P. O. W.

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Dong Bec reached down and grabbed her head right behind her jaws. He had underestimated the effect the water had on her hide, and his hands slipped as she flexed her muscles and pulled three feet of her body through his grip before he realized what was happening. She turned her head and instantly bit down on the NVA soldier’s forearm.

  Dong Bec screamed.

  Lieutenant Van Pao saw what was happening and yelled for the rest of the platoon to run and assist the trapper, who was himself rapidly becoming trapped. The python, uncoiling from her sun basking, thrashed her coils against the soldier. She had the bite she needed on her prey, and now it was only a matter of starting to coil around it and remove the air from the ammonia-reeking animal’s lungs.

  “Help him!” The lieutenant screamed. She saw the whole platoon standing in shock, watching the snake coil around their comrade. Lieutenant Van Pao removed her pistol from its holster at her side and fired a round over their heads. “I will start shooting to kill!”

  She meant every word. She was not going to report back to Division that she had lost a man to a snake that she had been trying to capture.

  Dong Bec screamed again, but this time it came from the very pit of his stomach as he felt the first coil wrap around his leg and cold water touch his ankle. The python was pushing him into the river.

  The platoon reacted to the wrenching scream and attacked the snake in unison. The platoon sergeant found her tail and started pulling back on it, and slowly they had enough of her stretched out so that seven men could grab hold and lift ten feet of her off the rock. Too late, she realized what was happening to her, and before she could release her prey and escape, another ten feet of her body was lifted up in a nearly straight line and held off the rock by the ammonia-scented creatures. She was losing her traction; there was nothing to pull against.

  Dong Bec fell down on the rock, bleeding profusely from his left forearm. He was mumbling a Buddhist prayer that he had not recited since he had become a Communist.

  “Good! You have her!” Lieutenant Van Pao ran over to the line of soldiers and smiled.

  “Right now I don’t know who has who, Lieutenant!” The platoon sergeant released his hold on the python’s tail, and immediately the short, two-foot length tried wrapping itself around the next man in line, whose eyes bulged in fright.

  “Hold on!” Van Pao said, as she looked around for the large burlap rice bags they had brought along to put the snake in. She had had two of the bags sewn together and double lined, just in case. The lieutenant was very glad for this extra precaution now that she saw how big the python was close up.

  The platoon eased the snake into the sack slowly, ensuring that the head stayed inside the dark bag. They didn’t need to worry, because the python had mistaken the sack for a burrow and was cooperating, thinking that she was escaping from them.

  “Excellent!” Lieutenant Van Pao was thrilled. “Tie the sack shut and cut a sturdy bamboo pole for carrying her back to camp!”

  The lieutenant took a seat on the warm rock and lit up a Russian cigarette. She noticed that her hands were shaking when she held the match against the dry tobacco.

  The platoon sergeant and the platoon medic were helping Dong Bec. The medic was bandaging his arm where the python had left rows of teeth marks that would leave deep, permanent scars. The platoon sergeant had removed Dong Bec’s shorts and was rinsing them out in the river. The soldier had defecated and urinated during his struggle with the monstrous reptile.

  Lieutenant Van Pao smiled and then took a long drag from her cigarette. She now had a tool that could be put to very good use in her business.

  Colonel Garibaldi and Corporal Barnett had been locked up in their bamboo cages for the night when the NVA hunting party returned to the compound. The Americans were kept in individual cages, while the more numerous South Vietnamese and Montagnard CIDG prisoners were kept chained up in one of the new longhouses. The small POW camp held only the two American prisoners, but it had room for two more. Colonel Garibaldi’s weapons systems officer had been held in the cage across from Barnett until he had died the month before from malaria, and James had spent his first and only night in the cage to the left of Barnett’s. The new cage had been built in the exact center of the small American area and was no farther than ten feet from any of the POWs.

