Dateline: Viet Nam: A Military Thriller Double

by Robert Vaughan

  “No shit?” the driver asked.

  “You wouldn’t know where we might find some willing girl to do her duty to her country, do you?” The driver picked up a chewed, unlit stogie from his ashtray, then stabbed it in his mouth. He smiled around the edge of it.

  “Well, now, it just so happens that I do,” he said. “It might cost you a few dollars, but she’s worth it. Believe me. She’s young, blonde, clean, and sexy.”

  “What do you think, Conally? You want to try?” Francis asked.

  “Well, what do you know?” Conally said. “I can feel it twitching around down there, just thinking about it. By Jove, I do believe it’s going to work. Let’s go.”

  “You got it,” the driver said. He put the flag back down, then pulled out into the traffic.

  “How much you think it’s going to cost?” Conally asked.

  “What the hell difference does it make?” Francis answered. “We’ve already given an arm and a leg.”

  Hunter handed Bill a beer. Bill tapped the top with the church key, punched it open, then passed the opener back to Hunter Two Bears. Hunter opened his own while Bill sucked down the warm suds.

  “Okay,” Hunter said. “I want to know what happened.”

  “What do you mean, what happened?” Bill answered defensively.

  “Goddammit! I know something happened out there today.” Hunter said. “What happened? What did you guys run into?”

  “Has anyone said anything?”

  “No.”

  “No, they haven’t and they won’t,” Bill said. “They’re afraid of what Lieutenant Cox and the others might do.”

  “What others?” Hunter wanted to know.

  “The others who were with him. The ones who went along with it.”

  “Goddammit!” Hunter roared. “Hanlon, you better tell me what the fuck went on out there.”

  Bill took another long, Adam’s-apple-bobbing swallow of his beer. “You wouldn’t believe me,” he said finally, speaking so quietly that Hunter could barely hear him.

  “Try me.”

  “You remember what you told me about your great-grandpa or whoever getting killed at Wounded Knee? How it happened? How the soldiers just opened fire?”

  “Yes.”

  “The army hasn’t learned much since then,” Bill said.

  “What are you talking about?” Hunter asked, but even as he asked the question he felt chills pass over him. He knew what Bill was talking about.

  “Murder, Hunter. Cox and about ten or fifteen of his bunch lined up all the people from that little village and shot them down. They killed little babies who couldn’t even walk, children, mothers with babies suckin’ on the breast, old women, and old men. They killed them all. They shot them down like they were cutting wheat.” Bill laughed, though it was more like a grunt than a laugh. “Would you believe they gave some of the kids C’s before they killed them? One of the kids just stood there, eating...” —Bill’s voice broke — “…eating that fuckin’ scrambled eggs and ham while he waited for them to shoot him. By the time they got through, there were more than a hundred killed.”

  Hunter felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach and a weakness in his knees. He squeezed his can so tightly that it collapsed and beer squirted from the top.

  “Are you going to tell the colonel?” Hunter wanted to know.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be my word against the lieutenant’s,” Bill said.

  “No, it wouldn’t. You’ve got a dozen witnesses.”

  “Hunter, the platoon was split exactly in half. Half the men did it and half the men didn’t. Now, the ones who didn’t participate didn’t have the stomach for killing civilians. On the other hand, I can’t see them turning in their buddies either, not for what they see as a bunch of dead dinks.”

  “I see,” Hunter said.

  “The only thing we can do is try and live with it,” Bill said. He took a thoughtful drink of his beer. “Some of us are going to find that harder than others,” he added.

  “This way,” Phat called to the fifteen or so men who remained from his company. Phat, now a veteran of five years’ fighting, was a sergeant, the highest-ranking member of the original My Song Company. After Captain Minh was killed, the Central Committee assigned another officer, a lieutenant, to the My Song Company. But he hadn’t been with them long and he was a North Vietnamese regular, so Phat was the one with the most experience. The My Song Company had been out on a sortie when the Americans came to the village. When Phat and the others returned to find everyone dead and the village burned, the NVA lieutenant decided it was time to move on.

