To make matters worse, the North Vietnamese Army had the help of a corps of supporting combatants with superhuman powers who could lead them across the DMZ to South Vietnam, and do so even through the pitch-black of night.
Dogs.
Chinese dogs whose presence in Vietnam was a closely guarded secret. Their collars, which bore the emblem of the PLA, had been removed.
The dogs had been doing their thing for quite a while already. When the US Army’s anti-guerrilla special forces, the Green Berets, secretly entered Laos, organized a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, CIDG, and started threatening the DMZ’s western border, it was the dogs who, by summer 1967, forced this strategy to a halt. “Resist America!” the red dogs (that’s just a metaphor) barked as their showdown with the CIDG in the mountains began.
Over the course of the summer, the red dogs’ numbers dwindled to twenty, of which only eleven were assigned to the area around the seventeenth parallel, but they remained North Vietnam’s most powerful ally on the ground.
They remained a symbol of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh’s friendship.
This was the situation in the DMZ and in Quang Tri. This was how matters stood in the northernmost reaches of the I Corps Tactical Zone. Offensive and defensive maneuvers were conducted aboveground; all kinds of other things went on belowground. The US military was determined to build the McNamara line, and the North Vietnamese Army just kept smashing it to pieces. It was almost as if the wall were being built expressly to be destroyed. Naturally the Vietcong were everywhere in the south, west, and east of the province, and they kept plugging along with their war of attrition. In essence, the US military had erected, here in this Buddhist land, to no good purpose, a hell whose flames the military itself was burning in.
And you were sent into those flames. You, DED, were given the command. Your ultimate goal was the complete and utter annihilation of the communists; the first step was to track them down. That was your mission. Yours, and the other nine dogs’. A specialized elite. You were told to keep track of the Vietcong as they slipped quietly into invisibility in the jungle, to search out the North Vietnamese special forces, and to follow them at a distance without attacking. As long as they could figure out where the bastards kept bubbling up from, they could get this chaos under control. And that was the whole purpose of your special training on Okinawa, right?
YES.
Well, then, show us what you can do.
Woof!
You were already accustomed to the environment. To the tropical terrain, the climate. And so, DED, they set you loose—you and your fellows. But…it was different. These thunderous explosions, the horrific smells, the artificial blasts of fire…Was this some kind of show?
You had been set loose. Ten of you. Into the faint miasma of tear gas sprayed somewhere in the distance, eddying through the air. A droning close by that assaulted your ears. Rockets and grenades whizzing overhead, the stuttering of machine guns, bullets sweeping over the ground, shrapnel, flying gunships. Ghastly odors. And there, infiltrators, commies—you’d found them. You pulled back fifty yards. One hundred yards. But you never, not for a moment, let them leave your sight. You pursued them. You kept going. Ten dogs heading, now, in ten different directions, each discovering a camouflaged entrance to the subterranean network of tunnels.
But were they real?
Each of you, one after another, poked your head in to see.
And here everything happened at once. You, DED, and each of three of your fellows, were suddenly approached from behind by another dog. These four new dogs weren’t wearing collars. They didn’t have tags. But they weren’t wild. They simply weren’t revealing their affiliations. They were red dogs with a terrible wealth of experience fighting real battles in the jungles of the Indochina peninsula. Yes, there behind each of you was another dog. Those other dogs attacked.
You were all driven into the holes.
You were anti-Vietcong specialists, yes, but you weren’t fighting dogs. You knew how to deal with people and minefields, but no one had taught you what to do if you were set upon by another animal like this. And these weren’t ordinary animals; these were creatures of the twentieth century, these were weapons. Modern weapons. And they were like you. Members of the Carnivora order and the Canidae family. Dogs.
You were driven down, underground.
As were your three fellows.
An officer in the North Vietnamese Army stood and watched through a pair of binoculars. Two dogs sat at his feet. Waiting, ready to go. Glancing down from the eyepiece, the officer gave the dogs a sign. “Lure them into the fourth layer! Or under the tiger trap!” he commanded. The two dogs, set loose, immediately dove into the well-hidden holes underground.
