Cry Heaven, Cry Hell. Howard Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ decided to be systematic about his endeavor. He would operate in the colonies in which France was the most hated and the weakest in its stature. He started out by becoming conversant with the historical and cultural patterns.

      After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until the restoration of the monarchy in 1830, France became a weakened state. There was a surplus of idle soldiers, an excess of artillery that was not being used. With greedy eyes the nation looked to Africa and Asia where armies were not strong because they had other ideas besides warfare on their minds. The Algerian dey was weak, and this “Cradle of Democracy” used an insult to their consul as an excuse, first to blockade Algiers for three years then launched a military expedition against the city. They raped women, desecrated mosques, looted the treasury. The struggle became long and violent, with the French exterminating one third of the population. Having had the temerity to make Algeria a part of France allowed them to export not only settlers from their own land, but also Spain, Italy, and Malta to take the land from the native farmers and cultivate it. The result was the literacy and educational upscaling of Algerians fell. The foreign migrants were granted full French citizenship, while native Algerian Muslims didn’t even have the right to vote in their own native land. In 1954 a War of Independence was declared. It took almost a decade for France to defeat The National Liberation Front, and a plebiscite was held which finally resulted in independence.

      Even the Romans knew of Vietnam, as far as 166 B.C. The Portuguese and Dutch became involved in the 1500’s, backing rival families in the North and South. In 1784 a French Bishop intervened on behalf of the Southern family in return for concessions to France. The assistance was interrupted by the French Revolution and taken up after that. The attempts to impose Catholicism served as a focus to the Confucian population to resist Westernization. This was the excuse that France needed to invade the country. Throughout the 19th century the French colonized both the North and South with many resistance movements that led only to defeat of the Vietnamese. In the quest for modernization to build an army that could throw out the foreigners, exposure to Marxism occurred. In 1941, Ho Chi Minh became leader of the Viet Minh, a front to fight for Vietnamese independence. It was dominated by Vietnamese communists. Vietnam had been exploited by the Japanese during WWII. After the war the Viet Minh launched a revolution to seize the offices of government. France tried to re-establish their rule, but Ho Chi Minh received aid from communist China. War broke out in 1947 and lasted until the battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. The modernly weaponed French underestimated the ability of the Viet Minh to move heavy artillery over the mountains and surrendered to them in this famous battle, while U.S. advisers watched the other “Cradle of Liberty” flounder.

      One of the terms of the Geneva Agreement stated that Vietnam would be divided into two countries: North and South Vietnam. The South was ruled by a strong anti-communist, Ngo Dinh Diem. He urged the United States to back his counter revolutionary force against the communist North. Communists, Buddhists, and students in the South all joined to oppose his dictatorial rule. A National Liberation Front arose to throw Diem out. The U.S.A. was pressured to send military advisors. In 1964, an American ship was sunk in the Bay of Tonkin. The North was attacked by the air. This launched the Vietnamese War, in which the U.S.A. was evacuated from Vietnam.

      Rodin absorbed these facts and their implications for his family war against the French Empire. In Algeria, he became an agitator and a trainer for guerilla soldiers in the cities and rural areas. He backed socialist movements to draw the Algerian attention to the inequities of natives of a country being denied educational opportunities or to benefit from new agricultural techniques because a foreigner had moved in their land to benefit her own lackeys and to deny them the fruits of their own labor. Along with the attacks on the thinking that questioned what benefit France had brought to this nation, came training programs. Stolen weapons were diagrammed and assembled and re-assembled; the discipline to face interrogators and tell them lies to mislead them was integrated into their personhood. The points of vulnerability on the body were practiced until they became rote; the most vulnerable point of a tank was learned. Assembly of machine guns, rocket launchers, howitzers was learned in detail so that they could be rapidly assembled or destroyed. Where modern weapons were not available, use of what was there was adapted to defense and offense.

      The most difficult skill that Rodin had to learn was non-identity. When blocks of people had learned the abilities he taught them or when French victory seemed imminent, he had to be able to disappear. The people whom he taught, and for whom he agitated were not to know his name or face. Many times he wore a disguise. Sometimes he led boycotts or demonstrations, then he had to disappear on a rooftop or in the sea. The important impact was that he start the anger flowing and disappear at the point of the highest escalation.

      He joined the French Foreign Legion after the war and played both ends against the middle in Algeria. He would attack the Berber villages during the day, participate in the raping, pillaging and destruction. At night, he’d dress as an Arab woman named Rebaza and complain to the men about her sons starving because all the land was given to foreigners to cultivate while the natives were left without land, or she would lament about her sons not being educated for anything, but to be cannon fodder for the French wars. Then Hitler invaded France. This was his chance to score points as a French hero and undermine her at the same time.

      Much later, at Dien Bien Phu, he had to play a dual role and move between Viet Minh, as a Russian advisor and Frenchmen shouting misconstrued orders to the soldiers. To get from one side to the other, he had to build a tunnel within a tunnel and negotiate it at a rapid speed as the battle progressed. By the time the Americans took over the war, he was long gone. He brought back the principle that the Japanese had used of operating through tunnels, in case the Vietnamese were not familiar with it, which they evidently were.

       Chapter 2

      Having established rapport with the Vichy government and the Underground during the war, Rodin was able to operate with a free reign. Because of this he was able to affect a rescue that was based on a connection with his past. A B-17 bomber was sent to blow up a munitions plant that was sending rockets across the channel from the Danish peninsula. It was intercepted by a squad of Messerschmitts and shot down. There were two survivors that had to outrace German troops. Suddenly shots rang out ahead of the crewmen. The Germans lay dead behind them. Rodin stepped out of the bushes and demanded to know who the survivors were. The first one answered, “I am Lieutenant Patrick Mikawber, of the U.S. Army Air Force, and this is Sergeant Corlando Moran, of the same. Rodin had thought that this first one looked familiar. He told him that he knew his father and mother from Lafayette Escadrille. He recounted some of their adventures, and Pat updated him on what had happened to his family and their emigration. He did not talk about his father’s escapades, just mentioned that he had started out as a truck driver and had started his own company (which actually happened).

      He wanted to accomplish his mission. The Underground unit and the two flyers planned to disguise them as workers in the plant wearing face masks in the likenesses of two Underground that actually worked there. They sneaked dynamite and fusing in their lunch pails and planted it at various sites in the plant. Corlando almost got them caught when he tried to look up the skirt of a female employee that had bent over to pick up a dropped part. They tied the fusing to the ends of the dynamite sticks, then knotted all the sticks together. When they got out, they tied a knot to another length of fusing and tied this length to the detonator. When the plunger was pushed, the explosion rocked the village, and whatever employees could get out barged through the door. Corlando saw the girl at whom he peeked, run out; he ran up to her and kissed her. After the war, he went back and started a relationship with her.

      Now the task was to get the flyers out of the country. They were smuggled out in a boatload of llamas, aardvarks, and anteaters bound for an Amsterdam zoo. After this, they were transported to the Cliffs of Dover at the bottom of a garbage scow. Pat wrote his father and Molly about this adventure and added greetings from Rodin.

      Rodin was always serious about his dual role. СКАЧАТЬ