He forced himself on to his knees and inched towards the door of the hut. As far as the Viet Cong were concerned, it was obviously recreation hour. They were all gathered around the radio, listening intently. The men who had been standing guard over him were only a few yards away, but their backs were to him. Could he do it? Could he simply crawl away? Even if he wasn’t spotted, it would be only a matter of five or ten minutes before his disappearance was discovered. They would know almost immediately. But it was dark. And the forest was dense. It might be possible. And he had nothing to lose.
Stealthily, hardly able to believe that he could have even got to the door of the hut without attracting attention, he lay flat on the ground and wriggled outside. Every movement was unspeakable agony. It was impossible for him to lift his right arm above his head in an effort to haul himself onwards. He had to be content with clawing at the ground, one-handed, and digging his toes into the earth for leverage. But he was moving. He was heading away from the hut, away from the compound and the gathered, listening men, and towards the pitch-black immensity of the forest.
Over the radio’s static Elvis Presley gave way to Joan Baez. ‘Christ Almighty,’ he said to himself as he cleared the beaten earth of the camp and burrowed into waist-high vegetation. ‘Don’t they know she’s singing an antiwar song!’
The ground beneath him was becoming less firm. Moisture oozed through his fingers. Cautiously he raised himself to his knees, and then to his feet. He could no longer see the camp; he could no longer be seen. He headed off in a northeasterly direction, his feet sinking ankle depth into mud at every step. A snake that he could not see, but only sense, slithered across his feet. And then he heard commotion behind him.
He began to run, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, his swollen ankle and knee and elbow joints screaming out in protest. He was sinking deep into the mire with every step. The ground was pulling him downward, drawing him back. He could hear the Viet Cong bursting into the forest behind him and he forced himself to go on, knowing that he had a lead of about fifty yards maximum. Water gleamed dully in the darkness. He headed towards it, floundering into its depths. If he could submerge himself, breathe through reeds, then he still might escape.
The water was a mere sheen covering swampland. Something hideous and nameless coiled itself around his legs and began to tighten its hold, dragging him downwards. He twisted and turned to free himself, and as he did so he began to sink down into the morass. He was embroiled up to his waist, and then his armpits. ‘No!’ he yelled out hoarsely, knowing that the creature wrapped about his legs was about to be the victor. ‘For Christ’s sake, no!’
The Viet Cong surged from between the trees. Hands grasped hold of him. He was being torn apart at the waist. One of the black-pyjama-clad figures leaned towards him and then thrust his AK-47 beneath the surface of the water and fired. The threshing, unseen weight around his legs was stilled. Like a beached whale he was dragged, bleeding and broken, on to firm ground.
Early the next morning he was transferred from the hut to a bamboo punishment cage. It measured a bare four feet by six feet and was just high enough for him to sit up in it.
And there he stayed. He wasn’t taken out for exercise. He wasn’t taken out to go to the latrine. There was no shade from the sun by day, and no shelter from the cold by night. His wound stank with putrefaction, but to his everlasting amazement the arm did not turn gangrenous and did not have to be amputated.
Day followed day, and week followed week, and month followed month. When he was taken out of the cage, a little while before Christmas, it was so that he could once more be questioned. And tortured. That was the first time he broke. Not outwardly but inwardly. They tied up his elbows again until they touched; they ruptured an eardrum; they beat him with bamboo rods. And when at last they threw him, more dead than alive, back into the cage, he closed his fingers around the bars and he thought of Christmas in California. He thought of turkey and hot showers and soft beds. And he thought of Abbra, and how it was going to be years before he’d see her again. If he ever saw her again. And he lowered his head to his hands, and wept.
Chapter Twenty-four
The Huey never made it to the ground. It smashed into the jungle canopy, hanging vertically, a bomb just waiting to detonate. Kyle pushed himself bloodily away from the control panel and yelled at his copilot to get the hell out. There was no reply. One of the bullets had smashed the Huey’s Plexiglas bubble and hit him between the eyes.
