"Look out!" I warned Riedl and as he turned to meet the charge the sinewy Chinese brought down his weapon at an oblique angle. Had it landed the blow could have sent Riedl spinning into the ravine a hundred feet below, but he ducked in time and the stock only grazed his shoulder. Even so the blow was enough to knock the gun from his hand. Sergeant Schenk uttered a savage yell as he smashed the head of a terrorist with a swinging blow, then stabbed another one with such force that not only the bayonet but also a part of the muzzle entered the wound. Lifting his foot, he kicked his adversary backward to free his bayonet, then rushed to Riedl's side. The militiaman wheeled around and lifted his rifle to ward off the coming thrust. He only managed to divert it. Schenk's blade ripped across his chest and the two went down in a tangle, barely a yard from the precipice. The diversion enabled Riedl to recover his automatic. Still stooping he shot the Chinese behind the ear. Blood, bone, and brain tissue blew across the stones in a savage spray. Sergeant Schenk rose, covering his ringing ears, dumbfounded by the proximity of the blast; his face and hands were sprinkled with blood and bits of flesh.
"Sorry, Victor," Helmut apologized, "I had no choice." From the hand of the still writhing Chinese he kicked free a short curved knife. "He was about to cut your belly open."
A tall, lean guerrilla with protruding teeth materialized in front of me. Howling with his mouth wide open, he pushed his bayonet so far forward that he lost his balance and crashed headlong into Schulze. Erich swore. He reeled, steadied himself, and swung his gun up in a savage blow. The barrel caught the terrorist a terrific wallop across the mouth. He stopped howling as a few of his teeth went down his gullet; staggering back he fell on his knees until a kick from Riedl helped him over the precipice.
The enemy was falling all over the ridge, for numerous as they were, in hand-to-hand fighting my men held the advantage of both weight and muscle power over the smaller guerrillas. A couple of our six-foot-plus comrades were obviously enjoying themselves whacking and tossing aside the enemy troops as though they were mushrooms. Indeed some of the brawny ones fought in what looked like a ring of dead or dying terrorists, heaped high. Still more Viet Minh were climbing upward on the rugged slope. Ignorant of peril and unconcerned about losses, they came flowing over the precipice, swamping the plateau like army ants and cutting a swath across the land they invade.
"Drop, everybody!" We heard a vicious yell in German from higher above. "On your belly! Down! Down!" The next instant the clatter of a machine gun erupted from the rocks and a couple of submachine guns joined in simultaneously. Dropping to the ground, I saw militiamen and Viet Minh collapsing in heaps of agonized flesh. Shredding uniforms, staggering under the impact of the heavy slugs, crying, bleeding, twisting, and falling, the enemy went down all over the plateau. Lying on a flat boulder overhead, Sergeant Schenk, Suoi, and the three ex-guerrilla nurses coolly proceeded to clear the place of the enemy, the girls sweeping the ridge and Sergeant Schenk the slope. While we were fighting for our lives with bayonets, rifle butts, and our bare fists, Victor had climbed the rocks and reloaded an MG. The magnificent four were now blazing away at the bewildered enemy.
The guerrilla reinforcements stopped; their ranks faltered and fell back on the slope. On the ridge the struggle came to a sudden and dramatic end. Enemy dead and wounded littered the plateau, but unfortunately our bullets could not distinguish between friend and foe either; a few of our comrades were still struggling with the terrorists, locked in brutal hand-to-hand brawls when the bullets from above began to pour. It was a small consolation that we had no way of knowing who had been hit by our own bullets. But the enemy was beaten. Those who survived that sudden rain of steel were now tumbling down toward the woods, slithering and crawling away to shelter. Schenk and the girls had saved the day. The guns fell silent and we rose.
"Hans, I was right," Riedl yelled. "The nurses are an asset for the battalion."
"Hey, men!" Schenk called from above, "are you all dead or asleep down there? Let them have a couple of grenades for good measure.'"
