Hungry and homeless in Paris, surviving on his wits, he came to loathe the wealthy and bourgeoisie. In time, he found others who shared his newfound leftist fervor. They subscribed to the philosophy of Karl Marx, despised Stalin, and passionately defended Lenin. At night, in the Montmartre, they gathered in side-street cafés, drinking wine and decrying capitalist greed.
Angry for change, Metz and several friends sought to join the emerging Communist party in Paris. They found, however, that it was littered with the very wealthy and bourgeoisie that they had come to disdain. Philip found that these noble elite, politically liberal pigs would sleep their days in the Georges V Hotel, and then at dusk, ride limousines to Montmartre where they could slum away their nights being fervent, fashionable Communists.
Philip Metz and two of his friends left Paris, disgusted. The three men took a train to Nice where they sailed to Cairo, working as deckhands. There, an Egyptian rubber merchant hired the French trio to work as supervisors at his plantation in Cochin China.1
When the Japanese invaded that region, his two friends fled to Australia, but Philip remained at the plantation. There he joined guerrillas in a resistance effort, subsidized and equipped by the Allied Forces. British SAS agents accompanied them, and helped to arm, organize, and train these underground fighters.
Throughout the war, Philip helped to rescue and spirit to safety many British and American pilots who crashed in the jungles. Although they shared a common enemy, Philip could not support their political beliefs. He would remain neutrally cool whenever any of these men tried to befriend him.
When the war ended, and the British invited the French to return and resume control of their Indochina colonies, Philip chose to remain with the guerrillas. This army, led by Ho Chi Minh and a former teacher from Cochin China, Vo Nguyen Giap, had expended some of the weapons and ammunition that the Allies provided while putting up a token fight against the Japanese. However, they managed to stockpile the bulk of these weapons for the inevitable revolution they saw coming.
During the next eight years, their Viet Minh2 resistance bloodied the French badly. Loyal to the Viet Minh, Philip put on a façade of allegiance to his native France. Its soldiers there regarded him as a patriot and hero, having endured life in the jungles, fighting the Japanese. As a result of their regard and trust, officials frequently invited him to their parties and formal gatherings where military officers often discussed with him la sale guerre, this dirty war.
For years, he freely traveled the country, listening to boastful officers while taking note of French military strength, movement, and other activities. Then he faithfully passed the information to his Viet Minh comrades.
By 1953, the war was going poorly for the French. They asked Philip to join in their efforts to infiltrate the Viet Minh. He graciously accepted their offer but then promptly deserted.
Deep in the mountains southwest of Da Nang, Philip began living a comfortable yet primitive life in a plantation villa, sheltered by a thick jungle canopy, overlooking Cambodia. There he became useful, interrogating French soldiers and pilots, captured by the guerrillas. If befriending them did not work—trying to convince them that they were now safe with a fellow Frenchman—then he resorted to torture.
He always stripped his victim naked. Then he would stand the man before him and openly admire his sexuality. He would tell the man that he really preferred young Oriental boys, because of their smooth skin and willingness to please. Their small, hairless genitals excited him. However, a well-endowed Frenchman, covered with black, coarse hair, could be exciting, too.
As he approached the naked man, he would reach into his right pants pocket and take out a straight razor, folded inside a yellow-stained ivory handle. While he talked, he tumbled the closed razor through his fingers, sometimes pointing it to the man’s face to impress a point. He made sure his victim saw the implement and fixed his eyes to it.
Philip would smile and gently glide the razor’s handle down the man’s chest and then up his inner thigh. Delicately he would follow with his left hand, caressing and fondling him.
Disgust often sent the prisoner into a rage.
This delighted Philip. He would smile and fondle the man even more, and dare him to resist. They nearly always did.
Guards would tie the prisoner onto a wooden seat with his legs spread and his ankles strapped to the rear legs of the chair, leaving his penis and testicles fully accessible and vulnerable. The guards bound the man’s arms and hands to the chairback and then soaked him with their urine.
