The Phuong twins move down the paddy dike and give coconuts to the Nguyen brothers, Mot, Hai, and Ba. There are a lot of blushes and giggles from the Phuong twins and a lot of good-natured catcalls from the villagers. The village matchmakers have been working overtime to solve this critical problem in mathematics: how to divide three Nguyen brothers into two Phuong twins.
I wipe sweat from my face with somebody's Liberation Front bandana. I climb up into the paddy dike and lie down. My back is throbbing with pain. I concentrate. I ignore the pain.
On Parris Island, during Marine Corps recruit training, Gunny Gerheim, our Senior Drill Instructor, taught us that pain is only an illusion and exists only in the mind.
Concentrating, I can hear Sergeant Gerheim's booming voice: "Fall into the squad bay, herd.
Gent inside! Get inside! You pinheaded no-brained foreskin-chewing pogey bait maggots, you are lower than worm life! All right, ladies, right shoulder locker box. Do it now! And repeat after me: 'We're a bunch of girls, and we can't march.'"
I miss Parris Island. Parris Island was a picnic.
As I sit up and swallow my last bite of fish and squash, a muffled drone on the horizon turns into a Bird Dog spotter plane. A small olive-drab Cessna sputters in slow motion above the rice fields, unarmed, just one for a little noontime VR--Visual Reconnaissance.
Loudspeakers on the plane play Buddhist funeral music wile a Kit Carson Scout who has Chieu Hoi'd reads invitations to surrender and itemizes the many bennies available for Viet Cong troopers who defect over to the American side of the bamboo curtain.
The villagers wave at the plane in a friendly way, and they jokes: "Ban May Bay giac My"--
"We must shoot down all of the American pirate planes." Everybody laughs, waving harder.
I wave too, and I hunch down beneath my white conical rice-paper hat as I squat on the paddy dike.
Johnny Be Cool stands on the back of his water buffalo, waving.
Today, instead of buzzing along harmlessly until it's out of sight, the Bird Dog swings around and makes another pass, coming in unusually low, rocking its wings to wave at the villagers, who wave back and cheer, and laugh, because everybody knows that the Phuong twins, the pretty girls who brought us lunch, are at this moment in a camoflaged postition in the treeline, taking care of business.
The Phuong twins track the Bird Dog through the sights of a 12.7-milimeter antiaircraft gun until it is out of sight.
The day returns to its usual back-breaking routine until late in the afternoon, when someone finds an unexploded shell. There is some minor excitement as Commander Be Dan arrives with four Chien Si, Front fighters from the village Self-Defense Milita.
The Chien Si are skinny teenaged boys wearing dark green shorts, short-sleeved khaki shirts, and rubber sandals cut from truck tires. The fighters are armed with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their backs.
Commander Be Dan and the Woodcutter have a brief but noisy debate concerning the risk of removing the shell. It could be cut opne and the explosives inside used to make boody traps and hand grenades.
Commander Be Dan is short and stocky, like a Korean Marine. He's missing his left hand at the wrist. His hand was blown off when Commander Be Dan was a sapper in the Dac Cong, the Viet Cong Special Forces. He's a former heavy-hitter demoted to the minor leagues. As the Woodcutter chatters on and on and flings his arms, Commander Be Dan is silent.
Commander Be Dan never says very much; he's sort of a Viet Cong Gary Cooper.
During planting season three villagers were killed and seven injured when their plows and hoes struck unexploded bombs and shells. Even the soil that gives us life is full of death sown by the enemy.
Commander Be Dan convinces the Woodcutter that this particular shell is too dangerous to remove intact. The shell is blown in place, quickly, so that the harvest can continue.
We work on. More hours of hard, back-breaking labor. The grain is in head and ready to fall, so harvest days do not end until twilight.
Tonight is village meeting night. As we leave our partly harvest crop and walk back to the village we look forward to an entertainment.
Song and I kick aside the stubby white ghosts that are chickens pecking rice kernels off the paddy dike. Somewhere a water bo bellows mournfully, lonely for his girlfriend. Somewhere laughing children run, trying to catch firelfies.
