HIGH SPIRITS: Knee Slappers
Aitken, Jonathan
HIGH SPIRITS JONATHAN AITKEN Knee Slappers DAUGHTER IN CHURCH IS A RARE EVENT. I am not referring to the polite titters that can greet the occasional sallies of pulpit wit, nor even the giggles...
...You see, what happened was that the pastor announced that next Sunday he would be conducting the baptism of a new born baby...
...Alsop's bodyguard" (Joe was getting the VIP treatment), hunkered down together in a big foxhole...
...Any offers...
...In the middle of this mayhem the only sensible place for a couple of noncombatants was a foxhole...
...He had not enjoyed being the object of such derision...
...My story is set in Vietnam just a few weeks before the Tet offensive of 1968...
...Even if a big story had broken and fallen into my lap when we were together in the DMZ, my London time zones ensured that Alsop's reporting would always be on America's breakfast tables first...
...A second advantage was that I had no visible political hang-ups about the war...
...Eventually an English-speaking villager came forward and provided the explanation...
...But it soon became evident that this laughter had deeper wellsprings of comedy...
...We agreed that we would do exactly what the man in the seat in front of us did...
...What I'm after is real hilarious humor that sets the table in a roar, splits sides in the pews, and convulses even the clergy...
...Things were getting pretty hairy almost everywhere, but they were particularly bad in the most misnamed part of 'Nam, the Demilitarized Zone...
...Eventually the church calmed down, but Joe Alsop had his dander up...
...So I cast my bread upon the waters of the U.S...
...JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57...
...More shaken than either of us cared to admit, we decided to move on to another battalion on Joe's visiting list but getting there involved a two or three mile walk along a track to a point where we could pick up a helicopter...
...To our total incomprehension, it was in Vietnamese...
...For nothing I have ever done before or since in the way of making a joke, delivering a one-liner in an after-dinner speech, or acting out a slapstick charade has ever delivered so much as a quarter of the loud, proWe agreed that we would do exactly what the man in the seat in front of us did...
...press corps and caught a whale...
...But there were advantages in teaming up with a 25-year-old Brit...
...My plans went awry when MAC-V, the military assistance command headquartered in Saigon, suddenly decreed that no reporter could travel alone to the DMZ...
...Joe Alsop could have paired himself off withany reporter to get the necessary MAC -V passes to go to the DMZ...
...After a second or two of stunned silence, the congregation started to laugh...
...So your High Spirits columnist, in those days a 25-year-old war correspondent for the London Evening Standard, made plans to visit the DMZ in search of good copy...
...Well here's a story that might just win a prize in the ecclesiastical laughter stakes...
...He was also the strongest journalistic champion of the war, of the Pentagon, of General William Westmoreland, and anyone else who thought that victory was just around the corner for America in Vietnam...
...Whenever the Vietnamese gentleman in front of us knelt down, we knelt down...
...Boy, did they laugh...
...Our formula worked well for most of the service...
...very amusing," he said amidst high-pitched chucklings...
...For it was a Sunday morning and the entire population of the village seemed to be streaming into a small Christian church complete with cross and tolling bell...
...So Joe and I, plus a USMC sergeant who had been assigned to us as "Mr...
...Whenever he stood up, we stood up...
...Journalists must move together in pairs, went the new edict...
...When the battalion commander called in helicopter gunships called Puffs (after Puff the Magic Dragon) to get rid of the VC, the pilots got the coor56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 JONATHAN AITKEN dinates wrong and showered our position with bullets instead of the enemy's...
...Our formula worked well for most of the service...
...At dinner one night in the British Embassy I met the late and great Joe Alsop...
...Moreover, the idyllic scene that met our eyes had both a pastoral and religious flavor...
...I am not referring to the polite titters that can greet the occasional sallies of pulpit wit, nor even the giggles that can follow a slip of the tongue by a Aminister or a reader...
...It was a measure of our shell-shocked disorientation that neither of us seemed to have realized that the service might not be conducted in English...
...Why the hell were you laughing at us...
...You could hear the VC laughing as they resumed their mortaring...
...Oh very amusing...
...Our leader, the man immediately in front of us, stood up...
...So as soon as the service ended he stalked round the congregation demanding, "What was that all about...
...At first I thought their mirth was something to do with the incongruity of two large Anglo- Saxons in their combat fatigues standing alongside a small Vietnamese villager in his black pyjama suit...
...He was not only a legendary syndicated columnist from the Washington Post...
...This Vietnamese village was the epitome of rustic tranquillity...
...And then he said: 'Would the father of the baby please stand up...
...The only problem was that we were the only three people in the crowded church who rose to their feet...
...With a little imagination it could almost be said to resemble one of John Constable's paintings of placid English village life...
...longed, and almost hysterical laughter that the sight of our stand-alone threesome produced in that church...
...Louder and louder grew the laughter, but Joe and I did not have a clue what it was all about...
...It wasn't just that I was a complete novice when it came to covering war...
...One of us suggested that it might not be a bad idea to rest awhile, to join the Sunday congregation, and to give thanks to the Lord for having survived the previous night of horrors...
...Our camp came under attack on three sides from heavily armed NVA troops and from Vietcong guerrillas who mortared us mercilessly throughout the night...
...An additional bonus was that a couple of senior American correspondents, Ward Just of the Washington Post and Arnaud de Borchgrave of Newsweek, had traveled with me on trips in the field and were prepared to give me their seal of approval...
...For some reason, this story of the three-fathered baby in the Vietnamese village church never made it into the columns of the Washington Post...
...So off we set until about halfway down the track it opened out and took us through a sizable village...
...So after a certain amount of huffing and puffing, Joe Alsop agreed to let me be his junior bag carrier and we set off together for the DMZ...
...So we entered the church and found a couple of empty seats...
...Unlike 20 or so Marines who left the DMZ the next morning in bodybags, we survived...
...After a moment or two of whispering between ourselves, Joe and I hit on a formula for overcoming the language barrier...
...Alsop and Aitken stood up too...
...That made me an acceptable companion in his eyes...
...At that moment in the conflict, British war correspondents based in Saigon were not a large tribe, and I had no success in finding a traveling companion among them...
...Alsop grilled me closely and bestowed on me the accolade that I was "obviously not one of those gone-soft-in-the-headantiwar liberals...
...It was a terrifying friendly fire episode, even though our casualties were light...
...k Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator's High Spirits columnist, is the author of seven books, including Nixon: A Life...
...HIGH SPIRITS JONATHAN AITKEN Knee Slappers AUGHTER IN CHURCH IS A RARE EVENT...
...Anything that could go wrong did go wrong...
...The USMC battalion tasked with showing the great Joseph C. Alsop how well the war was going soon found itself preoccupied with more pressing matters...
...Our first and only night on the DMZ was dominated by Murphy's Law...
...All fine and dandy until there came a moment when the pastor made some sort of an announcement...
...The pastor also split his sides in merriment...
...Joe and I were weary and frazzled...
...I was no competition...
...The man in front of us turned round and he promptly doubled up in hysterics too...
Vol. 38 • July 2005 • No. 6
