White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  It was common knowledge that there were at least two North Vietnamese Army regiments operating from just across the Cambodian border. The nearest province to them was Kien Phong, and in only one night’s travelling the Cong, supplied from Cambodia with medicines and money and ammunition, could be deep in the province. From there, smaller units spread the supplies via boat and the labyrinthine canal network into the provinces of An Giang and Sa Dec, and as far south as their own province.

  ‘Very big,’ the village chief confirmed. ‘The supplies are going to be brought in, not by the local Cong, but by the NVA themselves.’

  Lewis groaned. He was feeling like death; all he wanted to do was to crawl into his bunk and pull a blanket over his head, and the chief was telling him that they were on the verge of a massive confrontation with North Vietnamese troops. ‘When?’ he croaked, aware that both Lieutenant Grainger and Hoan were looking across at him anxiously, knowing that there was something wrong with him.

  ‘Four nights. Maybe five nights. My informant will come back to me and will tell me their route and checkpoints.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lewis rose to his feet, staggering as he did so. ‘Let’s go and inspect the militia.’

  ‘Do you think you should?’ Grainger said to him urgently, sotto voce. ‘You’re burning up. We should get you the hell back to camp.’

  ‘Fifteen more minutes isn’t going to make any damn difference, and if we’re about to face the NVA, it would be nice to know that Tay Phong’s militia is prepared.’

  With Hoan at his side, Lewis inspected: the troops, warning the platoon commander to be in a state of readiness over the next few days, and then, barely able to see for the raging pain in his head, and barely able to walk because of cramps in his legs and his feet, he struggled back to Tay Phong’s crumbling jetty.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Dai uy, what the hell are you coming down with?’ Grainger demanded, terrified that he was going to have to call in a chopper to whisk Lewis to the nearest field hospital, and that in Lewis’s absence the responsibility for organizing the ambush of the NVA units was going to fall on to his shoulders.

  Lewis didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was dimly aware that they had boarded a water taxi, and that it was mercifully free of the live farm produce that had accompanied them on their earlier journey. He was pretty certain he hadn’t been poisoned. He knew damn well that he hadn’t been in contact with any punji sticks, or any other poisoned booby trap that the Viet Cong were so adept at laying.

  He tried to think what he had eaten in the last twenty-four hours, but his brain wouldn’t function. Rats? Had he eaten any rat lately? Rat meat was a local staple and one that Sergeant Drayton often used in order to supplement their C rations. Chopped and cooked Chinese style with beans and flavoured with the nuoc mam sauce that accompanied every Vietnamese dish, it was surprisingly palatable. But Drayton hadn’t served any for over a week, Lewis was sure of it.

  By the time the water taxi bumped gently against the canal side in Van Binh, he was leaning over the side of the boat, retching his heart out.

  Very slowly, taking all of Lewis’s weight on himself, Lieutenant Grainger began to half carry and half drag him back towards the team house.

  Lewis knew that he was throwing up, and he knew that someone was holding a bucket for him, was murmuring words of comfort, but he didn’t know who it was. As the unknown person removed the bucket and handed him a cloth to wipe his mouth with, and then a cup of water, he thought perhaps that it was his mother. His mother had always been gentle and understanding when, as a child, he had been ill.

  He rolled back into his bunk, aware that someone was tucking a blanket in around him. He felt a fall of silken hair touch his face, and despite his abject misery, he tried to smile. Abbra. It was Abbra, of course.

  ‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ he mumbled gratefully, squeezing her hand before sliding once more into unconsciousness.

  She didn’t leave him, and in his brief moments of lucidity he knew that he was there, sponging his face and his chest, holding a cup of water to his mouth, re-covering him with the blankets he feverishly tossed aside.

  ‘Love you,’ he said as lights and colours whirled about him. ‘You’re a wonderful girl, sweetheart. The very best.’

  It was morning when the fever broke. He lay, looking up at the base of the bunk above him, trying to work out where the hell he was. Turning his head slightly, he could see the wooden-floored, sparsely furnished room and a girl who was not Abbra sitting cross-legged on a mat, sewing up a tear in a pair of tiger-stripe fatigues. Vietnam. He was in Vietnam and Abbra was over eight thousand miles away.