Kyle didn’t hang around. He had only seconds to escape before the Huey exploded and he did not waste one of them. He was out of his harness, out of the crippled ship, falling and tumbling through the thick foliage to the ground.
When the Huey blew the blast rocketed him for thirty yards. His helmet had been torn off and his hair and his flak jacket were on fire, he felt as if he had broken every bone in his body, and as he rolled in hellish agony, on the ground he was aware that half a dozen North Vietnamese Army regulars were running forwards towards him. He struggled to reach for his pistol and failed.
His hand wouldn’t move. His arm wouldn’t move. He didn’t know if it had been broken, or if it had been shot off or ripped off. He knew only that the names were no longer picturesque and that he was in danger of becoming the barbecue dish of the day.
He rolled on the ground, struggling to reach for his, pistol with his left hand, but where his pistol should have been there was nothing. Blaspheming viciously, expecting a round of machine-gun fire to blast him into eternity at any moment, he beat at the flames engulfing his head with his good arm.
No machine-gun blast came. He was surrounded. The flames leaping from his flight suit were extinguished. His scalp felt as if it were leaving the top of his head, but his hair was no longer on fire. High above him, coming under a slaughtering barrage of artillery fire, a Huey circled desperately. He knew who was at the controls. Chuck, risking his own neck in a suicidal attempt at rescue. He could see the Huey take fire, veer and dip.
‘Get the hell out, you dumb bastard!’ he yelled skywards as his boots were yanked from his feet and he was searched for weapons.
For the first time since he had hurled himself from his ship he could take mental stock of his injuries. His right arm was still attached to his body but was broken, the bone projecting unnaturally at the elbow. His back was burned, but he had no way of knowing how badly, and his scalp and face were also burned.
He was alive though. He clenched his teeth as he was ordered to his feet, wondering how the hell he was going to survive the pain of his burns without proper medication. He was alive, but he was also injured – God only knew where on the Cambodian-Laos-’Nam border – and a prisoner. He was, in short, in the biggest crock of shit he’d ever been in in his entire life.
The ground was littered with the bodies of the reconnaissance party, shot down as they had tried to board the Hueys. Kyle could see a couple of ARVN soldiers being herded away from the site at gunpoint, but he could see no other American survivors.
‘You’re on your own, baby,’ he told himself grimly, fighting against waves of pain and faintness and nausea. And in Saigon, Trinh would be on her own too.
Long before they had cleared the scene of carnage he collapsed. When he fleetingly floated back to consciousness he was aware of being carried on a stretcher. For a crazy moment he thought it was a regulation US army stretcher and that he was on his way to a blissfully civilized, sanitized US army hospital. And then he saw the khaki-uniformed pith-helmeted Asians carrying him and he wondered why they were going to such lengths to keep him alive, and what it was they intended doing with him.
The burns on his back were unbearable and for nearly two weeks he was able to think of nothing else. The NVA treated him by coating the burns with a mixture of leaves and gunge. When he weakly protested that the leaves would cause infection, he was told that the leaves possessed a special healing quality. What was in the gunge he never found out, and looking at the sickly mess, he th
ought it better that he didn’t know.
His arm was bound tight against his chest and though awkward was the least of his troubles. His main concern, once his flesh began to heal, were the puckered scars on his forehead and temples. Would Trinh find them physically repulsive? He thought not. Serry would, but then, he wasn’t in love with Serry anymore. He wondered how she would react to the news that he had been shot down. Her asshole of a brother would probably leap so high for joy he’d hit the fucking moon.
Since his capture, they’d rested only at night. The NVA kept on moving, travelling north. They were in a high mountainous area, and he suspected that they were in Laos, not ’Nam. Wherever they were, there were no US troops on the ground and the further they travelled, the less chance there was of them running into any, and of him being rescued by them. Occasionally planes would fly over, but the Viet Cong had ears like dogs and were always in deep cover before aircraft were directly overhead.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said exasperatedly as they plowed on through another long, hot, insect-ridden day. ‘Where the hell are we going?’
