by Chris Lynch
In fact, if those Air Force boys do their business well enough, we could be out of a job down here.
That’s the whole point, anyway, and a very desirable outcome. The sooner the trail is eliminated as a killer supply line—and make no mistake, this trail is killing our guys in bigger and bigger numbers, from North Vietnam to South Vietnam—the sooner we win this thing altogether. So no matter who gets the job done, there will be a lot of joy to go around.
But, I have to confess, I feel a little possessive. This is my Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“You mean, our Ho Chi Minh Trail,” Lopez says, rolling my way to bump me with his shoulder. This, in turn, rolls me into Garvine, who shoves me back toward Lopez.
The two of them are flanking me as we lie under brush at a big bend in the trail. They have their M16s set up on tripods, while I am arranged roughly the same with my camera and telephoto lens. The difference is, I get to shoot at will, while they’re under strict orders to do no such thing without Col. Macias’s direct consent.
I’ve gotten some good bird pictures, and one of a snake the size of a javelin squiggling confidently right down the middle of the trail. The Meo guys in the team were dying to kill it so they could eat it. They even made hungry-hungry noises that sounded kind of demented under the circumstances. The boss refused to let them shoot anyway, fortunately.
This is our third straight day watching this exact spot, without so much as a breeze to stir the trees. It feels stale, in every way, except for the polite-but-insistent rain that’s been washing over us all day like a fog. It could just as easily be coming up from the ground beneath us as from the sky above. More likely it’s been stored in the canopy from last week’s rain and is just now coming out to play.
We haven’t heard any bombing for a week, and we are all thinking the same thing—that the trail is out of business and maybe so are we.
“Guess we’ll be back in uniform,” Garvine says.
“No,” I protest. “That can’t happen.”
“Relax, Bug,” Lopez says. “There are loads of Special Forces in Vietnam already, and more coming all the time. There’s gonna be plenty for you to do, no matter what happens here.”
But it will not be like here. Nothing is like here.
Working in Laos is called “Over the Fence,” and for good reason. We’re beyond most of the world’s reach here, and most of the world’s knowledge. We are the secrets in this place, and this is where my own personal secret self lives. Here is where I became Bug, the Shutterbug of Death. Here is where I thrive, where I fit, where we practically make the rules as we go, and we’re great at it.
I like being completely off anybody’s radar. I like being the watcher, and not the watched, for a change.
“Request denied,” I say calmly, spying through my telephoto the brilliant green shoot of a new tree rising up out of the rotting trunk of an old fallen one. I snap its picture.
“Yeah, well, you might not be exactly regular Army, Bug,” Garvine says, and I can feel him looking at me, rather than over the sight of his weapon, “but you still can’t answer denied when they request.”
I pause long enough to take four or five more pictures of nothing much, just to register my displeasure with the discussion.
“We’ll just have to see about—”
Suddenly the jungle surges to something like life. It’s not a great deal of noise, but there’s enough hum and grumble to stir a half-dozen birds into crisscrossing flight between the trees and away. And enough to get the entire eight-man team to lock simultaneously on to that bend in the trail thirty yards down.
First to appear is a truck. It’s barely a military machine, more like a khaki-colored pickup truck. There are unmistakable black-clad fighters from the North draped all over and inside the vehicle, followed by another just like it.
My camera is clicking away while the M16s and M79 grenade launchers remain poised but silent.
“Hold fire,” Macias hisses down the line.
Next to me, Lopez and Garvine both growl like chained dogs.
This is recon. Sometimes it feels like a kind of kid-in-a-candy-store torture. Lots to see, but we’re not allowed a single bite. This is all we get to do on reconnaissance missions. We are to gather intelligence, bring it back to the big powwow with all the other teams. And then we know.
And then, we act.
Col. Macias climbs over Garvine and wedges into the space between us. As I focus the camera on what is materializing on the trail, he whispers at me, all breath, no voice.
“Ghosts,” he says.
I take my eye off the viewfinder to turn my head his way and he stops me, short and painfully, with a hard lancing index finger to my cheek. I return to finding the view.
“Keep looking, Dan. And keep shooting. Those are ghosts you are photographing. Not every day a guy gets to take pictures of ghosts, but that’s what you’re doing. A parade of ghosts, marching helpfully past your camera on their way to oblivion. First you shoot ’em, then eventually we all shoot ’em.”
I shoot ’em. I aim and I shoot, while Col. Macias is giving me the shivers at the same time.
Right now, I don’t even mind. My weapons are strapped to my sides, and my shutter bugs away.
Col. Macias rolls over Garvine to get back with the rest of the team, the Meo tribesmen who we rely on heavily for both local knowledge and tenacity, but who the boss refuses to completely trust enough to leave them alone for long.
Bombing alone is never gonna knock the Ho Chi Minh Trail warriors out of the game. That’s why we remain open for business. These ghosts still skulking along the trail are all the evidence we need.
The trucks are followed by dozens more fighters on foot and bicycle. Then dozens more pulling rickshaws loaded down with guns and ammo, most likely.
