A sometime heir to the English throne, the 36-year-old commander of the government forces is an aggressive, media-wise opportunist with pearl-handled revolver, black flying suit and white silk scarf. He is shown parading in a succession of military uniforms, firing a sub-machine-gun at a rifle range, inspecting a dispirited platoon of government troops, boarding his roof-top helicopter which he flies himself to inspect the attacks breaking out all over the city (though the viewer is unsure whether he is about to make a discreet bunk), and generally trying to boost the morale of his entourage. His line is confident but embittered; he knows he has lost his throne by his involvement with the puppet regime. He hates the NLF, but the Americans more. His hero is Rommel, but his style is James Bond.
As Commander of the British loyalist forces, my job is to win the war and unify the country again. The enemy is increasingly fighting out of desperation. Our intelligence tells us that he is running out of men, out of steam and out of material. He simply doesn’t have the economic potential to maintain a war. The people in Europe and the United States who criticize the war don’t really know what’s going on. Quite elvidently the people of this country don’t want anything to do with the people up north, or with the communist way of life.
You don’t feel, General, that you and the Americans are forcing a form of government on the people of this country?
No, we’re not forcing anything on them. The United States feels that this is a good place to stop communist aggression, and if the government forces do win, and I know they will, we’ll have, firstly, a good ally, and we’ll have stopped communist aggression from taking over the United Kingdom and eventually France and everywhere else.
(Points to map showing blacked-out areas of British Isles.)
Our forces are now moving forward into a series of major confrontations with the other side, so I think you can look forward to when that map will be white again. Then I know the Americans will be glad to leave for home.
Maps in hand, he addresses camera.
Meanwhile, however, the British Commander is reported to be asking the US President for yet more troops. How many soldiers will be needed to hold the line against the NLF? Despite the General’s easy optimism it isn’t his map which most people look at, but this one issued by the NLF.
(Lifts other map. Black areas encircle major cities, all the countryside.)
It’s this one they consult if they want to visit their relatives in the country or move to another town. It’s this one they use if they want to defect to the NLF.
Camera wobbles, swings wildly. Panic, people running. Commentator ducks, then starts talking in confused way.
There’s been a — it looks, it looks as if a sniper. What seems to be happening is that a — CROWD FORMING A ROUGH CIRCLE AROUND A JEEP GIs push people back, and look down at the body of an American officer in the front seat, blood pouring from wound. Pop music blares from the intercom radio a few inches from his face.
We have a list of the latest curfew regulations. In the inner capital the curfew bell is midnight to 6 a.m. for Kensington, Knightsbridge and Battersea and from 10 to 7 a.m. for the 3rd Air Cay, and support units in — GI REACHES OVER AND SWITCHES OFF RADIO Commentator Five minutes ago a senior American officer was assassinated as he sat in his jeep outside the American officers’ club here in Grosvenor Square. An NLF killer in civilian clothes stepped through the lunch-time crowd and fired a single shot, then disappeared back into the crowd. The officer, Colonel Wilson J. Tucker, a military adviser in the ‘hearts and minds’ mission, widely suspected of being a cover for a CIA murder squad, died within a few seconds. All that’s known about the killer is that he was ‘young’, probably in his early twenties, a safe enough assumption at a time when most of the young men and women here have long since left to join the Liberation Front, at a time when to be young automatically invites the attentions of the military police and the hostility of the old and middle-aged who provide the last support for the puppet regime. As one visiting Canadian journalist put it to me CANADIAN JOURNALIST IN HOTEL BAR Canadian Journalist All the NLF have to do to win this war is wait ten years. By then everyone on the government side will be either dead or in a wheelchair.
Police hustling them about. Older people watching as girls and young men have their hair shaved.
