He had vowed that as long as he was in the valley, he would try to bury the people killed by the soldiers. It was disrespectful to leave their corpses rotting in the sun. But this was going to be difficult. He would have to drag each body across the length of the paddy to reach dry soil.
Over the next hour, he trudged through the muck, at times stopping to rest. After pulling the corpses to a clearing, he found the shovel he had hidden near a trail and began digging a shallow hole. Just then, two other Vietnamese men showed up, helping him cover the bodies with the soil.
With two hours to spare before sunrise, the three crept along the trail until they reached the edge of the foothills where other villagers had been hiding. Nyugen warned them to leave. If they wanted to stay, they would have to go deeper into the mountains. But some of the villagers were defiant. They were angry and determined to remain. This was their land, and they were not going to subject themselves to the humiliation of Nghia Hanh. Some had already been there and escaped. They hated the filth and the fear, the concrete walls, barbed wire, and armed soldiers. They weren’t going back.
No one was going near Sanchez. It was better to leave him alone.
After his prisoners had been killed, he walked to the edge of the campsite and plopped down on the ground.
He felt responsible for the death of Dao Hue and was now blaming himself for failing to protect the Vietnamese brothers. The choppers would have been in the Song Ve in the morning and would have taken them to Go Hoi. It would have been no burden to the unit to watch over them for a few more hours. Killing the two was not only unnecessary—it was stupid. The VC could have been interrogated. Now he was a wasted opportunity.
In the campsite, all of the soldiers but one were sleeping in a circle known as a wagon wheel, their feet pointing to the center. That way, if they were attacked or if someone heard a suspicious sound, they could kick or nudge the person next to them. The exception was Sanchez, who stayed on the perimeter. He didn’t know how long he could remain in the unit with Hawkins. He had been a Tiger for seven months. He had lived through more than a dozen battles, including the Mother’s Day Massacre. He had always felt proud to do what he did. The Tigers were trained to be aggressive: that was the culture. But Sanchez was now seeing actions that went beyond the bounds of war.
“You don’t kill civilians and you don’t kill prisoners,” he told his men. But that’s what was happening, and no one else seemed to care.
As he sat staring into the darkness, he heard a thud close by in the brush, and before he had time to react, Sanchez was knocked backward by an explosion. Suddenly, he was rolling on the ground, with sharp, stinging pains in his legs and side.
“I’m hit!” he yelled out before another explosion shook the camp, and then another. Wood yelled for the soldiers to stay down, crawl to the hill, and then roll to the bottom. Not everyone heard him, and before Sergeant Domingo Munoz could escape the camp, fragments from a grenade ripped into his body. Immediately, two medics rushed to him as the other soldiers bolted for the hill. Wood was already on the radio to headquarters, calling for help. Another medic crawled to assist Sanchez, who could barely move.
Unlike the previous attack, the Americans could see the enemy’s position just beyond the hamlet, and several Tigers on the perimeter began firing their M16s and M79 grenade launchers into the brush. The hamlet was lit up by the counterassault.
A half dozen Tigers stood their positions, blasting the thicket. The M79s appeared to be doing much of the damage, blowing out sections of trees. After several minutes, the Tigers stopped firing, waiting for the enemy to begin lobbing another round of grenades, but nothing happened. Except for the moans of the wounded, there was silence.
As the soldiers returned to the camp, a medevac headed out to pick up Sanchez, Munoz, and another wounded Tiger. Sanchez looked as if he would survive. As the medics wrapped tourniquets around his legs to stop the bleeding, he managed to reach his shirt pocket for his crucifix and clenched his teeth. “Please don’t let me die,” he said. Munoz was in worse shape; the medics could not stop the bleeding. Blood gushed out of his wounds, and with it, his life.
The “bad things” Sanchez had worried about were no longer hypotheticals. The clock had struck midnight.