  ‘Welcome back to the world of the living, Dai uy,’ Lieutenant Grainger said with a grin, handing him a cup of coffee. ‘You had me pretty worried for a while.’

  ‘Not half as worried as I was,’ Lewis said dryly, easing himself up and resting his weight on one elbow as he sipped gratefully at the coffee. ‘How much time did I lose?’

  ‘Eighteen hours. The fever broke at about three in the morning. Since then you’ve been sleeping like a baby.’

  From the far side of the team house Tam was watching him as she sewed. There was a strange expression in her eyes, a look almost of apprehension. He dimly remembered the gentle touch of feminine hands sponging his face and chest, holding cups of water to his mouth, even, dear God, holding a bucket for him as he vomited. He looked across at her, feeling grateful and more than a little embarrassed. He couldn’t say anything to her in front of Grainger, not the things that he wanted to say, but as their eyes held he gave her an affectionate and appreciative smile.

  The effect was amazing. Her apprehension vanished, replaced by an expression of overwhelming relief – and shy familiarity.

  Later, after she had left the team house and he had dressed, he had walked across the compound to where she was laying freshly laundered fatigues out in the sun to dry.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to play nurse,’ he said, acutely aware of the soft curve of her breasts and the slender line of her hips beneath her cheap cotton ao dai.

  She paused in her task, looking laughingly across at him, the familiarity in her eyes no longer so shy. ‘I did not mind, Dai uy,’ she said, her voice full of naughty mischief. ‘You were not half so fearsome when you were helpless!’

  It was no way for a cleaning girl to talk to a co van and a dai uy, but he did not reprimand her. As far as he was concerned, she had earned the right to speak to him as a friend, and he was enjoying their easygoing camaraderie.

  In the days that followed, the lighthearted teasing of their new friendship did not take place when Grainger or Drayton or Duxbery or Pennington were within earshot. On those occasions she spoke to him with cool respect, and then only when necessary. But at other times, when he was teaching her English, or when Lieutenant Grainger was out on patrol with Sergeant Drayton and Sergeant Pennington, and Lewis was engaged with administrative work, then she would ask him about America, laughing with delighted incredulity at whatever he told her, and in more serious moments he would talk to her about her own country, educating her about the true nature of the Viet Cong, and what would happen in the South if they and their North Vietnamese masters were successful in their ambitions.

  Tarn had at first doubted, but gradually her disbelief had begun to fade. After all, if the dai uy said these things were true, then they must be true. The dai uy was clever, far cleverer than her sister and her brother-in-law.

  By the time Lewis and his team and the local militia, supplemented by the militia of other villages in the area and by a Special Forces squad, left camp to intercept the NVA supply team, Tam had given Lewis her complete trust and loyalty.

  It was dusk when the men filed out of the compound, making their way down to the canal and the waiting patrol boats that had been requisitioned from the navy especially for the night’s operation. She watched them board the boats, and then walked back into the team house, making sure the mosquito netting was down around Lewis’s bun
k, that his second pair of boots were clean and mud-free, that there was clean clothing for him to change into when he returned. As she lifted the jacket of his green jungle fatigues, a photograph fell out of an unbuttoned breast pocket.

  She picked it up and looked at it. It wasn’t the first time she had seen it. It was a photograph that the dai uy almost always carried with him, but though she had caught glimpses of it previously, she had never before been able to study it at length. She knew who it was of, of course. The dai uy’s wife.

  She looked down at the photograph jealously. She had thought that all American women were fair-haired, but the girl in the photograph had hair as glossily black as her own. And the dai uy had married her. He must have thought her very beautiful, which meant that he liked long black hair, and her own hair was far longer than the American girl’s, and even more night-black. She slipped the photograph back into the dai uy’s pocket feeling immensely cheered. At least she knew now that she was physically attractive to him. And over the last few days, that had become very, very important to her.

