by Gayle Rivers
When we reached high ground, I sent the other four down a narrow valley with Jackson and the stretcher, and I climbed to survey with the sight. Any movement southwest toward the Mekong was blocked by pockets of military activity; I could not identify the troops. We went high again and kept moving southeast. So it went for days. Every time we tried to turn toward the Mekong, we found our path obstructed.
We kept climbing until the thought of dragging the stretcher up one more hill became unbearable. When we reached a junction of four rivers like noughts-and-crosses southwest of Ban Hatpakmut, we moved into the bed of one stream that seemed to aim for the Mekong. Just as the stream broke into open terrain, I heard a sound which I did not recognize at once. "Look!" said Prather, pointing toward the southwest. Just above the horizon I saw three helicopters moving slowly east to west; these were the first we had seen since leaving Thailand. From time to time, they hovered or dropped low to the ground. They were too far to identify as U.S. or Thai, but they were American-made machines, and they were looking for something. They appeared to be on our side of the Mekong.
"If they come overhead, do we try to contact them?" "I'm going to ground."
We were an uneasy lot; strange things were running through our minds. From a high vantage point, we saw a highway several miles to our southwest. It carried so much military traffic that I began to doubt it was connected with us. We rested on the river the remainder of the day and had a long debate about our next course of action. We thought we were on the Nam Kading, west of Ban Phangiaung. The nearest safe Mekong crossing I knew was at Nakhon Phanom, more than seventy miles to our southeast; I had worked out of Phanom West, a Thai airstrip near there. Muang Pakxan appeared impossible. There was no division in the unit over this; none of us was willing to risk confrontation with Laotian government troops.
We agreed to turn ourselves over only to Americans, or to Thais if we got across the river. Until then, we would keep moving southeast.
"If we can find a radio," I said, "I'm calling out for choppers." _
"What if they shoot us down?" asked Wiley.
"That's a risk I'm prepared to take," Prather said, and the others concurred.
We pushed off after dark and made fifteen miles that night, not bad going considering our condition. Or had we been two days doing it? Things were beginning to blur in my mind. We intercepted a dirt highway west of Ban Phonkho and moved along high ground that carried us above mangrove swamps to either side of our route. We took a trail, then had to lie low for hours while people moved up and down it. I began to forget where we were and what we were doing.
We were in a terrible state by now, moving on instinct alone. Prather had contracted malaria and carried a constant fever. Dysentery struck Morrosco as we were ascending a steep grade. He fouled his fatigues with watery excrement; he cursed and moved on. I had a fantasy of walking away from the unit, sloping off into the woods all by myself. I was sick of the sight of them. Tan was the only one functioning well. He was moving like a lizard, he was so sharp. I could not understand it until I saw him choke down three Benzedrine tablets at one go. I began to watch him. He was taking speed every three or four hours. We had all been using it, though not in quantity. I stopped when I found myself dependent on it to keep moving. I spent a hellish twelve hours until my adrenals started to work again.
We debated cutting southwest to the Mekong, them decided to keep moving southeast, paralleling the curve of the river. We knew somebody was deploying Laotian troops against us. But it just was not rational to think that the entire government army was after us.
Prather suggested that one area commander was directing operations against us because of what we had done in his region. If we could get clear of him, we would be far safer. This was little more than a way of reassuring ourselves that we had alternatives. We were working hard to make this thing appear better than it was. It was hard to accept that we were public enemy number one.
It took us another day and a night to get down to where Highway 137 began near Ban Nongjao. We arrived at a hamlet near there just after nightfall. We were in a bad state; we needed what a hamlet could give us—food, rest, tending to our wounds, a psychological rejuvenation, a brief respite from the relentless chase. A quick look told us that the place was occupied by mercenaries strolling about casually with weapons in their hands. Most of the armed men were concentrating around one central dwelling.
"Who are they?" I asked Tan.
"Obviously mercenaries. But friends or foe? There's no way of knowing."
"Do we go in?"
