A staf sergeant named Crowley, Matthew M., got his head blown off by a Eurasian drug merchant named René Bouvier. There was a photo in the file of a short, black-haired sergeant with two or three other staff-looking noncoms around him. Everyone was smiling, and the flip side of the photo said the short guy was Crowley. The Eurasian was never found. Al and a technician CID named Clay Belker investigated the killing, Belker signing on the body's fingerprints. Belker I remembered, a gangly, surly white guy from Alabama. Al always thought that Belker was O.K., God knows why.
I reached November 1967, when I arrived in Saigon. The next file involved Al directly. An MP was knifed and died when he stumbled on two GIs buying heroin from a Vietnamese. On his way down, the MP winged one GI named Curtis D. Chandler, who was caught six blocks away, bleeding freely. Al interrogated Chandler, who refused to give the name of his partner. I wrote down the full name of Chandler and the word "partner?" There was no further mention of partner except that "further interrogation proved unsuccessful." Involuntarily, a picture of a different kind of interrogation came to mind and decided to stay awhile.
* * *
The hallway was in the damp basement of the South Vietnamese National Police substation three blocks from our headquarters. To the basement were brought confirmed or suspected VC (Viet Cong). The hall was dim, one 25-watt bulb on a wire about halfway down the corridor. The place stank more from disinfectant than puke, urine, or feces, but not by much. The atmosphere of successful interrogation, National Police style. Rumored but not seen. Well, not often seen.
Sometimes they did it with switches of split bamboo, swacking the stick against a prisoner's bare feet or palms until the screaming gave way to the short-lived relief of unconsciousness. A little slapping about the face, and the questioning proceeded. A slow mode and strenuous.
A second method was cigarettes. No, not as bribes. Lit ones. Applied to earlobes, lips, eyelids. Like the killer had done with Al. Some noise and smell, agony extreme but intermittent. Effective and less strenuous, but still time-consuming.
For quickest results, a crank telephone box and a couple of wires were employed. The interrogator's aide would crank the box, the current thus produced transmitted by the wires connected to the prisoner's a genitalia, male or female. The aide's muscle tone and endurance weren't much limitation on the pace and the duration of the questioning here.
I was to be present at an interrogation because the prisoner, doubly damned as VC as well as black marketeer, supposedly spoke good English. He therefore would be able to give me names of American servicemen providing products from the PXs, either through the front door (by discount purchase) or through the back door (the ultimate discount). My National Police guide escorted me down into the basement to the interrogation section.
You've heard sitcom laughtracks? Well, if the producers of a horror movie ever wanted a screamtrack, they really missed their chance back then. Name your scream and the NP would provide it, on cue. A seventy-year-old woman's long, piercing wail. A thirty-five-year-old father's gasping outbursts of anguish as he realized he would be fathering no more. Perhaps a sixteen-year-old girl for whom permanent disfigurement must have seemed a vague and distant concern compared to the cause of her shrieking and gagging hoarseness.
"This room," said my escort, smiling brightly.
"Please?"
He swung open the door. The smell of disinfectant was very strong. There were three NP men in the room. One was seated at a table taking down machine-gum sentences in Vietnamese. The speaker was a fiftyish man in dark red prisoner pajamas who sat across from him. The pajamas seemed three sizes too large. The prisoner was speaking so fast the seated NP could not transcribe it. The NP standing next to the prisoner clouted him on the cheek with a backhand and spat a Vietnamese word. The prisoner slowed down.
The third NP spoke to my escort quickly in Vietnamese, then addressed me in English. My escort fetched a chair.
"Welcome. I am Captain Ngo." He inclined his head. "You will please to sit?"
"Thank you," I said, sitting and tugging a pad and ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket. "I'm Lieutenant Cuddy. I understand this man speaks English?"
"Oh, yes. We will . . ."
He shot a terse question in Vietnamese to my escort.
"Su-pend," said my escort.
"Ah, yes. We will suspend now and you will question him. The traitor's name is Can Gai Trinh. He has much to tell you."
Captain Ngo, barked something at Trinh and the guard who was about to clock him again. I heard a scrabbling sound from the room next door. I hoped it was a rat. If not, it was probably a child.
