Silent Warrior

by Charles Henderson

  Sounds of gunfire froze the men to the ground beneath their heavy foliage cover. The enemy patrol that had passed them no more than fifteen minutes earlier had either sprung an ambush or had stepped into one. In either case, the two Vietnamese scouts felt a sudden surge of joy. Friendly forces, whether American or Vietnamese, though presently in battle, were nearby. Perhaps their rescuers held the ground below the small rise, just ahead, that gently sloped its backside downward to the flatlands and rice fields where Highway 1 cuts its way northward.

  How, though, could they make contact without their potential rescuers shooting them first? The two scouts were dressed in civilian clothing not uniforms. With rifles in hand, any friendly patrol could easily mistake them for Viet Cong.

  Silently, sliding on their stomachs, the two men eased themselves to the top of the rise, hoping to see the forces below them that continued their fight. But too many trees stood in their way.

  Certainly their brethren had these VC pinned. It seemed obvious to the scouts that if the VC had attacked the Americans or ARVN below them, they would have hit-and-run. The enemy guerrillas had too few men in their party to sustain a long-held attack against the typically superior numbers and firepower of their opposing forces. To be saved, the scouts had to put faith in their assumption, and gamble their lives on it.

  Now, only sporadic gunfire echoed below. The two men waited. Listened. Smelled the air and looked for movement. They did not want to encounter a retreating enemy force this close to redemption.

  Finally, silence.

  “Chu hoi!” one scout shouted, letting his voice carry downhill to the flats in the still air of this day.

  More silence.

  “Americans! Don’t shoot!” he now shouted.

  Still silence.

  Careful to move behind cover, the two Vietnamese men, holding their AR-15 carbines, ready to fire should they meet Viet Cong, crept down the gentle slope.

  “We ARVN scouts!” one man shouted, now closer to what he and his comrade hoped was a friendly patrol.

  “We need help!” he called through the trees.

  “Throw your rifles ahead of you, and then lie facedown with your arms spread out,” an American voice called back to them.

  “Yes,” both men cried. “Yes, please help us.”

  NEARLY NINETY MILES west of where the two scouts happily walked homeward with a patrol of U.S. Army Rangers and Vietnamese Popular Force volunteers, Philip Metz stood in the doorway of his plantation home, smoking his calabash pipe.

  He wore a white bush shirt and khaki trousers, and stood barefooted on the polished wooden planks of his front porch. The sweetly scented smoke from his pipe drifted toward the lush green trees and bushes that surrounded the large lawn that extended 100 feet outward and encircled the home.

  Grass-covered ruts from a narrow, infrequently used road cut through the forest that surrounded Metz’s home, and stopped at the side of his house. Tall weeds grew in the road’s center, between the now-faint tire traces. Few vehicles had passed along this route since the days of World War II. Then, they were mostly square-nosed old trucks and cars with hand-cranked starters and wooden-spoked wheels with thin rubber tires set in a narrow track under their chassis. Now, though, only random vehicles carrying cargo or troops made their way through this overgrown country.

  Once in a while, a truck carrying supplies wound its way along Highway 19 from Andaung Pech or Lomphat, Cambodia, and turned northward, following the Ya Krong Bolah River, along its west bank, to a place where the waterway makes a wide arching bend toward the east, nearly halfway between Kontum and Dak To, Vietnam. There, the truck turned westward, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nearly ten kilometers farther, the narrow, faint road that led to Philip Metz’s house branched northward through the jungle.

  From his home, one could easily reach Laos or Cambodia, and the Viet Cong way station that also served as a holding facility for prisoners of war bound for Hanoi, in a day’s or a night’s walk. Metz frequently made this trek on foot, whenever his Communist allies needed his talents as an interrogator.

  As Philip Metz stood on his porch, enjoying the fragrance of the evening and the smoke from his pipe, he could hear the whine of the truck’s engine as it climbed its way to his house. He smiled, because in addition to the regular fare of canned goods, sacks of rice, flour, beans, and other supplies, he knew the truck carried a long awaited gift from France somewhere within the tarpaulin-covered load.

