The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1 - 3

by B. Hesse Pflingger

  I wandered up the tree-lined street, dodging my way through the press of cigarette peddlers, beggars, whores, pickpockets and porters, to the Hotel Catinat. I took a seat in the Pink Night Club against the wall, where I nursed a beer and peered through thick cigarette smoke, checking out incoming faces for possibilities. The rock band was ear-splitting, and the pert little mini-skirted singer gave an aerobic performance, gyrating a bump or a grind per beat, more or less, her silky black hair thrashing to and fro. But it wasn’t the same. Though things had started to wind down by ‘70 when I arrived the first time, Nam still hosted a few hundred thousand GIs. For guys who didn’t mind being there, it could be a fun war back in those days. The occasional firefight kept your adrenalin flowing, and off-base leave meant girls, beer, R&R trips with the nurses at China Beach and those other gals in Bangkok, surfing down at Vung Tau when I could swing it, and a hundred other amusements you’d have a hard time getting away with back home.

  Maybe I’d better amend that last statement. When Professor Pflingger offered to take down my story, I promised him I’d be as accurate as possible. So here’s the straight truth: Genuine firefights with the jungle full of concealed Charlies blazing away were no fun at all—scared the dogshit out of me, if you really want to know. It wasn’t until afterward, back at base with all vital organs accounted for, that I could pop open a beer, sit back, swap lies with the guys and relish the rush in retrospect.

  But that happened only a couple times. In my unit firefights were the last thing we looked for. I’d been in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols—LRRPs, the men with the painted faces, the Army’s 75th Rangers. Most of the action I saw involved sneaking into an area with a team or two, slipping through the jungle as unobtrusively as possible, and scouting out the location and strength of the enemy. As often as not, we’d be out a week or more with no contact; which was useful, because knowing where the enemy wasn’t, was as valuable as knowing where he was. When we did sight Cong we might leave quietly and report on it. Or we might call in an artillery or air strike as we were extracted by chopper, then watch the fireworks from back a safe distance. Or we might set up an ambush—our units racked up the highest body-counts, man for man, of any in Nam. Tromping around out in the trees and occasionally shooting up enemy that had no chance to shoot back was thrilling, no denying. The times they did shoot back, well, I can hardly claim we weren’t out there asking for it. If we’d done our job right, Charlie never would have caught us in a position like that. Most of the time we covered our tracks so well that they never even knew we’d come calling.

  By ‘75 Americans in Nam numbered only a couple thousand, most of them bona fide civilians, and Saigon teemed with an extra million refugees who’d flocked in from the countryside as the Viet Cong stepped up their attacks in January. With barely enough rice to fill a bowl, the refugees naturally weren’t spreading money around on whores and overpriced drinks. That task was left to the dwindling band of foreigners, American hardcases, drug lords, black marketeers, gangsters and South Vietnamese politicos (those last four categories more or less the same guys).

  It was a far cry from the good old days of neon overkill, throbbing rock music and the girls at the San Francisco, the Wild West and MiMi’s. The little action remaining seemed wistful, even desperate, the fun of it, along with hopes of victory, long since deflated. It was like waiting out the fourth quarter in the home-side grandstand after the visiting team had sewed the game up, watching the clock slowly tick along while the other side whomped on the scrubs who’d been sent in for seasoning. Of course I was four years older, and an officer not a non-com, and maybe that made a difference too. Young buck soldiers fresh from the jungle and out on the town can have a whale of a time—but officially there hadn’t been an American soldier in Nam for nearly two years.

  No familiar faces wandered into the Pink Night Club: I’d run into nobody familiar since my arrival in Saigon. The folks I’d known here previously were either back Stateside, dead or off pursuing bigger hustles. A little before the 10 o’clock curfew the bar closed down. I settled with the barmaid, shot farewell smiles at the disappointed whores and B-girls who I’d shooed away earlier, and strolled back out into the evening air. It felt heavy, hot and sticky now that I was blocks away from the riverfront. The curfew kept the night streets virtually devoid of traffic except for military convoys, a sharp contrast to the daytime tangle of bicycles, scooters and cyclo-rickshaws. I started towards the Brinks Hotel, where they’d housed me along with a lot of Embassy personnel. It was a definite improvement over my quarters last time around, when we sweated out the heat, the mosquitos and the monsoon rains in plywood hooches. I appreciated the upgrade. Now that our part in the shooting was behind us, I didn’t feel even slightly embarrassed to be a REMF.