It was a question he had asked a hundred times before. For the first time he received a reply. ‘Hanoi,’ the Vietnamese at his side said succinctly. ‘We go to Hanoi.’
Kyle stumbled and nearly fell. ‘We’re walking there?’
The Vietnamese grinned. ‘We walk from north of Vietnam to south, and from south to north many times,’ he said in commendable English. ‘Walking to Hanoi on Ho Chi Minh trail is holiday. Vacation.’
‘Not for me it isn’t,’ Kyle muttered grimly. He knew now where he was being taken. To Hoa Lo prison, North Vietnam’s main penitentiary.
The ARVN troops who had been taken prisoner with him had been left in one of the Montagnard villages that they had passed through. Now he knew why. Their status didn’t warrant the long march to a prison used primarily for shot-down and captured US fighter pilots.
‘And how long is it going to take us to walk to Hanoi?’ he asked, sweat pouring down his face as they threaded their way through terrain thick with rotting vegetation.
‘Twelve weeks, thirteen weeks,’ the Vietnamese replied. He had a Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47 slung around his neck, and Kyle knew that if he made one false move he would be in the rifle’s sights and it would be good-bye world forever.
All of the soldiers were Russian armed. The AK-47 was their basic weapon, but there was also a scattering of Type 56 assault rifles and one man even carried an RPG-7 antitank missile launcher.
Kyle thought constantly about overpowering one of the North Vietnamese and fighting his way free with a captured weapon. So far he’d had no chance, but he was constantly on the watch for one. He certainly didn’t want to find himself incarcerated in Hoa Lo. Once in there, he might never see the light of day again.
Although the trail ran through rugged, mountainous country, they quite frequently met with parties of soldiers and peasants ferrying supplies south. The sacks of rice and crates of military hardware were strapped to bicycles, some of them modified with a length of bamboo attached to the handlebar and seat column, enabling the bicycle to be controlled by a man walking alongside it, even over the roughest ground.
Whenever such a party was sighted, his captors would slip a rope around Kyle’s neck and lead him, animal-like. ‘Why the hell is this necessary?’ he fumed, hating the humiliation of it. ‘You have AK-47s and Type 56 assault rifles levelled at my head all the time! You don’t need to tether me as well!’ He was never answered, but he knew why the rope was considered necessary. It wasn’t enough for him merely to be their prisoner. He had also to be cowed and subjugated, and though he felt very far from being either, the rope around his neck gave him the appearance of being so.
As they climbed higher the terrain changed, the vegetation thinned, the dense foliage giving way to forests of pines. Their only food, apart from fruit and berries gathered as they trekked, was rice. Every soldier carried his own supply in a cotton tube slung over one shoulder and under the opposite arm. At night they slept on hammocks slung between the trees. They passed through no more villages, but the traffic on the trail grew heavier. There were carts and trucks as well as bicycles, as bombing raids by US aircraft became frequent.
He had been exultant when the first F-4 Phantoms screamed overhead, raining down orange-sized incendiary bombs. The bomblets were packed inside a canister and burst open immediately after release from the aircraft, seeding a large area. They were impossible to hide from, the only defence against them being to pray like the devil that they wouldn’t drop on his patch of ground.
After he had spent a half dozen heart-stopping occasions waiting for a raid to come to a conclusion, his reaction became far less enthusiastic. Apart from human victims, the damage they caused was minimal. The trail was still road-worthy. Trucks, even if they were hit, were always miraculously repaired. Traffic on the trail continued with a dogged persistence that Kyle could only reluctantly admire.
Intermittently, as the altitude began to decrease and as they crossed the border into North Vietnam, there were anti-aircraft units and supply dumps and maintenance depots by the side of what had now become a recognizable road.