Walking with Song, I inhale the life-giving odors of earth, sun, sweat, and animals. My back is stiff and numb, but my body feels hot and strong with the good tired feeling that comes at the end of a day of hard work, when you feel like you're earned your supper and have earned your right to a good night's sleep, because you're free, and honest, and you don't owe anybody a damned thing.
After the evening meal, still tired from our day in the fields but enjoying the relief from the tropical heat, the entire village assembles on the village common, facing the giant banana tree.
Sitting on top of the rusting wrekc of the French armored car is Bo Doi Bac Si, a North Vietnamese Army medic. This is a relief for everyone. It means that we are not going to have to suffer through another reading from Mao's Little Red Book by Ba Can Bo, our political cadre.
Bo Doi Bac Si is an ernest young man, serious about his duties, yet friendly and good-natured. He is wearing a clean khaki uniform with trousers and spit-shined black leather boots. Red collar tabs bearing a single silver star on a yellow stripe identify him as a Corporal. Attached to the front of his small khaki-colored pith helmet is a red metal star.
A pet monkey sits on Bo Doi Bas Si's shoulder, playing with the Coporal's ear. Bo Doi Bac Si found the monkey on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The monkey was dying and he nursed it back to health. He calls the monkey Trang--"Victory."
The Corporal, along with his superior, Master Sergeant Xuan, are stationed in Hoa Binh as liasisons between the Front fighters and North Vietnamese Army units that march like army ants down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and draw supplies of rice from the village of Hoa Binh.
The commanding officer of the NVA liaison detachment, Lieutenant Minh, a very popular man, was killed last month during a B-52 attack a few miles from the village. During the attack, Lieutenant Mihn jumped into a shell-hole fish pond for cover and was bitten by a deadly bamboo viper.
The title of Bo Doi Bac Si's talk is "Ho Chi Minh's Armies March by Night."
Bo Doi Bac Si opens a small pocket diary. The pages of the diary are stained. The cover is faded and torn. He turns the pages of the diary for a moment, then looks at the audience. He has happy eyes and an easy grin. He is the Audie Murphy of the NVA. When he speaks, his voice is touched with emotion: "We began our historic journey with a cheer, "Nam Tien!"--
"Let's march South!"
As Bo Doi Bac Si speaks, Song whispers a translation into my ear. She knows that my understanding of Vietnamese is sketchy and that Bo Doi Bac Si's northern speech is too fast and too heavily accented for me to understand clearly.
Before Bo Doi Bac Si can exploit the momentum of his dramatic beginning, Trang, his pet monkey, stops eating peanuts from the shell and suddenly grabs the Coporal's pith helmet and pulls it from the Corporal's head, revealing a closely cropped shock of ink-black hair.
Holding the pith helmet with both hands, Trang puts the helmet onto his own head. We all laugh, of course, but we struggle to be polite while the Corporal lunges at teh little brown monkey in a vain attempt to recover his headgear. Some of us laugh as the chattering monkey and the pith helmet disappear over the back end of the armored car. We can hear Trang screeching as he runs away.
We are quiet and respectful as Bo Doi Bac Si continues: "Before I joined the People's Army I worked as a petrol station attendant just outside of Hanoi. My father is a bricklayer and my mother works part-time as a volunteer nurse."
"On the day I left home I told my mother and father to think of me as dead, and not to be sad for me, but happy.
"In my training battalion were comrade soldiers from all over Viet Nam. We were issued uniforms, boots
, pith helmets, a mosquito net, a knapsack, a rice bowl and a pair of chopsticks, and a war surplus Russian Army belt with an enameled red star on the buckle.
With so many fine things we felt like very rich men.
"We were given many pieces of paper to write on, and we complained that we were eager to fight the puppet armymen of the Saigon gangsters and wanted to win many battles agains the American imperialist aggressors, not waste time writing our names and birthdates and natal villages on endless pieces of paper.
"Our training was hard, six days a week, and our instructors were very strict. We marched in formations, ran up hills, ran down hills, crawled under barbed wire, thew hand grenades, bayoneted wicker men, and learned how to clean and fire our rifles effectively.
