by Gayle Rivers
One woman kept screaming hysterically, running about without knowing what to do. Wiley grabbed her and flung her toward the group we had herded together. The woman stumbled and fell. He booted her in the stomach and dragged her with one hand into the group. We had the fear running in. It was no good walking in and asking people to put their hands up and be very quiet; it never worked. If we let the momentum drop, we would start doubting the odds ourselves.
I told Tan to make them shut up and to get everyone out in the middle of the clearing. A man came forward who must have been the village head. They did not want trouble, he said. They would do whatever we wanted. But the men started to mumble among themselves, and I asked Tan what they were saying.
"I don't like the look of it," he said.
Then Prather came piling out from hiding and ran straight at one of the buildings. I saw three guys at the veranda window trying to draw beads on us. Tan
and I went back to back and fell to our knees. He covered the peasants, while I furiously scanned the rest of the houses for more snipers.
The three guys never saw Prather. He came across the front of the building and killed all three with one sustained burst. Jackson and Wiley ran through the houses and dragged out two unarmed men.
As I turned back to the peasants, I saw a flicker of movement on my right. I pivoted and fired in one motion. Too late I saw it was a woman running to where the three men lay dead. One must have been her son or husband. I had fired instinctively, and I had made a mistake. Two men ran to the woman, though she was already dead. I saw what they were doing. But I fired anyway. I killed one of them. Jackson killed the other.
All this time, Morrosco had been working his way beneath the buildings. Now he surfaced, shouted, and pointed at one building, and disappeared again. Two men started sniping at us from the last house in the hamlet. The villagers began to scream and wail and wave their hands in begging gestures.
"They've got children down there," Tan said.
I saw Morrosco leap on the veranda and burst inside with his Armalite blazing. There were ten seconds of sustained firing, at first a few single rounds, then all automatic fire. Morrosco came outside and fell up against the building. I thought he had been hit, but he waved that he was all right. No one else seemed to be shooting at us, so I went to join Morrosco and see what had happened. Prather came with me.
We climbed the porch and went into the small building. Six children were cowering together in one corner, staring at me without making a sound. I waved them out the door, and they dashed out, ducking as they went past as if they expected me to hit them. Two men and three children lay dead on the floor. Prather put his hand over his mouth, then over his eyes. He turned and ran out of the building. I watched from the window as he ran to where the peas-
ants squatted. He grabbed up the head man off the ground.
"You bastard!" he shouted. "You killed those children!"
He brought the blade of his hand down across the man's face, crushing his nose. The man sagged, but Prather held him up by his shirt. He drove his fist straight into the man's mouth, splitting his lips and knocking out his front teeth. I turned back into the room.
I pulled the three children together and laid them out. They were so bloody small. They had all been hit by Morrosco's Armalite, which must have been spraying bullets everywhere. I had little time for sentiment, but this sight affected me. A man's body can absorb a lot of punishment. But a child that has been shot is a grotesque thing. These kids' bodies had disintegrated. When a 5.56 round hits a four-year-old child, it just takes arms and legs straight off.
The children were the only ones I regretted to see suffer in this war. I did not give a fuck about the rest of them. When we had started to subdue this crowd, I had no plans to come down on them hard. But when they allowed their own children to get killed, I had nothing but contempt for them. The action had been forced on Morrosco. There was nothing else for him to do. Morrosco liked kids. He felt as bad about it as anybody. But there was no blaming him.
I covered the small bodies with the rush matting from the floor, then walked out and put them out of my mind. The peasants could bury them in their own way after we had gone.
I learned now that Morrosco had been slightly wounded in the upper arm, and a bullet had torn the flesh to the bone on one finger of his left hand. But he was too angry about the children to talk about it. Prather and Morrosco needed to let off some heat, so I ordered them to herd all the people into one of the houses. It was a rough business; they broke heads and smashed down anyone who did not move fast
enough. They made everyone squat on the floor and put their hands on their heads, not for security but discomfort. We took turns guarding them while Wiley and Tan organized some of the women to wait on us.
The women knew that the quickest way to be rid of us was to give us what we wanted. Several set to work at a furious pace. They got water on to boil, and we took turns washing while they stitched our shirts and gave them a quick scrub. We grabbed stew meat from a pot with our fingers before they could heat it. They gathered us chickens and cornmeal and bags of doughy preserved meat that hung in the houses. One woman brought several eggs wrapped in rough sacking. They would be broken in our packs five minutes after we moved out, but we would throw the mess, shells and all, on a fire somewhere and gulp it down.
Jackson and Tan searched the hamlet and found several weapons, but they were too old to be of use to us. The peasants stayed very quiet. The women whimpered a bit, but the men remained silent; their eyes were filled with such hatred, they could have attacked us with their bare hands. But peasants want to live as much as anybody else. A man of forty had had about forty years of this existence, and killing me had a very low priority in his life. Sooner or later I would go away, and the whole thing would be forgotten for a while. Next week, he might be a refugee. In a month's time he would return home. Nothing much would have changed. The buildings would be gone, but he could build another house. The rice would still be in the fields. In a year, it would happen all over again.
