Dateline: Viet Nam: A Military Thriller Double

by Robert Vaughan

  The approaching boats touched alongside a few moments later and forty men boarded, leaving only one man per boat. The boarders moved quickly to establish control of the big boat and less than

  ten minutes after they boarded, all passengers were disarmed and the pilot was heading for shore.

  “Phat,” Minh called a few moments later. Phat had been moving among the passengers, assuring them that those who cooperated would not be hurt. Phat had been talking with the assault team leader.

  “Yes?”

  “Take the passengers ashore, far enough away from the boat that they can’t see anything. We don’t want any information getting back to the authorities.”

  “Very well,” Phat agreed.

  When they reached shore, the gangplank was lowered and all the passengers—the old men and old women, the children, and the babies—were moved off the boat. They shuffled down the gangplank carrying their belongings with them, moving stoically, as if this were no more than a routine stop in their journey. Phat walked with them, leading them about five kilometers away from the shore. He told them to set down there and wait for his return. Then he left. Of course, he had no intention of returning, but by the time they realized that, the business at the boat would be done.

  When Phat returned to the boat he saw men loading weapons. He looked back toward the tiller and saw a new pilot.

  “Where is the other pilot?” he asked.

  Minh pointed down, and Phat saw two bodies floating face down in the backwater. One was the pilot; the other was his wife.

  “You killed them?”

  “Yes,” Minh said.

  “But they were cooperating with us.”

  “Perhaps. He may also have been merely pretending to cooperate with us so he could provide the government with information,” Minh said. “We had no choice, we had to stick with the plan.”

  Phat looked down at the bodies. The woman was still clutching her cooking spoon.

  “Med Evac 717, you are cleared for immediate departure runway two-seven. Turn right as soon as possible after takeoff, contact Paris Control.”

  “Roger, Ton Son Nhut, Med Evac 717 rolling.” Four turboprop engines were advanced to full military takeoff power as the C-130 started down the runway. The propeller blade tips cut swirls through the mist so that long corkscrew contrails followed the airplane down the runway until it rotated, then climbed out of Ton Son Nhut at a 45-degree angle.

  There were eighty-seven people on board the C-130 as it winged its way to Tokyo. Up front, there were two pilots, a flight engineer, and a radio navigator. In addition, there were two airmen crew chiefs. There were also four doctors and eight nurses on board. The rest of the passengers were patients. All the patients were stretcher cases and the stretchers were triple decked along both sides of the airplane. Francis Poindexter was in one of the stretchers.

  “How are we feeling?” one of the doctors asked, stopping by Francis’s stretcher and putting his hand on his forehead.

  “We are feeling fine,” Francis said quietly and without expression.

  “Good, good,” the doctor said. “That is good.” The doctor moved to the next stretcher and asked the same question, to receive the same noncommittal answer and he responded in the same way. “Good, good, that is good.”

  Francis listened to the doctor’s “good, good” float up the aisle until the worthy doctor moved far enough away so that the constant drone of the engines drowned him out. Francis turned and looked through the window. He could see the lower surface of the high wing, the bulge of the two engine nacelles and the externally carried fuel tank, which hung on the wing between the two engines. He looked at the ailerons, saw a tiny movement, and thought of the pilot sitting up front, all comfortable and content, driving this thing with no more effort than driving a car. He saw the nylon static electricity leads stretching out from the trailing edge of the wing and he wondered why the three- hundred-fifty-mile-an-hour wind didn’t tear them off. By turning his head slightly, he could look down. He could see nothing but clouds, though once, when the clouds parted slightly, he saw a mantle of green and he wondered if they were still over Vietnam. If so, was some infantryman slogging around down there, sucking his feet out of the mire and muck of flooded rice fields, slapping at mosquitoes, twitching every time he passed a hooch or a clump of trees, or anywhere else a V.C. might hide?

  At least he wasn’t down there now. He paid a hell of a price to get out, but at least he wasn’t down there.

