ALLIGATOR PATROL

[Dave Monroe]

... well, skipping ahead here in V., I come to that "Alligator Patrol"
at chapter five (V.!), "In which Stencil nearly goes West"--"go West,
young Stencil!"--"with an alligator," and can't help but pull the
following from the shelves of the MCL.  From Paul N. Edwards, The Closed
World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) ...

Scene 1: Operation Igloo White

    In 1968 the largest building in Southeast Asia was teh Infiltration
Surveillance Center (ISC) at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command
center of U.S. Air Force Operation Igloo White.  Inside the ISC vigilant
technicians pored over banks of video displays, controlled by IBM 360/65
computers and connected to thousands of sensors strewn across the Ho Chi
Minh Trail in southern Laos.
    The sensors--shaped liek twigs, jungle plants, and animal
droppings--were designed to detect all kinds of human activity, such as
the noises of truck engines, body heat, motion, even the scent of human
urine.  When they picked up a signal, it appeared on the ISC's display
terminals hundreds of miles away as a moving white "worm" superimposed
on a map grid.  As soon as the ISC computers could calculate teh worm's
direction and rate of motion, coordinates were radioed to Phantom F-4
jets patrolling the night sky.  The planes' navigation systems and
computers autmatically guided them to the "box," or map grid square, to
be attacked.  The ISC computers were also able to control the release of
bombs: the pilot might do no more than sit and watch as the invisible
jungle below suddenly exploded into flames.  In most cases no american
ever actuallly saw the target at all.
    The "worm" would then disappera from the screen at the ISC.  This
entire process normally took no more than five minutes.
    Operation Igloo White ran from 1967 to 1972 at a cost ranging near
$1 billion a year.  Visiting reporters were dazzled by the high-tech,
white-gloves-only scene inside the windowless center, where young
soldiers sat at tehir displays in air-conditioned comfort, faces lit
weirdly by the dim electric glow, directing the destruction of men and
equipment as if playing a video game.  As one technician put it: "We
wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball machine, and we
plug it in every night."
    Official claims for Igloo White's success were extraordinary [...].
Had these figures been accurate, a conservative estimate would still
have put the cost of interdiction in the neighborhood of $100,000 for
each truck destroyed--the truck and teh supplies inside it usually being
worth a maximum of a few thousand dollars.
    But official estimates, like so many other official versions of teh
Vietnam War, exiusted mainly in a never-never land of military public
relations.  In 1971 a Senate subcommittee report pointed out that the
figure for "truck kills claimed by the Air Force [in Igloo White] last
year greatly exceeds the number of trucks believed by the embassy to be
in all of North Vietnam." ... (pp. 3-4)

... and so forth.  Certianly, well after the late 1954/early 1955
setting of the more "contemporary" chapters of V., as well as somewhat
after the novel's 1963 publication date, but, I imagine, the dream was
still there.   What aspects of Boeing's operations might Pynchon have
had access to in his stint there?  He seems to have kept up with the
military-industrial complex, at any rate ...

But cf., in V. (Harper whatever ed.), say, "The chase had been going on
since nightfall," "aim half-blind and fire," "could only see the coco in
occasional flashes" (112); "a big plexiglass plotting boiard, engraved
with a map of the city and overlaid with a grid coordinate sheet,"
"probables, hunts in progress, kills," "roving anchor men," "Each anchor
man had a walkie-talkie, tied in on a common network," "Zeitsuss kept
all the lights out except for those on the plotting board and a reading
light over his desk" (115) ...

"Zeitsuss," by the way, not only "time-suss," cf. Zeitgeist? but waht
does "suss"--sorry, no umlaut ... "suess"?--mean in German? I think the
director of the propaganda fil, Jud Suss, was tried as a war criminal
...--"the place looked like a combat center"--indeed ...--"and anybody
walking in would immediately sense this tenseness, purpose, feeling of a
great net spreading out all the way to the boondocks of the city, with
this room its brains, its focus" (115-6); "That is, until they heard
what was coming in over the radios" (116)--and even then ...

Tres Vietnam, at any rate, non?  "Coco" = "gook," even?  "A lot of you
don't come back," "You that do come back live in human shit and
alligator blood eight hours a day," "Downtown they think that you guys
are wasting ammo" (117).  And recall that those alligators, those
"worms," have, indeed, gone "white," albino, "pinto," at any rate, in
those sewers ...