by Dale A. Dye
“I’m not saying anything of the sort, Justin.” He was proud of the job his air crews had been doing at great risk while American ground forces began their ultimate departure from Vietnam. “Ever since the withdrawals started the B-52 crews have been carrying the bulk of offensive combat and you know it. I’m just trying to justify this one-time commitment of so many assets on a small target while we’re pushing to get out of Vietnam.”
Firing up a cigarette with an engraved Zippo, the MACV colonel inhaled deeply and squinted around the small, secure space where American combat assets were monitored and committed on a daily basis. “Johnny, I’m gonna let you in on this one but it’s strictly need-to-know. Nothing I say can leave this room. You read me on that?”
The Air Force officer leaned forward and rested his weight on his knuckles. He felt the familiar rush that coursed through his veins when he was yanking and banking in the cockpit of an F-4 Phantom. Now that he was relegated to flying a desk, it didn’t take much to prime his adrenaline pump. “I know the drill, Justin. So tell me what the hell is down there under those trees worth committing three entire cells of Big Ugly Fuckers to a single target?”
“Johnny, you ever wonder what morale must be like along the Ho Chi Minh Trail?”
“It’s gotta be lower than white whale shit on the bottom of the deep blue sea.” The Air Force officer snorted and lit a cigarette of his own. “I can’t figure out how those little commie shit-heads keep going with the pasting we give them.”
“Motivation, Johnny. You don’t sit down there and let our guys rain high explosive all over your ass day after day and then crawl out of your hole and pick up a shovel unless you’re highly motivated. Like most soldiers, those gooks on the trail are motivated by inspirational leaders. When morale begins to slip, Hanoi sends somebody with major-league charisma out into the bush to prop up sagging spirits.”
“So you want to expend all the ordnance and money to kill some party-hack out there on a morale-building junket?”
“I guess that’s it, Johnny—assuming you want to call the Commander-in-Chief of the PAVN a party hack.”
The Air Force colonel felt sweat begin to run down his ribcage despite the chilly air being pumped into the targeting center. This was getting very interesting. With Uncle Ho dead and buried since ’69, it could only be one person. “General Giap? Vo Nguyen Giap is out visiting troops along the trail?”
The MACV colonel mashed out his smoke and shrugged. “You said that, Johnny, not me.” But the wide smile on his face left no doubt in the Air Force officer’s mind.
“Holy shit, Justin! We nail that fucker and the war is over tomorrow!”
“Nothing survives in that grid square, Johnny. You see to that.” Colonel Justin Bates Halley clapped his Air Force counterpart on the shoulder and headed back to his own office. He had a lot of work to do on his retirement package.
SOMEWHERE IN LAOS
It was two—maybe three—weeks since Fighter Comrade Cleveland Herbert Emory, Junior, had a chance to bathe. The daily push along the trail since orders arrived for the two American comrades to head north had been brutal. He lay exhausted in his hammock beneath the sheltering branches of a large teak tree and smelled the cloying, stale stench of himself. As he had nearly every day since he and Fighter Comrade Theron Clay had been detached from their combat unit, he wondered why the Vietnamese who sweated and strained alongside them on the trek north didn’t seem to stink with the same gagging, malodorous vengeance.
Earlier, somewhere back along the trail when the debilitating malaria attacks had swept through the veteran unit of porters and sappers that formed their escort, Emory decided the lack of body odor among the Vietnamese must have something to do with a purity of spirit. Only those who were rotten on the inside smelled bad when the sweat of honest labor pumped from their glands. He knew in the logical parts of his mind that it was bullshit, but he needed those sort of thoughts to sustain him at least until he reached Hanoi where he would become a bigger, more effective part of the worldwide anti-capitalist struggle.
Anyway, his Vietnamese was insufficient to inquire about any such vague concept. At this point in his life, he could only be sure that his fellow fighters in the National Liberation Front didn’t reek as badly as he and Theron Clay did. He gazed up at patches of darkening sky he could see through the thick jungle canopy and thought about the female porter he’d been hitting on for the past few days. She arrived with the messenger from Front Headquarters with new orders for them.
