by Bing West
In the open paddies just outside the fort, Tam moved slowly, giving each patroller time to shake down his equipment and adjust it against various squeaks and rattles. But when he entered the blackness of Binh Yen Noi, Tam quickened his pace, seeking to escape the dark by running away. O’Rourke, holding to a slow tread, let him go. Tam did not go far. Within a minute he had scurried back to the cautious O’Rourke, frantically gesturing to him to walk faster. O’Rourke slowed down even more. For a few seconds, Tam stood rooted, terror telling him to flee that dark place, the shame of flight tying his feet. As the patrol fled past him, he made up his mind, and jumped into line just behind O’Rourke, giving the Marine the point position.
From inside a house, the sound of forced coughing reached the Marines. The patrol stopped. The coughing stopped. The patrol proceeded. The coughing started again.
O’Rourke stopped and turned to Tam, who shook his head and tried to push the lieutenant forward. The rest of the patrol came up and clustered around. The man coughed again, loudly, persistently.
“What do you think?” O’Rourke whispered, addressing no one in particular.
Suong spoke up, making no attempt to keep his voice low, acknowledging the patrol’s presence had been signaled.
“Yes, yes. Very bad man. Number ten. Him warn VC.”
“Let’s take him in,” O’Rourke said, gesturing as though he were grabbing the man.
“No,” said Suong. “No good.”
Tam nodded his head vigorously.
“That guy must have some clout if Thanh can’t touch him,” Sullivan said.
“Well, we’ll make him a believer,” O’Rourke said. “We’ll put the fear of God into him, then he won’t be so quick to spy on us next time.”
Three Marines converged on the house, led by Lance Corporal Robert Bettie, a tall, tough young man with a calm, self-contained manner. Bettie entered through the open front door. Inside the man calmly stood waiting. When Bettie hesitated for a moment, uncertain what to do next, the man spat out a window. Bettie swung, hitting the man in the face and knocking him down. He put his rifle muzzle on the man’s chest.
“When Marines pass, you no talk, you no cough.” Bettie made a loud false coughing sound. “You no warn VC no more. I come back sometime. I see.”
It was doubtful if the man understood one word, but the message was clear. Bettie walked out of the house. Suong, who had been peeking in the doorway, was laughing.
Then ahead of them rang out four or five quick, insistent clangs from a metal gong, and the heavy tone rolled through the hamlet.
“I don’t believe that,” O’Rourke groaned. “Next, they’ll be using sirens.”
He paused, then: “Let’s move.”
“Still?” Riley asked.
“What did we come out here for?”
“Let me check with Top,” Riley said. “She’ll know if the Cong are in here.”
“Good idea,” said Sullivan.
Riley took point and led them down a side path toward the river, then turned left and crossed a paddy dike to enter a copse sheltering seven or eight houses. He walked up close to the house nearest the paddies and called in a low voice, “Missy Top? Missy Top?”
Vinh Thi Top was a cute eighteen-year-old girl with a pert manner and a quick smile. She had a full, well-shaped figure and often wore tight pants and a light, white cotton shirt. She never wore a bra and she loved to flirt and tease. Almost daily a half-dozen PFs and Marines swarmed around her house and her mother was quick to profit from her daughter’s popularity. Top offered to do the laundry of those Marines who liked to hang around her house drinking beer and eating fresh peanuts. It was the mother who did most of the washing and pocketed most of the money, but everyone was satisfied with the arrangement.
Top made some extra money through sex, but she would go to bed only with men she liked and when she felt like it and asked no fixed price. She took what was offered more as a gift than as payment and sometimes a week or two would go by when she would sleep with no one. Any Marine was at a disadvantage in the competition for her favors, since he had to coax her to bed during the daytime, when it was hot and sticky, and the children were running about shouting and screaming, and no room had a lock and the PFs and other Marines always tried to peek in and watch and laugh. In that environment sex was limited, but the Americans liked to visit the homes of Top and other young girls anyway, just for the companionship and the escape it provided from the war which washed over the village at dark.
