by Gayle Rivers
Rape was commonplace in Indochina, but I did not expect it in our unit. It happened more than once in units I was leading; if I was around, I would stop it; if it happened prior to my arrival, I just did not give a damn. I rejected the entire Oriental theater; the civilians meant nothing to me. The girls were raped three days in a week by troops going in different directions. I would never take part in a rape. I never actually saw one of my men commit rape, though once I saw the aftereffects. It was in the northern part of South Vietnam, where the people had been pillaged for years. The girl was not young; she must have been in her twenties. She had been raped, not by one guy but several. She walked to an older woman who took her away. She was not crying, just empty. She looked beyond emotion. There was nothing left of importance in the lives of these women except their children. Sexual fulfillment for them was gone forever, not unlike certain women in our Western society who just get screwed silly. It was as empty as that, a mechanical thing, void of all feeling.
I interrupted a mass rape by a Pathet Lao unit which was a very different, very ugly scene. It was strange; when an American raped a woman, it was not really rape. He would take her, and she would put up some resistance, but he would get into her. And then there was an animalistic release, and it was over. He would go one way looking pleased with him-
self, and she another. That was rape, sure. Until you had seen the other thing.
We were a party of twenty-two. Nine of us were special forces, the rest what was left of an American unit that had been trapped in a village. We had freed the unit and were walking to a pickup point when we came on a village that was held by fifteen Pathet Lao guerrillas. They had herded the villagers out into the clearing and were making them watch a mass rape. This village was no more friendly toward us than they would be to the Pathet Lao, but they just wanted to do this thing. They had four women. One was a girl of fifteen or so. The others must have been in their twenties. The rest of the villagers were herded in a circle around them, guarded by four men. We quietly surrounded the village, but the peasants were between us and the Pathet Lao. We could not hit them without wiping out the entire village. So we had to sit and wait.
They stripped the young girl and bent her backward over the bonnet of an old vehicle, and the guys jumped her from every direction. One was fucking her and another jammed his rifle barrel up her ass, and another one was beating her teeth out with a belt buckle. They just tore her apart, and when they finished with her, they threw her aside like a sack of potatoes and grabbed another one.
The guys with us, the regular soldiers, were going crazy. Some were vomiting, others were priming their weapons and begging us to go in. We split the party up with one special forces man covering a couple of regulars. We sat there and waited until those four girls were finished and the villagers had been moved around.
We hit the Pathet Lao unit. Not one escaped, and few died quickly. I really enjoyed killing that day. I shot one guy to pieces, a little at a time; he had been ramming his rifle up the girls and ripping them open.
When it stopped, the young girl was still alive, but blood was pouring from her mouth and ears, so one
of the Americans shot her. The villagers stood around with their eyes to the ground.
When we cleaned the village up, we found five children lashed to one of the huts. They were dead. They had all been tortured. A tiny girl of nine or so had been raped. A man can do a lot of damage to a child. In the end, that nine-year-old was no longer a child, she was a woman. That was how ridiculous it could get.
We rested for five hours, then struck north toward Highway 19. We were walking mid-contours on the hills, from which we could spot activity in the valley floor. We crossed the highway in daylight between two enemy outposts without making contact. We headed for a trail that would put a range between us and the Vietnamese border, which swung dramatically toward us north of the highway. We ran into a unit of North Vietnamese regulars, whom we avoided by going to ground. They forced us to strike east of the range and push north into very rugged terrain. This area was well patrolled by Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese units. We stayed high on the hillside for better observation.
We followed the Nam Pa toward its junction with a branch of the Nam Meuk. We were entering dangerous territory; there was a road near the junction of the two rivers that carried a lot of military traffic over the border.
Near Sop Nhom, we started bumping into patrols. We kept moving closer to the river to avoid them; finally we were forced onto the riverbed for cover. We knew there was an outpost where the two rivers met, so Toliver decided we would cross the Pa where the road forded it in shallow water.
We arrived at the ford at dusk. Before we could move, two NVA patrols went across. We decided to wait until dark. Time was pressing at our backs; we could not stay here indefinitely.
The riverbed was wide and flat, surfaced with sand
and shingle. We waited until two hours after nightfall, then started across. When we were well into the river, four vehicles came down the road on the far bank and stopped at the river's edge. We went to ground where we stood. Fifteen or sixteen men got out and disappeared into the jungle beyond the riverbank.
"Do we go back?" Jackson asked.
"Hang on," Toliver said. "Let's see what they do."
For an hour, we watched them move along the shore. They appeared to be reconnoitering to set up a machine gun or a campsite. Finally they all came back to the jeeps. Half drove away, leaving eight men and two vehicles behind. They started to lounge around the vehicles, their vigilance lax. Toliver waved for Tan to crawl up beside him.
"Go see if you can hear what they're saying."
Tan inched his way to within fifty feet of the men and listened for a quarter of an hour. Then he crawled back.
"There are more people coming back," he said. "They are going to pitch camp right there."
We had to get out of there before the others returned, and there was no way to do it except to take these people. We could not work a fire fight this close to the border. It had to be done quietly. For the first time, I felt we were outnumbered; just that one extra man made me uneasy.
