A Requiem for Crows: A Novel of Vietnam

by Dennis Foley

  He spent the next two hours writing what would only be a three page letter. In it he said more to her about his feelings for her than he had in all of his earlier letters combined.

  The boats were each not more than six feet long and four feet wide at their mid-line. They had taken a beating during the few days the patrol members practiced carrying them, loading them, paddling them quietly in unison and righting them when they overturned in a stream near the Sugar Mill.

  At first Scotty was skeptical about boats made from tightly woven bamboo could even float, but they did. Now they were stacked upside down on top of each other in the back of a truck following the members of the patrol all crushed into the lead deuce and a half.

  Only a dozen days separated Caruthers from a plane trip home. Though he was senior to Scotty, they decided it was time for Scotty to take over Caruthers’ job. This put Scotty in the first boat with the patrol leader, Captain Nguyen, and Caruthers in the second boat with the extra supplies.

  They got off to a rocky start putting the boats into a stream feeding the Song Vam Co Dong river year-round. The boats held the twenty-five man patrol with some added equipment and rations in the center of each boat.

  An hour into the slow paddling upstream the boats ran into unexpected trouble. Scotty felt his boat come to an abrupt stop about the same time he felt some pressure against his knees through the thin bamboo bottom.

  Three of the soldier-paddlers immediately started chattering about the problem as they leaped over the side to free the boat from whatever halted its progress.

  Instead of pulling the boat forward over the obstacle, the soldiers pushed it backwards—into Caruthers’ boat. It immediately started to float again. Still, they had not cleared the underwater obstacle.

  Two of the soldiers from the lead boat searched blindly under the waterline, only their heads above water. Scotty could see one suddenly smile as he began to chatter cheerfully in Vietnamese. He pulled and tugged and finally brought a large knot of tangled reeds, roots and all, from the bottom of the narrow river bed. He and the other two soldiers heaved the bundle up onto the bank, The finder was proud to stand in what had been the high spot to show all he had cleared the channel.

  Scotty was glad to see the obstacle gone. But he was concerned about the sound of their voices carrying in the flat of the surrounding area and the fact they had now left evidence on the bank someone had passed that way.

  During the night the problem of blocked channels from the increased flow of rain and runoff into the streams and rivers happened three more times. Scotty was pleased to see the change in the behavior and improved noise discipline as they got ever closer to their objective. He just wished they had been more quiet earlier.

  As planned, the move to the abandoned hamlet near the Cambodian border would take two days. With the passing hours, the pressure on the patrol to find someplace to lay up during the day grew. The lack of adequate vegetation gave them very few options.

  Just before dawn of the on the morning of the second day Scotty passed the word back to the other boats after Captain Nguyen picked a suitable tree stand which would hide the entire patrol.

  It was square and small, no more than fifteen meters on a side, but it was large enough to hide everyone if they stayed down and didn’t draw any attention to the cluster of trees.

  To hide from sight and reduce the chances their movement into the area would be discovered they emptied their boats of men and equipment before it got light. They then swamped their boats and sunk them in the stream next to the trees which would conceal them.

  Scotty stepped out of his boat onto the spongy ground hoping to find some more firmness in the trees. Dragging his combat gear, rifle and his radio with him, he moved slowly, waiting for the sucking muck to release his boots with each step. He found a tree with some exposed roots to sit on he guessed would hold him and some of his gear out of the rotting marsh.

  It took almost half an hour for the patrol members to get into the trees, set up a defensive perimeter and settle to avoid being seen once the sun came up.

  Scotty knew the daylight hours were going to offer the only opportunity for him to get some sleep. Still, he pulled out his map and spent a few more minutes memorizing the relative positions of key landmarks along their patrol route. He wanted not to have to pull out his map to orient himself should they make unexpected enemy contact along the way.

  By nine in the morning Scotty still had not gotten any sleep. The swamps were crawling with small determined flies. And no matter what he did he couldn’t avoid the weather extremes which alternated between blistering hot when it wasn’t raining and a bone chilling downpour when it was. He sat up and looked around the perimeter. Twenty-four other people all trying not to move, not to make noise and not to be seen. From the small clump of trees only marginally concealing them, Scotty could look out in almost any direction across miles of flat marsh land untilled, uninhabited and uninterrupted save a few more clumps of trees like theirs.

  Scotty tried to fill the time until he could sleep with checking, rechecking and cleaning up his gear—all mud covered or waterlogged from the first night’s boat trip.

  Three hours later he was out of small tasks to do unlikely to draw attention or make noise. People think it is easy to sit still for hours. But the temptation was great to move about, get comfortable, stretch, scratch, cough even get up to take a piss. Any unnecessary motion was asking for trouble. No one could be sure there wasn’t a single enemy soldier somewhere out in the reeds with the sole purpose of keeping an eye out for the approach of patrols like Scotty’s.

  He looked at his watch, its face so caked with decayed organic matter from the ground he had to scrape it clean with his thumbnail and polish the smeared mud with his fatigue shirt. The watch hands had hardly moved.

