Shadow Warrior (4 page)

Despite his youth, Bill had the run of the city, first in the company of his nanny and later on his own. Victoria Park in the British concession was surrounded by iron railings. No Chinese were allowed into the park—except for amahs in charge of foreign children, hobbling along on their bound feet. Looming over the park was a dark gray building, half castle and half cathedral—Gordon Hall, named after General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, who had surveyed and fixed the boundaries of the British Concession after the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860.
¹⁵

The market was located on Taku Road, a dirt thoroughfare that bisected the British sector and extended into the native districts at both ends. Hundreds of Chinese mingled there. Stallkeepers hawked their wares, and the air reeked of fresh earth, cabbage stalks, aniseed, garlic, and soya. A huge granary housed the rice that came up the Grand Canal from southern China, forming one side of the marketplace. Against this building's wall, acrobats, storytellers, magicians, and conjurors performed. Next to the conjurors sat a row of men making six-inch-high figures out of different colors of clay mixed with water. The figures were called
ni ren
, which meant “mud men.” You could ask for anything you wished—opera singer, dancer, mandarin, or warrior. The sculptors were especially good at soldiers.
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Periodically, a junk loaded with supplies—frequently arms—was hijacked on the Sea River or the Grand Canal, supposedly by pirates. The British editor of the
Peking and Tientsin Times
, however, correctly identified the brigands as members of the infamous White Lotus Society, the influential antiforeign movement whose agitation had spawned the Boxer Rebellion. One day, the sound of gunfire coming from the river brought Bill's mother, Margaret, up short. Bill was nowhere to be seen. She and Elbridge began scouring the city. They eventually found their son with some other European boys at the riverfront, where the local protection force was fighting off “pirates”—in reality White Lotuses attempting to hijack a junk full of arms.
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Like the other children of American and English families, Bill attended the Gordon Road School. The Empire Cinema was a favorite haunt of concession boys; on Saturday afternoons the performance always began with the same ritual. Herr Schneider, who looked just like Charlie Chaplin, would walk down the five steps into the orchestra pit, take his violin out of its case, and rest it on a small pad on his shoulder. The theater's pianist
would sound the key note while Herr Schneider tuned his strings. After bowing to the cellist and second violinist, who together made up the rest of the orchestra, the maestro would turn to glance up at the cinema manager, who stood beside the film projector at the back of the gallery. It was his signal for the picture to begin, and the youngsters settled down in their seats to watch yet another installment of a serial like
Tarzan of the Apes
. Herr Schneider provided passionate background music for all of the shows until the advent of talkies.
¹⁸

The officers and men of the regiment were encouraged to mingle with the Chinese and learn local customs. Chinese-language training was mandatory for officers, and Elbridge hired a language instructor for Margaret and Bill. The latter's CIA personnel file would later list his Chinese language skill as “fair.” One family photo features father and son dressed in native Chinese garb. In the sweltering summers, the Colbys vacationed at the seaside resorts of Qinhuangdao and Weihai. In the fall there was horseback riding on the plains surrounding Tientsin. Bill would later observe that “my boyhood experiences of China . . . had prepared me for the exoticism of Asia.”
¹⁹
In truth, foreign travel was a rarity for pre–World War II Americans. Bill's experiences in China would do more than prepare him for the mysteries of the Orient; it would create a lifelong craving for immersion in other cultures. Though he was just a preteen during his Tientsin experiences, young Bill was sensitized to the political, economic, and military forces that were shaping international politics.