Toliver and Wiley crawled forward until they were almost to the bank. Tan, Morrosco, and Prather crawled out to our far left flank. Jackson and I stayed put. We were the only ones to retain arms; the others dropped all their gear in the riverbed.
Tan and Morrosco stood up and started walking toward the eight men, with Prather, because of his height, several yards behind them. Tan chatted in Cantonese in a loud voice, and the other two nodded and mumbled. The NVA were puzzled but did not show the slightest alarm. Three of them came forward to see who it was. As luck would have it, they did
not bother to fetch their rifles, which were in the jeeps. The only weapons they carried were the long North Vietnamese bayonets they all wore on their sides. They walked past Toliver and Wiley without seeing them. When they were well clear and closing on Tan, Toliver came off the ground and barked orders at the other five in very authoritative Vietnamese. Unfortunately only three of the five came forward; the other two stayed in the jeep.
Wiley and Toliver jumped the latter three with machetes. They both hit the first man simultaneously and killed him instantly. Wiley swung his blade at the second man and missed. Toliver killed the third before he could unsheath his bayonet. The man Wiley had missed shouted and ran for the jeeps. The other three turned and, whipping out their bayonets, went for Toliver and Wiley. Tan, Prather, and Morrosco moved in behind them, and a wild fight broke out, bayonet against knives and machetes. There was a lot of shouting and the eerie clattering of boots on shingles.
Jackson and I charged right through the fight toward the last two in the jeep. When we got close, I saw that one was drawing a bead with his rifle, so I bowled him over with my shotgun. The guy Wiley had missed beat me to the jeep, grabbed a weapon, and at the same time threw on the headlights just as Wiley and Jackson arrived behind him. I was completely blinded but kep
t running. Wiley climbed over the front of the jeep and got into one of the two, and Jackson got into the other. Jackson disarmed his man and threw him, but fell down himself. He had the man around the waist and was getting nowhere, so I jumped in and was trying to pin the man for Jackson when I heard Wiley scream. I came off the ground and saw the other guy about to drive his bayonet into Wiley. I drove my knife into the back of his neck, then stabbed him twice more before he died. Jackson had recovered and killed his man. He and I jumped up. Toliver was the last man fighting. Before we could reach him, he
tore the throat out of the man he had thrown to the ground. Then he ran forward and kicked out the jeep headlights, throwing the scene into darkness.
"Sound off!" Toliver shouted.
Everyone answered.
"Who's hurt?"
"Wiley." It was Jackson.
We all ran to where Wiley lay on the ground.
"I was dodging the bayonet," he said. "The tip caught in my shirt."
"How bad is he?" Toliver asked Morrosco, who was examining the wound near Wiley's waist.
"I don't think it hit any organs. It looks like it hit a rib and was deflected. He's got some muscle damage and a lot of torn flesh. He's going to be in pain, but he'll be all right."
"What are you doing?" Toliver had turned to Prather, who was wrapping a compress around his left hand.
"I grabbed for the bloke's wrist and caught his bayonet blade. He withdrew it and split my hand open. Nothing serious, Vic."
"Let's clean up and get out of here."
We ran back to the river, strapped on our gear, and tore back to the vehicles. We grabbed all the weapons in sight and faded into the bush. We hoped the theft would make it look like work of bandits.
We hit rugged terrain immediately but pushed on at a hard pace for half an hour until Morrosco noticed that Wiley's wound was bleeding profusely. He had said nothing because he did not want to slow us down. We bound his side tightly and moved on more slowly. Our route called for us to take a trail to the northeast, but that was the direction in which the two jeeps had departed, so we went due north into the wildest country we had seen. What looked from an elevated position to be rolling hills proved to be a landscape of sheer cliffs, deep ravines, and broken rock faces with heavy jungle vegetation growing straight out of the cliffs. From above, the trees made a smooth blanket of green, be-
cause they had all grown to the same height to share the sunlight; in reality, some were forty feet high, some were ten feet.
We stopped at a riverhead an hour before dawn. The border lay on the far side of the range facing us. We had walked all night, stopping when Wiley could not maintain the pace, despite the morphine Morrosco had given him every hour.
We rested in a sheltered area overlooking the valley. There was no one for miles around. Toliver decided to make camp for the day to give Wiley time to recover. We would cross the border that night.
During our respite, the realization grew in my mind that a chunk had been taken out of our armor. Wiley was still bleeding and growing weaker; Morrosco stayed in constant attendance on him and finally stemmed the bleeding. Prather was in pain, though not badly hurt. There was little he could do for his hand. He wrapped it tightly, leaving the fingers exposed; it was one of those superficial wounds that would open and close for days. We were all banged about sufficiently—torn elbows and knees, scratched faces—to be that fraction slower. For some reason, the inside of my ear was bleeding.
We got a reasonable amount of semi-sleep. We were weary, but by no means exhausted. But there followed a lull after a piece of action like our last, which had come so close to going wrong, when people's energies dissipated and needed time to be recharged.
