by Bing West
Before returning the next day, we made a trip to My Lai, four miles to the east, where American soldiers had massacred over one hundred villagers. A place of careful gardens, pitiful statues, and gruesome pictures, the memorial grounds felt like a cemetery. Throughout Vietnam there were instances of Americans killing in the hamlets, driven by anger or fear, terrified and ignorant, believing every villager was a Viet Cong.
“That didn’t happen in Binh Nghia,” Charlie said. “The Marines couldn’t destroy their own village. What would they say? Sorry, we forgot we live here?”
After leaving My Lai, we had lunch in Binh Nghia with a landowner dispossessed in 1975 of thirty of his thirty-one hectares. His father had been the village chief, assassinated in 1962. Dozens of his extended family clustered around as we sat down to rice, green sprouts, pork, tea, and bootleg rice wine, all grown on his half acre. The family lived in four bare rooms with a dirt floor; a fluorescent bulb—the single change since 1966—dangled from a tattered electric wire we carefully avoided.
He had done two years’ “service” after 1975. His friend the police chief had been “sent away” for seven years. Now they were back in the village and we noticed the school-children crossed their arms quickly as they walked by him, a sign of respect for an elder with stature. When he said that he hoped to run for village chief, his wife shook her head, suggesting she had heard that dream before.
After lunch, he walked ahead of us down the village trails, joking that the Americans had taken him prisoner. One villager laughed and shouted in English that “Victor Charlie’s (Marine radio slang for Viet Cong) in charge here now. Where you go?”
“I’m taking them to Quat’s and Suong’s,” he replied, referring to the Communist Party chief and to the widow of the man who fought so fiercely against the Party. That sentence summed up the complex skein of village politics. Marines used to say, “If the VC were on our side, we’d wrap this war up in a week.” Yet the same basic, tough soldier was on both sides. Communism wasn’t a better way of life or a better ideology. Rather, in Vietnam it proved to be a better military system, more capable of insisting upon sacrifice without end.
The Party chief, like everyone else, lived in a small house; the old term was “hootch.” Handsome, with a trim mustache, he had been ten when the Marines were at the fort. At first he was formal, using the salutation “ngai” (exellency), meant to establish distance. Gradually, he warmed up, switching to “anh” (older brother), and explaining the village had grown from 6,000 when we were there to 12,000. Fishing had somewhat expanded, but the land hadn’t. Every child went to school, but after that, what? No one had a solution. The village was on its own. The central government had no money to send. Prospects for employment outside the village were grim.
His family listened in the background. Soon the women tired of politics and infrastructure development.
“You know Ppbill?” asked the older sister. She was the older woman in the orange-print pajamas who had flirted with us near the market.
“Phil,” corrected the Party chief. “Pph.”
His sister tried to say Phil and made a face. After all, which of them had really known Phil? Corporal Phillip Brannon had died in the village in 1966. Her brother had been ten, playing soccer behind the fort; she had been eighteen. It wasn’t much of a mystery which one had talked to Bill/Phil.
The Party chief nodded at several other names and left for a meeting. We stopped by Mrs. Suong’s home, which showed obvious signs of disrepair. She was sitting in the courtyard peeling strips of bark which are pounded into a paste to add color and preservative to the cement exterior of the huts, or hootches. We said we admired her husband and offered a solatium, modest by our standards but perhaps a bit large in the village. It seemed to overwhelm her, and as we walked off, she stood smiling while a dozen crones gathered around her, jabbering away.
At the fort, there had been a small cement marker with a bronze plaque in remembrance of the Marines. In 1975, when the guerrillas came down from the mountains, they hauled the marker a few hundred meters away to the courtyard of a militia soldier. Why they didn’t dump it in a paddy or break it into pieces was not explained. The plaque was beaten into a trowel. The villagers wanted to give it to us, but its owner had thrown it away years ago.