We wanted that hamlet desperately. They all waited for my decision. I could not make up my mind.
"What about the mercenaries?"
"I say we take a chance with them. Change our luck," Prather said.
"Might as well shoot yourself out here in the bush. It's quicker."
"I'm tired, Gayle. I'm just about ready to do that."
"I'm still in charge here. Nobody's committing suicide—individually or the entire unit I'm taking you all back to Bien Hoa."
I decided to let the people settle for the night, them take the place quickly. We never saw more than five or six men with weapons, but they were constantly coming and going from the one building. Women and children were wandering about unmolested, so they had the confidence of the mercenaries. When things grew
quiet, we parked Jackson in the undergrowth, and the five of us moved in for a close look. We were slipping up a trail fifty yards from the first hut when we came face to face with two peasant men. We must have been a frightening sight, but I gave them time to recover from the shock. I prayed they would smile and make a welcome sign. They just stared. Then one of them tried to shout out a warning. Before three words were out of his mouth, we had killed the two with our knives. We waited, but there was no alarm.
These two were ordinary peasants, not mercenaries, so the hamlet was definitely unfriendly. It was either held by mercenaries, or the village men were themselves mercenaries. Since M Ngoi, I had harbored a deep hatred for these kinds of people. We went forward very quickly, up under the buildings. The hamlet was quiet but for one large building, where people were having a party of some kind. We could hear singing and general carrying on. We crawled back to Jackson.
"What do we do?"
"We can hardly go round the bloody place without going miles out of our way," I said.
"I'm sick of being hunted, of running and hiding," said Wiley. "These are the people that are making life miserable for us. Let's go on the offensive for once."
"We'll hit them hard, take what we need, then get out."
"This is what we've been carrying the rockets for," said Wiley. "Those guys have got the village women in there with them, and I bet they're raping the shit out of them. Let me go on the far side and hit that building with the rockets."
Wiley hurriedly stripped the rockets from the packs and began assembling them. The rest of us primed our weapons. For weeks we had been rats in a drum with no way to get up the walls. Wiley's remark was an excuse we all grabbed at to hit this place. We could avoid combat here, move around it, and take a safer village. But straight through was the quickest, simplest way. Killing was the only positive thing we had left
in our lives now. What the hell, why not? For once, we could enjoy the luxury of initiating an action.
"Let me go with him," Jackson pleaded.
"Sorry, Alvin," I said. "You stay here. If we have to leave in a hurry, this is our best way out."
I allowed Wiley time to circle to the far side of the hamlet. There were a few people milling about, but I managed to move under all the dwellings one at a time. I checked to see who was in them, listening for boots rather than bare feet, or the sound of brass buttons or weapons being tended. Everything seemed in order. Most of the villagers, the children and the adults not working as mercenaries, were sleeping. The four of us took position facing the entrance to the longhouse. It was a bamboo and thatch building with one long, low window.
I saw several half-naked women pass the window and heard sounds from inside whiclr convinced me they were sky-larking around and having a gang bang.
I had the night sight trained on the window and was waiting for a target when Wiley hit the building with a rocket. Somehow he had fired it almost in a direct line so that the rocket entered at an angle through the base of the wall. The rocket went off inside the building, and it was total devastation ... a tremendous explosion ... the whirring chains biting through the air . . . shrapnel whistling ... the structure engulfed in flames. He blew a neighboring building apart with a second rocket.
People came jumping out of buildings with their clothes on fire, and we shot down everything that moved. A few peasants had grabbed up weapons and were firing wildly at us. We heaved grenades and hurled bodies everywhere. I saw Morrosco run up to the longhouse and shoot everybody that was still alive. As people spilled out of the other houses, we shot them down at the door and heaved grenades in behind them.
Gone was all thought of hitting the hamlet and moving out. We fired and fired. I wanted to kill every-
one. I felt that everything that moved, everything left alive, had contributed to the hell we had been through for the past three weeks.
"Stop it, Gayle," Tan shouted. "We're the only ones firing."