Top was one of the few villagers openly defiant of the Viet Cong. When she was fifteen, she had been kidnaped by the VC and forced to perform nursing duties in a hospital far back in the mountains. After several months, she escaped, only to be recaptured when she was within two miles of her house. But she persuaded her two guards to let her go before they had walked her back to the hospital. The district committee later punished the guards for immoral actions and ordered Top seized and returned to the hospital. But she proved too elusive. She never slept at home, and changed residence every night. Sometimes she would wait until dark before slipping into a friend’s house, and the dusk patrol often passed through her front yard on the off-chance that she would still be home. If she was, she would whisper to them what she had heard passed from house to house about VC movements that night. It was an information technique the Marines had learned from the PFs, who had several such contacts in each hamlet.
Now at Top’s house, Riley kept calling, “Top? Top?” while O’Rourke and the other patrollers stood back in the shadows and kept watch. Eventually, the thatched door to the house swung up and outward like a garage door and Top stepped outside.
“VC come, VC come,” she said, pointing toward the marketplace. She placed her hand affectionately on Riley’s arm, gestured to him not to shoot her, giggled and darted into the darkness down the path.
The patrol turned back toward the market. To get there they again had to silhouette themselves on the long paddy dike. They went across the open space at a jangling trot, forsaking quiet to regain some concealment.
Safeties off, they walked slowly up the trail, and when they reached the wide market, they spread out on line and gingerly moved across, ducking between the empty stalls, fingers on triggers, tense, waiting, expecting from somewhere a burst of fire or a hurled grenade.
Nothing. Through the marketplace, back into the dark, narrow trail, up through the hamlet and out into paddies. Nothing. Across a dry paddy and into the scrub growth along the river bank. Nothing.
O’Rourke was tense.
“Relax, Lieutenant,” Sullivan whispered. “These people are always imagining there are Cong all over the place. All we have to do is watch the river.”
Sullivan placed the men on line facing the water and motioned them to spread out and lie down. The night was dark with clouds and a boat could have passed by seventy yards from them without being seen. From the sounds, it was obvious that Viet Cong were on the river and on the far bank. The noise of loud splashes, as if someone had slipped off the bank, reached them and occasionally they heard the dull thunk of boat wood. Still, they saw no movement. One hour passed. Two hours. No one could pick up a definite target. Even Riley, squinting and bobbing his head, could not make out the boats he could hear moving in the shadow of the far bank.
Alone among the patrollers, O’Rourke had no concern with the river traffic. Worried about their rear, he had crawled forward to the river’s edge, slowly pulled his body over the bank, twisted around and, half-lying and half-standing, set the bipods of his automatic rifle facing back across the paddy in the direction from which the patrol had come. Despite himself, twice he dozed off for a few seconds, lying in the soft, yielding mud with his head resting on his crossed arms. Each time he awoke in fear, imagining that a Viet Cong was standing just above him, about to shoot.
The second time he came awake, he peered at the shrubs along the trail with ferocious concentration, trying to squeeze the sleep from his brain. The harder he sta
red, the more he was certain two of the clumps were moving, yet so slowly that it was like watching the minute hand on a watch. So he fixed in his mind the location of the two objects, closed his eyes and held absolutely still for half a minute. When he reopened his eyes, the dark shadows were not where he had fixed them to be.
He looked around and saw none of the other patrollers. He had told no one he was shifting to stake out their rear, and now watching the slow stalk of the enemy, he felt more aggravated than afraid. The enemy was still over fifty yards from the patrol line, but if he fired, his tracers would pass by the unsuspecting Marines and they might fire back at him.
Riley solved his dilemma. Alerted by instinct, he had turned his attention from the river to look back over his shoulder. His eyes had immediately picked out the infiltrators and he glanced around to see if the other patrollers had spotted them. He could see only PFC Guadalupe Garcia, a shy, soft-spoken young Marine who was immensely popular with the Vietnamese. Riley crawled over to him.
