by Doug Houser
KC listened to the rep’s response and then he said, “All right, I’ll expect to see four padded vests here by Friday. When they arrive, I’ll call your boss and tell him how pleased I am with your customer service. I’ll talk with you soon, then.” KC hung up the phone, temporarily satisfied.
No sooner had KC clicked his computer keyboard to begin recording a brief summary of the conversation and the agreement he’d made with the vest manufacturer, the phone rang again. He picked it up and spoke in a much calmer tone, “KC here, may I help you?”
Lieutenant Stone was on the line and in what seemed to KC to be a mixture of joviality and concern, said, “KC, what’s up?”
“Long days here. How about you?”
“Yeah, same thing here, too. Just seems to go with the job.” Then, Lieutenant Stone quickly changed subjects and asked, “Are you available around six tomorrow morning?”
“Sure, what do you have in mind?”
“How about if I come to your office. I’ve got something I want to run by you.”
“Ok, I’ll see you here at six or so. Bye.”
Promptly at six A.M., Lieutenant Stone entered KC’s office. They shook hands, exchanged greetings and sat down in the two chairs facing KC’s desk. KC began, “What’s important enough to bring you here, and at this hour?”
“Well, I’ve thought quite a bit about the conversation we had at lunch a couple of weeks ago. The longer I thought, the more concerns I conjured up. It just seemed that there would be too many opportunities for someone to get into a lot of trouble. Including me. So, I was about to call you and tell you that I didn’t think I could help. Then Lou Marino called me. Remember him?”
KC nodded.
“Well, he’s now Police Chief in a southern college town. At first, I thought he mostly wanted to just catch up and laugh about old times, but he kind of meandered into telling me about a case they’d been working on for a while. He said it was extremely frustrating insofar as they had an eyewitness to a hate crime who was afraid to talk to the police. He said they’d tried everything they could think of to win this witness’s confidence, but nothing worked. He asked me if I had time to listen to the story and see if I had any ideas. I said, sure, tell me about it. So he did. When he finished, I thought about it for a while, made a few suggestions, all of which they’d already thought of, tried and found that they didn’t work. So, I thought, maybe if I ran it by you, we could come up with something. Got time to hear the story?”
“Sure. Now you have me intrigued.”
Lieutenant Stone began to tell the story that had been told to him by Lou Marino. “The story begins with a church that’s located in the most well-to-do neighborhood in the town. The church is situated near the entrance to a private country club. The membership of the country club and the congregation of the church are actually many of the same people and all are wealthy and white. The congregation has never had any non-white members and that’s how they want it to remain. One Sunday, a very nicely dressed young black girl attended the morning church service, by herself, choosing to sit in an empty pew in the back row. This caused quite a fuss and one of the church ladies approached the girl after the service and suggested that she might be more comfortable at another church.”
KC just shook his head in disgust.
Stone continued. “It turns out that this girl’s mother, Jasmine Williams, is a thirty-six-year-old single mom who works as cook and housekeeper for a wealthy woman who lives about a half mile from the church. Jasmine has a twelve-year-old son, Marcus, and this fourteen-year old daughter, Keisha. The three of them live in the guest quarters, which is a small cottage, behind the main house where Jasmine works. The black section of town is about five miles away, on the other side of the university, which is in the center of town. Keisha likes to attend church and this particular church is within walking distance. She never gave the church lady’s “comfortable” comments much thought and continued for several more weeks to go to Sunday morning church services. After some more time passed, she began going to the Sunday evening service too. After the evening services, her brother, Marcus, would meet Keisha outside the church to walk her home. On the third week that Keisha attended evening service, while she and her brother were walking home, a car pulled to the curb a few feet in front of them. A man got out, approached them and threw what turned out to be sulfuric acid in Keisha’s face. He didn’t say anything, just walked back to the passenger side of the car, got in and they drove away.”
KC frowned, then looked at FlintStone. “So Marcus is the eye witness who’s afraid to talk to the police. How’s Keisha doing?”
“Yes, he is. Keisha’s doctor thinks there’s a good chance that he can save the vision in her left eye. He doesn’t feel quite so good about the right one.”
“Do we know anyone there in the medical field?”
“No, but Lou does. He says one of the top eye doctors in the country is affiliated with the University Medical Center. That’s where Keisha is and he’s her attending physician.”
“So, even if we could get someone to go there to provide a second opinion, it probably wouldn’t make any difference. Is that what Lou thinks?”
“We didn’t talk specifically about getting a second opinion, but from what Lou said, I don’t think we can help her, medically. Lou is confident that she’s receiving the best care available. Apparently, Marcus is a pretty savvy kid. He told his mom that as soon as Keisha started screaming that she couldn’t see, somehow, he found a garden hose and began flushing her eyes out. He said the hardest part was to get Keisha to hold her eyelids open. It seems that Marcus had learned what to do when something caustic got in someone’s eyes in his school science class and he immediately sprang into action. The doctor said that Marcus was totally responsible for saving whatever eyesight Keisha still has or any that she might regain.”
