by Bing West
“Di-di,” Beebe said, gesturing at the point PF.
In the dimming light, the patrol passed through the incomplete breastworks in front of the fort onto the main path which led eastward straight across open paddies for a quarter of a mile before turning north and disappearing into a black mass of trees which surrounded the hamlet of Binh Yen Noi. The same treeline paralleled the path all the way to the fort, passing not thirty yards to the rear of the moat. But before entering cover, Beebe wanted to see how the patrol looked in the open.
It looked miserable, more like the parody of a heel-and toe race than a combat patrol. No sooner had the PF at point struck the main path than he hurried eastward at a pace better suited to a cross-country race. Brannon tried to keep up, while at the same time juggling his equipment to keep it from rattling, forcing his gait to have the grace of a drunk ostrich. For the first few steps, Beebe had held his pace to a crawl, placing his weight carefully. Before he could adjust, a fifty-yard gap had opened between him and Brannon, whom he could barely see. Fearful of having the patrol split into two segments less than a minute after leaving the fort, Beebe broke into a trot, the speed of which increased for each man back in line, finally forcing a flabbergasted Faircloth to run as fast as his legs would carry him to join up with a column rapidly disappearing into the darkness. Hearing the footsteps pounding up behind him, the point PF broke into a run to stay out in front, where he assumed he was supposed to be. With momentum begetting more momentum, the patrol was thundering toward the black and ominous treeline with all the stealth of a berserk elephant, the equipment of the men jingling and jangling with every step.
“Catch him, Brannon, catch him,” Beebe wheezed.
“Catch him hell,” Brannon panted back. “It’d be a lot easier to shoot him.”
“What’s the word for ‘stop’?”
“I don’t know. But I know the word for ‘water.’ Will that help?”
“Screw it. Hold it up. I’m not going up against that treeline like this.”
The two Marines jogged to a halt and leaned forward, hands on knees, to catch their breaths. Suong came panting up, followed at a few seconds’ interval by each of the other patrol members.
“I don’t believe it,” gasped Faircloth, trying to untangle the straps of two LAWs from his neck. “I just don’t believe it.”
“What’ll we do now?” Page asked. “Go back in?”
“Go back?” Beebe replied. “Page, you’re out of your gourd. We just came out. I’ll camp out here before I’ll go back and face those others. We can’t go back in. We’ll have to wait.”
The men sat down along the side of the road and waited. Five minutes passed, ten minutes.
Brannon spoke. “Don’t look now but here comes Native Dancer. Walking. Slowly walking. Vee-re slowly walking. Like he’s all alone and doesn’t like it.”
Up the path from the treeline, in a half-crouch, with his rifle at the ready, came the PF point. He was moving slowly and making no noise.
“Now that’s good movement,” Brannon said. “He does everything right. He just does it sort of backward.”
Suong went forward to talk with the point. When he came back, he pointed at the treeline and whispered, “VC, VC.”
“I think it’s a crock,” Faircloth said. “He’s just trying to cover up for that guy screwing up.”
“You’re probably right,” Beebe said. “But at least Suong’s taking point. Let’s go.”
They entered the treeline, and the visibility dropped from fifty feet to five. Houses were spaced near the path, which was overhung with coconut and banana trees and bordered by thorn thickets and broad-leafed shrubbery. In places the vegetation so overgrew the path that no light from the sky entered, and in those black tunnels each patroller proceeded by sound and guess only. He could see nothing.
Suong moved quickly, too quickly for the Marines, who feared an ambush at any second and who were sure that the noise of their passage was traveling ahead of them. Once in the hamlet, the PFs wanted to stay close enough to the Marines to touch them at all times. If a PF felt a gap was opening between him and a Marine, he would run to close it, heedless of the crackling branches breaking under his feet.
After several minutes, Suong turned off the trail where there was a gap between two houses and waited until the others were bunched close behind him. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled forward until he had passed the houses and was kneeling at the edge of a clean-swept backyard. After motioning Beebe to creep alongside him, he stabbed his finger toward the other side of the yard.
