by Bing West
“It’s time,” Lummis said.
A simple patrol. Four Marines and two PFs. Out from the fort, straight across the paddies two hundred yards to the stream, a two-hour wait, and back in. Nothing to it. The Americans had now been in the village six days. This was the thirtieth patrol dispatched. The patrollers doubted they would encounter any enemy so close to the fort.
Walking on the paddy walls without any sort of concealment, they crossed a series of three rice paddies, each the size of a basketball court, and reached the stream bank. Parallel to the stream ran a low, thick dike, built by the farmers to prevent flooding in the paddies. The tide was out when the patrol reached the dike, and there was a four-foot slope from the paddy down to the water’s edge. The routine ebb of the tide permitted vegetation exposure to the sun, and a narrow belt of swamp plants and mangrove trees ran from the edge of the dike down and out as far as the high-water mark, a distance of some twenty yards. The massive water buffalo, driven to the stream to soak after plowing the nearby paddies, had, by their bulk and daily habits, trampled clean a small swath in the swamp’s undergrowth. From the edge of the buffaloes’ inlet, the stream could be seen fifteen yards away, with a sand bar jutting up farther out in the river.
Lummis led the patrol over the dike and into the dark hollow of the inlet. It may have started as a lark, as a means of showing Ho Chi, the schoolteacher, that there was no bogeyman, but in the dark next to the water with the bushes rustling and clouds crowding the sky, the patrollers forgot the light mood in which they had left the fort.
Lummis set them in fast.
“I’ll put the PFs on the left,” he whispered. “Brannon, you and Fielder peel off right. Culver and I will take the middle.”
A storm was coming. The wind was rising, blowing into their faces and humming against their ears, blotting out the ordinary night sounds and making it impossible to hear a soft footfall. The broad leaves on the thick shrubs were scraping against one another. The bushes were dancing and bobbing and swaying, giving the image of men leaping up and ducking back down. The wind was whipping across the stream and tiny wavelets were lapping and popping at Lummis’ feet.
To his right Brannon had crawled atop the dike wall. There he lay in the mud on his stomach, his automatic rifle resting on its bipods in front of him, his chin propped on his fists. Below him, Fielder sat with his back resting against the dike wall, his head at Brannon’s elbow, his rifle pointed into the dark swamp, so close at hand the muzzle could touch the bushes.
The rain started. At first a light spattering, followed by a steady downfall, and finally a heavy, continuous sheet of water. It seemed the raindrops were attached to each other in steady streaks, like from the faucet of a shower, slanting down with enough wind-given force to sting the cheeks of the patrollers and force them to squint and shield their faces. The nearby bushes quivered and sagged as the branches tried to shake off the tormenting streams of water. The din of the rain beating on the undergrowth, splatting in the mud and murmuring in the guzzling paddies, drowned the ears of the patrollers. They could not hear. They could not see.
Then came a white gash of close-passing lightning and a roaring clap of thunder over which a man’s shout could not be heard. The cacophony of the elements decided Lummis. He pivoted around, with the intention of gathering his men and going back in. And there was Brannon on the dike, propped up on his elbows, his rifle stock against his cheek, his silhouette appearing in the lightning blazes. Like a pointer on a bird, he was frozen on the dike, with his taut body in a puddle of mud and water, most of his weight supported by his arms, leaning, straining forward, willing his body to melt and mold into the stiffness of the rifle’s wood and steel.
Lummis froze. And without words, the message communicated to the others. In the lightning, Brannon had seen something move farther down the dike. Rigid as stone, he held his fix. Fielder rolled on his shoulder, to shield one ear from the rain, trying amid nature’s sounds to distinguish a man’s noise. Brannon broke his point momentarily to tap Fielder on the head and gesture at the swamp, then reset his bipods so that the rifle muzzle was pointing past Fielder’s nose at the bushes.