KC stood up and paced back and forth a couple of times, then told Lieutenant Stone, “You know, the more I think about this, the more pissed off I get.”
“That’s the way it hit me, too. That’s why I wanted to talk with you about it. It just seems that if there’s anything that can be done about this, it needs to be done.”
“Well, at this moment, I’m so pissed, I can’t think straight. But it does remind me of something. Did I ever tell you about the darkest night I’ve ever experienced?” Lieutenant Stone shook his head, no.
“Have you got a few minutes to hear the story?”
“Sure. But what does it have to do with this?”
“I’m not entirely certain, but let me tell you about it. At the very least, maybe the telling of it will help me calm down so I can think about what to do about Keisha and Marcus.”
Chapter 22
Peeps and I were preparing to set out on our sixth or seventh stiletto patrol. We checked the weather forecast and the prediction was for clear skies during nighttime hours over the following five days. There would be a new moon on our third day out, but with a clear sky, the stars would actually make the conditions perfect for us and really bad for the NVA. They would be totally sightless without using lights and we would be able to see just fine. For the last five weeks, we’d been all over the Hai Lang Forest and everywhere we went we found elements of the NVA 224B division. None of the stuff we found on the NVA we killed gave any indication as to their mission. Division G2 was going nuts trying to figure out what a whole division was doing just wandering around up there. Based on what we’d found, it looked like elements of all of the division’s regiments were now located in the Hai Lang Forest. So, someone got the brilliant idea of inserting a recon team up along the Ben Hai River hoping they could spot additional units crossing from North Vietnam and maybe figure out who they were and possibly determine if they were planning to join up with the 224B division.
This was a hair-brained scheme for a number of reasons, foremost among them being that there were no known LZ�
��s up there. So that meant we’d have to rappel into the jungle in plain view of the entire NVA contingent that was likely on the north side of the river. Being inserting in this manner at night was ridiculous because you can’t hide a chopper no matter how dark it is. I could just imagine us rappelling on ropes hanging from a hovering chopper that a major contingent of the North Vietnamese Army was trying to shoot down. Plus, they might drop us right in the middle of an NVA unit that was already on the south side of the river. And maybe, worst of all, even if we somehow got safely inserted, we would then be totally surrounded by enemy forces that knew exactly where we were, with no LZs available for emergency extraction and no escape route except through the enemy.
When the captain gave me the mission, I told him that someone in G2 was walking around with a screw loose and that I wanted to talk with the division commander about it. Being a career officer, he told me I couldn’t negotiate my missions with the general. Well, you know me well enough to realize that that wasn’t a satisfactory answer. I barked back at him and he did the same to me. However, after much gnashing of teeth on his part, he finally agreed to let me talk with the Division G3, General French. I’d met this guy before and didn’t have a very high opinion of him. He was impolite, inconsiderate and didn’t seem to know that World War II was over and that the tactics he’d learned in that war had no place in these jungles. He thought you could take tanks north of highway nine, into the mountainous jungle. Even after he had tried it and failed, on an operation that I witnessed personally, he continued to insist that he had done it with success.
Anyway, I got my chance to talk with him on the radio. Once I had explained all of the problems and the limited chances for success as I saw it, he told me that he needed to get a patrol in there even if it would be dangerous. That was his word, dangerous. I almost corrected him and told him that in addition to being dangerous, it was just plain stupid, but I held back. I then turned things around on him a little when I asked him if he wanted to have a chance of a patrol being successful and obtaining some useable intelligence. He acknowledged that he did. So, I told him that we might have a chance if we were inserted about three days southwest of the position he wanted us to be in and advanced on foot. He reluctantly allowed that that might present an increased chance for success and, in his typical manner, told me to go ahead and try it my way and that I’d better make it work.
I almost told him that that was a really stupid thing to say. I almost told him that some patrols get wiped out trying to get off the LZ, that sometimes the chopper gets shot down before it inserts the patrol, that some patrols snoop and poop around out in the jungle for days and never encounter the enemy, that some patrols search for days and just when they begin to see signs of the enemy, they run out of food, that even if you’re lucky enough to make it to a spot on the map that some out of touch, senile general picked out, it doesn’t guarantee any measure of success, whatsoever. I didn’t tell him that, but there have been many times, looking back, that I wish I had.
Hair-brained as it was, Peeps and I had been given our mission. Of course, being the loyal young Marine officer that I was, I didn’t tell Peeps that the general had wanted us to rappel into the jungle near the south bank of the Ben Hai River before I had talked him out of it. We simply got busy trying to identify possible LZs within about three days of General French’s objective. The problem with doing this is that the map indicates terrain features, but not foliage and trees. You could pick an area that looks promising on the map and find out when you get there that the jungle canopy is ninety feet thick. What I really wanted to do was send a chopper up there to see what was available. But, with so much NVA activity in the area, I figured if the NVA spotted a chopper today, they’d suspect what it was looking for and they would be waiting at the LZ for us tomorrow. If they didn’t spot our chopper until tomorrow, when we were inserted, they would send patrols to look for us, but we could most likely sneak past them with the only problem being that they could slow our progress.
