by Gayle Rivers
He said the mission would call on our individual talents. That he, Tan, and I would be the first team, with Prather to back us up. So much for Prather being baggage. He said we would leave from and return to Thailand. We would be a couple of months behind enemy lines. He inferred it would be in Laos. Jackson pointed out that the briefing had touched on terrain and topography in northern North Vietnam.
"There may be enemy troop movement from there which could affect our mission, so look for more North Vietnam-Laotian border briefings," he said. He went on, "It will become obvious that some of you like to do things in an unorthodox way. In this unit, you can operate any way you want, so long as it doesn't interfere with the smooth operation of the team. I think well learn, in fact, that our little idiosyncrasies complement one another."
He said that some of us would have individual briefings, what we called mission recognition briefings. We would often go in somewhere as a unit, then separate to carry out individual assignments, after which we would rendezvous for the pickup. We got individual recognition briefings from the intelligence people about tactical obstructions protecting our target. That could be anything from a bridge to an enemy unit to a mountain. But from what Toliver said about the unit working together, it did not appear to me that we would be splitting up. Toliver finished by
emphasizing again that the mission would be "observed by highest authority, outside the immediate theater." We broke up and went straight to the scheduled briefing.
It was Saturday now. The funny thing was that weekend passes existed in the American Army in Vietnam, even in a combat zone. The base was quiet for two days. Guys had gone to Saigon. People played baseball. The base had a weekend feel.
The weather was at its best, cool at night, not yet suffocatingly hot and wet by day. Things felt relaxed. We were not accepting the briefings under pressure. Sometimes you felt like you were going over the top, you had had a gutful, and small things like weather or the rumble of a distant battle seemed to stretch your nerves to the snapping point. When a man had been cut off from any friendly human contact, living on his nerves, forced to retain a cool exterior just to survive . . . when that man came back in, he could be explosive. Some could let it out by talking. If you did not like to talk, it was harder.
The second briefing came in hard. Only two of the civilians returned; they handled the political side and the colonel the military. A couple of lieutenants served as aides. But this was no commitment briefing. We must have passed muster, because we were in it now. We got down to business.
The first civilian told us there was tremendous pressure on the U.S. high command for a decisive stroke in Vietnam. The war was becoming daily more unpopular in America, and press reports in the States of communist military successes were demoralizing the allied forces at a fantastic rate. If the Americans were going to win in Vietnam, they needed a bold stroke to gain the initiative. And soon.
The colonel stated straight off that the mission would be extremely dangerous and of the highest secrecy. The combat spectrum would allow us to take advantage of our individual ways of doing things, but we would function as a unit. This told me we were not getting
individual briefings because we were splitting up. The colonel said we had been specially selected for this mission because of our individual talents, thus sidestepping the question of the national mix. We already had our medic and radio operator. Other specific responsibilities would be forthcoming at future briefings. We would depart and return to Thailand. Caches would be prepared for us in Laos, and we could have field linkup with one Green Beret unit in central Laos. The team would have absolutely no linkup outside the special forces network. My ears perked up when I heard this. Normally we would have been able to call on friendly Laotian infantry or airborne units to help us out if we got in trouble. High command did not want even friends to know what we were doing. The mission was being oriented more and more toward North Vietnam, though the colonel was not ready to admit it, and toward an elimination role. It began to look as if we were going to hit a unit of North Vietnamese officers.
He went on to say we would be provided certain weapons and armament for which we had shown personal preference. We would be taken off the base for a week to familiarize ourselves with these weapons.
We hit the maps for zone briefings that incorporated co-ordinates of our route in Laos. We were briefed on military obstructions in northern Laos and then shown, without explanation, two aerial reconnaissance films of northern North Vietnam. That was very deep into enemy territory, very near China. Some of us had been west of Hanoi, but never that far north.
We were briefed on future briefings. We would be confined to quarters until Monday, when we would have two briefings from people coming from the States, followed by a three-week training period interspersed with individual briefings. Finally, a departure briefing.
All this was taken without a single question from the team. First, we did not know what was happening, and second, we had learned from Toliver's breakfast meeting that we would get more answers from him than
from the colonel. The colonel knew we were getting all we could from the briefing; we were not dumb listeners to be put in tin cans and shipped into combat. But he was getting no feedback from us. I thought at first it was our silence that was making the colonel uneasy. He began to sweat as the mission edged toward North Vietnam. Then I noticed that the rest of the briefing team were anxious as well. This I had never seen before. My first thought was that the mission was still being debated somewhere. Or someone was having second thoughts. They were getting close to telling what it was all about; if they were going to kill it, they would have to do it soon. One thing I knew for sure. If the mission was on, we were going in against the rain. We all began to get uneasy as we mirrored the tension at the front of the room. Jackson drummed his fingers lightly on his desk. Prather cleaned his pipe for the third time without lighting it.
When Toliver took us back to quarters, his gear was there. He was part of the team now. After we had eaten, he called us together in the day room. In his hands he had a dossier on each of us.
