Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  Vo Nguyen Giap

  The smell of smoke was rank, acrid, lingering in every nook and cranny, a permanent reminder of the recent attack. There was an air of pessimism in the room, the unthinkable had happened, the enemy had actually penetrated their inner tunnel system and caused terrible damage to their efforts to successfully assault Saigon.

  “So Phuc is dead?” Binh asked them.

  He already knew the answer, of course, that was part of the craft of a politician, a commissar, always know the answer to a question before you asked it. That way you never got hit with the unexpected. Major Ba inclined his head.

  “I am afraid so, his body was buried in the explosion but we understand from Comrade Son that he was already dead. He was meeting with some of the local commanders to go over the new deployments. They all died.”

  “Except for Major Son,” Binh said acidly.

  “Yes, of course, no doubt they saw him as a good hostage to take back with them to Saigon.”

  “A pity you allowed them to escape,” Minh continued.

  Ba shot him a vicious look, both knew that someone on the outside had helped them, possibly Special Forces. There was no way to prevent it.

  “Enough of this,” Son said loudly. His face was still screwed up in pain, but he was determined to do his best to repair some of the damage these fools had created.

  “We need to continue the offensive, Dung or no Dung. How do we stand?”

  “The Sixth Viet Cong Battalion has been ordered to attack the Phu Tho Racetrack, Comrades. The Americans and their Vietnamese puppets have started to establish the racetrack as a helicopter base to replace their facility at Tan Son Nhat that my men destroyed.”

  The inclined their heads. While Son had been getting himself shot and his unit decimated in Cholon for little gain, Minh had ordered a series of daring attacks on the helicopter base near Tan Son Nhat. The base had been destroyed and now the Americans were using the racetrack. So it was time to destroy that base too and deny them the use of their airpower.

  “Is the racetrack well guarded?” Son asked.

  Thank God he was still too wounded to take part, Major Ba thought to himself. The damn fool would go and get his head shot off, as well as the heads of the men he led into battle, just as had happened at Cholon, where some of his units were still pinned down and fighting for their lives.

  “Not particularly,” Binh, the Commissar said with a satisfied smirk. “It is only guarded by a few units of American military police, perhaps a hundred men in all. Evidently they do not think that lightning will strike twice in the same place. They are about to learn how wrong they are.”

  “So you have a thousand men of the Sixth Battalion attacking a hundred defenders, it sounds like a sound strategy, Comrade Commissar. Let us hope that they do not reinforce the defences before your attack begins.”

  “We go in tomorrow morning, Major Ba. There is no time for them to bring in reinforcements.”

  “Then you will be successful, Comrade. We wish you good fortune, are you leading the attack personally, in view of the death of Phuc?”

  Binh smiled widely, the others noted the slight edge of fear that crept into the corners of his eyes, belying the easy confidence he tried to project. “Alas, no. In spite of my personal health difficulties, I wanted to lead the attack but other of our commanders insisted that they should have that honour. But I will be close to the battle to direct operations.”

  Both Son and Ba suppressed their smiles. They knew that if Binh was within half a mile of the action, he would be deep underground, safe in a deep, dark tunnel. Still, he was a good communist, his stirring words and persuasive, if somewhat threatening speeches had inspired thousands of men to fight for the Viet Cong. Sadly, many of them had also died for the Viet Cong. Too many. But that was the nature of war. Besides, after the war, the North would be in charge of the whole of a unified Vietnam. These people from the South, who thought they would have a hand in running the country when the Americans had left, were in for a shock. Nguyen Cong Trong, the local commander in Cu Chi, picked up a bottle of wine and poured glasses for all of them.

  “Gentlemen, a toast to Comrade Binh and the soldiers who are about to crush the Americans and drive them into the sea. To victory, always to victory.”

  Son and Ba, who had both enjoyed a good, communist education in Moscow paid for by the Russian government, recognised the toast. It was the caption to the well known propaganda poster carrying the image of Che Guevara, the Cuban communist deputy leader to Fidel Castro during their revolution.

  ‘Hasta la vittoria, siempre’.

