by Robin Moore
“All right if we sit down? I want to introduce someone who’s been wanting to meet you.”
Brandy regarded me a moment with what must be a permanently doleful expression, I thought. Then he turned and called over an old Vietnamese waiter. “Garçon? L‘addition s’il vous plâit.”
The waiter handed Brandy a check. He put down a few piastres and stood up. “Et maintenant, messieurs, si vous voulez, nous parlerons chez moi.”
We followed Brandy out of the restaurant. “At that place,” Brandy said in his rolling French accent, “they know me only as Robair, a French planter from Tay Ninh. They do not know that I even speak English. It is a very useful place. But they will wonder that I was talking to Americans.”
Pickins chuckled. “Sorry if we blew your cover.”
Brandy shrugged expressively, long lines accenting his long thin face. Then he turned to me and apologized for his rudeness.
“Nothing to forgive,” I said. “But I’d sure like to hear about what you are doing over here.”
“Eh bien, I am meeting my medical specialist and intelligence sergeant for lunch at The Peacock. You are welcome to join us.”
With a wave, Pickins was off and Brandy and I walked the two blocks to the restaurant, where we found Sergeant Ossidian, the dark, heavy-featured intelligence specialist, and Sergeant Targar, the medic.
Targar had a pronounced but pleasant accent, and he told me he had been born in Hungary but left in 1952 and joined the U.S. Army. His somewhat Oriental appearance I attributed to centuries of invasions and population movements in the Balkans.
The luncheon was lively and informative, and when it was over Captain Martell gave his men nearly a carte blanche to tell me about the team’s mission. This they did over cool drinks at Caprice’s, a favorite Special Forces hangout, where the girls were good to look at—and even touch if we felt so inclined.
The two biggest problems at Nam Luong, I learned, were recruiting strike-force troopers and good intelligence agents. Both problems had been handled with typical Special Forces ingenuity.
The sergeants took obvious relish in recounting how their captain had wangled a badly needed extra company of strike-force irregulars. From a previous mission, Martell was personally acquainted with the chief of police in Saigon under President Diem. Brandy knew what the Saigon jail was like, and he hit upon the idea of bailing out the juvenile delinquents, and giving them a chance to join his strike force and fight the Communists rather than rot in the ancient, festering prison cells. It took presidential approval but finally Martell acquired about 100 assorted thieves, rapists, muggers, dope pushers, pimps, homosexuals, and murderers. These last were released to Nam Luong because they had only murdered other delinquents, not useful citizens.
The chief of police promised the young hoods jail for life if they deserted Nam Luong, and in front of them gave Captain Martell and his then LLDB counterpart permission to shoot any of the jailbirds that caused trouble.
The company of Saigon irregulars proved to be a hard-fighting group, though given to various types of body mutilation after a battle. So terrified were they of a life in prison that unlike the other companies in the camp there were no desertions.
Unfortunately, after the fall of President Diem, his successor, “Big” Minh, currying popular favor, decreed a general amnesty and threw Diem’s chief of police into jail. Most of the strike-force company of Saigon criminals deserted forthwith. Only a few stayed, converted by the reform efforts of the Americans.
But now with Viet Cong activity on the upswing around Nam Luong, and the aggressive General Khanh recently come to power, one of Captain Martell’s missions on this trip was to replenish his strike force of hoods. Ossidian and Targar had the utmost confidence that “the old man” would somehow turn the trick.
Recruiting new agents was more of a problem, however, especially since Nam Luong was situated in a province of constantly increasing VC domination—indeed, it was believed to contain the headquarters of the Viet Cong command staff.
Until two weeks ago Ossidian had a prize agent, one Tang, a lieutenant in the Viet Cong stationed near the province capital, which was only five miles from the Special Forces camp. Well educated, Tang spoke English, Vietnamese of course, French, and Chinese. As a Buddhist, he had been unable to reach the level of advancement he felt due him in the Diem Roman Catholic administration. The Viet Cong, or as they preferred to be known, “The National Liberation Front,” spotted the low-level dissident government employee and recruited him.