He tried to make conversation with her as they hid by day in dank, damp tunnels along the trail, but she usually just giggled and pinched her nose, joking with her friends about how badly the two Americans smelled. He’d find a place to bathe somewhere along the trail. There were plenty of streams and water courses. That settled in his mind, Emory turned to watch a bunch of porters assembling their loads for the night march. They labored uncomplaining like good communists, and Emory felt a rush of empathy for these people who knew nothing but war, sweat, and struggle. They were the true revolutionaries, the kind of simple people who would change the world one day.
They were ignorant peasants, but they understood that at the gut-level. Otherwise they would never be content with life along the trail, humping huge loads day after excruciating day pushing rickety, overburdened bicycles through the ruts and mud, back and forth like mindless drones. Most of them missed the real points in the occasional lectures from the political officers and giggled at the revolutionary theater performances, but they toiled on for a better life, a better world in the future. They were patriots.
Emory sat up in the hammock and thought about the encounter with the Marine who had been watching them along the trail, the man Clay had so nearly killed. That fool likely considered himself a patriot too. They should have captured him and brought him along to see the struggle and commitment of the people he was fighting. But that was in the past, and maybe for the best if the guy lived long enough to report what he’d seen. That would be a bomb-shell for fellow revolutionaries fighting against the system in the U.S. And even if the guy died out there in the bush, the political detonation would be the same after Emory reached Hanoi where he expected to be a star player in world-changing events.
When the officer in charge of the porters signaled for assembly, Emory rose and folded his hammock. He planned to find a place in the conga-line of bearers that was as near as possible to the female that had caught his eye. A slight breeze swept in from the north and slithered through the foliage covering the long, dark tunnel that marked the northbound route they were using. Emory shoved his glasses up onto his forehead and watched Theron Clay shoulder a huge A-frame pack loaded with rations. Clay smelled even worse than he did, if that was possible. The breeze blowing past the spot where the huge black man stood waiting for orders to move carried a stench like a freshly fertilized rice paddy.
Clay merely waited, not moving or shifting the pack straps. The weight didn’t seem to bother him at all as he stood tall and straight like big jungle teak tree. Even the nightly cloud of voracious mosquitoes that swarmed up from rancid pools in the bottom of nearby bomb craters didn’t seem to annoy him as they did everyone else. As the porters scrambled around him, Clay watched them through red-rimmed eyes, his big head swiveling like the turret of a marauding tank searching for targets.
Shouldering his own much lighter load, Emory fell into line well ahead of Theron Clay where he would be upwind of the man. In a little while after the march began, everyone else would maneuver for a similar position. In a half hour or so of walking, Clay would be the last man in line. He always was.
Clay was dangerous as well as malodorous, burning with a livid hate that needed regular rekindling, and most of the Vietnamese gave him a wide berth. On the rare occasions when he was called on to speak at political sessions, Theron Clay launched into such a virulent, profane screed against what he considered his white oppressors, that even the political officers were
frightened into silence. Theron Clay frightened everyone, and Emory believed the man would never reach Hanoi. Some night some VC fighter would kill Theron Clay.
Only two days ago when Emory tried to engage Clay in conversation, he’d nearly gotten himself killed. It seemed that Clay had decided he would no longer be called by his “slave name.” He was now to be called Mustafa as Emory discovered with Clay sitting on top of him holding a knife at his throat.
“It’s Mus-ta-fa from now on, motherfucker!” Clay said the name in three syllables full of grunts and pants. When Emory readily agreed and struggled to his feet shaking from the close encounter with an ugly death, he quietly listened to Mustafa explain the new wrinkle in their relationship. The name was taken from a Black Panther brother Clay knew and admired back in St. Louis. He would henceforth respond to no other calling. And anyone who wanted to argue or force the issue would die. Mustafa Clay was no longer fucking around with anyone. There was some truly ugly stuff boiling inside Clay, and Emory never knew when it might congeal and detonate in violence. Mustafa Clay might change his name but not his destiny. He was like some deadly caged beast, and the VC would tolerate that in their ranks only so long.
j
Mustafa Clay walked at the rear of the unit and let his mind wander, wondering as he always did since he ran away from the army how he came to be in this jungle fighting with little yellow dudes against a white man’s army that was mostly black. He closed his eyes and saw familiar flickering images of his mother, a slave to the white establishment all her life, working for coolie wages with no chance of ever getting off the clean-up crew at the General Motors plant where she worked out on Kingshighway in St. Louis.
