by Bing West
From the horse-riding region of Pennsylvania, White several years earlier had chosen not to follow his father and his older brother to the Hill School and to Yale. Instead, with a boy’s dream of a military career, he had attended the lesser-known Manlius Military Academy, graduating as the class president and cadet commander. His marks were not sufficient for Yale, however, and college seemed dull, while the Vietnam war was receiving favorable publicity in 1965. So he enlisted in the Marines to fight, sure of himself and sure of his military prep school training. It was also sure that no Marine drill instructor would share that attitude, and White spent his first seven months in the service as a short-tempered and harassed private. Then came Vietnam and a rice paddy, with his platoon squashed down by machine-gun fire and White still able to think, shoot, encourage and direct. Five months and fifteen operations later, he was a sergeant and the most experienced squad leader in the battalion.
In early September his squad drew shotgun duty for a truck convoy driving the sixty miles north from Chulai to Da Nang. They had barely started when they ran into a nest of snipers firing at them from a distant treeline. White’s squad debarked and, accepting the snipers as a routine irritant, followed a standard procedure. Covering each other, two fire teams advanced on the treeline while White stayed back with his third team to keep contact with the drivers. He was leaning against a truck hood talking on a radio when a few stray rounds zipped by. More from habit than any sense of danger, he dropped flat and continued talking. The movement proved to be his undoing. In a moment of panic, the inexperienced driver put the truck in gear and slammed his foot on the accelerator. One of the front wheels ran over both White’s legs. Nothing was broken, but his legs were badly bruised. Sent back to the battalion medical ward, he had been recuperating in bed when he heard of the attack against Fort Page. White asked to see the doctor.
“Sir, I knew Sullivan and I know that gang at the fort,” he said. “They’re going to need someone. I can walk. I’d like to go down.”
The doctor agreed, so White grabbed his rifle, limped to the medevac pad and hitched a helicopter ride to the fort. He was waiting when the combined-unit Marines returned from the funeral. He looked at them carefully and they stared flatly back, not accepting but not rejecting him, an acknowledgment that he might fit in, knowing who he was and what he had done.
“We’ll take the watches in the fort tonight,” White said, noting their red eyes and slack faces. “The reaction platoon can take the patrols tonight.”
“This is our village,” Fleming replied, “not theirs.”
“Now listen,” White said, with an edge on his voice, “starting tomorrow it’s back to business as usual and you’re going to be working your asses off patrolling all over the ville. Smarten up. That platoon’s pulling out tomorrow so we might as well get some work out of them tonight and get a good night’s sleep ourselves.”
The following day, as soon as he was off guard, Combat Culver walked alone to the marketplace, bought a bottle of Vietnamese moonshine, and sat outside the house of a PF friend, drinking himself into oblivion in the morning sun. He had been friends with Larry Page and had been on patrol with him that calm June night when he was killed. And he had been closer to Sullivan than anyone else in the fort, acting as a confidant and staunchly defending the sergeant’s actions. Shortly before noon some women passing by the fort told Faircloth that the American called Culver was crazy drunk in the marketplace. Faircloth went after him and returned to the fort with Culver, alternately bellowing and screaming, slung over his shoulder.
“Something’s wrong in the ville,” Faircloth said after he had placed Culver on a cot. “I’m not part Indian for nothing. I can sense it. I can almost smell it.”
To better gauge what Faircloth meant, White sent his Marines to stroll around the hamlets while he stayed at the fort to assist in the departure of the reaction-force platoon, who were already climbing into the waiting trucks. The Marines walked nonchalantly down the paths, as they had on a hundred other afternoons. Only this time the villagers avoided them, walking off the trail when they saw them coming or shuffling rapidly by with downcast eyes. If a Marine shouted a greeting to a farmer he knew well, the man would reply in a low voice or with a furtive gesture, as if embarrassed or frightened to be recognized. Even Lance Corporal Larry Wingrove, a husky, smiling young man whose popularity with the children was magnetic, walked alone.