  Phat and the others felt no particular sorrow over what had happened in the village. The My Song Company had been controlling the villagers by terror tactics anyway. The Americans didn’t understand that tactic—they just came in and blew everyone away. It was a waste…but it wasn’t particularly a tragedy.

  The lieutenant had been following a trail to the east, to sanctuary on the Cambodian side of the border. But when they crossed a small stream, Phat turned south.

  “Sergeant Phat, the lieutenant wants us to cross the border,” one of the men said.

  “We’ll never make it,” Phat replied. “The Americans will have soldiers there, blocking us off.”

  “How could they? They don’t know where we are going.”

  “They know everything,” Phat said. “Haven’t you figured this out yet? They have airplanes that can see in the dark, see us under the trees. They know where we are going.”

  Ngo Nhu, the North Vietnamese lieutenant, came back to see what the discussion was about.

  “What are you doing, Sergeant Phat?” he hissed. “We have to join our comrades across the border.”

  “I think not,” Phat said. “The Americans will be waiting for us. We must work our way south.”

  “We are going across the border!” Ngo Nhu ordered.

  Phat pointed his AK-47 at the NVA lieutenant.

  “Lieutenant Nhu, if you wish to cross the border, you go ahead. I am going south here.”

  “Fool! I will report you to the Central Committee. You will be shot!”

  “If you try to cross the border, you won’t live long enough to talk to the Central Committee,” Phat said.

  “We shall see about that,” Nhu replied. He looked at the others. “Come with me,” he ordered.

  “I choose to stay with Sergeant Phat,” one of the others said, and three more agreed with him. The remaining men, about ten, went with the lieutenant and they crossed the stream, heading east.

  “I will report this mutiny,” Nhu called back angrily.

  Phat watched Nhu and the others as they crossed the stream and started across the rice paddies for the hills beyond.

  “Phat, let us go quickly,” said one of those who stayed with him.

  “Wait,” Phat said. He held up his hand. “Let’s see if they make it.”

  Phat and his four companions hid behind the stream bank and watched. Nhu and his followers moved out onto the rice paddy, running quickly along one of the dikes.

  Suddenly two helicopters appeared from behind and over Phat’s head. They were flying fast and

  low, and they zipped by overhead, totally unaware of Phat’s existence. They started for Nhu and his men.

  Phat raised up and fired at the two helicopters. The others joined with him and they were rewarded for their efforts by the sight of black smoke streaming back from the engine of one of the helicopters.

  Both helicopters opened fire on Nhu and his men and Phat saw Nhu and the others dive off the dike and splash down into the flooded paddy. Automatic-weapons fire coming from the vegetation across the paddy told Phat that he was correct in his belief that the Americans would be waiting in a blocking position. As Phat stared across the paddy, he saw scores of American soldiers coming out of the trees, moving toward Nhu and his men.

  The helicopter Phat had hit turned and started
down toward the paddy to make an emergency landing. Phat fired again at the helicopter and he saw the front windshield of the ship fill with holes as his bullets sprayed into it. The helicopter, which had been coming down in a smooth descent, suddenly lurched and fell over on its side. It crashed hard, then exploded into a great, greasy ball of flame.

  “Son of a bitch!” Phat heard one of the American infantrymen shout. “Lookit that!”

  The remaining helicopter made another pass over Nhu and his few remaining men. Then the Americans closed with them. The fighting was short and furious. Then it stopped. Nhu, and every man who had started across the rice paddy with him, lay dead.

  “Let’s go,” Phat said quietly. He started downstream, keeping under the trees so he wouldn’t be detected by any aircraft that might be flying over them.

  “Sergeant Phat, you’ll be in command now,” one of the others said. “Nhu was the last officer in the province.”

  “Yes,” Phat said. “I know.”

