by Bing West
When they did make their way back to the fort, they found the two PFs waiting for them in the paddy just outside the gate. Suong had not let them enter alone and they had been too fearful to return to the track. Although Fielder was irritated, O’Rourke accepted their apologetic presence calmly. Inside the fort, several soldiers were awake, waiting to hear the results of the patrol. O’Rourke told them what had happened.
“The Cong are getting shook,” he concluded.
“I know that point man didn’t see us, so the Cong are backing off because they don’t know where we are. They don’t like it out there so much any more.”
A few days later, on August 10, 1966, O’Rourke flew back to the United States, leaving with a satisfied feeling that things were going well. The Americans were patrolling better, although they were not paying enough attention to the PFs. Sullivan tended to make decisions without asking advice, and Suong had complained to O’Rourke about the sergeant’s style. Still, the individual troops got along well and there was no friction with the villagers. It appeared that if the combined unit persevered in their patrolling, the Viet Cong could gradually be deterred from entering the hamlets.
Certainly the district officials had been buoyed by the tenacity of the combined unit in continuing to seek contact with the enemy after Page and Lam had been killed. Shortly after O’Rourke’s departure, a large Vietnamese and American inspection party from province came down to review the progress of the village noted in the reports from district. Phuoc’s Revolutionary Development cadres turned out smartly dressed and lined up as an honor guard along the main trail to escort the dignitaries to the main marketplace. There, after a round of speeches and anti-Communist songs, the Binh Yen Noi area was officially declared an Ap Doi Moi, or pacified hamlet.
This resulted in a redistribution of the government manpower assigned to the hamlet. The police force returned to district, leaving behind only Thanh and two assistants. The RDs were sent back to Quang Ngai City, the province capital, to await reassignment. Phuoc was granted a leave of absence from the RD program to campaign full time for the National Assembly, and he moved back to Binh Son district headquarters, promising to visit the village often. Only the PFs and the Marines were staying, their combined force numbering thirty-five, if all the PFs came to work on the same day.
With fewer government troops in the village, the Americans expected that the Viet Cong might push harder, and in the last days of August they patrolled with special diligence, convinced they would contact the Viet Cong even more frequently than they had in mid-July.
The Americans were driven by a group ethic. They were judged by their peers and each knew what was expected of him and what he expected from the others. Their performances in the combined unit would serve no long-term goals, since only Sullivan planned to stay in the service. As far as the group was concerned, a man could be sloppy at the fort and try to duck distasteful chores and only be yelled at by the others or chewed out by Sullivan or Fielder. But on patrol no man dared let down, or suggest that the enemy be purposely avoided. That would finish him in the eyes of the others. While Beebe was in charge, a corporal leading a patrol had circled out onto the dunes instead of setting an ambush on the trail, as instructed. The patrol passed an uneventful night, as the corporal intended, but when he returned to the fort and told Beebe no one had come down the My Hué trail, the other patrol members turned their backs on him and walked disgustedly away. Beebe sent the man back to the battalion in disgrace.
The Americans liked the village. They liked the freedom to drink beer and wear oddball clothes and joke with girls. They liked having the respect of tough PFs like Luong and the admiration of the other PFs who could not bring themselves to challenge the Viet Cong alone. They were pleased that the villagers were impressed because they hunted the Viet Cong as the Viet Cong had for years hunted the PFs and the village officials. The Americans did not know what the villagers said of them in the privacy of their homes, but they observed that the children, who did hear their parents, did not run or avoid them, as they did Thanh. The parents were more than just polite. The Marines had accepted too many invitations to too many meals in too many homes to believe they were not liked by many and tolerated by most. For perhaps the only time in the lives of those dozen Americans, seven of whom had not graduated from high school, they were providing at the obvious risk of death a service of protection. This had won them open admiration and stature within the Vietnamese village society in which they were working and where ultimately most of them would die.
Book III
Defeat
12
The Marines’ expectations of increased combat in late August did not materialize. There were a few brushes, one or two grenades pitched at them, and several sampans shot at. Most of the river encounters were of the usual variety with undetermined effects: a splash, a boat, a shot, a minute of heavy firing, a lull, the pop of illumination flares, a view of placid waters, darkness, silence. Only one encounter proved unusual.