A stone’s throw north of the marker was the village shrine, a simple cement room, dyed yellow, with four pillars and an open front facing the paddies. Inside, surrounded by joss sticks, was a bright wooden altar honoring the spirits of the village. Once a year, the villagers gather to pray for good crops and no floods. Behind the building is a cement well bearing a Vietnamese inscription to the Marines who built the well and the shrine in 1967.
A crowd led us to the marker, which was resting between two palm trees, overlooking an expanse of rice paddy as green as the world’s finest golf course. It was a fitting spot for Sergeant Sullivan, Corporal Brannon, and all the others who fell there. We looked out over the paddies as farmers half a world away from the United States talked about Americans dead thirty-five years.
A few miles distant, there is the memorial to the Vietnamese dead at My Lai. These two memorials symbolize the contradictory faces of America in that tragic war, the one fearful in polished marble, the other resolute in rough cement.
W. H. Auden once wrote, “Teach the free man to praise.” For that freedom, America has generously praised the generation of World War II. But of their Vietnam progeny, of those who returned to jeers rather than parades, the press has projected the face filled with fear, unworthy of praise. It is left to others in unlikely places to trace callused hands over rough cement and to remember the faces which were stalwart.
The village remembers.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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THE PEPPERDOGS
BING WEST
Now available in hardcover
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The Pepperdogs….
If one falls down, the others will lift him up.
—Ecclesiastes 4:10
I
MITROVICA VALLEY, KOSOVO-SERB BORDER
SUNDAY, 21 DECEMBER 11 A.M.
To the half-drunken Serb soldiers in the tan Toyota pickup, the farm looked inviting. Its orange slate roof, untouched by mortar blasts, glistened in the thin sunlight. No shells had burst against its whitewashed walls and most windowpanes were intact, the few broken ones sealed neatly with white tape. A stocky woman in a blue mantilla was draping bright quilts over a rope strung to a nearby tree, taking advantage of the fickle winter sun to air out some bedding. The rich farm was war’s joke, like a tornado that spares a single mobile home.
Holding their rifles carelessly, four soldiers hopped from the pickup, laughing back and forth like teenagers going to a party. Their leader had a full black beard and wore a shaggy black-bear coat with torn, floppy sleeves. His girth was so wide it looked like the bear was still inside. He didn’t try the handle on the front door. Instead, he raised back his foot and kicked, splintering the frame. Unhurried, he plodded up the stairs, trailed by his men.
The woman had scurried inside when the pickup veered off the main road, but she found no place to hide. When they had finished with her, she lurched out the kitchen door, stumbling through the mud toward the privy, a stone’s throw to the southeast, where the wind seldom blew the stench toward the house. Her skull had fractured at its base when they slammed her on the boards and threw her skirt over her head. The blood streaming from her nostrils was vivid red and darker rivulets seeped from her ears. She walked dizzily, lurching while everything whirled around and around her. Then she vomited and crumbled gracefully, settling down, folding her parts within herself.
The soldiers paid no heed to the dying woman. They had wiped themselves, passing around a grayish towel, stiff as cardboard. Now they were wrestling onto the back of the pickup a Blutner piano, with two broken ivories and several snapped strings. The woman knew sev
eral melodies which avoided the broken keys, including a little Liszt, but the men hadn’t asked her to play.
Sergeant Saco Iliac, head bodyguard to the commanding general of the Tigriva Division, picked up one end of the piano, smirking as his men struggled with the other end. He was thinking how he would arrive before the general’s luncheon. The general would set the piano in the middle of the great room and pound Saco on the back of his thick fur coat.
Sometimes Saco lumbered like a bear to remind his men how he had won the coat. After they took Srebenica, they disposed of most of the hadjuks the first night and blood caked their uniforms. No longer stupified by drink, their heads splitting, the soldiers were anxious to get back home and wash up. Gathered in the barn, there were fewer than a hundred to go, but no one wanted to go back inside.
