The Five Fingers

by Gayle Rivers

  We anticipated that the guards in the immediate vicinity would number about sixty. They would be the Chinese equivalent of special forces. They would

  not panic for long, and we certainly could kill sixty of them.

  "Let's don't get greedy," Jackson said, "The pigs get fat, and the hogs get slaughtered."

  We had to assume that the main security forces would be down on the highway. After all, this was supposed to be a secure meeting. If the President of the United States was walking around the White House lawn with the Russian leader, they would have a few bodyguards about. But they would never expect a commando team to hit them with rockets and high explosives.

  Once we had delivered our explosives, it was time to leave. We would have nothing but small arms to fight with now. The Sahka and rocket launcher rifle would stay behind; they were of no use to us. We had to pull this off in under ten minutes, before the security detachments on the road below could reach us. We would strike north into the mountains beyond, circle back south to our route in, and run for Thailand.

  Withdrawal was very suspect for the first twenty minutes; we would be at close quarters and under observation all the time. Twenty minutes north of Ta shu tang, we would move into cover.

  We worked on Prather's plan late into the night. With a few changes we made on the spot, it seemed sound in theory. If it worked in rehearsal, we would stick to it.

  We were tense but relieved by the time we broke up. After a quick meal, we gathered in the day room for a chat.

  "Toliver's a good English name," Prather commented.

  "Taliaferro's a good Italian one," replied Toliver. "My father came to America when he was five. He changed his name the day he reached twenty-one. I may change it back one day."

  "Where'd you get that southern accent?" Morrosco asked Jackson.

  "What's it to you, soldier?"

  " 'Soldier' won't do in this outfit," Toliver said.

  "It's not southern. I'm from Texas. Anything wrong with that?"

  "I don't know' You left it. Do you know why Texas was settled?"

  "No, I don't know why Texas was settled."

  "Neither do I."

  "That supposed to be funny?"

  "What happened was the wagon trains were headed for California, and when they got to Texas, the guides died."

  "Why don't you go get Tan, Gayle," Toliver said to me. Tan had not joined us in the day room.

  Tan's door was open, so I knocked and went straight in.

  "Join us for a beer?" I said. Then I saw that Tan was sitting on the floor, gazing at a yellow candle flame. I had walked in on his nightly meditation. He was resting on a rush mat, his back very straight, his hands and legs in the lotus position. His only movement was a deep breathing and an ordered, slow blinking of the eyes. I left him. Half an hour later, he joined us.

  "Hey, Kiwi," he said, "what's going on? Is Jackson letting these young boys know who the sergeant is?"

  I had liked Tan from the first time I saw him, a sentiment which had been mirrored by him. I had spent less than a day with him before I recognized that Tan was about the best soldier I had ever seen. He was totally tuned into a combat environment and to doing the things he was good at. He was very talented and commanded a tremendous amount of respect right across the unit. And he immediately distrusted anything that he was not involved in or could not instantly identify. These were ideal qualifications for the special forces.

  Though Tan was a lieutenant in the South Korean Army, he must have grown up in America, because he spoke American English with no trace of a Korean

  accent. His age was difficult to judge because, like so many Orientals, he had a mature face and a very youthful physique. He was a handsome man with a clean, shiny complexion; a lot of the Koreans were pock-marked, as if there was something in the climate that did not agree with them. Tan was not classically Oriental in appearance. His eyes were a bit rounder than the average Korean. He was about my height, five feet six or so, which was on the tall side for a Korean. He was unusually stocky, very strong but incredibly quick, with a total awareness of the immediate physical environment. Tan was the sort of person who seemed to catch something before it started to fall.

  I supposed that Tan had gone to America after the Korean War. He must have trained with the American forces at some time, because he did things the American way. But Tan was a man with no history. I would never try to penetrate the armor of a man like Tan. His past was to be his own forever. He was a man with a hatred. The others speculated about what might have happened in Korea. I never bothered.

