What did this tell us, I asked my class.
Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.
Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.
Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How? It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz:
Of my three-score years and ten
These twenty would not come again.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over
Twenty years and the spring is over.
This was the school in which we learned
That time was the fire in which we burned.
Sentimental sojourn.
Less time left for those visions and revisions.
In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.” Many of the students to whom I spoke said “being liberated.” “The establishment press has been giving us some joyous news,” one said, and when next we spoke I modified “falling” to “closing down.”
Every morning I walked from the Faculty Club to a newsstand off Telegraph Avenue to get the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. Every afternoon I got the same dispatches, under new headlines and with updated leads, in the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, and the Berkeley Gazette. Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.
I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.
I read such reports over and over again, pinned in the repetitions and dislocations of the breaking story as if in the beam of a runaway train, but I read only those stories that seemed to touch, however peripherally, on Southeast Asia. All other news receded, went unmarked and unread, and, if the first afternoon story about Paul Christian killing Wendell Omura had not been headlined CONGRESSIONAL FOE OF VIET CONFLICT SHOT IN HONOLULU, I might never have read it at all. Janet Ziegler was not mentioned that first afternoon but she was all over the morning editions and so, photographs in the Chronicle and a separate sidebar in the New York Times, VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, were Inez and Harry Victor.
That was March 26, 1975.
A Wednesday morning.
I tried to call Inez Victor in New York but Inez was already gone.
12
SEE it this way.
See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.
From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.
The warm rain down on the runways.
The smell of jet fuel.
The military charters, Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport, C-130s, DC-8s, already coming in from Saigon all night long now, clustered around the service hangars.
The first light breaking on the sea, throwing into relief two islands (first one and then, exactly ninety seconds later, the second, two discrete land masses visible on the southeastern horizon only during those two or three minutes each day when the sun rises behind them.
The regularly scheduled Pan American 747 from Kennedy via LAX banking over the milky shallows and touching down, on time, the big wheels spraying up water from the tarmac, the slight skidding, the shudder as the engines cut down.
Five-thirty-seven A.M.
The ground crew in thin yellow slickers.
The steps wheeled into place.
The passenger service representative waiting at the bottom of the steps, carrying an umbrella, a passenger manifest in a protective vinyl envelope and, over his left arm, one plumeria lei.
The woman for whom both the passenger service representative and Jack Lovett are watching (Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport is not the same as Jack Lovett’s reason for being in the operations room at the airport) will be the next-to-last passenger off the plane. She is a woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case) when it is possible to look very good at certain times of day (Sunday lunch in the summertime is a good time of day for such women, particularly if they wear straw hats that shade their eyes and silk shirts that cover their elbows and if they resist the inclination to another glass of white wine after lunch) and not so good at other times of day. Five-thirty-seven A.M. is not a good time of day for this woman about to deplane the Pan American 747. She is bare-legged, pale despite one of those year-round suntans common among American women of some means, and she is wearing sling-heeled pumps, one of which has loosened and slipped down on her heel. Her dark hair, clearly brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left temple, is dry and lustreless from the night spent on the airplane. She is wearing no makeup. She is wearing dark glasses. She is wearing a short knitted skirt and jacket, with a cotton jersey beneath the jacket, and at the moment she steps from the cabin of the plane into the moist warmth of the rainy tropical morning she takes off the jacket and leans to adjust the heel strap of her shoe. As the passenger service representative starts up the steps with the umbrella she straightens and glances back, apparently confused.