  “How are we feeling?” one of the doctors asked.

  Francis looked over at him. This wasn’t the same doctor.

  “We are feeling fine,” Francis said quietly and without expression.

  “Good, good,” the doctor said. “That is good.” The doctor moved to the next stretcher and asked the same question. Francis couldn’t hear the patient’s answer, but he heard the doctor.

  “Good, good. That is good.”

  At 1800 hours, an ambush patrol left An Loi, just as it did every night. This night the ambush patrol was the same size as Sergeant Two Bears’s Rape and Pillage platoon. It was hoped that the Vietnamese who were in the camp by day and were V.C. by night, would think it was the same platoon.

  In fact, at 2200 hours, long after all the Vietnamese were gone from the compound, Hunter’s platoon left by an auxiliary gate. They moved quickly and silently away from the village, through the thin jungle and across dozens of open rice paddies, staying on the dikes so they wouldn’t be slowed down by the flooded fields. For the first several kilometers, they avoided all contact, swinging wide of farm hooches, ducking for cover when they saw a light.

  Hunter kept them moving at a steady pace for four hours, resting them from 0200 to 0300. At 0300 they moved out again and kept up a steady march until just before dawn, at which time they crossed over into Cambodia. Hunter considered the consequences of being in Cambodia. One moment ago they were soldiers, out on patrol. Now they were criminals, violating neutral territory. At best, they were now subject to court-martial and imprisonment. At worst, they could broaden the war.

  They continued on, going deeper and deeper into Cambodia. The jungle was thick here and the going was difficult and tangled with undergrowth. Sometimes it was so thick that they literally had to hack their way through the brush. It was hot and their energy was sapped, not only by the muggy heat but by the mosquitoes that swarmed around them. The men gulped their water and Hunter had to caution them about water conservation.

  Pepper was on point, and about ten kilometers after they crossed the Cambodian border, he halted. Hunter crawled forward, passing the others, who had dropped into hiding places as soon as the patrol stopped moving.

  Hunter found Pepper on his belly, under a tree, looking over a small rise.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Pepper pointed ahead. “This is what we came for,” he said.

  In a small clearing ahead, Hunter saw what Pepper was talking about. It was a base camp, not unlike An Loi, though this was considerably smaller.

  The camp was surrounded by concertina wire and there were guard towers at all four corners. There were three long buildings that might have been barracks, a small building that housed the camp generator, and two smaller buildings, probably the headquarters building and the officers’ quarters. There were no flags, nor were there any vehicles or other equipment with insignia of any sort, but Hunter knew that the men in this camp were North Vietnamese soldiers.

  “Sergeant Mills to the front,” he called. His call was passed quietly to Mills and a moment later Mills came up beside him.

  “Tell the mortars to take out the barracks and generator house. Put the rocket launchers on the guard towers.”

  “Right,” Mills answered.

  “I’ll get everyone else deployed with the best possible field of fire. Then we’ll take targets of opportunity.”

  “When do we start? ”

  “Right after sunup,” Hunter said. “I’ll break squelch three times.”<
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  “Okay.”

  “Mills?”

  “Yes?”

  Hunter stroked his chin and looked at the younger NCO. “You know we’re in Cambodia, don’t you?” he asked.

  “I figured we might be,” Mills said.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Hunter said. “If anything happens to me, you’re in charge. You’re going to have to get the men back across the border as fast as you can.”

  “Right,” Mills answered. “Sergeant Two Bears?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try and stay around, okay? I don’t want to be in charge.”

  “What’s the matter? No ambition?” Hunter teased.

  “There you go,” Mills replied. He crawled back to get the heavy-weapons people in position. Hunter began spreading out the rest of the men. When everyone was ready, they waited.

  Hunter found a can of fruit cocktail and opened it slowly with his P-38. He drank the juice first, enjoying the cool sweetness. After the juice was drunk, he ate the little pieces of fruit, delighting in the texture and the moistness as much as the taste. He didn’t know why the army didn’t put the canned fruit in every C-ration unit. It was far and away the best thing in the entire inventory and never had it been more delicious than it was right now.