  It was most appropriate as both recalled what they had learned of the fate of Che. Many said he had been betrayed by Fidel Castro, a convenient way of getting rid of a rival who was becoming both a threat and a nuisance.

  “Hasta la vittoria, siempre,” they chorused.

  CHAPTER 8

  'The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient, and as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.'

  General William Westmoreland

  There were hastily assembled sandbag defences near the landing pad and we hurried to take shelter. Mortar shells were falling around the racetrack, machine guns spat bullets across the open spaces and it was clear that to go out in the open would be tantamount to suicide. There were only a handful of MPs bravely trying to defend the place, it was clear to me that they had a problem. The amount of mortar and machine gun fire suggested a large enemy force, perhaps a battalion in size, possibly more. There were only a few dozen MPs, I didn’t see how they could possibly hold it. An MP Captain was on the radio, urgently calling for reinforcements. Dozens of rotary wing aircraft lay smashed on the field, a testament to the ferocity of the Viet Cong attack. All over the field small units of VC were converging on the main helicopter command and control compound where we sheltered alongside the MPs and the bulk of their helicopters. A Cobra gunship flew in for a strafing run and it poured fire down on the enemy, but a heavy machine gun opened up concealed outside the base and hit the Cobra, it seemed to stagger in the sky, then it literally exploded in mid-air. The black clad guerrillas took heart and mounted a head-on attack on a sandbagged outpost, the MPs fought back with their M60 and M16s, the barrels must have been smoking by the time the communists pulled back, leaving half their number dead and dying on the field. But there had been eight MPs in the fortified position, I could see three stretched out, dead or critically wounded. With their overwhelming numbers they could keep attacking us and sooner or later would overrun our positions. Then I heard a scream and looked behind me.

  A guerrilla, heavily camouflaged, had popped up right behind our position, he was bristling with grasses and pieces of brush woven into his uniform, whether he’d been there for a long time or had crawled through the undergrowth was impossible to say, but more of his companions leapt at us screaming bloodthirsty battle cries.

  “Captain, they’re inside the defences,” I shouted at the officer in command.

  He whirled around. “MPs, behind us,” he shouted.

  Several of his men turned back and began to engage the Viet Cong. Paul, Ritter and I were still armed with our M2s. The door gunners shed their flak jackets and had taken back possession of their M60s and Major Diem and Jack Bond raised their M16s. Together with the MPs we let loose a hail of fire that slashed through the VCs and hurled their bodies aside to lie bloody and ruined in the grass. I estimated that ten men had attacked us, now ten bodies lay broken in front of us. But more were coming already, I could see that another fifty VC had taken advantage of our struggle with the insurgents to rush forward on the field. Now they were attacking furiously, running forward and firing in short bursts, then dropping into cover, out of sight or our guns. In the distance behind them, we could clearly see more VC massed ready for the next assault. In front of our position, it was a similar story, VC loosing off short bursts and dropping into co
ver whilst more of their number waited to press the attack.

  The MP Captain, whose name on his tag said Parker, his full name was Norman Earl Parker, listened intently to his radio. Then he turned to his men.

  “They’ve got two companies on the way, they’re landing them from Hueys. They’ve got the fifth of the sixtieth mechanised infantry and the thirty-third ARVN Ranger Battalion heading this way, we just need to hang in there.”

  It was almost as if they sensed that reinforcements were en route, the communists redoubled their efforts and they launched attacks both to the front and to the rear. We fired clip after clip at the oncoming troops, the M60s slashed their ribbons of fire at the enemy columns and dozens of them fell. But it wasn’t enough, dozens more, hundreds more kept coming. There was a cry to my side and I saw Major Diem go down with a bullet to his throat, he lay against the sandbags choking up blood. One of the door gunners was flung back by a heavy burst from an AK47 that stitched across his chest and destroyed both him and his machine gun, smashing through the firing mechanism. Then the pilot of the Sikorski Jolly Green, who had picked up an M16 and was firing short, aimed bursts at the enemy, suddenly jerked and then fell back slowly. A bullet had struck him through the nose and had gone straight through his brain. As if that wasn’t enough, the second M60 suddenly jammed and our desperate rearguard action became a doomed last stand.