  Hunter Two Bears went TDY to a radio-relay station to help set up a perimeter of defense. He was gone for seven days and when he came back he learned that Bill Hanlon had transferred to another line unit. He was certain that Bill wouldn’t have transferred if Cox had only moved him to his platoon. Angry, he went to Cox to find out why he had let Hanlon go.

  “We’re better off without him,” Cox said. “He was nothing but a troublemaker anyway.”

  “He was the best goddamned soldier in this company,” Hunter said. “Company, hell! He was the best in the battalion.”

  “Perhaps I knew him a little better than you,” Cox said. “I saw him differently.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Hunter said. “You transferred him because you were afraid of him. Well, that’s the real funny part of it, Lieutenant. You didn’t have to be afraid of him, because he wasn’t going to say anything. The one you have to be afraid of is me.”

  Lieutenant Cox’s eyes narrowed and turned to ice. “I’m sure I have no idea what you are talking about,” Cox said.

  “In a pig’s ass you don’t know. You think you’re going to be able to keep what you did at My Song a secret? My God, Lieutenant, you wasted over a hundred civilians.”

  “Sergeant Two Bears, I don’t know what you know...or what you think you know, but I rendered a complete report on the My Song mission. It was a good operation and I’m proud of it. In fact, I have it on very good authority that I will be getting the ‘V’ device for my Bronze Star.”

  “You make me sick,” Hunter said.

  “Sergeant, one more word out of you and I’ll have you upon charges.”

  “You won’t do shit, Lieutenant,” Hunter said. “You don’t want anyone to start poking around My Song.”

  Cox looked at Hunter for a long moment. Then he smiled, a slow, evil smile. “It might interest you to know that Sergeant Hanlon is up for the same award,” he said. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want to do anything that would screw things up for your friend. Especially since he would wind up facing charges as well.”

  “Why would he face charges? He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “He was there, Sergeant. He was there and he saw what happened. He’s been back over a week but he’s made no report of any kind. By his silence, he has become a co-defendant, as it were.”

  “Then you admit you did it?” Hunter asked.

  “No, Sergeant, I admit no such thing,” Cox said. “I was just pointing out a few fallacies in what you advanced as your plan of action, that’s all. Now, if there’s nothing else?”

  Hunter looked at Cox and he squeezed his hands into such tight fists that his knuckles turned white. Oh, how he would love to bust the lieutenant right in the mouth.

  Dear Billy,

  You will forgive your mother for calling you Billy, won’t you? I guess it’s not the name you’re known by, by all of your buddies, but you will always be Billy to me.

  The most awful thing happened last night. You remember Jim Freeman, the boy who had the real pretty red car? The one with the special paint job? He was a friend of yours in school, I think. Anyway, last night he had a wreck and was killed. They say he had been drinking. He was driving over one hundred miles an hour and he hit the back end of a big trailer truck. He was going so fast that he knocked the rear wheels right out from under the trailer and the trailer just sort of collapsed on him and crushed him under the car.

  Well, enough of that. You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve been promoted. Yep, I am now a full-fledged associate. We’ll have to have a little party to celebrate when you come back home.

  Billy, I’m having a hard time explaining to everybody why you went back to Vietnam. They all think you’re crazy. Maybe what’s making it so hard for me is that I also think it was a crazy thing to do. I know you were having a difficult time in school, but honey, that didn’t mean you had to go back in the army. I wish you would have come to talk to me about it.

  Nobody likes this war. Everyone is demonstrating against it all the time. Why, would you believe that last week some protesters or somebody actually threw bricks at the wounded as they were coming back to the States?

  Speaking of wounded, you got a postcard from somebody named Francis Poindexter. He’s in the hospital in Washington, D.C., and he wants you to come up and see him. From the sound of the card, he must not know that you went back.

  Be careful, Billy. Write soon.

  Love,

  Mother

  “What’ll we do with his bunk? You want me to turn it in, or what?”

  “No sense in that. There’ll be a replacement in pretty soon. Then we’d just have to draw another one. Why don’t you stockade it?”