Tang was not a bloodthirsty type, however, and he had been revolted at the VC terrorist tactics in which he had participated. The day he found himself dragging pregnant women into the town square where their stomachs were slit open and the fetuses pulled out, his sensibilities were so outraged he knew he could no longer be part of the Communist organization.
One of Ossidian’s agents who came and went freely through the Viet Cong camps reported Tang’s discontent and a meeting between Ossidian and Tang was arranged in a safe house in the province capital. Tang soon began accumulating wealth. His information was so good that the LLDB camp commander at Nam Luong persuaded his B-team commander to request, to insist in fact, that Captain Martell divulge to him his source of intelligence.
Martell obeyed the order only after a new B-team superior, Major Fanshaw, in the country for one week, took a chopper into Nam Luong to see personally that full disclosure of all intelligence sources was made to Captain Cam, Martell’s counterpart.
Ossidian grunted in disgust. “It takes a good B-team commander a couple of months, sometimes more, sometimes never, to learn when not to go strictly by State and Defense Department policy.”
Two weeks after Cam’s face to face meeting with Tang, Ossidian, carrying an envelope heavy with piastres, had gone to meet his prize agent. At the safe house the intelligence sergeant found Tang, horribly tortured to death, propped up in a chair facing the door.
“Is Cam a VC sympathizer?” I asked.
“It’s worse than that.” Ossidian stared darkly at the glass of beer before him. “It’s part of this Oriental face thing. Cam had to discredit our success with Tang. So he took off for corps headquarters to boast that he had recruited the VC lieutenant himself and should get credit for all the good intelligence coming out of Nam Luong. The spy system the VC have in all the ARVN corps headquarters is so good they zapped Tang even before Cam could get back to camp.
“What are you doing, for replacement agents?”
“That is a good question,” Ossidian replied, winking at Targar.
“The old man said to tell him whatever he wanted to know,” Targar said. “It’s a good story.” He gestured toward his teammate. “Take it from me, Ossidian here is the dirtiest-thinking sonofabitch I’ve ever known in my life. I wouldn’t talk to him back home on Okinawa, but here in Vietnam give me this sneaky Syrian on my team every time.”
“I’ve been in intelligence ten years, advising in five different countries,” Ossidian said, confirming the left-handed compliment.
Together Ossidian and Targar told me how they had recruited their present star agent.
Ossidian had always wanted a pretty female agent to spy on the Viet Cong in his territory. But there was only one way to get a really good-looking, intelligent, dedicated female agent. You had to find a girl who hated the enemy with all her soul. She must desperately want revenge. How do you find such a girl? Ossidian figured it out.
Hardly a week went by that the VC didn’t hit a government hamlet. These were villages built by the Saigon government and housed people who had been moved from Viet Cong threatened areas. They were protected by an armed civilian militia with ARVN troops near enough to help in case of a VC attack. However, the militia usually was unable to beat back night attacks, and ARVN troops wouldn’t come out after dark. The first thing the VC did after such an attack was make an example of the village chief, his wife, and children if any.
Ossidian persuaded Captain Martell t
o request a helicopter to be available for one week on a few moments’ notice. He kept the radio man on the alert twenty-four hours a day. On the third day of this alert the news he was waiting for came. The VC had overrun an important government hamlet twenty-five miles to the north during the night.
Ossidian, Targar, and Captain Martell called for their chopper and were actually landing in the hamlet as the last of the Viet Cong guerrillas were running from the fast-approaching government troops. There was the usual weeping by new widows and as Targar, with his medical kit, started to do the best he could for the wounded lying on the ground, Ossidian, his camera at the ready, strode into the town square.
The grisly sight he had expected was there before him. Shocked and wailing townspeople were standing around, numbed at the horror they had been forced to witness.
Even Ossidian, hardened as he was, confessed to a touch of nausea as he went about the business of taking photographs of the hamlet chief and his young son, perhaps twelve years old. Both had been tied up by the thumbs and disemboweled. He took portrait shots of the old man’s face turned to his boy, eyes open, pupils rolled back, the deep lines of agony still set. The youngster’s gaping body was a tragic sight, head back, mouth open, tongue bitten through.
