by Ian Slater
The evening meal was rice and some kind of meat that they told him was pig — which he doubted — and black beans. They told Baker through a local translator that “you see the hill people, the Montagnards, were correct. They always said the Americans, the green faces”—they meant Green Beret commandos’ face paint—”would not desert them, that they would come back.”
“It’s been a long time,” Baker said by way of apology.
“What is time to us?” the family elder said, smoking his pipe at full blast. “The important thing is they came back.”
One of the younger men shook his head from side to side. “The important thing is, will they stay?”
“No,” another man said matter-of-factly as he held the rice bowl close to his mouth, shoveling with his chopsticks. “The question is, what will Salt and Pepper do?”
“Who cares what they will do?” the old man said angrily. “There is always one rotten banana in the bunch.”
“One!” the younger man said. “In this case there are two.”
“Who are they?” asked Baker. “Montagnards?”
“No, no,” the old man said, waving aside the mention of Montagnards. “They are rebels.”
“From what tribe, then?” Baker inquired.
No one spoke, busily eating and drinking tea, the silence growing heavier by the second. Baker felt his gut tighten as if he’d swallowed a slime ball along with his rice. Slowly he put down his bowl. “Are they Americans?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” the young man said.
“Do you know where they are?”
The old man’s chopsticks waved in a wide gesture toward the peaks of Lang Bian Mountain. “Up there.”
“Why do you call them Salt and Pepper?”
The young man shrugged nonchalantly. “One is white, one is black.”
“You’re sure they’re Americans?”
“Yes,” the old man said, offering more tea.
Baker was simply lost for words. He’d come looking for MIAs and possibly POWs, not renegades. He blew on the hot tea. “Could you contact them?”
The old man shrugged. “I don’t know. Who wants to talk to such vermin?”
Baker conceded the old man’s point. Who would want to find two turncoats? He’d sure as hell get no thanks from Washington. The Chinese would of course relish the propaganda value, despite the fact that whoever this Salt and Pepper were, they must now be near middle age.
“What do they do?” Baker asked. “I mean, so they turned and ran for the other side — the Communists — but they can’t still be running against our men — I mean the U.S. has been long gone.”
“The U.S. has come back,” the younger man said. “The renegades will run with whoever runs against the U.S. — the Chinese or the Khmer Rouge. Sometimes they transport heroin from Laos into Vietnam.”
Baker felt himself sweating despite the cool air of the Lat village. The very mention of the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia — the Khmer Rouge being one of China’s allies in the south — filled him with the kind of fear and loathing some of his Jewish friends experienced upon hearing the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald — run by power-crazed madmen bent on genocide. China would welcome a Khmer Rouge attack against the Vietnamese anywhere on Vietnam’s western border.
“Have you heard any rumors of a Khmer Rouge invasion?” he asked.
“Yes,” the old man said. “Porters are being recruited to move ammunition and supplies along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border and the Laotian-Vietnamese border using some of the old Ho Chi Minh trails.”
No one spoke for several minutes, the only sounds those of the fruit birds from the hill country and the sipping of tea. Finally Baker, still trying to absorb the shock of the information and the implications of it for the war should the USVUN forces be hit on another front, determined that the USVUN field commander, General Freeman, should be advised of the impending likelihood of an attack on his left flank. But Baker’s thoughts immediately returned to the subject of the two American renegades.
“Do you know what rank they hold?” Baker asked. “These two?”
“No.”
“Have you seen them yourselves?”
“I did,” the young man said. “Once. It was a drug line moving toward Saigon.”
“Ho Chi Minh City,” the father corrected.
“Saigon,” the young man repeated, and Baker knew he had an ally. “I saw them for only a moment. They were in NVA uniforms with the big metal rings on their backpacks. Remember? The rings were for attaching camouflage — leaves and such — so that, unlike an American, an NVA soldier could move his head around without any camouflage moving. They had gone past so fast you could not see them clearly. But the white one was much smaller than the black one.”