Nationalist aspirations, conflicting ideologies, and imperial designs swirled all about the Colbys. During their posting, Elbridge, Margaret, and Bill visited Japan, traveling by steamer up through the inland sea to Hiroshima and then boarding a train to Yokohama. There they saw the giant steel mills that would fuel the burgeoning Japanese military-industrial complex. Japanese encroachment on Manchuria had begun just when the Colbys arrived in China. During the family's three years in Tientsin, the Japanese garrison in the city grew from six hundred to six thousand. “As a kid,” Bill's son John recounted, “he saw the new Japanese soldier firsthand—tough, dedicated, fanatical even.”
²⁰
America would eventually have to deal with this threat, Elbridge told his son. The Republic must play its proper role in world affairs, he insisted, protecting its legitimate strategic and economic interests. Woodrow Wilson had been right: totalitarian aggression was a threat to all people, and the United States had a duty to facilitate
the spread of democracy and to support the principle of national self-determination. The fate of the nation and the fate of the world were inextricably intertwined.

In 1932, Elbridge's tour of duty came to an end. Shortly after the family's return from China, he was assigned to the Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC) at the University of Vermont as an instructor in military science. Burlington, the state capital and site of the university, was a charming, rustic town of some forty thousand. The community and its college were situated on the wooded eastern shore of Lake Champlain. Small and remote at the close of the Revolutionary War, Burlington had quickly attained a degree of prosperity as its economy shifted from fur trading to textile manufacturing and lumber milling. Burlington's most famous citizen had been Ethan Allen, whose Green Mountain Boys played a key role in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga during the war for American independence.
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Bill was as happy in Burlington as he would be anywhere in his youth, or at least as happy as an army child could be. He would later recall that the family's constant travels provided him with a unique education, but also with a sense of rootlessness. Still, his years in Burlington were ones of stability and contentment. Like most of his peers, Bill was an avid outdoorsman. In the winters he captained the high-school ski team; in the summers, he spent much of his time on or around Lake Champlain.

Shortly after the family's arrival in Vermont, Elbridge moved into a cottage he had inherited from his father at Thompson's Point on the lake. Hunting, fishing, canoeing, and camping lay just beyond the Colby's back door. When he was thirteen, Bill and a friend, Bill Cook, embarked on a ten-day canoe trip on the lake, camping on shore at night.
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During the summer before his junior year, he and another chum embarked on a two-week biking tour around New England, visiting forts and historical landmarks by day and sleeping in fields and meadows by night. Physically, Bill Colby was unimpressive: full grown, he stood no more than five feet nine inches, and, until late in life, he never weighed more than about 150 pounds. In high school, his frame was almost waifish, accentuated by a large head on a thin neck. His fine-boned face promised a certain handsomeness in maturity, and young Colby was neat, even natty, with dark, meticulously combed hair and wire-rimmed glasses. There was an excellent mind, well-disciplined and inquisitive without being pedantic. He made
excellent grades, rarely recording a C at a time when A's and B's were given to only the best students.

Bill remained an only child, which was somewhat unusual in a Catholic family. There were rumors of miscarriages. The young man spent a great deal of time with his parents. His mother—warm, gracious, mannerly without pretension—adored Bill. Her love was unconditional but not permissive. Like many strong women of her era, Margaret identified with her son and envisioned great things for him. Elbridge did not trust to love; like John and Abigail Adams, he believed in discipline and detailed guidance for his progeny. Elbridge spent his days away from his teaching duties at the university writing and exercising. John Colby later remembered his grandfather as “ramrod straight, a principled guy” who could not make small talk and who was devoid of humor. Elbridge proved a diligent and diverse, if not accomplished, scholar. Among his many published works were
The Echo Device in Literature
,
Early American Comedy, Problems in Trench Warfare
,
Theodore Winthrop
, and
The First Army in Europe
.
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Elbridge was an avid genealogist, compiling more than enough documentation to win membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. He frequently took Bill to nearby Fort Ticonderoga, which the Colbys' ancestors had helped capture from the British, and to Fort William Henry, which Colonel Jonathan Bagley, another ancestor, had helped to build. “Bill loved to go to Fort Ticonderoga . . . loved the Green Mountain Boys and the idea of these irregulars taking on this massive fort,” son John recalled. “He grew up with that spirit and those stories from his father, yet he was not a martial kind of guy.” As the family remembered it, Margaret and her sister Frances, who moved in permanently following her husband's death, were not much into substantive matters. While Elbridge might want to discuss the Greek origins of geometry, they preferred to talk about the latest fashions or the movies. That left young Bill as Elbridge's principal interlocutor. The father liked to argue, but he was tolerant of dissent. The son did not have the option of non-participation; so Bill learned how to take a point and defend it, to think clearly, and to express himself concisely. He also acquired a certain imperviousness to pressure. “My dad's father was very directed, I would not say harsh, but stern and focused,” another of Elbridge's grandsons, Carl, recalled. “His mother gave Bill all the love he ever needed and he just took off from there.”
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As an adult, Bill Colby would spend much of his time either as a participant in or an advocate for unconventional warfare. It was an appreciation bequeathed him by his father. Elbridge was fascinated with Robert Rogers and Rogers' Rangers. Rogers' Rangers were, of course, a historical reality, an independent company of colonial irregulars attached to the British army during the Seven Years' War. The unit was organized and trained by Major Robert Rogers as a rapidly deployable light infantry force tasked with reconnaissance and special operations conducted against distant targets. So effective was the unit that it became the chief scouting company of British forces in North America. In front of the Colby house at Thompson's Point lay a trail taken by Rogers and his men as they ventured north during the French and Indian War. Their mission was a reprisal for Indian raids against British settlements. After killing every man, woman, and child in an Indian village, they returned safely to Fort William Henry.

