Devil's Guard

by George R. Elford

  One after another the guerrillas surfaced—dazed, shocked, exhausted, unable to swim the corridor of death. A few of them tried to crawl ashore, others just stood in the shallow water dumbfounded or blinded, until the bullets spun them back into their murky graves.

  Suddenly there were no more guerrillas in sight. The river flowed peacefully as if nothing had happened.

  When the smoke cleared, Sergeant Krebitz surveyed the tunnels, altogether two hundred yards long. It was a well-built complex with several large chambers for stores and sleeping quarters. Krebitz counted three hundred bunks.

  Three of the chambers were loaded to capacity with weapons and ammunition. Sergeant Krebitz selected what we could use, then the tunnels were blown up . with delayed-action charges. The explosion tore a thirty-foot-wide and twenty-foot-deep trench across the village; the ensuing air pressure flattened every hut within a radius of five hundred steps in either direction.

  None of the villagers had been hurt, except by the sad fact that they had no village to return to, but, alas, c'est la guerre! If one plays with fire, one can burn oneself.

  We buried Karl Pfirstenhammer on a hill and placed a heavy boulder over his improvised grave. I sat there for a long time with Noy, telling her of my meeting with Karl on the Danube in 1945; the wine we drank, the fried fish we ate, his clay pipe . . . his little sister Erika, who was now a young lady, studying to become a doctor. In my kit I had Karl's wallet with her picture, and it was my gloomy task to write her a letter—the last letter she would receive from Indochina.

  Sergeant Krebitz erected a small wooden cross. On it we nailed Karl's French beret and his Wehrmacht belt inscribed: "Gott Mit Uns"—"God Be with Us"—that he always wore.

  We stood in attention, then sang in a low tune:

  Heil dir im Siegeskrant, Heil dir im Siegeskranz.. ...

  A last salute—then tears were wiped away and guns flung over the shoulders. Forward!

  17. THE RED HIGHWAY (OPERATION "DELUGE")

  The battalion was camped for the fifth day, but the downpour did not seem to lessen. It was raining without a break; the hours of daylight shortened and deep in the jungle between the thickly forested hills the hours of darkness stretched to almost eleven hours. A wicked wind blew from the southeast, tearing at our flimsy lean-to shelters and driving the heavy drops through our fatigues and underwear.

  Cooking was out of question and our tobacco turned into a soggy mess that could not be lit. Since the rain started our diet had consisted of dried fish, biscuits, and vitamin pills. The only fire which we were able to light was burning inside a shallow crevice, barely large enough to accommodate the girls. There we prepared boiled sweet potatoes, rice with curried fish, and occasionally a cup of tea for the girls and for Xuey, who was down with fever and abdominal pain.

  Sergeant Zeisl suspected appendicitis, a condition which in the circumstances was a death sentence. Our faithful little Indochinese companion knew it too and he accepted the inevitable with a faint ironic smile saying: "We all have to go one day. Just let me go without much pain." I sat beside him for a long time under the tarpaulin sheet which the men had rigged up between the trees to make a primitive tent.

  "You have reached your objective," Xuey said, giving my hand a feeble squeeze, "but you will have to be very careful from now on. A hundred times more careful than ever before. Those down there are professionals." He turned his face slightly toward the steaming valley. "They overlook nothing." Even now he only thought of our welfare. Then he asked for some sleeping pills and Zeisl obliged.

  The densely wooded plateau where we had established ourselves, for better or worse, was the only place where the streams, now swollen to rivers, wouldn't flood us. Throughout the night we heard the crashings of uprooted trees and the distant thud of tumbling rocks and earth. During the day, the entire world seemed to be moving downward, along the slopes, into the valley.