  Lewis boarded the head patrol boat, grateful for the special equipment. A possible confrontation with North Vietnamese Army forces was a very different ball game from a skirmish with the local Viet Cong, and the local Viet Gong were bad enough. He ordered one of the Vietnamese to squat in the bow and to keep a sharp lookout over the tall reeds that choked the canal banks. He laid his M-16 across his knees and mentally reviewed his strategy, hoping to God that he wasn’t going to find any flaws in it now.

  The branch canal that the informant had told them the NVA were going to use was one he was unfamiliar with, and he had had to trust his local militia commander’s knowledge of the area to determine the best point to stage an ambush.

  ‘Here, Dai uy,’ the young commander of Van Binh forces had said unequivocally, ‘There is an intersection here with a main waterway. If we diverge here,’ – his finger had stubbed at the map spread out on Lewis’s desk – ‘then we can converge on them from both sides.’

  Lewis had nodded in agreement. It seemed an ideal point for an ambush. The only problem was that the NVA were well aware of every vulnerable position on the routes that they used, and they might be prepared for them. There was another worry too, one which he had discussed far into the night with the other members of his team. Their informant might not be an informant at all. He could very well be giving them false information in order to lure them into a trap.

  ‘In other words, we might very well find ourselves ambushed by superior forces before we have the chance to lay our own trap,’ Sergeant Drayton had said dryly, as he cleaned his Colt .45 automatic. ‘Not a very nice thought, is it?’

  It wasn’t, but Lewis had decided that it was a risk they would have to take. If worse came to worst, they would be able to summon air power. The patrol boats were radio linked to a USS aircraft carrier a mile out in the South China Sea, and helicopter gunships could be dispatched from the carrier’s deck the instant they were asked for. It was a comforting thought, but he was fiercely hoping that such action wouldn’t be necessary. He wanted the ambush to be as trouble free and as textbook an operation as their last ambush had been.

  It was dark now, and the moon was full and high as the boats chugged softly down the waterway, deeper and deeper into what Lieutenant Grainger termed ‘Indian country’, country where the Viet Cong had complete control, country where they could expect, at any moment, to come under heavy enemy fire.

  As they turned off the main waterway on to narrower, less-used canals, the undergrowth from the banks reached out towards them, low-lying branches flicking them with damp, insect-infested leaves.

  ‘Christ, I hate this damned country!’ Sergeant Drayton whispered viciously as he swatted at a party of ants that were scurrying down the neck of his fatigues.

  Lewis could cope with the ants, it was the leeches he hated. No matter what kind of operation they had been engaged in, when they returned to the team house, they would be covered with leeches. Burning them off with the end of a lighted cigarette was the most effective way to remove them, but out in the country it wasn’t always possible to light a cigarette and then their unwelcome and painful travelling companions just had to be endured.

  As time passed they began to move slower and slower, hampered by the water vines and reeds that choked the little-used channels.

  Lieutenant Grainger looked across at him anxiously. ‘How are we for time, Dai uy?’

  ‘We have a little.’

  They hadn’t much and they both knew it. If they weren’t in position at the intersection before midnight, then they ran the very real risk of running straight into the oncoming convoy of boats. And the kind of firefight that would ensue would be anything but textbook.

  The Vietnamese militia commander crept towards him.

  ‘We’re nearly there, Dai uy,’ he whispered.

  Lewis nodded, signalling for all engines to be cut. As they glided over the fetid black water, he strained his ears for the sound of any other movement. Nothing.

  ‘Here we go, Trung uy,’ he said quietly to Lieutenant Grainger. ‘Let’s hope to God it isn’t a setup.’

  It wasn’t. With swift expertise he was able to string his troops out along both sides of the canal bank. The navy patrol boats were heavily armed and he had the .30-calibre machine gun that each boat carried offloaded and mounted in ambush position, to increase their firepower.

  He flicked on his PRC-25, his portable receiver-transmitter that he was never without, transmitting softly to the commander of the local militia platoon that was on his left flank, checking for problems. The answer was negative and he called in Lieutenant Grainger who was with a platoon from Van Binh on the other side of the canal. ‘Lima, this is Foxtrot, over.’