That was when the adjutant thought of the contest. Three officers held watches and five finalists entered the barn where the last Muslims milled around like cattle. A Croat, who had been a wrestler before the war, did two more males than Saco. But so what? The small ones Saco went after wriggled like eels. His trick was to grab the ankles and swing their heads against the roof poles. Whack! and it was done. One girl bit his thumb, costing him several seconds. Still, he won the coat in an honest contest. The Croat did fifteen, while he, Saco, snapped eighteen necks to win the coat.
Saco sat next to the driver in the Toyota. The legs of the piano hung over the sides of the pickup and the soldiers sat at odd angles, their rifles swinging wildly as the truck bounced down the hill toward the paved road at the far end of the pasture. The tarp thrown over the piano flapped and billowed, as though waving at the American Cobra gunships buzzing over the main road.
The Toyota was the muscle kind advertised in glossy car magazines, with high axles and four rear wheels, ideal for heavy farm work or driving around a small town with the radio blasting. The left front tire soon caught in a pothole. They were five minutes in front of the general’s convoy; it wouldn’t do to arrive late at the Castle. Four sets of shoulders set to rocking the overloaded pickup back and forth to push it loose.
Captain Tyler Cosgrove, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve—very reserved, he would laugh—handled the motorcycle with easy skill. It was his turn to be scout and Sergeant Neff and the two corporals a quarter mile behind in the humvee would have to wait their turn. This was the first morning in a week without rain or sleet but—Hey! I didn’t make out the duty roster. Cosgrove had that medium build and sharply handsome, slightly vulnerable, face seen in advertisements for Prada and other upscale stores. Upbeat by nature, his spirits lifted to be on a fast bike on a Sunday morning. He tried not to think of his mother in the hospital. He would see her soon enough, his tour eight hours from ending. He would be at the airport by five. He swung the bike in short half-loops, enjoying the pull of gravity as his body leaned first one way and then the other. One final hour of playing Marine before coming to grips with his mother’s mortality.
He had studied the overhead photos, the radio intercepts, the reports from locals. The route was secure. This close to Christmas, Cosgrove considered Fifth Avenue more dangerous. Wall Street commandos, flush with bonus money and guilt about missing their kids’ soccer matches, would trample you on their way to FAO Schwarz. Here in Kosovo, NATO soldiers had pulled guard duty year after year. Nothing ever happened. That’s why reserve units like Cosgrove’s were sent over for three-month stints. The shooting war was in Afghanistan. Nobody worried about the reserves in the Balkans, an afterthought among the Pentagon planners.
So what if the confab with the Serb general was overprotected? For Cosgrove, riding a motorcycle was better than sitting around waiting for the evening flight to the States. This was the last U.S. sweep and he was nearing his turnaround point, with the Serb convoy only a few miles to the north.
He glanced casually at the farm to his left…smoke from a farm…that Toyota?
“Arrow Five, this is Six,” he spoke into his head mike. “I have eyes on one pickup with a piano in back. It’s Tesch on tour, the cows twitching their tails to the beat.”
“Six, this is Five. Can you get us tickets?”
“SRO. First pasture around the bend. I’ll save you a space near the stage.”
“Roger. Three mikes behind you.”
The bike was fast. One moment, an open road. And now the bike was coming right at the Serbs in the truck. They barely had time to grab their weapons before the American stopped in front of them. He pushed his goggles back and spoke, like a fighter pilot, into the voice mike projecting from his helmet.
“Arrow, this is definitely weird,” Cosgrove said.
“Hey!” Saco smiled. “Is nothing. We help move.”
Cosgrove was sitting back, his hands on the bike’s crossbars, the 9mm pistol secured in his shoulder holster. Saco moved closer, eyes on the pistol. Cosgrove looked past him at the house, his gaze wandering until it came to rest on the crumbled woman. He stiffened abruptly and reached for the pistol.