Trinh stopped talking to the NP transcriber and looked at me.
"Yessir," he said.
"Your full name and address," I asked.
He told me.
"How long have you been here?"
"Whole life."
I shook my head. "No," I said. The guard took this as a request to strike Trinh.
I looked at Ngo. "Tel1 him to stop hitting the prisoner.”
Ngo spoke, and the guard backed off a step.
"I mean, how long have you been in this building?"
"Oh, maybe full day."
"How old are you?"
"T'irty-one."
I looked at him. He flitted his eyes around the room, fearful he'd sparked more retribution. He still looked fiftyish. The pajamas covered everything but his head, weak hands, and bare feet. There were no marks on those parts. Probably used the crank box. "Tell me the GIs who work with you in the black market. Names, outfits."
I got a stream of people. Twelve or thirteen, from PFCs to a master sergeant.
I took it all down, got some functional details and some future dates to mark.
I looked up at Captain Ngo. "Who knows he's here?"
"Nobody. We catch him clean. Behind a building. Nobody see."
I inclined my head toward the prisoner. "I may need him at the trial of the bad Americans," I said. Trinh's face lit up, the hope, however, tempered by experience.
I locked Ngo with my best stare. "Will he be alive then?"
Ngo frowned, disappointed. "If you like," he relented.
I shook off the interrogation memory and waded through about twenty more reports. Names, faces, places. The absurdities of a big city at the edge of an unnatural war. I went through December of '67 into January of '68. I dreaded reaching the end of that month, so I got up and took a stretch-break. My interlude with the muggers was taking its toll in stiffness and soreness. I finished the ice water and I took the pitcher to the door. I opened it.
The receptionist was gone, but a master sergeant swiveled around in the seat Casey had occupied hours ago. He stood up and smiled.
"Help you, sir?"
"Yes. Are you Sergeant Ricker?"
"'I`hat's right, sir. What can I do for you?"
He was about six feet tall. Maybe one-eighty in shape, two hundred with his pot. I was tired, and he had that vaguely familiar look of many middle-aged noncoms. Bald, forty-five or so, with a Southwest twang in his voice.
"Just some cold water, if you can."
I extended the pitcher as he said, "Sure thing, sir."
I looked up at the clock. It said 16:45. He noticed me and shook the pitcher at me.
"Now, don't you worry none about that clock, sir. Casey, Sergeant Casey, he told me you was here on something important, and I already called the missus. I'll be here jest as long as you need. I got me a book and everything?
There was a Louis L'Amour novel spread open face down on his desk.
"Thanks, Sergeant. I really appreciate it."
"Would you like some coffee, sir? It's no trouble."
"No, thanks."
"Jest be a minute."
He was gone perhaps thirty seconds.
"Here you are, sir."
"Thanks, Sergeant."
"You jest take your time." He smiled. "There ain't nothing goin' on over in the old D. of C. on a cold Monday night in M
arch anyways."
I went back in, closed the door and sat back down. Mid-January 1968 became January 20, then January 25, then finally January 30. The dawn of the Year of the Monkey, the lunar New Year holiday all of Vietnam celebrated.
They called it "Tet."
Some military historians trace the strategic beginning of the Tet Offensive back to September 1967, in terms of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong planning and stockpiling in and around the cities of South Vietnam. Tet was really the first time the cities were hit, the VC up till then being a nearly invisible enemy, indistinguishable citizens by day, raiders in rural villages and an occasional town by dark. One North Vietnamese general suggested much later that since the offensive did not result in widespread, spontaneous uprisings by the people of South Vietnam, it was, in effect, a military defeat for Charlie. Americans who were there that night might disagree with him.
The Viet Cong caught the whole country sleeping. They attacked air bases, corps headquarters, National Police substations, even our Embassy, which squatted like a concrete sewage plant in a neighborhood of French villas on Thong Nhut. Al and I were sacked out in our BOO when the first explosions awakened us. We got dressed and raced downstairs, the pop and crack of small-arms fire filling the air between the louder blasts of rockets and sappers' satchel charges.