“Some people enjoy this kind of bath very much,” Philip would tell his victim, still tumbling the razor in his fingers. “Although sexually stimulating to me, I also find urine a remarkably efficient conductor of electricity. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Metz always waited to see the man’s reaction. He knew that the talk of electricity evoked wild speculation of what horrifying torture might await. Often, if the prisoner was an inexperienced soldier, he would immediately crack from no more than the soaking. The victim would cry and offer to cooperate.
Once satisfied that the prisoner had said all he could, Metz would take the straight razor, flip open its blade and slice the man’s throat. He considered it personally hazardous to allow any of these men to live.
Through the next twelve years, Philip had elevated his interrogation skills and his thirst for masochistic pleasure to what he considered an art form. He sought to make a prisoner talk, not from brutality or excruciating physical pain, but from the mental games he loved to play. It satisfied his deep-seated need to feel dominant. Powerful. Masterful.
However, there were those who withstood his mental torture. These men then experienced his expertise at inflicting profound pain.
When the Americans entered the war, business for Philip picked up considerably. Almost weekly, the Frenchman had work to perform just across the border in the plantation house the Viet Cong had converted to a way station on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In addition to providing shelter and storage, it served as a temporary jail to hold prisoners bound for transport northward, and to restrain others for the Frenchman to interrogate at his leisure.
The air smelled sweet from the cool dampness brought on by sunset. Philip gazed into the peaceful evening as he smoked his pipe. A sense of calm always welled within him following a successful interrogation.
His boy companion came to his side, carrying a small rucksack. He reached inside it and took out a chocolate disk wrapped in foil, taken from an American C ration. He offered the treat first to his mentor, and when he refused it the boy pulled the foil away and took a bite.
“American chocolate mixed with rice cereal,” the Frenchman said to the boy. “They are very good, yes?”
“Yes, Monsieur Metz,” Huong answered.
The Frenchman drew smoke from his pipe and let it gently drift from his mouth and nose, listening to the sounds of the frogs and night birds singing in the darkening jungle.
THAT SAME EVENING a gray helicopter launched from an airfield near Pleiku, hidden deep in Montagnard3 country.
The chopper followed a dirt and gravel roadway that led through the mountains toward the South China Sea coast, intersecting with Highway 1 north of Na Trang, but not quite at Phu Cat.
Its pilot, a stocky man with shaggy gray hair, wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, flew the craft low, zigzagging across the rivers and other areas where enemy forces might hide. He pushed downward on the UH1E Huey’s collective,4 set at the side of his seat, while giving the bird maximum power by twisting the checkered metal handle on the collective bar, much like a biker would turn a motorcycle’s throttle. He lightly grasped the cyclic5 control, set between his legs, delicately maneuvering the aircraft as it raced just above the treetops.
His copilot, a dark-haired man wearing a khaki cap with a long green transparent bill, rode in the right, front seat keeping watch for any movement on the ground that might signal trouble. Both men wore revolvers in shoulder holsters ove
r green flight suits that bore no markings.
Air America, a quasi government civilian air service manned by contract pilots, paid the men an exceptional salary compared to what pilots back home made. These contractor airmen typically possessed a thirst for adventure, and a good deal of greed for a fat paycheck. Few, if any, sought this hazardous job as an act of patriotism.
Two other Americans rode on this flight, seated on the gray cloth and tubular aluminum bench that stretched across the rear of the chopper’s cargo and passenger space. Buckled in jump seats facing the American passengers, two South Vietnamese men, wearing khaki trousers and shirts, clutched automatic rifles that they pointed out the open side doors.
The helicopter had just crossed a river that cut deeply through the land when the pilot and the Vietnamese man in the left jump seat saw a white stream of smoke shoot up from the trees toward them. The pilot banked hard left, trying to dodge the small rocket. The trail of smoke traveled above and just behind the helicopter’s cabin, missing the main body, but the explosion sent debris and shrapnel into the engine and rotor head.
The console set on the floor between the pilot and copilot suddenly began sounding alarms and shining orange lights behind gray rectangular buttons. Similar buttons set in rows between the two instrument panels and on the overhead glowed as well.