What of the other six dogs? Three were skewered with bamboo spears by commie sentries waiting inside the entrances to the tunnels and died instantly. Their bodies tumbled belowground, as if they had simply rolled into a deep, straight hole, disappearing as suddenly as the Vietcong themselves. One of the remaining three fell victim to an identical bamboo-spear attack but didn’t die—was, rather, unable to die—and simply lay there yelping. Three minutes later its lungs filled with blood. It lay there wheezing. Each of the American dogs had been accompanied by an American soldier. Two of these soldiers were panicking. A second before, the dogs had been walking along a few dozen meters ahead—the soldiers usually watched their dogs through binoculars—and now all of a sudden they had disappeared, just like that, or in the case of the fourth dog, been transformed into a wheezer who lay writhing on the ground. Shit, they thought, they’re here! Vietcong nests!
They put in a request for an air sweep to neutralize Vietcong forces.
Two dogs to go.
THESE LOOK LIKE VIETCONG HOLES, the dogs decided, and waited nearby. They stretched out on the ground as a sign to the soldiers following them that they had found something. And they listened to the earth. They heard a sound. Their fellows were being pursued. Their friends, down beneath the ground—BELOWGROUND? BUT HOW? HOW?—were being attacked.
And then the explosions came. One after the other, four grenades landed nearby. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the mission the ten dogs were engaged in—with their pursuit of the commies. But the shock inspired a split-second reaction. The two dogs instinctively leapt down into the holes they had discovered, into the network of tunnels.
A fighter aircraft appeared on the horizon. It was flying extremely low, dropping bombs with minute precision from under its wings. Air-to-surface missiles, ordinary bombs. This jet’s bombing really was marvelously precise—excellent support. Only the areas in the sights, visible in the plane as the coordinates on a map, erupted into a spectacular display. Showtime! The earth crumbled, erupted, heaved, crashed. Fragments of bombs flew, scattered, mixed with ruthlessly torn-up clods of dirt that somersaulted through the air. And the burial began. The underground passageways caved in. The “Vietcong holes,” targeted in a manner intended to cause minimal damage to the surroundings, were sealed off with almost unerring precision.
You were underground then, in the fourth layer.
You, DED, felt the first layer collapse.
Overhead.
For a moment, you lost consciousness. You and the red dogs—there had only been one in the beginning, but somewhere along the way a second had joined the chase—who had pursued you down from the second layer to the third, then finally to the fourth, slammed your heads against the tunnel’s hard rock floor and earthen walls as the jolt of the explosion rocked it. This wasn’t part of the limited bombing that had been requested. This was a separate battle that had started at the same time, and the offensive and defensive maneuvers associated with it would continue for three hours without rest on the ground, over a range of four thousand feet above and below the McNamara line. Two observation towers still under construction
were toppled. More than seven hundred sandbags were catapulted into the air. An electrified fence, torn in places, zipped and zapped. Some thirty-three thousand cartridge cases were scattered. Soldiers’ limbs were airborne, then dotted the ground. It was impossible to judge how many humans had been wounded, because of course there were left and right arms, and right and left legs. The earth itself was a wave transporting an unusual sort of surfer: the McNamara line, with the wooden barriers that had been built to conceal it as its surfboard.
Part of the earth, that is. A tidal wave.
The world crumbled.
And then, eventually, you awoke.
You had lost consciousness for only a moment, but the past was severed from the present. Did you know what had happened, DED? You’d been buried inside the earth. The entrance—which is to say, from your perspective, the exit—had been closed. Not all the entrances/exits to the vast network of underground tunnels, of course, but all the entrances/exits to the fourth layer, where you were. Just a few moments ago, there had been two vertical openings through which you could drop down into, or climb up out of, the fourth layer. Only two. Now there were none.
Part of the first layer had crumbled. This caused the collapse of the second and the third. And then.
The vertical openings were closed. Lost.
