Code Name: Queencobra
JPYoung
Waukegan 1963
They called it ‘the jungle’…the neighbourhood vacant lot was overgrown with vegetation.
Marc Gillette’s childhood gang camped in makeshift pup tents on hot summer nights; they played Tarzan in Deepest Darkest Africa and ‘Indian fighters’. The current neighbourhood gang played ‘spaceman’ on Venus pitting the girls against the boys, and ‘army’ with toy weapons and plastic helmets.
After morning Mass, watching Westerns and brunch with Mother, Marc matched wits with Charlie Chan. As baseball replaced the WGN afternoon movie, he changed from his suit into grey slacks, black polo shirt and casual shoes to enjoy a long walk through his tree-lined neighbourhood on the warm Sunday afternoon.
Though there was now a house on the corner, the jungle extended around its boundaries. Sauntering through the meandering pathways was relaxing, not only due to childhood memories, but the green foliage blocked out views of the street.
Marc’s solitude ended when he sensed someone…
Out of the verdure came seven-year-old Charlie Miller wearing a Mattel Toys green beret and leopard spot camouflage poncho carrying a camouflaged tommy gun and plastic K-Bar knife.
They stared at each other for what seemed the longest time, yet was only a few seconds, for Marc journeyed back to his past…
‘I was playing Jungle War Stories. Did I scare you, Mr. Gillette?’
‘No Charlie, but you certainly surprised me!’
One of the neighbourhood gang, Charlie attended his church. They often exchanged salutations, pleasantries, riddles and elephant jokes. The bright humorous boy always made Marc feel good. In turn, Charlie thought Mr. Gillette was The Coolest Guy in the World. He envied him from his classroom window seeing him in his grey suits and black beret carefreely pedalling his bicycle. He was the same age as the dads in his neighbourhood but looked, dressed, spoke and acted nothing like them…and he didn’t work!
‘I haven’t seen jungle cloak-and-dagger in a very long time!’
‘It’s my guerrilla fighter set I got for my birthday! But my big brother calls me a GOrilla!’
Marc examined Charlie’s ‘GUERRILLA FIGHTER’ beret badge that resembled a cross between the Special Forces crest with its Indian Scouts/First Special Service Force crossed arrows with dagger and the parachute of the Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés.
‘When you’re alone you’ve always someone interesting to talk to. Where’s the rest of your guerrilla band?’
‘Nobody’s around on Sunday. I saw Charlotte and her sister at church, but I don’t think they want to be guerillas.’
‘You never know Charlie, the best guerilla fighter I ever knew was a girl.’
‘Wow! Where did you know her from?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way home. I first knew her in France, then Indochina; but this is between us! Top secret!’
Washington D.C. 1957
Ordered to immediately report back to his office; he wore his uniform to take a military aircraft.
In addition to their government jobs, all his cohorts were members of armed forces reserve units. Their director decided to improve their skills and physical fitness by their undertaking a variety of military courses. Though the others undertook technical studies, Marc was assigned to a refresher parachute course and the U.S. Army Ranger School.
Friedrich Nietzsche stated, ‘Out of life's school of war—what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger’. Ranger school proved it! He’d lost so much weight and gained so much muscle that his pinks and greens no longer fit him well. He acquired the olive-drab infantry officer’s uniform he wore now. Like a shirt, his Ike jacket only had his parachute wings without ‘fruit salad’ ribbons. The only sleeve insignia was his black and gold RANGER tab.
His director greeted him with a Dr. Seuss triple rhyme,
‘You lost weight. You look great! Do you believe in fate?’
‘”Fate”, sir?’
One doesn’t tell a retired general, ‘kismet my ass’…
‘Gillette, you know we’ve never seen eye to eye with the French, and after Suez our relationship is more adversarial than the Soviets…It’s Quasi-War Two.’
‘Sir.’
‘We’re doing a joint operation in a very dangerous place. The first stroke of fate is that you’re fresh out of Ranger School. The second is that they requested you by name, or should I say, your World War II codename…Willoughby…
He hadn’t used his codename since he parachuted into France with his Jedburgh team. Assisted by a Free French executive officer and a British gentleman-ranker radio operator, he led a band of French Resistance fighters in sabotage and guerrilla warfare.
‘Who asked for me, sir?’
