by David Wind
By the second day of the mission, the day they’d crossed the Laotian border into North Vietnam, Steven knew the two Special Forces men, Corporal Tom Cole and Sergeant Jeremy Raden, were the best jungle soldiers he’d ever met. It was their ability to make the team fade into oblivion whenever an enemy patrol was near that had kept them undiscovered.
Latham was the equal to the Green Berets in his ability to move undetected through the jungles. He had been the advance scout for this very mission; and he’d been in the area a half dozen times on single man recon.
The high cover routes through the dense foliage is what they concentrated on. Their assignment was to chart the passages that would allow the large-scale troop movement necessary to launch a double flank pincer invasion.
To date, they’d accomplished everything they’d set out to do. Now, Steven thought, all they had to do was to get their information out. In the back of his mind—as he was sure it was in everyone’s—rested the words of Colonel Botlin’s final briefing:
“The reason why all of you, and not just Captain Savak and Lieutenant Morrisy, have been given the complete details of this mission is so that if only one of you survives, that man will be able to complete the mission and bring back the map case and its contents.
“Under no circumstance is the enemy to learn why you are in their territory. Your orders are to avoid capture at all cost. All cost! Each of you have new uniforms. The buttons contain a fast acting poison. All you have to do is rip one off, bite it in half, and put it under your tongue. Gentlemen, I guarantee you that using the poison is a preferable alternative to what Charlie will do to you.”
Along with the uniform was a special canvas and plastic map case. Sewn into its flap was a small black container. The container was a magnesium and acid fail safe device should the mission go sour. If spotted by the enemy, and if he or Savak judged escape impossible, Steven would pull a wire embedded in the tube. Once activated, the acid would ignite the magnesium. They’d impregnated the map bag with a flammable substance the magnesium would set off.
In fifty seconds, the maps and notes would burn past recognition. If Steven was lucky enough to circumvent capture, after the maps had been destroyed, and he made it back to the extraction site, he would recreate every note and route.
Squatting in the jungles, with mosquitoes buzzing around his face and snakes and centipedes crawling over his feet, Steven understood it was his total recall abilities and not the abilities Botlin had listed at their first meeting, which was the true reason for his presence on the mission.
“Time to go,” Latham said, materializing from behind a tree. His round face was marked with black and green strips of camouflage make-up, as was everyone’s.
Steven slipped the strap of the map case over his head and stood. When Savak rose, the three friends started forward in single file. Latham always took the point. They kept at least ten feet distance from Latham, and six between themselves. The two Green Berets were on the flanks. They travelled east, moving stealthily, always searching for pratfalls in the routes of the coming invasion.
An hour before sunset, they made camp in an unusually dense copse of trees. Moss hung thickly from the old and thick branches, cutting off the last of the daylight and giving the ground a false and eerie dusk.
The Special Forces men and Latham spent a half hour securing the perimeters of the camp and setting up a network of baffled alarms, while Steven and Savak wrote out the notes about the four miles they had just covered.
They ate at sundown, in two shifts. Their food was a mixture of cold rations and whatever roots and vegetables they found growing wild. They had not lit a fire since leaving Laos; they would not until they returned to the extraction point.
During their meal, Sergeant Raden and Corporal Cole briefed Steven about what they had seen out on the flanks, and their feelings about the route they’d been over that day. Steven noted their extra information, and added it to his own.
After their meal, the team went about their regular duties. The Green Berets took up their guard posts. Steven, Latham, and Savak remained in the camp.
“We’re going to make it,” Latham said after burying the remains of their meal and squatting on his haunches near Savak and Steven.
“Of course we are, we never lose,” Savak promised, smiling confidently as he spread out the supplies. The inventory of their supplies was a nightly ritual Steven and Savak had taken on.
“We’re getting low on solids,” Savak stated, gesturing to the dried rations. “I don’t know if there will be enough rations for us to make it back.”