She wanted him to join her on the janitorial crew when he finally let the white teachers drum him out of high school. She wanted him to labor for the massa like she did and forget what she called all that jive-ass nonsense out on the streets. She was bound to be a slave all her life, and she didn’t understand revolutionary power. That’s what drove Mustafa into the ranks of the Black Panthers. They believed the only worthless black men were those who refused to fight the white man for their dignity.
He was doing that, helping to organize an urban strike force over across the river in East St. Louis, when he got caught in the draft. The Beast reached out with big claws and snatched at him. His brothers had a plan for that, a plan for Theron Clay. Like Muhammad Ali, he was going to claim his Muslim religious beliefs kept him from submitting to the draft. There was precedent for that. But Theron Clay was no Cassius Clay and the cops made it clear that he would wind up doing hard time if he refused to report for induction. That’s when a brother from Chicago came along and brought the instructions. There was a cadre of black men—all revolutionary brothers—doing time in Vietnam, serving as soldiers or what the brother from Chicago called undercover agents of the revolution. Their mission was to fuck up whitey’s war machine from the inside, and the movement was growing. What it needed was a steady influx of dedicated replacements.
So Clay submitted to the draft and eventually went along to Vietnam carrying a list of names and units where he might find the brothers operating under cover. He’d been trying to make contact with one of them at a big combat base near Chu Lai when a Lifer white sergeant took special interest in Private Clay. He found himself a slave again, working in the motor pool grease pits, filling sandbags, burning shitters, and all the odd, ugly jobs available around the base camp. He stood it for a while, working by day and searching for revolutionary brothers by night, until one of his contacts slipped Clay a frag grenade and proposed a plan to lift the yoke of oppression.
By the end of the week, the U.S. Army was minus one cracker sergeant and Theron Clay was being held for investigation and inevitable court-martial for murder. A brother in the MPs helped him escape from the stockade and Clay headed for a contact in Tam Ky where two AWOL brothers had a secret crib. The brothers and a string of their Vietnamese hooker girlfriends hid him for a while, but the heat was on and building after a rash of race-related fraggings swept a number of rear-echelon Army commands.
It got too intense for the AWOL brothers who needed to protect a drug-dealing operation. Some smack-junkie under pressure might rat on Clay and get them busted hard. They informed Clay that he was on his own and threw him out on the streets. Confused, so angry and disillusioned that he couldn’t think straight, Clay headed off into the jungle with some vague notion of reaching a seacoast and finding his way to Africa.
That’s when he was captured by a patrol from the 24C North Vietnamese Army Infantry Regiment. Mustafa was stripped of his boots, fed a handful of rice, and shackled to a patrol with orders to move him north as a prisoner of war. Fortunately, he was interrogated by an English-speaking political officer near the border of I and II Corps or the NVA B-5 and B-3 fronts. The dude who questioned him reminded Clay of the Black Panther block organizers he’d listened to back in St. Louis. The man had the same revolutionary rap, same preacher-in-a-pulpit delivery. Theron Clay dug it. Black or yellow, a yoke is a yoke and a slave is a slave. When the VC revolutionary cadre asked him if Clay would be willing to fight for the revolution, there was only one reasonable answer given the circumstances. Right on!
Operating with a main force VC unit, Clay quickly made a name for himself as a bush beast, kicking ass, scaring the shit out of the honkeys and the Oreo black soldiers who fought with them. And then one day they threw him in with jive-ass Emory who claimed to be another revolutionary. The dude talked like some kind of professor and claimed his old man was a fat cat exploiting the masses back in The World.