  Night walking through depopulated downtown Saigon wasn’t unpleasant. The city had remained virtually unscarred through a dozen years of war, remarkable when you consider how thoroughly we’d trashed the rest of the country. The urge for sleep hadn’t hit me yet, but I couldn’t face a staff gathering, so I passed the Brinks and ambled the few blocks over to where Sarge stayed. As I neared his building, I could see him lounging on his screened balcony. Like myself, he was “on loan” to a civilian outfit, but standard-issue US government housing would have cramped his style. He liked his privacy and wanted to be close to his customers, so he rented his own flat, price no object.

  I trudged up a flight of stairs and knocked on his door. A heap of muddy fatigues lay out on the landing beside it. Sarge answered my knock, all freshly scrubbed in shower thongs and brand new silk skivvies. He had the physique of a Coke vending machine. “Jake, my man!” he exclaimed with a delighted grin. “Come in, come in! How ‘bout a cold one for this hot night?” Through the doorway I heard Diana Ross softly singing “Touch Me In The Morning.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” I replied, more out of sociability than thirst. I’d had plenty already, but no sense turning down hospitality. “Looks like you spent some time out in the boonies,” I remarked, indicating the laundryman’s nightmare outside.

  “One hell of a thing,” he sighed as he reached a beer out of the cooler. His flat seemed more spacious than it was, thanks to its spartan, “Traditional BOQ” decor. Little graced the living room beyond a shelf of books, a teak desk, a top-quality Japanese sound system, some solid furniture fashioned of wood, leather and rattan, and an assortment of family and service photographs hung on otherwise bare walls. Straw mats lined up along the floor edges precisely. “Took a team down to that Delta, clearing up another mess,” he continued as he brought the beer out to me. “Them M113 personnel carriers can run on solid ground, and they can run in plain water, but why do these local cowboys have to run ‘em into waist-deep mud? It’s enough to make a grown man cry, ‘specially when it’s his job to get ‘em back out.” A pause, then: “It’s a funny feeling out there right now, Jake, a real funny feeling. They say just before an earthquake or before a volcano blows up, all the animals, they get nervous and strange-like. Same way out there. Can’t exactly describe it, but the folks just real edgy right now, acting like something bad’s about to happen. Same kind of feelin’ as just before Tet. We best be keepin’ our eyes open and one of ‘em on our backtrail.”

  When Sarge Wallace rendered an opinion on such matters, you’d be a fool not to listen. A master sergeant since forever, he invariably knew every who, what, where, when and why, usually even before who knew what, where and why. He’d finagled staying in Nam, on loan to a civilian contractor, partly because he liked the place but mostly to keep his current business going. He brought gold in from Macau or Singapore, where duties were low, and sold it for US dollars on the black market to locals, who figured that gold might be more negotiable than greenbacks in some of the scenarios that seemed more and more possible with each passing day.

  Not that Sarge was any kind of crook. He was 110% soldier and would never do anything in the
least way contrary to the Army’s best interests. He just dabbled in small-time smuggling, like most everybody else in Saigon. His various side businesses, his kid bro Henry had told me, usually netted on the high side of five hundred bucks a week, and Sarge kept to a strict rule never to exceed a thousand. “Get too greedy and you bother the big boys,” Sarge had explained to him, “and in most places that means you messin’ with the government, the police or the army. No amount of money’s worth that kind of trouble.”

  As with his Army duties, Sarge in business dealt fair but tough. “Pay up, or pay otherwise,” was said to be his motto. If he got the idea he was being juked around, his easygoing smile morphed into something suitable for Mount Rushmore. Henry said nobody had ever pushed Sarge far enough to find out what “otherwise” meant.

  Henry had alerted Sarge that I was en route to Saigon, so I was in tight with him from the moment I arrived. Sarge took a special interest in me because Henry thought I’d saved his life. Well, maybe, but what else should I have done?