  Barely two miles away, in a narrow valley, was an important terrorist supply base, "a king's ransom" as Schulze put it. A twelve-foot-wide jungle road ran through the enemy camp and into it entered a network of smaller paths. We had arrived at the long-sought "Red Highway," the main terrorist supply route between China and the southern provinces. No troops of the Foreign Legion had ever before come closer to it than a hundred kilometers. Its existence had been suspected but never proven. Only airplanes were able to penetrate so far into the Communist rear; they had done so on many occasions but had observed nothing but unbroken jungles. Like all the important Viet Minh establishments in the hills, the Red Highway was a masterpiece of camouflage. It had been cut through the jungle without allowing as much as ten yards of it to be exposed to the skies. At a few less densely wooded sections, hundreds of trees had been roped together and drawn closer to one another with the aid of pulley-like contraptions. Then they had been fastened in such a way that their crowns intertwined over the road. In the open ravines networks of strong wire had been stretched between the slopes to support creepers, which had soon blotted out the road beneath.

  The jungle road included permanent bridges, twelve to fifteen feet wide, most of them constructed a few inches underwater to fool aerial observation. Difficult or swampy sections of the road had been "paved" either with stones or with logs leveled with gravel. Along the Red Highway were checkpoints where guerrilla MP's controlled transport or troop movements. Rest-houses and service stations where carts and bicycles could be repaired also were located on that incredible network of trails. Its very existence was ridiculed by some leading French statesmen. It was simply too incredible to believe. Yet it was there!

  Here the enemy was no longer taking chances. While trying to approach the camp to have a better look, Xuey and Sergeant Krebitz had had to stop short of concealed machine gun positions at eight different points. The emplacements were not easily observable, though they were not hastily dug foxholes but what one may rightly call permanent fortifications. Small blockhouses, constructed of heavy logs, covered with earth in which shrubs had then been planted, commanded all the approaches to the Viet Minh base. Along the relatively short section of the jungle road which Xuey had been able to investigate, he spotted two Viet Minh observation platforms. Rigged up high on the hilltop trees, the platforms offered a perfect view of the neighborhood. The guerrilla lookouts could spot not only airplanes but also any overland intruders who imprudently proceeded across the nearby ridges.

  The base must have been only one of many similar bases established along the Red Highway. It included permanent huts where the arriving troops or coolies could rest for a while before resuming their long walk south.

  Despite the difficult approach, Krebitz had identified nine storage shelters which contained hundreds of bulky bales, jute bags, and wooden crates. He had also observed brisk traffic in the area. Viet Minh units arrived or departed at about six-hour intervals, even at nighttime. Among them were armed troops and coolies who drove heavily laden bullock carts or pushed bikes. Still others transported crates suspended from long poles shouldered by four or six men.

  Xuey had wanted to infiltrate the base alone. There were so many strangers in and about the place that he thought he would be in no danger while mingling with the enemy. Then the downpour had started and Xuey had come down with fever and the pain in his abdomen.

  Sergeant Zeisl was sure of his diagnosis of appendicitis. "I don't think I am mistaken," he said.

  "What are his chances?" Schulze wanted to know, much depressed by the unexpected calamity.

  Zeisl shook his head slowly. "Without an operation— none at all, Erich. The antibiotic will slow down the infection but Xuey should be on the operating table very soon."

  "How soon?"

  "Within twenty-four hours at the most."

  Xuey dozed off into a restless sleep and we huddled under the narrow burlap, trying to decide what to do.

  "We are certainly having it all right," Riedl fumed. "And it had to happen right now. . . . What do you want to do about Xuey, Hans?" He w
as looking at me as though fearing my answer in advance.

  "What do you want me to do, Helmut?" I asked him in turn.

  He flicked away his cigarette butt and ran a nervous hand through his dripping hair. "We just can't watch the poor devil die."

  "We should call for a copter," Schulze suggested.

  "Call a copter?" Sergeant Krebitz chuckled. "Sharks might fly in this downpour but nothing on wings, Erich."

  "Copters have no wings," he sulked. "Xuey is too good a buddy to let him die like this."

  "Besides we might need him in the future," Riedl added gloomily.

  I was already considering that possibility. Whether the army would be willing to risk craft and crew on such a mission remained to be seen. Besides could the pilot find us in the pouring rain with visibility almost zero?

  "We are very close to the enemy base. They will hear the copter coming in," Krebitz remarked.

  "No, not in this rain," Erich insisted. "You wouldn't hear a thirty-two-centimeter shell exploding two hundred yards from here."