"If you have any questions, let's hear them. I'll answer them if I can."
"What did the colonel mean when he said 'certain weapons' of our preference would be used?" I asked.
"You men have been chosen for this mission because, apart from being excellent special forces operatives, you have each an area of special competence which will be useful. Kiwi, you are a top marksman."
He had not told me anything yet. There were a lot of those around. "Tan, you can operate a radio in five languages," he went on. "Prather is an excellent topographer, climatologist, and pioneer. Morrosco, besides being a medic, is very good with explosives. As is Wiley. And Jackson has an eye for deflection like nobody's business."
Jackson grinned. He knew what Toliver meant.
"To answer your question, Kiwi, you're getting a Sahka."
"A what?" asked Morrosco. "And what's a kiwi?"
"A Sahka," Prather answered him, "is a 7-mm. hunting rifle. Czechoslovakian. A kiwi is a New Zealand bird, and the nickname for anyone who ever left." Prather looked slightly worried. He must have been wondering if his people knew what he had gotten himself into.
"A scope for the Sahka," Toliver said. That meant it was a hit job. "And you get your rocket launcher, Jackson."
"Do you know how many rockets we'll be carrying?" Jackson asked.
"As many as you need. And not one more. Wiley and Morrosco will help you disperse the load."
This was promising to be the kind of job I relished. The Sahka meant I was to hit someone who badly needed hitting. My last assignment like this had been to hit some real villains, a ragtag band of Montgard mercenaries in the pay of the United States. Their leader had worked for me before, and I hated and distrusted the bastard on sight. They had turned over and led an American patrol into an ambush that had wiped them out. With no survivors, they did not know we had learned about the sell-out. So we
hired them as one flank of a phony ambush of a VC unit. I borrowed a sniping rifle. When they were in position, we hit them. I put a dumdum through the head man and blew him apart like a melon.
Toliver led us out into the barracks yard for an hour of calisthenics. For a major, he could do a lot of sit-ups. I was not much more than half his age, and I was exhausted. We broke and went into the barracks to attend to personal details.
We were all getting to like Toliver. He was a strong leader without wearing his rank on his sleeve. When it did not matter, his discipline was almost casual. And he was obviously being as frank with us about the mission as he was allowed.
Toliver was a hell of a man in every way. Tall and lean—he was well over six feet—he was fit in the
extreme. He had a swarthy complexion which was more than a deep tan. He had a typical army head with closely cropped hair streaked in gray and brown. This was a common sight in Vietnam, where even youths of eighteen who had been in too much high-density combat found their hair turning white. There was a scar under Toliver's left eye, and he was missing part of the little finger on his left hand. He was powerfully built, a man of constant physical awareness; every move he made seemed calculated. His uniforms were noticeably more immaculate than even other special forces people. I guessed his age as late thirties. He had a Korean ribbon, so the Army had been his life from a very early age.
He impressed me as a man of his own style, a man used to doing things his way. Without stretching the bounds of military respect, his self-confidence made him as casual with superior rank as with his juniors. The people who briefed us showed great respect for Toliver; he had done a lot of missions, and it showed. A man who had been through as much as Toliver never let go completely. He could appear to be totally relaxed, but the edge was always there.
My feelings for him had changed abruptly from that first briefing. Then he had been assessing us because, to my knowledge, it was the first time he had seen any of us. When a person did that to me, I rejected him immediately; I felt contempt for him. There was no question of his expertise. One look around the briefing room told me I was with the best. But some are always better at being the best. After what I had been through for a year, I felt threatened by no other human being. I felt contempt because his assessment of me was irrelevant. I could not be belittled by superior rank, because a situation would arise sooner or later where we would recognize and respect one another's capabilities, or one of us would prove to be the better man. If there was mutual recognition of that fact, then you respected one another as equals. If not, you had the leader and the led. But from that very
first breakfast meeting, Toliver had made it clear he knew what I was.
I grew to recognize that his brilliance as a commander was directly allied to mission concept, to using the people under him to maximum advantage. He was expert with explosives and weapons and in unarmed combat, but his greatest talent lay in delegating the experts he had at his fingertips. That meant knowing a little about everything. A man could not be trained for this; it came from experience and having a certain knack. Years in Vietnam meant Toliver had both.
By Saturday evening, the base was filling up again with soldiers on shortened weekend passes who started preparing for a Monday morning inspection. We stayed in the quarters, quietly tending to our personal detail, figuring out just what we wanted to take with us. We knew enough by now to make a lot of educated guesses. The Sahka meant it was to be a hit job. The time allowed meant a long walk somewhere. I would need a lot of ammunition for the shotgun. The others were working out their own gear in the same way.
All day Sunday, the base buzzed with activity as it prepared for the Monday inspection. The south side was cleared completely of all unauthorized personnel.
