Vespa motor scooters puttered all around Saigon, humming like hornets. A few red, the rest a watery pea-soup green. “Some getaway vehicle,” I said, peeved at the humiliation. “Fleeing on a two-stroke lawn mower engine.”
A waiter delivered us each a small aperitif. I sipped the blond liqueur and sifted through the contents of the major’s wallet. Pictures of two kids, the wife, a pickup truck and a Ford Falcon parked in the driveway of a sprawling white Victorian with a wraparound porch. A wallet-size hand-tinted photo showed a pink-cheeked ARVN ranger in a beret. In a tiny insert next to him, a tinier paratrooper rappelled down a rope. In another black-and-white, a properly shy Vietnamese girl in a tight, high-collared, long-sleeved ao dai stood next to the major. In with the piasters in the bill compartment was a condom packet that had raised a permanent round impression in the leather.
The Virginia driver’s license had him at age forty, nine years older than me. I groped my pants pocket for my mentholated Newports and examined his tiny bank-card calendar. Three months left to mark off from his tour of duty. He’d be home earlier than expected, Glad-bagged inside a crate, his personal effects in a ditty pouch between his knees, his body seen off by an honor guard from the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, the ARVN troops he had come such a long way to instruct in the art of war. Never mind that they’d been soldiering since before the baby Jesus drew breath.
Judging from his starched khakis and MAAG shoulder patch, Major Furth was more likely a Saigon warrior, a REMF: Rear Echelon Motherfucker. Even so, unarmed and ambushed on a city street by a woman in civvies was no way for any soldier to go.
In ’62, fifty-three Americans had gone home in flag-draped boxes, yet the embassy kept insisting we all were non-combatants. Though five thousand of us were in the field, Washington insisted all sixteen thousand US military in-country were “advisors.” Whether we bore arms or wielded pens, flew missions or desks, didn’t seem to matter. We were paying the price for taking a stand alongside the South Vietnamese. As we closed in on the last two months of ’63, the casualty toll was already double last year’s and rising as the Red Queen trawled the streets, adding her kills to the total.
Before the Red Queen showed up, weeks had gone by without shots being fired. We had explosions in town—bombs, plastique—and restaurants had started to put up latticework grills to keep out tossed grenades, but gunplay was rare. Your chances were still far better of getting killed by a barstool than a bullet.
Until now, Americans in Saigon had rarely been targeted. And never their dependents, like the kids in the stateside yellow bus passing in front of us, carting students home from their half day at the unairconditioned American Community School, the older boys in the back puffing on Bastos, impressed with themselves ’cause they could buy beer and smokes anywhere in the city or bum them from the armed GI on board. The boys stared at the body, the girls mostly looked away. All of them worried it might be somebody they knew.
Guerillas were embedded in Saigon’s Chinese district and encamped in swampy wetlands within sight of the city, yet poor and posh alike denied that the Viet Cong were at the gates. The terrifying executions took place out there. Whenever violence erupted locally, the regime blamed “bandits.” But last month, during a crowded matinee of Lady and the Tramp at the theater leased for American use, a bomb had smashed the ladies’ room. And across town in Cholon, a thirty-foot section of the wall surrounding General Harkins’s headquarters had gotten blown out. These incidents made everybody edgy with the thought that the VC had something new in mind for US personnel that might even include their families. Nevertheless we’d carried on like everything was normal—until these slayings.
Not that there was much we could do if Viet Cong assassination teams started targeting unarmed American advisors. We lived and worked in locations scattered across the city. Being dispersed allegedly made us less noticeable and safer than if we were concentrated. At least that was the official bullshit the brass put out. The simple truth: there wasn’t any huge, impregnable base to take shelter in. Tasked with our well-being, the US Navy didn’t have the manpower to secure the bus lines, the dispensary, the American library, the brand-new naval hospital, the bowling alley, the swimming pool in Cholon, the USO, the motor pools and commissaries, the mess halls, or the big base exchange where everyone shopped. Much less our widespread workplaces or the villas and apartments throughout the city the Navy leased for service members and their families. Security at our bachelors’ quarters was only slightly better.