For the first time, I saw what had happened. In our overindulgence, we had wreaked havoc on this place. Bodies were strewn everywhere . . . children . . . soldiers ... old people. If there was no price on our heads before, there was now. We hurriedly searched the surviving buildings and found a terrific amount of arms, communist and American. The hamlet was burning profusely. We must have seemed like a hundred men to these people. Tan herded the survivors in front of one building, screaming at them in Laotian. While he and Prather were bringing the peasants under control, I sent Morrosco and Wiley to fetch Jackson. The hamlet was larger than I had imagined; we herded together about thirty people. We must have killed the same number. I went into the longhouse, which the flames had consumed to ash. There was a lot of weapons, a lot of naked, dead bodies. Brass buttons and belt buckles. The men had been in some kind of uniform, though there was no identifying it now.
There was plenty of wailing among the people left alive. Two women broke away and ran into a hut. We did nothing to stop them. They brought out some children. Several more children and two women came forward from where they had been hiding. When Jackson came in, he made it clear there were more of us hiding outside the hamlet. Tan sent four men to bring us all the arms we had not found. They returned with some dated weapons and some communist automatic rifles, as well as M-ls and Armalites.
Morrosco found a pile of American uniforms, and he went a bit haywire. He dragged two men out of the crowd and threw them to the ground. They rolled in balls, holding their heads in their hands.
"Where do these come from?" he screamed. "You bastards. You've wiped out an American unit."
He raved on and began kicking these guys. They did not know what the hell he was saying, and they let themselves be kicked. Finally I stopped him, because by this time it had all calmed down, and everything was getting a bit sick.
I had a gutful. I did not want to absorb any more of this scene. I was beginning to differentiate between the needed and the needless, and it seemed needless for Morrosco to be kicking around two peasants after we had wiped out half the village.
I had a hard time calming him down; Prather came to help. Morrosco was like a man crazed with drugs; his weapon was dancing in his hands; his eyes were pleading for someone, anyone, to move so he could shoot them down.
We grabbed up some food, medical supplies, ammunition. Tan found a huge old American radio,v but he could not make it work, and it was too heavy to take with us. It looked like a base radio; the Americans must have run these people once, then had their own arms turned on them.
We made the villagers clean Jackson's wounds. They were healing quite well, though there was terrific scarring and bruising all along the leg. I was ignoring my own wounds, though they were gravely infected. Prather pleaded with me to get attention, but the more he argued, the more I rejected help. His wounds were by no means healing, but they were closed and manageable; he had considerable use of his bad arm. Tan's arm had deteriorated; he had practically no lateral movement. Morrosco's wound was healing fast.
We left and headed downriver, hoping somehow to reach Nakhon Phanom. We pushed up some low hills for several hours before stopping to rest. I was too whipped to post guard, and no one took the responsibility upon himself, so we just splayed out on the ground without a word. We were very grim, almost silent. No one made any real effort to go to sleep, because none of us trusted sleep now. But we could fight it only so much. As I sat there thinking, I watched
the others drift into sleep and drift out, and I drifted into sleep a couple of times, but the fatigue and my nerves jogged me awake. As dawn approached, we moved.
We cut down toward a flat valley of rice paddies interrupted by marshland and vast sandy areas like dried lake bowls that were scarred with vehicle tracks from some recent battle. We skirted several mangrove swamps in a very hot sun. Dehydration was telling on us all. East of Ban Nakok we headed toward a trail that would take us in sight of the Mekong. We pushed across an open landscape with low, gentle vegetation. It was easy going, but we were pushing through a sticky hot sun. We saw constant air activity, which meant we were approaching a battlefield. We walked in almost total silence. We were all thinking more than we were saying, and none of us felt like sniping at one another. The tension was unbearable. I no longer knew where the limit was.