  Tan was totally dedicated to being what he was. He was in Vietnam to kill communists. Sometimes it was as if he had no allegiance to anything but that, not even to Korea. He would fight communists until he died. Now he had been given this job, to kill the biggest Korean communist he would ever see. He was not keen on details; he wanted to go. The more involved things got, the less interested he was in the far-reaching effects of the mission. To Tan, Vietnam was a localized theater. He did not care what the Americans were up to, or the Russians, or the Chinese. He had an abstract interest in Asian politics; he was quite knowledgeable on communist political strategy, particularly at the peasant level. But he refused to allow that to be allied to the mission. He wanted to go north and kill his communist. And, if possible, come back and kill some more.

  Tan was an intellectual, well educated in several cultures. He spent his spare time meditating or reading,

  mostly religious books. Despite whatever years in the States, he remained an Oriental, but with Western interpretations. He had the privilege of a Western education, which made him in my estimation a better man. Not out of conceit for the Western mind. Tan had grasped the best of Western technology, but if he had lost his Korean culture, he would have been a lesser man. Tan was not that.

  Though Tan worked mostly for the Green Berets, he was permanently attached to a Korean Rangers squadron which operated under its own identity. The Koreans were about the best troops in Vietnam. Tan was virtually a free agent. He was given enormous latitude for a Korean, to the extent that while the ordinary Korean soldier had almost a shaved head, Tan had black hair that hung straight to his shoulder blades. In moments of relaxation, or when we were being briefed, it remained loose. In training, he tied it in a pony tail with a scarf and tucked it in his shirt.

  An idiosyncrasy like the long hair emphasized Tan's self-confidence. Many of the Oriental soldiers, even good ones, were self-deprecating. Tan knew he was good, knew he commanded our respect. He did not have to prove a damned thing. Oddly enough, he was capable of a certain affection for the people around him. I could see it growing in the unit, for Toliver, for me.

  CHAPTER 5

  We stayed in the same quarters, under permanent guard, for the balance of the training period. We spent the first two days working out our plan under a shed in the barracks yard; after that, we flew out almost daily to a firing range a few miles away where we rehearsed in earnest.

  Our day started with breakfast at 0530 hours. We were serviced in our own mess by the colonel's staff aides, senior NCOs who brought our food in from outside. We had anything we wanted. Toliver, Jackson, and Prather enjoyed a heavy breakfast of eggs, sausages, toast, juice, and coffee. Wiley ate the same, only more. Tan had nothing but fruit juice and coffee. Morrosco's massive frame burned more energy than the rest of us, and he could never fill his sweet tooth. For breakfast, he ate a pumpkinlike gourd smeared with jam and sugar. He stuffed his pockets with sweets to munch on during the day. I usually had wheat germ and milk, then tropical fruit: papaya, guava, tree

  tomatoes, a boiled sweet potato similar to the New Zealand kumara.

  After breakfast, we carried out pack readiness while consolidating in our own minds and among ourselves what we wanted to accomplish for the day. Then a physical buildup. We ran, climbed ropes, vaulted a horse, did body contact work: pushing, wrestling, throwing. Stretching our bodies to the limit first thing in the morning m
ade us rearing to go.

  At 0900 hours, special forces choppers picked us up behind our barracks and ferried us to an open patch of land about five minutes northeast of the base. The spot was elevated and had tree cover at the perimeters, which made it difficult to observe; Bien Hoa was under continuous surveillance. The chopper crews stayed with us as a security guard. We laid out with sandbags and timbers the approximate dimensions of the conference hall and set to work.

  We broke for lunch in the field; the chopper crews ate with us. They were very impressed with our weapons, especially when I started piling off with my shotgun. In the afternoon, we practiced anything we were not happy with from the morning.

  The day ended when we called a halt. One by one we would decide we had reached our goal for the day. Over coffee, Toliver would debrief us in the field on how the day had gone. We planned the following day's program. Then we would loosen up a bit, perhaps play ball with the chopper crews until dusk. On the way back, I might have a go at flying a chopper. We showered and ate and a couple of hours later had an evening briefing with Toliver. Then Toliver would disappear for a briefing with the colonel, who was monitoring our progress very closely.