“Would you recognize them again?”
“No, though I have heard they never separate and the white one is bigger than most Vietnamese. Sometimes they move from place to place by air, but it is said they only transport drugs on foot.”
Baker sat still, both hands cradling the cup, accepting the offer of more tea. Then he sipped the tea, and a crisis had passed because he had resolved what to do. The moment he got back to Dalat — hopefully tomorrow evening — he would send a message to USVUN’s HQ. He’d get shit for not having notified State first or the Pentagon, and not going through normal channels, but he took comfort from the words of Field Marshal Von Rundstedt, who once declared that “normal channels are a trap for officers who lack initiative.”
He thanked his hosts for the meal and went outside to bring in his sleeping bag from the jeep. Despite the fading light, he saw that all the tires on his jeep had been slashed.
“Vandals!” the old man pronounced. “Hooligans — from Dalat, no doubt.”
No matter who it was, Baker told them, it meant he would have to go back to Dalat by bus in the morning. “What time does it leave?”
“Seven.”
From habit, Baker unzipped his sleeping bag to make sure that no bugs or snakes had set up shop, then laid it down on the palm-matted floor, sat down and, by candlelight, wrote down a summary of all he’d heard that night. He folded it when he was finished, took his boots off, and stuffed it down his right sock until he could feel the square of paper under the arch of his foot. Then he quietly begged pardon and asked the young man who had said “Saigon” instead of “Ho Chi Minh City” whether it was possible for him to get a weapon — a pistol, anything.
The young man said this was possible; caches of arms had been buried by many villagers during ‘Nam, but Bac Baker must understand that this would cost money, not for himself, but for those who sold such things illegally. Two hundred American dollars.
“Traveler’s checks?”
“Sure, American Express or Visa, okay, fine.”
The young man soon returned and handed Baker a .45 service revolver and two full clips. Sure, Baker admitted to himself, he was feeling a little paranoid about it all, but it was just in case the tire slashers weren’t simply vandals after all.
There was a scream — the old lady who had come to clean up the kitchen. Someone had placed the chopsticks Baker had used upright in his rice bowl — since time immemorial a Buddhist sign of the dead.
Moving quickly, Baker removed his raincoat, flashlight, and what few other belongings he had in the jeep, and bunched them in his sleeping bag to resemble a body. He turned out his lamp, then sat in a corner of the room where he had a clear view of the open doorway, his ears straining for the least sound, the gun in his right hand resting on the left for instant use. All he had to do was stay awake till morning.
He tried to remember what they had told him on the firing range back in Washington, but all that seemed, and was, a world away. He thought about the chopstick sign. The message didn’t worry him so much as who’d done it. He’d heard nothing. Could someone have come up to the high house without making a sound? If not, it must have been someone in the family. Was the young man’s use of “Saigon” instead of �
�Ho Chi Minh” merely a ploy to build confidence in him? Was the young man an agent provocateur?
In any case, Baker hoped he wouldn’t have to use the gun— merely having it in Vietnam was highly illegal — and hoped the tire slashing and the sign of the dead were merely two unrelated incidents. Perhaps the chopsticks being put in the bowl like that — sticking up like incense tapers — was a nasty bit of teasing by someone else in the village. All right, Baker told himself, so it was a cruel prank by some spiteful neighbor and had nothing to do with him. The problem was still the stealth it took for someone to come up to the house, creep up the ladder steps, do it, and leave without being noticed by either him or his hosts. Which brought him back to the family again.
He heard a soft thud, like a rubber ball thrown in through the doorway. A grenade? He switched on his flashlight, ready to kick it out the door, and instead saw nothing but a slash of brilliant green slithering toward him. He fired with one hand holding the flashlight, the other pulling the trigger, until he’d emptied the .45, his hands shaking uncontrollably from his phobia of snakes, the snake having disappeared under the mattress. By now of course it was as if the house had been bombed, everyone running and talking excitedly, lanterns coming on and swinging through the hamlet.