Understanding that they had arrived at their ambush position, Beebe gestured to Faircloth and Brannon to lie down between the PFs facing the yard. He motioned to Page to twist around and watch the direction from which they had just come. Beebe and Suong lay side by side in the center of the small line and waited.
From the houses around them, they heard the murmur of voices, the clatter of pots, and occasionally the sharp, hacking coughs of the sick. Lights from the fires and the lanterns in the houses winked unevenly at them. The air close to the ground was windless and musty, smelling of decayed leaves, old fires and many humans. Without wind, the mosquitoes were hovering around the men, probing for a piece of skin where sweat had wiped away insect repellant, their buzzing near the ears a distraction from concentration on the job at hand.
So Beebe never heard the Viet Cong. He would never have seen them either had Suong not suddenly begun nudging him hard and pointing across the yard. Where Beebe had been looking blankly for an hour, he now thought he saw a shadow move. Straining to mark the spot, he slowly started to lift the rifle to his shoulder when a noiseless figure darted across an open corner of the yard and disappeared behind a house. Thoroughly startled, Beebe half-rose to his knees and his rifle barrel clanked on the ground. At the sound, a second figure appeared where the first had just been and disappeared in the same instant.
That was all. Nothing more untoward occurred during the patrol. But it was a shaken group of Marines who returned to the comparative safety of the fort.
“How’d it go?” a Marine asked when the patrol returned.
“Unbelievable,” Beebe replied. “The PFs can’t move and we can’t shoot fast enough. I can see now why the PFs are scared shitless to go out there. It was like playing a game of blindman’s buff, only the other guy can see. I don’t know who we’re up against, but they’re good, man, they’re very good. It’s their turf.”
“I still get shaky thinking of those first few nights,” Beebe said later in an interview. “I had had a lot of stuff thrown at me in my year in Vietnam. Those guys I brought down to the fort had, too—at one time or another we had been pinned down in the paddies, mortared, had those B-50 rockets go whooshing over our heads, even gone after 50-caliber emplacements. It was nothing compared to that ville. That was the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. The PFs would be shaking. You’d reach out and you could feel them quivering. But they’d go as long as we did. Well, not always. Of course, there were times when I didn’t want to go myself. Nobody did. You had the idea the VC were fussing with your mind, that they knew exactly where you were, that they could read the label on a suit in a dark closet.”
3
The days quickly took on a routine, with activities following a regular pattern. The fort took priority at first and consumed much energy and attention. Within three days, however, the defenses were basically complete, although no credit was due to technology, not even barbed wire. The fort could have been built the identical way a century before.
Once the digging was finished, the men gladly laid aside their shovels and devoted full time to their combat tasks. The Marines were uncertain of their PF allies and frightened by their unseen adversaries, but there was not one of them who wanted a steady diet of digging. To them, the village night patrols brought an element of excitement and physical challenge not unlike a strenuous athletic contest. These men knew the results of firefights—the splayed b
odies, the sobbing cries, the gritted curses—but they would rather face the chance of death than fill sandbags all the dull day long.
The police wanted no part of the night patrols. Although well trained and not afraid to run ambushes, they left such military chores to the Marines and the PFs. When it could be avoided, Lam preferred not to run a random chance of losing one of his police. His men were day people, specialists in the intelligence rather than the operational field of war. They were in the village only temporarily, and far enough overstrength in number to keep them safe while they were there.
The police were not so much interested in the enemy soldiers as they were in the people who connected the VC with the villagers and in those who supplied intelligence, food and recruits for the VC units. To combat their enemies, the police relied chiefly on the unraveling method. Once one enemy agent was captured, it was hoped that he would divulge information leading to someone else, and so on. But the Viet Cong did not oblige by organizing their apparatus in such a simple and vulnerable way. In their first four days in the village, the police questioned over fifty suspects, acting on gossips and tips provided by the PFs, their families and friends. Not one arrest was made, as Lam quickly discovered that all known Viet Cong had left those hamlets close to the fort. Only the part-time helpers and sympathizers had remained behind and, although the PFs disliked them, the police were not interested in them. Some such Viet Cong sympathizers were questioned and some were beaten, but all were released.