  From the first moment, my objective was to personalize my target, to make it—not the mission— the most important thing in my existence. I studied the three films for hours alone, selecting certain shots to be blown up for facial and character analysis. On a couple of occasions, the colonel came in the film

  room and tried to chat. But preparing a target is a solitary exercise. I did not want him interrupting my pace of recognition and interpretation. Even among the unit, we did not discuss our targets or individual briefings. None of us wanted another's analysis of his target; it remained a very personal thing. A hit like ours was rare, even in special forces. It might happen once in a career. We were being allowed the time to think it through. I spent hours pacing the impact area, inwardly working out my attitude, dissecting the target mentally and physically. I would work on a vein of thought, then test it to see if it worked in practice. Or I would spend a morning timing myself over a certain distance, as often alone as with the others.

  I stuck the blown-up photos on sandbags, paced off 180 meters, and started firing. Zeroing in for the first shot was a mechanical operation that took ten minutes the first day. The only thing not allowed for was the elevation, which I would have to determine on the spot. I began tuning my weapon for my fire rate, allowing myself the flexibility to adjust to altered conditions at the site. I could never train to absolute perfection, because things are never exactly as they are supposed to be. But I could try. There were areas that had to be strictly timed. After I had made my shots, I had to disconnect from my weapon. Do I secure it? Drop it? Throw it clear of the area? I would make the shot from a prone position, using my pack as a gun rest. My other weapons would be behind me; I could not risk something swinging under my arm as I fired. I had to detach myself from my prime weapon, gather my gear, and take off for the trio. Our lives were counted in seconds here. Four of us practiced alone, the trio as a team, until each knew he had reached the limits to which he could perfect his role.

  Then we came together on the linkup. There was nothing difficult here. It was a matter of working out how well we could coordinate, which after three weeks together on the march would become an automatic function anyway.

  We rehearsed withdrawal tactics, but there was little we could train for, because it became purely operational, for which we were already at peak training. A fire fight was almost a matter of habit for us. Once we had memorized instructions, the rest came naturally. Mission-in and mission-out were going to be fairly commonplace, though harder than usual. Details were reduced to mechanical factors like daily progress, the two caches, the abort signal. There were no rendezvous to make, so our progress would be charted by coordinates.

  We rehearsed the hit day after day until we were all satisfied. Then we began on its permutations to compensate for anyone who got hit on the way. If I got killed, Toliver took my targets, and Prather took Toliver's. Prather would join the trio if one of them was hit. In the absence of Tan, Prather would hit his prime targets, and I was responsible for his secondaries. And so it went. If we got to the site, anyone could take any other's job. If all three of us with prime targets were killed, the mission was aborted. All this was not training appertaining to this particular mission; this was basic mission readiness, excepting that we were training to carry out a very important job in a very short time, and we were given the luxury to prepare it to perfection.

  As soon as we had the hit rehearsal going smoothly —about the middle of the second week—when we should have started to relax, I felt the unit tightening up. We had time to think about more than the physical mission, and I heard snatches of conversation about "stopping the Third World War" and "changing history." When the issues thrust themselves forward like this, they were too big for people like Morrosco and Wiley to handle. Their edginess was reflected across the unit. We all grew tense. Toliver and the colonel started to detune us psychologically from the importance of our targets. The purpose of the mission became to remove certain individuals meeting together on a fixed date. The motivations for the mission

  reached so far beyond the immediate theater of Vietnam that to allow us to relate our job to the possible consequences would have focused our interest on political repercussions rather than the mission itself. This could create endless delay factors, both in preparation, where we might overdo our training, and at the site, where the possible repercussions might make one of us hesitate a second before pulling the trigger. They did not want us preoccupied with the extremity of what we were doing.

  The emphasis was put on the threat we had been made aware of, and its diminishment by taking out these parties. Immediately it became a military mission, no longer sabotage or political assassination. We were being asked to do what special forces do best, but on a grander scale.