Steven shook his head. “We’ll manage, even if—”
“Quiet.” Latham’s hoarse whisper cut him off as the rattling sound of branches hitting together whispered through the air.
Steven froze, listening intently to the jungle. He heard nothing. Then, slowly, he realized just how much nothing he was hearing.
The silence was almost total. No birds called in the day’s end. No insects chirped their welcome of the night. There was only the shallow sound of his breathing. The faint cracking of a branch breaking from a tree and striking the jungle floor reached them as a spooky echo.
Latham had his rifle set. Savak was drawing his forty-five. Steven did the same while sweeping his gaze along the boles of thick trees.
“That was one of the perimeter warnings,” Latham whispered.
They held still for another ten seconds. Nothing happened. There was no sound.
“Raden. Cole,” Latham called loudly.
The two Special Forces men gave no reply.
A sharp burst of adrenaline released into Steven’s blood. His heart pounded like a jackhammer, and his breathing shortened. His senses expanded, heightening his hearing and sight.
Moving quickly, he took off the map bag and hooked his finger into the metal pull ring of the magnesium tube. “Ready,” he told Savak and Latham.
Hearing a low thump from behind, Steven spun. He saw the round tube of a Soviet made grenade rolling toward him. An instant later, a noxious cloud of smoke steamed out from its end.
“Do it, Steven.” Savak ordered as he began to fire short bursts into the trees.
Latham joined Savak in laying down a barrage of covering fire for Steven.
Steven pulled the ring and tossed the map bag from him. Three more grenades landed near him, spewing up thick belches of gray smoke. The acid did its job. The magnesium flared clean and white amid the thickening fog. Eighteen seconds later the impregnated map bag burst into flames.
“Where are they?” Steven shouted, searching wildly for the hidden enemy as he executed a slow three-sixty from his crouch. He held his modified forty-five in an extended double-handed grip, the fumes from the grenades choking and blinding him.
Before he could complete the circle, the world tilted sideways and the jungle floor rushed up to meet his face.
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Steven woke slowly, his head throbbing and feeling twice its normal size. It was dark. The only light came from a full moon. His tongue was thick and his mind slow.
He looked around. The other four men were with him. He tried to sit, a wave of cramps kept him down. The smell of mildew and rot permeated his every breath. He was clammy.
“Easy,” said Cole, the Special Forces corporal.
Steven drew in a deep breath that sent an unexpected wave of pain oscillating through his chest. When the pain eased, he sat slowly. They were in a bamboo hut, maybe fifteen by fifteen. Moonlight sifted through the double layer of heavy wire mesh barring the narrow window opening.
Then he realized why he felt clammy. He was naked. So was Cole. He glanced at the others: Savak, Latham, and Raden were still out. The moonlight cast an eerie pall over their pale bodies.
A terrifying sense of dread mixed with despair grew with lightning speed. He stood shakily, and found that his legs were not quite ready to hold him. Using the side of the hut for support, Steven went to the wired windows.
He
looked out. To his right were the shadowed outlines of several low-slung hut-like buildings. The darkness prevented him from seeing how many buildings.
Craning his neck, Steven pressed his cheek to the thick strands of wire to get a better view. Off to his left was a similar series of flat roofed and small wooden buildings.
Set in the center of the two wing-like rows of bamboo dormitories, was a larger two-story structure. Light seeped through shaded windows on both levels. Steven looked across from where he stood. In direct line of sight, fifty feet away, was a guard tower.
Steven had seen similar layouts before, from choppers and from recon photos. They were in an NVA prison camp. Turning from the window, he looked around the hut, searching desperately for what he knew was not there.
A strange sense of mental numbness overcame him. He sank onto the damp floor and looked at Cole. “God help us,” he whispered hoarsely. “They took our clothing. They have the pills. We have no way out.”
