Snap Shot

by A. J. Quinnell

  ‘So it’s over? No more nightmares?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s not over, Ruth.’ He gestured at the photograph. ‘That . . . you, helped me to sublimate it. I don’t know how. But it’s still in my head. I feel it there like a cancer. The lid’s on, but for how long I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.’

  She nodded. The trepidation now had a form.

  ‘You have to go back further David. Back to the cause. You need help. More than I can provide. You know that.’

  He leaned forward. There was a pleading now in his eyes and when he spoke it was in his voice.

  ‘Yes, I need help. I know that. But I know it with the certainty that only you can provide it. I’m asking more than I have the right to.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘I’m going to tell you what caused the nightmare and then I’m going to ask you to help me. The story is filthy and the help I need may be impossible.’

  He sat back and extracted another cigar and lit it. She knew she was walking straight into a minefield. Part of her mind screamed at her to turn and run. The other part, the part that contains the grey matter which stimulates curiosity, kept her clamped in her chair. Forced her to say:

  ‘So tell me.’

  It took an hour. He talked in a low monotone. Sometimes he was lucid, the narrative flowing. At other times having to grope for a word - to find it and drag it out. During that hour she was assaulted by a gamut of emotions that left her mind and her body limp. Once she let the tears flow - a release without which she could not have endured.

  He told her of the final patrol.

  It was the kind of patrol from which correspondents and photographers were definitely banned.

  In Vietnam the Americans had long used special forces, including mercenaries, for certain missions. These included hit-and-run attacks into North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; reconnaissance sorties into solid Vietcong territory, and occasionally punitive raids against pro-Vietcong villages and mountain tribesmen. After the Tet offensive in 1967 and the increasing disintegration of the South Vietnamese army these patrols were being stepped up. To the American field intelligence in Saigon they became a rare source of information in an increasingly disjointed situation.

  The individuals who manned these patrols were, in one way or another and for various reasons, on the outer fringes of humanity. There were among them US Special Forces, good units and good men. Good in both the moral and productive use of the word. They fought a hard war in a hard way, but they fought it within reasonable if flexible limits. These men were in the minority and, as the time passed, that minority shrank. By the time Munger went on his patrol many of the original units had been supplemented with mercenaries from a variety of countries. There were Frenchmen and Belgians, South Africans and South Americans, Koreans and Cambodians. They were often joined by Meo tribesmen who hated all Vietnamese, whether they came from the North or the South. Munger’s patrol was led by a Captain from the US Special Forces. He had been in Vietnam for seven years and, as he once explained to Munger, he had become hooked on killing like a junkie on heroin. To compound his problem he was also hooked on heroin. It had not always been so. Munger had known him from the beginning of 1962 when he was fresh and eager, patriotic and idealistic. He had arrived with one of the early US Military Aid teams and for the first six months had trained units of the South Vietnamese Army: the ARVN. Later he had gone on operations with them as an advisor. After an extended tour of duty he had returned Stateside to Fort Bragg. He had found it hard to readjust to peacetime soldiering and so had volunteered for another tour in Vietnam, and then another, and then another. Munger knew several like him. The war invaded their brains and pushed everything else out until finally they were nothing but killing machines. Their superiors felt uncomfortable in their presence, although they saw them infrequently and only on the occasions, when they gave them orders or pinned medals on their chests. This Captain was twenty-eight years old with a face that had lived a century.

  There were three other US Special Forces men in the patrol. One was a thin, taciturn homosexual who came from a slum in the Bronx. He hardly ever talked, except in obscenities. The other two came from the deep South: one was white, the other black. They were both huge men and were linked, like Siamese twins, in a bond of hatred. The rest of the patrol was made up of two handsome Belgians, who wore dark glasses and talked endlessly of their exploits in a dozen wars; a scar-faced Australian who wore Colt 1911’s on each hip and tried to talk like a Texan; a Frenchman whose parents had owned a plantation near Hue and had been painfully killed by the Vietcong; and finally there were two Meo tribesmen who were to act as guides and interrogators in the event that prisoners were taken.

