by Robin Moore
On the second break Barton sat down beside me, fanning his face with his tattered lucky campaign hat. “Couple more hours and we’ll be in the middle of them,” he said in low tones. “Better drop fast, right in the trail when you hear it coming in.”
“I know what to do, old man,” I replied. In an ambush both sides of the trail would be mined, or at least planted with pungi stakes, which give agonizing death to anyone falling on them.
The rest period over, we started off again across the rice paddies, dry in this season of the year. The constant grinding and rattling of the wood cutters’ oxcarts crawling back to town from the thick scrub forests indicated we were still paralleling the main road. Half an hour later the clatter of oxcarts became more distant and finally faded completely. Now we were heading directly at the North Star hanging low on the horizon.
We stalked along the edges of the rice paddies and fields, staying within the shadows of the bordering woods. Suddenly I saw dark forms ahead dart out of the patrol formation and become clearly silhouetted in the open field. They bent over, picked objects up and scurried back into the line of march. Barton cursed under his breath.
“You can’t teach them,” he snapped. “We go through a watermelon patch and they have to load up. If the VC are watching they’ll know just where we are.”
My carbine, sixty rounds belted to the folding stock and two banana clips taped butt to butt in the lock, began to be awkward to carry. Technically, I was a noncombatant but the VC didn’t know this, so the weapon was ready for instant employment.
Perhaps the strikers sensed approaching danger for they began observing excellent noise discipline, picking up their feet and placing them down softly. In alarm, I felt the tickling in my throat of a persistent cough which had latched onto me some months ago in a cold spell just before I left New York.
New York was the other side of the Milky Way now, but the cough wouldn’t quit. A slight croak tore lose from my throat. Instantly Barton’s cautioning hand was on my shoulder. I reached swiftly into the pocket of my loose jungle fatigues for the bottle of GI gin. A good slug of this 80 proof terpin hydrate elixir guarantees an hour free of coughing.
As we pushed on through the night, Barton glanced frequently at the luminous dial of his watch. Daylight was not far off, and neither, I judged, was the enemy, when the patrol halted. I followed Barton forward. Through the trees ahead the river shimmered in the bright starlight. The moon had set.
I watched as Barton and Lieutenant Vinh talked in inaudible whispers. Finally, Barton turned to me. “Lieutenant Vinh came up with a new one. He says we can’t cross the river because there are too many alligators in it.” Barton grinned. “This is the time I would have to make an excuse for not crossing. I’m glad he did it for me. The point section is going up as far as the river and wait for daylight. Vinh says, ‘Maybe we go back to Nam Luong when daylight comes.’”
From the trees we watched as 20 strikers, led by Sergeant Hanh, made their way to the river’s edge. The white, flat light of dawn was beginning to erase the stars and seep into the scrub forest. Sergeant Ritchie and Barton, their carbines ready, peered through the tangled growth in all directions.
Suddenly, from the other side of the river, shattering bursts of automatic-weapons fire ploughed into the point section. Hanh dropped to the ground, shouting orders, and the strikers began crawling back to rejoin the platoon.
Before the rest of the platoon could put up a heavy volume of fire to cover the retreating strikers, we were hit from our left flank. I threw myself to the trail and fired bursts from my carbine. Barton, Ritchie, and the irregulars around us were returning. I wondered how many of the honor guard would make it back to us. Our volume of fire built up as the BAR men began pumping heavy slugs back at the ambushers. The fire from across the river ceased. Probably all of the point section that were going to make it had scurried back from the river bank, leaving no more targets.
Barton looked back at me and then up and down the column lying in the trail. Finally he spotted Lieutenant Vinh. “Hey, Vinh,” he shouted. “We get pinned down, all dead here we don’t attack. Not big ambush now but more VC come from Phu Nhu soon.”
Sergeant Hanh crawled up to us. He said something to the interpreter who stayed near to Lieutenant Barton. The interpreter cried, “Men on point back. Sergeant Hanh say we must go attack ambush. VC coming across the river now.”