  Lieutenant Van Pao led the detail carrying their cargo. There were three NVA soldiers at each end of the sagging bamboo pole. Barnett watched and could see that the load they were carrying was heavy. Van Pao stopped in front of the low cage they had just finished building and spoke in rapid Vietnamese to the detail. Two soldiers hopped up on top of the cage and untied the trap door, while the rest of the detail struggled to lift the large rice sack high enough to clear the top of the cage. Barnett smiled as he watched the soldiers struggle. The cargo shifted and moved inside of the sack, which made it even more difficult to handle. As Lieutenant Van Pao glanced over at Barnett and caught him smiling, she flashed a look of pure hate at the American and screamed at her soldiers to hurry up. The sack had finally been placed on top of the cage and the tied end positioned over the open trap door when Private Dong Bec climbed up on the structure, holding a bamboo rod with his good arm. Beaming with pride, he carried his bandaged arm like a baton of honor. He would be the hero for a couple of days in the camp with the rest of the NVA soldiers. Dong Bec loosened the strings that held the sack shut and directed the opening of the bag down into the cage.

  Sensing the fresh air, she moved her head out from the safety of her coils and started crawling out of the uncomfortable burrow.

  Garibaldi’s and Barnett’s lungs stopped functioning at exactly the same instant. It looked as if the snake would never stop coming out of the rice sack. She was circling the cage, looking for an opening to escape. Garibaldi had estimated when he was building the cage that it was about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide. Barnett had commented on its chest-high height, and now they knew why; it had been built especially for the python.

  “Do you like my new pet?” Lieutenant Van Pao suppressed a giggle. “Well, Spencer Barnett… Do you like my pet?”

  Spencer heard his own voice answer the woman. “Nice… real nice, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

  “I am, Spencer…. I love snakes.” She laid her hand against the side of the cage where the snake was circling and tapped the bamboo with her blunt fingernail. “You might have a chance to meet her… very soon.”

  Colonel Garibaldi shuddered. He knew what Sweet Bitch had in the back of her mind. She had interrogated him enough for him to understand her level of reasoning.

  The NVA soldiers followed the lieutenant to their mess hall for supper. Barnett could hear her laughing all the way down the trail. The guard positioned in the small shack that overlooked the Americans smiled and lit up a cigarette. Barnett could see that it was taken from a Marlboro pack.

  “That fucking thing has to be Kaa’s mother!” The colonel watched as she sensed the air between the narrow bamboo bars of her cage. “Jeez! She’s got to be thirty-five feet long!” The snake was still circling the cage, trying to find a way out; one long side of the structure as well as a short side had her body pressed up against it, with about a foot of her head and neck just making a turn.

  “Who’s Kaa?” Barnett found his voice.

  “Rudyard Kipling, a British writer, wrote a book about a boy lost in the jungle, and a huge snake called Kaa sort of adopted him…. This thing has got to be his mother!” Garibaldi was amazed. The snake was still clean and shiny from its swim in the river and being in the clean rice sack. She was beautiful.

  “What do you think they’re going to do with it?” Barnett was afraid to say what he thought.

  “I don’t know… maybe make it a camp pet….” Garibaldi wasn’t going to scare the boy and say what was really on his mind.

  The conversation stopped when the old Montagnard the NVA used as a runner approached their cages with a small bucket of rice. Barnett pushed his
wooden bowl over to the small opening where the old man scooped out two handfuls of the bland food, using his own dirty hand as a spoon. Barnett nodded his thanks, and the old man smiled a near toothless grin and reached into his waistband and removed two small bananas and a wild bird’s egg. He patted the egg gently and said something in his native Bru language. Barnett nodded again and smiled.

  “I think the old man likes you.” Garibaldi spoke from the shadows of his cage. The sun was setting, sending mixed rays of light through the heavy green vegetation.

  “I don’t know why….” Barnett slipped his arm through the cage and tossed one of the bananas over to the colonel. He had gotten very good at tossing objects, and the banana landed within an inch of the bamboo bars.

  “Thanks….” Garibaldi picked up the much-needed fruit that wasn’t a normal part of their diet and ate it slowly. “He might feel sorry for you because of the way James harasses you… and it might have something to do with his daughter….”

  “Who’s she?”