  Munger had first heard about the patrol whilst having a drink in a seedy bar in Tu Do Street. A group of Marines had been talking about a recent action in the Delta and how tough it had been and how many casualties their unit had taken. The Special Forces Captain and one of the Belgians had been sitting at a nearby table. The Belgian was drunk and he loudly derided the Marines, telling them they knew nothing of the real war. There would have been a fight but the Marines knew of the Captain and what he was capable of, so they finished their drinks and left. Munger had been sitting at the end of the bar and the Captain had grinned at him and called to him to join them. It turned out that he was to lead a patrol in two days’ time to an area North West of Vinh Long. For many months the Vietcong had held sway in the area and the High Command thought that they might be building up for a major action. They wanted hard information.

  They drank a lot that night until the Belgian passed out. In the early hours of the morning, long after the bar girls had gone home and the bartender had grown weary with boredom, Munger finally persuaded the Captain to take him along on the patrol. It would be difficult, but not impossible. Both the Captain and Munger had great skills in circumventing authority. He would make his own way to Vinh Long and then the Captain would infiltrate him into the patrol as one of its members. He would have to dress accordingly and conceal his camera. There was one cast-iron condition: the Captain would vet any photographs that Munger took. Drunk as he was, at that moment an icy look came into the Captain’s eyes. Munger agreed readily, telling himself that he would cross that bridge when and if he came to it.

  So he went on the patrol and from the first day it was a roller coaster ride into the core of hell.

  It started with a fight among themselves. They had marched for seven hours, deep into the forested hills, and made their first bivouac on a long, narrow ridge. The Meo tribesmen stood the first watch and, as the rest of them heated their rations, one of the Belgians pulled off a boot, examined a large blister on his heel and cursed. The black Southerner made a remark about soft pretty boys. The Belgian said something in French that included ‘cochon noir’. They were two French words that the negro understood and in an instant he had his huge hands round the Belgian’s throat. The other Belgian grabbed his sub-machine gun but as he cocked it the muzzle of the Captain’s revolver was in his face. The Belgian lowered his gun and the Captain reached over and, with perfect precision, clipped the negro behind his ear with the heel of the revolver butt. So order was restored. The negro was unconscious for ten minutes and his intended victim had livid red weals around his neck for the rest of the patrol.

  That night Munger watched the Captain and the Frenchman shoot up with heroin. The white Southerner sniffed coke and the rest of them smoked joints. Munger began to wonder if he would come out alive.

  The next day they moved deeper into the Vietcong stronghold. The Meos scouted ahead; the rest of the patrol moved in a fan formation, each man about fifty metres from the next. They were all vastly experienced and, in spite of their nocturnal intake of drugs, moved quietly, skilfully and confidently. Munger was slightly reassured.

  On the evening of the second day the white Southerner sat next to Munger while they ate. He was inte
rested in photography and knew of Munger’s reputation. He was a man who talked slowly, even for a Southerner - each word was gradually framed by his thick lips and delivered with a slurring drawl.

  He explained that he also took photographs. Would Munger like to see them? Munger noted the curious expression in his eyes and he guessed what was coming. It had happened several times before in Vietnam and other places. He shrugged negatively but the Southerner was already reaching into the pocket of his battledress.

  There were six of them, tattered and dog-eared. To Munger they were standard atrocity photographs. Dead and mutilated bodies. A man holding a pair of legs on each shoulder, smiling at the camera. The dismembered corpse at his feet. A row of black-cad Vietcong prisoners, elbows tied behind their backs, staring at the camera, looking at death. The next photograph showing them on the ground, limbs twisted. A Meo tribesman spilling human ears onto a ground sheet from a canvas bag while a sergeant from the Special Forces counted them to calculate the bounty. The last one showed a Vietcong tied to a tree, a bayonet protruding from his throat. The Southerner watched Munger closely to see his reaction, looking for the slightest sign of unease - wishing it.

  ‘How about that?’ he had drawled.