Still overawed by their unexpected deliverance, the troops now gathered themselves, sprang forward, and began to hurl grenades after the escaping enemy. Explosions shattered the silence. The MG's opened up once more; earth and stone erupted below the ridge as more and more Viet Minh curled and crumpled like broken dolls, rolling down into the ravine. Wiping the sweat from his face, Schulze glanced up and shook his fist at Suoi.
"We will talk about this shooting business of yours— just come down," he called to the girl with joking apprehension mixed with relief.
"I am not coming."
With a few powerful strides, Erich mounted the rocks, caught hold of the girl, and brought her down. "I am going to whack you good and hard, if that's what you want." ' "You wouldn't dare!"
No, Erich "wouldn't dare." He only drew her close and held her tightly. And for the first time, at least in our presence, he kissed Suoi. Though surprised for an instant, she responded; the strap of the submachine gun which she was still holding slipped from her hand and the weapon dropped with a clatter. The girls giggled. Riedl and Karl helped them down, glanced at them, then at each other, and broke into a broad grin.
"Shall we join the party?" Karl asked. "At least we won't be the only ones around here." Helmut nodded as he caught hold of Thi and before the girl could do anything about it, he kissed her long and hard. Karl was struggling with Noy for a similar favor.
Sergeant Schenk wiped his lips, turned toward Chi, who stood leaning against a boulder giggling. "You are the smallest one here and I am small too. We seem to match, don't you think so?" he asked. Chi did not understand much of the commentary but she understood what came afterwards.
"What a touching family scene," Eisner commented.
"Are you hurt?" I asked, lowering myself beside him.
"Not that I know of." He glanced at me. "Say, Hans, you're bleeding like a pig."
I touched my scalp. It was matted with blood. "It seems they put a hole in your head," Bernard joked. "We had better call the girls."
I called them. They came, holding hands with their newly acquired sweethearts—every one of them obviously very content with the turn of events.
"I cannot give you a medal but I thank you for what you did," I told them. "You were magnificent." They blushed and stood looking at each other, then at us. Noy stepped closer.
"You are wounded," she said. "Shall I look?"
I sat down on the ground and bent my head obediently. She opened her first aid kit. Eisner sent Suoi and the other girls to help Sergeant Zeisl look after the wounded. Smiling apologetically, Noy began to examine my scalp. Only then did I realize that Noy, too, was a very pretty girl with her faultless oval face, large dark eyes, and long braids neatly woven and held in place by a pair of wide orange ribbons.
"When you are through with me, you are going to change those orange ribbons for some blue ones," I told her. "They are much too conspicuous and we don't want to see your pretty head being shot at by the Viet Minh."
"I change ribbons—why?" she asked, not quite understanding the meaning of my "complicated" sentence.
"Because the terrorists can see your ribbons from far away," I explained, imitating a pair of binoculars with my hands. "The Viet Minh see your ribbons, tatatata—and Noy is dead."
She nodded, a series of quick little nods. "Oui, monsieur. I change ribbons."
"Good girl!"
"You have luck," she commented, working on my wound. "Your head was shot by a bullet. It comes little lower and you drop dead." Her way of selecting and assembling words was charming.
"Thanks for the consolation," I grinned, submitting myself to the treatment.
With deft fingers, Noy separated my matted hair and began to bathe the wound with disinfectant. The process brought tears to my eyes, which seemed to amuse my faithful companions.
"Stop grinning like a clown," I snapped at Karl, "and go look for your men. Noy won't be running away."
Sergeant Krebitz came, carrying papers. "Twenty dead and thirty-five wounded," he reported grimly, handing me the list. .......
"How many serious ones?"
"Seven, Hans. Shot through the lung, in the groin, in the abdomen."
"We are moving out in twenty minutes!"
"I know."
"How about the rest of the wounded?"
"They will be able to march any reasonable distance."
Noy finished bandaging my head. "Tomorrow I see you again," she said quietly. "Your head will be good, one week time."
We walked over to our gravely wounded comrades. One of them, Heinz Auer, a former paratrooper, had already died. The six others were barely conscious.
Although it seemed that, at least for the time being, the guerrillas had had enough, they still occupied a dense patch of forest and I knew we had to march before they could receive reinforcements, or even worse, mortars! Exposed as we were on that barren ridge we would have no chance to withstand a prolonged mortar attack.