“Vinh!” Barton shouted, “You hear that? Let’s go.” To my enormous surprise, Lieutenant Vinh suddenly shouted a string of commands and holding his carbine, stock pressed against his side with his right elbow, raised up into a crouching position and firing long bursts, started into the ambush. Sergeant Hanh, yelling commands was up and moving too, firing into the scrub ahead of us. The strikers, shouting Vietnamese curses, jumped up and moved into the ambush.
Barton turned to me. “You and Ritchie stay where you are, I’m going in.” With that, his tall frame bent low, Barton moved up with the strikers. I watched him jerk a grenade off his combat harness, and lob it into the bush ahead of him. There was a sharp blast, followed by screams as Barton crashed on into the ambush.
As abruptly as it had started the VC ambush ceased firing and pulled back into the dry jungle. The strikers slowly ceased firing and orders were shouted. The platoon reassembled on the trail. Miraculously only three strikers had been wounded and one killed in breaking up the ambush. It was light now and Ritchie went to work on the wounded men who had been dragged back by their comrades.
“Very good,” Lieutenant Barton complimented his counterpart, clapping him on the shoulder. Vinh smiled proudly. Hanh, patrolling the column now reassembled on the trail, came up to Vinh and reported. Barton’s interpreter relayed Hanh’s words.
“Sergeant Hanh say three men dead beside river, two more wounded. He go with strikers and bring them back. He say we must dee-dee quick. VC come again.”
“Hanh knows the score,” Barton said approvingly. “We’ve got to marry up with the second platoon fast.” Hanh, with a squad of strikers, went back to the river and returned carrying dead and wounded.
Ritchie hurriedly did what he could for the wounded, giving the more seriously hurt shots of morphine, and then we started back to join the cover platoon. Between the dead and wounded and those men required to carry them, the first platoon was considerably less than 50 per cent operational. We made the best time back we could to rejoin Swiggert’s platoon. Lieutenant Vinh, talking over his PRC-10 radio motioned to Barton, who moved up the file to the Vietnamese officer and took the receiver from his hand. He talked a few moments, handed the radio back to Vinh, and waited for Ritchie and me to catch up.
“Swiggert is waiting for us, we’ll be there in ten minutes. He said if he heard any more firing he’d come up and relieve us.”
The wounded held us up as was to be expected, and Ritchie, checking his hastily applied dressings, moved from one to another. We were carrying five absolutely reformed Saigon delinquents. They were dead.
“Hey, Vinh,” Barton called. “Maybe we put out flank security?” Vinh nodded wearily and called to Hanh who had tapped three men for the job when the scrub jungle to our right suddenly burst out with fire. It was broad daylight and we made clear targets. We pitched forward, most of the VC rounds going high. Fortunately the VC on this ambush were not hard-core North Vietnamese or their first fusillade would have been disastrous.
Strewn along the trail, dead and wounded men interspersed with strikers returning a withering fire of their own, the first platoon was a distressing sight. The VC incoming fire was so intense, if inaccurate, that Ritchie couldn’t move to attend the wounds of those crying out. Vinh was lying next to Barton, Hanh was up ahead with the remnants of the point.
Barton shouted something into Vinh’s ear and then rolled over to me. “We’re going to stay down, we’ve lost too many men in this intelligence operation already,” he cried above the noise of the fire-fight. “We can hold until the second platoon comes up and flank
s them. Five minutes at the most.”
Minutes later I had fired my entire basic load, and the diminishing volume of our return fire indicated that the entire platoon was running low on ammo. To our enormous relief a sudden massive swell of fire and grenade explosions split the air to the south. The second platoon had surprised our ambushers, who no doubt thought they were about to finish us off. Almost instantly the incoming rounds that had been whining over us stopped as the VC switched direction of fire. The second platoon was driving them out of their ambush positions now and we heard the fire-fight move northward and then cease altogether as the Communists broke contact and disappeared in the jungle.
Barton stood up and took a count of our casualties. We were lucky. Only two more dead and three wounded. The second platoon began to filter in around us. They were in high spirits, having suffered no casualties and killed several Viet Cong. Swiggert and Barton helped Lieutenant Vinh regroup the two platoons into one solid section. The seven dead and twelve immobile wounded were carried in the center. Flank security was put out, and we waited only for Ritchie to finish patching up the strikers hit in the second ambush before proceeding back to camp.