I told Peeps we should take extra smoke grenades to help conceal our withdrawal, if we were discovered. He agreed. I also asked him what he thought about taking some claymore mines that we could use to booby trap our retreat and slow the NVA if they were following us as we attempted to leave the area. He agreed with that, too. What I didn’t like is that we were loading up with extra gear when what we really needed to be was quicker, quieter and lighter than usual. It seems that no matter what the situation, there are always tradeoffs that complicate the decisions that have to be made. After discussing the pros and cons of the timing for our mission, we decided to go in just after first light the next morning, flying low to avoid detection as much as possible. That presents another set of tradeoffs. Stay higher and be visible from miles around or go in low and be easy to hit with small arms fire. Go in early when it’s still pretty dark and it’s harder for them to see us but it’s harder for the pilots to spot a good LZ. Go in later and it’s the opposite. We agreed it would be better for the chopper to risk taking a few rounds than for us to advertise our presence and since we were going to go in low, we might as well go early, too. Needless to say, we didn’t ask for the chopper pilots’ opinions on these issues.
We took off the next morning while it was still dark and headed northwest. Peeps and I had chosen a few areas in which to search for LZs the night before and we showed those to the pilots. We also told them we needed to execute our insertion with as much stealth as possible. Apparently they were somewhat familiar with the area because the co-pilot asked, “Well, which is it? Find an LZ or go in low?”
I told him, “You guys have to do your magic. Find an LZ from as low as possible. If it takes a while, we’ll sacrifice a little daylight for staying low. Just try to get us in before you have to go back to refuel.”
The co-pilot responded, “That terrain is a bitch. We’ll do our best, but I don’t have very high hopes for finding anything. By the way, who had the brilliant idea to insert you guys in that area?”
“Actually, it was mine. Our original orders were to rappel near the south bank of the Ben Hai. I negotiated this alternative as a safer solution.”
“Jesus Christ, what buffoon would want us to try to do that?”
“General French.”
“Oh, now I understand. I’m surprised you got anywhere with him at all. That senile old bastard thinks he’s still fighting World War II.”
We flew around and around, much of the time slipping between tree branches. It was a horrible way to look for an LZ, but like I said before, this kind of thing involves tradeoffs. I’m sure it was frustrating for the pilots, but they knew the alternative. They were aware that hovering near the south bank of the Ben Hai while we rappelled would almost guarantee that they and the chopper would end up on the ground, too. The only good news was that either the NVA weren’t operating this far west, or they didn’t want to reveal themselves by firing at a chopper. The fact that we weren’t taking any ground fire didn’t buoy our confidence any, but it at least allowed the pilots to carry out their search without having to deal with ground fire too.
After what seemed like eons, the flight chief motioned toward my map and pointed. The spot his gloved finger touched was about three thousand yards west of the locations Peeps and I had selected. But, we’d been up so long I figured that if there was a better alternative, the pilots would have located it by now. I signaled a thumbs-up to the crew chief and almost immediately, the chopper was yanked left and down. We were out the back door and into the jungle less than a minute later. The chopper took off hugging the treetops and was soon out of hearing. Once it had cleared the LZ, we never saw it, again. I said a silent thanks to the pilots. They had remained low, giving us our best chance of staying concealed. Now it was up to us to advance northeast into a position near the Ben Hai where we would try to identify any NVA units we could spot crossing from North Vietnam. That meant we would have to maneuver our way right onto the
river’s edge, because there would be no way to see any lights in the dense jungle. If we were fortunate enough to spot a unit, we would then follow them until they stopped, sneak up and kill a couple of them and hope they had some documentation that would identify their unit. This was going to be especially difficult because we wouldn’t be able to use our tube and flashlight technique for guidance. We would have to follow them by sound only, staying close enough to hear them while making no noise, ourselves. And, of course, we would be accompanied by the discomforting knowledge that the NVA had us surrounded.
By this time it was after ten in the morning. It was already close to ninety degrees and the humidity was probably around ninety percent. The terrain was especially steep with a continuous series of high hills and deep valleys. There was a triple canopy of dense foliage and trees. My hope was that the NVA knew the nature of the terrain in this area and would avoid it. But there was no way of knowing what they were doing or where they were. If they were merely seeking a good place to hide in the south until they received orders, then this would be a good place. They would have to transport resupplies of food from the North but that was true of anyplace the NVA occupied on the DMZ side of Highway 9. All the civilians had been relocated to the refugee village at Cam Lo in the fall of 1966. Now, there were only two groups of people on the DMZ side of Highway 9, United States Marines and NVA. If they were trying to actually get somewhere, then this was an absolutely lousy route to take. Hopefully, any NVA units that were in the area had somewhere to go.