  Perhaps, finally, with today’s shipment, he would receive the two cases of Beaujolais Villages wine a friend in France, a former lover, had sent to him. This man, whom he had first known in Paris as a youngster, had visited him nearly a year ago in Muang Mai, Laos, an ancient city on the Sekong river, once called Attopeu, which lay on the southeastern side of the Plateau Des Bolovens. The two men had remained devout Communists since those early days in Paris.

  When his friend departed from their year-ago reunion, he promised Philip that he would send as much of the delicate red wine as he could, once he had arrived home. Four months ago, Philip had received a letter from this friend, written a month earlier, stating that he had managed to ship him two cases of Beaujolais by air freight to Bangkok, but then it had to travel overland across Cambodia, which could take a few weeks or even months. He had carefully packed the twenty-four bottles in two large wooden boxes, surrounding each bottle tightly with straw.

  Philip had always preferred the delicately tart yet slightly brut flavor of this fine red wine of Beaujolais. He had difficulty finding any sort of wine here, though. He mostly drank poor quality Oriental versions derived from grape juice shipped in railway tank cars from central and eastern Europe, then corked in green glass bottles with poorly printed labels featuring flying cranes or snowcapped mountains as trademarks. They reeked of formaldehyde with a bitter bite that left one suffering a dull headache if consumed on an empty stomach. In his remote setting, even a bottle of Chianti represented to Philip a fine and rare delicacy to savor slowly. Thus, twenty-four bottles of Beaujolais seemed an unthinkable joy.

  Certainly, he would save them for his private time, to sip quietly and enjoy alone. They were too rare and fine in this world of jungle fever and unappreciative palates to share with anyone else.

  “Huong, come quickly,” Philip said in the southeast Asian-French dialect. “I can see the truck coming.”

  The Vietnamese youngster ran out of the house to the porch where the Frenchman stood barefooted. The boy stopped momentarily to slip on his sandals, which he had left by the front door, and then handed his mentor the pair of brown leather ankle-high boots that Philip preferred to wear.

  Metz had finished tying his laces, and had stepped onto the grass when the truck pulled to a stop at the side of his house. The vehicle had a three-ton capacity bed, covered with a green canvas tarpaulin. Although Yugoslavian-built, the Viet Cong had painted the truck’s cab, front, and frame a medium shade of robin’s-egg blue with bright red trim, and red lettering on its door. American aircraft making the excursion to Vietnam’s western border, to hunt along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, seemed less likely to bomb a blue, civilian-appearing truck than one painted dark green with a red star on its door.

  The driver and his helper wore white shirts and tan cotton shorts. They carried no weapons on them nor in the truck. Should anyone question the two men, they could easily pass themselves off as Vietnamese civilian delivery drivers, and the nonmilitary cargo as simply a restock of food and supplies for their village. Such trucks were common traffic, even in the remote reaches of Vietnam.

  “Bonjour, bonhomie,” Metz said embracing the driver, a man who had made this delivery every month for several years. “You have for me something special today?”

  “Oui, Monsieur Philip,” the driver said, smiling at his friend, and leaned into the cab of the truck where he had carried the two wooden boxes.

  Handing each case carefully to his assistant, the driver called to Philip, “At long last they have arrived. You
have asked for the last three trips, and I was always sad to tell you not yet. Today I am happy to tell you they are here.”

  “We will open one bottle and you must join me in a toast,” Metz said, smiling as he pulled loose the wooden top to one box and tore the straw packing from one of the dark brown bottles, exposing its brightly colored floral label.

  “No, thank you, sir,” the driver answered. “This is too fine a beverage to waste on such as me. You have waited so long for them as well. I could not.”

  “As you wish,” Metz said, laying the bottle back in its place, and then gently carrying the box inside his house. He knew the man would not accept such an invitation, because of his inferior station. However, Metz felt it poor form not to offer, since this man had acted so carefully to carry the prized cargo in the front seat with him.