While we waited, a small squad of four delinquents-turned-strikers returned, grinning broadly. None of them were wounded but there was blood on the tiger suits of two. Swiggert eyed them sourly as they displayed wet, red things to envious fellow irregulars.
“Nasty little bastards,” Swiggert growled. “Take a chance on getting themselves trapped out there to cut the hearts out of a few dead VCs.”
Ossidian was delighted with the results of the patrol. Co Binh would now be Colonel Ling’s valued and trusted agent and mistress. There was, moreover, another and unforeseen salutary byproduct of the operation: the hot-tempered miscreants of Delta Company were desperate to go out after the VC again and revenge their seven dead.
After he had been briefed on the entire operation by Lieutenant Barton, Ossidian drove into the school and told Co Binh she could report that Nam Luong had suffered a disastrous 20 dead and 35 wounded. The VC had probably exaggerated even further to their commanders, Ossidian knew, so the accounts would tally. As a result there would be no more operations going out of Nam Luong until more strikers could be recruited and the camp had recovered from this terrible blow to its morale.
On Monday night the Americans had a quiet celebration, drinking some of the bourbon I had brought with me, and talking about their wives or girl friends. It is always surprising to realize how deeply dependent on their wives and families most of these highly skilled and unusually sophisticated soldiers were. Ossidian alone had no wife or girl hoping he would safely get out of Vietnam.
Tuesday was a dull, restful day. With no operations going out, the entire team, except for the two medics who were always overworked, caught up on rest and letter writing. Tuesday evening Ossidian returned from town, excitement shining from his black eyes. Colonel Ling was coming into town Wednesday for an all-nighter with Co Binh. The tryst was set up at Mr. Hinh’s house.
The moment of fulfillment for Ossidian was at hand. The Syrian, as I understood now, lived for those occasional great intelligence coups that come so infrequently to the professional and almost never to the amateur. All else to him was merely existing.
Martell, another intelligence professional, though far better rounded as a man and a soldier, understood Ossidian perfectly and gave over to him full details of planning even though it was Martell’s entire career if anything went wrong and Vietnamese high officials found grounds for serious criticism.
The planning session ran most of Tuesday night and stirred hot debate among team members. But Ossidian, backed by Captain Martell, carried the meeting. The one thing Brandy insisted on, against Ossidian’s wishes, was the composition of a special top secret message to Major Fanshaw. As Ossidian pointed out, this meant that Major Xuan, with his spy system deeply entrenched in the American B team, would probably read the message even before Fanshaw, and send word to the local province chief and ARVN division commander who received healthy kickbacks from Mr. Hinh. The whole mission would be compromised and another agent lost.
Captain Martell and Sergeant Ossidian wrote and rewrote the message to Major Fanshaw and finally it was sent as follows:
A-2 intelligence source [A-2 was almost as reliable as a source could be, the code graduating from A-1, most reliable agent positive of information, to E-5, habitual liar unsure of information] informs us that Colonel Ling, VC commanding officers this corps area, entering province capital tomorrow night Wednesday. Request permission to capture him. Further request this information not go beyond Special Forces headquarters and detention of subject individual be left entirely to Detachment A-681. Please reply soonest. Martell.
The message went out encoded to the B team sometime after midnight and the reply came in to a nervously waiting A team at 2:00 P.M. Permission was granted with the reservation that once Ling had been apprehended he must be turned over to the province chief.
“Not so bad,” Ossidian commented. “We’ll turn him over to the province chief—when we’re ready.”
4
Mr. Hinh’s house stood at the intersection of the main street of the capital and a lesser, unlighted street. A large stone and concrete building, it was set back from the road and even though Hinh was probably the safest human being in the province, the grounds of the house were surrounded by concertina wire. The main entrance was guarded by two soldiers at all times. Thus did the ARVN division commander accommodate the province’s most important merchant and lawyer in this and many other ways.
