by Dennis Foley
“We go.”
Scotty turned toward the voice and saw Sergeant Tran, the medic back in his place in line waving in the palm-down style unfamiliar to most Americans.
Scotty smiled. “You speak English? Yes?”
The pocket-sized Asian soldier smiled revealing a pair of silver capped front teeth and shook his head. “No speak. We go.” And then he looked over his shoulder in the direction of the others who were already on their feet and readying to move out—away from the ambush site.
As quickly as the fully sun broke the horizon the temperature spiked. Scotty wiped the sweat from his face and eyes and looked around at the countryside as it came to life. Dirt roadways silent during the night, save the occasional stray dog and ever present hum of insects, filled with farmers and merchants. They appeared on the roadways from their small farms and thatched houses tucked into the thousands of tufts and clumps of trees offering shade and protecting them. Scotty was sure they had limited hopes: Just to get through yet another day without the war ravaging their lives.
Scotty again scanned the flat terrain to his left and right looking as far out as he could for any signs of enemy activity which might threaten the small patrol walking single file over the marsh turned hardened mud ground toward their pickup point. The night without sleep had taken its toll on all of them as they moved without the spark they had when they left the Sugar Mill the day before.
To Scotty fatigue quickly translated to a lack of security for the patrol. They walked with their eyes focused on the next step rather than the most threatening treeline or possible firing position for a hidden enemy rifleman. Their weapons were no longer at the ready. One of the Vietnamese soldiers up ahead of Scotty even carried his rifle over his shoulder. Scotty would talk to Caruthers about how to correct this on future patrols without giving offense.
Before Scotty heard the chopper he noticed both Captain Nguyen and Sergeant Caruthers each began talking over their respective radios. Caruthers looked up as he pressed the handset of his radio to his face, searching the sky for the voice on the other end of the conversation.
Minh’s chopper appeared as a small but thumping dot on the horizon and grew ever larger as it approached the patrol. Scotty knew they were speaking on separate frequencies: Nguyen speaking to Minh and Caruthers to Pascoe in the chopper which quickly fell into a large loop as it began circling the patrol over a quarter of a mile above them.
Almost as quickly as the chopper arrived it flew off in the direction of the Sugar Mill. Within an hour the patrol reached the small hamlet in a more secure part of the province where they would wait for the truck to pick them up and take them home too.
It seemed strange to Scotty—Captain Nguyen allowing the patrol to wait for their ride in a roadside restaurant. His American training would keep the patrol in some secluded spot in a defensive posture as long as possible to reduced the risk. Each day taught him how different they were, most of them never having known peace.
They each found a chair and either ordered something to eat or broke open their rations—no one in the patrol had eaten for over fourteen hours.
Caruthers sat down next to Scotty, rested his carbine against the wobbly chair and dumped his radio and rucksack onto the top of the table. “Damn, I’m getting too old for this boonie humpin’ shit.”
Scotty pointed a finger toward the radio. “What was all that about?”
“Who? Oh, the major. He and Minh came out to tell us what a good job we did racking up those two gooks. Pascoe busted my ass with a bunch of questions about ‘What were they carrying? Did they have any documents? How were they dressed?’ You’d think we fired up Ho Chi Minh’s chief of staff. Fuck, they were just a couple a’ bad guys slippin’ into country. This guy Pascoe’s got to lighten’ up or he’s going to burst into flame ’fore his tour of duty is up here.” He turned to the restaurant owner and pointed at the row of beer bottles on the wall over the counter. “Gimme’ one of them, papasan,” using the Korean War term older soldiers tended to pick up in one war and bring with them to the next.
Drinking was something else never done in Scotty’s training experience. “Little early for beer, isn’t it, Sarge?”
Caruthers playfully patted Scotty on the shoulder. “Son, if’n you don’t take y’er pleasures where you can here there’ll never be a right time. Hell, you’re on duty all day, every day. Nobody’s shootin’ at me right now and I’m not likely to get shitfaced on a single beer. I’m tired, hot, sore and I want a fucking Ba Mui Ba.” He then laughed, “Shit, what are they gonna’ do to me? Send me to Vietnam?”
