Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  The shadows, part of a larger fraternity known as FNGs—fucking new guys—stuck together (the other guys I just called “fuckers,” though not to their faces). At Bearcat we were divided into small squads of a dozen or so men, each squad half FNGs, half in-country veterans. My squad’s first assignment was to head north about five hundred miles and keep a section of Highway 9 clear. It bisected Vietnam near its skinniest point, not much north of Hue, running from near the coast at Dong Ha west through hills to the Khe Sanh base near the Laotian border and thus the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  It was grunt patrol work, trudging back and forth along our nine miles of highway, which happily was in the flatlands closer to the coast. Sometimes we’d escort refugees or drag out evacuees (the former were willingly relocated, the latter unwillingly). Occasionally we’d have to clear a mine planted during the night; more often we just kept our eyes open for them. It was more feet-wetting, as it were, this time wielding an automatic rifle rather than a dishcloth.

  After that, the real work began. For the next twelve months our squad was an efficient and deadly unit of Operation Phoenix, a secret CIA program designed to erode the Viet Cong infrastructure in South Vietnam. Its methods were simple: capturing, interrogating (usually accompanied by torture) and assassinating Communist operatives and sympathizers—anyone, really, who helped the National Liberation Front and the parallel government it had in place in much of South Vietnam.

  A lot has been written about Phoenix and its role in the war, but there is little consensus on what its activities were, even who ran it. Some accept the official line that the CIA handed it over to the South Vietnamese military to run in 1968 or 1969, leaving just a few American “advisers” in place. Others maintain American forces played an integral role in all of Phoenix’s activities, including its most brutal and bloody. Some say that its targets were almost exclusively military—active NLF operatives, even if they weren’t necessarily wearing a uniform—while conceding there may have been some civilian collateral kills. Others insist Phoenix went after anybody—farmers, teachers, doctors, the more respected and influential the better—in a vicious, evil and heavy-handed attempt to convince the South Vietnamese people that collaboration with the VC was suicidal.

  I can hardly remember hearing the terms “Operation Phoenix,” “Phoenix Program” or “Phung Hoang” (its Vietnamese name) while over there, and never from an official source. We were certainly not told we were part of it or what its goal was. But I know what Operation Phoenix was all about, at least my squad’s participation in it.

  We were stationed out of a series of firebases, perhaps fifteen to twenty, some large (as many as 1,300 men), some small (perhaps 100 troops), some barely more than clearings in the forest that served as makeshift LZs (landing zones). We had no real division designation, although at Bearcat we were told we were part of the Third Brigade of the Eighty-second Airborne, even if the Eighty-second had been pulled out of Vietnam once and for all in December 1969. Still, we had clout. If we needed to get somewhere, they got us there fast, whether by chopper or truck, bumping whoever was ahead of us in line.

  Never were we directly told to kill anyone; we didn’t need to be. The base commander would give our squad leader a file folder containing perhaps a map, a photograph, name and aliases of the target and close associates, and whatever other pertinent information was available. Usually the file was pretty thin, but always there was a piece of green or red tape attached to the file tab. If it was a green cell job, as we called it, it was an instruction to bring the target back for interrogation. If it was a red cell, the message was “don’t bother.” During the eleven months I was with the squad, we saw a lot more red tape than green.

  It didn’t take long for us to fit one stereotype that has emerged of American soldiers in Vietnam: crazed potheads with guns. And we fit it better than most, insofar as we were as close as American troops got to being irregulars and thus were largely left to our own devices, both in camp and out. No one got on our back to shave or cut our hair, we weren’t required to take part in the morning parade and raising-of-the-flag crap, our tents weren’t subject to inspection.