“Lupe,” he whispered, “they’re behind us.”
“I thought I saw something move back there about a half-hour ago,” Garcia whispered in reply.
Both men rolled onto their backs and looked past their feet toward the paddy and the bush-bordered main trail.
“See them?” Riley whispered. To him the prone figures were easily distinguishable from the other shadows.
Garcia squinted and strained for several seconds before responding by holding up two fingers next to Riley’s cheek.
“Yeh,” Riley whispered.
“Better tell Sullivan.”
“Sullivan hell. I’m going for O’Rourke. You watch those two and don’t move.”
As silent as a crab on sand, Riley scurried between the bushes along the bank to the spot where O’Rourke was supposed to be lying. It was empty. This made Riley stop crawling and cast his eyes about frantically for a few seconds until he saw O’Rourke’s head and rifle. He crawled on his stomach up the embankment until his face was only inches from O’Rourke’s.
“They’re out there,” he hissed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
By way of reply, O’Rourke only smiled and held up a grenade. By now the other patrollers were crawling in toward the lieutenant, having seen Riley slip by. The activity among the patrollers alerted the two infiltrators, who froze among the shrubs. Blending with the dark shadows, they waited for the moment of danger to pass.
“Let me throw the grenade,” Riley whispered.
“No,” O’Rourke whispered. “Let them get closer.”
“Aw, come on. I spotted them. Let me throw.”
“All right. But let them move in first, so we don’t miss.”
Riley put down his rifle and picked up the grenade, holding it in his right hand and hooking his left forefinger through the pull loop. O’Rourke squirmed to snuggle his stock into his shoulder and placed his cheek along the wood of the receiver. They waited. Several minutes eased by.
Then, either having decided they had been detected or thinking better of their chilling game, the two shadows moved, fast and away. Riley responded while the two Viet Cong were still getting to their knees in preparation for their sprint to the rear. He jumped to his feet, jerked the pin and flung the grenade with the body motion of a javelin thrower. The Viet Cong were running at a diagonal to the Marines and Riley’s excited throw carried the grenade right over the heads of the runners. O’Rourke let loose a long burst of tracers at the fleeing figures, and in three seconds it was over, with nothing to shoot at except blackness and the fading sound of fast feet.
“Damn,” O’Rourke said. “I wanted them.”
And with that he was off, weaving like the halfback he once had been, rifle held high, moving forward at a driving run to close behind the Viet Cong and cut them down. Sullivan up and moving. Then Riley. O’Rourke out fifty yards, seventy-five, one hundred. Down flat at a dike, rifle on bipods in front of him. Searching, listening, straining.
Nothing. Nothing but the hoarseness of his own breath and the pounding strides of the others coming up behind him. Sullivan flopped down, followed by Riley. All listened for a moment before admitting that the Viet Cong were gone.
“I think I hit one,” Riley said.
“You mean you might have brushed one with that fast-ball of yours,” O’Rourke replied. “The idea was to blow them up, not set a world’s record for the longest grenade throw.”
“Sorry, I got a little excited.”
“No big thing. This ambush was compromised long before we got here. The VC were playing with us. We’re just going to have to think these things through more. It’s going to take more planning. Let’s head back in.”
When they returned to the fort, the Marine sentry yelled to Sullivan, “Battalion wants the report, ASAP, Sarge.”
O’Rourke, distinctly out of spirits, said, “Let me have that damn thing. Horse Three, Horse Three, this is Charlie Five. Saw two VC, threw one grenade and fired sixty rounds. No friendly casualties. No enemy casualties. Over.”
The radio sputtered.
“Horse Three, I told you what I saw. You can do what you want with it. Over.”
The radio sputtered again.
“Aye-aye, sir. Out.”
Garcia spoke up. “What did battalion want, Lieutenant?”
“They’re claiming one VC probably killed and one wounded,” O’Rourke replied. “The operations officer said no Marine can fire sixty shots at an enemy and miss.”