At twilight only the PFs gathered at the fort; the hamlet elders and the village officials had left to spend the night at district headquarters, as they had done before the Marines had come to the village. At the fort, Thanh told the Marines that when the patrols went out, they would be forced to fight. The Viet Cong had talked to the people and said they were coming back, like in the old days. Following the attack on the fort, they had said the Marines would leave and the villagers had seen the trucks leave that afternoon. Nervous neighbors had been urging the families of PFs to flee, lest they be denounced and punished when the Front held their first public meeting. In each hamlet secret cadres were organizing for the return of the Viet Cong, and some were openly giving instructions to the people. Thanh thought the northernmost hamlet of My Hué would be the site of the Liberation Front return rally, and White was eager to take a patrol and accompany the police chief there.
Suong did not object, so White took responsibility for the My Hués, leaving Wingrove, Fleming and Culver to work under Suong in the seemingly safer Binh Yen Noi hamlets. Suong did not say anything until White and Thanh had left, then he put Luong in charge of a five-man patrol which included Wingrove and Fleming. As he walked out the gate, Fleming noticed that the PFs who were staying behind were putting on their cartridge belts and that Suong was shaking awake a badly hung-over PFC Culver. Suong seemed to suspect that Binh Yen Noi might not be as quiet as Thanh and White thought.
It was not fully dark when Lin Thuc, a stocky PF with hard eyes and a quiet manner, took point and led the five patrollers down the main trail into Binh Yen Noi. Moving quietly through the hamlet, the patrol had almost reached the marketplace when Wingrove sensed a strange tempo to the place. As they were supposed to, the villagers had their lights out and were indoors. The hamlet was hushed—too much so. The Marines had argued long with the more stubborn of the villagers to tamp down fires, lower the pitch of conversations and not pile brambles on trails to enclose animals. Feeling that the way was too clear and the stillness too pervasive, Wingrove dragged the pace while trying to decide on a course of action. Several yards ahead, Thuc, having seen Wingrove’s hesitation, drew up and stepped into the shadows.
Wingrove at that point was abreast of the house of Missy Tinh, a pretty girl with a coy manner and a warm smile who competed with Missy Top for the Marine laundry concession. Unlike Top, Tinh had not slept with any American. But she said no in a way which left hope for the future and she had several ardent suitors.
As Wingrove walked by her house, he saw her father standing in the shadows.
“Chao,” Tinh said.
“Chao, ong,” Wingrove replied automatically, inquiring after his health. “Mann gioi khong?”
Wingrove knew Tinh rather well. On several occasions he had eaten at his house, attracted there by his pretty daughter. Wingrove had a relaxed way about him and a guitar with one bad string on which he could pluck a few stanzas of two Vietnamese songs and fake his way in English through several rock-and-roll numbers, a talent which had prompted his rivals to quip that Missy Tinh invited the guitar to dinner and let Wingrove tag along. Wingrove laughed tolerantly at the jibes of his American friends. While he was genuinely attracted to the demure Missy Tinh, with her composed manner and graceful style, he knew that the morals of the Vietnamese village society were strict and that Tinh’s father kept a close watch on his daughter. But that didn’t bother him. He liked visiting with the family, strumming his guitar near the hearth while Mr. Tinh sipped a beer and his wife busied herself in the kitchen and Missy Tinh helped her mother and smiled each
time she walked by.
So when Wingrove saw Mr. Tinh out after curfew, he at first thought nothing of it and walked on after saying good evening. But after a hundred patrols in the village, part of Wingrove operated in accord with a delicate sense of self-preservation. As he started to walk on, Thuc, the point man, stepped out of the shadows and looked at him with a strange, puzzled expression, as if he wanted to communicate an unease he vaguely felt yet couldn’t express in the pidgin language they used. Wingrove stopped and stood looking at the ground while the rest of the patrol moved up. Then, acting on an impulse he didn’t understand himself, he doubled back and circled around Tinh’s house. So quietly did he move that he was standing next to Mr. Tinh, who was whispering to a crouching figure, before either of the men saw or heard him. Mr. Tinh never tried to run. He just looked at Wingrove, first in shock, then in resignation.
