"What's up, Karl?" I asked, somewhat puzzled, but I joined him as he turned back toward the woods.
He replied curtly, "There are a couple of wenches down in a ravine—raped and bayoneted."
"Who did it?"
"I have the ones responsible."
Karl led me to a ravine not far from the huts. Passing some shrubs I saw Sergeant Krebitz holding a submachine gun; a few steps from where he stood sat a small group of troopers. They were already disarmed and their belts taken away. When we appeared they rose and stood in sullen silence.
"There they are!" Karl said pointing toward the nude bodies of five young women who lay in a large pool of blood. I turned to face the culprits.
"All right. Whose idea was it?"
They stood in silence. Five unshaven ragged men, gazing down at the sodden earth, fingering their buttons; none of them looked at Sergeant Krebitz and his party of guards as they began to carry away the ravished corpses. None of them looked at either me or Karl.
"Mueller!" I addressed a small, chubby trooper. "Step out!"
He stepped forward and stood at attention. "Were you the perpetrator of this outrage?" I spoke.
"I ... I ... found them, Herr Oberleutnant," he stuttered, "the girls—"
"You mean when you found them they were already dead?"
"No, Herr Oberleutnant . . . they were . . . alive," he replied, barely audible. Then he looked up and added, "They had guns ... all of them.. . ."
"Go on, Mueller!"
"So we killed them," he went on hesitantly, "we killed them just like the others ... all the others." He uttered a short nervous snort and glanced at his companions, looking for a sign of support, as he added. "We always execute the armed terrorists, don't we?"
"You raped them, Mueller!"
"What difference does it make, Herr Oberleutnant? They were to die anyway."
"Steiner!"
A second man stepped out. "Do you agree with Mueller that it does not make any difference whether you raped the girls before killing them or not?" I waited for a moment but no answer came. "Speak!"
He made a feeble gesture with his hands. "I guess it was wrong."
"You guess? Where did you serve during the war, Steiner?"
"I was a paratrooper, Herr Oberleutnant . . . Belgium, Greece, Italy . . . I've been many places and been wounded five times."
"That's meritorious ... but that's what you learned with the paratroops? Were you raping girls in Belgium too? Or in Greece, in Italy?"
Steiner protested vehemently. "Never! Herr Oberleutnant must surely know. . . ."
"I know!" I cut him short. "Because you would have been punished very severely, if that's what you wanted to say. What makes you think that it is different here in Indochina?"
'Those guerrilla bitches, Herr Oberleutnant," he ran a nervous hand over his face, "they aren't human."
"They were human enough to satisfy your lust, weren't they?" He did not answer, only stood, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue.
As a matter of fact we seldom executed woman guerrillas except for a few truly hardened Communist she-devils who had been guilty of hideous crimes. Sometime back in 1949 we had captured one Viet Minh amazon who had found immense pleasure in the torture-murder of captive Legionnaires. One of her victims we discovered in a horrible state of mutilation. The naked sergeant's arms and legs had been drawn outward by stakes and burning splinters had been slivered under his skin; finally cutting away the dying man's private parts she had forced them into his mouth. At first the sight was terrifying, then it made us sick. The wrath swelled in us so that we swore to hang every Viet Minh tigress we could lay our hands on.
"Stolz!"
A lean, lanky Saxon stepped forward. With a quick jerk of his head he tossed his long blond hair from his face and froze at attention. During the war Karl Stolz; had been a panzer driver and a much-decorated one. He had to his credit vicious engagements from Poland to Paris, from Belgrade to Athens, and from Salerno to the Po valley in Italy. He had lost twenty-six panzers and survived five direct hits. He had been wounded eleven times and spent altogether seven months in various hospitals. During the offensive in northern France, Stolz had driven his panzer into a burning town which the French had barely evacuated. In front of the shell-torn town hall he had spotted a young woman. Lying in a pool of blood and crying for help, she was a pitiful spectacle; her left leg had been torn away by a shell and she was eight months pregnant.