  ‘Foxtrot, this is Lima,’ Grainger’s voice said, so quietly he could barely hear it. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘This is Foxtrot … Have you any problems? Over?’

  ‘This is Lima. Negative. Over.’

  They were all in position. The patrol boats, with their deck-mounted mortars, were discreetly out of sight several yards down the main waterway from the intersection. There was nothing for them to do now but settle among the soggy wetness of chest high reeds and wait.

  As Lewis crouched in acute discomfort in the darkness, he was sure that he wasn’t alone in hoping that their information was wrong, that if and when a convoy appeared, it would be Viet Cong, not NVA. If it was the NVA, then they were going to be in for a vicious battle. The North Vietnamese were outstanding soldiers, never giving way and never retreating. If the same tenaciousness and discipline could be bred in the soldiers of the ARVN, then Lewis felt quite sure that South Vietnam would have been more than capable of fighting its own battle, without American aid. But for some reason, in many units of the ARVN, tenaciousness and motivation were conspicuous only by their absence.

  The radio crackled. ‘Foxtrot, Lima, over.’

  ‘Lima, this is Foxtrot,’ he whispered into his hand mike ‘Over.’

  ‘This is Lima. We have lights approaching. Over.’

  The canal network was so labyrinthine that sampans travelling in a convoy at night habitually travelled with a small single light in the bows so that they could easily follow one another and not become lost.

  ‘This is Pelican. How many lights? Over.’

  There was the faint possibility that the sampans were being manned by fishermen. And if they were, the last thing he wanted to do was to come up on them with .30-calibre machine guns and deck-mounted mortars.

  ‘This is Lima. A whole string of them. Eight or nine. Maybe a dozen. Over.’

  Lewis muttered an obscenity beneath his breath. A dozen sampans in convoy were not local fishermen. All his units were on the one radio frequency, and he knew that all had heard his conversation with Grainger.

  ‘This is Foxtrot to all units,’ he whispered tersely. ‘Stand by to attack. Over.’

  Ambushing a fleet of sampans wasn’t the straightfo
rward task that ambushing an unprepared foot patrol was. Lewis knew that the NVA’s first reaction would be to leap into the canal and to make for the banks in order to have the advantage of fighting on solid ground. Once that happened, it would be close fighting of the very worst kind, and he wanted to avoid it by decimating them with machine-gun fire before they even had a chance to hurl themselves overboard.

  But it was an impossible ambition. The sampans were too far apart for them to be able to open fire on all of them simultaneously. It seemed to Lewis that even before he gave the signal for all units to blast the boats with everything they had, they were under answering fire. Nothing went as planned. The patrol boats were slow in moving out of their hiding place in the main waterway to give them support; the NVA from the tail boats were in the water and on the banks, raking them with fire from AK-47’s even before the answering fire from the lead boats had been silenced.

  Almost from the word go he knew that the operation was a debacle. Despite the explosive, savage spray from the .30-calibre machine guns and the ceaseless roar of fire from M-16’s, the North Vietnamese kept hurtling towards them, Kalashnikovs at their hips, firing as they came. He knew he could expect no help from Grainger. Over the PRC-25, Grainger had yelled that he and his platoon were under heavy attack and were already being forced to fall back.

  Lewis cursed the moon, so full and bright that it gave them virtually no cover. As he let rip with his M-16 at the crack North Vietnamese troops bearing down on them, Drayton leapt to his side, attaching a fresh belt to the flapping tail of his ammunition and then reloading his own M-16 and firing off another clip as the NVA steadfastly advanced.

  As a fresh surge of troops from the sampans made the bank, Lewis hurtled past Drayton, racing towards them, a hand grenade, pin out, in his fist, his arm cocked as he threw and then dived for cover.

  ‘That got the motherfuckers!’ he could Drayton yelling exuberantly.

  Lewis’s first instinct, when he knew there were only eight or a dozen boats in the convoy, was that there was no need to call in air support. Now it was a decision he bitterly regretted. By not calling in the helicopter gunships right from the beginning, precious time, and lives, had been lost. He had called for them the minute he had realized the size of the operation they were involved in, but there was still no sign of them.