by Bing West
Around noon the parents came to take their dead baby home. The Marines asked if there was anything they could do. The mother said it would be a great help if she had ten dollars and a small wood box. Ten dollars and a small wood box.
That afternoon there was a large funeral for Xu Bui, and Father Cappadola, the regimental chaplain, who was to die saving a Marine up at the DMZ, drove down and spoke to the Buddhist monks. Together the priest and the monks offered a quiet prayer at the fort for the powerful hamlet chief and the little baby girl.
16
In early November, White had to relieve one of the few surviving original members of the combined unit. It was Riley, whose nerves were rubbed raw and who constantly volunteered for patrol, only to fire at the slightest wrong sound. In one week he triggered four ambushes by false alarm. Finally White told him he was finished.
“I’m sorry, Riley,” White said, “but I have to send you back to the battalion. You’re a good man, but you’re too jumpy.”
“Bull,” Riley replied. “I volunteer all the time, right? I have the best eyes of anybody. Lieutenant O’Rourke knew that. I was his point a lot of times.”
“That’s the trouble, Riley, you’re seeing ghosts. You’re trying too hard to avoid a repeat of Page or Sullivan. You’re shooting at thin air, man, and you’re screwing people up. Go back to company. When you unwind a little and take the edge off those memories, then you can come back down.”
The unit also never regained Theilepape. When he recovered from his wounds, he rejoined Charlie Company and talked quite a bit about going back to the combined unit. He was all right when he was awake and keen on patrols, but he couldn’t sleep. He would wake up screaming and reaching for his rifle, and White was convinced that the man would be an insomniac if sent to the fort. Under those circumstances, the battalion doctor refused to allow Theilepape’s transfer back to the combined unit.
About the time Riley left the fort, back came the Revolutionary Development troops, two teams of sixty men each. The assassinations had lowered the pacification ratings of Binh Nghia’s hamlets and the RDs were to rectify that slippage. According to the script written for them in Saigon, the RDs, as grass-roots representatives of the Saigon government, were to convince the villagers as a massive and homogeneous whole to fight against the Viet Cong. The RDs were supposed to demonstrate their sincerity and their promise of a better economic life by working with the people in the fields and on the river. The Marines never saw an RD bending his back in a paddy, while the teenaged RDs themselves laughed when the old farmers sarcastically asked their advice on planting. Only one RD worked steadily. A man with extraordinarily nimble fingers, he moved about the hamlets showing the women new knots for weaving and repairing fishnets.
Since the youths of the village found them pleasant fellows, the RDs had no trouble recruiting a hundred young men for a People’s Self-Defense Force (PSDF). Three afternoons a week for a month the RDs drilled their recruits, giving them bamboo sticks for rifles and showing them how to walk in step and how to sing the RD marching songs. In late November there were graduation exercises, attended by officials from province headquarters. For the big parade, each new defender had a clean carbine. But just for the parade. The next day the RDs collected the carbines again and the PSDF went back to their sticks.
The RDs were lucky the Viet Cong did not choose to test them, with the weather contributing to that luck. November had ushered in the monsoon season, with the river spilling over into the paddies at each high tide. This made patrolling easier, because it limited the mobility of intruders. So the Marines moved farther afield and, because it was different, they took to patrolling in sampans which they paddled everywhere—across swollen paddies, up tiny streamlets, in and out of the mangroves, even across the river to the edge of the Phu Longs. The PFs refused to step foot in the boats, calling the Marines fools for inviting ambush and saying they were lucky the Viet Cong were sensible and disliked moving in the cold rain. White finally was forced to abandon the boat patrols when Suong threatened to tell Major Braun, the district adviser, and the Marines returned to slogging through the paddies at three in the morning with their teeth chattering, mumbling to each other about the bone-chilling winter nights.