Early Monday, we were led under guard to our briefing room. Awaiting us were the two civilians, the colonel, and a major we had never seen before. The rest of the briefing party were absent. As we started to take our seats, the colonel called us to attention.
"Gentlemen," he said, "the general has a few words to say to you."
General Westmoreland had been sitting at the rear of the room, and we had not seen him when we filed in. He was supposed to be in Washington, and here he was greeting us. He came forward and made the usual vague speech about the importance of the mission. This was largely ignored because he said nothing concrete but implied that he knew what it was all about. I did not know and I did not care what he thought about it. While the general was speaking, I found my-
self listening to the big choppers. Iroquois and Cayusas were coming and going all the time at Bien Hoa, and I was accustomed to the familiar beat of their rotors. What I heard now was the distant but unmistakable rumbling of the Chinooks, several of them. Westmoreland stopped in midsentence, glanced at the colonel and his own aide, then continued. The colonel trembled visibly as he rustled the papers in front of him. I heard the faintest tremor of anxiety in the general's voice. When the choppers touched down near our building, the general cut his speech short and returned to his seat. I heard a party of men storm into the building, the sound of their heels rushing ahead of them as they strode through the corridors. In the distance, I heard several jeeps driving off in another direction.
A moment later, the door flew open. Two civilians burst in. They both carried brief cases and wore raincoats against the chill of the early morning helicopter ride. They were followed by several military aides. I had never seen either of these men before, but from the way they came upon us, I knew they were very powerful people. They bubbled with confidence and authority. The first man sat down facing us. The other stepped forward without bothering to wait for an introduction.
"General"—he nodded in a perfunctory bow to protocol—"gentlemen, we won't waste time. You have a basic outline of the mission. Let's get down to what it is all about."
In three minutes, he sketched everything we knew to date. He stopped and looked up at the general.
"Gentlemen," Westmoreland said, "I wish I could spend more time with you. Unfortunately, I must attend to a base inspection. Your mission is of the utmost urgency. I wish you every success, and a safe return."
The general left the room with an aide. I suddenly realized that the inspection had been a decoy to get these two men on the base without attracting attention. Bien Hoa was very much a front-line base, under
constant observation by the enemy. Somebody was going to a great deal of trouble over us. But I was not given time to reflect on this.
"Faces!" the speaker snapped. The second man removed a brown envelope from his brief case. The envelope contained photographs which he pinned, five in a line, then seven beneath, to a bulletin board set up at the front of the room. These were head and shoulder shots, portraits of communist officials. The faces suddenly became familiar; we had seen them repeatedly in films over the past week. General Nguyen Van Giap, the North Vietnamese Chief of Staff, was the only one I knew by name. His had been the first picture to go up. The American raked a pointer across the top line of five photographs.
"Prime targets," he said sharply. "Secondary targets," he said, quickly thumping each photo in the lower line. He gave us no time for reflection. He stepped closer and rapped General Giap's photograph with his index finger.
"Rivers!" he called out.
He made a V with his fingers and touched the next two photos, both Chinese officials.
"Toliver," he said.
He made the same V beneath the last two primary targets.
"Tan," he said, turning slightly to look at the man.
The first of Tan's targets was Chinese, the second Korean. Tan stiffened visibly in his chair and leaned forward. The speaker dropped his hand to the second row.
"Rivers," he said, again spreading his fingers to indicate two targets for me. The next three went to Jackson, then one each to Tan and Toliver.
I could not tear my eyes away from the first photograph. I had been up against Giap a lot in the past year, facing un
its he was directing in the field. He was the man who made the NVA work, the cleverest fighting man in Southeast Asia. Here stood a stranger in a raincoat giving me license to hit him. I found myself
shaking with excitement The blood seemed to rush to my head, to my fingertips. The back of my neck burned fiery hot. Jesus,'I thought, this is it. Then the thrill subsided as quickly as it had come.
And suddenly I was amazed at what we had gotten into. All the analysis, all the assumptions we had been making for a week began to fall into place. Prather was the one who broke the concentration. He packed his pipe, then looked up without lighting it.
"Sir," he said, "does my government know about this?"
The man gave a mirthless smile which told me he was not going to answer Prather's question.
"Your unit designation is the Five Fingers, the mission designation the Five Fingers Exercise. You have been selected for the mission because of your individual talents . . . allied to your five nationalities. It must be obvious from your political briefings that there has been an upsurge in political activity among the Southeast Asian communist rulers appertaining to this theater. A plan of action is at this very moment being debated among the communist hierarchy which, ■ if implemented, would have global repercussions. Forty-five days from this date, a conference will be called by the adherents of this plan to finalize its form and content. It has been decided to combine the interests of the principal anticommunist powers to effect joint counter measures. You have been assigned • to this mission as representatives of your various nations to take positive pre-emptive action against this conference to prevent this plan being carried forward. Your job, gentlemen, is to erase the conference site and to terminate with extreme prejudice the faces you see before you."
"Sir," interrupted Prather, "by whose authority are we ordered to do so?"