Standing back, Ossidian snapped several shots showing the intestines of the father and son hanging down in the dirt, flies buzzing in them. Then came a masterpiece of the grotesque.
A pig, snorting unconcernedly, rooted its way across the square, and as it came to the hanging entrails of the village chief noisily began to eat them. Ossidian managed to take the picture before Martell rushed upon the pig, kicking it squealing away. The wife of the chief hung jaggedly, tied between two upright stakes. Carefully Ossidian photographed the body in which every bone had been methodically broken. Again, he carefully focused on the broken but quite recognizable face for a close-up.
In his serviceable Vietnamese, Ossidian inquired politely where the home of the late village chief stood. A dazed old man led the intelligence sergeant across dirt paths to a substantial concrete-block house, painted blue and trimmed in red. Above the door the date it had been built, 1962, was indicated in raised numbers painted white. Probably then the hamlet chief had been a Catholic, using the Christian calendar instead of the Buddhist.
Inside, Ossidian, assisted by Captain Martell, found a desk, and above it the picture of a family of three daughters and two sons, one the boy hanging in the square. He took the picture down and then went through all the papers and envelopes. An hour and a half later, as the vanguard of the ARVN battalion entered the stricken town, Ossidian had found what he was looking for, and he and Martell were urging Targar, cleaning and dressing wounds, to hurry.
Back at the A team, Ossidian took a jeep and drove into town. At the photography shop he went into the darkroom with the proprietor and stayed with him while the films were developed and certain shots enlarged. The pictures made the darkroom technician sick and Ossidian had to help him get the prints completed.
The following morning Ossidian was on the milk run to Saigon from the province capital, the address of the butchered hamlet-chief’s daughter and several of her letters to the family written in both French and Vietnamese in his plastic briefcase. Also of course, he had complete photographic documentation of what the Viet Cong had done to her parents.
From the letters he had determined that Lin Son Binh, the daughter, was a teacher in a Catholic school for young girls being prepared to complete their education in France.
Ossidian worked on the premise that the Viet Cong always had an agent watching him even in Saigon, so at Special Forces headquarters he handed a letter addressed to Co Binh (Miss Binh) to be delivered to her personally through a Vietnamese courier who could not be recognized by anyone, Viet Cong or government, as an agent of the Americans.
The news of the attack on the hamlet had not yet been released in the Saigon newspapers. Ossidian would have to tell Co Binh of her parents’ fate. He had wanted it this way.
At 4:00 in the afternoon, dressed in civilian clothes, Ossidian arrived at the Air Vietnam reservation offices. He had thought of asking her to meet him in a cafe, but proper Vietnamese girls didn’t walk into such places alone. He walked inside the air-conditioned room and waited. He wasn’t sure which of the daughters in the picture would be Co Binh. Ten minutes after he arrived, a nervous-looking Vietnamese girl in a white au-dai entered the office, looking about uncertainly.
Ossidian whistled softly to himself. This was a very beautiful girl, delicate and slim, with an air of hauteur that made a man want to break through and get to her. “Wouldn’t some Viet Cong big shot like to take that,” the intelligence sergeant had thought to himself, even as he approached her, a reassuring smile on his face.
“Co Binh?” he asked politely.
She looked up at Ossidian and nodded firmly.
“Do you speak English?” he asked. “Ou aimez-vous mieux que nous parlerons en français.”
Co Binh smiled for the first time. “I think maybe we speak English.”
Ossidian smiled. He had no illusions about his French although he could get along in the language. “Good. Will you come with me so we can talk about your family?”
When the girl hesitated Ossidian drew the family picture from his briefcase and showed it to her. Co Binh gasped, looking at the framed photograph, hand-tinted, that she knew hung in her father’s house. “You were at my father’s house?”
Ossidian nodded and thought he detected a blush on Co Binh’s face, a momentary sag in her proud carriage. “What did he tell you about me?” she demanded defensively.