“We’re going in,” the pilot called through the headsets.
Drawing back hard on the collective, the pilot attempted to flare out his auto-rotation into the trees, slowing the bird’s descent rate to soften the impact.
Branches shattered the Plexiglas front of the aircraft, and broke off the still-turning rotor. The tail section remained in the trees while the body fell to the ground, buckling its skids on impact.
Smoke billowed into the cockpit, and raw fuel spewed from the auxiliary bladders installed against bulkheads behind each end of the wide backseat.
“Get out! Get out!” the pilot screamed as he leaped out his side door, the cabin still shuddering from impact. The copilot bailed from his side as well, and the four passengers scrambled away just as the fuel caught fire. It happened in split seconds, nearly instantaneously.
“We better get far away from here as fast as we can,” one of the CIA field operations officers told the others. “The guys who fired that rocket gotta be beating feet this way. Those smoke signals will take them right to us.”
The two Vietnamese carrying the automatic rifles had already begun leading the four Americans away from the crash site.
“Stay on their tails,” the copilot shouted as he ran after the two Vietnamese. “You gotta keep up ’cause they’re not slowing down.”
As they ran behind the Vietnamese scouts, the sounds of automatic rifle fire caught their attention, urging them on to greater speed.
“They’re running a recon by fire6 around the crash,” the pilot said breathlessly to the men who now ran several yards ahead of him. “They’ll be on our trail pretty quick.”
5
The Riviera
“GET UP, BURKE,” Carlos said so cheerfully that it nearly sounded like singing. “Found something exciting for us to do this week while we’re off from teaching school.”
Lance Corporal John Burke sat up from his cot, where he had dozed and read much of the morning. A paperback copy of The Deep Blue Good-by lay spread open, pages down, on a nightstand that he had fashioned from an ammunition crate. Two other John D. MacDonald mysteries, Nightmare in Pink and Bright Orange for the Shroud, lay beneath the first of the Travis McGee series.
“Exciting?” Burke asked. He turned his head at an angle and closed one eye, looking back at Sergeant Hathcock. “Fun and exciting, or scary and exciting?”
“Probably both.” Hathcock shrugged as he sat on his cot and began unlacing his boots. “We’ve got a bunch of small unit patrols that’re gonna start over near the beach and back to the hills down south a ways.”
“Like around Que Son, Cam Ne, and the Riviera?” Burke said, letting Carlos know he, too, knew of those areas. “They sound more scary and exciting than fun.”
“Scary if you do something stupid,” Carlos said. “We ain’t gonna be that.”
Carlos lay back on his cot and picked up one of the Travis McGee books and began thumbing through it.
“These any good?” Carlos asked, steering the conversation away from the scary and exciting.
“So far,” Burke said, picking up The Deep Blue Good-by. “I just started reading them. Lance Corporal Hull over at the Public Information Office let me borrow ’em. He said that he really liked them.”
“What’re they about?” Carlos said, closing the book and reading the cover of Bright Orange for the Shroud.
“About a private eye that’s not a private eye but does investigations and stuff like a private eye,” Burke said. “He’s pretty cool. Lives in a boat called The Busted Flush down near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Bahia Mar, says here on the first page.”
Carlos laid the book back on the stand and lit a cigarette.
“Never heard of it,” Carlos said, blowing smoke.
“Me either,” Burke said, “and I’m from down in that part of the world.”
Carlos quietly smoked his cigarette while Burke returned to reading the book. Then Hathcock dropped the finished butt in a red-painted can half-filled with sand, sat up on his cot, and looked at Burke until his partner stopped reading and looked back at him.
“So, when do we go?” Burke asked.
“We’ve got a ride headed that way tomorrow morning,” Carlos answered.
Two days later, John Burke stood on the damp sand of a wide and curving beach. He opened his jungle utility jacket and let the wind blow across his sweaty T-shirt. His bush hat fluttered behind his back, hanging from the string looped around his neck, and he raised his arms like the wings of a great condor to let the wind cool him.