So three dogs were buried alive in the ground in the general area of the seventeenth parallel north, the DMZ, in the fourth layer.
Not just in the ground, but under it.
Three dogs, not just you. That fact would soon become clear.
You awoke.
In the beginning, there was darkness. AM I BLIND? You had just suffered a concussion and your judgment was unsound, you became anxious. But no, DED, you weren’t blind. You were in a place that rendered your eyes useless. Pain wracked your body. You had been bashed, you were covered with scrapes. OH, IT HURTS, IT HURTS, you whimpered. And your whimpering echoed off the rock floor and the hard walls of packed earth. OOOHHH, it echoed. IIT HHUURRTTSS, IIT HHUURRTTSS. You had no way of knowing this at the time, but over the next few weeks you would acquire more and more of these bruises. WHERE AM I? you thought. WHAT AM I?
IIIT HHHUUURRRTTTSSS! your echo said.
After that, you kept quiet.
There were enemies.
In the beginning there was darkness, and then there were your enemies. I’M UNDERGROUND, you recalled. AND I’M AN AMERICAN DOG. AN ELITE. I’M PROUD OF WHAT I AM.
Your enemies, too, kept quiet.
You caught a whiff of something awful. Your eyes might be useless, but you were still a dog. Your nose rendered you omniscient. After all, you weren’t just any dog, you came from a special line of German shepherds that was the pride of the US military, and you had gone through a rigorous screening process in California, and then again on Okinawa. I’M A TOP-CLASS MILITARY DOG! I’M THE PRIDE OF AMERICA! Something stank. Two enemy dogs.
IT’S THEM.
THE SAME KIND. GERMAN SHEPHERDS.
Two of them.
Something stank. You knew what it was. One of them was injured. One of them. And the other…was frightened? But it wasn’t simply frightened of you. The evolving situation itself had stunned that red dog. But such excuses were meaningless. The point was that from that moment on, the two dogs dropped into the weaker position. And you, as a result, ascended to the anti-weak position.
You had power now.
Their fear empowered you. You: DED.
You bristled with a murderous strength. They moaned. Both of them.
Incapable of enduring the silence any longer, they started barking. ARE YOU FRIGHTENED?
YOU…ANTI-AMERICAN DOGS.
Next you attacked them. You did it in a flash, with no warning. In no time at all you had closed the distance between you and them, taken aim at the wounded dog, buried the deadly weapons in your jaw into its flesh. The other dog scampered away, crouched in a posture that made a counterattack unthinkable, its tail literally between its legs. You didn’t pursue. This was a strategic decision. You were unaccustomed to this darkness. This closed network of tunnels was a whole new world. You mustn’t be rash.
EXPLORE, you told yourself. FIGURE THIS PLACE OUT.
Unsteadily, uncertainly, you began. This world had only just been born.
A step forward. Ten steps forward. Three forks in the tunnel. It took an hour to get that far. You returned to where you had started. The dog you had toppled wasn’t yet completely dead. It was teetering at the edge of death, but still breathing.
You lay down beside it to rest.
And then?
Two hours had passed, and you were worn out. You were getting hungry. There was nothing to eat. Where was the food?
There.
You could eat that, right?
You tore into the red dog’s stomach. You made that last breath he had taken his last breath. In the beginning there was darkness, and then there were your enemies. And then you were hungry. And so you did it.
This was a world with new rules. You became a moral being. Yes, DED. You consumed the body. Flesh of your flesh. You couldn’t have grasped it, but that meat was…a distant relative. A pure German shepherd that traced its ancestry back to Bad News.
And so you lived, and you had one less enemy.
You hadn’t yet noticed that five of your fellows had ended up underground as well. They, too, had no way out. And more enemy dogs as well: six in all, including the two the officer in the North Vietnamese Army had ordered into the tunnels. Except that now one of those red dogs was gone.
Six vs. five.
What’s going on here? What is this?
