The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Think about it for how long?” Parker asked.

  “Say, a week,” Ellis said.

  “What have you planned for the next seven days, Ellis?” Parker asked, smiling.

  “I found out where three of my guys are,” Ellis said. “Lopez, Dessler, and Talbott. They’re with an ‘A’ Team in Kontum Province.”

  “Sure,” Parker said. “Why not? I think we have to presume that whatever’s going on here is more important than passing canapes at Bragg.”

  “Thanks,” Ellis said.

  (Three)

  Villa dans le Bois

  Thu Sac, Kontum Province

  Republic of South Vietnam

  1630 Hours, 15 January 1962

  The Villa in the Woods was no longer in the woods. Even before the building had been turned over to “A” Team Number 6, Company “A,” First Special Forces Group, it had been in military hands. It had been put to use as Headquarters, Third Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment (Separate), Army of the Republic of Vietnam; and ARVN riflemen had spent long and hot days chopping down the towering pines for a distance of one hundred yards from the big old house.

  The better logs had been trucked into Kontum and sold, and the less valuable logs used to build frameworks for various sandbag structures on the perimeter of the compound, inside the compound, or attached to the villa itself. To the surprise of the men of the Third Battalion, 119th Infantry, ARVN, some of the money received from the sale of the logs had actually been spent for their welfare. Other commanders would have put all of the money in their own pockets, but their commander had actually bought rice with some of it, and used some of it to buy pigs and chickens.

  When the Americans came, they made other necessary military improvements to the compound. They removed the forest to a distance of two hundred yards from the villa itself. The Vietnamese were impressed with how the Americans did this. For one thing, they did not ax or saw the trees to the ground. They wrapped the trunks, as close to the ground as possible, with primer cord, covered the primer cord with sandbags, and with cheerful shouts of “Fire in the Hole!” detonated the primer cord. There followed a sharp crack. The trees seemed to shudder, and then they started to fall. The explosive force of the primer cord cut the tree trunks almost surgically.

  The timber thus obtained had been turned into lumber on a barter basis. For every two tree trunks turned into construction lumber by an ARVN corps of engineers platoon equipped with a portable U.S. Army sawmill, the ARVN engineers got to keep one trunk for themselves. And since Master Sergeant Charles B. Dessler was supervising the lumbering operation, all the money from the sale of the tree trunks went to the engineers and not into the pocket of the ARVN engineer officer.

  The primary purpose of the American timbering operation was the creation of a beaten fire zone, thus depriving the Viet-cong of a place to hide closer than two hundred yards from the villa. But they also needed some of the lumber (the rest they sold) to reinforce the compound further. Six towers were erected, five on the perimeter of the compound, and the sixth in the center. All were protected by sandbags and equipped with machine guns and other weapons. The one inside the perimeter also served as a water tower, and the various antennae with which the “A” Team communicated with its headquarters and various ARVN units were mounted to it.

  Water again flowed through the ornate faucets of Villa dans le Bois’s faucets, and there was a sufficient quantity of it to permit a steady flow through otherwise unneeded bidets to cool wine.

  There were three lines of coils of barbed wire surrounding the villa. This was called concertina, because it expanded from its shipping coil like the bellows of an accordion. Each coil was hung with beer cans and other light scrap metal so that noise would be created if the wire was disturbed.

  Outside the exterior line of concertina, and between rows one and two and two and three, there had been emplaced both homemade (number ten cans filled with metal scrap and rocks and small charges of Composition C-3) mines and Claymore mines. These were a new and effective device that when detonated blew away everything in a cone-shaped pattern for about thirty yards.

  The “A” Team was being “protected” by a company from the Third Battalion, 119th Infantry. They were housed in bunkers inside the inner ring of concertina, but, except for the company commander and half a dozen others, they were denied access to the villa itself. In the minds of the “A” Team, there existed some question of the resolve of the ARVN infantry company commander to give it the old school try in the event of an attack. He was therefore kept close at hand, where he could be watched and his resolve strengthened. The half-dozen other ARVN—five noncoms and an officer—both spoke English and had in various ways managed to convince the “A” Team whose side they were on. As a general rule of thumb, it had been concluded that the allegiance of at least half of the ARVN riflemen was dependent on who they thought was going to win the engagement then in progress.