  “I have this letter for you, too, sir,” the driver said, taking an envelope from inside the cab where he had carried it tucked behind the sun visor. “Colonel Ba, himself, said I should make sure to hand you this personally.”

  “You have done your job well, my friendly man,” Philip said, taking the envelope and pulling loose the flap with his finger. He took out the gold, wire-framed spectacles that he carried in his trouser pocket inside a brown, hard-shell leather case.

  After studying the message carefully, he looked at Huong. “My boy, I must prepare to travel one day after tomorrow.”

  WHILE PHILIP, HUONG, the driver, and his assistant loaded the new month’s stores into the large pantry built next to the kitchen, Jim Land sat in the tent that had been set up for Operation Rio Blanco’s intelligence section. There he listened quietly to a civilian field officer from the U.S. Mission in Da Nang, who had moments earlier stepped from a gray, unmarked helicopter that now waited on the landing pad at Hill 263.

  “Sergeant Carlos Hathcock and Lance Corporal John Burke should get here any minute,” Land said. “As far as I am concerned, they are the best sniper team in the country today.”

  “This mission is vital to the security of nearly every operative we have in I Corps and II Corps. I cannot emphasize that enough, Captain,” the field officer said. “That’s why we asked General Walt for the best he had. Colonel Herman Poggemeyer, Walt’s G-3, told us if anyone had the people capable of accomplishing this mission, it would be you. We have no room for failure. No second chance on this.”

  Land looked outside where he saw Hathcock and Burke walking toward the tent, their rifles shouldered and packs on their backs. Hathcock carried the captain’s pack in his left hand.

  He looked back at the field officer and then at the major who had summoned him a half-hour earlier from the sniper detachment’s headquarters tent, where a group of them had been eating.

  “They won’t fail, sir,” Land said. “I would have no problem putting my life in their hands.”

  “I’m glad you have that kind of confidence in them, Captain,” the field officer said. “They will have the lives of a lot of our people in their hands.”

  “Ready to go, sir,” Carlos said, stepping inside the tent and handing Land the pack he carried. “You might check to be sure we got everything you need, Skipper.”

  “Change of skivvies? Spare socks, bootlaces, shaving kit?” Land asked, shouldering the pack.

  “Yes, sir,” Hathcock answered as the group of men began walking from the tent toward the landing site where the gray helicopter waited. “We also threw in your binoculars, knife, and some peanut butter, cheese, John Wayne crackers, and hot sauce, too. You already had quite a bit of suff in there as well.”

  “Thanks. That’ll more than work,” Land said.

  “HUONG, PLEASE HURRY,” Philip said, sitting on the side of his bed, pulling tight the laces on his brown leather ankle-high boots. “I must be on time to rendezvous with the colonel’s patrol. It is a long walk to accomplish by sunrise.”

  “I am just finished packing your kit, sir,” the boy answered.

  “You did remember to fill my tobacco pouch, too, Huong?” Philip called to the boy.

  “Oh yes, sir,” Huong answered. “I placed it next to your pipe, on the table by the doorway.”

  “Thank you,” Philip said, standing and walking into the living room where he found his pipe and tobacco.

  Huong handed the Frenchman a soft leather valise with two small handles at its top and a long strap that Philip draped over his shoulder.

  “I will be back in two or three days, Huong,” Philip said walking to the porch steps and stopping to light his pipe. “Take care that you do not burn down the house while I am away. If you do happen to catch the house afire, though, please save my boxes of wine.”

  “Please be cautious, sir,” Huong said as he watched the Frenchman disappear into the darkness.

  Metz started down the faint, narrow roadway that led from his house, enjoying the sweet smell of his freshly lit pipe tobacco. He wore khaki trousers and a white bush shirt. A straw hat, its brim worn ragged in several places along its edge, hung over his back on a cord coupled with a wooden ball slide, which he could snug under his chin to hold the hat on his head should the wind blow. He would need the hat tomorrow to protect his balding head from being blistered by the sun.