As we approached the track, fifteen Pathet Lao came cycling down it, then stopped and dragged their bikes off into the woods. We slipped across the trail. Mor-rosco and I went forward a quarter of a mile, dodging from cover to cover in sparse vegetation. We were just out of the trees, down on our bellies, when Mor-rosco tapped my shoulder and pointed. We were within three hundred yards of a Pathet Lao encampment. This entire area was unsafe. We would have to go farther south, then east.
Just before we got back to the unit, some instinct told me there were people about. I waved Morrosco down. Three men passed without seeing us. We were in sight of our guys when we saw two more of these blokes walking to where the unit was hidden. Neither party had seen the other. They were on a collision course.
Morrosco and I moved quickly through the trees to intercept them. One was between us and the other, so I signaled to Morrosco to take him first. I moved away. Morrosco underestimated the time it would take
me to get set. I was several feet off my man when Morrosco knifed his. The guy made a noise. My man turned and saw what was happening. He whipped his rifle up to shoot Morrosco.
I flew out of the bush and drove my knife straight into his stomach. We fell down together, and the guy grabbed my throat with both hands. I tried to stab him again, but my knife was stuck in bone. The guy was jumping around on the end of the blade like a speared fish, but he was choking the life out of me. He was a strong son-of-a-bitch; I felt myself growing weaker. I struggled with my knife and beat him on the face with my free hand, but I could not break his grip. He was bleeding from the mouth; he was going to die. But he wanted to kill me first. All the time, I was conscious of attracting attention and trying to do him silently. And he had me; his grip was getting tighter and tighter. As I began to lose consciousness, Morrosco slipped his garrote over the man's head and ripped his throat to the bone. I grabbed both his hands but did not have the strength to break the grip. Morrosco pulled the fingers from my throat. I collapsed, and Morrosco rolled me on my back. He checked me over while I caught my breath, then pulled me to my feet and pushed my gun into my hands. He pulled the knife free and slammed it into the sheath at my side. I looked at him. I bashed him on the arm, and we took off.
We all dashed across open ground, then over the road completely exposed. We had just reached cover when we heard four shots. The bodies had been found. Within
minutes the area was crawling with these people. They saw or heard us, because they got on our trail. We managed to stay just ahead of them in the heavy undergrowth. Farther east, we overran a party of five and wiped them out. We ran for half a day with these people not many minutes behind us. We dodged another party of seven. The countryside was crawling with armed men. We reached a highway that led into Muang Kham Mouan and moved along it to cross it at a safer
point. I was out front, walking fast. We broke out of the trees fifty yards off the road.
A gun fired, and a bullet slammed into my thigh. I spun and went down on my back. Once again I had triggered an ambush prematurely. Guns went off everywhere, but the others had dropped the stretcher and run back into the trees. There was a lot of yelling on our side, trying to figure out where they were. I finally spotted them at ground level, firing from a depression on the far side of the road. When they did not rush me, I crawled for cover in the undergrowth. The firing stopped. They were going to wait and pick us off. I lay there for several minutes, trying to make out their firing position. I counted eight, but could have counted some of them twice. They were mercenaries, but no ordinary bandit rabble; they were pretty well organized.
We began moving against each other, crawling through the bush to draw flank. Firing was sporadic, so I took time off to shove a wad into my trousers. I was bleeding like a pig. I dragged myself out on the flank and drew a lot of fire, then I got a bead and took a couple of them out. I could not see my people, so I was out there on my own, stalking and being stalked. I was charged by two men and shot one, and he fell dead beside me. I fired at the second guy, but the Armalite was empty. I raised up as far as I could and swung the Armalite at him. It slipped out of my hands and went flying off into the bush. The guy stood right over me. He fired, and the bullet must have passed between my arm and my chest. He stopped to draw a more careful bead. A bullet smashed into the side of his chest. He pirouetted and landed right beside my head. I rolled over and killed him with my knife. Half a dozen bullets tore into his body that were intended for me. I was down to my shotgun and thirty rounds now. It was useless unless I was charged, so I kept working my way to our flank. We gradually regrouped and pushed them back on one side as they tried to flank us; I was hoping to stretch their flank,