Baker tried to talk but couldn’t. Instead he pointed the handgun at the mattress. Finally he could manage a few words. “Con tran!” he said. “Con tran!” It meant python, but he couldn’t remember the word for “snake.” “Con tran—green. You understand con tran?”
Sure, everybody understood. Who didn’t understand? Pythons, said one of the contemptuous teenagers, are known for their great flying ability! “Must have been a bat!” another said.
The young man, his host’s oldest son, who called Ho Chi Minh Saigon, carefully lifted up the riddled sleeping bag and straw mattress with a stick in one hand and a long knife in the other. There was no snake there, only a wild pattern of holes that the bullets had made after passing through the sleeping bag, mattress, and thatched floor.
Soon the rest of the villagers went home. They needed sleep for their work in the fields more than they needed stories of flying pythons from a mentally ill American. And in his city-bred panic, the American had totally lost face.
Yet the next morning, when a policeman arrived wanting to know who had been firing a gun last night, none of the villagers could answer him. They were all asleep, they told him. No one wanted trouble for the hamlet. Oh yes, they said, they’d heard shots coming from the direction of Lang Bian’s peaks, but Vietnamese had lived with the sound of firing for a thousand years. A poacher, perhaps. Everyone knew that since the Vietnam War deer, wild pig, and even tigers had begun to repopulate the area. “Saigon,” as Baker had begun calling his host’s oldest son, was apparently the only one who believed Baker that a snake, despite the height of the house’s stilts, had been in his room.
“What color was it?” he asked Baker.
“Green.”
“Then it wasn’t a python.”
“No — No, but I couldn’t think of your name for snake.”
Saigon asked, “What kind of green?”
“Very bright.”
“A bamboo viper,” Saigon said.
Baker didn’t want to ask the next question, but his need to recover face at least for himself after his outburst of panic forced him to. He asked Saigon if a bamboo viper was your ordinary elephant grass, nonpoisonous creepy crawly or what?
“Had it bitten you, you would have been dead within the hour. You had better keep the gun.”
In one sense, it was the last thing Baker wanted to hear, yet it reassured him to know that someone at least believed his version of what had happened. “Someone is after you,” Saigon said. “You’ve come too close, I think, to Salt and Pepper. I don’t think they are directly involved — otherwise you’d be dead. They are probably off west somewhere in Cambodia or Laos, but I think the slashed tires, the rice bowl and the chopsticks, this is all — how do you Americans say it? — ’low-tech.’ The word has been put out, but now with the Americans helping us in the north, no one wants to do it overtly—” He paused. “—to kill you in the open. They wish it to seem like an accident.”
“Slashed tires are hardly covert” Baker said.
“True. But that might have nothing to do with it. Teenage bad types.”
And why, wondered Baker, are you telling me all this? Is it you? Are you after me? Are you just telling me all this so as not to make me suspicious?
It was as if Saigon could divine what Baker was thinking. “I’m helping you,” Saigon said, “because you are here helping us. I wasn’t born until after the war. For me it is history. I do not dislike Americans.”
“Thanks,” Baker said. “I feel awkward with the gun. What if the Dalat police stop me? They’ll stop you because you’re breathing.”
It was the first time since last night’s meal that Saigon had laughed. “It is true. They would stop their grandmothers. Give it to me. You will be safe on the bus going back to Dalat. I’ll send someone to your hotel with it. I think you should have it.”
“You think I should pursue this matter of Salt and Pepper?”
Saigon shrugged. “This is up to you, but till you’re back safely in Saigon, I think you should keep the gun, I will keep the sleeping bag. If the police saw that, they would be suspicious.”
“Yes.” Baker walked a few paces, then stopped. It was six-fifty, and the first bus out would be in ten minutes. He took out a note he’d written about the existence of Salt and Pepper and of the possibility of a Khmer Rouge flank attack against Vietnam. He gave the note to Saigon, telling him that if anything should happen to him, Saigon should give the note to a senior cadre in Dalat to be passed on to USVUN HQ.