  “Okay. Listen, I’m going to trade mattresses with him, if that’s all right.”

  “Yeah, sure, go ahead. He sure as hell won’t mind.”

  “What do you want to do about his personals?”

  “Anything there that shouldn’t be?”

  “He had some rubbers in his billfold.”

  “Take ’em out. Anything else? Any whore’s letters, fuck books—anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, leave the rest. Someone from supply will inventory ’em and take care of ’em.”

  “It was a damned shame. He just got here.”

  “No, he didn’t. He’d been in-country a long time. He just transferred over here, that’s all. He knew what to expect.”

  “He was a strange one, really kept to himself.”

  “Yeah. I asked him about where he’d been, what he’d done, but he never would talk about it. He said something strange once.”

  “What was that?”

  “He said he couldn’t hear them scream. If he could hear them scream, he would be all right.”

  “Hear who scream?”

  “Beat’s the shit out of me.”

  “Mail call!” someone called from the front of the tent. “Anderson!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Baker.”

  “Right here.”

  “Lindell.” The clerk sniffed Lindell’s letter, then let out a long sigh. “Son of a bitch, Lindell, every time I deliver a letter to you, my hands smell like I been in a French whorehouse.”

  “That’s the closest your hands ever get to that smell, my man,” Lindell said. The others laughed.

  “Hanlon,” the clerk called.

  There was silence in the squad tent.

  “Sergeant Bill Hanlon.”

  “He got hit on ambush last night.”

  “Where is he? First Field?” the mail clerk asked. “I gotta know where to forward the letter.”

  “Send it back.”

  “Send it back? What do you mean, send it back?”

  “Hanlon’s dead.”

  Chapter Eight

  Ernie was sitting at a table on the veranda of the Continental Hotel. He would have preferred a table right near the entrance but it was occupied by a man Ernie recognized as the Minister of Imports. The minis
ter was reading a newspaper, and the fat, sausagelike fingers of both his hands were adorned with diamond rings. Rolls of flesh from his thick neck lay in layers across the silk collar of his expensive suit.

  The conversations being conducted in the Continental were in French, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Ernie couldn’t follow the Chinese, but the French and Vietnamese conversations dealt with things as diverse as the price of rubber on the international market to a ballet being performed in Cholon. No one was talking about the war, and Ernie saw a perfect example of something that he frequently tried to point out to other Americans, but was unable to make them grasp. The stratum of society represented by the people with whom Americans normally had contact was totally isolated from the mainstream of the Vietnamese people. It curled and seeped through the population like an oil slick in water, moving with the current, seemingly a part of the whole, but never actually emulsifying.

  It was early afternoon and Ernie was drinking a “33” beer. He had an appointment with Colonel Craig Pardee, the MACV P.I.O. officer. Colonel Pardee wanted to know why very few of his carefully worded P.I.O. “Action Reports” showed up in Ernie’s stories. Pardee was very proud of his “Action Reports,” and he went to great lengths to make the reports exciting.

  Colonel Pardee arrived fifteen minutes late. He was wearing khakis and a garrison cap, complete with “scrambled eggs” on the bill. He was wearing aviator sunglasses, though Ernie noticed he wasn’t wearing wings. Colonel Pardee’s chest was adorned with what the G.I.’s called the “Vietnam basic load” of ribbons. There were two Vietnam service medals, the red-and-yellow ribbon awarded by the government of Vietnam, and green-and-white ribbon awarded by the United States. The green, white, brown, and blue National Defense ribbon completed the bottom row. The next row started with the green Army Commendation, and the red Bronze Star for Service award. He was also wearing the blue-and-gold Air Medal, earned by frequent flights to the beaches of Vung Tau. There were no “V’s” on any of the medals, and there was no C.I.B., though there were crossed rifles on the left collar point, and a silver leaf on the right. Colonel Pardee, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, was the absolute model of the straphanger, also sometimes referred to as the REMF, of rear-area motherfucker.