“That mean beer?” Scotty asked. “That ba mooee…”
“Naw, it’s Viet fer ‘33’—the name of the beer.” Caruthers spun the bottle the owner had placed on the table revealing the large numerals on the label.
Scotty smiled. “Guess I learned some more Vietnamese today.”
Minutes after arriving and still damp, dirty and tired, Scotty and the other patrol members sat in the briefing room at the Sugar Mill debriefing the ambush patrol in detail.
Major Pascoe tapped his pencil on the list of notes he had jotted down in his notebook. He continued to anxiously tap the pencil’s eraser against the page as Sergeant Caruthers described each step of the ambush patrol from his own notes.
Pascoe kept interrupting Caruthers.
Scotty watched as Caruthers only gave Pascoe as much as it took to shut him up and not let Pascoe start lecturing Caruthers on what they should have done better. Caruthers was good at holding off the Pascoe.
And Pascoe was very unhappy the patrol didn’t kill more VC and capture more weapons, equipment and documents.
“Major, if we’d let those two guys go on by thinkin’ they were just the point element of a larger unit and we’d a been wrong we’d have no body count at all. I think Captain Nguyen did it right, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so.”
Even if Pascoe didn’t agree Scotty realized he wouldn’t say so in front of Captain Nguyen because to do so would embarrass Nguyen in front of his soldiers.
It took two hours to cover the ambush, most of it focused on the execution of the violent exchange lasting less than a minute. Out of questions, Pascoe deferred to Nguyen who released everyone to go clean up and get something to eat.
Pascoe stopped Caruthers and Scotty as the debriefing broke up. “You two hang back. I want to talk to you.”
Caruthers caught Scotty’s eye and shot him a momentary expression of impatience with Pascoe.
“We can do better than this, gentlemen. A body count of two? That’s not going to get anyone’s attention in Saigon at MACV Headquarters,” Pascoe said, his hands on his hips, shaking his head.
“Major, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone in Saigon. I was just out there hopin’ we could put more fire on them gooks than they could lay on us. I was just hoping to keep from getting my ass shot up because I was thinking I was some kinda’ cowboy,” Caruthers said.
Pascoe’s face reddened. “I don’t think I like your attitude, Sergeant.”
Old soldier that he was, Scotty could see Caruthers chose not to respond, leaving the next move in Pascoe’s hands.
Quickly, Pascoe turned to Scotty. “I expect to see far more out of you. Don’t you disappoint me too, Sergeant.” He didn’t wait for a reply. He just put on his cap, kicked the door open with is boot and walked out into the mid-day sun.
Scotty stood quietly looking at Caruthers.
Caruthers ritually pulled some chewing tobacco from the pouch he plucked from his pocket and tucked it into his mouth. “If that man thinks I’m goin’ to stick my fucking neck out for him with as little time as I got left in-country he’s dumber than I thought he was.
“Anyway, I wasn’t runnin’ the damn patrol—Nguyen was. And there’s no way in hell I was going to light a fire under a Viet captain. He’s about as good as we got in the whole fuckin’ division. All I’d a done was piss him off if I’d a pushed him.”
Scotty shrugged, no
t sure if he could offer anything to Caruthers’ mood or justification. “Sarge, you’ll be out of here soon. Don’t let him get to you.”
Caruthers moved the plug of tobacco from one side of his jaw to the other with a flick of his tongue, opened the screen door and fired a stream of tobacco juice out into the compound. “Son, he’s gonna’ be your problem soon. Jus’ remember he can kill you, but he can’t eat you.”
Bugs circled the small desk lamp as Scotty tried to write a letter to Eileen. The desk wobbled, the bugs landed on his writing paper, but his mind was still out on the ambush. Scotty’s mind drifted back to the darkness and the gunfire and the sight of two humans floating in the canal.