  Our teams had been sent to investigate some new VC tunneling reported by a village informant. As a rule, non-coms led LRRP patrols, but we’d brought a new officer, Lieutenant Hanna, along for the experience. A routine mission, we rappelled out of our choppers into the zone with the objective of locating the tunnels and reporting on enemy strength in the area. Of course, as expert as we LRRPs were at staying out of sight, the Charlies could match us. They probably observed us too, as often as not, but usually they didn’t give away their positions. By 1970 they’d sensed we Americans would eventually be departing, so they’d taken to biding their time and playing it cautious. Their style was to stay out of sight, then mass at the site of an attack, hit, and fade back into the jungle before the defenders could get organized. Picking unnecessary fights with us could only deplete their strength and mess up their overall strategy.

  That mission had been a quiet one. We knew we were in Indian country, but we’d already walked around for a week with no enemy sightings to show for it. We were about ready to fold the mission and call in a couple Hueys to extract us and return us to base with another report on where the enemy wasn’t.

  We were walking a trail through broken woods. A steep embankment came down on our left, and, to our right, ten or so meters of more gradual bank covered with scrub and tall grass sloped down to a stream. Henry’s team, along with the lieutenant, were spread out ahead. My team followed, me at the point, a couple dozen yards back. I came around a bend to see Henry and Lieutenant Hanna standing together in a small clearing, checking out our position on a topo map. The other guys had halted also, strung out along the trail and taking their ease. It was sloppy procedure, but after all we’d seen no sign of enemy for a whole week.

  In Vietnam combat could be there and gone before you realized it. I happened to be looking over at the embankment to the left just as, no more than twenty yards away, the brush parted and two gun barrels poked out and opened up. Apparently I was out of their line of sight, maybe obscured until that instant by the brush on the hillside. Whatever, I whipped my weapon—an M16 with underslung grenade launcher—up to my shoulder and fired the grenade at the hole, then snapped off a burst on full automatic and hit the dirt behind some brush. Meanwhile Lieutenant Hanna and Henry went down. The other men scrambled down the creek bank. They were met with loud bangs—landmines! I heard a muffled explosion from the hillside. I saw Henry dazedly crawling toward the stream, heading for what he thought was safety. I scrambled to my feet and made straight for Henry, falling on him just as he started down the bank. Then it dawned on me that we were sprawled out there in the open, point blank in front of that tunnel opening. I rolled over to get my pack between me and it, then clenched my teeth and waited to be shot to pieces.

  It didn’t happen. Except for the groaning of the men who’d been hit, the stillness of disturbed jungle once again prevailed. Damn if my grenade hadn’t gone right into the tunnel and taken out two skedaddling Charlies.

  Well, if you ever get a chance to choose one thing to be, choose “lucky.” I sure had more luck that day than some of the others. Lieutenant Hanna got hit pretty bad. One of the fellows who’d found the mines had bought the farm—not much we could do for him but retrieve the body. The other one had lost half a leg and was bleeding like crazy. Henry was more stunned than anything, as the pack on his back had taken most of the rounds. He’d been spun around and knocked down, but otherwise just grazed. The other guys down the stream bank retraced their steps very carefully.

  It was a neatly arranged ambush, I had to admit. When shooting starts you instinctively dive for cover away from the fire. The gooks must have been keeping track of us, had figured we’d pass this point and had laid a trap, mining the brush and high grass down the stream bank. Why they hadn’t waited for the rest of us to arrive I can’t say; and the two Charlies were in no shape to enlighten me. Maybe nailing a LRRP officer was an irresistible temptation. Had I been anywhere else at that precise moment than where I was, they’d have gotten away with it, and maybe even gotten me. As they say, timing is everything.

  Now the only effective team leader, I assumed command, and our next move was obvious—haul ass out of there. No telling what else Charlie might be up to in that sector, and we’d already had enough contact for one day. We’d passed a spot a couple of klicks back on the trail that would be easier to secure as a landing zone. We patched up the wounded, got ourselves together and booby-trapped the bodies in the tunnel with grenades. As we pulled out I radioed the coordinates for an airstrike. Even before we reached our LZ we could hear the jets plastering it.