Fleming had taken four men to set in an evening watch on the river above Binh Yen Noi. They had not even finished the clearing of twigs and stones from the ambush spot when two sampans came sculling by within seventy yards of the bank. Thinking they could capture the occupants of the boats, two PFs stood up and shouted to the rowers that they were trapped and to put into land. The response was a fast and accurate burst of fire which forced the PFs to go flat in front of the Marines’ rifles and gained for the boaters several seconds of rowing time. Then the patrollers disentangled themselves and their angry bullets whipped the waters. The lead boat got away, leaving the slower sampan to absorb hundreds of rounds before slowly sinking without ever capsizing. The next day the villagers brought six bodies to shore. One was dressed in olive drab trousers and a camouflage shirt and was carrying a 9-mm pistol. Thanh sent the corpse to Binh Son for an identification check, while the other five were left on the bank for relatives to claim. Gossip among the river traffic would carry the word across the river and into the Phu Longs.
That afternoon the district chief drove to the fort to tell the ambushers that the man with the pistol had been identified as a Viet Cong captain. The pistol was given to the PFs, along with three carbines which had also been retrieved. And that evening, since no one had come to claim them, the five bodies on the bank were buried in a common grave.
With the exception of that one river ambush, action in and around Binh Nghia was light, and the month ended on a quieter note than the Americans had anticipated. They were not sure how to react to the lull in the tempo of violence. They had been in the village almost a hundred days, had conducted over four hundred patrols, had fired or been fired on over two hundred times.
The weeks and months of contact after contact had exacted a price from the men. All had lost weight and all longed for an uninterrupted night of sleep. A Marine was lucky if he averaged four to five fitful hours of rest each day, usually from four until nine in the morning. Few of the Marines had learned how to slumber through the simmering heat and human noise which filled the fort during the day. The battalion had given them a large squad tent and cots, so the Marines had a room to themselves, but the temperature under the canvas rose to over 100 degrees by ten in the morning and stayed that way until after sundown. Men frequently dozed off while lying motionless on the longer ambushes, and the patrol leader might later yell at them but he would do nothing more. Sometimes a man could stay awake no longer.
On top of that, O’Rourke had insisted that two Marines remain on sentry duty nightly at the fort, despite its protection being a Vietnamese responsibility. O’Rourke’s easygoing manner had been deceptive, for he had trusted no one and supervised constantly, tolerating no laxity in combat matters. He had insisted on an edge of readiness which was hard to maintain night after night, especially since the combined unit had successfully carried the fight back to the enemy after their initial series of setbacks.
Sullivan had clearly favored an adjustment of the pa
trolling and sentry pace to a less hectic level; O’Rourke had not. With September bringing an ease to the combat and with O’Rourke gone, the sergeant decided to give his men a break. This seemed reasonable in view of an official assessment prepared at the end of a summer by a battalion inspection team which called the fort “a virtually impregnable fortress.” So instead of two Marines awake at all times inside the fort, Sullivan cut the requirement back to one. Averaged out over the long term, this meant each man would be able to sleep an extra forty-five minutes each night.
The patrols continued unabated, but during the first week in September the enemy seemed to have given up the fight altogether. For several days in a row there were no firefights, Thanh’s informants picked up no rumors, and the families of the PFs heard nothing from their neighbors about nocturnal guerrilla visits. The combined unit threw its small night ambushes out farther, venturing into the My Hué hamlets, where in June daylight raids had required at least a platoon. Still nothing.
The Marine battalion left the district to conduct an operation against an NVA unit back in the hills and its outposts were temporarily guarded by elements from another battalion. Charlie Company of the 7th Marine Regiment had a base on a hill in the middle of the sand dunes one mile northeast of the fort and a headquarters and service platoon occupied that position, while another platoon moved onto a steep knoll called PF Hill, a half-mile west of the fort. These were the regular units nearest the village, and although they had been ordered to “continue patrolling and effect liaison with the Combined Action Platoon at Binh Yen Noi,” no officer from the temporary units visited the fort.