  Sometimes we went out on an almost daily basis; sometimes we just had three or four outs, as we called them, over a two- or three-week period. We’d lose a guy, on average, every week or two. Sometimes he was KIA—killed in action—sometimes wounded in action; occasionally he was killed or injured by some sort of booby trap. These might be explosives attached to caches of arms or food or—a favorite—placed under wounded Vietnamese we’d be tempted to help. Or poison placed on the sharp-tipped leaves of a plant that often lined the trails. We lost a guy to another common booby trap: sharpened bamboo spikes attached to a sprung branch triggered by a trip wire. It was one of the more gruesome ways to go and did more than its share of ramming home the point: everything in that fucking place wanted to hurt or kill you—the weather, the plants, the people. That led to both depression and cold-bloodedness: if they were after you, it justified you getting them first, if only to stay alive.

  So while our squad may have lost twenty or thirty men during my time with it, it took out a whole lot more, perhaps ten for every one we lost. Of these, about 70 percent were red cell jobs.

  It’s not as if the killing was ever easy, let alone pleasurable. But as time passed, it became less personal, just a job to get over with. And it certainly became unexceptional very quickly: when death and killing are all around you all the time, death and killing become mundane in no time flat. The banality of evil and all that, I guess.

  It helped, of course, if you had a strong belief that you were doing the right thing—something I did have, at least to begin with. Most of the squad felt likewise and that kept us relatively on the level. No one ever went out with a self-inflicted injury or a section eight—psychological reasons. And we never committed what could be termed an atrocity—not against the enemy, at least.

  On one out, our squad was assigned a target in a particular ville. Entering it, we found the place utterly empty and eerily quiet. Fires burning, food in the midst of being prepared, but no one anywhere. It took us a few minutes to find the villagers. They were all laid face up in an open pit, stacked like cordwood. The lime spread over them looked like pancake makeup. All dead. Mostly old, mostly women and small children. Our arrival had probably surprised the killers—we just assumed it must have been a VC action—because they hadn’t stuck around to cover the bodies with earth. So we went after them. It didn’t take long for our tracker to catch up to them, but it came with a surprise: the killers—there were a dozen of them—were fellow Marines.

  That kind of action confirmed something that was already clear: by the time I got to Vietnam, the character of the average American soldier had changed. The best had been either killed or rotated back to the world. Many of those left were the bottom of the barrel.

  After about three months, I ended up one of the squad’s leaders. The guy I had been assigned to shadow had been transferred, leaving me the senior 18A. At twenty-one, I was one of the oldest as well. My seniority meant that I was the guy who was usually handed the file with the red or green tape on it, but not a whole lot more; all of the older guys were responsible for training the FNGs and making sure they didn’t do anything that might get us killed.

  But there was also the imperative to set an example. Not necessarily a good example—I smoked as much reefer as the next guy. (Though not in camp. No matter how little oversight we enjoyed, no one with half a brain smoked in camp. We never knew when some brass might roll in for a photo op, and no one wanted to be the unlucky goof walking around with a joint in his mouth.) But we older guys had to keep our shit together and not lose it. No combat “mementos” such as ears, no risky heroics or excess, no letting the deaths of squad members get to us.

  The shorter I got—the sooner my tour of duty was due to end—the more obsessed I became with making it out alive. Since I didn’t drink and have never been one for whoring or partyin
g, I didn’t take leave; the downtime between assignments was enough R & R for me. There was lots of card playing and reading—I went through more Reader’s Digest condensed books than I could count. Leave was also just more unnecessary exposure. The VC knew perfectly well that our nasty little squads existed, and their networks in the bars and fleshpots of Saigon and other towns were on the lookout for our kind in particular.

  In December 1970, I turned twenty-two and everything looked to be winding up as planned. I’d been in Vietnam for a year, and tours of duty lasted between twelve and fourteen months. As squad leader, I had stopped checking in on a daily basis with the CO of whatever camp we were in to see if we had an assignment. If we didn’t but I was standing in front of him, it was human nature for the CO to find us something to do. So we stayed in our tents, out of sight, out of mind, meaning another day or two or three of inactivity. Which, with the clock ticking ever closer to discharge day, was a big deal.