Clay tolerated Emory but never trusted him. He understood black men coming to the Nam in uniform to fuck up the white man’s army, but a lily-white rich boy wasn’t gonna do something that revolutionary. A dude don’t shit in his own nest, especially a rich dude. Clay figured Cleve Emory was likely a plant, a bogus ofay motherfucker, a spy looking for him and others like him. He’d have to kill Emory. It was just a matter of time.
j
The portage unit was stopped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, sitting in the dark and waiting for orders. There was a delay, something wrong a little further up the track, and a cadre officer said they would have to remain in position until the problem could be solved. A unit of sappers carrying hand tools passed through their ranks, and one of them explained that they needed to repair bomb craters to allow passage of a convoy of trucks headed in the other direction. It would likely take most of the night.
No one was happy about that despite the respite from walking under heavy weights. Night and darkness were their friends. When the sun rose, so did the aircraft that regularly attacked stretches of the trail. Movement, dispersal, and concealment were the keys to survival along the great trail. They never knew when a deadly marauding eagle might dive out of the sun, so they avoided daytime exposure like vampires.
They could hear the work underway up the trail, but no one issued orders for them to move. When dawn shadows showed in open patches, the cadre commander began ordering them to hide their loads and build overhead shelters. They would spend the daylight hours right here where they were stuck until the track could be repaired. There was no help for it, and traffic headed south always had priority over porters moving north.
j
The first 500-pound bomb detonated with a jarring blast south of the place where the sappers were working. The ground heaved beneath his feet, and Cleve Emory understood immediately what was happening. They were caught under an Arc Light strike, a B-52 raid. Bombs were failing ahead of them, but that wouldn’t last. Vietnamese porters all around him were scrambling for cover anywhere it could be found. Most of them were headed north up the trail where the sappers were working, hoping to find a hole deep enough to hide them from the death falling from the lightening sky. American bombs fell in long sticks. If no cover was immediately available, safety lay in running out of the impact zone toward the rear of the marching line of explosions.
Emory spotted Theron Clay standing upright in the trail staring up at the sky and ran past him watching huge black detonations march like goose-stepping soldiers through the bush on both side of the trail. He saw the female and two other porters disappear in a cloud of flame and smoke which knocked him off his feet. The bombs continued to fall to his front, his rear, and on both flanks. He lay frozen in terror, snuggled into the roots of a mangrove tree. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from the marching barrage of death and destruction. People were being shredded by shrapnel and beaten into the ground by horrendous concussion. Trees were falling, crushing people like grapes or impaling them on sharp limbs. All around him, the jungle had turned into a boiling cauldron of high-explosive.
Clay suddenly appeared walking defiantly upright, his dark skin covered with a pale patina of dust and cordite. He was screaming at the sky but Emory was deafened, his ears clogged with blood from burst eardrums, and he heard nothing other than the rolling thunder of falling bombs. A violent shock wave punched him in the back and he vomited.
Just ahead on the trail, Mustafa Clay was slammed in the chest by the bloody head of the cadre commander whose body was rent into flying chunks by a nearby bomb hit. The impact knocked Clay backward where he fell next to Cleve Emory. Sizzling hot shards of shrapnel rattled off tree stumps. Clay struggled, trying to get back on his feet but his body would not cooperate. He lay there on his back and screamed at the sky.
When the bombs finally stopped falling, nothing vertical was left standing for a full kilometer of the trail where the porters and the truck convoy had been parked waiting for road repairs. The B-52s had been precise, laying long sticks of bombs in a tightly woven carpet of death. Bodies lay everywhere, limbs and skeletons contorted into grotesque postures by the battering ram of continuous concussion. Cleve Emory and Mustafa Clay were riddled with slivers of shrapnel, swollen grotesquely from concussion, covered in blood and gore. A road repair crew moving cautiously into the devastation found them among the carnage later in the day. The after-action report filed by a cadre commander who inspected the bomb-blasted stretch of their vital resupply route said that nearly everyone on that stretch of the Ho Chi Minh trail for a full kilometer north and south of ground zero had died in the bombing. He requested 200 immediate replacements for the casualties from one of the most devastating American air strikes anyone had ever seen.