  Nine men, two officers, and seven noncommissioned officers made up the “A” Team. Three of the noncoms, Master Sergeant Charles B. Dessler, the operations sergeant; Master Sergeant Juan Vincenzo Lopez, the armorer; and SFC Richard L. Talbott, commo, had jumped into Cuba with First Lieutenant Tom Ellis. They were pleased and surprised when the twice-a-week supply convoy from Company rolled into the Villa dans le Bois compound and Ellis climbed down from the cab of the second truck.

  The commanding officer (Captain Howard G. Fenn) and the executive officer (First Lieutenant Donald G. Crossman) had known Ellis while they were in training at Camp McCall. Their initial impression of him at McCall was that he was a nice kid, but they wondered what he was doing in Special Forces, which was supposed to recruit its officers from mature and experienced officers.

  It had subsequently been brought unforgettably to their attention by Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan, Deputy Commander for Special Projects of the Special Warfare Center (who had overheard them referring to him as the “Boy Wonder”) that Lieutenant Ellis was in fact the guy who had fought his “A” Team through twenty miles of angry Cubans to a last-minute escape from the beach at the Bahia de Cochinos.

  When they saw Tom Ellis climbing down from the supply convoy six-by-six, both Captain Fenn and Lieutenant Crossman, privately and independently, wondered if he had come to Villa dans le Bois to relieve and replace them. The team had been given a simple mission to perform: win the hearts and the minds of the people by providing, among other things, medical services. And they had been unable to do it.

  On Christmas Eve the villagers of An Lac Shi had gone to the Blessed Heart of Jesus Church for midnight mass and found Father Lo Patrick Sho, Mayor Song Lee Do, and four altar boys dead. The altar boys had been shot behind the ear, and the priest and the mayor had their throats cut open and their reproductive organs cut off. It was the Vietcong means of expressing their displeasure with lackeys of the traitorous anti-liberation forces who had encouraged the peasants to avail themselves of medical services offered by the Americans in the green berets.

  The tactic had been very effective. When Staff Sergeant Robert Franz, the “A” Team’s medic, had made his round that week, not only had no villagers of An Lac Shi appeared with sick children, or old people suffering from parasitic infestation, or any other illnesses, but no villagers in any of the other four villages in the team’s area had shown up to take advantage of Staff Sergeant Franz’s free and competent professional services.

  Intestinal parasites causing rectal bleeding are bad, but not nearly as bad as a cut throat.

  Captain Fenn truly believed he had done his best. He had even come up with the name of the Vietcong officer responsible, a Captain Van Lee Duc of the Ninth Company, Fifty-third Regiment. It was just that he couldn’t find the sonofabitch, and God knows he had tried.

  He had received simple orders from Captain Fenn: “You have to find that bastard, Don, that’s all there is to it.” Lieutenant Crossman also believed that he had done his best, and that his best simply hadn’t been good e
nough. Yet, after spending ten days and nights in the jungle and forest, he had no better idea now where Captain Van Lee Duc was than he ever had.

  He hadn’t had so much as a sniff. All ten days and ten nights (in two five-day excursions) had done was to prove that somebody out there didn’t like them. Two of his men had run feces-smeared punji sticks through their feet, and one of them had suffered a smashed upper right arm (he was lucky he wasn’t squashed like a bug) when he tripped a wire and released an eight-foot section of tree trunk imbedded with more feces-smeared pointed sticks.

  Lieutenant Don Crossman was very much aware that he had sent three men to the hospital in Saigon, and all he’d gotten for it was a sense that Captain Van Lee Duc was sitting out there behind a tree, laughing his balls off at them.

  There were, of course, extenuating circumstances. The natives were understandably more afraid of people who had proved their willingness to risk God’s wrath by emasculating a priest in his own church than they were of Americans who were some strange combination of soldier and Good Samaritan. They were consequently not about to tell the Americans, much less the ARVN, anything at all about what they knew of the location of Captain Van Lee Duc and the Ninth Company of the Fifty-third Regiment of the People’s Liberation Army.