Following the disruption of the assassination squad and the onslaught of bad weather, clashes with the Viet Cong dropped to less than one a week. In the first two weeks of December there was only one significant contact. That occurred when a patrol engaged an enemy squad in a running firefight in Binh Yen Noi at two in the morning. Having captured one Viet Cong, the Marines bound his arms behind his back, shoved a gag into his mouth, put him in front of the point man and continued after the others. When the enemy fired a few rounds to discourage pursuit, the prisoner bolted loose and plunged into the man-grove swamp. He ran through the heavy swamp grass and, unable to evade his pursuers, finally dove headfirst into the deep waters of the river, never resurfacing. To the Americans, the incident indicated that the enemy was as tough as ever; he was just less willing to engage than had previously been the case.
With combat at a low ebb, the RDs felt it was safe to hold a five-day fair, stressing the themes of village unity and solidarity against the Communists. The last public political gathering had been held by the Viet Cong in1964. The first day was to be a twenty-four-hour session, followed by four days at a less hectic pace. All teenagers were forced to participate; such mandatory attendance absolved the participants from later retribution by the Viet Cong.
The fair began at noon on Christmas Day and the people came in droves, using the RD coercion as an excuse to gather and gossip, to gamble and to be entertained. The day was dismal, with a steady drizzle and a sharp wind which left a man shivering and longing for a stiff drink. So the village officials, the RDs, the PFs, the farmers and the fishermen drifted from the marketplace in little groups to various homes to drink beer and rice wine and cheap liquor. The women who stayed in the market claimed the large tents which had been set up for the youth groups and settled down to gossip. Dispossessed and not caring to sit in tents anyway, the youths drifted around in tight knots of boys or girls, the boys strutting, the girls giggling, all freshly scrubbed and dressed in clean, pressed clothes, enjoying each other and their holiday from work.
Not on duty until sundown, the Marines had scattered throughout the village. Garcia and Corporal Paul Swinford had holed up with the village officials, telling each other that they were there to improve their Vietnamese, refusing the rice wine but drinking beer, eventually slurring their words so badly one wasn’t sure when the other was speaking English or Vietnamese. Convinced that Wingrove’s charm was his guitar, his friend Corporal Larry Melton had bought one also and they spent the afternoon with PF Thinh Muy and Corporal Robert Clements practicing quartet numbers. Along with some other Marines, White had been invited by one of the village’s few Catholic families to a Christmas lunch. The leisurely and filling meal took two hours, and White was sure that by himself he had eaten one whole roast duck, a salad bowlful of steamed rice, three small ocean perch and a head of lettuce.
At the end of the day the villagers began to drift toward the torchlit warmth of the marketplace. The RD leader had planned on an attendance figure of one thousand from a total population of five thousand. By full dark there were four thousand people, lured by the promise of songs and skits, jammed into the marketplace. The bedlam of the crowd drowned out the opening speech of the RD leader, who was standing on the wooden stage. Thanh, in visible contempt of the RD leader’s futile efforts, stepped out from the shadows.
“Dung noi,” he said in a flat voice, walking through the thick of the crowd with the people pressing back to get out of his way, even the children choking off their giggles. “Ngoi xuong. Dung noi.”
The people quietly sat down on the benches or wrapped ponchos around themselves and sat on the ground. With a casual wave of his hand, Thanh gestured to the RDs that the show was theirs and turned aside. Immediately the villagers broke
out chatting and laughing and the RD leader couldn’t be heard. Again Thanh stepped forward. Silence. He turned away. Bedlam. He stepped forward. Silence. He turned away. Bedlam.
Even Thanh had to laugh. The RD leader gave up trying to speak and signaled to his assembled troops, who broke out singing the RD marching song. The people liked the tune and quieted down to listen, and the RDs swung through a few more martial numbers, encouraging the people to join in. The PFs watched silently until the RDs sang a refrain which went:
How splendid is our country!
Brave people, let’s go forward for the sake of Happiness, Liberty, Justice and Charity.
Brave men, a happy future is before you—
As cadres, you must motivate everyone to back up the Government.
