself left in summer 1968.

JFK, LBJ, DED. That, from a dog-historical perspective, was the progression.

And so there you were.

ME
?

Yes, you.

Woof
.

DED barked.

June 1967. You had crossed the Pacific, but you weren’t yet in Vietnam. You were on
Okinawa, about to be separated from your sister. That’s why you barked. You had both
passed a screening test at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, in California, and then
they had shipped you off to this distant island. You had undergone six weeks of special
training. You were siblings by different mothers, born of the same seed. The difference
between your ages was two years and four months. You were descended on your father’s
side, some seven generations earlier, from Bad News. Five generations back, your great-great-great-grandfather
had had, as his aunts and uncle, Jubilee, Sumer, and Gospel.

What kind of training did you undergo on Okinawa? Your handlers took advantage of
the extreme similarity of the Okinawan environment to that of the Indochina peninsula
to teach you specialized techniques for fighting against the Vietcong. First you had
to get used to the jungle, with its oppressive heat and humidity. Then you had to
learn to find hidden tunnels. Because the elusive communist guerrillas hid out, generally,
in a vast network of underground passageways they had constructed. You had to hone
your ability to navigate minefields. You had to be able to detect ambushes before
they happened and respond to surprise attacks.

That’s what these six weeks were for. To turn members of the American military dog
elite into Vietnam War professionals.

Specialists.

Ten dogs in addition to DED and his sister had been brought in from the mainland,
along with another forty-six from a base in the Philippines and twenty-nine specially
selected from a platoon at a base in Korea. Unfortunately, seventeen out of the total
of eighty-seven dogs were unable to become fully capable specialists. DED’s sister
was among these. And so, DED, you barked. Because while you would be sent off to the
Indochina peninsula, your sister would be shipped back to Oahu, Hawaii.

You sensed, somehow, that you would never see her again. That you would never again
be able to play with her. And so, DED, you barked.

Your sister’s name was Goodnight. Though she had failed the screening test on Okinawa
and was shipped off to a military installation on Oahu to serve as a sentry dog, she
was still an outstanding dog—they wouldn’t have used her if she wasn’t—and in time,
she would have her own rather complicated role to play in your history. For now, we
will set her story aside.

To focus on you, DED.

ME
?

Yes, you.

Think of your name. DED was an acronym for “dog-eat-dog,” and it had been given to
you in the hope that you would become a tough fighter worthy of the phrase. Do you
get what that means, DED? Giving you a name like that was in poor taste, yes, but
there was more to it than that. And as it happened, in the end, your name suggested
your destiny.

You would consume canine flesh.

And soon.

That was the fate that awaited you.

MINE
?

Yes, yours.

Woof!

Seven days later you were prepared to ship off to Vietnam. This was still June 1967.
You and your sixty-nine fellow specialist anti-Vietcong dogs departed Okinawa and
landed on the Indochina peninsula. One by one, the dogs were assigned to their new
units. None was assigned to the IV Corps Tactical Zone, which was farthest south.
Forty-four were assigned to the III Corps Tactical Zone. Half that number were assigned
to Tay Ninh Province in the west, along the border with Cambodia. Four dogs were assigned
to the II Corps Tactical Zone, and the rest—twenty-two in all—were assigned to the
I Corps Tactical Zone, up north. Of the latter, eight went to Quang Ngai Province,
four to Thua Thien-Hue Province, and ten to Quang Tri Province, all the way up north.

July 1967. DED was among the ten dogs sent to Quang Tri.

They went by helicopter.

They swooped down from the sky into a landing zone that had been cleared in the forest,
into the thick of war.

The northern border of Quang Tri butted up against the seventeenth parallel. Against
the DMZ. That summer, the DMZ was far from demilitarized—it was the site of intense
fighting. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff had given permission to start shelling
the DMZ a year earlier, though naturally this fact had not been made public. The Americans
had one simple slogan in the border area, where the two states and the two sides in
the conflict met: “Keep the Commies Out!” Seven months earlier, permission had been
granted to return fire across the DMZ. Shooting back could be considered a form of
invasion. Five months earlier, permission had been granted to carry out preemptive
strikes. This was…well, obviously a form of invasion. They were doing all this and
still had no results to show for it. Then, three months earlier, they started constructing
a defensive wall. This time they were going to try closing off South Vietnam. This
was the beginning of the “McNamara line,” which required an incredible investment
of manpower and involved the use of all kinds of equipment: barbed wire, mines, observation
towers, searchlights, and so on. They carried all this stuff in using CH-54 heavy-lift
helicopters, commonly known as sky cranes, and conducted frequent flyovers to protect
the project.