  Munger had shrugged. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘when you’re shooting in the shade, try using an F4 aperture setting. You’ll get better in-depth focus.’

  The Captain had been watching and listening and he burst out laughing. After an uncertain pause, so did the Southerner.

  After that they didn’t bother Munger with their stories or their photos.

  By the fourth day they had covered over a hundred miles and just past noon they ambushed a column of six Vietcong who were carrying supplies of rice and vegetables.

  Again Munger was surprised by their military precision. The Meo scouts had given plenty of warning. The Vietcong were moving down a trail that skirted a low hill. They were in what they thought to be safe territory and so they took few precautions. The Captain placed the two Southerners above the trail and gave them explicit instructions. The rest of the patrol, including Munger, was to spread in an arc below the trail. The Vietcong moved along in single file. As they passed the Southerners, a short burst of sub-machine gun fife cut down the first four. The two at the rear dropped their bundles and ran straight into the waiting arms of the rest of the patrol. They didn’t even have time to cock their Kalashnikovs before they were slammed to the ground and their arms bound behind them. The Captain needed information so he needed prisoners.

  Munger only had time to shoot six snaps of the action and then the Captain was hustling them away before other Vietcong homed in on the noise of the gunfire.

  For the next five hours the patrol marched rapidly East to get away from the scene. The prisoners stumbled along behind, with nooses round their necks. They knew that if they fell they would be dragged along until they choked. They didn’t fall.

  That night they were interrogated by the Meos. The rest of the patrol looked on, sometimes laughing and sometimes offering unnecessary suggestions. Munger sat away to the side, his arms clasped around his knees, trying to close his ears. It wasn’t so much the sounds the prisoners made - their gags were only taken off at infrequent intervals so they could answer questions - but the noise of the laughter. He tried to cut it out of his head, telling himself that these interrogators were not people, not human beings. They were merely the aberrations that focused humanity.

  He got no sleep that night, even when it was over. In the dawn he took snaps of the two mutilated corpses. The white Southerner watched with interest and asked him to make copies for him.

  That afternoon they reached the village. During the previous night’s torture the prisoners had revealed that it was the home of a certain Dien Phang, a Major in the Vietcong Intelligence. As his unit was operating in the general area the Major occasionally was able to visit his family. He had a wife, a daughter and a young son. It was a small village, nestling in a narrow valley. A stream ran through the centre of it.

  The Captain and one of the Belgians reconnoitred it and estimated a population of under thirty. There was no sign of armed men: mostly it was women and children and old men, but they had seen one younger man washing himself in the stream.

  The Captain decided to move in right away. Their presence in the area was already known to the enemy and they would by now be mounting a major search. Time was running out. The two Meos were posted on ridges at each end of the valley to keep a lookout. The two Belgians were to approach from one side and the two Southerners from the other. Those four usually worked in pairs. The Frenchman and the homosexual would approach from downstream and the Captain and the Australian from up-stream. They all moved to a ridge above the village and the Captain pointed out the salient features and stressed that the younger man he had seen was to be taken prisoner. If he was Dien Phang, the Captain wanted to deliver him to Saigon. He would get at least another medal and the mercenaries on the patrol would get a cash bonus.

  While the Captain talked, Munger was busy photographing the village through a telephoto lens. It was a peaceful, even idyllic, scene. Some of the women and children were working, bent over in vegetable fields. Others were washing clothes in the stream, pounding them on the smooth rocks. Three old men sat in the shade of a leafy tree, talking and smoking long, thin, clay pipes. Munger felt a rising tension. He could guess what was about to hit that village.

  They synchronised their watches and then fanned out. They would attack in fifteen minutes. The Captain hunched down with the Australian, next to Munger, and surveyed the village through binoculars.

  ‘By the way,’ he said to Munger from the side of his mouth. ‘You stay up here.’

  Munger took his eye from the viewfinder. ‘Why?’

  The Captain grinned, ‘I don’t want none of this recorded for posterity.’ He lowered the binoculars, turned to look at Munger and the grin was replaced by a hard look. ‘You understand?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Munger looked through the viewfinder again. Even with the telephoto lens he wasn’t going to get much detail of what happened. He had agreed easily enough, but he was there to take snaps and he would take them, no matter what.