The ambushers were being stalked. In the first flash of lightning Brannon had seen a man crawling up the dike, with others crouching some distance behind him. Having seen Brannon at the same instant, the crawler had rolled off the dike into the swamp, with his men following. The patrollers now had to wait out their enemy. To back off into the open paddies would invite attack, and the enemy could fire first from behind the protection of the dike wall. Minute after minute, the patrollers waited motionless, knowing that the enemy did not know exactly where they were, gambling that they could still get off the first bursts of fire.
As quickly as it had come, the thundershower was passing overhead, taking with it the intermittent light and part of the din. The rain slowed but still pattered on, and the wind stopped gusting and blew fair and steady. Lummis began to wonder about Brannon. He knew it was irrational to relax just because the squall had passed, yet he felt himself doing so.
Not so Fielder. Half-sitting, half-squatting next to Brannon, his left leg had gone to sleep and he had a cramp in his right thigh, yet he refused to unbend or straighten up. Listening for a careless foot in the swamp, he had twice heard a cracking sound like wood breaking. With the wind bending the mangrove bushes, he was not sure enough to act on the sounds. Still he knew it was not his imagination, for after the second cracking noise he had heard Brannon click off his safety. Sensing that the enemy was coming, Fielder laid aside his rifle and took a grenade from each of the breast pockets of his green jungle jacket. He took one of the hand bombs and quietly slipped off the elastic which was attached for added safety around the base of the spoon. Next he peeled off a piece of Band-Aid which held down the pull ring and kept the grenade from jingling when he walked. Finally, he pulled straight the bent-back edges of the holding pin and eased it halfway out of the grenade, so with a simple movement of his fingers or teeth he could complete the pull which would release the spoon and ignite the grenade’s three-second timer. He repeated the process with the other grenade and sat there, listening, not seeing, a grenade in each hand, ready to go.
On the river, ducks and geese started squawking, the flutter of wings sounding quite close to the inlet. Within half a minute the racket died down.
Then it came, and only a professional could have called it a warning. The grenade was already out of the hand of the Viet Cong, already in the air, already seeking flesh and bone, when the slight pinging sound of the spoon flying loose traveled ahead of the thrown bomb and warned the tense Marines.
“Incoming!” yelled Brannon, his shout mixing with Lummis’ scream of “Grenade!” and the patrollers were diving flat when a white flash whipped across their eyes. A sharp crack slapped their ears, followed by the bee hum of shrapnel sailing past before losing death speed and plopping down harmlessly into the paddy water behind them, like a handful of pebbles tossed into a shallow puddle.
Less than two seconds passed before Fielder shouted “Outgoing!” as he jerked at a loose pin and lobbed a grenade out and over the bushes around him, as if he were making a hook shot with a basketball. The grenade landed with a soft splat, and there was a delay of a few seconds marked by a quick rustle of bushes near where the grenade had hit. Fielder was in the process of pitching his second grenade when he heard the movement. Opening his palm, he let the spoon fly from the grenade, then lobbed it twenty feet at the sound. He had barely let it go when his first grenade went off, which in turn covered the sound of his second grenade landing. Its blast seemed to follow before the bushes had stopped dancing from the shock wave of his first grenade and Brannon was shouting.
“Beautiful—that was beautiful. Right in there. Right on the bastard. Beautiful.”
Then Lummis was bellowing, “Brannon, shut up. All right, let’s rip this place apart just in case there are others.”
On both flanks, the Marines and PFs
emptied magazines into the swamp. Red lines of heavy tracers cut back and forth through the bushes which stretched ten meters to the open river.
After about ten seconds, they stopped firing. Someone cursed. The clatter of empty magazines being changed drowned out his voice.
“Knock it off and sit still. Listen for them,” Lummis said. “We probably got that one, so listen for groans. Anybody hit?”
“Yeh. Culver took some shrapnel. No big thing though. It hit him in the head.”
“Wha-at?”
“I don’t feel too bad,” Culver spoke up. “But I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I caught a piece in my forehead.”
The sound of the firing had carried clearly to the fort and Beebe had immediately called the nearest artillery position, asking for illumination. While Lummis was bandaging Culver’s head, the first flare blossomed over the patrollers.