The other man let out a stifled yelp and darted away. He ran right by Thuc, who took one look at him and yelled, “VC, VC!” The man swerved off the trail into a paddy. At a distance of twenty feet, Thuc shot him dead. Wingrove collared Tinh while Thuc splashed forward and stripped a French submachine gun from the body. As Thuc waded out of the paddy, bullets snapped at him from several directions.
The patrollers flopped down and returned the fire, covering Thuc’s dash to the dark of the bushes. But still the enemy fire did not abate; instead, it swelled and Wingrove counted flashes from over twenty weapons. Then the enemy started moving toward them, slipping along the sides of the main trail, firing and bounding forward by groups of three and four.
“Get help!” Fleming yelled, his M-14 slamming out short bursts across sixty meters of paddy at a winking treeline.
On his back Wingrove was carrying a radio loaned by the reaction platoon so they could be quickly contacted back at PF Hill.
“You get it,” Wingrove replied. “Take that thing off me and call in. I don’t know how to use it.”
Fleming crawled next to Wingrove, tugged the radio from his shoulders and turned it on.
“We’re really in it out here,” he radioed. “It’s either a reinforced platoon or a company. They’re on the trail south of the market.”
The enemy was trying to outflank the patrol, creeping between the houses and yelling to each other as they came on. Behind the Marines Luong’s M-1 was cracking steadily while Thuc preferred to stay at Wingrove’s elbow and direct his shots, since he had a grenade launcher. Thuc had remarkable eyesight. He would catch a movement in the bush and excitedly point out the location to Wingrove, who would then pump in shell after shell. Within two minutes, artillery flares were opening over them. Fleming was back at work with his automatic rifle and his tracers ignited two thatched houses, further lighting the scene and preventing the Viet Cong from entering the paddy to retrieve the body.
Inside ten minutes they could hear reaction forces thundering down the trail and crashing through the bush, their shouts and skyward rifle blasts adding to the melee in a signal to both the patrol and the enemy that help was coming. The enemy firing died abruptly and Wingrove relaxed, thinking it was over.
But Thuc and Luong would have none of that, insisting they attack the enemy immediately. They swore they heard the Viet Cong yelling to one another, “Get across the river. Get across the river.” Wingrove told Luong he was out of his mind, that there might be a VC company out there. Then Suong arrived at the head of a PF squad from the fort, and right behind him came a Marine squad from PF Hill.
“You guys got here pretty quick,” Wingrove complimented the Marines grudgingly. “You must have run all the way.”
Thuc and Luong were busy talking to Suong, who merely glanced at the patrollers to make sure none of them had been injured before wheeling his ten PFs and heading for the river, leaving one PF behind to hold the hapless Tinh. Thuc urged Wingrove and Fleming to convince the other Marines to move. Wingrove feared an ambush, but he feared even more being upstaged by the PFs, so with Thuc in the lead, they were off for the river, taking a path parallel to that of Suong.
Occasional rounds snipped through the trees after them, but the snipers did not succeed in diverting the attention of the teams. Wingrove’s group reached the river bank at the spot where Sullivan’s rented coconut tree grew. The lady who owned it and with whom Sullivan had had his picture taken by O’Rourke darted out from her house as Wingrove passed by.
“VC, VC,” she said, pointing to a small hut near the tree.
Wingrove and Thuc crept up as close as they dared on either side of the door. Thuc called to the occupants to come out.
“Hang oi,” Thuc shouted. “Lai oay. Gio tay len.”
Wingrove heard the enemy inside the hut whispering, then they shouted something to Thuc. Thuc shook his head.
“No come out. Hold here,” he said to Wingrove, gesturing toward the clearing and the river beyond, making it plain that the first Marine or PF to expose himself along the bank would be shot.