CHAPTER 11
With bags of rice seedlings flung over their backs, Kieu Cong and the other farmers trudged down the mountain, swinging machetes to cut through the brush. For nearly an hour, they slashed through the thicket, cutting themselves on the sharp elephant grass and bamboo as they moved down the slope. Though some of the people complained, Kieu knew it was the only way. Indeed, he had told them as much before leaving their hideaway. They needed to reach the valley floor and plant the young green sprouts in order to grow more rice to survive. Their own supplies were dwindling and would be gone in ninety days—at best. There was an easier path to the valley floor, but the farmers were afraid the American soldiers would see them. So this was the only way.
After clearing the brush, the people reached a steep footpath where, a day earlier, they had tied two water buffalo to a tree. After throwing harnesses around the animals, the farmers slowly led the oxen down the slope. Without the animals, there was no way they could plow the field.
As the sun was rising, they reached the valley floor and traipsed onto the first rice paddy, the muck squishing between their toes. Kieu didn’t waste any time. He turned around and motioned for the men to plow and the women to plant. They had two hours to insert as many seedlings in the ground as possible before returning to the mountains. If they were lucky no one would see them.
At sixty, Kieu was actually the youngest farmer on the field, but he was undoubtedly their leader. Raised in the Song Ve, he was seen as an elder, even if not the oldest, a likable fellow who had the respect of people from Van Xuan village.
A generous man who traveled frequently to the pagoda to pray, Kieu was known for teaching the tenets of Buddhism to all who asked him. But mostly, people sought his advice about growing rice. He took the time to teach younger villagers how to build dikes and how to know when seedlings were ready for planting. He would lead the young villagers into the paddies, patiently showing them how to plant the sprouts, never placing them too deep in the soil or too close to the dikes. During the harvest, he showed them how to toss the stalks onto round, woven trays to separate the grains from the husks. To his own five children, he made few demands other than that they observe their daily prayers and follow the teachings of Buddha, especially with regard to the need to be honest. “He told me not to steal,” said his son Kieu Trak. “He encouraged me to avoid the bad things in life.”
A small man with leathery, withered hands, Kieu reached down to make sure the water was five inches deep. If it was less than five inches, farmers ran the risk of their seedlings withering in the sun. If it ran over five inches, the dikes could break, or the seedlings would drown.
Kieu raised his hand and signaled for the men to begin plowing. As the buffalo started dragging the plows to make a smooth bed, the five women in the field walked quickly along the plow lines, planting the seedlings into the rich black muck. Under normal conditions, it would take nearly three days to cover the entire field, but they didn’t have three days. Kieu knew from scouts in the mountains that the soldiers were camped just three miles away.
By dawn, the Tigers followed their daily ritual of breaking down their M16s, cleaning the cartridges, and reassembling them to ensure they didn’t jam. After checking their ammo supplies and rations, they waited for their orders.
Several were still shaken from the ambush the night before when team leaders walked into the campsite after a meeting and broke the news: Munoz was dead and Sanchez was on his way to an Army hospital in Japan.
To the newcomers, Sanchez was one of the few team leaders who bucked the trend. Now he was gone.
Munoz was another story. They knew he had a wife in Texas from the letters he received from home, but didn’t know much else about him. H
e had turned twenty-two just before joining the Tigers in May—days after the Mother’s Day Massacre. But he was still a Tiger, and now he was dead.
Upon hearing the news, Doyle began ranting about “gooks” and that they should all die. To him, it was obvious: as long as villagers were still in the Song Ve, the Tigers weren’t going anywhere. “You don’t have to worry about anyone who’s dead,” he said. Ybarra and Green joined in, saying they wanted to be let loose in the mountains. If he couldn’t be drinking beer back at the base, Ybarra wanted to be hunting. There was only one good thing about the Song Ve: “That’s where the gooks are,” he said.
Kieu Cong was worried the planting was taking too long. The five men and five women had been in the paddy two hours, and several hundred seedlings had yet to be placed in the soil. Part of the problem was that the field was too flooded, and the dike needed to be lowered to release an inch of water. But beyond the water level, the elderly farmers were tired, their footing slowed in the muck. For weeks, they had been hiding in the mountains and surviving on small rations of rice, sometimes a bowl a day. Kieu knew he couldn’t push them any harder.