We leaped with eight or ten others into a deuce-and-a-half-ton truck that barreled the mile or so to our headquarters.
The doorway to our station looked like the entrance to an anthill. MPs were scurrying in and out, passing, tossing, dropping equipment. Jeeps and deuce-and-a-halfs were pulling up and pulling out with a lot of noise but little pattern. The harried captain on duty split us up, A1 drawing a barricade reinforcement north of the headquarters and me a recon by jeep toward the red-light district on Tu Do Street. Al was wounded almost as soon as he left the station, so I figured I would just skim the reports from the start of the attack onward. There was no reason for me to relive my memories. Still, the nightmare images from that night flashed back no matter how quickly I flipped the pages.
Two MPs, a young blond PFC and an older black sergeant, lying dead next to an overturned, burning jeep at a street comer. Both still held their .45s, jacked open and empty. Nine Viet Cong, some with automatic weapons, sprawled in a staggered attack formation in front of them. An incredible stand. Four National Police officers stopping a vegetable truck. They pulled the driver out and shot him to death, rumor being that the VC had infiltrated their weapons and explosives for Tet in such vehicles. A farmer, elderly with arthritic, stained fingers and a few long strands of chin beard. He wore a broad, peaked coolie hat and clutched a copy of Chinh Luun, the Vietnamese-language newspaper. He was sitting motionless in a corner of a blown-out building, staring at another corner. God knows how he came to be there or what happened to him afterwards. A red-haired trooper, who had spent the entire night of the attack with a B-girl, being dragged between two MPs into the station. He looked so young, a ninth-grader being taken to the principal's office for detention.
Viet Cong prisoners, the men in cheap white dress shirts, the women wearing white kerchiefs. All kneeling in gaggles of five or six, arms bound behind them. The National Police would snug the rope just above the elbows, tugging back so hard that the elbows nearly touched, creating an image of supplicant, uni-sexual Venus de Milos.
Two of my men, hit by an AK-47 in the hands of a skinny Vietnamese hiding in a dark doorway. They went down all akimbo, as if they were marionettes and someone had cut their strings. I tired three rounds into the shooter, who spun and belly-whopped on the pavement. A shadow in the next doorway moved, and I fired three more times at it. The shadow slammed back against the door, landing so that the feet were in the light. A child's feet.
An American nurse, blond and thin with terrible acne, stroking the face of a head-bandaged sergeant and assuring him that his eyes weren't gone forever. A GI, screaming in Spanish and shooing a scrawny cat away from a dead body. The cat had been going after the corpse's eyes. The GI started throwing up. A mother lying face down in the street, her eyes open, snot and blood and broken teeth all around her. Her daughter, maybe four years old, howling and beating her fists bloody on the pavement while two National Policemen stripped and looted the Viet Cong bodies in the alleyway.
Standing in a gutter, I look down and see an arm. A black left arm. With a faded gold high school ring on the fourth finger. A blue stone.
Two B-girls, still in their slit-sided hostess dresses, crucified on a side wall of a Tu Do Street bar for fraternizing with us, the enemy. They had been raped and slashed repeatedly. One was still alive when my sergeant put a bullet through her head. If you had seen her, you wouldn't be asking yourself that question right now.
An explosion that ripped through a convent school. Intentionally set, no mistaken bomb dropped randomly from above. Thirty-nine girls, aged seven through eleven, blown into a thousand once-human fragments.
Tet. The joyous lunar new year. Auld lang syne.
* * *
I rubbed my eyes. I got up and opened the conference room door. Ricker swiveled around and stood. It was 18:10. Christ, where had the time gone?
"More water, sir?" he asked.
"No thanks, Sergeant. Just stretching."
"Yessir. Anything else I can get for you?"
"Yeah, a new set of memo1ies."
He laughed respectfully. I closed the door and went back to my reading.
Al was in the hospital until mid-February. I slowed down when I saw his name reappearing prominently. Al and a Sergeant Keams brought in an acid freak named Farrell who had fragged his platoon leader. Farrell swore he would get Al, swore to God, Timothy Leary, and his mother. Farrell, Wiley N. I remembered him. One more for the list.