There followed during the second week of September a series of disquieting events, the rationale for which became known only after the capture of several prisoners a year later. The first of the events occurred on the night of September 10, when Charlie Company’s perimeter—the top of a sand hill in an open desert—came under attack from six Viet Cong. The battle was predictably lopsided and no American was injured. Nor, it seemed, were any of the enemy, who, after firing at a few bunkers, fled in the direction of PF Hill. Three hours later that hill, even steeper than Charlie Company’s sand dune, took harassing fire from the paddies below. For the next few nights, both neighbors of Fort Page were more concerned with protecting their own perimeters than patrolling in a strange area.
On the night of September 11, the eve of the GVN elections, the 409th North Vietnamese Battalion blew up the bridge on Highway One which linked Binh Son district town with Marine division headquarters at Chulai. The 409th, composed of some of the most skillful demolition and commando experts in I Corps, had come to the district in response to the repeated requests of Le Quan Viet, the one-armed VC district chief. In keeping with its elite status, the battalion was ordinarily reserved for use only at province level, and it was a mark of Quan Viet’s political influence and urgent need that his request was filled. The battalion had come not just to destroy a bridge; it had another task as well.
On September 12, Riley, leading a tired patrol back in at three in the morning, stopped a hundred yards short of the fort to fire a green hand flare signaling his approach. He was on the open section of the trail with paddies on either side, and as he knelt to pop the flare, his eye caught a slight movement behind a paddy dike to his right.
“Hey,” he said, speaking aloud in his disbelief, “we got company.”
Realizing they had been seen, two Viet Cong leaped up and ran toward the hamlet treeline. It took the startled patrollers over three seconds to react, and that was too long. They lost sight of the enemy, although they could hear them splashing through the paddies. The Marines were tempted to sweep the area with automatic-weapons fire, but the PFs refused to allow it, arguing that the bullets would rip into the houses in the hamlet unnecessarily. So, instead, they plunked a dozen M-79 grenade rounds into the paddies, more as a gesture and an alibi lest those at the fort accuse them of laxity, knowing the chances of hitting the sprinting enemy were remote. But the precaution proved unnecessary, as neither Thanh, Suong nor Sullivan questioned them closely or paid more than casual attention to the incident, although it was the closest the enemy had been to the fort in two months.
On September 13, Sullivan sent the patrols out over two kilometers from the fort, one ambush to be set in each of the three My Hué hamlets. And as had become his habit during the past few weeks, he let the PFs patrol the safer hamlets of Binh Yen Noi by themselves. The Marines joked that the PFs so assigned spent more time flirting with their girl friends than patrolling, so it came as a mild surprise when around midnight rounds started cracking over the fort, coming from a treeline bordering Binh Yen Noi, not two hundred yards away. Sullivan did not have his men return the fire for fear of hitting some sleeping villagers, and the Marines were a bit annoyed at losing a little sleep but were otherwise unconcerned over the incident.
The next morning the patrols from My Hué reported no contact at all to the north. The PFs who wandered in from Binh Yen Noi, on the other hand, were visibly upset, reporting contacts with numerous probers close to the fort. In response to requests for exact numbers, they would only insistently repeat, “Beaucoup VC, beaucoup VC.” That could mean anywhere from two to twenty, however, for the PFs often exaggerated the size and intensity of encounters. Moreover, none of the PFs had been injured and the Marines had heard no sounds to indicate any large firefight during the previous night.
So Sullivan made no changes in the daily routine on September 14. Nor did the PFs attach any special significance to their scare. What finally quelled any lingering uneasiness Sullivan might have harbored was the afternoon arrival of Phuoc, who had traveled by sampan up from Binh Son to announce that the final tally was in and that he had been elected to the National Assembly. The district chief had asked him to warn the fort that intelligence sources indicated an attack was imminent, but in his excitement Phuoc forgot to relay the message. He did voice considerable concern, however, about information at Binh Son which pointed to the presence of an informer among the PFs at the fort.