Sino-American conflict. The direct confrontation that both sides had been avoiding was now taking place, here on the Indochina peninsula. Happening on the ground—indeed, not just on the ground but under it, several layers down. A Vietnam War of the dogs.
The next day—although there was really no basis for speaking of one day or the next as there was nothing to mark the passage of time—you discovered one of your fellows. She was dead. She had stumbled into a tiger trap. This was a brutal sort of contraption consisting of sharp bamboo spears angled up from the bottom of a hole, meant to kill “American imperialists.” There were a few in the fourth layer that targeted the US military’s underground combat specialists, so-called “tunnel rats,” who would be lured in and disposed of.
Five vs. five.
You inspected the tiger trap. Not by sight, since you could hardly see anything. By sniffing and touching. And then you hauled your fellow’s body up out of the trap, one chunk at a time, and ate it.
Over the course of the next year, the remaining dogs dedicated themselves to a slow process of subtraction. Four vs. five. Four vs. three. Two vs. two. On average, one dog died every two months. In the second week, DED, you and your fellows came together to form a pack. Your enemies did the same. Some dogs were able to adapt to this sunless new world, and some dogs were not. The red dogs, the Chinese dogs whose affiliation had been concealed, had already acquired a close familiarity with the network of tunnels—they remembered its structure; carried, as it were, a mental map in their heads—and so they realized that the entrances/exits to the fourth layer had been closed off, and they despaired. Or else they were thrown into confusion by the shock of what had happened. THE MAIN TUNNEL THAT HEADS OFF TO THE RIGHT HAS COLLAPSED! AND SUDDENLY A BRANCH…THERE’S A NEW BRANCH HEADING OFF TO THE LEFT! You and your fellows knew nothing of this loss. You were not tormented by the anguish that consumed your enemies. You knew it: THERE IS THE FIRST STEP. ALWAYS, ALWAYS. Again and again you pounded this instinct into your brain. You took one step at a time, and before you knew it you had taken ten steps, a hundred steps. YOU UNDERSTAND? you asked your fellows. GO ON, BUT GO CAREFULLY, you commanded your
fellows.
And fairly early on, you discovered a storeroom. Preserved food the commies had stashed away. The cave held enough to keep you alive for a few weeks down there, underground—besieged, as it were. Enough, perhaps, for a few dogs to survive for a few weeks. But how many? The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, incidentally, had left the fourth layer untouched for almost a year, ever since the attack the previous summer, assuming it was beyond salvage. And intense combat continued along the McNamara line, rendering it impossible to dig down again. As long as the first and second layers remained functional, they decided, thinking strategically, those two layers would have to suffice. And this strategy affected the dogs too, as they fought their own Vietnam War. The supplies hadn’t been gathered in one place in the fourth layer, of course; they were dispersed. There were a few of these caves. And just as you, DED, and your fellows had found a storeroom, so too had the enemy pack. Right around the same time. So you were even. You had equal portions. And so a territorial dispute began.
How did you mark off your realms of influence?
You were dogs, so you claimed space with your scents.
The front lines were the areas covered with your piss and shit. And through the process of marking the ground, you created your own canine military map. Here, in this still new world, in the fourth layer, deep underground, coordinates were organized in terms, not of latitudes and longitudes, but of shititudes and pissitudes. In those terms—carefully, ever so carefully—you grasped the contours of a place that rendered vision useless. Scent spoke eloquently, telling you, for instance, that war had been declared. Or that the enemy was constrained. It was all on the map. An ambush was planned at a certain location. And then there was the canine version of a search-and-destroy mission. The deadly struggle continued. How many bruises did you acquire? Not only from your explorations, but from grappling with the enemy, and from overhead, the repeated cave-ins. You kept adapting, though. Your right front leg was bent, yes—you had broken a bone and there were no splints down here. SO WHAT? You had power. Your enemies’ fear had empowered you, and you had been emboldened ever since. Needless to say, you were the leader of your pack. BEAT THEM BACK! you shouted. KILL THE ANTI-AMERICAN DOGS!
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 20