We gave ourselves a good scrubbing down. I even took my knife and had a go at my beard. Then it was time to leave. We told the peasants that if anyone moved within the next hour, we would return and fire the hamlet. We regrouped and moved out.
We crossed Highway 6 by midday without incident, though we saw a lot of military traffic. We decided against going back into the river because of what had happened at the hamlet, so we worked our way down
smaller rivers that would carry us toward the Laotian border. For half a day, we walked in virtual silence; no one felt like talking. The streams grew smaller and more frequent as we approached the border. East and south of Lai Chau, we spotted observer aircraft which we presumed were looking for us. We saw distant patrols as well, but they were always a day's march behind us. The enemy seemed to have underestimated our speed. We reached the Laotian border and rejoined the Nam Meuk after two days' unmolested walking. We would join up with our outgoing route half a day's march to the south, where the Meuk intercepted the Nam Pa. We reached the Meuk in late afternoon and found a safe encampment before nightfall. I was happy with our progress and decided to indulge in a good night's rest. We ate and relaxed, then set about repairing bodies and washing uniforms. Our spirits were lifting.
"I'm glad to leave North Vietnam behind," said Morrosco.
"Yeah," said Jackson, "there's combat and combat. But that was some ugly stuff up there."
"Maybe it will get a little easier now, mates," said Wiley. It was the first positive sign from him in days. "How far now to M Ngoi and some of that good chow?" he asked me.
"Sixty-odd miles. I calculate three days and a bit."
"That's where it ends," said Prather.
"Don't kid yourself, Lew, about what lies between us," said Jackson.
"I don't," he replied, "but it can't be worse than what we've seen to date. Well survive it."
"I believe you're right," said Jackson, preparing to
turn in.
I was delighted with the restored mood of optimism. The weather was warm, so we slept out under the stars with our groundsheets beneath us. I gave the men the first full night's rest we had had since leaving Thailand a month earlier; everyone got five hours' sleep. I took a good share of guard duty, because I was
feeling responsible for the unit. But even then I body-slept. I consciously relaxed each part of my body until I was approaching a state of total physical rest while remaining mentally alert. I was almost as fresh as the others when we pushed out the next day.
We broke camp slowly. Everyone was chatting cheerfully. We thought we might be picked up even before M Ngoi because by now somebody must have been wondering where we were, perhaps even looking for us. We pushed off down the Meuk, and even the terrain was favoring us now. We reached the Nam Pa and marched for another day and a half without seeing anyone. By midafteraoon on the second day, we were at the river and road junction where Jackson had been pinned down by the NVA patrol. We encountered no obstruction, not even much road activity though this was a busy track. Either we were moving faster than our pursuers anticipated—assuming we had pursuers— or they thought we had gone somewhere else. But it was unproductive to analyze our opposition to that degree. When I was on the run, I dealt with what I found and just tried to anticipate the obvious. I could not predict everything the enemy might do, because I did not know how far the enemy extended.
We were feeling good; knocked about a bit, but whole. We were on our way to intercept the Nam Rue, which would carry us to M Ngoi. There, at worst, we could rest, rejuvenate ourselves, and rearm; at best, we might get carried straight out of this war. We made camp about midnight at the junction of the rivers Pa and Rue. We preferred moving by day; though it was slightly more dangerous, it made easier going. Then before we settled down to sleep, for some instinctive reason I decided we would push on. This was accepted without complaint. We left the Nam Rue to slip between the villages of Pak Luong and Phou Gi. We were moving into an area where the Luang met the Rue, and the countryside was thick with roads and tracks. I wanted to be beyond these two villages before
sunup because it was a bad area to hold up in and a worse place to move.
It was just coming dawn when we reached an elevated spot north of Phou Gi. We saw a large unit of NVA troops moving out to the north behind us— six jeeps, a dozen canvas-topped troop carriers and pick-up trucks; in all perhaps a hundred men. We went to ground and watched them pass below us and disappear in the distance. We jumped up and hurried like hell to get back into the river, passing very near Phou Gi without being seen. We came off some high land toward a trail three miles below us which would carry us to the river. For a day now, I had had a bad feeling about the way things were developing, and I was very suspicious of the trail we were approaching. I stopped the unit when we reached a point where we could observe the trail from above through heavy woods. It was just wide enough for two vehicles to pass; we could clear it in nine or ten good strides. Prather and I went forward alone. We crawled the last hundred yards in total silence. We reached the edge of the road and lay perfectly still for a minute. Slowly I raised my head and looked about. And froze.