As the sun rose over the first ridge, Kieu and the others spotted a man walking across the paddy. At first, they froze and stared at the figure, but soon realized it was Kieu’s son Kieu Trak. The thirty-four-year-old man had been keeping a lookout and had become alarmed because the farmers were taking too much time.
“I told them they needed to hurry,” he recalled. “They were running out of time.” But while his father was concerned, he ignored the warning, telling his son to go back to his post. “He told me that they needed to finish their work. He said this may be their only chance.” There were just a few days left for optimum planting and no guarantees the seedlings would last. The farmers had been nurturing the sprouts thirty days in the mountains and needed to get them in the ground.
Kieu Trak was reluctant to leave. He felt a sense of obligation to take care of his father. Weeks earlier, he had decided not to join his brothers and sisters in a relocation camp but to stay with his father, who had refused to go. For the first two weeks, father and son had hidden together before being joined by Kieu Trak’s wife, Mai Thi Tai, who escaped from Nghia Hanh.
Kieu Trak’s father ordered him to go back to his lookout perch. Slowly, he turned around and walked toward the foothills, leaving his father in the middle of the field. As he reached the end of the paddy, Kieu Trak could hear a sound echoing across the valley floor. As the noise came closer, he realized it was the whirling blades of a helicopter.
His heart began to race as he turned around to look at his father, who was already motioning for his son to run away. “No, no!” Kieu Cong yelled. “Go back.”
Kieu Trak obeyed and raced toward a cluster of trees near the footpath leading to the first ridge. Just as he reached the brush, the helicopter was within sight. He rolled on the ground and into a thicket of bamboo, peering at the figures of his father and the others in the field. They weren’t running.
Kieu Trak yelled for the farmers to flee, but they continued planting seedlings. Maybe they—like he—hoped desperately the chopper would circle and leave, like they used to do before the great evacuation. But there was more than just a helicopter to fret over. Between the river and the field, Kieu Trak could see men walking toward the rice paddy. They appeared to be soldiers.
For the first time in days, the Tigers had broken camp as a full platoon. No teams. No instructions. No warnings.
As they had left the campsite, Barry Bowman had noticed the men were walking faster than usual in a single-file column. No one was talking. They were tired of the grenade attacks and even more upset at battalion commanders for leaving them on the valley floor another day.
There had been no shortage of volunteers to walk the point that morning, but Ybarra had been the first to jump in front—just where team leaders wanted him. By now, he was the designated point, but not through any official decision. His commanders knew that, unlike many newcomers, Ybarra wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger and wouldn’t turn away.
With Ybarra in front, the Tigers had moved down a hillside and spotted the burned-out remains of another hamlet. A small narrow dirt roadway twisted through the cluster of blackened bamboo and clay slabs.
The men had slowed their pace as Ybarra inched his way one hundred meters in front of the others, with Green leading the rest of the column. Ybarra had tiptoed over to the first hooch, using the barrel of his rifle to lift up a piece of wood that he thought might be covering an earthen bunker, but it was just wood.
Ybarra had moved on to the second hooch area, and then to the third a few yards away—seemingly unconcerned that the rest of the platoon was several paces behind.
When Ybarra had reached the last hooch, he had motioned for Green to catch up. So far, there were no signs of life.
Suddenly, before Green could join Ybarra, the point man had raised his hand and motioned for the platoon to halt. Crouching down, he had pointed toward a rice paddy about two hundred meters away. After staring a few more seconds at the field, Ybarra had sprung up and motioned for the others to follow.
He had turned around and, while still walking, whispered something to Green. Green then slowed down long enough to tell the man behind him what Ybarra had spotted.
The third man turned around and told the fourth, and the fourth turned and informed Hawkins. The commander hadn’t hesitated. Instead, Hawkins had wheeled around and passed the word: “Fire on my orders.”
After a couple of minutes, the soldiers were now well within sight of the villagers, but for some reason, the Vietnamese weren’t moving. Several were hunched over, their backs to the soldiers. Two of the men continued to drive the water buffalo along the beds.