Such sentimental self-esteem was too much for Luong, who was more than a little drunk, so he shouted: “That’s buffalo shit!” The audience howled, while the RDs gamely kept trying to sing and other PFs joined in with catcalls and Suong started yelling at them to shut up, fearing a brawl. The villagers thought it was great fun. The RD leader waved to Wingrove, who bounced onto the stage with his guitar-carrying quartet, and the PFs and RDs forgot their differences with a common target to hoot and hiss. The quartet disappointed no one. Their efforts at both Vietnamese and American songs failed so badly that they made excellent parodies. Their appreciative audience kept them on stage for an hour, calling them back for encore after encore.
They were followed by a series of skits, each of which had a political message but which were well received because the village actors had laced them with ribald humor. There was a story about a cuckolded Viet Cong guerrilla hero who was given frequent medals and overnight assignments from the village committee chairman who was bedding his wife. There was a mock speech by a VC leader explaining that the Americans had come to Vietnam for capitalistic expansion. As all could now see, it was obvious the Americans needed rice and wanted to steal their water buffalo. From the way the villagers laughed and clapped, it appeared that a VC political officer had seriously made such a speech to them before the Marines’ arrival. The actor concluded on an unexpected note. Pointing toward the bench where the Americans sat, several balancing two or three youngsters on their knees, he asked them to stand up and for Sergeant White to say a few words. The Marines tried to duck and White didn’t know what to say but the villagers gave them no choice. They clapped and shouted at them until White walked on the stage.
“Thank you,” he said. “I am glad you are happy here tonight. I and my men are glad. Thank you.”
At midnight the fair was still packed and the outguard patrols of the PFs and Marines had reported all was quiet. White was changing the guard.
“Bevan,” he said to one of his senior corporals, “take a patrol up to the My Hués. Take a couple of RDs with you.”
It was flood tide and near the market a section of the trail was under water. Bevan collected four men, and before he left, he turned to White.
“Hell, we’re going to get wet anyways,” he said, “so we might as well wade straight through the paddies.”
White stood at the edge of the crowd to watch the patrol leave. Barely were all five in the paddy when the sergeant heard a soft splat in the water, as if someone had thrown a large rock. White flinched. The patrollers momentarily froze. Then they waded a few feet farther before they heard a tiny, dull thunk from across the river. All knelt down, none willing to dive completely under water, and ducked their heads to their chests. White stood on the edge of the oblivious, laughing crowd and thought of yelling “Mortar!” He knew he had a good ten seconds, but what was the use of a panic and of people standing up, offering more of their bodies to the shrapnel? So he kept his mouth closed and willed himself not to crouch down. He stood waiting for the explosion, growing old and thinking of Christmas in the snow. Then there was another splat and White breathed again and the patrol splashed back to him.
“Two duds in the water,” Bevan said. “What are we going to do if they drop one into the crowd?”
“A whole lot of people are going to die,” White replied. “But they’re firing blind. They don’t know whether they’re short or over. Give me the phone.”
“Charlie Six, this is Fat Boy Six Actual. We are getting mortared at the market from somewhere across the river. We got thousands of people here. Get them off us or it’s going to be a slaughter. Over.”
White listened for a moment, then said to the crowd of Marines, PFs and RDs which had gathered: “Illumination’s on its way. They’re going to get some choppers up.”
Even as he was speaking there came a subdued crumping sound from farther out in the paddy as a mortar shell struck and went off under water. Those on the edge of the crowd clearly heard the muffled explosion and turned in that direction. Seeing the Marines milling about between them and the sound, they lost interest and turned back to the RDs singing on stage.
“They’ve traversed wrong,” White said. “That was farther away than the duds.”
Before anyone could reply an illumination flare burst overhead, followed within seconds by another and another and another. The crowd stirred uneasily. For the next few minutes in an unbroken chain, the flares kept popping, with as many as eight burning at the same time. The villagers had become plainly frightened, knowing something was awry, while the children accepted the flares as part of the show and jabbered excitedly. Then came a loud roar and two helicopters passed over the marketplace at treetop level and swooped down on the mangrove swamp across the river.