"I was assigned to a school and trained to doctor wounded comrade soldiers in battle.
"The day our training ended we were the happiest and proudest men on earth, with a strong fighting spirit. We felt that it was a great honor to have been selected to defend our beautiful country and our way of life.
"We rode to Tchepone on a train. Most of my comrades had never ridden on a train and we were frightened. But soon we were laughing and joking, happy that our training was over, and looking forward to a great adventure and to great victories in defense of our southern brothers, who were gallantly and steadfastly resisting the cruel domination of foreign criminals. From our train windows we could see happy children standing on thebacks of their water buffaloes, waving to us. We were their protection. We were the sons of their people, the armymen of the people, and we all understood deep down inside that our responsibilities to our people were great.
"We got off the train and climbed into big gray-green Russian trucks. The trucks had low-lamp shuttered headlights. We rode in the trucks day and night for two days. When we got off the trucks we were in a big camp with thousands and thousand of Bo Doi--comrade soldiers--just like us. We had never seen so many soldiers.
"Our commanders ordered us to take off our uniforms and put on black pajama outfits. We were instructed to say, if captured, that we were not Bo Doi, government soldiers from the North, but Chien Si, guerrilla fighters of the South from the National Liberation Front. We were not told where we were going. We did not ask.
"Each fighter was issued two grenades, one hundred bullets, a poncho, a small shovel, an assault rifle, and eight pounds of rice, which we carried inside a hammoch lined with wax paper and slung across our chests.
"We cut twigs from tree braches and tied them to our pith helmets and equipment with string.
Each fighter was assigned a heavy load of military supplies to carry on his back. I was given a knapsack containing six 61-millimeter mortar bombs.
"The night before we stared South we had a feast, spicing our rive with mushrooms and chopped fish. We even drank a few beers we'd smuggled into camp. We listened to a puppet radio station, careful not to be caught by the cadres, who were afraid we might be brainwashed by the propaganda of the Siagon gangster regime. If we were caught, our cadres would criticize us.
"My comrades and I all bought pocket diaries for recording our historic march and for writing poetry during the long march South to almost certain death. We knew that our descendans would treasure our diaries after we were killed in battle. We had no thought but that we would fight on until we were killed. We were committed to the cause of the salvation of the nation, which is very sacred.
"We carved walking sticks and inscribed them with out motto: 'Live great, die gloriously.'
"We walked for what seemed like thousands of kilometers. We saw Bo Doi battalions singing as they marched. We sang too. Up mountains, down mountains, along paths barely visible, along paved roads, through jungles that were wet, green and gloomy.
"Crossing rivers and streams was the hardest part of traveling in the jungle. Our feet were always wet and diseased. Every cut became infeced. Leeches were our constant compaions.
"Everywhere the Dan Cong Labor Brigades were working to repair the Strategic Trail, which was sometimes called the Truong Son Route. Pirate planes bombed the trail every day, sometimes near, sometimes far away. But nothing slowed the flow of the camel bikes--
Chinese bicycles loaded with up to one thousand kilos of military supplies.
"We ate at food stations, hot rice boiled in big black iron pots. We saw hospitals, vast supply depots, and antiaircraft cannons. Thousands of workers and fighters lived all along the Strategic Trail to assist the river of People's Army battalions marching South. Food was stored in bomb craters covered with canvas.
"Casualties due to dysentery were increasing. In the second week, two fighters were killed by the bombs. Heat casualties were becoming more common--we left them behind in the underground hospitals. Some of them caught up with us later, but some died.
"I tended wounds, gave out medicine, and checked everyone's feet regularly to prevent jungle rot.
"Half of our battalion had malaria. I remember walking all day with such a high fever that while my body moved forward my mind was unconscious.
"By the third week we were seeing heavily bombed jungle and burned and blackened rain forests. Lake-bomb craters were everywhere and we saw scary places where every tree and every plant and every living thing had withered and died.
"In the fifth week, American pirate planes dropped fire from the sky and many fighters were burned alive. The air was pulled out of our lungs by the fire and I fainted. When I woke up, the trees were charred, smoking stubs, and I had burns on my arms and face and my hands.