  I’d called ahead for the pickup and medevac, timing it so we wouldn’t have to sweat it out waiting for them—good thinking, as the VC’s weren’t about to let us leave in peace. As the choppers arrived, so did incoming mortar. I clambered aboard, the last man in, and took a few fragments in the legs from the shell that finally found the range. Otherwise we got away clean. Henry was okay, and Lieutenant Hanna eventually recovered. Later recon determined that we’d been ambushed at a branch of a new tunnel network intended to be a staging area for an upcoming offensive. Air strikes never did permanent damage to VC tunneling, but at least we’d located it and given them something to think about. Mission accomplished.

  Headquarters must have been short of their hero quota that month, because for the afternoon’s work I wound up with a Distinguished Service Cross, also a Purple Heart. And it may have had something to do with my recommendation for OCS at the end of my tour. What I remember most vividly about the episode was laying there on top of Henry waiting to be riddled by AK-47 slugs. Not the easiest way to make a living.

  We’d been sipping at our beers and passing small talk. Sarge was stretched out, amply filling his rattan and leather planter’s chair. “How’d you wind up enlisted anyhow, Jake?” he asked. “Henry says you were a good soldier. But you just don’t seem like no grunt. Why weren’t you an officer right from the get go?”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” I answered.

  “No kind of luck I’d ever wish on a man,” he quipped, but he was plainly proud of being Army. “Weren’t you some kind of football player in college, where was it Henry said, that UCLA?”

  “Tailback on the frosh squad, benchwarmer thereafter. Dropped out of school midway into my sophomore year.”

  “Now, why would a man drop out of college, with the draft facin’ him? Turn on, tune in, drop out, like the feller said? You weren’t doing no drugs, were you?”

  I could see why Sarge knew everything going on worth knowing. He was the kind of guy you just couldn’t help talking to. “It wasn’t exactly that I dropped out. Seems the dean gave me the boot, thanks to a little incident.”

  “Come on, Jake, they wasn’t expelling nobody from college back in those days. All those kinds of hell the students was raising, and did anything ever happen to any of ‘em?”

  “We’re treading on sensitive gr
ound here, Sarge,” I protested. But what the hell, I knew whatever I said would stop at Sarge’s lips. I’d never told anybody the whole story, and maybe it was about time. “It had to do with this girl I was going with,” I began.

  “Nothin’ new since Old Man Adam,” he reflected with a knowing smile.

  My girlfriend, Dana Wehrli (“Whirlybird,” the surfing gang called her), had decided to go respectable. No future in running with surf rats, she’d calculated, and time was slipping away from her, she being all of nineteen years old. So she up and transmuted from Gidget-Gone-Ballistic to Miss Junior Leaguer; and she had the looks, and her family had the money, to carry it off. She even managed to get herself engaged to a medical student.

  This happened during our sophomore year, about the same time it became clear that Tony Gilliam, not me, was destined to be starting tailback. To be honest, I never would have been. Everybody was getting bigger but me. Tony transferred in from junior college. He had that extra step, that slightly sharper angle cutting inside the defensive end, that instinct for anticipating the flow, and most importantly, the Desire. As for me, I enjoyed playing football, but I was more into surfing, so spent more time in the water than on the grass. Of course I realized all that much later. At the time, what with one thing and another, I was feeling pissed off as hell.

  Then I heard about the wedding shower that Dana’s sorority sisters had planned for her. I decided the moment had arrived for my personal statement on the matter. Streaking that shower would show the world what I thought of Miss Dana Wehrli and her diddley-ass medical student.

  It took place on the patio of the Bel Air home of Dana’s sorority “big sister,” on a crisp and sunny Sunday afternoon in late October. The property sat inside a jug handle curve. Our plan had D.D. and me stopping my Mustang along the fence at one side of the yard; and Bagel and Wild Blue Under would have the van parked by the fence at the other side, back doors wide open and motor running. The fence was 1 x 12 redwood planks, tightly spaced, about five feet high. I’d vault over it, sprint through the astonished throng, shoot over the fence on the other side (maybe pausing at the apex to moon the whole sorry lot of them) and be gone before they knew what hit them. From what we could see, peering through a crack in the fence, it looked like no problem.