‘We don’t know, but I think you do…Code Name: Queencobra…We’re sending you two, as John Paul Jones said, In Harm’s Way…’
Montreal
On his flight he recalled a book he read before the war. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's North to the Orient declared air travel enabled traversing vast distances quickly that opened new possibilities for expeditious exploration, adventure and cultural exchange in previously inaccessible and uncharted territories. It was an experience once only available on amusement park rides, like the one in Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman. Rapid air travel also created a new class of people…
They reunited on neutral ground; the capitale du Canada français. There she was…looking as beautiful and exciting as she did when she was his British Special Operations Executive liaison with their French Forces of the Interior Group. She spoke English with an English accent and French with a French one; he was never sure where she spent the most time. There was no happier joint military command in history.
He first saw her when she was dressed as a nun carrying a submachine gun,
‘And I thought my nuns were strict…’
The pair got along splendidly, both were competent, but easy-going with each other.
They were lovers then, and were lovers again, yet they kept their true identities from each other. Reliving their past, they intimately conversed on their long flights with the identities of a husband-and-wife Canadian journalist team.
It wasn’t only each other’s physical fitness, but the looks in their eyes…
They lived in the now and communicated without speaking; they knew neither had a spouse or children. He didn’t mention he was freshly out of running through swamps doing small unit tactics without sleep; he presumed she’d been doing the same for real in Afrique du Nord Française.
She was beyond interesting…she was fascinating…Fascinating people are dangerous…sometimes to others, sometimes to themselves…that’s why they were fascinating…
Saigon
Following the Indochina War, the Americans replaced the French in what was now South Vietnam. The French still had local guerrillas être de permanence in communist North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
When a ‘person of interest’ went down in a plane, the downed American showed his blood chit identifying him as friendly and requesting assistance. His rescuers became his captors when they quickly figured out that if he was that valuable, they would get more money, from either the Americans or the Communists by playing them off against each other.
The Central Intelligence Agency needed the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure to get him back but wanted one of their own people along. The French compromised by selecting an American they and Queencobra, the former leader of the nearest ‘friendlies’, the local guerrillas, knew and recommended, Code Name: Willoughby.
She stated the Americans in Saigon hated the French and made cooperation miserable.
On first meeting their C.I.A. liaison, his scowl proved it…undoubtedly, he believed he’d be the American accompanying Queencobra. Then,
‘Marc the Knife!’
They underwent their initial Office of Strategic Services training together! He was sent to Burma; they hadn’t seen each other since then.
From then on, the pair were treated like the Royal Family. The C.I.A. provided aircraft for insertion and extraction as well as the latest intelligence. The D.G.S.E. gave the C.I.A general intelligence but saved the specifics for Queencobra who led their G.C.M.A. team during the Indochina war.
Her guerrillas would lead their infiltration to their destination and pick-up point. Queencobra commanded, Willoughby, who knew none of the local languages, acted as bodyguard, comedy-relief sidekick and U.S. ambassador extraordinary.
Somewhere in Indochina
The moonless and windless night was perfect. The landscape below was illuminated by a flaming rectangle. Madame le Mort and The Lone Ranger jumped from their Civil Air Transport aircraft steering their modified parachutes to land within the drop zone. They hadn’t reserve parachutes due to the low height of their airplane.
He’d never seen anyone more warmly greeted than she was.
They wore capes made of leopard spot parachutes and Bérets commando vert. They presented Queencobra and Willoughby with their own identical costumes; everyone not so attired was fair game...
Their uniform of strong but light parachute capes gave protection from the elements, effective camouflage, ground cover, provided shade, and was strong enough to drag cargo on the ground or be a tent. They were hammocks, and shrouds for the dead.
Both carried green camouflage-painted M1928A1 Thompson submachine guns made in the USA but captured by the Red Chinese who armed the Viet Minh with them. Now the tommy gun was back in an American’s hands.
They moved out at dawn. The decaying vegetation and sodden soil reminded Marc of Peter Graves’ pithy comment in East of Sumatra,
‘How can anything so full of chlorophyll smell this bad?’
If he hadn’t been acclimatised from the Rangers, he never would have kept up the pace in the heat.
‘Inconflicto’
Feelings of overconfidence and invulnerability killed more people than cancer.