The fact he had been on his first combat patrol, might have fired a round and killed someone and had seen his first real Viet Cong soldiers was something he had been training for, worrying about and anticipating for so long. Now it was behind him. In soldier terms, he had lost his cherry. He was now a real combat infantryman. He felt a sense of accomplishment tempered with the understanding he would do it many more times before his tour was over. And he might not survive all his future enemy contacts.
Though his head was filled with the ambush, he found himself unsure about what to tell Eileen. He picked his pen and snapped the plunger over and over exposing then concealing its ball point. Should he share the details of the two deaths with her? Would he be lying to her if he simply said nothing or glossed it over?
He decided telling her too much would only worry her and put her in an awkward position with Kitty, should Kitty ask Eileen what he had told her about the combat operations. More than most mothers, Kitty was keenly aware of the consequences of a meeting engagement with the enemy gone wrong. So he started writing, mostly asking questions: How was she? How was Kitty? How was her mom? The job, the weather, the old Studebaker. He continued to fill the small notepaper page with blue lines, here and there marked by globs of greasy ink. The pen too was a casualty of the oppressive heat.
At the end he turned to more personal comments: How he missed her; how much he wanted to spend time with her when he got home and how he hoped she felt the same way.
Before long it was after midnight and he wrote the words Love, Scotty, put the pen down and rubbed his burning eyes.
Scotty finally folded the letter and slipped it into the envelope. He carefully addressed it and wrote the word free in the upper right hand corner where a stamp would go—one of the few privileges given to soldiers serving in Vietnam, free postage for letters home.
Rain began to pelt the tin roof over his head.
He promised himself he would tell Eileen the whole truth someday when it would no longer frighten her to know what he was facing each time he left the compound.
Chapter 17
SPRING DIDN’T ARRIVE IN SCOTTY’S part of Vietnam without bringing the Monsoon winds which, in turn, brought the rains. Rain would continue through October or November with a hundred days marking the monsoon’s greatest intensity. Paddies had already begun to fill to overflowing; ditches along the roadside would swelled with fast running brown water and the compound at the Sugar Mill became a mud bog.
The soldiers knew which months would bring unending torrential rains and had put down makeshift wooden pallets made from ammunition boxes to provide pathways crossing the compound and even some of them were already submerged.
With the approach of the Monsoon Scotty had put more than a dozen combat patrols under his belt learning to apply all of the techniques of soldiering he had learned in training. And with each patrol his confidence was elevated.
He had been surprised and pleased to see how all the combat techniques pounded into him by Ace Russell and the long list of NCOs Russell had passed him on to had worked when he needed them. He’d seen several more firefights, more deaths and some devastating wounds sustained by both sides. But the things he found most surprising were the dogged determination of the poorly equipped Viet Cong and how well suited he was for the job.
He had come to like the Vietnamese soldiers, even if he often became impatient with their universal lack of sense of urgency. Actual combat—the shooting part, was as terrifying as the first time, but he seemed to be able to call on something inside to control his fears and the constant anxiety he lived with every day he walked the fields and paddies. Wanting to be as prepared as he could be, Scotty picked Caruthers’ brain knowing he would only have access to him for a few more weeks.
And he soon enjoyed a comfortable relationship with the Vietnamese soldiers who had been watching him closely before they slowly placed their confidence in him.
The time passed quickly while Scotty was busy but ever so slowly when he thought about how long it would be before he could see Eileen again—which was often.
“Hayes!”
Scotty heard Pascoe’s voice and excused himself from the small group of Vietnamese soldiers he sat with in the mess hall. He walked to the doorway where Pascoe stood, obviously unhappy about something. “Yes sir?”
“Outside.”
On the steps of the mess hall Pascoe looked around, making sure his remarks where not overheard. “What did you learn in NCO school?”