Lam was convinced that the only real enemy left during the daytime in the Binh Yen Noi hamlet near the fort were secret cadres whose identifications were not known to the villagers. It was rumored that the known village Viet Cong had been ordered to the hamlets of My Hué, four kilometers northeast of the fort. There they would be safe during the day and could roam throughout the village at night. The Viet Cong so dominated the three My Hué hamlets that any stranger ran the risk of being denounced as a GVN spy. The villagers were organized into committees, the better to watch each other while working for the common cause of the National Liberation Front. A local guerrilla squad kept a twenty-four-hour watch on the approaches to the My Hués, and fired warning shots when GVN forces came near.
About a week after the fort was built, Lam directed a raid against My Hué. He selected a secluded spot on the main trail to the marketplace and at night surrounded it with police, Marines and PFs.
When the villagers passed by in the morning, they were met by the police, who took them into a small ravine, asked a few quick questions and searched those who seemed suspicious. It was two hours before news of the dragnet drifted back to My Hué and the traffic ceased. By then the police had questioned over two hundred people and had taken grenades or small-arms ammunition from thirty.
Some of the ammunition had been intended to resupply a Viet Cong company operating outside the village, although the amount captured was too small to have any combat significance. Lam was also sure none of the porters was a high-ranking cadre. The VC did not risk their leaders so casually.
The thirty captives were bundled into boats and taken downstream three miles to the district headquarters, where the district chief gave them the choice of one month in jail or ten days at his indoctrination center, which he called “political education sessions,” a technique he had learned while a Viet Cong commander. All chose the indoctrination center.
And after ten days of GVN lectures, discussions, harangues and exhortations, the odds were that at least two or three of the villagers would return to My Hué in the secret political or financial employ of the district chief. This compromised all of them in the eyes of the Viet Cong, and finding thirty replacements to run the risk of another police check point would not be easy. Lam knew, however, that the Viet Cong would nevertheless replace their losses, and would keep on replacing them after each police raid. The raids only bought time, while affecting the localized perceptions of the villagers concerning the relative strengths and chances of success of the two opposing sides. Sooner or later, GVN forces would have to attempt to enter and hold My Hué, not just cut it off from the outside.
The police believed that the Viet Cong, for their part, would have to attack the combined unit or lose influence among the villagers. Lam was convinced that enemy scouting parties were circling close to the fort each night. The local schoolteacher, Ho Chi, claimed that many of the children told of hearing Viet Cong soldiers nightly passing near their houses in the hamlet.
A short, wiry man with a toothy grin, Ho Chi was fond of practical jokes, with a complaisant Brannon as his special butt. Twice Ho Chi’s size, Brannon would respond to a prank by seizing the schoolteacher, forcing him to the ground and sitting on him. This was the signal for the PFs to assault the big Marine, who lost ten wrestling matches in ten nights before refusing to play the game any more. Ho Chi’s English was scarcely better than Brannon’s pidgin Vietnamese, and on top of that he was a notorious liar. Even when he did understand what he was supposed to say, he frequently would say something else and twist a conversation beyond unraveling. He was the only man in the fort who could make Lam laugh.
The Viet Cong were the one subject concerning which Ho Chi could be relied to talk with rigid honesty. So great was his fear and hatred of them that sometimes his voice would shake during a translation. A bachelor, Ho Chi had lived alone with his father near the tiny schoolhouse, just off the main trail three hundred yards west of the fort. One night, a year earlier, the Viet Cong had entered his house looking for him. He was not there, for rarely did he dare go home in the evening. His father, however, was there, and they killed him. Ho Chi said they acted out of anger and frustration. There was no reason for them to kill his father. After that, Ho Chi had slept in the district compound until the arrival of the Americans, when he, along with about a half-dozen village and hamlet officials, decided it was just as safe for them to sleep in the fort and cut out the long commute to district. Ho Chi said he was not a brave man, and he was petrified at the Marines’ teasing efforts to drag him outside the fort on one of their night patrols. Yet, six days a week, he walked down the road to his schoolroom and taught the children, an act for which he was marked for assassination.