It did again when the gang who held the downed C.I.A. operative was bunched together for a training lecture that the few perimeter and captive’s quarters guards were also paying attention to. Their basecamp may have been invisible from the air, but the jungle allowed the undetected guerrillas to get fatally close to them.
Willoughby unsheathed his K-Bar, Queencobra still had her Fairbairn-Sykes dagger; they came alive when they killed the oblivious guards…
‘School’s out!’
The pair lobbed hand-grenades into the training cluster. Some screamed when they saw them a split-second before they exploded. Queencobra and Willoughby emptied their magazines into the shrieking meat as their patrol finished off the sentries with machetes.
Magna cum caedes…Payment in blood for the greedy…
The two ecstatically smiled at each other, for the couple that slays together stays together, as they had in Occupied France.
‘Thank God…I thought I was finished.’
‘You’re not…’, Willoughby replied.
‘They are’, added Queencobra.
There was no pursuit as they carried the recovered American in a parachute to the landing zone.
Her guerrillas gave him as warm a farewell as they did to her…She joyfully explained their gleeful team had also been called from their routine lives for the mission.
A strange short take-off and landing aircraft flew the Frenchwoman and the two Americans to safety.
Cap-Saint-Jacques
After their debriefing, the pair were given a stay at a luxury seaside hotel; they behaved like honeymooners.
They danced beneath the palm trees in the night of a thousand stars on the Baie de Cocotiers. The Cochin-Chinese girl romantically sang Dalida’s Histoire d'un amour in yearnful nostalgia and mournful regret simultaneously; as French songs were.
‘Do we love each other because of who we are or what we do?’
‘C'est inséparable…’
Aéroport International Tân Sơn Nhất
‘Returning to La Belle France? I envy you.’
‘Eventually, but...I’m visiting my brother and his family in Sydney.’
‘I really envy you.’
‘I have another man in my life…Philippe… He’s my seven-year-old nephew. You two have a lot in common.’
‘Other than you, I’ve more in common with seven-year-olds than anyone else.’
They gave each other what would be perhaps their last embrace…
He whispered,
‘Marc’
‘Micheline’, she replied.
Waukegan 1963
He looked at his engraved Rolex Submariner that the C.I.A. presented them with,
‘It’s almost teatime and my 4 o’clock movie!’
‘It won’t be as good as YOUR Jungle War Stories! You’re just like the men in the movies I watch, I don’t know anyone else like you. Thanks!’
‘You know Charlie, you’re the first and last person I’ve told this to. I feel wonderful confiding in an old friend like you. Thank you! When I saw you dressed like that, it came out like dysentery…never mind what that is…Don’t forget, “Hush Hush”!’
Charlie pondered,
‘I still can’t get over it. The prisoner’s held where there’s a guerrilla band who’ll only work for your ladyfriend. The C.I.A. wants an American along but the only person the French want is who your ladyfriend wants. You just were with the Airborne Rangers…Everything came together.’
‘Life’s a Las Vegas slot machine. Everything has to come up at the same time, it’s so easy for one little thing not to come up and you lose. You never know, that’s what makes life interesting. Someday you’ll find that out…How do you want to end up in The Game of Life?’
Charlie thought of the board game of that name he played on rainy days with his brother or the gang,
‘I want to get Revenge on lots of people and end up in Millionaire Acres!’
‘You crack me up, Charlie!’
Marc gave him a man’s handshake, Charlie was thrilled,
‘I know you think this sounds stupid…but I wish I was grown up.’
‘I know you think this sound stupider…but I wish I was one of your gang afterschool.’
Charlie looked at him in wonder.
‘But I know before you have your hour and a half of fun, you’re sitting in a classroom all day that seems way longer than it really is, then you go home to your parents for the rest of the evening. You’ve longer times of people telling you what to do, and you’ve only brief moments of fun; then they’re gone…Like the grown-ups say, “It’s a long time between drinks”. Everyone earns their fun in the jungle…do you understand?’
Charlie nodded.
‘See you later, Charlie!’
‘Seeya, Mr. Gillette!’
He watched Mr. Gillette walk down Chestnut Street, singing an old Irish tune,
‘Yonder, yonder…lies the home of my true love…Yonder, yonnnnnderrrrr…‘twas so long ago…’twas so long agooooo.’
FIN
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Australia • 69 years old