I drained the aperitif, letting the chilled alcohol drench my tongue and glide down my throat. An MP collected the major’s dog tags and wallet, slipping them into an olive-drab drawstring bag. Two other MPs hoisted the stretcher with the body onto a small Army truck, Hang Loose with the Deuce stenciled on the bumper.
Pedestrians stepped around the waiters sluicing blood off the sidewalk. A siren announced high noon, the beginning of the three-hour siesta. The Vietnamese cops scattered.
I squinted against the stabbing flashes of light as we got back into our jeep. A pang turned into pain in my hips. A recent bout of dengue revisiting the scene.
Me and Robeson went over the little we knew from Freddie Crouch, our voices raised over the engine and the hot air streaming past us in the open jeep. Two Americans had been cut down in the street in quick daylight attacks, the first shot dead near a flower market, the next a few days later at a food kiosk. “She’s in and out lightning fast,” Crouch had said, “improvising targets on the fly.” And now this third blitz attack curbside at a café, using the same shoot-and-scoot tactic. The drivers varied, the shooter didn’t.
“She’s always the button—and deserves to be. She doesn’t miss,” I said.
“You think this is one of Madame Nhu’s paramilitary broads? She puts her sharpshooters up in contests against guys.”
True, the president’s pain-in-the-ass sister-in-law had created her own women’s paramilitary corps. But much as she loved attacking America in the press, I doubted she’d have the balls to start ordering hits on us herself. If you asked me, she just liked having 20,000 uniformed women saluting her for the cameras. But this was how Robeson covered all bases, casting a wide net before he circled back toward simpler possibilities.
“If the Dragon Lady was sending a message the shooter would have been wearing the corps’ blue jumpsuit and regulation dark lipstick. She acts like her ladies’ militia’s a force to be reckoned with but they’re mostly for show. Her ‘little darlings’ may be decent enough at target practice, but they couldn’t pull off shots like this.”
“Yeah, our girl’s got some serious skills.”
I leaned toward him. “I’d say a decade’s worth.”
“So maybe she’s a Viet Minh veteran?”
“No,” I objected. “Too damn young. If she’s twenty, she would’ve been, what?—ten or eleven back when the Viet Minh were kicking French ass up north.” The independence fighters had recruited some awfully young teens, but that still seemed like a stretch.
“She got herself trained real good by somebody somewhere.” Robeson wiped his brow. “The North’s got Chinese and Russian advisors. There’s gotta be some decent pistol instructors among ’em.”
I shook my head. “Taking down a live target from the back of a moving scooter—she didn’t learn that on no VC firing range or live-fire course up north.”
“Point taken,” Robeson agreed. “She got thrown in the shit.”
Robeson navigated us expertly through the sea of vehicles. Saigon traffic was a chaotic mix of hand-drawn carts, oxcarts, bicycles, three-wheeled cyclo-pousse rickshaws, overloaded scooters, motorcycles, Renault taxis, buses, and military vehicles like ours. Vietnamese drivers could buy their licenses whether or not they could drive. In an accident, the foreigner was always in the wrong—and would be expected to pay to make it right. The army was known to shell out up to a thousand bucks, so acciden
ts were not always so accidental.
We cruised down a street lined with eateries that specialized in snake dishes, then passed under a long canopy of flame trees. I swiped at the sweat stinging my eyes, grateful for the shade. Saigon had hardly a traffic light to slow our progress. At intersections, vehicles never stopped or slowed, but passed between each other at right angles like synchronized drill teams.
The heavy air was muzzy with exhaust fumes. A derelict villa loomed over the road, barely visible through creepers growing upward along its façade, its roof slowly being lifted off by vines. The purple and red flowers smelled great but couldn’t hide the aroma of raw sewage in the street. Saigon was like a booby prize. The Vietnamese had surrendered it to the French a century ago hoping they’d be devoured by the mosquitoes. The colonists brought in mosquito netting and built four thousand kilometers of canals to protect themselves. The French had planned for half a million residents. Four times that many had flooded the town for protection and profit, overwhelming the roads and plumbing. Saigon’s sewers were bursting. The poorer neighborhoods—like the shantytowns on the outskirts and the sampan slums on the canals—had none. No running water, no electricity either.
