Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

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.