LITMIR.BIZ

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teach me—a "foreign devil"—precious Chinese secrets that he kept hidden from them, but Old Lee ignored their resentment and trusted his own instincts.

      My privileged position with the master irritated Ching Wei more than it did anyone else, and before long he thoroughly disliked me. But in typical Chinese fashion, all this personal discord remained well hidden below the surface. Chinese society demands harmony among classmates and colleagues, even if it's only superficial. Moreover, my superior performance both in class as well as in the cockpit of a plane demanded at least his grudging respect. That's also the Chinese way.

      Eventually, it became clear that Ching Wei was doing more than just flying military supplies over the Hump. Somehow, he amassed an enormous fortune in gold, and being young, arrogant, and Chinese, he flaunted it for all to see. He bought a huge villa on the outskirts of town, where only the top brass could afford to live, then filled it with luxuries available only at great cost on the black market and moved in a few fancy women. In those days most of us couldn't find a beer or a cigarette in Chungking for love or money, but Ching Wei had plenty of both and much more to boot. He lived like a Chinese general.

      "He is an arrogant and small-minded man," Old Lee used to say of him. "'Dog bones wrapped in human skin.' Pay him no heed." But the rest of the guys really resented Ching Wei's blatant profiteering, even though corruption was so common throughout the Chinese command that there seemed little point in reporting him.

      Old Lee and I made frequent excursions into the rugged mountains of western Szechuan, outside Chungking. We visited ancient temples and spent many a night in remote mountain monasteries with raggedy old monks who invariably turned out to be founts of wisdom. Several times we visited an old friend of his who had retired to a distant mountain cave to meditate in complete solitude. His name was Ling Yun, which means "soaring in the clouds." He'd been living in that cave for over five years when I met him. It was during these excursions into the mountains that Old Lee taught me his most important lessons, and I can't blame him for being so secretive about them. In China, the most profound teachings and techniques have always been transmitted orally from master to select disciple, precisely to prevent jerks like Ching Wei from gaining access to them.

      My navigator, Sam Conway, and I were in charge of all pilots and crew flying the Hump in and out of China, and it didn't take us long to figure out how Ching Wei was making all his money. Actually, his own navigator exposed him after Ching Wei refused to give him a bigger cut of the action. The navigator was bright enough to know that if he reported Ching Wei to the Chinese command, he'd only get himself in trouble, if not killed, for rocking the boat. So he reported Ching Wei directly to me. That set the stage for what happened next.

      His navigator reported that Ching Wei had been using his aircraft to smuggle opium from India to China. Since the Japanese onslaught had cut Chungking off from all domestic Chinese sources of opium, users there paid enormous prices to get the stuff. Back in those days, opium was as much a part of the Chinese diet as rice and tea—and often it was more plentiful than both. Almost everyone smoked the stuff. So, for the fat-cat addicts of Chungking, India became the only viable source, and Ching Wei, the only available supplier, of their precious opium. After the big shots finished smoking the good stuff, the pipe heads were scraped out and the dross was sold again to coolies and clerks who couldn't afford anything better.

      Ching Wei's ploy was clever: he had his ground crew in India replace half the military and medical supplies bound for Chungking in his aircraft with opium. The food, medicine, and other supplies he left behind served as the payoff to the ground crew to keep their mouths shut. When he landed in Chungking, his own boys unloaded the crates, juggled the delivery ledgers to account for the missing supplies, and stashed the opium in a warehouse near town. He greased a lot of palms along the way, but since the entire scam depended solely on him and his plane, Ching Wei took the lion's share of profits. Had he not been so greedy, his navigator would never have blown the whistle on him.

      This sort of thing was standard operating procedure in the Chinese military, so for a while we let the whole thing ride. But as his greed grew, Ching Wei dumped more and more supplies in India so that he could bring more and more opium into China, causing a critical shortage of food and medicine for the wounded who kept piling up in Chungking's hospitals. Pretty soon Ching Wei was getting as effective as the Japs at killing Allied troops. Sam and I no longer had any choice: we reported Ching Wei directly to the U.S. command.

      Colonel Boyd went through the roof when he heard our story. He was ready to go find Ching Wei and shoot him on the spot, but so much bad feeling had already been generated between the Chinese and American commands in the wake of Stilwell's recall from China, that the bust had to be handled just right to be effective.

      We found out from his navigator when Ching Wei's next opium run was scheduled, and that afternoon Colonel Boyd decided to inspect all incoming supplies personally. Inspections were, of course, routine, but they'd always been conducted by Chinese officers who were paid to inspect things, as the Chinese put it, "with one eye open and one eye closed."

      Ching Wei landed right on schedule and taxied to a halt at his usual spot on the tarmac. It was a cold, overcast day, with drizzling rain. Ching Wei's crew swarmed around the plane and began unloading the cargo bay just as Colonel Boyd and three armed aides came squealing around the corner in a jeep. They screeched to a halt right in front of his open cargo bay, while Sam and I watched the whole thing from a discreet distance.

      You should have seen the look on Ching Wei's face when he stepped off the ladder to find the colonel and his aides prying open his crates with crowbars. He protested loud and long and made dire threats, but all to no avail. The colonel inspected every single crate, and when he'd completed his tally, he found a total of 1,800 pounds of raw opium stuffed into various boxes marked "Medical Supply" and "Food." He arrested Ching Wei, loaded the crates of opium onto a truck, and drove straight over to the Chinese command, with both the culprit and the evidence in hand.

      To make a long story short, the Chinese finally court-martialed Ching Wei, but only after heavy pressure from General Chennault, who vowed to bring the matter to the personal attention of his good friend and patron Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself. No one in China ever wanted to get on the wrong side of that ruthless dragon lady, especially on the subject of opium, for not only did she personally detest the Chinese opium habit, she was also a devout, God-fearing Christian with a missionary zeal to stamp out what she referred to as "China's Shame." So Ching Wei was officially court-martialed rather than given the usual slap on the wrist, and to further mollify the U.S. command, they handed him a stiff ten-year sentence in the brig, but needless to say Ching Wei never served a day of it. As I recall, it cost him $10,000 per year to get his sentence reduced to zero, which means he had to cough up a $100,000 bribe—a hell of a bundle in those days.

      A few weeks later, a mangled corpse was hauled into town on an oxcart. The peasant who brought it in complained that the body had "fallen from the sky" and landed in his pigsty, killing a pregnant sow. Since the body wore a Chinese uniform, the old farmer had brought it to the Chinese military base in town for disposal—and to demand compensation for his sow. The corpse belonged to Ching Wei's navigator.

      Before hurling him to his death, Ching Wei must have forced the navigator to tell him how he'd reported the scam directly to me, because a few days later he confronted me on the street as I walked home from Old Lee's place. Neither my Chinese nor his English were very good back then, so it was almost a comical encounter.

      "Why you telling Amelicans me selling opium?" he demanded, barely able to contain his rage. "Now no plane, no business, no face!"

      "Forget about face, Ching Wei, yours isn't worth saving." If there's one thing I can't stand about the Chinese, it's their absurd attachment to "face." Here they were, losing their asses in the war, and all they worried about was gaining "face."

      My remark made him so furious that he had to switch over to Chinese to express himself. "Puck your mother's stinking cunt!" he shouted for openers, invoking the favorite Chinese curse. "You know perfectly well that half the officers in Chungking play the black market! Why not report them all?"

      "The others buy and sell cigarettes, beer, soap, and other things, but they're not depriving dying men and orphans of the food and medicine they need

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