  "The rain might stop at any time."

  "We could move Xuey a few miles from here and guide the copter to a safer place."

  'That we might try," Krebitz agreed.

  "If they will send a copter at all," I remarked.

  "Colonel Houssong will send one," said Riedl. "He would never let us down."

  I turned to Corporal Altreiter. "Will the radio work, Horst?"

  He shrugged. "One can always try."

  "Try it then____"

  And so we decided to do something for Xuey that we had seldom done for our own kind....

  Twenty minutes later our signals were answered and my message went through. A copter was to take off within an hour and we could expect it to arrive in three hours. I chose to transport Xuey to a barren ridge four miles away. It was a devilish undertaking in the pouring rain. The stretcher bearers had to ford swollen streams and climb slippery elevations where every instant landslides or tumbling trees threatened to wipe out the group. Eight men of Gruppe Drei volunteered for the perilous trip, and they had to start immediately if they were to reach the ridge before dark.

  We agreed to transmit a steady radio beam which the copter could "ride" to within a few miles of our camp, then Sergeant Krebitz was to take over with walkie-talkies.

  I wrote a short but informative report to Colonel Houssong, in German. The colonel did not understand German, but neither did the Viet Minh. If my report, written in French, fell into enemy hands the consequences would be immediate. The German text would always provide us with time to do whatever there was to be done. The guerrilla commanders had no immediate means of learning the implications of a message in German.

  In this respect, however, 1 underestimated the Viet Minh. A few months later we learned that for over six months three German nationals from the Soviet Zone had been attached to the Viet Minh High Command. Their principal task was to keep track of our communications and to evaluate our activities in general. The three German Communists had often been to the field, sometimes quite close to places which we had actually attacked and badly mauled. Knowing us well, the Viet Minh had been extremely careful not to allow them into any dangerous areas but since our movements were, in most cases, unknown to the enemy, their precautionary measures had been quite useless. It was only sheer luck that prevented our treacherous "compatriots" from falling into our hands on two occasions. From the interrogation of prisoners we learned that we had missed by only three miles the turncoat camp at Muong Bo. On another occasion, they had been among the thirty-four survivors who escaped Pfirstenhammer's flamethrower attack on a small Viet Minh camp south of Cao Bang, an action in which over a hundred terrorists had perished. It would have given us immense pleasure to entertain those envoys of Walter Ulbricht. Erich nicknamed them "the ratpack of Pan-kow" and we loathed them even more than we hated the Viet Minh.

  We had bad luck with our Communist counterparts but we did manage to capture a Soviet instructor in 1950; according to his papers he was Major Senganov. His interrogation led to the capture of one more Russian "adviser" and two high-ranking Chinese officers in a tunnel system two miles away. After questioning, the Chinese were shot out of hand. I was about to call for a copter to ferry our illustrious Russian guests back to Hanoi when Erich quietly remarked that we should not place Colonel Houssong and his superiors in an impossible position.

  "Not even Paris," he reasoned, "can hold the Ivans and at a word from Stalin they will be given a first-class air ticket back to Moscow." Indeed, with the Berlin blockade still fresh in the postwar history, the incident could easily trigger another crisis with unforeseen consequences. "The moment the French High Command knows about the Russians, their hands will be bound by Paris and in the end we are going to pay for it," he explained. I accepted his reasoning.

  We executed the Russians in a cave which Sergeant Krebitz then blasted shut. Seven months later, when we passed the place again, the fallen boulders and earth were already overgrown with vegetation, erasing all traces of the secret tomb. When told of the incident, Colonel Houssong's only comment was a relieved "Dieu merci."

  "You cannot imagine what would have happened if you had brought them in," he said and requested us to erase the place from our maps—even the footpath that led to the one-time cave.

  The men of Gruppe Drei improvised a stretcher and lay the dozing Xuey on it. Schulze covered him with a burlap, which he then fastened to the primitive contraption with a couple of belts. "The sedative will keep him asleep for a while," Sergeant ZeisI told me. "Let's hope he gets to Hanoi all right."

  We shook hands with Sergeant Krebitz. "The hills are going to be slippery. Take care!"