Robeson sang to himself as we rolled. “Oh mama don’t you weep and moan/Uncle Sam he got your man and gon’.” On a traffic island, sentries dozed in shaded hammocks while their fortified pillbox stood empty. On the sidewalks, vendors slept beside their covered wares or atop their outdoor counters. I wondered where the Red Queen had tucked herself away for the noontime siesta after her morning’s success.
Chapter Three
The Headquarters Support Activity Saigon office was an aging French villa covered with wisteria and sandbags. HSAS was a bastard unit with a few agents from each of the different investigative agencies of the armed forces: OSI, ONI, AIC, and us, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. CID was on the second floor, across the hall from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Our work space was a large room with metal desks, a fake fireplace, and French doors that looked out over rue Pasteur.
On the floor above us were the offices of the provost. Three gentlemen lawyers were the total Judge Advocate presence in Saigon, which meant all court-martial proceedings had to be held in Okinawa. Our operation was nearly as small, usually just six of us CID investigators. We had no police lab or even so much as a legitimate jail in-country, only a jury-rigged brig near the baseball diamond at Pershing Field, out by the airport. But me and Robeson were content, happy to be out of the boonies. No more rice paddies, forests, mountains, or jungles. We were comfortably posted in the capital of the eight-year-old half-a-nation we’d come to save from the red tide of Communism that was leaching down from its northern half in support of VC insurgents in the south. Taa fucking raa.
On our first tours, the two of us had advised a Vietnamese battalion of about four hundred men. Robeson ran an ambush academy, training troops in combat assaults, shoot-and-scoot patrolling, pincer movements, and bracketing with mortars. Me, I taught basic commo: radio discipline, Morse code, and how to transmit commands for directing small-unit maneuvers. Our instruction was barely tolerated and largely ignored. Hot pursuit of the enemy wasn’t a popular subject either, when we took the training into the field. You could bed down in a dicey night position with an entire ARVN company and wake up all by your lonesome if they didn’t care for you or your advice. Turns out they weren’t interested in engaging the enemy. All the South Vietnamese wanted were the goodies we could deliver and for us to shut the fuck up.
Viet Nam was nothing like Korea, where the US commanded both the American and Korean troops, and everyone was dropped into the crap together. Here we were strictly outsiders—guests—making suggestions our hosts happily spurned. Dealing with ARVN was like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. Me and Robeson grew weary of the struggle to get Buddhist troops fired up about battling Communists on behalf of their abusive and unloved Catholic government. We both got real tired of jungle rot, biting bugs and ground leeches, the foul dysentery that vacuumed you out and the heatstroke and tropical fevers that stewed the gray matter in your brainpan. One day we concluded that the longer we stayed out in the woods with the unhappy lads of the ARVN, the worse our odds got of going the distance in this non-war.
So we’d both grabbed at the chance for military police training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Half a year later we came back to Viet Nam as newly minted “Sidneys,” Criminal Investigation Division agents. We didn’t have to worry anymore about motivating badly served Asian troops or playing hide-and-seek in the woods. Our jurisdiction was strictly limited to American soldiers in-country. Granted, these numbered in the thousands, with few of us “Sids” to police them. But the mostly small-time lawlessness that accompanied the undeclared conflict suited us both. We lived on the cheap and tax-free, most everything expensed, and we didn’t have to sweat about who was winning and who wasn’t.
Our office interpreter, Xanh Lan Hoa—Blue Orchid—sat at her Underwood in a lavender ao dai, her long black hair cinched in a French braid. She was a young widow whose husband had perished in a skirmish in the highlands years ago. “Missy Blue” had a thing for Robeson. One day when some Vietnamese had jeered at them walking together in the street, Missy had pointed to the small brown birthmark on her right cheek and touched Robeson’s wrist. “Same-same,” she’d said, and giggled. “We same.” Robeson had tried his best not to be moved, but he was. I’m not sure what their relationship was doing for her English, but it had certainly done wonders for his Vietnamese.