“They looked to be older, about half of them men, half women,” Carpenter recalled. Shaking his head, he looked around to see the other soldiers’ reactions to the order. Wood and others were dumbfounded. It was one thing to open up on enemy soldiers, or prisoners, or even people running away. But these people weren’t moving—they were just farming.
Before anyone had a chance to say anything, Hawkins raised his carbine .15 and pulled the trigger. Immediately, Doyle, Barnett, and Green fired.
From the thicket of bamboo, Kieu Trak watched as his father and others initially looked up, appearing almost startled, before they began running. Some fell in the muck. Others made it to the dike before dropping. The helicopter soaring overhead began circling the rice paddy, then firing down on the chaos below.
Shaking, Kieu Trak could see the water buffalo running in circles, their handlers nowhere in sight. He couldn’t do anything. If he ran onto the field, he would be killed. He buried his head in his hands and began sobbing.
Less than a quarter mile away, Lu Thuan, a villager who had fled to the mountains, watched from a ledge as the helicopter zigzagged overhead, trying to follow three of the farmers bolting toward a dike. Suddenly, as the farmers tried to jump across the embankment, Lu could hear the rattling of the machine guns from above. All three dropped to the ground. “They were helpless,” he recalled. “There was nowhere for them to go.”
As the soldiers fired, Carpenter refused to lift his M16. “I couldn’t believe it,” Carpenter recalled. “I knew people were pissed off. The valley was a shitty place for all of us. But we didn’t have to pick on civilians. We were the Tigers. We were above that.”
Bowman was just as upset. “They were just working in the field. We all knew that. They had no weapons. I remember them running and falling. There was absolutely no place for them to hide. I just watched. I couldn’t take part in it.” But their reluctance meant nothing to those who now lay dead, and it began to mean something to those who had killed them.
Hidden by bamboo shoots, Kieu Trak waited for darkness. For hours, he wondered whether his father was alive or dead and agonized over whether he should go onto the field to find out. Every few minutes, he would stare at the bodies, hoping to see some
movement. But the bodies were still.
That morning, he was in the rice paddy with his father, warning him about taking too long. He wished his father had heeded his advice, but Kieu Cong had always been stubborn. He was a man who took responsibility for others, and if the rice wasn’t planted, the villagers would go hungry.
By late afternoon, Kieu could hear the voices of American soldiers. For a moment, he froze. Did they see him? But instead of checking the bamboo cluster, the men passed by and headed in the direction of the hamlet.
The soldiers’ voices trailed off, until Kieu could only hear them faintly in the distance. He decided to take a chance and crawl into the field.
Just before the sun set below the ridge, Kieu could see the figures of two people creeping onto the rice paddy. They looked to be villagers, but he wasn’t sure. As they moved toward the middle of the field, he noticed they were not wearing uniforms and did not appear to be as tall as soldiers. In fact, they were Vietnamese women. He knew there would be other villagers looking for their loved ones. He slowly brushed aside the bamboo shoots covering his body, rolled over, and stood up.
Staying low, he crept onto the paddy until he could see the faces of the two women—one his wife. They didn’t say anything but immediately moved toward the first body in sight, which appeared to be a man facedown in the muck. They turned it over. It was Le Muc, a villager who had worked side by side with the Kieu family for years. They moved to the next body. It was Phung Giang, another well-known farmer. He, too, was dead.
Kieu then turned and saw another body a few yards away. As he moved closer, his heart sank. It was the body of his father lying faceup, his white shirt covered in blood. He went over and placed his hand on his father’s chest, but knew he was already dead.
He tried to hold back the tears. This was no place to break down—the soldiers could be back at any time. He had to remove his father’s corpse and carry it to the dry earth for burial. Kieu stood up and grabbed his father’s arms and slowly dragged him across the paddy, his wife following. As they inched along, they could see other villagers begin to crawl onto the field and, moments later, hear their soft, muffled cries.
Tiger Force Page 12