  He tried to pull his canteen from its carrier without making any large moves or noise. As he put the spout to his lips and inhaled the strong chemical odor of the water purification tablets dissolved in the cloudy water he wasn’t sure if he was really thirsty or bored and eager to get moving.

  Returning his canteen to its carrier, Scotty leaned back on his rucksack. Comfortable he had done all he needed to do to be prepared to move out after dark, he let his mind drift to Eileen and home. Simply bringing it to mind tugged at the center of his chest. Belton, Florida seemed so far away and from another time. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Eileen. The first image to come to him was her in school. Her hair was longer then and she wore skirts with petticoats—attractive skirts, not the matronly ones she had to wear to work at Ronnie’s. He let his mind linger on her walking down the hallway of Palms High, her calves tapering into the bobbie socks she wore with her loafers. The image seemed to be even farther back in his past than it actually was. He mentally counted the months then multiplied out the days until he would be going home. No matter how many days he had left, they all combined into months—plural. It seemed like an eternity. It was becoming clear to him he had something he’d never thought much about—a future. A future with Eileen.

  He let himself dwell on her face as he drifted off in a light sleep.

  “Hayes!”

  Caruthers’ raspy whisper woke Scotty from a much deeper sleep than he had even thought possible in the muck and rain. “Yeah? What? What’s wrong?”

  Caruthers’ put his hand on Scotty’s arm. “Nothing. So far, we’re okay. But we’re moving out in a hour.”

  “Got it.” Scotty sat up, his shirt sticking to his back, saturated with a paste of water, mud and decayed black slime. He reached around and tried to pull the shirt from his skin. “Great. ‘I wanna’ be an Airborne-Ranger…,’” he whispered to himself—the words of the Jody cadence he had sung so many times double-timing in formation back at Fort Benning.

  He rubbed his eyes and looked out to the limits of his vision, darkness setting in. He tried to look back to the south east, toward the small towns and hamlets on the larger river. He could no longer see the
day’s end traffic of carts, oxen and farmers all headed home. It was as dark where he had come from as where they were going. At that point it hit him: They were really deep in enemy territory. And they were only one day into the patrol.

  One more check of his gear and Scotty started on himself. He reapplied camouflage stick to his face, neck, hands and exposed forearms. The rain and sweat had removed most of what he had applied before dawn to get him through the day. As he stroked his skin with the huge lipstick-like tubes of makeup he began to inventory the toll the patrol was already taking on him. His hands and arms were covered with small cuts from the saw grasses. Everywhere he had lumps and bumps from mosquito bites. He found several spots where an attacker was effective, some still stubbornly attached to his skin.

  He pulled his plastic bottle of bug repellent from his shirt pocket and squirted it onto his hands, drenching them and then rubbing the excess on his neck and face. The solvent in the repellent made the camouflage stick’s waxy pigment dissolve a little and go on more smoothly without crumbling.

  He checked his work with the metal signal mirror he kept on a small chord around his neck. In the dark his image was far from clear, but what he could see showed him where he had missed exposed white skin sure to give him away and compromise the patrol or even cost him his life. If he could see anything in the mirror so could the Viet Cong.

  While some of the soldiers slipped out of the tree stand and back into the stream bed to refloat the boats, Scotty turned to Captain Nguyen to make eye contact and let him know he was available, should he need him.

  Nguyen simply acknowledged Scotty’s readiness with a slow nod.

  Scotty couldn’t quite figure Nguyen out, yet. He seemed to understand more English than he spoke or let on and was a man of few words in either language. He treated Scotty as an equal despite the great difference in the their ranks. And he never seemed to pester Scotty with endless requests for personal favors. But he was not afraid to approach Scotty when he wanted to know something with his three-word question: “Show me, please.”

  He could have ended up with a much worse counter-part than Nguyen. For this, Scotty said a small thank you.

  Proximity was everything. The closer the wobbly boats got to the objective area the more vigilant they all became. Scotty couldn’t make out many faces in the full-on darkness, but he could see the postures of the soldiers. Those who were paddling were careful not to clunk the wooden paddles together or hit the side of the boat. Those not paddling, entrusted with the security of the boats, held their weapons high and ready—their heads on near swivels watching for the slightest irregularity in the surrounding terrain. And the soldiers in each boat tasked to empty the bilge by scooping out water using number ten vegetable cans from the mess hall did so quietly. They took care to first scoop without scraping the bamboo bottoms awash with seepage. Then they quietly dipped the cans into the water over the side, turning them upside down to empty without splashing. Training was paying off.

  Scotty turned to look over his shoulder. Navigation in a small boat at night was one of the most difficult skills any infantryman had to master. At least walking the soldier could check his direction with his compass and his distance by counting his pace. The first thing every Ranger learns is his own pace—how many steps it takes for him to move one hundred meters in the bush. Scotty knew his cold—one hundred and twenty one paces would put him at the hundred meter mark on flat land, more going up or down hill. But his pace was no good to him in a boat moving at a speed he could not calculate. And without landmarks along the banks to help him the best he could do was stay oriented on where they had come from. The small towns behind them threw a faint glow of light up onto the cloud cover letting Scotty know they were still heading west—toward Cambodia. But he was uncomfortable now knowing exactly where he was on the ground.