  I was reminded of the famous battle of Thermopylae, when King Leonidas of the Spartans had led his troops in defence of the famous pass, faced with an overwhelming horde of Persians they fought on to the last man.

  There were just too many of them, I wondered how the hell I could get Helene out of this, she was lying on the ground out of the firing line. She was no coward, I had my boot on her bottom, pressing her down despite her squirming constantly to get up and begin taking care of the wounded. Then I heard the distinctive noise of the Huey AH-1s approaching, we all looked up, there were at least twenty of them coming in fast, escorted by Huey and Huey Cobra gunships. Two lines of machine gun fire probed up in the sky to towards them but the enemy gunners had given away their positions and the gunships swooped, the pneumatic road-drill thunder of the miniguns spoke and the earth around the machine gunners was ploughed up with thousands of bullets as the miniguns hammered out their message of death. The first of the troop-carrying Hueys landed and suddenly the situation was different. The VC could still beat us, they had the overwhelming advantage in numbers, but the men who had just arrived beefed up our defences and now the attacker’s job was made much harder.

  We kept up our barrage of fire, the VC kept up their pop up and shoot attacks, getting nearer and nearer. Then we heard the sound of engines, lots of engines, heading our way. A huge dust cloud preceded them but as we got closer we could see the silhouettes of American armoured personnel carriers. The fifth of the sixtieth mechanised infantry and the thirty-third ARVN Ranger Battalion had arrived. They stopped adjacent to our positions and the doors swung open, men poured out and began taking up firing position. A Lieutenant Colonel emerged from one vehicle and came over to us.

  “I’m Colonel Gibler, I’ve got two of my companies here and the ARVNs, what’s your situation?”

  The MP Captain hastily brought him up to speed on the situation on the battlefield. Gibler surveyed the carnage in front of him.

  “You’ve done well to stand this long, Captain. I’ll order the gunships to start a sweep of the enemy, and then we can go in and finish them.”

  “Yes, Sir,” the captain replied, obviously relieved to have the burden of an indefensible position removed from his shoulders. In the past minutes, the whole pitch of the battle had altered. The Viet Cong were no longer faced with a few dozen MPs, the defenders now had armour, superior numbers and firepower and of course, the devastating killing power of the gunships. Then the Colonel caught sight of us.

  “Mercenaries?” he asked Paul.

  Schuster smiled. “We’re not that well paid, Colonel. We’re just guides, we did our killing in the last Vietnam War, a few years ago. We’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The Colonel looked keenly interested when he heard the accent. “And before that?”

  Paul hesitated, and then shrugged. “Russia.”

  “SS?”

  “Waffen-SS, yes.”

  “So you’re no strangers to fighting these people?”

  “Well, no. But we were rather hoping that someone else would take up the baton now, Colonel.”

  He laughed. “I hope we can manage to do that. In the meantime, you’ve all done a good job. Radioman!” he shouted.

  A corporal with a radio came rushing over to him. He picked up the handset and called in the gunships. He was quick and efficient, issuing a stream of orders that got his forces moving as one deadly, cohesive unit. The gunships went back in on the attack, chewing up the VC. The APCs had turret mounted machine guns, they traversed backwards and forward decimating the enemy in an awesome display of coordinated firepower. Soon, the situation was reversed, the Americans and the ARVN rangers moving forward in short runs, the machine guns and miniguns keeping the VC heads down. Finally a flight of Phantoms came roaring in and dropped napalm on the remaining VC positions and many of the survivors of the attack were incinerated in the flames of jellied petroleum.

  There was a strange silence that descended over the battlefield then a low noise, as the crackle of flames ate at burning equipment and uniforms that still covered their dead owners. There was an occasional cry from a man in desperate pain, but there were few of those. I even heard the wind sighing through the grass and the wrecks that littered the field.

  “I think it’s over,” I heard Colonel Bibler tell the MP Captain.