“Đại úy want you both,” she said, her soft brown eyes fixed on Robeson.
Our boss, an MP captain, was a mustang—an up-from-the-ranks enlisted man who caught a field promotion in Korea that put an officer’s butter bar on his helmet. We trudged dutifully into his lair, formerly a large wardrobe closet.
“’Bout time, gents,” Captain Deckle said, sounding none too happy. Captain Deckle told us he was just back from briefing his superior, an obnoxious major half his age, a ping-pong-playing super soldier with custom-made boots we lovingly referred to as “Major Asshole.”
“Sir,” I said, as Deckle waved us into the chairs facing his antique desk. Rent on the office was next to nothing but renting the furnishings cost plenty. Go figure. In one of the endless twists of Vietnamese law, income from rents was heavily taxed, income from leasing furniture was not. So renting out cheap places expensively furnished was one of the many schemes the Saigonese employed to hold on to their money, not that many Vietnamese paid taxes at all.
We filled the captain in on the latest killing. He listened, then said he was taking Crouch off the case for good. “Henceforth you two are officially in charge of this death-dame business.”
I could tell from Robeson’s expression that he was thinking the same as me: if Freddie Crouch wasn’t such a fuckup, he might have gotten somewhere on the first two killings, and our frustrated captain wouldn’t have dumped the third killing—and now the whole case—in our laps. Robeson sighed, making no secret of being put out.
Deckle glared at him. “The three men she’s gunned down are our people, and the locals aren’t showing much interest in catching her,” the captain stressed. “So don’t look so damn disgruntled, Agent Robeson.”
“Yes, sir,” Robeson said, “but how do we protect our people from random street attacks?”
“Sounds like a personal problem. Did you hear me ask for questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Captain, he has a point. How do we interdict this broad? She’s got the run of the city. Anywhere she spots an American uniform and the glint of an officer’s insignia, she’s got a target. How do we possibly stop that?”
Captain Deckle eased back in his chair. “We might have caught a break.”
He handed over a sheet of foolscap on which he’d scribbled the name and holding location of a Viet Cong who’d recently deserted, using one of the new safe-cond
uct passes regularly scattered across the countryside to tempt the half-starved guerillas into switching sides. This one had surrendered himself to a Psy Ops advisor in Da Nang. Looking for favors during his debriefing, the VC had nervously brought up the Commie heroine who’d started zapping Americans in the capital.
Deckle said, “The deserter, Tam, swears he doesn’t know the lady’s name or so much as her nom de guerre, but claims the Viet Cong command holds her in very high regard. Says her prowess battling ARVN made such a big impression on the commissars, they’ve put her in charge of Unit Eight.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Robeson mumbled. “Another kid in charge of Unit Eight.”
The captain nervously tapped the desktop. “Yeah, yeah. Your witness says she’s barely twenty but old before her time and commanding our favorite local terror cell.”
“Kids making war on American officers,” I said.
“The defector also claims the Committee of the South recently gave their bad girl an additional objective—liquidation of a major player. Says he doesn’t know who or when. Just that it’s soon. But maybe the right questions haven’t been put to him. Go see if this hoi chanh can give you a line on her and who the honcho is they’ve added to her to-do list.”
I said, “This bigwig she’s been assigned. Do we at least know whether he’s American or South Vietnamese?”
“Not clear.” Captain Deckle fired up a Salem. “‘Cáo già’ was the quote.”
“‘Old fox,’” Robeson said. “She’s going after an ‘old fox’?”
“Miss Blue’s translation too,” Deckle said, impressed. “The Red Queen’s unit is likely after someone pretty senior. Remember a year ago last May? The brat in charge of Unit Eight before her tried to take down our esteemed secretary of defense.”
Robeson nodded. “A sweet-lookin’ sapper boy trying to blow up McNamara.”
Play the Red Queen Page 2