  On top of that, Captain Van Lee Duc and his small headquarters staff (estimates of his nucleus ranged from five to eleven; the truth was probably somewhere about eight) had an area of forest, jungle, and rice fields about ten miles by seventeen—170 square miles—to hide in.

  But none of the extenuating circumstances mattered. They had been not able to find the sonofabitch, which meant that they could send Staff Sergeant Franz out every day for the next six months and he would have no patients.

  Since Lieutenant Ellis had proven his own ability to command an “A” Team, it was entirely likely that he had been sent in to replace officers who were unable to comply with their orders.

  But it was almost immediately apparent that Ellis was making a social call, nothing else. A not entirely happy social call to be sure: Over dinner Ellis told the story of getting Eaglebury’s body back from the Cubans.

  Obviously this was a gross breach of security on Ellis’s part, for doubtless the file on the whole business was still stamped TOP SECRET. But as obviously that top-secret business was so much bullshit. The Cubans had had Eaglebury for sometime before they finally shot him. No man can resist torture beyond a given point. The Cubans almost certainly knew they had captured, interrogated, and finally shot a lieutenant commander of the U.S. Navy. And the Cubans damned well knew they had been paid fifty thousand dollars for his body, so who was that a secret from?

  Toward the end of the first case of liter bottles of Asahi beer, the conversation turned to Captain Van Lee Duc and the altar boys with their brains blown all over the sanctuary. Captain Fenn and Lieutenant Crossman were a little uneasy having their failure dragged out in front of Ellis, but there was no way they could stop the conversation once it had started. Fenn thought that it was possible that Ellis would be able to think of something he hadn’t.

  He took considerable consolation from the fact that Ellis didn’t have any more idea what to do than he did.

  In the morning, however, Ellis did something Captain Fenn thought was a little strange. He asked SFC Talbott, the commo man, if he could get through to Saigon on his radio, and if he could, would the Saigon operator patch him through to the Hotel Caravelle.

  Talbott told him he didn’t know about the telephone patch and that Saigon was chickenshit, but he would find out.

  “Tell him I want to talk to Major Parker.”

  The officers knew who Major Parker was. There weren’t that many majors in Special Forces, and only one of these was an aviator, well over six feet tall, and as black as midnight.

  Listening to the conversation, Captain Fenn thought that Lieutenant Ellis had a lot of nerve (Ellis told Parker that he was having trouble getting a ride back, and could Parker come pick him up?), and that Parker was what he had heard he was, a nice guy, maybe a little too nice for his own good. (Parker, his reluctance evident in his voice even over the frequency-clipped circuit, agreed to come get him at the airstrip in Kontum.)

  “I don’t know if this is going to work, Captain,” Ellis said when he got off the radio. “The odds are that it won’t. But have you got a spare map on which you could mark where you think this guy might be?”

  “He could be in any one of a dozen places,” Fenn said. “What are you up to?”

  “Mark every place you think he might be.”

  “What the hell are you up to, Ellis?”

  “If I’m not back tonight,” Ellis said, “it will have been wishful thinking.”

  “What, goddamn it?”

  “I think maybe Parker can find this bastard for us,” Ellis said.

  “How?”

  “He has a very interesting airplane,” Ellis said, “and that, no shit, is all I can tell you about it. It’s classified ‘TOP SECRET—Eyes of God Only.’”

  “And you think he’ll help?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellis said. “If he does, he’ll be sticking his neck out. But he might. I’m going to throw the altar boys with the bullets in their ears at him.”

  (Four)

  U.S. Army OV-1A Aircraft Tail Number 92521

  Heading: 030° True

  Altitude: 3,500 Feet

  Indicated Airspeed: 270 Knots

  (Kontum Province, Republic of South Vietnam)

  2035 Hours, 19 January 1962

  “Spanish Harlem,” the pilot said to his microphone, “Spanish Harlem, this is Father Divine. How do you read? Over?”

  “Read you loud and clear, Father Divine, and God bless you,” Spanish Harlem replied.

  “Got a match, Spanish Harlem?” Father Divine asked.