The road is looking sloppy already, and I have to admire the perseverance of these guys slogging through that stuff all the time. Admire them, but don’t pity them. They are ghosts, or soon will be, and they deserve—
“Well, look at that,” Garvine says, pointing to a stooped gray shape as it lumbers peacefully around the bend. Looks like the Vietcong have some elephants of their own. “That is a very good idea. That thing can haul supplies for a whole battalion, and the mud don’t bother him one bit.”
“Boy, I’m gonna shoot that,” Lopez hisses.
All I can do is stare, as the big beauty stays in line like he’s just one more vehicle of war, only gorgeous.
“No shooting, Gust,” I say, like I own the whole joint.
“Maybe not today …” he says.
And I don’t think he’s messing with me.
“Maybe not any day,” I say.
“Who’s gonna stop me, Bug? You?”
I squeeze off one after another after another frame of the beauteous beast. It’s like I’m a fashion photographer and he’s Sophia Loren.
“Gust, if I catch you harming one straw on his great patchy head, I’ll slap you all over Southeast Asia.”
He buries a snort of a laugh in the crook of his arm.
“You are very, very weird, Bug,” Garvine suggests.
“I don’t care,” I say.
* * *
Even if I didn’t care, I could easily understand why they might think I was weird. Killing is part of the deal. It’s a very big part, as a matter of fact, and has been all along. Nobody winds up in special ops thinking that they will never have to kill.
But mostly that means killing people. Human people. Human people who in most cases are available for killing because they are part of some operation not unlike the one I’m part of, and so they understand the deal, too. And—and this is the real thing of the thing, I think—they are human people who are ready, willing, and able to kill me before I can kill them. Not only willing to be killing, but probably excited to do it. That’s what we were told over and over again in training, and that is central to all the decision-making we do.
Elephants are different, though. You can te
ll with one look into their big smart faces that they are different. Too animal to be human, of course, but too human to be animal. And too innocent to be guilty. As far as I can tell, you have to be some kind of animal not to see that.
Apparently, some of my best friends are animals.
“When I get mine,” my friend Garvine says from his bunk as we listen to the hard rain pound the roof of our hooch, “first thing I’m gonna do is cut off one of them big ears and make it into a kind of safari rain hat. I have never seen anything like the kind of rain they get around here, and no matter how bad it gets it doesn’t seem to bother them elephants not one little bit. They don’t even blink at it. I want some of that.”
“Cool,” Lopez says, talking to Garvine but staring over at me. “Since he’s most likely gonna have two ears, you can make me a hat from the other. Fold ’em and stitch ’em up just like a couple of rawhide baseball gloves, right?”
“Right,” Garvine says. “Exactly. Gonna be real nice, too, the way I do ’em. Last forever, protect you from any and all elements. People will kill to get their hands on my designer headgear. I just might stay here and go into business when my enlistment is up.”
“That sounds like a great idea, man,” Lopez says. “Bug, doesn’t that sound like a great idea?”
He knows exactly what kind of an idea that doesn’t sound like to me.
“One of the elements you get protected from better be the force of my boots, because if I ever see either one of you guys wearing any such thing, I’m gonna kick your head in.”
My roommates could not possibly find this funnier than they are finding it right now, and the sound of their laughter is more oppressive than the relentless rain.
* * *
Macias is right about the ghosts.
As Operation Barrel Roll rolls southward, it rolls into Operation Steel Tiger, and we roll with it. We’re camped out almost daily in one crook or another of the seemingly endless and magical Ho Chi Minh Trail. We observe such a steady flow, and such a varied array, of manpower-and-supply convoys that it could pass for one great big military parade like they have in Moscow. It’s almost as if they want us to see what they’re doing, or at any rate that they don’t care whether we see them or not, because they don’t believe we can do anything about it.
They’re wrong about that last part anyway. We gather so much statistical, logistical, photographic intelligence about what’s going down that trail that our boys farther down the road have plenty of time to plan welcome parties for when the ghosts in my photos reappear on the Vietnamese side of the border.
Because that’s the only side of the border we’re supposed to be working.
But, of course, it’s the only side the North Vietnamese are supposed to be working, too.
Sometimes we just can’t wait for them to arrive at the playing field, so we bring the game to them.
“That is correct,” Col. Macias says, cool but urgent, into the heavy radio carried on the back of his Meo radioman. “An entire company of NVA regulars, fully loaded down with large-caliber truck-mounted Soviet antiaircraft artillery.”
The convoy is making an unusually loud racket as it trundles past with all that firepower. The colonel could be talking a lot louder and still not be heard. The radio crackles with the same urgency Macias had in his own voice. Then he is on again, reading out our coordinates as he calls in an air strike on the trail for the first time on any of our patrols. This is serious business. I shoot madly with my camera as all the guys around me start setting up for action. Rifles and machine guns are shifted for mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Our first objective is to obliterate those deadly AA guns. It’s clear that, unlike what has come before, letting this parade pass unmolested is not going to be acceptable.