  "Don't worry," he replied, wiping the rain from his face. "If we cannot climb, we are going to swim them. There is enough water in the hills to float a raft between the peaks."

  The party departed and we sank back under the burlap. Suoi and the girls prepared some biscuits with jam. Noy poured five cups of hot tea—a very tempting delicacy which we gently declined to accept.

  "You drink it," Schulze urged the girls, nodding toward a dozen of our comrades who were sitting miserably soaked beneath the dripping trees. We never accepted a privilege that was denied to our comrades. It was rule number one of our jungle code of companionship.

  "So much for Xuey's reconnaissance trip," Riedl remarked quietly, as Sergeant Krebitz and his small group disappeared into the woods. I, too, was thinking of our fat prize so temptingly close yet now so far out of reach.

  Then all of a sudden Noy stood before me. "I go there, Commander," she announced resolutely. "I can do what Xuey wanted to do. . . . See camp. Thi comes with me."

  "I come," Thi nodded. The two must have discussed the matter already.

  Riedl protested. "That's ridiculous, Hans," he began, but lie stopped short of saying anything else. He, too, realized the importance of Noy's mission. We desperately needed information. Someone had to go and only a native Indochinese could penetrate the base.

  "There are many, many women in the camp," Noy insisted. "They come and go."

  "Nobody will know us not belong there," Thi added in her broken French. "We see camp and come back."

  "What do you think of it, Erich?" I asked Schulze.

  "I think it is quite feasible."

  I turned to Noy and reached for her hand. "Do you think you will be all right, Noy?"

  "Jawohl, Commander," she replied in German and smiled. "We go there, see all and come back. Then you can attack."

  "It is very important for us that you do come back, Noy. Not only because of the information you might bring back but because we all like you very much and we think you belong to the battalion."

  She blushed slightly, lowered her head, and said quietly, "I am doing it for Karl." She looked up and smiled. "Don't worry."

  "If you overstay, I shall go and bring you back myself," Riedl stated. "Be careful."

  Noy and Thi had been away for three days, and we c
ould do nothing but hope for the best and wait for their return. The day after their departure the rain finally stopped but the sky remained overcast, and we had to keep our sodden clothes on until they dried from our own body heat. Sergeant Krebitz and his party returned muddy to the ears and dead tired—but also successful. Xuey was safely on his way to Hanoi. Schulze, who somehow always managed to keep his tobacco dry, lit a cigarette for Krebitz. "How was your trip?"

  "Merde!" Krebitz grunted, puffing contentedly. "Twice we slipped into a river, performed a ski slalom with stretcher, provisions, and all down a hundred-foot slope, missed a falling boulder by inches, and almost guided the copter into a cliff. The pilot finally managed to land the thing with its left gear hanging over a precipice. The crew dumped some crates, we pushed the stretcher through the hatch; a guy grabbed your report and off they went. And just as well, because half a minute later the whole precipice began to crumble. I guess the vibration had done it. The whole works went to hell, and we barely managed to jump clear."

  "A magnificent venture," Schulze grinned; reaching into his rucksack he withdrew a canteen. "You deserve an extra rum, Rudolf."

  "You should see what's in the crates big daddy sent us." Krebitz gulped some rum, wiped the canteen, and handed it over to one of his troopers. 'Toss it around and don't be shy—it's on the house."

  Colonel Houssong had been thoughtful enough to send us everything we were short of. The crates contained, among other items, tea, coffee, cigarettes, tobacco, jam, insect repellent, saccharin, matches, drugs, and letters. Among them were two for me, from my parents and from Lin. There is nothing more heartening than to receive*let-ters in the jungle—"a hundred miles beyond God's back," as Karl used to say. Letters from Europe, from people who lived (incredibly enough) in nice homes with beds, electric light, and bathrooms.

  "Yesterday we spent a magnificent day at Bexhill-on-the-Sea," Lin wrote. "My uncle has a small plot and a trailer there. After lunch we went to the movies and saw a terrific French picture with Yves Montand, 'The Wages of Fear'; in the evening we had a garden party with barbecue. I truly hope you will visit us here one day... ."