  “Roger, lighting match at this time,” Spanish Harlem replied.

  Spanish Harlem was sitting with his back against the enormous roots of a banyan tree. An AN/PRC-9 radio was on the foul-smelling rotted vegetation of the forest floor before him.

  Lieutenant Tom Ellis was wearing a bulletproof vest, a pair of fatigue pants, and (because he had them, and nobody had his size to loan him), a pair of Corcoran jump boots, the gloss of which he’d now concealed beneath a layer of muck. Over the shoulder straps of the bulletproof vest was the canvas strapping of web gear. Suspended from the web gear were two canteens, two ammo pouches, and a .45 Colt pistol in a leather holster. Taped to the canvas straps of the harness were a canvas pouch holding two spare clips for the .45 and a first-aid kit. The pockets of the bulletproof vest each held a fragmentation grenade. Leaning against the tree was an M-14 rifle, an updated version of the M-1 Garand rifle of World War II and Korea. It fired the same bullet—a .308-inch-diameter 186-grain boat-tailed projectile—at just about the same ballistics as the venerable .30-06; but improvements in powder had permitted a smaller cartridge case. The Garand had fired its cartridges from an eight-shot clip. The M-14 had a twenty-shot magazine, which fed through the bottom. Ellis’s M-14 had two clips taped to each other. There was another taped-together magazine in each of his ammo pouches. He had in all 120 rounds of 7.62-millimeter NATO (which is how the shortened .30–06 case was identified) for his M-14.

  There was a dagger in a scabbard taped to his right boot. It was a British weapon, designed by a Shanghai policeman named Bruce Fairbairn for the commandos in World War II. It was made of high-quality steel, sharp-pointed and thin-bladed, long enough to penetrate vital organs and sharpened on both sides. It belonged to Captain Howard G. Fenn, and it had been something of an olive branch on Fenn’s part to Ellis following a heated argument following Ellis’s announcement that he, not Fenn, was going to take the hike in the woods.

  “It’s as simple as this,” Ellis had said. “If you go and somebody hears about this, they’ll know I told you about what the airplane can do. And my ass would really be in a jam. Either you and Crossman stay, or I call the whole thing off.”
>
  There had been heated words, but in the end Fenn had given in. The first priority was the elimination of Captain Van Lee Duc. He would just have to swallow the humiliation that somebody else was leading half his team and a half-dozen reliable ARVNs into the woods to do it.

  When he saw that the knife Ellis intended to take on the walk in the woods was a nasty-looking switchblade, Fenn broke a long standing vow (“My toothbrush, sure; my wife, possibly; my limey sticker, never!”) and pressed the Fairbairn on him.

  Spanish Harlem took what looked like a stainless-steel mechanical pencil from one of the ammo pouches.

  “Close your eyes,” he ordered. “Here goes the match.”

  He closed his eyes, held what looked like a mechanical pencil over his head at arm’s length, and lit it.

  There was a hissing, and immediately a white light of terrible white brilliance at the tip of what looked like a mechanical pencil.

  The light revealed the three other Americans of the patrol, Ellis’s people from Cuba, and the half-dozen ARVNs. All were dressed like Ellis. All had their faces blackened with a non-reflecting paste. All sat with their eyes tightly closed, shielding them against the terrible brilliance of the burning thermite.

  Ellis counted: “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand.” Then he quickly jabbed the tip of the match into the muck between his legs. There was a hissing, and a smell of burning vegetation, and the white light disappeared. But not the red glow on his eyeballs, even though he had very carefully averted his eyes from the light.

  “There it is,” the co-pilot of the Mohawk said to Phil Parker. He was not looking out the window, but at a device mounted on the Mohawk’s instrument panel. It was feeding a sheet of thin, slimy-feeling photosensitive paper to him. A small red light on a flexible steel mount gave him enough light to read it.

  “Got you, Spanish Harlem,” Phil Parker said and waited for the device to spew enough paper out so that he could tear it off. Then he studied it carefully. The Mohawk, on three-axis plus air-speed automatic flight stabilization, kept flying at precisely 3,500 feet at 270 knots on a course of thirty degrees true.