Sullivan greeted Phuoc with affection. Suong acted as if he were Sullivan’s equal, or superior, in military matters, a fact which Sullivan resented. Phuoc, the diplomat, did not pretend to expertise in tactics and in the past had smoothed over rifts between Sullivan and Suong, whom O’Rourke had admired. Sullivan had frequently sought Phuoc’s advice and considered the man his friend.
The Marines were pleased at Phuoc’s election, and in the growing dusk he sat down to supper as their guest, saying that he planned to spend the night with them and bicycle through the village the next day. As the PFs strolled in from the hamlets, Sullivan read the roster of the night’s guard detail and patrols. Faircloth was to lead an eight-man ambush into My Hué, while Fleming was to take just one other Marine and a few PFs and move a half-mile into Binh Yen Noi. Fleming chose his friend, PFC Kenneth Learch, a small, cocky young man. Both patrols left before full dark. Night came thick and drizzling, with rain clouds obscuring a quarter-moon. Neither of the patrols saw or heard anything unusual on its way out. Each settled down to pass a dull, uncomfortable night.
At the fort, Sueter had drawn first guard and busied himself arranging his medical supplies before going out in the rain. Brannon was boisterously presiding over a three-cornered game of hearts with Glasser, the new supply man who had developed a vast admiration for him, and PFC Robert Theilepape, who was trading good-natured insults with Brannon on an even basis. Fielder had gone off to a corner to read his wife’s letters in peace. Sullivan, Suong and Thanh were listening to Phuoc brag of his election victory.
Around ten, Sullivan said it was time for lights out. No one argued. The weather was ideal for sleeping and the Marines wandered into their unusually cool tent and stretched out on their cots. Thuoc accepted Sullivan’s invitation to sleep in his private quarters, a small alcove off the central meeting room which served as the village office by day and in bad weather was filled with PFs at night. Only twelve were s
leeping there on September 14, for in addition to supplying six men for the combined patrols, Suong had dispatched a seven-man unit into Binh Yen Noi to guard the rear of the fort against a recurrence of the harassing fire of the previous night.
It proved to be a sound idea poorly executed. The PFs sent into Binh Yen Noi needed to knock on only a few doors to satisfy themselves that the Viet Cong were not in the hamlet, yet they were expected to hunker down in the cold drizzle less than a hundred yards from the fort with the supper smells of steaming rice and roast chicken in their nostrils and the inviting lights of warm houses blinking all around them. The temptation was too high; the danger too remote. The seven split up to pass the night with their families or friends, none suggesting a rendezvous point in case an emergency arose.
The first watch at the fort proved to be three hours of unrelieved boredom for Sueter, and shortly before midnight he quickly tramped through the mud across the courtyard to the squad tent and shook Theilepape.
“Huh?” Theilepape groaned, coming awake slowly. “What time is it?”
“Ten minutes to twelve,” Sueter replied.
“How’re things?” Theilepape asked as he pulled on his boots.
“Quiet.”
“Who has the duty after me?”
“Fielder. And how about reminding him to wake me when he gets off watch. I’m holding sick call in the market first thing in the morning.”
“O.K.”
Sueter was undressed and already lying on his cot by the time Theilepape had slipped on a poncho and stepped out into the rain. Thin and self-effacing, Theilepape got along well with the villagers. His blond hair had on several occasions provoked admiring remarks from the bolder of the hard-working old women in the village and the PFs teased him that he would get “much boom-boom” once his Vietnamese improved. Before going to his post, Theilepape walked into the village office to check with the PF radio operator, who said he had received no messages from district. Not wishing to awaken any of the PFs sleeping in the room, Theilepape did not linger in conversation. He stepped outside, walked hurriedly across the courtyard. He had not seen the Vietnamese who had the walking post but thought nothing of that. It was not his business to inspect the guard. In pulling a Marine off the walking post, Sullivan had passed full responsibility to the PFs for protection of the rear of the fort. The PF with that sentry duty was in the rear—sitting in a chair with his throat slit.