  “The one James is living with in the village.” Garibaldi turned to listen to a noise coming from the South Vietnamese POW compound and continued talking. “I don’t think the Bru like it when the NVA take their children and give them to others.”

  “Well, James treats her like shit.” Barnett looked over at the guard, who was ignoring them. Some of the guards didn’t care if they talked to each other, but the new ones, directly from units fighting in South Vietnam, would harass them for hours. The NVA soldiers who had been wounded in combat and were recuperating from their wounds were the worst.

  The sound of people approaching stopped Barnett and Garibaldi from talking. A squad of NVA soldiers approached in the dim light, dragging a South Vietnamese POW. Garibaldi recognized the man from the first day that he had arrived. He was a second lieutenant from a unit near Da Nang, who had been captured with some of the survivors from his Ranger platoon.

  Barnett sat cross-legged on his mat and watched. The NVA sergeant climbed up on Mother Kaa’s cage and opened the trap door. He beckoned for the squad to drag the South Vietnamese officer up on the structure. The man realized what they were going to do and started to put up a struggle. They had him almost to the entrance of the cage when he stopped fighting them and began talking in a very humble tone of voice. Barnett couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he guessed that the lieutenant was begging for mercy. The NVA sergeant grunted and cuffed the lieutenant before shoving him into the cage with his foot.

  Barnett could not remember a longer night in his life. The lieutenant cried and begged the guard to help him and finally ended up crying a series of long wails each time the reptile touched him. Twice during the night Barnett smelled cigarette smoke coming from behind his cage and guessed that Sweet Bitch was listening to the South Vietnamese officer from the shadows.

  It was near dawn when the sounds of shuffling and crying ceased in the dark cage. Barnett could hear the snake slithering over the bamboo matting that lined her cage floor, but no sounds came from the lieutenant.

  Dawn revealed an answer to the mystery. The South Vietnamese lieutenant had removed his pants and had torn strips from the legs to make a rope. He had crudely hanged himself—or, more accurately, he had slowly strangled himself with the homemade rope using the bamboo bars.

  Barnett looked over at Colonel Garibaldi’s cage as soon as the morning light was bright enough to see by and saw that the colonel had also been up all night. “Sir… I don’t think that I can handle it… if… if they…”

  “Me neither, Spencer… me neither…”

  The Air Force colonel couldn’t take his eyes off the dead South Vietnamese soldier.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Project Cherry

  Sergeant Amason could see Woods sitting on top of the bunker. Searching through his pockets for his lighter, he took his time lighting the Kool hanging from his lower lip. Even from where he was standing, he could feel the agony coming from Woods without seeing the man’s face. It had been weeks since they had returned from the reconnaissance patrol in the A Shau Valley and the decimation of two of their recon teams.

  “Watching the dust, Sergeant?” Lieutenant Reed had exited the bunker from the rear entrance and saw his NCO standing there smoking.

  “There’s enough of it, isn’t there.” Amason looked over at the lieutenant. “The bigger this base camp becomes, the more red dust…. That shit is everywhere!”

  “It makes you want to go to the field, doesn’t it?” Reed tried leaning against the burlap wall in the narrow strip of shade the early-afternoon sun provided.

  “Yeah…” Amason kept watching Woods.

  “How would you like to go back to the A Shau for a short mission?” Reed tried rushing over the name of the NVA stronghold.

  Amason slowly turned his head away from Woods and looked the lieutenant directly in the eyes. He could feel the fear enter his bowels and felt like defecating, but his face didn’t reveal any emotion. “The A Shau?”

  “Yes. Brigade has received a highly classified message that concerns us.” Lieutenant Reed looked around to see if there was anyone near who could eavesdrop on their conversation before continuing. “One of the CIA listening posts in Laos has monitored a telephone conversation between a POW camp commander and a high-ranking NVA intelligence officer.” Reed checked the area around him again for people. “Do you remember the seismic-intrusion detectors we planted?”

  “How can I forget?” Arnason looked back over to where Woods was sitting. The soldier hadn’t changed his position.