Wiley felt bad about slowing us down and kept insisting he was all right. We ignored that; we would draw our own conclusions about his condition. But this was the man coming out in him. His only concern was about hindering the mission.
I thought his fever might slow him. But we were strong people, and we were up in the highlands where it was cooler, where we had no jungle environment to contend with. Still, there was a feeling that we had gone a long way, mentally perhaps more than physically. We had to consider how we had been doing things
for the last few days, because we were on a mission of the utmost discretion, and yet we had gotten ourselves in half a dozen furors.
We had reached that psychological moment that comes in every mission when we looked at one another and saw that we had all survived and everybody was more or less healthy, and we had this feeling that the thing would work. This was a gradual transformation that came after an initial rejection of the environment. I had come out of Osaka and then a base camp and finally a forward camp into the stark reality of jungle warfare. I had not liked it, and I saw my sentiments reciprocated in the other men. But a couple of weeks had formed a mental graft over the comforts of life, and as the memory of those receded, we settled down to playing soldier in the jungle. From the beginning, I had shared a strong sense of purpose for the mission with Tan and Toliver, and to a certain extent we had been pulling the others along. Now we stood at the point of no return. We were right on schedule; this was the day we were expected to reach the North Vietnamese border. The signal was due now or never.
Our instructions were to maintain watch right up to the last day. There had been allusions in the briefings to the mission being aborted because of the sheer impact of going into China. We had been briefed that if we received the abort prior to North Vietnam, we could look upon it as a mission complete; the whole thing had been forgotten, written off. We could turn around and come back home, our job done.
In briefing, we had been promised repeatedly there would be no abort after Laos. And every time, the briefer had hedged with half a dozen exceptions. Abort after today would mean a panic situation. Someone had had a drastic change of mind; or the conference had been canceled; or we had been observed, and political pressure was being applied.
No one spoke when Tan switched on the radio. If we went in, the chances were strong that we would not survive. This feeling had been heightened by the
fury of our recent combat. From where we sat, we could look into this land that was totally alien, totally hostile to us. We were really going behind the lines now, absolutely universes away from safety. We were walking into a coliseum with the lions, and the gates would be closed behind us. We could survive only by killing the lions.
I accepted that challenge. Suddenly I was thinking about Giap again, thinking how much I wanted to get the man. I started functioning again as that type of operative, making connections with that side of my character. And I got a positive rush, as if someone had shot me full of Benzedrine. I started to flex my muscles again. I would climb the mountain to its highest peak. And I would survive the bitter winds to come back down again. I would get the man, and I would beat the game. I would get away. No one could stop me. Not even Toliver. If the abort came now, I would take off on my own. The others may not have shared my excitement. I sensed a certain mood—or it was something I saw in their eyes—as if some might have been thinking a bit too much about living.
"You know," said Wiley, "it's a hell of a thing we're getting ready to do."
"Not many guys get a chance to change history," said Morrosco.
"Make history," said Prather, "not change it. History has no life of its own. It's made by the men who control its destiny."
"Well, we're getting the chance to stop a war," said Morrosco.
"Or start one," answered Prather. "We're making a clear parallax with world opinion."
"What does that mean?" asked Jackson.
"Assassination is frowned on everywhere. Who knows what the reaction will be?"
"The people that sent us in know what they're doing," said Jackson.
"I hope so," said Wiley.
I looked at Toliver. He showed no sign of having
heard. He looked at his maps, then into North Vietnam. Each of us was reacting in
his own way to the realization that the real mission was about to begin. Everything to date had- been just getting us this far, and we had become slightly detuned from the mission purpose because of our involvement in the normal en route conflicts. Now that the mission was upon us again, people were having very real, very human doubts. The best way to overcome those doubts was to become totally preoccupied with the soldiery of it all. Jackson inspected his rockets. Tan nursed the radio like a baby on mother's milk. I made contact with the Sahka. I detached myself slightly from the others and cleaned my weapon slowly and carefully. I assembled it, then broke it down and put it away; it was an act of reassurance that I was maintaining my deadly application to the job.
"Fifteen forty-five," said Toliver, looking at his watch. "That's it. That's time, Tan."
Toliver walked to where Wiley lay resting.
"How are you?"
"I'm fine. The bleeding has stopped, I won't slow you down."
"Does anybody have a reason we shouldn't push out now rather than in the morning?"
We grabbed our gear and moved out.
CHAPTER 11
We traveled fast, because we wanted to be in the highlands by midday. Our early departure had been an immediate positive action at a moment of great psychological stress. We climbed a long land corridor that jutted into North Vietnam and followed a river toward its source. The river began at a series of sharp hills; when we left it behind, we were in North Vietnam. We passed four hamlets without incident, moving with great caution because we were approaching Lai Chau, a township that radiated considerable military activity. To avoid the increasingly frequent farms, we climbed farther up the hillside, which soon grew into four-thousand-foot mountains. The terrain was rocky, with little cover, but we were out of sight of people moving in the valleys below.
We crossed two highways in the next two days without being observed, but we were edgy because we could hear traffic closing on us constantly. We forded the Nam Po at night without seeing anyone, though it was a busy river.