Chapter Twenty
VIETNAM
On the morning of their third day in the prison camp, shortly after a meal of cold rice had been thrust at them, the sky turned malevolent. Dark clouds billowed angrily. The humidity was so thick it made breathing hard inside the bamboo hut.
The hut’s two windows, covered with a double layer of metal mesh, allowed only a small amount of stagnant air to stir. The dirt floor was always damp, the sleeping mats filthy and lice infested. Sores and lesions had already formed on all their bodies.
Looking out the window, Steven thought their imprisonment would never have been, had their uniforms—their means of dying quickly and painlessly—not been taken from them while they lay unconscious.
The first night had been the worst. Each of them, as they’d woken from the gas, went through the same reactions of hopelessness as Steven.
They’d kept awake as long as they had been able to, but the effects of the gas stayed with them, and they’d slept on and off.
Shortly after daybreak of the first day, the guards pushed rancid rice, a tub of brackish water, and coarsely woven pajamas into the hut.
No one spoke to them the rest of the day. They received no other food. The five men took turns at the window, learning as much as they could about the prison camp, and seeing the impossibility of their situation. The only thing of value they learned on the first day was the low-slung building on the far side of the prison compound housed other Americans.
Raden and Cole, downcast and angry at their failure to have detected the ambush, were uncommunicative. They blamed themselves for the capture of the team, and nothing the other three said was able to break their mood.
The second day was a repeat of the first. By the end of the second day, each of them had begun to question why they were being isolated from the other prisoners.
On the third day, a half hour after they finished the cold rice, Steven saw the camp commander, accompanied by a small contingent of guards, heading toward their hut. He drew back from the window and signaled the others. The five men stood together in a tight group.
The captain opened the door and entered. He was of average height for a Vietnamese, about five-four. He wore a wrinkled uniform, but his leather boots were highly shined. He had a pocked marked face, thin lips and brown stained teeth.
Behind the captain, four uniformed guards carried Russian made AK-47s. The captain strode to the middle of the floor. Two guards stayed at the door. The other two guards stopped on his flanks. “I am Captain Lin Tam Ho, commandant of Qua Doc prison camp. You call me Captain Lin.”
He gave the five men a shark’s smile. A shiver ran along Steven’s back at the malignant hatred contained within the man’s expression.
“Spread out against wall,” he ordered.
The five prisoners followed Lin’s orders, and pressed their backs to the wall. Slowly, without speaking, Lin inspected each of the men in turn. When he was finished, Lin pointed to Tom Cole. The two guards at his sides moved forward. They separated Cole from the others, using their rifles to push Latham and Raden back.
Dodging beneath one rifle, Jeremy Raden kicked up and out with his left foot. He caught the guard in the solar plexus. The man fell backward, writhing in pain. Raden launched himself at the second guard, the hard and calloused edge of his palm slicing toward the guard’s neck. Before Raden’s hand reached its target, the captain reversed his pistol, leaned forward, and swung. He hit Raden at the base of his skull, stunning him long enough for one of the door guards to race forward and slam the stock of his assault rifle into Raden’s temple.
Then Captain Lin stepped over Raden, bent, and put his automatic to the sergeant’s head. He cocked the pistol, paused, and looked at the other prisoners. He smiled at their expressions of horror.
Slowly, Lin drew the weapon away from Raden’s head. “His turn next.”
Lin motioned to his men. They grabbed Cole’s arms and dragged him out. Steven went to his knees next to Raden. The sergeant was unconscious. Fortunately, the skin on his scalp was unbroken.
Latham, Steven, and Savak crowded the window. As they watched, Captain Lin showed them what they would all eventually be facing.
They tied Cole to a set of crossed bamboo beams, twenty feet from the hut. Lin started his interrogation by asking simple things. Cole refused to speak. After ten minutes of unanswered questions, Lin picked up a long, half-inch thick branch and whipped Cole’s abdomen. With every lash stroke Cole strained against his bindings. He never cried out.
