by Gayle Rivers
"I'm all right," he yelled. "It's a ricochet or splinters."
Wiley dropped back with Jackson to lay down covering fire while Tan slapped a compress on his head. We kept running. The firing grew more distant,
no
then stopped. The mercenaries would be regrouping, counting their dead, wondering how many of us they had come up against. We kept moving at the double until we gained the lower slopes of a jagged green hill. There Toliver took a new bearing to the north, and we moved off cautiously, working our way to higher contours. We marched all day and through the night, breaking once for two hours. We saw no one.
We arrived at M Ngoi just after noon the following day. Tan, Jackson, and Wiley circled the village to the north. The rest of us spread out through the trees on the south side.
Though we expected M Ngoi to be secure—Green Berets had been operating from there for more than a year—we watched and waited. Our cache served as a form of insurance. The Green Berets would have brought it in, then left it to the village elders to hide. If anything went missing, the Green Berets would punish the entire village, and if the Pathet Lao discovered the cache, they would kill every man, woman, and child and burn the village, so the villagers had selfish reasons for remaining loyal to us.
M Ngoi was not much larger than the hamlets we had been skirting in the hills. On three sides of a rectangle, stilted longhouses of bamboo and thatch faced a clearing, their backs to the jungle. The open side of the clearing held a few small sheds. We saw no signs of tension among the people. The men were smoking and talking on the upper side of the village. The women moved casually about their chores. But these villagers were masters of deceit, or they would not have survived thirty years of warfare. I looked for the children. They were playing about freely. If this was a setup, they would have been hidden away. I suddenly realized how much I wanted M Ngoi to be safe. How much we needed a civilized respite. Hot food. A bath. A shave. Undisturbed rest. We waited for three hours for that telltale clue that something was wrong. Finally, Toliver stepped out of the trees. "Let's move," he said.
He whistled and waved to Jackson. We closed a net around the village, moving everyone toward the clearing with a wave of our weapons. There was no panic whatsoever. The women kept working until the diminishing circle caught them up, then they grabbed up the small children and nudged the older ones in front of them. The village men huddled quickly, then four younger ones came forward to meet Toliver; the old men hung back in the shadows of the houses. I felt good about the whole scene, though we still kept our weapons at the ready. Toliver went forward to meet the welcoming committee. They greeted him with a bow and a prayer sign. The oldest of the four, obviously the spokesman, must have been in his late forties, the other three ten years his junior; they were all young, I thought, to be village councillors. The spokesman welcomed Toliver in fluent English. Toliver was cool but not unfriendly.
"Where is the head man of the village?" Toliver asked.
"I am the head man," the man replied, smiling.
"The head man is well known to my people. He is very old and has been a friend to the Americans for many years," Toliver said.
"The old man was honored by our people too. Now he is dead, and we honor his memory. The people have chosen me as head man. Please accept the humble hospitality of our small village."
Toliver looked at Tan. Tan questioned the other three men sharply.
"They say he is telling the truth," Tan said.
"We accept your hospitality with pleasure," Toliver said. "Tell your people that no one must leave the village while we are here. Anyone attempting to do so will be shot. Even the children. If you obey my orders and treat my men well, you shall be rewarded. We wish you no harm."
The man spoke to the crowd that was gathered in the clearing. When he had finished, one woman grabbed up a small child and ran into the house. The
rest remained impassive; they had heard the speech many times before. The crowd slowly broke up. The women dragged the smaller children to play around them while they carried on with the cooking and washing. The men and older boys hung about to watch us.
"What do you think, Gayle?" Toliver asked me.
"I think the village is secure."
"Tell me why," Toliver said.
"Three reasons. First the women. They're not afraid. There were not enough babies snatched up when you threatened them. The men can fool me with their smiles and bows. But if they were setting us up, the women would be frightened out of their wits. They don't look frightened. Secondly, if they were going to hit us, these young blokes hanging about looking at our gear would have been staked out waiting for us. They would have hit us before we could take the village."
"And thirdly?" Toliver asked.
"And thirdly, Tan's not complaining."
"I agree with you," Toliver said.
"Where is the Green Beret unit we expected here? Are you going to ask?" I said.
"No," Toliver replied, "and I want no mention of the cache until I'm completely satisfied. The men not standing guard can fall out but I don't want any weapons broken down yet."
Wiley and Jackson stood the first guard at opposite ends of the village. Toliver continued to question the head man while Tan talked with the others. After half an hour, Toliver called for food and hot water.
When Morrosco started tending the wound in Tan's scalp, a woman came and gently pushed him aside. He watched suspiciously as she probed the blood-caked gash, then let her get on with the job. The rest of us cleaned weapons a few at a time, always leaving some primed for action. A great wooden tub in a wash shed was filled with water heated over open fires. Two at a time, we soaked in the steaming water while the women scrubbed us with soapstone. After bathing, we wrapped clean loincloths about our waists and rested on a shaded
balcony. The older boys, those still too young to be kidnaped into one army or another, questioned us timidly in broken English about our weapons, which we forbade them to touch. The children hung back at first, then came slowly forward.