‘Soon there will be anti-aircraft units and maintenance depots all the way into the South,’ one of his guards told him proudly. ‘Soon Ho Chi Minh Trail become a three-lane highway, just like you have in America.’
They began to travel only at night, though even then US planes flew overhead. Sometimes the planes were Phantoms, but more often they were air force gunships, converted transport aircraft fitted with low-light-level television, infrared sensors, ignition detectors, night observation scopes, and other electronic detection devices. But despite all their technological hardware, the traffic on the trail continued, ammunition, guns, and rice travelling in a near continuous flow from north to south.
‘What is going to happen to me when we get to Hanoi?’ Kyle asked the most talkative of his guards. He had a pretty good idea, but conversation of any sort was a relief to the constant monotony of walking, walking, walking.
‘In Hanoi you will be very well treated,’ the guard said with a confidence that Kyle didn’t share. ‘Vietnamese people realize you are not vicious imperialist aggressor but only a dupe of the imperialist American government. You will be educated to understand better.’
‘And then?’ Kyle asked, mildly amused.
‘And then you will be given your freedom. You will be able to tell other American soldiers of how they, too, are dupes of imperialist American government.’
Kyle groaned. He had heard rumours, about pilots tortured in Hanoi until they made confessions of ‘war crimes’ that could be used by the North Vietnamese for propaganda. He needed to escape before he reached Hoa Lo prison, and his time was running out fast.
Night-time would be best, he plotted as he plodded on under his captor’s watchful eyes. The greatest handicap to a successful escape was the impossibility of merging among members of the local population. If he had been in France or Italy in the last war, then once he had initially escaped there would at least have been a chance of his staying free because, suitably dressed, he would have been indistinguishable from the natives. There was no such cover in Vietnam. In Vietnam, no matter how he dressed, he was immediately recognizable as a big white American. In daylight he would not be able, to move twenty yards before the alarm was given and he was recaptured.
The risks were colossal but Kyle was determined to take them. He planned to make an attempt that very night. He would wait until the rest period, until he was taken into the vegetation at the side of the road to relieve himself. Then he would take his guard by surprise and overpower him, grabbing his weapon. What he would do after that, whether he would shoot it out with the remaining dozen or so soldiers or whether he would be able to steal off into the undergrowth undetected, he didn’t know. He would play it by ear.
He was never given the chance. They had been on the trail only for an hour or two t
hat night when two trucks, travelling south to north, drew up beside them. Seconds later he was being ordered at gunpoint into the rear of one of them. Some of the soldiers clambered aboard with him, grinning euphorically, while others boarded the second truck.
Kyle could have wept. There would be no more rest stops in the dark and at the side of the road. No more crazy, virtually impossible chances of escape. From now on escape was hopeless. He was travelling at high speed towards Hoa Lo, and there wasn’t a damn thing in the world that he could do about it.
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the tarpaulin, wondering how he could get a message to Trinh, how he was going to survive incarceration, how long it would be before he was once again free.
Although the tarpaulin covers were still down early the next morning, he knew that they were now driving over asphalt instead of the rough road surface. Obviously they were very close to Hanoi, possibly even in Hanoi. At what he took to be a roadblock, they stopped for a few minutes. A uniformed figure nicked back the tarpaulin and gazed at Kyle in hostile curiosity. Then the tarpaulin was replaced and the journey continued. He could hear the sound of other motor vehicles. Jeeps and motorcycles.
They halted again, and this time the soldiers who had escorted him all the way from the Laos-Cambodia-’Nam border were gestured out into the road and two impassive-faced soldiers he had never seen before took their place, their rifles cocked. Kyle felt a pang of regret at his abrupt separation from his erstwhile companions. At least he had come to know what to expect from them. He didn’t know what the hell to expect from his new guards, or the guards who awaited him Hoa Lo.
White Christmas in Saigon Page 44