“The U.S. cavalry,” Garcia cracked.
“Well, I’ll give those zoomies their due,” White said. “They got here in one hell of a hurry. No mortar crew is going to be firing from across there again tonight.”
The villagers also knew that whatever the crisis had been, it had passed with the arrival of the helicopters. Gradually, they drifted away from the fair, until only the teenagers were left, giggling and laughing in their large tents. Several Marines and PFs stayed with the RDs to protect them, while the others walked back to the fort. Suong was unusually talkative at four in the morning as he and White checked the sentries at the market one last time before plodding back in. He said the story that the Viet Cong had tried to kill the villagers would be known in every hamlet the next day. That they had tried and failed was the worst possible combination for them. The villagers had been given the most powerful reason not to like them while not being made to fear them more. Suong believed the mortar attempt was a stupid, desperate act.
Faircloth was on the front post when the two leaders walked into the fort.
“You’re going to have to sack out on sandbags, Sarge,” Faircloth called out. “All the cots are taken.”
“Why? We have six guys still out on patrol.”
“Yeh, but all the village honchos are here. They’ve been straggling in by ones and twos for the last two hours. You’re too late.”
It had been over three months since the village officials had dared to sleep in the fort.
“I felt good about that,” White said later. “It had taken us a long time to work back and we had lost Lummis along the way. But we kept hanging in there and finally the village officials had enough trust in what we and the PFs could do to stay overnight. I had to move in some extra cots, but it was worth it. It was sort of like a Christmas present and a good-bye present all wrapped up as one.”
White was due for relief in December, but he did not want to leave until the unit had a new leader. He had chosen nobody from within it. The men had lived together too long to accept the sudden elevation of one of their own to the position of final authority. They could all fight well; what was needed was someone who could think in a crisis without giving way to gang consensus. White had discussed the situation at length with Charlie Company’s new commander, Captain Dave Walker, a veteran leader with a scar across his neck from a 30-caliber bullet.
Walker said he was watching a twenty-year-old sergeant named McGowan. In Nove
mber he had sent the sergeant to the besieged Special Forces camp at Ba To to take over a squad. The sergeant had fought in the hills for a month. He had made dozens of patrols and lost nobody from his squad. Unlike many other NCOs, he had not sold the weapons his squad captured to the Vietnamese for personal profit, despite pressure from some salty squad members.
White went back to the fort and discussed the candidate with his men. Two of the Marines, Swinford and Corporal Ed Gallagher, had served with McGowan a year earlier on board a Navy cruiser. Gallagher, a new replacement at the fort, liked him. Swinford, a rugged youth who had been in the combined unit for several months, did not. Before they were corporals, McGowan had became a sergeant. Both agreed he deserved his promotions but differed on whether he was right for the unit.
“He won’t screw you,” Gallagher said. “He’s a tough bastard. He’d throw hands with you, but he wouldn’t go running to the CO.”
“Man, he just got over here,” Swinford objected. “They were fighting by regiments at Ba To. What good is that going to do him here? He’s green. We don’t need a green man in charge.”
A tall, husky, black-headed Irishman, Vincent McGowan had fought in the Golden Gloves and tended bar in his father’s tavern in New York City. Calm under pressure and confidently self-reliant, he had an easy smile and an outgoing manner. Since Christmas, Captain Walker had been sending him out on patrols to gain familiarity with the terrain and the style of small-unit fighting in Binh Son district. Knowing he was competing for command of a unit with a large reputation, McGowan had been trying unsuccessfully for a solid night contact to impress Walker. On the night of January 7 he took an eight-man patrol out from the company perimeter and across the dunes, in order to set up an ambush well to the north of Binh Nghia. The route was new to him and the patrol was being guided by a corporal scout who had been with Charlie Company several months. After a three-hour trek, McGowan was convinced that the scout was lost and that the patrol was moving in a wide circle. But then the scout insisted that they had arrived at the right ambush site, so they burrowed in along the crest of a scrub-covered dune, with eight automatic rifles pointing down on a path twenty feet below.