9
By August the twelve Marines had engaged in seventy firefights and their dress reflected the experience they had gained. Brannon and several others bought camouflage uniforms sewn skin-tight so when they walked down a black trail their passage would not be betrayed by the swish-swish of pants’ legs rubbing together. Sueter took to wearing black-and-green-striped shorts and a green T-shirt, paying in mosquito bites for his silent passage. Lummis favored Levi’s and sneakers. Although no American could match Luong, who went barefoot whenever he had point, the Marines were improving. From the start, the Marines could shoot better than the Viet Cong. Long hours on the ranges of boot camp under the tutelage of stern drill instructors had seen to that. And after hundreds of patrols in the village the Marines were learning to move as well as the Viet Cong. The wish to keep on living was seeing to that.
Staying alive was a matter of minimizing one’s own mistakes while capitalizing upon those of the opponent. Plus a little bit of luck and much common sense. Like the night O’Rourke tried to force the Viet Cong into error. He had a simple plan.
“Sullivan,” he said, “I’ll go out first by the main trail and set in near the market. You give me a fifteen-minute head start, then take the back trail up to the dunes. With both entrances to Binh Yen Noi covered, we stand a good chance the Cong will be tipped off about at least one ambush. If they are, they’ll move in right by the other one. When you get into position, fire a green flare. That way the Cong will think you’re coming back in, but I’ll know you’re in position and it’s safe to fire at anyone moving.”
O’Rourke took Lummis, Fleming and two PFs and left the fort shortly after dark. The night was cloudy and the shade trees lining the trail beyond the marketplace cast the path in such pitch blackness that O’Rourke set his men in less than a foot from the trail. Lying on their stomachs, they waited, watching the skyline for the signal flare.
Fifteen minutes passed. A half-hour—forty-five minutes. No flare. An hour slid by. Thinking Sullivan had miscued, O’Rourke’s exasperation grew to anger. He and his men would be forced to be in position all night, fighting off sleep and the mosquitoes, yet unable to fire even if they saw somebody.
He was bitterly musing on the stupidity of his position when the first of the patrol walked by. The man came silently up the soft trail and was standing directly above O’Rourke before the lieutenant heard him. Then he was so close that O’Rourke, looking up, could see his silhouette. He seemed too tall for a PF, and O’Rourke guessed Sullivan’s d
elay had been caused by putting a Marine at point, who had become lost. The man glided cautiously on, and his place was taken by another figure, in turn replaced by a third. As the patrol passed, O’Rourke could easily hear the jangle of equipment loosely strapped to web gear, and such sloppiness increased his anger against the lost patrol. The patrollers were letting their point man do all the work. The others were just bumping along behind, making no special effort to be quiet. Not only that, but O’Rourke counted ten men and he had asked Sullivan to take out no more than six.
The last man in the patrol stopped to let out a smothered cough, his feet not a foot from O’Rourke’s face. O’Rourke had a strong urge to reach out, grab the Marine by his ankles, throw him to the ground and show Sullivan’s entire patrol how heedless their passage had been. Only the fear that the Marine might shoot as he fell held O’Rourke back from tripping him.
The patrol passed on and O’Rourke waited for the green flare. Waited. And waited. No flare came that night, and at dawn O’Rourke led four furious and frustrated patrollers back to the fort. It was not yet six in the morning when he kicked open the door to Sullivan’s private sleeping quarters and shook him awake.
“Sullivan,” he said, “you’re lucky I didn’t kill you last night when you led that herd through the marketplace. And why the hell didn’t you fire your flare afterward? My people were almost eaten alive waiting for seven hours because you screwed up.”
Sullivan sat up on the edge of his cot and slowly rubbed the sleep from his eyes, while he tried to concentrate on what O’Rourke had said. At length, he replied:
“Sir, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I never left this fort last night. I found we were out of green flares. You didn’t have a radio and I wasn’t about to go poking around the market looking for you. So I canceled the patrol.
“I don’t know who you saw out there, but they sure as hell weren’t Marines.”