Sergeant Zeisl came slowly toward me. He was carrying a small medical container. We all knew what it contained and for what purpose. "Shall I proceed?" Zeisl asked grimly.
I nodded. "Make it quick."
The troops began to gather. Some of them bandaged, others uninjured. No one spoke; all stood in bitter silence. Riedl kneeled down beside a wounded comrade to wipe his perspiring forehead and to shoo off the flies. Zeisl filled a syringe with a lethal concentration of morphine. Noy, who was watching the preparations, and thinking that all we wanted to do was ease the suffering, suddenly bent down for the empty vial which Sergeant Zeisl had discarded. She looked at it, then turned toward me with her eyes wide open.
"Sergeant do wrong!" she exclaimed pointing at Zeisl. "Gives them too much. The men die. He is mistaken."
"He is not mistaken, Noy," Pfirstenhammer drew her aside gently. "We cannot carry them and we cannot leave them here either. Do you understand?"
"I understand," she answered and her eyes began to fill. "You kill them!" She looked around bewildered, looking at Karl, at Eisner, at me. We all averted our eyes. Noy began to sob. "You cruel people . . . you very, very cruel people."
"Come, Noy," said Karl, placing an arm around her shoulders. "You should not look."
"You are worse than the Viet Minh," she cried, "for even they help their wounded."
"We cannot help them, Noy. You are a nurse, you should know better."
"You why not call helicopters?"
"It would take hours before the copters could come. Do you think they can live that long? Or that we can live that long? The Viet Minh will gather more men, then attack again and again."
"You are not God," she sobbed, "you cannot give or take life."
Karl led her away gently.
Sergeant Zeisl delivered the injections, replaced the needle in a small vial of alcohol, and put it away in his kit. He turned. Facing the six men on the ground, he raised his hand for a last salute.
"Attention!" I commanded. The ring of troops froze.
"Salute!"
And as Sergeant Krebitz proceeded with his gloomy
task of collecting identity tags, watches, wallets, and
pocketbooks from the men who were leaving us forever,
the troops began to hum, then sing in a low tone, the old
, German soldier's song, "Wacht am Rhein."
I read their names from the list in my hand: Heinz Auer, Rudolf Forcher, Leopold Ambichl, Josef Bauer, Josef Edler, Anton Gebauer, and twenty more. Although the Free World has yet to honor them, they had fought the enemy of all mankind for ten long years and in battlefields ten thousand miles apart. The same enemy in different uniforms, in a different disguise. They had done more to preserve freedom and civilization than many much-decorated generals and celebrated statesmen. Only they received no medals for their deeds. Not even a decent Memento mori! They were forgotten and forsaken heroes. We could not give them as much as a decent burial. We placed them in a deep crevasse and blew rocks over the makeshift tomb. A single line in German was inscribed on a jagged boulder: "Deutschland-Poland-Russland-Nord Afrika-Indochina 1939-1951, 27 comrades."
We had no time to count the enemy dead but they must have numbered several hundred. Removing the weapons, grenades, ammunition, and papers of those who had fallen on or immediately below the ridge, we descended the southern slope, still under sporadic enemy fire. But the very boulders which had sheltered the guerrillas before now provided us with cover. Keeping low so as not to silhouette ourselves against the moonlit sky, the battalion descended. Covered by the MG's of Gruppe Drei we entered the woods, and followed a path which we sighted and compass-marked from the ridge.
A few hundred yards inside the forest we passed a small clearing, but as we penetrated deeper and deeper, the forest became thicker. The trail led straight toward Muong Son, but that was precisely the place where I no longer wanted to go. The enemy seemed well informed about our destination and that concentration of Viet Minh troops below the ridge was the very last "coincidence" I was willing to digest.
We were moving deep within enemy-controlled territory and far from French fortifications or patrol routes. We could march without fearing mines or even traps; we could even use our flashlights, shielded with green plastic. My idea was to advance as far as possible, then rest for the remaining hours of the night. At dawn I intended to leave the path and to move west, penetrating still deeper into the Viet Minh "hinterland," seeking a favorable spot to vanish into the jungle. As we had often done we would cut our own trail, starting a few hundred yards from the regular path without being connected to it.