  “It seems that the NVA have found six of them, but they can’t locate the second set… the set your team planted.”

  “Thanks… We did try to hide them.” Arnason was trying to be sarcastic.

  “I hope you didn’t camouflage them too good, because they want you to go back and retrieve them.”

  It took a couple of seconds for what the lieutenant had said to sink into Amason’s mind and take precedence in his thoughts. His voice thickened, and the words came out in a jumble. “Are yuh… you trying to tell me those motherfuckingstaffbastards… after I lost five men dead and two still in the hospital… James and Barnett missing… Are you telling me they now want me to go back there and retrieve those fucking electronic boxes?” Arnason could feel that he was about to lose his temper and fought within himself to regain control. “Three weeks ago—three weeks!—those supersecret boxes were so damned important! Now they want them back!” Amason lit another Kool with shaking hands. “Fuck them!”

  “Sergeant! I was in command of those teams…. Don’t you think that I feel the loss too?”

  “Look at what it did to him!” Amason nodded in the direction of the distant Woods.

  “Who?” Reed couldn’t see the soldier sitting on the perimeter bunker.

  Arnason curled his lip in contempt. “Woods… Have you been to the hospital yet, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m going to try and make it there this week…. I’ve been real busy with after-action reports and the debriefings.”

  “Yeah… Tell Kirkpatrick and Sinclair that….” Arnason turned to walk away before he did something stupid. “You were in command in the A Shau… so act like a commander.”

  “Sergeant! I’m not going to take much more of your bullshit attitude!” Reed exercised his officership. “I’m doing the best that I can do! Someone has to fill out the paperwork, and you haven’t seen me volunteering for it!”

  The officer did have a point. He was young and was trying. “Sorry about that, Lieutenant…. You’re right… you’re trying to do your best.”

  “All right… let’s drop it.” Reed’s face had turned red. “The mission to the A Shau is going to be quick. We’ll be briefed this afternoon, and the insertion is planned for first light in the morning. The plan is simple: Your team will be inserted under a heavy escort of gunships, both Hueys and fast movers. You’re to locate the sensors and destroy them.”

  “Destroy?” Arnason fought back
his anger.

  “Yes. The sensors have an antitilt device in them, so it’s just a matter of locating them and jiggling them a little with an entrenching tool….”

  “Simple as that?” Amason lit his third Kool. “Don’t forget, sir… we camouflaged them, so finding the exact spot where each one of them is buried is going to be difficult, not simple.”

  “Sergeant, I was briefed by the brigade commander, personally! There’s much more to this mission than meets the eye. I’ve told you all that you need to know. Believe me, it’s very important that the NVA doesn’t locate the sensors first.”

  “My team is sort of new.” Amason made the statement to remind the lieutenant that his team hadn’t been tested even with a short patrol. “Sinclair is still in the hospital, and it looks as if he’s going to be sent back to the States…. I’ve been loaned Simpson, but he’s fighting like hell to get off a recon team and stay back in the rear to run his drug ring….”

  “You’re not being fair, Arnason!” Reed flexed his jaws. “There’s no proof Simpson is selling drugs!”

  Amason answered the lieutenant with his eyes. He wasn’t going to honor the officer’s totally ignorant statement with words. The lieutenant knew as well as he did that Private Tousaint Simpson was the drug dealer in the An Khe base camp. Lieutenant Reed averted his eyes, and Amason continued talking. “And this new man… Lee San Ko… looks promising, but he’s going to have to be shaken out first.”

  “This will be a good mission for him.” Reed felt that the subject had turned in his favor. He had personally assigned the new man to Arnason’s team. Sergeant Lee San Ko was a full-blooded Chinese American who had come from Hong Kong with his family as a small child. The man was a martial arts expert and had trained in reconnaissance back in the States and Panama. He was very promising and was being groomed as a team leader to replace Sergeant Fitzpatrick, who had been killed in the A Shau Valley.

  “You say this is a hot mission?” Arnason’s professional side took control as he stuffed his personal emotions away somewhere deep where they wouldn’t get in the way.