“Look,” said Brannon, “there’s a boat.”
Beached on the sand bar not fifteen yards out in the stream was a round wicker-basket boat. One or two Viet Cong had been paddling downstream under cover of the storm when the bank had suddenly erupted with fire. They had then beached their craft. The Marines did not know whether they were lying flat and unseen on the sand bar or had swum off.
“Hose down that sand bar,” Lummis said.
Fielder and Brannon began firing, the red arcs of the tracers skimming across the water, a few hitting rocks on the sand bar and angling off in wild and spectacular flight.
“How’s Culver?”
“He’ll be O.K. There’s blood all over him, but he was only nicked.”
“Another Purple Heart the easy way,” said Culver. “One more to go and I go home.”
“Hey,” Brannon shouted, “let me try for that boat with a LAW. I never get a chance to fire one.”
“All right, Brannon,” Lummis answered, “but don’t screw up. It’s our only LAW.”
“Relax, I’m a pro,” Brannon said. “Watch this.”
Brannon extended the LAW and knelt in the inlet near the spot where the incoming grenade had gone off. Sighting in carefully at the round wicker boat not thirty meters away, he squeezed the firing mechanism. Nothing happened. He realigned and squeezed again. Nothing. He tilted the tube upward off his shoulder to inspect the faulty trigger. The LAW went off with a roar, the rocket streaking out across the paddies.
“Great shooting,” Lummis growled. “That’s gonna land in district headquarters.”
The patrol leader walked to the water’s edge with his grenade launcher. He fired once and the M-79 shell splintered the boat. “Let’s go home,” he said, “before we shoot down a jet.”
“What about that guy in there?” Brannon asked, looking toward the mangroves.
“You want to go in there stumbling around looking for him?” Lummis replied.
“No.”
It was raining again as the patrol turned back toward the fort and the men splashed noisily along the paddy dikes. By the time they reached the fort the flares had gone out. Beebe was waiting to debrief them and they clustered briefly in the courtyard, heads bowed, the water running in rivulets from the brows of their hats.
“That’s it for tonight,” Lummis said. “Let’s pack it—”
He was silenced by the quacking of ducks in the stream not two hundred yards across the paddies directly in front of the fort.
“Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “No sooner are we in than they move right in front of our noses. That really frosts me.”
The squawking and fluttering of the ducks became louder. Lam walked out into the rain and mud, clad only in his white underwear. Ignoring the weather, he stood listening for a moment before shaking his head and smiling at the disgruntled Marines.
“Tiki, tiki,” he said. “Small. Not many, two, maybe four.”
Lummis turned to Brannon.
“Want to go out again?”
“Sure,” Brannon said. “Why not?”
“You can go out after the last patrol comes in,” Beebe said. “But don’t go farther than we can support you.”
4
The patrollers straggled off to sleep. Ordinarily most of the Americans and Vietnamese slept outdoors on cots, air mattresses and sandbags, with the light breezes keeping away the bugs. But the rain had driven everyone indoors and the men were sleeping side by side in a hall about the size of a small living room. The air was dank and smelled of wet, dirty clothes and too many bodies.
Lummis found a niche by the door, shrugged out of his wet gear, took off his shirt and boots, lay down and fell asleep. At four, the Marine sentry came in search, tripping over men and shining his flashlight into several cursing faces before finding Lummis, who in turn woke Brannon. They put back on their sopping shirts and boots, struggled into their web gear heavy with magazines and grenades, threw two LAWs apiece over their shoulders, picked up their automatic rifles and walked out of the fort.
“We’ll be in the cemetery, Theilepape,” Lummis called to the sentry. “You’ll hear if we get into it.”
Cold, sullen, in ugly temper, Lummis walked down the trail toward a cemetery a quarter of a mile away. Brannon lagged several yards behind, watching their rear. The clouds had passed and the stars were shining down, bringing a brightness to the night and promising a brilliant dawn. They reached the cemetery and turned right, passing cautiously between the mounds of earth until they neared the bank of the stream where they had fought six hours earlier. Then they sat down some yards apart with their backs against tombstones and, with a clear view over the calm stream, waited to add to the dead.