At thirty minutes after midnight Captain Martell and Sergeant Ossidian drove up in the camp’s jeep and parked it down the main street on the far side of the intersection from the Hinh residence. They could clearly see the lights at the entrance gate and the two ARVN guards listlessly lounging around the two sentry boxes. I sat in the back seat of the jeep where I could follow the action. At the same time Martell parked his jeep, Sergeant Swiggert drove up the side street to the rear of the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding Hinh’s mansion, and parked. A few minutes later Sergeant Targar parked behind him in a closed ambulance, which he had borrowed from MAAG to transport some of his wounded out to a plane the next morning for evacuation to Saigon.
At 12:45 in the morning six black-clad carefully picked volunteers from Delta Company (“Saigon’s finest second-story men,” Swiggert had reported) slipped out of the truck Swiggert had driven. Two of them were carrying a ladder. Silently they laid it over the concertina wire and one after the other they scampered over the wire into Mr. Hinh’s back yard. Two of the figures stole around to the front of the house, hugging the shadows until they had taken up their positions behind the guards. Each within an easy leap of silencing his man, they waited in the shadows cast by the two sentry boxes.
The other four members of the task force picked a likely part of the rough stone walls of the house and began to climb toward the second story of the large square building. One by one they gained a foothold along the second-floor ledge.
Co Binh lay stiffly staring at the ceiling next to the nude body of the man she hated. Although it was contrary to Vietnamese custom she had persuaded a stimulated and unargumentative Colonel Ling that she could sleep only with plenty of fresh air and had insisted that the barred window be open enough to admit the night breeze. Ling’s mind was not on the window. Besides, for two years he had been staying at Hinh’s house whenever he had come into the capital. Wasn’t he being guarded by alert government troops?
At exactly 12:55—Co Binh was wearing a luminous-dial watch Ossidian had given her—she stirred, and despising what she had to do slowly slid the backs of her smooth legs over the colonel’s so the rear of her thighs rested above Ling’s groin. It was a friendly custom for Vietnamese girls to sleep like this with their lovers and had a sensuous effect on both partners. The colonel stirred. Knowing this was the last time she would have to give herself to the man who had ordered
the death by horrifying torture of her father, mother, brother and thousands of others, Co Binh gently moved her thighs in a massaging motion.
Ling woke up stimulated and passionate. Greedily he reached out. He twisted around, forced her thighs apart and with lust, long unappeased by anything so exquisite, brutally possessed her.
Now, as she had been coached by Ossidian from the time he first asked her to do this with the hated Viet Cong colonel, she cried out in mock throes of ecstasy, her cries becoming louder as the fervid Ling used her body with increasing ferocity. Her throaty outbursts of passion, so unusual in the usually discreet and passive well-bred Vietnamese woman, only whetted Ling’s appetite, and his animal grunts carried well beyond the open window.
Four black forms converged, quickly pulled the window open, and jumped into the room. After a few seconds of what they considered well-deserved voyeurism, they savagely clobbered Ling on the back of his neck and head with blackjacks provided by Ossidian.
Ossidian had anticipated perfectly the reaction of his little thugs as they pulled Ling off Co Binh’s naked young body. For a moment each of them almost lost his sense of the mission as he stared down lasciviously. Then they remembered Ossidian’s dire threats. They also thought of the promised week in Saigon with 5,000 piastres each to spend if the operation were a success. As Co Binh snatched the sheet around her and sat upright, temptation was quickly overcome. One of the task force remained behind to help Co Binh get out while the other three, after tying a rope around the inert Ling’s waist, lowered him to the ground below.
The two strike-force members chosen for sentry elimination watched the minute hand on their watches turn to 1:05. Then each, with a foot and a half length of soft nylon cord held at the ends, jumped his target, throwing the garrote around the guard’s neck, pulling it tight enough to shut off all sound. The guards stared up at the black-pajamaed men and knew they were dead. Three other black-clad phantoms carrying a naked man rushed through the gates. The guards did not see the familiar ambulance drive up and the three intruders with their victim jump into it even as the truck sped away.