We had, in the course of months, cut several secret trails in the guerrilla-held areas. Since our routes had no connection with the existing paths, it was very difficult for the enemy to detect them. Arriving at an existing path we never continued directly opposite but fifty paces to the left, or to the right. In each section my men left a few innocent-looking objects to serve as "markers"—a casually bent bough tied with threads, a discarded tin holding a few cigarettes, an old lighter, or something similar. The disappearance of the marker would tell us immediately that strangers had come across our trails. Naturally no guerrilla would ignore a lighter or a fountain pen on a tree stump.
Having marched for over two hours without finding a suitable place for camping out, Sergeant Zeisl suggested that we should stop because of our wounded comrades. "We will have to remove two bullets tomorrow," he reminded me. (Two of the men were marching with bullets in their flesh.) "They have lost much blood and need a rest."
I decided to camp down where we were. Eisner dispatched advance and rear guards to cover the trail with machine guns. Sooner or later the enemy would catch up with us.
"Change the sentries as frequently as possible, so that everyone can have some sleep," I told Bernard.
At dawn two platoons went up and down the trail to plant mines and primed grenades triggered with boughs or trip wires. Another group advanced a mile to discard cigarette butts, empty tins, and other "evidence" of our presence far beyond the point where we intended to leave the trail. A hundred yards inside the woods the trailblazers began to cut a new path. Very cautiously, careful not to leave tracks or break branches, the troops left the trail. I was confident that the guerrillas would bypass the place. Discovering our planted evidence farther up, they could easily march headlong into our mines.
Around ten A.M. we stopped at a shallow creek to cook a meal and to attend the wounded. With the help of the girls, Sergeant Zeisl extracted the two bullets and changed the bandages of the others. I thought it was time to give the troops a well-deserved rest.
"We will camp out here until everyone is fit again," I told Eisner. For a moment he looked surprised.
"It might be a week, Hans ... or even more."
"So what?"
"You are forgetting about action Transit."
"To hell with action Transit," I growled, massaging my aching temples. My head was throbbi
ng like a steam engine and I could imagine how the two men with bullets just extracted from their flesh must have felt. "What if we blast a few wretched Viet Minh convoys? It won't stop the war. They can wait." I swept an arm about the woods. "This is a good place. We have ample shade, water, and we are far from villages and trails. The enemy has no idea where we are. A week later we may hit them like a bolt out of the clear sky." I lowered myself to the ground with my back against a tree and closed my eyes. "We need a rest, Bernard. Especially the wounded ones, including me. I am weary."
Eisner nodded. "I will give the word to build shelters," he said.
"Do that, Bernard—but tell the men not to make much noise."
We were to camp along the creek for eight days. By the afternoon we had a triple row of small huts, made of branches and leaves, on either side of the creek. Suoi and the nurses were presented with a cozy little hut, "furnished" with love and appreciation. It even had beds— thick layers of dry leaves, covered with towels, in place of mattresses—and a table. In order to insure their comfort and privacy, Sergeant Krebitz and a few men from Gruppe Drei built a bathing hut for the girls right in the creek. They had become very popular with the troops who kept referring to them only as "our angels," not only because the girls cared for the injured ones with tender zeal and were always ready to help and never complained of hardship or fatigue, but also because their very presence, their cheerfulness and ever-present smiles, seemed to uplift everyone's spirit.
Game appeared to be plentiful in the area. Carrying the silencer-equipped rifles, our Abwehrkommando left for short hunting trips every day and brought back deer and wild boar. Xuey and the girls prepared wonderful native meals and taught the men how to cook better meals for themselves. We had no facility for mess-cooking. The men had to take care of their own meals.
One evening, I think it was our third evening in our jungle camp, I sat in my hut writing my journal, when Erich appeared all of a sudden. "Hans," he addressed me in a troubled voice, "do you suppose you can perform a marriage ceremony?"
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