  They continued paddling, first turning off on one tributary to the stream, then, another hour later to an even smaller stream—all flowing out of the west.

  His neck ached and the small of his back began to burn from kneeling in the boat for so long. Scotty scrubbed the face of his watch against his leg again to clear the new layer of dirt and mud from it and held it up to see the marginally readable radium dial. Zero one hundred hours military time—one a.m. and they were still paddling.

  Scotty craned his neck and straightened up to see over the heads of the others in his boat. The blackness: Cambodia was out in front of them—somewhere. No towns, no inhabited villages and visible signs of life. But every man on the patrol knew they were heading toward a sanctuary filled with hundreds, if not thousands of enemy soldiers, way stations, ammunition caches, hidden training areas, mess and sleeping facilities. All concealed and now covered again by a second cloak—darkness. Scotty’s guess was they were pretty close to their objective—the abandoned hamlet.

  Captain Nguyen held up the small armada. He turned to Scotty, said, “Boats here,” and pointed at an overhang on the inside of a turn in the stream. According to their patrol plan, they would submerge the boats and walk the rest of the way to the hamlet using the streambed to conceal their tracks.

  Offloading all the gear, weapons, rations and ammunition from the boats to the patrol members’ backs took nearly a half an hour to do quietly. Scotty was impressed with the further increase in noise discipline within the patrol. He knew what they knew—anything, any slip, clank, bang or splash, could unleash enemy fire and get them killed.

  While four of the soldiers finished tying the boats to underwater roots, Nguyen took Scotty and three others forward to find the hamlet. Caruthers stayed behind with the remainder of the patrol waiting to be brought forward after the advanced party found the hamlet.

  Unlike a linear ambush, Nguyen put the two dozen soldiers into a tight perimeter inside the small hamlet consisting of four abandoned single-room thatched huts and one larger hut which appeared to have once been someone’s home on a few hectares of soggy farmland. The onetime owners had planted trees all around the small cluster of structures and a erected a broken down fenced pen to hold livestock. His efforts provided some concealment for the patrol members. The owners had been gone for years, but the trees grew anyhow.

  Scotty walked around the entire perimeter at a crouch to lower his profile against the blue-black sky and checked each soldier’s field of fire more to see where everyone was than to oversee Nguyen’s placement.

  By the time Scotty got back to the command post where Nguyen, his radio operator, Caruthers and the medic had setup it was nearly dawn and time for everyone to freeze in place and see what the day would bring. Scotty hoped the south side of the perimeter would offer a good view of any infiltration trails coming out of Cambodia.

  Knowing their survival would depend entirely on staying hidden, each man in the patrol began pulling grasses and reeds from the ground to camouflage themselves, replacing the wilted vegetation they had picked up the day before.

  Back in the command post Scotty unpacked his ammunition and began to inspect it. The last thing any soldier wanted was to suffer a stoppage in the middle of a firefight because he had neglected to keep his ammo clean. As he inspected each magazine he realized he was beginning to feel an even greater sense of danger. Just a couple of football fields from the Cambodian border put him closer to the largest enemy threat he had faced since arriving in Vietnam. He knew full well the hamlet they had chosen was easily within the range of enemy mortars on the other side of the imaginary dividing line. And his division’s artillery was not able to reach out to help the patrol. This gave the enemy an advantage and sanctuary.

  He pulled out his map and dropped in onto the flat side of his radio in front of his knees. With a single spin he oriented the map to true north and matched up the few landmarks on the map with the reality of his surroundings.

  Finally, he checked the receiver of his rifle for a round well seated into the chamber and set it aside before he touched up his camouflage makeup again.

  The day droned on
with the hum of insects and small birds in the flooded fields surrounding them. Scotty shielded himself from the intense periods of sun between the rain squalls by tucking himself and his equipment into a fragile and still partially thatched lean-to which must have once served to keep dried fish and grain up above the waterline. As he gazed out onto the flats between the hamlet and the border he spotted something unusually black. The motion fired up his senses making him reflexively raise his rifle to the ready. It was a shiny black. The glimpse alerted him to the chance of a Viet Cong soldier in wet black pajamas they called ao ba ba.

  Scotty pulled his binoculars from his rucksack and trained them on the small dark spot almost two hundred meters outside their perimeter. With his naked eye he could see some movement, not unlike someone crawling close to the ground. But with his binoculars he could see it clearly. It was not just black. It was steel blue, black and the darkest of nighttime violets. It was a crow—a large common crow. Scotty relaxed and felt a little silly.

  The crow was busy attacking something out of Scotty’s field of view, something obscured by the marshy grasses and reeds. Whatever it was, the crow ripped small pieces of whatever he was standing on and ate them with gusto and urgency.

  “Corbeau?”

  Scotty pulled his glasses away from his face and looked to find Captain Nguyen. Vietnamese was still an alien language to Scotty. But when the officers slipped easily from Vietnamese to French and then to broken English it was even more difficult. He followed Nguyen’s eye line out to the bird ripping at its prey. “Oh, crow, right?”