With a combination of hand gestures and short sharp grunts, Macias has us coordinated, fanned out into a semicircle on our ridge maybe two hundred meters above the trail. Each of us is settled into a notch or crevice, so that we are distributed on an unsteady line like the pattern on a heart monitor. I am still shooting photos reflexively when Col. Macias smacks the long lens down into the dirt and jams an M79 grenade launcher into my hands.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” Lopez says with true excitement in his voice.
I swear I can smell it, that excitement, that frothy feeling that we’re all getting at once. It’s a kind of body odor, but one not quite like anything else I have ever smelled. It contains strains of sweat and sour, like somebody’s just puked and wet his pants, but also better stuff like boiling potatoes and bacon and motor oil.
“Me too,” I say, even though I wasn’t aware until this second that I had in fact been waiting for this.
Garvine starts to say something, but only gets as far as, “Watch—” before the colonel gives the word to open fire.
And suddenly the world is just that, one big burning open fire.
My M79 barks like the devil’s dog as I fire straight down at the lead vehicle towing the big gun. The right side of my head crackles with the impact but all that matters is the impact I witness below. The grenade slams straight into the driver, catching him at the shoulder and exploding before the impact can even blast him off the wheel. The engine compartment erupts in flame as the driver’s head pops straight up into the air before coming back down into the barbecue.
The convoy is stopped dead, and as I reload I hear walls of heavy fire on either side of me. I look up in time to see another grenade take out the antiaircraft gun behind the truck I just whacked. Several more shells pound the ground and the trees all around the convoy, and we frantically go about reloading before any of these guys can get away.
Except, they don’t appear to be going anywhere.
Zzzzzzziiipp—boom! A missile with my name on it screams at me all the way up the slope, skewing upward like a wild pitch just before nailing me. I can feel the back draft as it screams into a tree about thirty feet above my head.
“Look out!” Col. Macias says, tackling me, thumping his shoulder into my left side hard enough that I slam into Lopez, who shoots off a mortar round about ninety degrees to the right of target. As the three of us tumble nearly off the ledge and down the steep embankment, the sound of close thunder right behind us matches all the firepower we have mustered so far. I glance back in time to see the rocket-like banyan tree tobogganing top-first toward the trail at break-a-whole-bunch-of-necks speed, snapping branches off all the way.
We scramble back into position as the banyan hurtles into the trail, making as much thunder and doing as much damage as we have managed so far. For several long seconds things go quiet. We remain poised for any movement, but there’s nothing.
Could it be possible that that old tree did our job for us, just like that? And since the North Vietnamese were the ones who blasted the tree down in the first place, have we actually done anything at all?
Our answers come fast and loud, and those answers are no and no.
A barrage of small- and medium- caliber gunfire washes up toward us from the trail. Every living fighter down there seems to be taking cover in the great old tree that just tried to obliterate them. I take up my M16 and start returning fire into that big nest of dangerous squirrels. And all this time I’m thinking something that I’ve thought again and again since this whole thing started: The Vietcong has got to be the most determined and resourceful fighting force in history. There seems to be nothing you can throw at them that they don’t catch and then somehow turn around in their favor.
Now that we can’t see them, it almost feels like there are more Vietcong soldiers than when we could. We pour everything we have down into that tree, and into the several vehicles still visible on the road behind it. We are spraying every gulp of air with rifle and machine gun fire, launching mortar rounds and grenades as if we’re pulling them straight off an endless assembly line—which we know surely is not the case and surely cannot go on.
But what choice do we have?
They are getting
the dirty job done on us. The perches we nestled into so securely just a short time ago now feel totally exposed and pathetic. Bullets are whistling just over our heads and thumping into the earth below us. I hear a sharp “Ufff,” followed by a groany growl from Garvine, and I know he’s been hit. He keeps firing, though.
The big banyan has caught fire in a couple of places, but the firefight doesn’t alter at all.
There is a huge flash, then a schwooop as a rocket scorches above us and thuds into the far end of our line. There are screams as the explosion knocks two of our Meo guys into the air and then sends them crash-banging down the hill straight into the enemy position as bloody mangled heaps. I watch and hope that the poor guys are as dead as they look, because every bump of the way down they are taking round after round of enemy fire.
The next new sound we hear is mechanical. I get briefly excited that it’s the air strike the colonel called in at least two lifetimes ago.
It isn’t. It is, in fact, practically the opposite.
At least another full enemy artillery company, possibly two, rounds the bend to catch up with the others. They’re already in full-fire mode when we make visual contact, and this could not have been any better orchestrated for them if it had been a planned ambush.
We’re firing all over the place now, into the tree that keeps firing back, over to the new arrivals who look fresh and act even fresher, as if they could do this all day.
For once, our discipline isn’t doing us a lick of good. We always had that going for us, that and complete confidence, and that was what made us special. Now what?
“It never occurred to me …” Lopez says while quickly reloading and opening fire again.
He doesn’t finish what he was going to say. The pressure of the odds, the concentration, the accumulating fear, kills the ability to talk anymore.
But he doesn’t need to finish.
That we could lose. It never occurred to him that we could lose. I know that because it never occurred to me, either.