Al busted a French national named Giles LeClerc who was drawing young Gls into a homosexual prostitution ring. LeClerc had a Vietnamese boyfriend and partner named Tran Dai Dinh who hadn't been caught. The method was consistent, but a long way and a long time for a lover's vengeance. I wrote LeClerc and Dinh down anyway.
Al turned in an American captain of intelligence who had taken too enthusiastically to NP methods of interrogation. Bradley D. Collier. Disgraced, courtmartialed, convicted, and sentenced. I fingered a photo of him. Sullen, a look of betrayal. A strong contender.
I stumbled on a reference to one of Al's combat assignments. When the infantry came up short on platoon leaders, the combat colonels would dip into the MP officer pool for fresh blood.
I remembered vividly one combat mission with Al. It was a three-day, company-strength sweep maneuver skirting the jungle. The company commander was a gung-ho jerk, with a Kit Carson scout (a "reformed" North Vietnamese regular) leading the way. I hated the jungle. I preferred anything, even the rice paddies, to it.
The first day was uneventful. Instead of returning to base camp, of course, we bivouaced in the bush. The second day was as quiet as the first. The second night, one of my perimeter guards led Al up to my foxhole. "Boy," said Al, hunkering down when the sentry left us, "have I got a great deal set up."
I looked up at him blearily. "A deal?"
Al checked right and left, then whispered, "A tiger hunt!"
"A what?" I said, well above a whisper.
"Shush." He looked around again. "A tiger hunt. No shit, John. There used to be a lot of them around here before the war."
"Al," I said, "there has always been a war in this country."
"No, no. I mean a long time ago. Before the Second World War. But there are still some tigers. And an old guy in that last village said he was a guide. I was there when the scout was questioning him. Honest."
"So?" I said.
"So," said Al, looking crafty, "for fifty dollars American, we can get ourselves a shot at a tiger."
I closed my eyes and hung my head. "Why," I said to the ground, "in the name of God, do you want to shoot a tiger?"
"Aw, c'mon, John. When are you ever gonna get another chance like this. A b
ig game safari for fifty bucks!"
"A1, we are pulling out at zero-five-thirty hours tomorrow."
"Tonight, John, tonight. We'll be gone and back by midnight."
"Man, do you have any idea how much a tiger weighs, or do you already have bearers signed up to carry it out?"
He sulked. "Ah, c'mon John. We'll probably never even see a tiger. It's the thrill. A once in a lifetime chance to have some sport in this godforsaken stink-hole of a country."
I held up my hand. "Al, I am not going stalking through a jungle at night after a tiger."
"But that's the beauty of it, John. The guide'll take care of that. He knows a watering hole that the cats use. It's close by. He'll lead us there, then bring a goat and stake it out for us. It'll be like sitting in your living room." .
"Then why do you need me?"
Al sighed. "Because I'm not about to go after a tiger with just a scout and an old man as back-up. I want a friend I can rely on."
I thought back to the BOQ brawl when Al jumped in to help me. "O.K.," I said.
Al clenched his Est, shook it into the air. He rose up and danced a little jig.
A1 convinced the company commander that Al and I wanted the experience of setting up a night ambush with the scout. The commander thought our attitude was "outstanding." We slipped through our perimeter, advising the guards of our likely direction and return time.
In the bright moonlight, we moved quickly back up the trail to the village, a little less than a kilometer. The scout, whose name was Van, connected us with the guide, who was called Chzia te', or simply "master" in Vietnamese. Master had a scraggly, dung-encrusted goat on a rope. I didn't catch the goat's name.
Through Van, Master asked us for his money. I always carried real cash, not MPC (Military Payment Certificates), in the boonies. I once heard that a Finance Corps lieutenant was killed when he tried to buy his way out of a tight situation with MPC. The locals wanted real currency, not monopoly money. After the exchange of cash, Master produced two large-bore antique rifles. He demonstrated how the breech-loading mechanism functioned, then doled out four bullets each to Al and me. I gave Al a murderous glare. He pretended not to notice. There were the sounds of a dog barking and a child crying from somewhere in the village as we struck off.
The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy Page 14