For an hour they sat and no boats came by. Gradually it grew light, and in the hamlet to their left the fishermen stirred and emerged from their houses and began pushing their boats on wooden rollers toward the empty waters. They stopped momentarily when they saw the two ambushers looking at them, but then proceeded again, their bustle disturbing a huge rat who scurried along the high-tide mark in the mud past the ambushers. Brannon thought of shooting the rodent, but let it go lest the fort go on alert at the burst. They stayed past six in the morning, not from any hope that some bemused Viet Cong would paddle by in the light, but to watch the dawn come.
At the start of another day, Lummis rose to his knees, picked up his rifle and flipped the bipods back alongside the barrel. Seeing that, Brannon followed suit, and together they walked back out to the trail, bearing with them the stink of the muck and the bites of mosquitoes and chiggers. Lightheaded from lack of sleep, their movements were sluggish as they trudged back.
Just outside the fort’s fence, they met Gerald Sueter, the squad’s Navy corpsman. Since he had medical duties in the Binh Yen Noi hamlets each morning, he was not assigned any late-night patrols. Sueter’s day started when many of the Marines were going to sleep.
“Since you two are up,” he said, “why not come down to the market with me? You might be able to grab a hot bowl of soup for breakfast.”
“That beats C-ration coffee,” Lummis replied. “Let’s go.”
All three were fond of the early morning, before the heat. Since first light lifted the village curfew, they passed dozens of people, some going to work in the fields, others driving cows, some getting an early start to the district market. The Marines exchanged courteous morning greetings with the men. They said fewer words to the women, who always seemed in a great hurry, quick-shuffling along the trail with shoulders hunched under the weight of water cans or bundled firewood balanced on stubby poles. They refused to look directly at the Americans, although Brannon, in complimenting a few good-looking girls, set up a titter among some older women.
Clean-shirted children, happily forgetting they were on their way to school, were soon swarming after the Americans, gawking at Sueter’s hefty size, trying to pinch the hair on Lummis’ forearms and challenging Brannon to recite more words in Vietnamese than they could in English.
A few youngsters, mostly indentured orphans, did not attend school. These were the poor, illiterate buff
alo boys in dirt-stained clothes who with tiny reed switches drove their enormous beasts to the hot paddies or the wide river. Whenever the buffalo plodded past, the Marines left the dung-spattered trail and stood well out on the paddy dikes, fearing the horned charge their strange American smell often provoked.
The Marines also stepped aside whenever they heard the jingle of a bicycle bell and with a wave of his hand a PF would pedal past, hurrying home from the fort to breakfast with his family and begin a day’s work.
Or at least that was the government’s plan for the Popular Forces: they would be primarily farmers or fishermen and only part-time soldiers. In Binh Nghia few PFs had the stamina to patrol and walk guard at night and then toil in the hot fields by day. Most needed to sleep sometime. Yet they were paid only part-time wages—$20 a month, half the wage earned by the police or the soldiers of the regular Vietnamese units. Most of Binh Nghia’s PFs were lucky: they were bachelors. They could eat and sleep at home and use their meager salaries to buy cigarettes and beer—when they didn’t gamble it all away. For those five or six PFs who were married, life was much harsher; not only did they have little money to spend on themselves, but their wives had to work doubly hard to support their families.
At a leisurely pace, the three Marines followed the main trail to market. East of the fort for a quarter of a mile their path ran straight, bordered on both sides by dark green paddies, before taking a sharp left turn and veering north when it struck close to a wide river called the Tra Bong. At the bend the trail entered a treeline, and for over a kilometer the trail was lined with cool thatched houses, separated by bramble fences and smooth dirt paths worn into grooves by generations of use. Interlacing the main thoroughfares were hundreds of less distinct tracks, the backyard roads beaten by the foraging domestic pigs, the cows and water buffalo plodding to and from their stalls, and the children playing among the houses.