Ossidian was both relieved and concerned: relieved because he suspected Co Binh had left home under some stigma, undoubtedly something to do with a man; concerned because she might no longer love her parents enough so that their horrible deaths would cause her to become an agent against the Viet Cong. However, surely her little brother’s ghastly death would affect her violently.
“If you will come with me, I have some things to tell you about your father and mother.”
“Maybe we can talk here?” she suggested.
Ossidian shook his head. “Please come with me. It is important.”
Reluctantly, Co Binh allowed herself to be led to a tiny blue Saigon taxicab and put inside. Ossidian gave the driver an address on Minh Mang in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. He did not want to tell Co Binh about her parents’ death in the cab so he asked her about herself and the school where she taught French. Her father had been loyal to the Diem regime and part of his reward had been the excellent education Co Binh and her brothers and sisters had received.
Co Binh replied impatiently to Ossidian’s questions. Finally, before they reached their destination, the intelligence sergeant said to Co Binh, “We are almost there. A Vietnamese doctor friend of mine will allow us to use his house to talk comfortably. Both he and his wife will be present.”
The cab pulled up in front of a doctor’s office and Ossidian led Co Binh, still clearly showing her reluctance, to the front door. He hoped that she would not know that Doctor Hinh was one of the most noted abortionists in Saigon. If they were being watched Ossidian thought wryly, there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind why the American and the hesitant, nervous Vietnamese girl were entering Doctor Hinh’s office.
The doctor, who had provided Ossidian with a safe house before, greeted them and led them to his sitting room, heavy with dark furniture and gaudy Buddhist religious symbols. He talked in Vietnamese for a few moments with Co Binh, pointed to an open door to another room where he and his wife were having tea, and then left Ossidian and Co Binh alone.
“Now,” the girl demanded. “Why you bring me here?”
Ossidian gave her a look of deep sympathy and said, “I was at your father’s hamlet yesterday just after he and your mother and brother were murdered by the Viet Cong.”
Co Binh let out a sharp cry of anguish, her hands flying to her face. The reaction
gratified Ossidian.
“When did you last see your family?” he asked.
“It has been almost a year. My father was angry when I brought to the village a boy who was a Buddhist to meet him. He . . .” Co Binh suddenly stiffened and gave Ossidian a sharp look. “Are you sure they are dead? How can I know? Why did not the government tell me?”
“They are dead, Co Binh.”
“What happened to them?”
“You know what the Viet Cong do to hamlet chiefs?”
“Here in Saigon we do not feel there is really a war. I have never been hurt by the Viet Cong. They are bad because they are Communists and hate the Church but . . .”
Ossidian knew the moment for the necessary brutality had arrived. He took the long shots of Co Binh’s father, mother and young brother from his briefcase and showed them to her.
She stared at them uncomprehendingly a moment and then the full impact hit her. She screamed. The wife of Doctor Hinh appeared at the door but Ossidian motioned her away.
One by one, Ossidian placed the other pictures in front of Co Binh, who stared at them shocked, white-faced, shaking, and moaning softly. When Co Binh saw the picture of the pig rooting in her father’s entrails she cried out and dug her fingers into her eyes.
“No. No. No more. Please,” she cried.
“Do you see what the Viet Cong are?” Ossidian pursued. “Do you see what they do all over your country, every day?”
Co Binh, incapable of coherent talk, was now screaming hysterically. Ossidian put his arm on her shoulders to comfort her, but she shook it off. He stood up and motioned to Doctor Hinh who was standing just inside the sitting room.
The doctor went to her, a prepared hypodermic needle in his hand, and gave the convulsing girl a sedative.
Co Binh spent the night at the doctor’s house and the next day, still in a partial state of shock, Ossidian began to talk to her of revenge and duty to Vietnam.
Two weeks later, as part of their civic action program, the Special Forces A team at Nam Luong fixed up a ramshackle old schoolbuilding in the province capital. Desks and chairs were bought, books and blackboards installed in the rooms, and the new school for refugee orphans of the province was ready by the time the new teacher from Saigon arrived. Co Binh became immediately popular with the children as well as the male adults of the town.