Less than a week after the Americans had come to the village, Lam told Ho Chi to tell them that they, too, were marked.
The Marines laughed. What was surprising about that?
“No, no,” said Ho Chi. “It is not just fighting. The VC are paying for your heads.”
“You mean, my head?” Brannon asked, gesturing with both hands grasped around his throat.
“Yes,” said Ho Chi. “That’s it. VC pay five thousand piasters for you, much more for Lam,” he giggled.
“I’m worth more than you make in two months, Ho Chi,” Brannon teased. “Maybe you take my head, huh?”
Ho Chi did not want to joke. “Some PF are VC.”
The Marines looked around. Lam and the PFs who were listening nodded their heads. Brannon seized Ho Chi by the shoulder while pointing across the paddies toward the small stream.
“VC right there, Ho Chi?” Brannon laughed. “VC right in front of fort? Maybe VC looking at us right now, huh?”
Brannon meant no harm by the remark, intending by a preposterous exaggeration to break the tension, expecting Ho Chi to swat him and initiate a wrestling match which would divert the attention of the combined unit.
Instead, Ho Chi replied, “Yes, there are VC there.”
“Oh hell, Ho Chi, right in front of the fort?”
“Yes. VC. VC.”
“Bullshit. I’ll walk out there right now and prove there ain’t no VC.”
“No you won’t, Phil,” Corporal Franklin Lummis cut in. “You’re not leaving this fort alone. I got the first patrol out. As soon as it gets a little darker, we’ll walk down there together.”
A short, muscular young man, Lummis had grown a thick, black mustache which greatly impressed the Vietnamese and gave him a threatening appearance and the occasional nickname
of “Pancho Villa.” Lummis had a dry, cryptic sense of humor, which the volubility of the amiable Brannon gave him the occasion to exercise. The two frequently worked together.
“I’ll go along, too,” Corporal Paul Fielder said. “I have the late watch and I don’t think I could get to sleep anyways.”
Quiet and steady, Fielder had the trust of all at the fort. Despite his tall size and husky build, he did not throw his weight around even when provoked. He did his work without being told, and if there was another chore that he saw before anyone else, he did that too. Fielder was well on his way to becoming the second-in-command of the Marines at the fort. He was also the most anxious among them to go home, to his wife and newborn son.
“I want one more Marine on that patrol,” Beebe said. “If Lam thinks there are Cong close to the fort, we’d better play it safe.”
“I’ll go,” PFC John Culver said.
The Marines’ nickname for Culver was “Combat,” in reference to the ironic contrast between his open, round face, which was more boy than man, and his wild nature in firefights. There was no doubt about it: Culver liked to fight. Only, he didn’t think. Sometimes he hadn’t backed off, even when his squad was badly outgunned. He also liked to play poker, at which he invariably lost. Culver needed a type like Lummis or Fielder to steady him.
The patrol set, they settled down to wait for dark. Twilight was the best time of day at the fort. The heat which burned a tanned man’s skin went with the sun, and although the mugginess remained behind, there was a faint breeze just steady enough to blow away his sweat, provided he did not move. After the night’s assignments had been made, the Marines would collect their combat gear and sprawl out on the trench walls to oil their rifles and recheck tracer-laden magazines and rest their full stomachs. While waiting for their patrols to leave, they would doze or exchange small talk and joke with the PFs. From dozens of houses in the treeline behind the fort would drift the faint smell of cooking fires, and now and then the exasperated shriek of a harried mother calling for her child would reach the fort.