In the beginning, Steven and the others called out to Cole, to let him know he wasn’t alone. As the minutes passed, and the torture continued unabated, their shouts slowed, and stopped.
Steven watched Lin, surprised that the captain had taken it upon himself to torture Cole. Most NVA officers were of a higher class than their troops, and did not engage in torture. However, as Lin carried on the beating, understanding filled Steven’s mind. Lin, Steven realized, was a sadist.
After an hour of methodically whipping Cole, Lin tossed the whip to the ground and went to a small square wooden table. He picked up a highly polished mahogany case. His movements turned reverent, and Steven could only wonder what the North Vietnamese captain was going to do.
Before Lin opened the case, it began to rain. Not hard torrents of a rain forest, but a slow and steady drizzle. Lin opened the case and withdrew something white. A moment later, he flicked his wrist, and a shining steel blade snapped outward.
Staring at the object in Lin’s hand, Steven’s bowels twisted sharply. Lin stepped toward Cole, his shark’s grin firmly in place as he held the pearl handled straight razor before Cole’s eyes.
With the grin of a madman, Colonel Lin Tam Ho carved an intricate pattern of cuts on Cole’s chest, arms, abdomen and neck.
Each excruciatingly slow slice of the razor cut through skin, muscle, and nerve endings. With each slice of the razor, Lin asked another question.
With every cruel and sadistic cut, the three friends shouted their hatred at Captain Lin until Raden made them stop.
“You’re giving in to them. This is what Lin wants you to do,” the Green Beret sergeant said. “They take every word you say, every shout and every plea as a sign of weakness. We have to show them our strength by keeping a unity among ourselves. None of us will speak except to each other. It has to be that way.”
Steven immediately perceived the wisdom of Raden’s reasoning. Savak and Latham were no slower on the uptake. They remained silent as the grisly scene continued.
Whenever Cole passed out from the pain, they doused him with alternating buckets of salt water and tepid fresh water until not even those could rouse him from his pained stupor.
Cole was strong; despite all of Lin’s tactics, the Green Beret corporal lasted four days. Left on the bamboo structure at night, he received no food or water.
Cole didn’t break: Cole died of dehydration and blood loss on the fifth day.
Lin left the dead corporal hanging on the cross for two more da
ys. He also left the four remaining men alone, so their fears would grow as they watched their companion’s lifeless body.
During the two days they watched Cole’s body desecrated by guards urinating on him during the days, and nighttime feedings of rats and larger rodents, the resolve of the four Americans grew stronger, along with the knowledge that they had fallen into an even worse situation than they’d first thought.
Steven kept a constant vigil on Cole’s body, burning the memory of the torture into his mind. When he wasn’t watching Cole, he talked with Latham, Savak, and Raden. They worked on a plan for escape, mentally following it through while looking for any loopholes. Despite the optimism of their plans, Steven knew escape was tactically impossible at this stage.
When they weren’t planning their escape, they talked about home, and about their families and friends. Raden spoke about his brother, his wife, and his mother. Latham about his family, and Savak about his shattered dreams of entering the diplomatic corps.
Steven didn’t talk about home or family; rather, he chose the responsibility of guiding the other men by keeping them occupied, and their thoughts as far from what was happening as possible.
Three days after Cole’s death, their isolation ended with the hut door exploding inward. Lin entered with the seven guards. Four of the soldiers rushed forward, their weapons at the ready, and pinned each of the Americans to the wall.
Lin stepped to the center of the hut and pointed at Raden. Two of the remaining guards took Raden’s arms and hustled the sergeant out of the hut. The other guards backed away slowly, keeping the weapons trained on the remaining men.
The Vietnamese dragged Raden to the cross, and made him stand still while Lin used American prisoners from the other side of the compound to cut what remained of Cole from the cross and take him to a burial ditch. When Cole’s carcass was gone, they tied Raden to the crossed bamboo posts.