  After ten minutes the Captain and the Australian slid down the hill to take up their start position. Three minutes later Munger quietly followed. Again the attack went like clockwork. There was no more than sixty seconds of concerted small arms fire and the patrol was in the village.

  Munger crept up to the back of a bamboo hut and watched and photographed the aftermath. There were eight bodies strewn about. The three old men had been cut down in one short burst. They lay beneath the tree with limbs twisted and blood soaking into the smooth dirt. Two women had been killed in the river and the slowly moving water was streaked dark red. A boy of about eight and another around six years old were lying like rag dolls, half inside the door of a hut. An old woman clutching a baby was lying on her back, half her head shot away. The baby was crying in her death grip;

  The rest of the villagers had been herded into a group by the two Belgians. Some had terror stamped on their faces, others shock, and others incomprehension. Munger shifted his view and snapped the man being dragged out of a hut by the Australian and the Frenchman. He struggled violently until the Australian smashed the stock of his sub-machine gun against the side of his face. He was not unconscious and blood poured down from a wide gash on his cheek. Then the Captain came out of the same hut. He was carrying a Kalashnikov and a bundle of papers and he was grinning broadly. Munger heard him call out to the Belgians that they had got the right man.

  As Munger continued taking snaps he felt a surge of relief. With the success of the mission maybe magnanimity would emerge. Maybe the rest of the villagers would be spared.

  It was not to be. Just as the two Southerners appeared in the centre of the village, two women in the group being guarded ran out towards the bound Vietcong: one his wife, the other his daughter. They were screami
ng and pleading and as all attention focused on them, three other women and a young boy tried to escape. They only got ten metres before the women were slammed off their feet in a burst of gun fire. The boy made it a little further but Munger watched as the black Southerner dropped to one knee, sighted carefully along the top of his sub-machine gun and squeezed the trigger. The boy was blasted ten feet into a clump of bushes. In his horror Munger remembered the story of how a correspondent once asked a mercenary in a bar how he could shoot children. The mercenary had grinned and said ‘You just aim a little lower.’

  Automatically Munger snapped the boy’s legs as they protruded, twitching, from the bushes. Then he was fitting a new film and the firing and screaming had started again.

  The rest of the guarded villagers had panicked and during the next few seconds were shot down one by one. Only the woman and the girl crouching over the Vietcong escaped the carnage. When it was over, silence and smoke hung over the bodies.

  By now Munger’s brain was numb but his fingers worked automatically and his camera recorded the scene. His eyes saw it through the viewfinder but his mind no longer registered. He had switched it off. Just like he had switched it off so many times before in his career: in Angola, in Biafra, in Borneo and in this ravaged country. He was a photographer doing his job. That was all.

  After that he photographed the rapes of the wife and the daughter. They all took part, laughing and arguing for position. The bound Vietcong was on his side, his bloody cheek in the dirt, his eyes wide open, watching.

  The girl was only about fifteen and beautiful and most of the men wanted her. The Australian dragged her mother off to one side and soon her screaming started, but the girl endured in silence on the blood-soaked dirt in the village centre. First the Captain, as though by right. Munger saw the virginal blood trickle down her thighs but she made no sound. Then the two Belgians, then the black Southerner, then the white one, then the Frenchman. The homosexual stood with the others, watching with a frustrated look on his face as the young girl’s limbs were twisted and contorted to give each man the entry he preferred. As the Frenchman finished with gasping lunges, one of the Belgians laughed and remarked to the homosexual that it was a pity that they hadn’t left a boy alive for him. He didn’t answer. He was watching the naked girl lying at the Frenchman’s feet as he zipped up his pants. She was lying on her belly, her legs spread behind her, her face cradled in her arms. Her long, black hair spread out like a fan on the dirt. With a bestial grunt the homosexual ran out and pushed the Frenchman away and sank onto his knees beside the girl, groping at his fly.