Elbridge had Bill, and, subsequently, his grandsons, read Kenneth Roberts's
Northwest Passage
, published in 1936. In the book, the young protagonist, Langdon Towne, is a Harvard graduate, an aspiring artist, an avid outdoorsman, a naturalist, a patriot—and a soldier-disciple of Robert Rogers. The villains in Towne's community are local officials who are guilty of arbitrary exercise of power, misuse of authority, and abuse of the law. The rangers in the novel assume almost mythical proportions: “Mostly they get along without sleeping, and a good part of the time they get along without eating,” a Rogers' disciple told young Towne. “Sometimes they lay [sic] in one spot for twelve hours without moving, while the mosquitoes and the black flies chewin' 'em to pieces. Other times they run seventy-eighty miles in a day and kill a few Indians when they get where they're going. If they can go afoot, they do so; but if they can't go afoot, they go in canoes, or on rafts, or on skates or on snowshoes. . . . They're up prowling around when everybody else is a-bed.” Rogers himself was, of course, a backwoods superhero—woodsman, diplomat, gentleman, a killer of men and unkillable himself.
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Bill Colby emerged from childhood to adolescence in the shadow of his father and his father's obsession with Rogers' Rangers and irregular warfare. But it may have been Langdon Towne as much as Robert Rogers who intrigued the Colbys. Kenneth Roberts introduced his book with the following passage: “The Northwest Passage, in the imagination of all free people, is a short cut to fame, fortune and romance—a hidden route to Golconda and the mystic East. On every side of us are men who hunt perpetually for
their personal Northwest Passage, too often sacrificing health, strength and life itself to the search; and who shall say they are not happier in their vain but hopeful quest than wiser, duller folk who sit at home, venturing nothing and, with sour laughs, deriding the seekers for that fabled thoroughfare—that panacea for all the afflictions of a humdrum world.” Langdon was such a man, a man Elbridge and Bill were determined to emulate.
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The beneficiary of some excellent schooling at home and abroad, Bill skipped a grade, graduating from Burlington High School in 1936 at the age of sixteen. He had planned to apply to West Point, following his father into the military, but he was a year too young. In the interim he was admitted to Princeton. By Christmas vacation, Bill had turned seventeen, old enough to apply to the Academy. Then, as now, candidates were nominated by their congressmen and senators, but only after passing West Point's entrance examination, which included a physical. The extremely nearsighted Bill failed the eye test. His disappointment quickly abated. “I was delighted,” he later recalled, “for that one year at Princeton had disabused me of the idea of a military career.”