There was a commotion behind them, and from the whispers Wingrove gathered that Suong’s men had joined the Marines lying in the shadows out of the line of fire. Thuc held up a grenade. Wingrove held up two. Thuc nodded. They each pitched a grenade at the door. The explosions were sharp and violent, and what was left of the hut was still hidden in a cloud of dust and dirt when they threw their second grenades. When the dust rose a bit, they cautiously advanced into the rubble, finding two mangled and well-armed bodies.
Suong moved by the hut, leading the main body, which, now combined, numbered about twenty. In front of them on the river they saw the dark outlines of several small sampans and round wicker-basket boats disappearing into the night. Farther out in the blackness pricks of light, the hooded signal lanterns of the VC guide boats, danced and bobbed like fireflies under the mad, chopping strokes of rowers pulling to put as much water as possible between them and the bank. Suong had to issue no orders. The firing began as a ragged crackling and soon swelled to a roar as, incredibly, the crews of the guide boats kept their lanterns lighted while the red tracers went flicking by. LAWs were pulled open and the rockets sent banging forth to join the thousands of bullets skimming across the waters.
“Shift that illumination,” Fleming was yelling into the radio. “Get it out on the river.”
“That’s out of range,” a voice from the artillery battery replied. “We’re firing at maximum range.”
“Nuts,” Fleming said, turning to the PF leader. “No more light, Mr. Suong, no more light.”
And Suong shouted for them all to fire and fire and fire and to hell with worrying about ammunition. The Marines with their automatic M-14s were lying in an even line as though they were on a target range, firing, changing magazines and firing as swiftly as they could. The PFs in various positions with their puny carbines were doing the same, and the noise of the weapons reverberated from the packed earth like a thousand hammers beating on a thousand frying pans. The din ended only when some Viet Cong leader managed to scream some sense at the guides and those lanterns not yet hit were puffed out.
Thuc led the way back to the main trail, where Suong paused for several seconds to look at the man Thuc had killed at the start of the fight. Across the paddy a small group of villagers were fighting the flames from the two thatched houses ignited earlier by Fleming’s tracers. They needed help to keep the flames from spreading, but most of the villagers were hiding in their bunkers, unaware of the danger to their homes. After posting a small outguard, Suong led his force to the fire, where he organized the soldiers into bucket brigades and used the paddy water that was a few feet from the houses. Soon the fire fizzled out. The families who had owned the two houses had huddled off to one side, trembling and sobbing, several of them burned or bruised. Fleming gathered them up, the Marines carrying the two smallest children, and followed Suong back the half-mile to the fort. The flares had stopped and the hamlet was dark and still as the long line of armed men moved quietly in the dirt of the trail, the loudest sounds of their passage being the fri
ghtened whimpering of the children, who had lost their homes, and the gagging cough of Mr. Tinh, who was pulled along with a rope around his neck.
At the fort, Bac Si Khoi and a Marine corpsman put salve on the wounds of the dispossessed families and set up bunks in the side room for them to sleep. In the main room, the interrogation of Mr. Tinh began. They beat the man until he could not stand, and then they beat him some more, yet he told them only what they already knew or what was obvious: that he had been a Party member since 1963; that he had told the villagers the Marines were not coming to the hamlet; that the Viet Cong were and that there would be a large public rally at the marketplace. He had been talking with Ba Bao, the assistant commander of the P31st Company and a native of Binh Yen Noi, when Wingrove walked up to him. Tinh would not say anything about the plans for the attack on the fort and he did not reveal the names of any other agents in the village.
At about three in the morning, Mr. Tinh was hanged from the flagpole in the courtyard of Fort Page.
Thanh wanted to go out immediately and pick up Tinh’s daughter, arguing that her father had wanted her to sleep with the Americans so that she could gather intelligence. Wingrove refused to believe the police chief and told him to leave the girl alone. Missy Tinh was never again to speak to Wingrove, holding him responsible for the death of her father, yet were it not for Wingrove, Thanh would have killed her that night. The PFs agreed with Thanh: Missy Tinh had to know who her father was and had been aiding him. But after that night they left her alone, because they feared what Wingrove would do if they did not.