CHAPTER 15
Sitting on our side of the road no more than ten feet away was a small canvas shoulder bag. Immediately I looked up into the trees. There they were. NVA snipers. They had seen the unit approaching. They were looking out over Prather and me, glasses trained where the others were holed up. It was the purest form of instinct that had told me we were walking into a trap. We had seen nothing to forewarn us; the only enemy we had spotted had been moving away from us.
The snipers expected us to come down the trail, because they had the tree trunks between them and the road, leaving themselves exposed to Prather and me. I counted three, settled in about thirty feet above the ground in three different trees. All three had sniping rifles; two of the weapons carried scopes. Prather had not seen them from where he lay ten feet behind me, but he had frozen when I did. Had we not been looking out for booby traps, we would have been moving faster and making a lot more noise. When I was
hunting mines or trip wires, I did it with such care that a spider's web stood out like bloody ship's rigging. But for this caution, we surely would have been observed. I thought to myself how lucky we were to be alive, but perhaps not lucky enough to live much longer. I had left the Armalite behind; I was carrying only my shotgun, which could be ineffective at thirty feet through the branches. Fortunately Prather had his M-3.
The snipers were sitting very quietly, like sharks waiting to pounce on bathers. Prather had seen them now. We looked at each other in distress. I could figure no way out of this. I put my face in my hands, searching for a solution that did not come. I looked back at Prather for encouragement, and he poked his tongue out. I could not imagine what the hell he was going on about. He started cutting his eyes from side to side while thrusting with his tongue at the same time. Finally I realized he was trying to point. I looked across the road, and the bushes were full of these guys waiting to hit us at ground level. The hair stood straight up on the back of my neck. My body flushed with heat.
I looked up again. The guys in the trees must have been observing the unit, because they were staring even more intently now. They would not shoot from this distance, because they wanted maximum coverage. They might hit one man, and the rest could disappear.
I could not count the men across the road, nor did I know if there were others in hiding elsewhere. Prather and I were finished, but we might save the others. I debated for a couple of minutes and finally decided to draw fire first from the men across the road and hope that it took the people above us some time to zero in. I was only asking for seconds.
I undipped a grenade from my shirt, sure that the snipers would spot even that much movement. I showed it to Prather and pointed across the road. He took a grenade as well, and I shook my head and
pointed my thumb up in the trees. I unhooked another grenade, but I honestly thought I would be dead before I could throw the second one.
The noise of the pin being withdrawn from the grenade seemed'to echo through the forest. My mind was racing, my heart pounding. I jumped up and heaved the grenade across the road, then threw myself to the ground, grabbing up my shotgun as I rolled. Prather hit the trees with his AK-47 and brought down the man directly above us. My grenade exploded harmlessly in the middle of the road. A bullet slammed into my back. I saw Prather get hit at the same instant.
"In the trees!" I shouted as I went over backward.
I had not had seconds; I got half a second. One of the snipers must have seen me coming off the ground and fired on reflex, hitting both of us. Now there was firing everywhere. Somebody blew a second sniper out of the trees, and the third one lost his balance and fell out without being shot. I saw him come floating down as if in slow motion. He hit the ground on his feet about five yards from me. He must have broken his back. He was still going down when I biffed the second grenade just beyond him in a side-arm throw. Stones and dirt and shrapnel went everywhere and ripped the man's body apart, and a lot more of it slammed into my side like a sledge hammer.
I must have blacked out for a few seconds because the next thing I saw was Tan staring into my face, and I somehow knew it was only moments later. I rolled over and took a firing line facing the road. Our guys had just time enough to form up in the trees when the guys on the other side heaved a lot of grenades in our direction, and nine of them charged over the road with fixed bayonets. We brought three down in the open, then the rest were upon us. I missed one with the shotgun; after that they were too close to know who was doing what. We were in prone positions, firing almost straight up at men trying to shoot us and drive their bayonets through us at the same time. I hit the first one to me, but as I pumped the shotgun
another was coming down on top of me. I blew his arm and half of his side away, and he went flying. A third reached me before I could react, and someone
shot him off my back. I blew one guy off Tan with the shotgun, somehow without killing Tan as well. Just when it seemed the noise and killing would never cease, it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. We looked around, but there were no more targets to hit. Then I saw that Jackson was locked in a silent death straggle. Before anyone could reach him, he turned a bayonet away from his stomach and impaled his opponent through the chest. The man slumped over, his rifle hanging to him, six inches of blade thrusting out the back of his neck.
"Stay where you are!" I yelled out. "Watch the road!"
We were waiting for another rush. I shot the only man who was still flopping in the road. We lay without moving for two minutes, then slowly began to surface. I sounded off. Everyone responded. A quick look around told me that everyone was exhausted from the last charge. We needed time to put ourselves together, even if there were more of these guys about. Without a word, Morrosco and Wiley raced across the road, prepared to take on the world to give the rest of us a few minutes respite. I heard them sounding off every three or four seconds. In a minute, we knew we had killed them all. We started to crawl around and check each other out.