They gathered about Morrosco, and he fed them gum and chocolate from the rations. I distrusted them as just more flotsam in the tides of war washing across Indochina. I had seen a five-year-old lob a grenade into a group of soldiers; I had seen two-year-olds running down the streets with their clothes on fire.
The women sewed the rents in our uniforms, then soaked and scrubbed them in hot soapy water. As they dried in the sun, the women worked the heavy canvas with their hands to keep it from going stiff.
We dressed when the evening grew chill. The men led us to the village longhouse. Rush mats decorated with flowers were laid upon the floor. Toliver and I sat side by side with the village councillors opposite us. Toliver questioned the head man about troop movement north of M Ngoi, particularly North Vietnamese units that regularly patrolled this far across the border. There was no unusual activity.
"Where is the Green Beret unit?" I asked Toliver.
The village men recognized "Green Beret" and immediately grew silent, looking from me to Toliver.
"I don't know," Toliver said. "I expected somebody to meet us. I'd like to know if there's any indication our pattern of movement has been picked up. If they're not here, there's a good reason, and we're not going to get it from these people. They may be out there in the trees watching us right now."
No one had spoken while Toliver was talking to me. When he stopped, they all burst into conversation at once. Several of the younger men spoke broken English and made an effort to talk with me, but they soon lost interest and fell into conversation among themselves.
"Tan," I called out.
Tan was seated at the far end of the room.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Come and sit next to me. I don't like people talking when I don't know what they are saying."
The women handed each of us a small wooden bowl, then carried in half a dozen cast-iron kettles. They ladled a blood-thickened meat stew into our bowls. One man broke
up a large corameal patty and passed around great hunks which we dipped into the stew. When the rich juice was gone, we ate the tender meat with thumb and forefinger. The stew was followed by several rice dishes, some with bean shoots or potatoes, others with bits of fresh perch from the mountain stream. There was a delicious soft goat's milk cheese with pieces of pineapple cut up in it. I drank goat's milk through the meal, while the others drank milk wine made with potatoes and ground onions. The women cleared away all the dishes and brought guavas and sour grapes to end the meal.
'They are proud of that meal," I remarked.
"They ought to be. That was some feast," said Morrosco.
"It is their way of welcoming the foreigner into their home," Tan said.
After the fruit, we drank coffee and mint tea. Prather and Wiley offered tobacco to the village men; only the young ones accepted. Jackson pointed out that the coffee and bags of wheat flour we had seen stashed in a corner meant Green Berets had recently been in M Ngoi. The old men retired to the far end of the longhouse to "chase the dragon," catching in flared nostrils the wisps of smoke that rose from tiny puttylike balls of opium that smoldered at the end of thin wooden sticks they gripped delicately between their frail fingers.
After the meal, Toliver and I remained at the table to quiz the younger men with Tan's help. The older man was titular head of the village, but the trio of young men were the active leaders and likely liaison with the Green Berets.
Prather stayed a short while, then left to sleep. The
children attached themselves to Morrosco. They followed him like a Pied Piper around the village, and he encouraged them to teach him their games. To my surprise, Jackson had a warm regard for the villagers and showed a remarkable familiarity with their customs. He wandered aimlessly about, chatting in English to anyone who would listen. Wiley lay on a mat on the porch. The women washed him with cool rags and fed him herb tea to combat his fever. Finally, he slept.
After an hour of intense interrogation, Toliver decided we had learned all we could from the young men. Tan rose quietly and left the longhouse. I saw him stoop to pick up a rush mat from the porch. He carried it across the clearing and mounted the steps of another house, dark and silent. Carefully he spread the mat on the porch. With a slow, fluid motion, he sat cross-legged on the mat, then brought his body effortlessly into the lotus position. For a few seconds, he rocked his torso back and forth. Hands resting lightly in his lap, fingertips touching, he stared straight ahead.
Morrosco and Jackson managed to find two seemingly unattached young women; the village men raised no objection. They looked to Toliver for approval. He ignored them. We were pulling out in a few hours; if they wanted women rather than sleep, that was their affair. Morrosco looked at me for reassurance. I shrugged. The two men made pallets on the veranda and went to sleep.
I was sympathetic to the two. In a different way, I too had been seduced. In Western terms, there was nothing sophisticated about these people; they were peasants in a small village struggling to survive a war they did not understand. Yet there was a charm here I could not ignore. The village lived on the bitter fruits of war. Yet these people we held by force of arms welcomed us with feasting. The village was neat and tidy, the villagers freshly washed. In a way, theirs was a rich, fulfilling life; they were completely at one with an environment that provided clothes for their backs, a full stomach of fresh and delicious food. These were
just simple mountain people, but they had much to admire and envy.