  Our incursion into China was always very clear. We were doing something that had not been done before, and we had been chosen because we were the only people good enough to do it. This underlined the drastic measures that were being taken: it elevated the whole affair above a lot of discussion. The mission, we were told repeatedly, had been initiated at the very highest authority. No one ever named the White House, but what else could we assume?

  How could the Western allies gamble so much on one bold stroke that would be measured in seconds? They could do so because we dealt in time spans that were incomprehensible to the average man. Some people— pilots of high-performance aircraft, auto racers, downhill skiers—have a different visual perception from the rest. They can stretch time with their eyes. In combat I often experienced this, as did other long-time combat veterans. Events around me could suddenly be thrown into slow motion while my mind was sorting problems and finding solutions at a fantastic rate. As if I had time to calculate what should have been reflex actions in a normal time span. The brain would start interpreting at the speed of light; my eye and my mind would take charge, directing my body with total

  detachment. Nothing happened too quickly; it was as if time stood still, waiting for me to respond.

  That was what survival in combat was about. You would be jumped by surprise; if you were that sort of detuned person, you allowed your body to function automatically. You just naturally moved the right way. That left your mind free for problem-solving. If a man was laying an arc with an AK-47, somehow you knew if you were part of the next sweep. You moved. Or hit that gun. And you got away with it. Because you had more time than he did.

  We needed that edge to survive this mission, because we were going to be out in the cold for a long time. We had already drawn the conclusion that we were expendable. In military terms, not the stark realization of what that meant. We had no linkups beyond central Laos. We were not given access to the espionage network in China, which must have been extensive just north of Vietnam, judging from the intelligence data we were
being fed. The colonel told us the mission justified exposing a network that had been built up over the past twenty years. The first plan had been to us Chinese. We were chosen as a better alternative. We could do the job as well, and we did not compromise the network.

  As training progressed and we became more integrated on a personal level, we found we shared mutual respect for one another's talents. Morrosco and Wiley were unit support; they had been brought in as aides for Jackson. But believe me, they were as important as the rest of us. Without them, there was no mission complete, no unit survival.

  Often one of us would show another something he did not know. Weapons instructions came natural to me. Wiley was superb with an M-3. Prather watched Barry a day or two and chose that as his prime weapon. I taught him to zero in with short bursts rather than sweeping the weapon . . . how to get a good spread by vertical instead of horizontal arcing, thus not creating self-inflicted deflection of the bullet.

  Jackson and Morrosco got Toliver to show them how to cut a boar's-tooth pattern at the top of the barrel of their Armalites. The boar's teeth caused the round to expand unevenly as it left the barrel. This set it in a tumbling motion which shortened its range but did not affect velocity greatly. On impact the round was tumbling and spinning and, by jees, it would rip a tree apart. We all tried it, and I got quite accurate using an adopted Armalite. Jackson taught us all how to use the rocket launcher and passed along some of his sighting techniques.

  Weapons fascinated me, because they are subject to endless adaptation. I showed Prather and Wiley how to use explosive bullets, crossed dumdums, to best advantage. Dumdums might be illegal under the Geneva Convention, but there was no question about our not using them. If you hit a man with a solid round, and missed bone, he kept coming. He might die later, but in the meanwhile he could kill you. The hollow-nose bullet was more effective, but it could flatten against bone and be deflected. The dumdum exploded on impact and just disintegrated in the man. Almost the ideal round. But any time you tampered with a bullet, you unbalanced it. Unbalanced rounds caused guns to jam. So you kept altered rounds to a minimum. You did not need every round to be explosive. This was overdoing a technique which was highly effective used in a balanced way. There was no point in having a prime weapon with prime ammunition if you used it en masse. In a fire fight, if you were using all explosive bullets, you would have shit flying everywhere. And when it all settled down, you would be surprised to see how little damage you had done. With one in three rounds explosive, you would pick your area of destruction and do twice the damage. It was partly psychological, partly to do with weapon application. The same was true with tracers. Used exclusively, it was like running a rope from your barrel to the target. You would not concentrate your fire within the natural confines of your arc, and you would be pin-pointed