Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,76

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,