"Save my baby ... oh, God save my baby," she implored in broken German. "I am dying . . . please save my baby." Stolz stopped his panzer. With his gunners firing furiously and with explosions still raking the street, he rushed to the woman and applied a tourniquet to her bleeding stump. Then with the help of another trooper he dragged her to the tank and lifted her onto the rear armor. With the trooper supporting the woman he had driven his panzer to the hospital half a mile away. Not wasting time at the entrance, Stolz drove his tank through the closed oak gate, stopping a yard short of the cellar entrance. He handed the woman to a frightened surgeon and two nurses, backed out of the garden, and raced off to tackle the French artillery outside the town.
He had been severely reprimanded and reduced in rank for having withdrawn from combat without permission, but the woman and her baby boy survived the war. Stolz saw her again in 1945 after he escaped from an American camp. The Frenchwoman gave him a civilian suit, food, papers, and money enough to reach Marseilles.
Now the same man was standing in front of me, after having participated in the rape and killing of five female Viet Minh.
"Why did you do it, Stolz?" I queried him looking straight into his eyes. He opened and closed his hands in a gesture of uncertainty.
"I don't know," he replied, "maybe the heat did it ... the jungle . . . this whole Gottverdammte war. . . . Maybe it was sheer madness. ... I am ready to take the consequences."
In a way I could understand him and all the others. Ten years of constant war is not exactly what one can call the education of Samaritans. The men were tired and fed up. But raping and looting I never tolerated in our ranks. The men had to be punished. I stepped back to face the lot.
"You have committed a loathsome crime," I spoke to them. "I presume that you were banking on the fact that we have neither a court-martial nor a prison here and that we cannot lose five good fighting men by simply shooting you. You should be shot but it would be a luxury our battalion cannot afford... . Sergeant Krebitz!"
"Herr Oberleutnant."
"From now on these five men are going to serve as an advance guard for Gruppe Drei!" I said.
Krebitz looked at me, puzzled. "Gruppe Drei has no advance guard. We look for traps ourselves."
"From now on you will have an advance guard," I said, stressing my words. "For these men here are going to walk a hundred yards in front of Gruppe Drei—on every march, Krebitz!"
"But . . . they don't know much about traps and mines. ..."
"They had better start learning!"
"Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant."
"And something else. . . . Should you have a particularly dangerous job in the corning weeks, you will not call for volunteers. You already have your volunteers. We have to spare the lives of the more valuable men."
"Jawohl!"
"Dismiss!"
We marched back to the main column.
"Assemble!"
"Companies—single file! Attention!"
"En avant... marchez!" Eisner commanded
Daylight filtered away imperceptibly; the blue sky changed into gray and the breeze stilled. We stopped at a small cascade to grab a quick shower, then rested until daybreak.
I could not sleep that night. I was thinking of my family, of Lin, of the raped girls—and of what tomorrow might bring.
15. MOVE QUIETLY—KILL QUICKLY
Three days later and forty miles away Xuey and Krebitz detected another guerrilla base. It was not a permanent one but even so our raid was a success. Moving in the dead of ni
ght, we literally caught the Viet Minh napping. Posing as guerrillas, Xuey, Krebitz, and twelve men from Gruppe Drei infiltrated the camp and killed the sentries.
I moved in with fifty troops. The enemy was sound asleep in improvised hammocks stretched between the trees. Except for the low whisper of the wind-driven foliage the only sound we heard was the peaceful snoring of the terrorists. They must have come a long way. They were sleeping soundly. Dispersing into teams of three men each, we bayoneted the sleepers. With loathsome teamwork one trooper switched on his shaded flashlight, the second man thrust home into the heart. The moment the blade plunged in a third member of the team muffled cries and moans under a folded blanket which was pressed tightly against the victim's face. Sometimes a man had to be turned over or uncovered, and the executioners had to work very fast to prevent noise.
My headhunters moved with a precision born of experience, and liquidated some seventy guerrillas without causing as much as a whimper. Only seven girl Viet Minh were spared; their heads were later shaved and then we released them unhurt. The wind, the snoring and the quiet hiss of the blades; a few muffled moans and sighs—it was quite a spectacle. The groups worked like a hospital team around a surgery table, though not saving but extinguishing lives. We had no choice. In hostile territory one must move and kill like a leopard. It was a rule that had existed eons before the great Mao had come to write it all up and claim ownership.
