Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is presented as a powerful wartime recruiter whose efforts to influence the conflict in Southeast Asia draw Creasy and Guido from mercenary work into a covert system of training and cross-border operations. Its role in their lives links the agency’s immense resources to a stark accounting of personnel: the men receive money and dangerous assignments, while the organization’s own classification system treats their unit as expendable.

Strategic Context and Recruitment

The agency’s expansion into private military forces follows a deterioration in the American position in Vietnam. The novel describes the United States as deeply involved and finding the war unexpectedly difficult; the sheer weight of manpower and ordnance, it suggests, might not suffice. Against that backdrop, the Central Intelligence Agency develops its own approach to the conflict rather than relying only on conventional military strength.

With a huge budget, the agency recruits and trains a series of private armies in South Vietnam and neighboring Laos. It needs instructors for Laos, and former sergeants of the French Foreign Legion are considered particularly suitable. Creasy’s experience in French Vietnam is an added qualification. The agency’s recruitment thus depends on the men’s prior military knowledge: their past service becomes a resource that can be redirected into a new, covert campaign.

The narrative brings the organization into view through this employment relationship rather than through its leadership or internal deliberations. Creasy and Guido encounter the agency as a source of work, training assignments, operational escalation, and pay. This personal route into the institution makes its reach legible in practical terms: the agency can enlist experienced outsiders and place them within a larger war effort without making them conventional soldiers.

Laos and Air America

In Laos, Creasy and Guido officially work as loading supervisors for Air America, a charter firm said to ferry freight around Southeast Asia. That stated commercial function conceals its importance to the agency: Air America supplies equipment, food, and other necessities to the Central Intelligence Agency’s private armies. The arrangement connects a civilian-looking transport operation with the agency’s military program, placing logistical support alongside recruitment and training.

The discrepancy between their nominal job and the work surrounding it is central to the novel’s account of the agency’s methods. Creasy and Guido are not described as ordinary freight supervisors in practice. They spend eighteen months training Meo tribesmen on the Plain of Jars. Their former Legion experience is converted into instruction for a force operating within the agency’s regional network, while Air America provides the public-facing and logistical framework around that activity.

This phase also establishes a transition in the men’s work. They begin as instructors in Laos, employed under a cover associated with freight transport, but the worsening American position leads the agency to create more aggressive units. In the novel’s sequence, the move from training forces to sending mercenaries across borders is an escalation of the same effort to disrupt the enemy’s capacity to operate.

Intrusion Units and P.U.X.U.S.P.40

As conditions worsen for the Americans, the Central Intelligence Agency sets up intrusion units: mercenary groups sent into North Vietnam and Cambodia to harass Vietcong supply lines. Creasy and Guido are promoted into one of these units. Their new assignment carries them from training work in Laos into covert operations beyond the areas where they had been stationed.

The unit’s designation, P.U.X.U.S.P.40, is entered into the agency’s computer at Langley Field, Virginia. The code expands to “penetration unit non-American personnel containing 40 men.” The label gives the group an administrative identity while revealing how the agency categorizes its members: by their function, their national status, and their number. The computer considers the unit expendable. The coldness of that assessment stands against the individual experience of the men who carry out its missions and suffer its losses.

The unit’s title and its description also clarify the agency’s reliance on non-American mercenaries. Creasy and Guido’s Legion backgrounds make them useful instructors and operators, but the designation makes their outsider status part of the organization’s classification. Their work is integrated into an American-directed campaign even as the unit is explicitly named for personnel who are not American.

Losses and Departure

By late 1971, P.U.X.U.S.P.40 has lost thirty of its original forty members. Creasy and Guido decide to take a long, perhaps permanent, break from the work. They have completed twelve covert missions and accumulated several wounds apiece; they have also acquired a great deal of money, which the narrative attributes to the computer’s generosity. The contrast is sharp: the unit’s records reduce the group to a designation and a dwindling headcount, while the two survivors leave with injuries and the proceeds of their service.

The novel does not describe the agency ending the unit or answer for the men lost. Instead, it gives the decision to leave to Creasy and Guido after the scale of attrition and the burden of repeated missions have become clear. Their departure closes this period of Central Intelligence Agency employment, though not their association with mercenary work. The agency’s importance to their history lies both in the opportunities it offers and in the system it exposes: a well-funded organization can recruit their skills, deploy them through a commercial cover, expand their role into covert incursions, and classify the resulting losses as acceptable.