Scotty was unsure what the question meant and tried not to show his irritation with Pascoe who had a tendency to ask nearly incomprehensible questions which always seemed to put him at an advantage. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
Pascoe pointed in the direction of the unseen table inside, where he had been sitting with the Vietnamese soldiers. “Does the phrase ‘Over-familiarity breeds contempt’ ring a bell from your leadership training? Or did you just sleep through that lecture?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
“I’m getting a little tired of finding you so damn chummy with the Viets. You can’t be their friend and also lead by example. Seems like every time I turn around you’re in some gaggle with a bunch of them.”
“But sir, I’m trying to establish what do you call it, ah, rapport with them. Isn’t that part of my job?”
“Sergeant, you can establish rapport without becoming their friend. Getting friendly with them will only undermine your authority. You should know that.”
“Sir, I don’t have any authority over them. They don’t work for me. I’m just an infantry advisor. I have to persuade them. I just can’t order them to do anything.”
“Don’t be a smart ass, Hayes. I want to see some distance between you and the Vietnamese and that’s the end of it. If I find you sitting around shooting the shit with them again I’ll be forced to find some other job for you. And trust me when I tell you it won’t be the limit of my actions. You’re one of the reasons why I was never keen on this accelerated promotion program for soldiers not ready for the responsibilities being an NCO demands. And if you force me, I’ll see to it you don’t stay a sergeant for long.”
Scotty felt anger rising inside his chest and was sure his face was flushed, giving him away. Still, he knew it was useless to argue with Pascoe. There seemed to be nothing they agreed upon except the undeniable fact: Pascoe was a major and Scotty was a sergeant. And the difference gave Pascoe all the firepower he needed to punish Scotty.
Scotty stood silent.
“Now, get out of here and find Caruthers for me.”
Scotty saluted and Pascoe turned his back and walked away. He knew one thing, he was right and Pascoe was wrong about relations with the Vietnamese soldiers. He wouldn’t change how he interacted with them. He would just do it where Pascoe wouldn’t catch him. And it would most likely be out of the compound on patrols and combat operations, where he was not likely to find Pascoe.
Pascoe and Lieutenant Colonel Wills stood stiffly under the overhang protecting the doorway to the General’s Mess as they watched the glossy olive drab helicopter with the red and while two-star general’s placard touch down on the helipad inside the compound.
General Pham Ly, commander of the division and American Brigadier General Pace Devlen, the Senior Advis
or to the Vietnamese Corps stepped from the chopper and sprinted to the overhang trying to dodge puddles and return the salutes of the two American officers waiting for them.
His uniform wet from the spray thrown by the chopper blades, Pascoe stood aside and held the door open while the three senior officers entered the mess. He looked back at the chopper and saw Colonel Minh in the command pilot’s seat, uncharacteristically making some notations in the chopper’s maintenance log book while the turbine engine groaned to a stop.
Inside the mess was a small island of European splendor. Pascoe had only been in the General’s Mess once before. No one on the staff and none of the advisors were allowed to use the mess unless General Pham was dining there. And even though he commanded the division Pham spent most of his time in Saigon.
Pascoe stood quietly by the door and looked around the room. Three large tables were arranged into a U were covered with clean, stiff tablecloths. Each place was set with bone china, sterling silverware and three crystal goblets. Napkins stood tented next to the plates and each place setting had a delicate cup and saucer.
The room had plywood fabricated stands which held vases of fresh flowers and the wooden floor had been painted with a thick coat of glossy black enamel.
General Pham took his place of honor at the center of the base table; Devlen took the place to his left.
Vietnamese soldiers dressed in mess steward attire appeared from behind a screen concealing a doorway to the kitchen and fluttered about the Vietnamese general like gnats. One unfolded Pham’s napkin and draped it across his lap, while another poured steaming Vietnamese tea into the delicate cup, while still a third plucked sugar cubes from an equally ornate sugar bowl and dropped them into the general’s tea.
The general looked up from his tea and waved for the standing Wills and Pascoe to take places on the leg of the U. They sat and the room grew quiet while everyone waited for the commander to finish his endless stirring to take a sip of his tea. He did and simply nodded approval to no one in particular.