War, whether in the desert or the jungle, is not a new invention; one may bring innovations but one may not alter the rules. A machine gunner who mows down a hundred men in a minute will seldom think of his victims. It never occurs to an artillery man that he kills. He may be working his howitzer in a peaceful meadow, or on the shore of a lake, to trigger death in a burning village many miles away. To shell or to shoot people is an impersonal affair. The executioner has no personal contact with the executed. To kill with the bayonet is not so easy. To kill with the bayonet in cold blood, one has to summon every ounce of hatred from deep within. Bitter recollections from the past, the haunting images of tormented and mutilated comrades, recalled in short flashes, give one the resolution to plunge the blade into the living body of another human being.
In all my years in uniform I have seen thousands of people die. I cannot recall the number of those I killed in combat or executed with my own hands—or killed indirectly by issuing an order to kill. Still, when the occasion arose, I had to repeat mentally, forcing myself into a state of self-hypnosis: You are trying to beat wild tigers into submission. . . . They are not human. . . . You are killing sharks, rats, bacteria. , . . Yet I doubt if I could ever have stabbed a captive tiger. I would lack the all-essential driving force—hatred. The tiger only follows the call of its nature, its instincts. The tiger never kills for pleasure. The Viet Minh kills only to spread terror and to intimidate its victims. For them I could feel no pity. I regarded the Viet Minh as the real prototypes of the Hitlerian subhumans. The most primitive Russian peasant harbored some noble features in his bearded face. At least I thought so. But the faces of those rat-like little Red gnomes in Indochina showed nothing but bestiality. Our hatred towards them knew no bounds. If we had had the means, we would have gassed them by the thousands without the slightest remorse.
Once again it was Xuey who spotted the guerrilla company as it forded the river. We split into three columns and deployed on the neighboring hills. Three hundred yards below the- hill which my group occupied, a wide trail ran between the river bank and the woods farther to the east. Obviously the trail was a major enemy route. Between the river and the woods stretched a wide patch of open bushland. We observed a number of peasants filling what appeared to be large baskets with earth. Another group was planting live shrubs in the baskets.
"They are the Dan Cong," Noy explained after observing them briefly. The Dan Cong were the labor detachment of the Viet Minh, composed of ordinary peasants compelled to work as slaves a certain cumber of days every month for the cause of "liberation."' The shrubs in the basket were a clever camouflage against air observation. Simply by moving the baskets onto the trail, the enemy could blot out the road and consequently the evidence of Viet Minh presence in the area.
Schulze, who had been watching the enemy for some time, suddenly turned toward me. "Look at that, Hans!" He handed me his field glasses excitedly. "Do you see what I see?"
"Dammit!" I swore in genuine astonishment. The scene which we observed was a most extraordinary and rather terrifying one. Down at the river, in plain sight, moved a small convoy of field howitzers. For the first time in Indochina we encountered Viet Minh artillery. I edged toward the precipice to have a better look.
Shouting and gesturing, a group of guerrillas entered the river and pulled ropes toward the opposite bank. "Look at it!" Erich exulted. "They even have a bridge there, a whole goddamned underwater bridge. We have got them dead center. This is not the shuttle service but a Viet Minh highway."
Indeed, the enemy appeared to be moving, or rather wading, across the river as if the water were only ten inches deep. They certainly had a bridge there, built to remain underwater. Otherwise the reconnaissance planes would have spotted it long ago. Hitched to teams of water buffalo, six small howitzers rolled down the grassy slope of the far bank and onto the bridge. The foremost terrorists had reached our bank and tightened the ropes on either side of the bridge to mark the way. Milling around the guns, pushing and pulling at the wheels, another Viet Minh group was assisting the animals. The enemy artillery caused considerable excitement among my troops.