Saco didn’t think. He rushed forward, knocking Cosgrove from the bike. He hit him once, then again, in the neck, on the side of the helmet, on the cheek. The great blows stunned Cosgrove and he offered no resistance. Saco lifted the Marine’s head, helmet and all, and slammed him against the ground. Cosgrove saw dazzling light, then black.
“Quick!” yelled Saco. “Throw him in back. And the bike. Move!”
The Marine hummer had started into the turn and taken the first path, twisting and bouncing toward the farm two pastures above. It took several minutes to reach the front step, where a farmer and his wife and a few children greeted them curiously. It was a few more minutes before Sergeant Neff realized he had turned off at the wrong farm. With slightly growing anxiety, he turned the vehicle around, bounced and lurched back to the highway and looked for the next cutoff. He soon found it and once again bobbed across rocks worn smooth by decades of wagon wheels.
When the hummer came around the curved face of the next tilled field, Neff saw the piano tilted forward in the rutted track, kneeling in cow dung as though awaiting execution, its keyboard legs broken and splintered. Another two minutes passed before the frustrated sergeant could bring himself to report that Captain Cosgrove was missing—plain missing, nowhere to be seen, no bike either, and farther upslope there was a dead woman and a farm on fire.
By then Saco’s pickup was two kilometers south down the main road, with the Serb convoy coming into sight behind it.
MITROVICA VALLEY, KOSOVO
NOON, SUNDAY
Serbian Lieutenant General Ilian Kostica gave no particular heed to the tan Toyota pickup as it recklessly cut in front of his lead escort vehicle. That was Saco showing off. Childish. The general’s mind was on the meeting ahead, determined to impress the American, who also played childish games, such as arriving early for negotiations. Only today, Mr. Ambassador, Kostica thought, I am the early one.
The small castle was the town’s strong sentinel, blocking entrance to the valley from the north. For centuries, it had shielded the farmers from whatever raiding bands made their way south along the only road, which twisted for dozens of kilometers among the hillocks, narrow ravines, and steep slopes of the mountain ranges on either side. Built in the seventeenth century, the castle was part fortress, part manor. Typical of the old Middle Europe style, it closely abutted the road, its massive stone facade indifferent to the occasional sideswipes of the tractors of drunken farmers.
Tanks were another matter. When Kostica’s armor—Soviet junk from World War II shoddily reconditioned in the factory which manufactured the tinny Yugo auto—first clattered toward the town, the castle looked like a massive bunker, its minarets and cut-glass windows only softening the thickness of stone walls which had withstood sieges a half-dozen times in the previous six hundred years. Kostica considered smashing it. Why take a chance?
The trembling proprietor persuaded him otherwise, running into the road in his hostler clothes, aware the tanks were taking aim, shaking but determined,
offering the general an aperitif, a petit déjeuner for his staff. The meal was excellent and Kostica had returned often. A good location for negotiations, too, right in the middle of the neutral zone between Kosovo and Serbia.
When Kostica pulled up, the security details of the two sides had already dismounted, the Americans robotlike in their oversize armored vests and helmets. He had told his guards to wear three sweaters under their jackets and not to shave for four days, so they, too, looked bulky and menacing. Saco had parked the Toyota around a corner. The other bodyguards grinned and nodded to him, and stepped aside to let him approach the general.
“I had a piano for you,” he said, “only an American came along, so I took him instead.”
It had to be a stupid joke. The general heard the words and his body reacted before his brain. For a moment, he thought he was suffering a stroke. His heart stopped for a beat. He could feel his blood pressure drop to his toes, as if falling suddenly in an elevator. For a few seconds he said nothing, aware of those around him.
Images were clear in his mind—a cannibal offering to share his meal, a dog mouthing a putrid fox and expecting to be patted. And this—this dancing bear shitting in the village square and expecting a pail of berries. General Kostica waited a moment, half-convinced Saco would raise his paws in the air and pant with his tongue hanging out, waiting to be scratched on his swollen stomach.
“Where is this American?”
“Right here.” Saco grinned. “In the back of the Toyota. He’s out. I hit him good.”