But nothing is quite that simple, I reminded myself, shaking off a false "sense of security the bath and feast had brought on. There was not a weapon in sight except those we had brought with us. But these gentle people must have been armed to the teeth. And they could use those arms, otherwise M Ngoi would not be a Green Beret village. It was their guile that deceived me. It took more than arms to keep a village standing in Laos. A Pathet Lao unit could walk in tomorrow and get the same warm welcome, the fish and rice, the hot baths, the smiling women who tended to rent uniforms and battered bodies. The Pathet Lao were no more fooled than we were or the Green Berets. The Pathet Lao would not mess up M Ngoi so long as they could ignore it; that would alienate them from the peasants who fed them. And they courted no trouble with village mercenaries.
There was not a man to be seen here between fifteen and thirty-five. M Ngoi must have had a mercenary unit out at this moment. They might even be guarding the village, ready to burst in on us at the first sign of trouble. Meanwhile, the mercenaries and the Pathet Lao were maintaining an effective truce in order to fight their common enemy, the Laotian National Army. There was this strange bush diplomacy in these regions where even the Green Berets were left unmolested if possible.
It was all considerably more sophisticated than this gentle, friendly village would suggest. You had to know who your friends were. And you never could. Besides the Green Berets, M Ngoi might be in the pay of the national army or even the North Vietnamese. Or all three. Blokes like Morrosco and Jackson never worried about that sort of thing. But I felt myself drawn daily more closely to Toliver, to my role as second-in-command. I had seen no sign of jealousy or resentment in the unit over my rank, even after the fight with Jackson. The team accepted it, encouraged it now that
I had proved myself worthy. And Toliver was growing to depend on me more each day.
It came down to the difference between soldiers who were very good at their job and soldiers who looked at the situation in a wider concept. I had as much respect for the trio's touch for the bush and combat savvy as any soldiers I had ever known. Rut there were limits to how much they cared to get involved. That is where you get a separation in authority and leadership. A Green Beret private and a Green Beret officer were two of the best soldiers anywhere, but they had a different way of looking at a military situation. They made such a devastating team partly because both recognize that difference. In our unit, military order closely paralleled the natural order. It made life less complicated for all of us.
When Toliver finally stretched out to rest, I made a pallet and fell instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep.
"Rivers!" Toliver called and shook me awake. "Get them together. We're moving out." It was 0300 hours. The men moved sharply. The sleep and hot food had made us stronger. The bath, a shave, a clean uniform, a momentary respite from combat in which to breathe the air of humanity had lifted our spirits. Wiley was not well, but he was holding malaria at bay. As we left M Ngoi, the village women draped our shoulders with wicker baskets of fruit and boiled vegetables. The village head and the three younger men led us half a mile north through almost impenetrable foliage to the cache. It was enormous. This was the last friendly contact and resupply point until we reached M Ngoi on the return journey. The Green Berets operated north of here, but if a cache were discovered, it might expose our mission pattern to Hanoi or Peking. The conference was little more than a week away. The least sign of movement toward Ta shu tang would cancel the conference or change the venue in an instant. When we marched away from this cache, we had no further linkup, no further source of resupply, and no support. We were truly alone.
We immediately sorted out the ammunition.
"Rivers!" Jackson called out. "Your shotgun ammo."
He handed me two dobie bags I had forwarded from Bien Hoa. I also took a new Armalite to replace mine, which had been jamming. We all had fresh uniforms. Clothing was our armor against the environment; the longer a mission endured, the more important a man's uniform became. Tan and Prather changed into new shirts; despite the repairs at M Ngoi, theirs were little more than tattered rags. The rest of us saved ours. We all changed socks and stuffed our pockets with extra pairs. Socks were our best safeguard against blisters that would cipple a man hiking ten miles without rest, but they were worn out in three days. Toliver threw away his torn boots and struggled into a pair too small for feet swollen from a fortnight's marching. All our boots were falling apart, but only he chose to break in a new pair
; the rest of us packed ours with the uniforms. The essentials sorted out, we dealt more leisurely with the rest of the cache.
'These people are one hundred per cent secure," Toliver said. "They didn't even break into the Red Cross packages."
What remained was a treasure trove of items unobtainable for these mountain peasants: cigarettes, chocolate, sewing kits, medicines. Morrosco sorted through the medical bags for more antimalaria pills now that Wiley was using them. We rifled through the rest, stuffing our pockets with glucose tablets and sugar cubes, cookies and dried fruit. There was enough to have supplied us five times over. This was done purposely so that we could leave a generous parting gift for the village.
Toliver had Tan call our escort from where they squatted quietly under a nearby tree. If we made it back from China, the survival of the unit could rest in the hands of these four. Toliver made a brief, almost formal speech in English which Tan translated, thanking the villagers for their hospitality. As a gift, he offered, with a deepest regret and humanity for its in-
significance, all that remained. To the head man he presented a score of grenades and an M-3 with a dozen clips. The four men would parcel the goods to their advantage; the villagers would find use for every single item, down to the torn shirts and abandoned boots. Toliver and Tan shook hands with each of the four men. The rest of us gave them a farewell nod. They bowed and made a sign with their hands. They waited for us to leave.
"Let's go," Toliver said.