Carlos Hathcock and his partner had spent this first day stalking among the sand hills and low dunes that bordered the beach and extended miles inland. Tall grass grew in clumps on these hills, providing the snipers ample hiding places where they could watch the narrow avenues that wound among the high piles of sand. So far this day they had seen nothing.
“You know, anybody a mile away can see you out there,” Carlos called to Burke.
“There is nobody within a mile to see me,” Burke said, still holding out his arms, feeling the sea air.
Pulling a wrinkled package of Beechnut chewing tobacco from his back pocket, Carlos took a pinch of the dark brown leaves and tucked them inside his cheek. He held the red and white pouch up for his partner to see, offering him a chew. Burke shook his head no, and then walked toward the barren dune where Hathcock lay sheltered at its base.
“We get skunked on the first day out, is not a good sign,” Burke said, buttoning his shirt.
“We ain’t skunked yet,” Carlos said, and glanced over his shoulder to see where the sun stood in the sky. “Looks like at least three hours of daylight left. I’ll bet if we move on south toward Chu Lai we’ll see something.”
“That’s five or six miles, Sergeant Hathcock,” Burke said.
“Probably closer to eight or ten, so we better get moving,” Carlos answered.
The two snipers had walked barely half the distance, following the higher contours of the dunes, staying away from anything that looked like a path, when the crunch of a mine exploding inland stopped them. Both men dropped to their knees and began crawling to the top of the highest dune around them when they heard shooting.
“Ambush,” Carlos said.
“Not that far either,” Burke added.
“Which way you think Charlie will flush?” Carlos asked Burke.
“Out here?” Burke answered. “Anyplace else I’d say west. They go west here, and they hit Highway 1, villes and more of our patrols. Either north or east.”
“I say they flush west, circle right, and angle northeast,” Carlos said. “Once they’re far enough up, they’ll cut back west, towa
rd home. That’s what I’d do if I had just ambushed an American patrol out here, where they get thick as flies on dung the closer you get to Chu Lai.”
“So, what are we going to do?” Burke said. “We’re due east of that ambush. We beat feet at ’em?”
“We go back where we were,” Carlos said. “If we’re gonna get a shot, we have to skedaddle. They’ll be scootin’ but they got a whole lot more ground to cover than we do. Let’s go another set of dunes more toward the beach, and then hotfoot it to a place where we can get up a little higher anyway. Gotta be hidden and breathing slow before they get near us.”
“Wonder if that patrol’s okay?” Burke said, looking toward the west.
“Shooting didn’t last long,” Carlos said. “Had to be either a hit-and-run, or somebody stepped on a mine and the rest of the patrol shot at nothing. It’s happened, but odds are they had VC turn loose on ’em and hightail it.”
Burke nodded, agreeing with his sergeant.
“I’m concerned about anybody being hurt, too,” Carlos continued, “but they got a corpsman, radios, and a lot more people. There ain’t a thing we can do for them but cure our own curiosity. We can do more good hit-tin’ the hamburgers that might have ambushed that patrol. Besides, I don’t want to get skunked first day out.”
An hour later, Hathcock and Burke lay hidden among large clumps of grass growing at the top of a high sand hill. The two snipers focused their watch to the south and southwest.
The wind gusted inland from the choppy seas straight over their backs and toward the enemy’s likely direction of approach. Both men remained still and silent, knowing that even a voice spoken in a normal tone could ride the air currents an astonishing distance.
Nearly two hours had passed and the sun rested just above the mountaintops to the west when Burke spotted the first man. He carried an old Chinese rifle across his back and had appeared from the north. Obviously, this lone guerrilla had not attacked the Marine patrol.
Carlos had laid his scope sight’s reticle squarely on the man’s back when he first appeared. Although he could easily shoot this one Viet Cong, the sniper rifle’s loud report would carry for miles. Certainly, no other Viet Cong or patrol on the run would approach after hearing the shot. So Burke and Hathcock waited, and watched the lone soldier walk along the sides of the sand hills’ slopes, rather than in level bottoms that wound between them.
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