  His mix of gray and black hair lay shaggy and well past his ears, nearly touching his shoulders in the back. Huong had trimmed it seven months ago. The square, level lines that the Vietnamese teenager had cut in his hair left Philip embarrassed to remove his hat. It took the Frenchman many brushings and much more work with his ivory-handled straight razor and turtle-shell comb before he finally succeeded in returning his hairline to its natural, tapered look. He vowed never again to allow the boy near his head with scissors.

  CARLOS AND BURKE looked out the side doors of the single-engine Huey, watching the black jungle below them as it rushed past at 160 knots only a matter of feet beneath the helicopter’s skids. Neither sniper knew why they had to shoot the white man, only that it was extremely vital that they do it.

  “Kind of tall, a bit portly, shaggy gray hair, somewhere in his fifties,” Carlos repeated to himself. “Can’t be too many like that around. Be hard to hit the wrong guy.”

  A colonel had briefed the two snipers the day before at a remote base, somewhere west. Concrete block hooches and showers had impressed the two Marines who got to lay in real beds with real mattresses last evening.

  “They want us to kill a white man,” Burke said to himself, wrinkling troublesome furrows along his brow as he watched the dark world skim past his feet. “I have never even looked at a white man through my rifle sights.”

  After making its short flight, the Huey settled into a small clearing just past the crest of a hill that would lead the two snipers down a gentle slope, through the jungle, along a narrow stream to a spot where they could fire 500 yards across a clearing and kill the Frenchman. They did not know his name, what he had done, nor why the CIA wanted him dead. But both snipers knew it was important.

  They lay silently in the jungle until the helicopter had cleared the treetops and the thumping sound of its rotor blades faded in the distance. Neither man spoke. They knew what to do and set out on their mission.

  A second chopper landed an hour later on a hilltop two kilometers distant from where the two snipers now lay. Jim Land, a four-man reconnaissance team, and a CIA field officer, who wore tiger-striped utilities, a camouflage ranger hat with its brim pinned up in the front, and had a bushy walrus mustache, quietly picked their way off the hill’s crest and hid themselves in a blind of rocks and brush. Already the black shapes of the mountains and trees began to show depth and detail against the now light gray sky. In a matter of minutes, the first rays of sunlight began to creep across the jungles.

  “Either your man is real good or dead back in the woods. I never saw a sign of life from the time it was light enough to see. He’s well-hidden or not there,” the man said in a cold tone.

  “He’s there,” Land said. “When that Frenchman heads down that path, you’ll s
ee. The bastard’s good as dead.”

  “You better hope so. Otherwise a couple of folks will be wishing they were dead.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This Frenchman. He’s a professional interrogator for Charlie. One of the best. I think he’s a little funny, too, you know, sadistic sex, likes little boys. They say the bastard gets his rocks off fuckin’ up people.”

  “Where you get all this?”

  “Just take my word for it. That son of a bitch is bad.”

  “Charlie has a couple of our people down there waitin’ to meet ole’ Jacques. We don’t want ole’ Jacques to get there.”

  “Why don’t you go in and take them? You know where they are?”

  “Can’t.

  “Your man is the key to this. He has to kill the cat.”

  “Spooks,” Land thought to himself.

  “I HOPE THAT information is golden,” the colonel who had briefed Land and the two snipers said to the field officer from Da Nang as they sat in his office watching the day brighten.

  “Our guy personally carried the message to the Frenchman,” the field officer said. “He is one of our earliest infiltrators, and has never let us down. It’s gold.”

  “That copilot is no problem, but if they break our field coordinator, all these operatives, including your messenger, have had it,” the colonel said, looking at his watch. “I hate to consider where we would be standing in this mess if those two scouts had not made it out. Us assuming all were KIA.”

  “I hope that Marine is as good a shot as they say,” the field officer said, looking out the window at the orange-trimmed clouds above the sunrise. “He misses, then we have no choice but to go with the air strike.”