As the crowded bus began its bumpy journey back to Dalat, Baker felt the loneliest he had in years. In going to Dalat, he was running away from Lang Bian Mountain.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
It was an awesome sight even for seasoned chopper patrols: over two hundred helos carrying two thousand of Second Army’s Assault Helicopter Battalion and Airborne into battle, fifty miles north of Phu Lang Thuong to the edges of the valley southwest of Loc Binh. From a distance to the fighters and bombers already plastering the scrubby ridges around Loc Binh with H.E. and napalm, the choppers made it look as if the sky was full of gnats.
Marte Price had wrangled a ride on one of the helos. General Jorgensen, she discovered, was a much easier obstacle to work around than Freeman. Jorgensen, at pains to be politically correct, had also allowed several other reporters, including LaSalle, to be in the first wave. Marte Price now wished Jorgensen had refused permission. The noise of over two hundred helicopter engines and rotors chopping the thick, humid air, and the distant thunder of heavy ordnance being dropped to clear the ridges of the PLA, combined to fill her with a fear she had never felt so intensely.
The members of the nine-man squad she was with were mostly silent, all but two sitting on their bulletproof Kevlar vests instead of wearing them, fearing shots from below that could easily penetrate the skin of the chopper and hit their genitals. The minutes before deplaning were filled with apprehension, each man knowing that the PLA might well be ready to spring a trap around the landing zones, holding their fire till the helo’s soldiers were spilling out on the flats between the ridges and then opening up in a murderous ambush.
As the First Battalion of Airborne went in led by Colonel Smythe, Freeman was in the control chopper high above the swarm of helos below, with F-14 Tomcats from the Enterprise riding shotgun, making sure that the helos were properly dispersed to ensure the perimeter about a half mile across.
Normally a colonel or a one-star brigadier general would have been directing the local deployment, but this had been Freeman’s plan, and if he was going to take responsibility for it, — he wanted to personally direct it. Besides, like Patton, he was known as a front-line general, no matter whose plan it was. Furthermore, Second Army was his u
ntil told otherwise by Washington.
Then it happened. Bravo Company of the First Battalion were deplaning close to a dike running along the edge of a rice paddy when the field seemed to erupt in fire, the fusillade of bullets coming from a scrubby and partially treed ridge that sloped down to the valley floor of green fields. Even as a star, or six-point 105mm howitzer, gun position was being set on the ridges south of the landing zone, with 105mms slung under the bellies of an equal number of heavy-load Chinook choppers, the PLA infantry were laying down a murderous fire on the Americans.
How did the PLA know there would be a major force attempt to secure the valley as a hub from which to “spoke out” attacks against the PLA’s supply line between Lang Son and Loc Binh and the road between Loc Binh and Lang Duong? In fact they didn’t know. The PLA had guessed that Freeman, a general known for his “keep-moving” tactics, wouldn’t be satisfied waiting for a set-piece battle about Phu Lang Thuong. He wouldn’t wait for his enemy to come to him, but would probably try to leapfrog, overflying the PLA’s spearhead on the Lang Son-Phu Lang Thuong road, to hit Wang’s and Wei’s forces deep in their own territory. That would stop the Chinese supply line, splitting their forces and allowing two divisions from Second Army’s I Corps to close in from Phu Lang Thuong.
Wang and Wei, while having made spectacularly impressive gains so far, had not managed to take Hanoi. The U.S. artillery was too formidable. The Chinese generals now had to decide whether to recall those PLA elements to the south now wheeling before Phu Lang Thuong for the attack on Haiphong on the USVUN eastern flank. If these PLA regiments were able to reach the allied port of Haiphong, then the winding, seventy-mile-long Haiphong-Hanoi road, the allies’ vital supply artery, would be cut, and with that would come a bonanza of allied supplies for the PLA. And whatever the PLA couldn’t find dockside at Haiphong could be supplied along the southeast coast from the Chinese city of Mong Cai.