  Then came Christmas Day. I woke up early, around seven, and made it to the mess before the good stuff was gone. We’d been convened to a meeting set for nine. Such meetings invariably meant a red cell job involving a significant target. Instead of just being handed a file, there was a full briefing. Usually a CIA or military intelligence agent would be present, having been flown in by chopper, as well as maybe a scout, the translator we would be taking along (if interrogation was required) and perhaps another veteran or two from the squad.

  On this occasion there were six of us in total, including two spooks and a demolition specialist from our squad. We were ordered to a ville that was harboring VC and keeping stashes of food and weapons for them. We were to take out the village headman as an example, find the weapons cache and blow it up. (Most of the VC weaponry was of no value to us; the guns were mostly Russian, Polish and Hungarian and often modified for field use. If there was one thing we were never short of, it was hardware.) Finally, we were to burn the village to the ground.

  We were trucked a couple of hours into the hills, and then got out and walked maybe half a mile. When we were just across a stream from the ville, we could see a lot of activity on the other side. One of our guys saw a villager tear up the hill away from the ville. I figured the villager was going to pass the word to VC in the area, so I grabbed my guy’s bolt-action M1—with its greater range, it was better for sniping than the automatic M-16 I was carrying—and fired off three shots in quick succession. I saw the target tumble and then lie still. While the FNGs searched the place, we went up to see the rabbit.

  As I approached, I started to get a bad feeling: the runner wasn’t getting any bigger. It turned out to be a young girl, perhaps twelve years old. She wasn’t quite dead, but close. I turned her around and she never said a word, just stared at me with a look of incomprehension.

  My first reaction was anger. I grabbed the headman.

  “Why did she fucking run? Why?” I shouted at him through the translator. “She shouldn’t have fucking run! It’s your fault! Why the fuck did she fucking run?”

  It wasn’t rational—I wanted someone to blame, someone other than myself. The headman just told me the girl was his granddaughter and he didn’t want her to get raped.

  A moment later my second came up to me and asked for instructions. They had found the food stash and some weapons. I said, “Burn it, burn it all!”

  He then asked me about the old guy, the headman. I told him to bring him to base camp. Those were not our instructions, and my second’s face reflected his concern. “Just do it!” I shouted.

  Merry fucking Christmas.

  To say I stumbled through the rest of my time there would be generous. The brass had seen burnout before and didn’t take disciplinary action. Instead, my state may just have hurried up my DD214, my separation papers. They came in two or three weeks into 1971, and a few days after that I was making my way south from the Dong Hoi area to Saigon. There I had my bowl of cornflakes and did the duffel bag drag, as they used to say.

  From Saigon I was on a military flight to San Francisco. As suggested by the military, I got off the plane in civilian clothes—jeans and shirt. My hair wasn’t military short, either, but that didn’t make any difference—the protesters were there to heckle us. I didn’t stick around. After a day or two in San Francisco I caught a plane to Vancouver.

  I’d left the Marines with slightly more than six hundred dollars—my per diems for traveling home and the money I’d saved by taking a plane ticket from San Francisco to Vancouver rather than all the way back to my point of enlistment, Plattsburgh. I’d decided after my return never to touch the military pay that, during my service, had been deposited directly into a Bank of America account. There was probably eight or ten thousand dollars in there, but it now looked to me like blood money. I’d had no problem dipping into it for cigarettes or pop when in-country, but once back in North America, I wanted to close the book on Vietnam fully and completely.

  Still, doing so meant that I was as good as broke. I went back to Hull and took up small-time hustling again. While that may have paid my rent and club-sandwich bills, it wasn’t going to earn me any real money. So when Paul Richer approached me one day to see if I was interested in helping him out in a drug deal he was putting together, I couldn’t say no.