  I helped Helene to her feet. She was shaking with rage. “I should have been helping the wounded, you had no right to keep me down there like a dog.”

  Then she caught sight of the battlefield, the bodies strewn over the field like so many worthless logs of wood. There were hundreds of them, mainly Viet Cong, stretching all the way from our position out to the perimeter and beyond. The stench of burnt flesh was appalling. She slumped her shoulders in despair. “There are so many.”

  “Yes, Sophie needs a mother, my darling. You couldn’t have survived out there.”

  Ritter and Paul came over to us. They had both sustained wounds, nothing too major and Helene patched them up with bandages she borrowed from the unit medics. Bibler was shouting orders at the men to begin operations to clear the field, this was, after all, the temporary helicopter base serving Saigon.

  I asked them to look after Helene and make sure she didn’t expose herself, just in case the battle was not fully over. Then I went looking for Abe Woltz. He was on the radio, presumably to the Saigon Chief of Station. He nodded a greeting. When he’d signed off, I put my request to him.

  “Abe, I need a favour.”

  “Anything, buddy, we’ve been through a lot together, I reckon I owe you at least one.”

  “Thanks. Our daughter, Sophie is still in Cholon in our bungalow, I need to get through to her. The ARVN have a roadblock, they weren’t letting anyone pass. I could do with some heavy persuasion to get me through.”

  He smiled broadly. “I’m in the heavy persuasion business, Jurgen, suppose I borrow some wheels and we head out there?”

  I thanked him and he said he’d join us in a few minutes. I went back to the others and told them to get ready to leave.

  “Where to?” Helene asked with a worried expression.

  “Cholon. We’re going to get Sophie.”

  She smiled, the first time I’d seen a genuine happy expression on her face for some time.

  “That’s wonderful, Jurgen. How will we get there?”

  Just then an M113 armoured personnel carrier clattered up and stopped. Abe looked out.

  “I think this should get us there in one piece,” he grinned. “I borrowed it from the Colonel, he said he owed us a favour and lent us a driver as well. Why not j
ump in and we’ll get moving?”

  The M113 was a fully tracked armoured personnel carrier that formed the backbone of the United States Army's mechanized infantry units in Vietnam since 1962. It was in fact the most widely used armoured vehicle of the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War, earning itself the nickname 'Green Dragon' by some people. They used it extensively to break through heavy thickets in the midst of the jungle to attack and overrun enemy positions. All I wanted it for was to break through a supposedly friendly ARVN roadblock, it should certainly do the job. I helped Helene get aboard, Abe was fiddling with the breech for the fifty calibre gun mounted on the top turret. Ritter and Paul joined us. Abe looked around and then called out to the driver. “We’re ready, let’s get over to Cholon.”

  The vehicle shot away with a jerk and we settled down to endure the journey. Like all tracked vehicles it was a shockingly uncomfortable ride. However, the thickness of the armour was more than adequate compensation for any discomfort we suffered, Saigon was still in the dying throes of the communist Tet offensive. We rode inside the hot, stuffy cabin that stank of petrol and oil, Abe rode on top, manning the turret. He’d found a helmet and a flak jacket, so was amply ready for anything other than a direct assault by communist armour or artillery. In the event, we were not troubled on our journey.

  We reached the roadblock and found the same officer in charge. At first he was adamant that no one could pass his checkpoint, even military vehicles. When Abe asked him exactly how his men, armed with M16s were proposing to stop him, he went quiet. Abe shouted at him and the man nodded to his trooper who lifted the barrier rather than have it smashed by the APC. We were through. We clattered our way through the devastated suburb, it was largely deserted. The whole place had been virtually destroyed during the battle for Saigon, I felt a deep sense of foreboding as we drove through the quiet streets. The driver had to keep swerving and manoeuvring around heaps of debris to continue making progress, but finally we came to our bungalow. Ritter, Paul and I climbed out with Helene and walked up the path to the front door. I asked Abe to stay with the APC, he covered us with the fifty calibre. Then the front door opened and Lan was standing there holding Sophie’s hand. Helene rushed forward.