  He wondered why he was enjoying it so much. He could be at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco or Antoine’s in New Orleans and not enjoy a meal more than he was enjoying this one. The beef stew and Indian fry bread his mother used to cook for him wasn’t as good as this little tin of fruit cocktail. It was true, what they said: Life did have more sweetness when death was near.

  Just after sunup, someone came out of one of the barracks and walked over to the row of concertina wire to take a leak. He was joined by another, then another, until soon fifteen or twenty men were standing there, some finishing and starting back to the barracks, but others taking their place immediately. A radio was playing in the barracks and the whining, nasal sound of Vietnamese music could be heard. The camp was totally unaware they were in any danger. Even the men in the guard towers were lax. One of them came down from the tower to get his breakfast, while the others were looking back into the camp toward the morning routine, rather than away from the camp as they should be.

  Hunter smiled. It was obvious that they were counting on the Cambodian border to provide them with all the protection they needed. It was a pretty sweet setup they had. They could leave here, hit a target in Vietnam less than an hour later, then beat a hasty retreat back across the border to the safety of Cambodia.

  A least that’s what they assumed. Hunter was about to demonstrate to the North Vietnamese that the old military axiom “Assumption is the mother of fuck-ups” was true.

  Hunter broke squelch on the radio once, twice, three times. At the third time, he heard the hollow kerchung of mortars being fired. Seconds later, there were four explosions inside the camp, two of them direct hits on the barracks. He saw the plumes of rocket smoke as the 3.5 rocket launchers were fired at the guard towers. All four towers disappeared in a rose of flame and a plume of smoke.

  “Fire!” Hunter shouted. “Open fire!”

  The M-16’s and the M-60 machine guns started popping away and tracer rounds slashed down into the camp.

  The North Vietnamese were caught completely by surprise and they started running pell-mell around the compound. It was almost thirty seconds before any return fire came back from the camp and when it did it was pitifully weak.

  Hunter kept it up, pouring in the small-arms fire. The mortars found their range and one after another, the buildings in the compound were destroyed. In addition, the M-79’s found their range and were dropping right in the middle of the NVA troops. Finally, Hunter saw a handful of North Vietnamese soldiers fleeing from the other side of the camp. He ordered them fired on and the tracer rounds from his men chased the North Vietnamese into the jungle on the opposite side of the camp.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Hunter called.

  It took a second, but all firing stopped. For a moment there was absolute silence, for the gunfire had quieted even the jungle creatures. Hunter swept the camp with his binoculars. He saw no sign of life. He raised the PRC-6 to his lips.

  “Mills?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Any casualties?”

  “None.”

  “All right. I’m taking half the platoon in. You stay back to cover us. If you hear anyone coming, give us a call.”

  “Roger,” Mills answered.

  “Come on,” Hunter said to those around him. “Let’s go down and see what we can find.”

  Hunter and Pepper broke the advancing squad into groups of three men each. Cautiously, they worked their way down toward the camp, keeping to the cover of trees and bushes, darting from one

  to the other as quickly as they could. When they reached the perimeter of the camp, Hunter signaled the others down, while he advanced alone.

  Crawling right up to the concertina, Hunter looked for mines, either pressure or command-detonated. He found neither, more evidence of the fact that the NVA figured they were safe inside the Cambodian border. He found a break in the concertina wire, then went through it. When he was on the other side, he signaled for the others to come on through.

  As the other men came into the compound, Hunter started moving carefully through it. There were dozens of bodies scattered around, most in the underwear in which they had slept. Hunter moved through them, searching carefully for any indications of mines or booby traps. He saw the generator shack, destroyed by his mortar crews. The generator was in pieces.