  Paul was right-hand man to Arnold Boutin, an older guy who came from a different neighborhood in Hull. Boutin had become the big dealer in town, but neither he nor Paul spoke English, and Arnold wanted to make a connection in Vancouver’s drug underground. In Canada in the late sixties and early seventies, Vancouver was the place for quality, supply and price, especially for LSD and other chemicals. Arnold and Paul came to me because they were aware that I knew my way around Vancouver and spoke English well. Their offer was generous: if I accompanied Paul out west and connected him, they would give me a pound of pot plus five hundred dollars. It all made for a good payday. I agreed on the condition that they’d pay my way and my expenses once out there.

  So in mid-May 1971 we flew off to B.C. After checking into a room at a hotel we got right down to business. I made a few shopping-around calls, inquiring about price and availability, and we eventually decided to do all our business with a friend, Spooner, who lived in the hippie part of town. He could get whatever was necessary. Arnold was in the market for acid and mescaline, both in substantial quantities. I wanted to make the buy all from the same person to minimize risk and avoid attracting attention.

  Spooner provided everything Paul wanted, including my pound of pot. But someone Spooner had sourced his supply from ended up being a police informant. The cops had thus started watching Spooner and, after we paid our visit to him, they tailed us back to our hotel. Still, they didn’t have any idea who we were or what we were doing. For all they knew, the packet we carried out of Spooner’s might just as well have contained beads or meditation manuals.

  Our next stop was the bus station, from which we were planning to send the drugs home via Greyhound. It was just a short walk from our hotel but the police managed to lose us along the way. Had we headed straight to the airport after we’d unloaded the drugs, my life would have been entirely different. But after leaving the station, I realized I’d forgotten my carry-on bag in our hotel room and so we stopped there on the way. The cops were back on us. As our taxi pulled up to the airport departure terminal, they busted us and hauled us into an interrogation room. I was calm—after all, we had got rid of the stuff. But it turned out Paul had kept the receipt from the bus station. They quickly traced the box and found the drugs.

  I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ federal time. Paul, who also pleaded guilty, got a very different sentence for some reason I’ve never figured out: two years less a day definite and two less a day indefinite, all of it to be served in a provincial jail.

  The New Westminster penitentiary was a nineteenth-century institution, built for punishment not rehabilitation. The tall gray walls and towers were intimidating, exuding authority and severity. Rats overran the pl
ace.

  Any prisoner sentenced to federal time in British Columbia was sent there first for classification, so we arrived by the busload—everyone from small-time dealers like me to multiple murderers. After a shower, clean clothes and a haircut we were all taken to a special cellblock for new fish. There, over a three-week period, we were assessed by corrections officials for assignment to the appropriate federal facility. Those pegged as maximum-security prisoners would stay in New West.

  It may have been the fact that I was French. Or maybe I just rubbed someone the wrong way. Whatever the case, I wasn’t going anywhere. I was assigned to the morning shift in the New West kitchen and moved to the appropriate wing. Getting up at five wasn’t easy at first, but it meant I’d be off at two and free to play tennis or poker or whatever turned my crank. But wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I had to watch my step: violence and death came suddenly and without warning in there. I had spent enough time on the street to know that this place had to have its own rules. Until I knew them, my best bet was to shut up and watch. I picked a couple of friends, also kitchen guys, and minded my own business.

  The first serious violence I saw was in the weight pit, three months or so after my arrival. A kitchen guy, Jack, who was doing life without parole for murder, had for a while been trying to punk out—force into sexual slavery, prison-style—a Chinese guy who was no bigger than me. At the end of a workout it was customary to do some reps with as much weight as you could manage. Jack could lift a lot. He was lying on the bench and had just hoisted the bar above his chest when the Chinese guy came up with a tennis racket and forehanded him in the face. Hundreds of pounds of steel came slamming down, crushing Jack’s throat. He died almost instantly.

  In many respects, prison was a lot like boot camp—boot that kept going on and on. The purpose of the two was much the same: to break you down and then rebuild you. Fortunately, I was well suited to survive in an all-male, tough-guy environment. I knew how to mind my own business, avoid troublemakers and do what was expected of me without standing out. I didn’t suck up, but I didn’t take any shit.