"After two days of burying the dead, we collected out equipment and continued our march.
We walked through a beautiful forest. Upon hundreds of trees were carved thousands and thousands of names of fighters who had gone before us. After we got over the strangeness of the sight we carved our own names into trees. We were tired, but we wanted to inspire our brothers who would follow in our steps after we were sleeping honorably with our ancestors.
That day my platoon sergeant stepped into a gopher hole and broke his leg.
"In the sixth week we were being bombed every day, sometimes more than once a day. We were so tired, we almost welcomed the bomb attacks as rest breaks. The monsoon rains began to fall and we were homesick. By this time almost every man in the battalion had malaria to some degree, and many comrade soldiers had to be left behind. We were losing men every day now, to malaira, dysentery, enemy bombs, and injuries. Two fighters died from snake bites. The tigers were eating our dead. We couldn't sleep because our eyes were swollen with mosquito bites. At night we could hear comrade soldiers crying.
"There were no more food stations. We ate wild fruits, nuts and berries, even roots.
Sometimes our commanders allowed us to fish with hand grenades. Fires were forbidden, so we ate the fish raw.
"Now our food was being brought to us in small quantities by Front fighters from villages like Hoa Binh. Without this food, harvested by the people and carried on the backs of women and children through enemy lines, my comrades and I would have starved.
"Hundreds of rickety bamboo bridges spanning hundreds of foul-smelling streams began to blur into one long green and black dream. Now there was nothing to break the monotomy of the jungle except grave mounds and skeletons by the trail. We marched only by night.
During the day we slept deep in the earth in cool, damp tunnels and listened to the constant droning of bombs, cannons, and the flying war machines.
"In the seventh week we slogged through a swamp, coughing with pneumonia, sick with fever. We stumbled through a dirty gray mist, our legs black with leeches, mud sucking at our swollen and blistered feet. We saw a big complex of tree houses in the swamp, abandoned by some strange race of forgotten people.
"Our food was reduced to a handful of rice a day.
"When we finally emerged from the swamp we saw our first Truc Thang--our first helicopter.
Every fighter was camouflaged with fresh leaves and twigs. We dropped to the ground while th
e horrible metal dragon sat in the sky directly above us. There was a very loud noise and a big wind. Guns fired and a comrade was killed where he lay. We were afraid, but no one moved. We waited for the order to return fire, but it never came. After a while the big machine flew away.
"In our eighth week we were met by Chien Si cadres. The cadres were southerners and had strange accents. They gave us the traditional welcoming greeting for comrade soldiers arriving in teh South, a drink from a coconut. Then they led us to a carefully concealed network of tunnels and underground bunkers.
"Underground, in the vast complex of tunnels, we cheered. We were safe. We had survived.
And, having survived, we would be able to contribute to the struggle against the enemies of the people. We asked for no greater honor. Of the two hundred fighters in our unit only eighty made it to the South. We, the survivors, greeted our southern brothers with enthusiasm.
"We were issued rations, and even some salt. Now, our journey over, we began to feel depressed. We had time to miss the comrades who had been killed or left behind. We missed our homes and our families.
"I had infected cuts all over my legs and hands. My black pajama outfit was rotting and hung in rags on my body. The climate in the South was depressingly hot.
"The earth-shaking advance of the Liberation Army was reduced to a crawl.
"But our cadre inspired us. He told us about how the first platoon of the People's Army was formed by General Giap. At eighten, General Giap was locked up in a French prison. His wife was also imprisoned, and was tortured to death.
"General Giap is only five feet tall and weighs less than one hundred pounds. But in December 1944, at age twenty-nine, he led the first platoon of the People's Army, thirty-four men and women, armed only with swords and muskets, against the French.
"The French captured General Giap's sister and cut off her head with a guillotine. General Giap and Uncle Ho lived in the high mountains for twenty years, sweating in the hot jungle, sometimes with nothing to eat but snakes and roots, but enduring without complaint, because they never doubted for a moment that the people would be victorious.
The Phantom Blooper Page 9