  The headquarters building, like the other buildings, had sustained heavy damage from the mortar shells. However, it was made of cinder blocks, and so was still substantially, intact. Hunter signaled for Pepper to cover him as he approached the building. He stopped just outside the door and tossed in a hand grenade. After the grenade went off, he dashed inside.

  This building, like the others, was deserted. He did notice something of interest, however. There was a bulletin board on one wall, plastered with newspaper articles. The articles were from American newspapers, and they were all about the Ghost Patrol.

  “Pepper,” Hunter called, “get in here.”

  Pepper came through the door, stepping over the debris and one NVA body.

  “Take a look,” Hunter said, pointing to the bulletin board.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Pepper said. “These fuckers were keeping a scrapbook.”

  “You got that little camera with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get a picture,” Hunter said. “I want to show that shit to the colonel when we get back.”

  Pepper took out his camera and began snapping pictures. Hunter started pulling open file cabinet drawers looking for maps, or anything he might find that could be of value. The only worthwhile thing he found was a bottle of whiskey.

  Back in An Loi, Spec-Four McKay looked up as Sergeant Bill Hanlon stepped into the orderly room.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” McKay asked in surprise. “I thought you got out.”

  “I did,” Bill said. “I came back.”

  “You’re crazy, you know that? I mean, you were out of here…really out of here. Back in the world as a civilian. Now you’re here.”

  “Yeah, now I’m here,” Bill said. “So, enough about that, already. Where’s Sergeant Two Bears?”

  “He’s in the field.”

  “No sweat. Just put me down for his platoon and I’ll wait for him to come back.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no room in his platoon,” McKay said, looking at the manning chart. “His platoon’s been augmented, it’s full.”

  “What do you mean there’s no room? I’m the squad leader, second squad.”

  “Not anymore,” McKay said. “That’s Sergeant Conroy’s squad now.”

  “So, hell, move Conroy somewhere else.” Lieutenant Cox overheard Hanlon and McKay, and he stepped out of his
office.

  “So you’re back, I see,” he said.

  “Lieutenant Cox,” Hanlon said. “You’re my platoon leader. Tell McKay where I belong.”

  “I’m not the platoon leader anymore,” Cox said. “I’m the CO.”

  That news startled Bill, but he didn’t show it. He smiled. “Well, then, that’s even better. You know where I belong.”

  “Put him in the third platoon,” Cox said.

  “Third platoon?”

  “You’ll do a good job there, Hanlon,” Lieutenant Cox said. “And I need some experience there. I’m getting the platoon ready for a special mission.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bill said. He knew better than to carry his protest any further. Anyway, he was back in Vietnam, back where he wanted to be. He’d just let it go at that. “When will Hunter be back?”

  “I can’t tell you, exactly,” Lieutenant Cox said. “He’s on an extended patrol.”

  “An extended patrol?”

  “He went after the Ghost Patrol,” McKay said.

  “Shit!” Bill said. “And I’m not with him.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant Hanlon, I promise you enough action to keep you interested,” Cox said mysteriously.

  For Hunter and the Rape and Pillage platoon, the trip back was proving to be uneventful. They didn’t use the same route leaving Cambodia they had used coming in, because Hunter feared that the surviving NVA might have found it and set up an ambush. That was what he would have done and he credited the NVA commander with at least as much sense as he had.

  By a fluke, the way back was much easier. They struck out through rice fields, little patches of jungle, and streams as easily as going on a field march back in the States. Hunter moved fast, but with flankers out to look for the enemy. None were found and they crossed back into Vietnam without contact.

  By 1630 hours, Hunter and the Rape and Pillage platoon were coming through the main gate. He had left with thirty-eight men; he was coming back with thirty-eight men. No one killed, no one wounded. As soon as he came through the gate he was told to report to Colonel Petery.

  “I don’t encourage this sort of thing during duty hours,” Colonel Petery said, as he opened his file cabinet. “But the sun is over the yardarm, as our naval friends say, so, Sergeant, how about a drink?”