"It seems that Giap is up to some big business somewhere in the not too distant future," Schulze remarked, lowering his field glasses. "I wonder where the howitzers are going?"
"I am kind of curious myself," Karl remarked.
I turned to Riedl. "Where is Xuey?"
"He went farther west with Krebitz and Gruppe Drei."
"Where in the hell farther west? There is the river!"
He shrugged. "A river won't stop Krebitz.. . .**
"Send word to Eisner. He should move farther up, closer to the bridge, but no one is to fire before we open up here."
"Understood!"
I pointed toward the forest line where the trail entered the woods. "Karl! You should deploy on either side of the trail, keeping low. Riedl will join you."
Shouldering their submachine guns, Karl and Helmut rose. "Wait a moment," Noy spoke, lifting her kit. "I am coming with you."
I pulled her back in a not very gentle manner. "I have the feeling that you are not going anywhere. You are staying right here."
"But I only—"
"Noy! You just do as I say."
She sat down.
"Where are Chi and Thi?"
"With Sergeant Zeisl, I think," Suoi replied hesitantly.
"I asked you to keep them in sight, Suoi. Zeisl won't have time to look out for them."
"I am sorry. . .."
I sent a trooper to fetch the girls.
The guns were coming across the bridge. A short, stocky guerrilla waded forward. Gesturing and hollering toward the peasants, he called to them; the peasants dropped their tools and rushed to help the guerrillas hauling the howitzers. On the other side of the river more Viet Minh emerged from the woods. Suspended from long poles which four men were carrying on their shoulders hung crates and sacks. Still others were pushing bikes laden with bags and boxes.
"A nice party," Erich commented. "The air force would love to join it. Shouldn't we call them, Hans?"
"Some other time, Erich. I want to get hold of those howitzers—undamaged."
He looked at me sharply. "The heck you want them. We cannot haul artillery pieces."
"You will be surprised. We are going to haul them right up here and prepare a reception party for some others."
"Are you planning to hold this hill?"
'This is a busy trail, Erich, with plenty of targets coming our way."
For a moment he looked startled; then he shrugged. "I guess we cou
ld camp out here," he said. "We have a good platform for the MG's, ample cover, and a good view of the river."
"Exactly!"
"Sergeant Krebitz is calling," Corporal Altreiter reported, holding the earphones for me.
"Krebitz. . . . Where the hell are you?"
"Across the river — watching the show."
"How did you get there?"
"We forded a mile upstream. No one has spotted us yet."
"How far are you from the bridge?"
"How far?" he repeated my question. "Can you see that tall peasant just moving down the trail toward the river? He is wearing a straw hat with a net hanging from it. The one with the bike . . . tin cans all over it. . . ."
I picked up my field glasses.
"Right now, he is passing a bare tree."
"I can see him."
Krebitz chuckled. "If I stretch my leg a bit I can kick him in the ass."
"Keep an eye on the group."
"How about keeping a couple of MG's on them?"
"Don't shoot until we open up here."
"Understood!"
The six howitzers were rolling along the trail and had almost reached the woods — where, if all went well, Karl and Helmut should be ready for them. A group of about fifty Viet Minh were still on the bridge; another party-was between the bridge and the forest. The rest of the enemy detachment, I thought, was covered by Gruppe Drei.
"Achtung!" I warned my gunners, who tensed; eyes focused, trigger fingers tightened, gun barrels traversed slowly from left to right, then back again as the men tested the pivots.
"Fire!"
The muffled MG's caused little noise but their effect was shattering. We carried a large number of automatic weapons and, although as the attack progressed we gradually phased out a number of guns to save ammunition, our initial assault was always delivered with everything we had. The weapons were muffled to confuse the enemy at least for a few minutes. Afterwards the mufflers had to be removed to prevent the guns from overheating.
Between the river and the woods a section of the trail ran unprotected. The enemy was exposed to our fire from all sides. Within minutes the majority of the guerrilla company lay dead or wounded in the shrubbery along the trail. With our superior position resistance was futile. The surviving terrorists bolted for the forest only to run into Karl's favorite toy—the flamethrower.
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