During the planning for this obvious insanity, other things occurred to challenge the Wandering Soul idea. One night a true tragedy unfolded, a night when I was assigned to be the officer of the day, or night, making a tour every hour of the green line around Phuoc Vinh base. The green line was a perimeter of decaying bunkers and unstable towers, all built for a war that was supposed to be over years ago. I was to examine weapons, check the communication lines and make sure they were operational, check to see that no booze or beer was present in the troops on guard, and generally represent authority.
I did the best I could. I went around in a jeep, stopping every so often, at random, walking into a bunker unannounced, acting as officerish as I could, looking for violations of the guard rules. There was supposed to be no marijuana, and nothing stronger. No one was supposed to be sleeping or even sitting resting with eyes closed. And there was to be no music, nothing that could hide the footfalls of the approaching enemy. There were about twenty-five bunkers and towers, each with a sector of the green line to cover. A no-man’s-land of about thirty yards surrounded the base, lined with anti-personnel mines, claymore mines, trip flares, and barbed wire. The working condition of all this defensive matériel was my responsibility, at least for a twenty-four-hour space, and I was supposed to have checked it all.
Needless to say, I had checked nothing, not because I was shirking the work involved, but because checking mines and other explosives was dangerous. The officer of the day before, and of the day before that, felt the same trepidation. The wires and flares may not have been checked at all since their installation however long ago. No one seemed to know. I did check the floodlights, which weren’t dangerous. The greatest fear in the night was that enemy sappers would breach the green line bearing satchel charges. They would run around in the confusion, throwing these charges here and there, destroying helicopters, igniting fuel bladders, and setting off secondary explosions in the artillery ammunition storage. This had happened or was rumored to have happened on other bases with hundreds of casualties. But this time was different.
About two hours after nightfall, someone set off a trip wire in the no-man’s-land, claymore mines went off, and an eruption of gunfire in one section of the green line roared out into the dark. The floodlights came on. Soldiers triggered additional claymores, and all the troops fired wildly across the no-man’s-land and into the forest. After a few minutes the firing died down. The officer in charge, me, raced to the sector where things had exploded, shortly joined by the base commander, who demanded to know what had happened. I didn’t know.
The floodlights showed that the intruders were not enemy soldiers. They were a group of young women from Phuoc Vinh village, very young actually, who had been given directions and a map of a safe route through the perimeter, where the trip wires and mines had been disconnected. But either the map was wrong or their pimp got it wrong, or they did. They had all been killed, cut to ribbons by all the firing. In the white glare they were small figures, dressed in black, scattered in a line leading back to the trees. It was an awful sight. The following morning, women from the village, half a mile from the base, were let in to retrieve the bodies. Some of the dead women were daughters or young mothers, not really prostitutes, just trying to make some money. The women from the village were carefully accompanied by US soldiers who knew how to disconnect the wires. The bodies were loaded into a truck and driven off somewhere. The wires were reconnected. By that time my stint as officer of the day was over, and I returned to the Wandering Soul project.
Public address sound systems were affixed to helicopters and recordings were made of what we thought, or at least I thought, might sound like the voices of the troubled Wandering Souls. My idea was generally based on radio shows I had listened to as a kid that scared the bejeezus out of me. It wasn’t a very good idea, but there was nothing else to go by. The script, which again was my idea, and again not a very good idea, had a voice identifying itself as a dead Vietnamese from some town near Hanoi. For years he, or she, or it, was trying to get home to be with its family. We made several rehearsals to play this piece of insanity from a helicopter at night over the base itself. The wailing voice, actually a woman who worked in MACV headquarters in Saigon, went over and over in a keening speech of sorrow that lasted about two minutes. Several of the helicopter pilots refused to fly these odd missions, complaining that they were having nightmares about their own souls wandering, even though they couldn’t really understand what the voice was saying. An additional idea came from one of the brigadiers, an idiot I thought, who proposed that we add a bit of one of Nixon’s speeches, sort of like a commercial break, in which he assured listeners we sought no wider war. And now back to our program.
I don’t remember how long we ran the Wandering Soul tape, but it wasn’t long. The whole project was as ludicrous as anything in the history of anti-communism, but at that point in the war zone, life had taken on many aspects for which the overused term surreal could accurately be applied. Here was a helicopter, flying at night over a section of Southeast Asian jungle, equipped with loudspeakers and recordings purporting to be the voices of the spirits of the undead, howling and weeping about being lost and consequently being very sad about it, written with almost no knowledge of the details of Vietnamese superstitions by an unfortunate military intelligence officer whose heart wasn’t in it, with the supposed purpose of scaring enemy soldiers into surrender or revolt. Actually, the word surreal is left far behind. And worse — we all knew that the project was inane, worthless, laughable, wasteful, and possibly dangerous, but we went ahead with it anyway. It hurts to think that all this was true.
Whether operation Wandering Soul frightened the enemy we had no way of knowing. But it did scare some of our allies. Some South Vietnamese units nearby were threatening mutiny. We hadn’t thought of that. It was abandoned after that, and the tapes, my first attempt at theater, were hopefully destroyed.
The Vietnam War was at least on paper a civil war. The North, communist and backed by the Russians and the Chinese, fought to unify the country with the South, backed by the US and some allies. So if a Vietnamese citizen from north of the demilitarized zone, despite his early allegiance to Ho Chi Minh, woke up one morning and saw the error of his ways and desired to join the South Vietnamese side and fight for capitalism and democracy, he was permitted to do so, and, again at least on paper, welcomed. We dropped millions of safe-conduct passes over the jungle. The cartoons on the passes showed a before-and-after situation. The before was death and misery in the jungle under American bombardment, and the after was food, shelter, and friendly acceptance. It seemed to be an open-and-shut case. North Vietnamese soldiers could take these passes to any ARVN or US troop and be welcomed to a new life in democratic South Vietnam. They would be fed, medicated, given a place to sleep, and sent to a reeducation camp to get their minds right. If they were sick with malaria or wounded, they might be encouraged by their own commanders to surrender rather than be a drag on the efforts of the healthy. The initial interview, when one of these enlightened people came forward, was done by the military intelligence people. The program was called Chieu Hoi, which meant “open arms,” or, in the unfunny humor of the times, “out of ammunition.”
The majority of the surrendering people were women, often North Vietnamese army nurses who were either desperately malarial, or pregnant, or both. My commander at the 1st Cavalry had the idea that we could get valuable information from the women by promising them benefits for their unborn. Exactly where he got this idea was unclear, perhaps somewhere at his own mother’s knee. But I was told to make promises, most of which were truthful. A few enemy babies were born in the 1st Cavalry MASH unit.
Some enemy troops surrendered when they were wounded. My commander further hypothesized that they should undergo any surgery without anesthesia. His idea was that they would cry out valuable tactical information. This was, of course, nonsense. I was detailed to be in the MASH uni
t when they were operated on. Since I couldn’t understand the screams of North Vietnamese soldiers, I took an ARVN translator along with me. He couldn’t understand anything, either. One poor unlucky young man had been hit with a claymore mine, which sprayed him with dozens of steel ball bearings. He never lost consciousness and screamed Troi Oi! — Oh, God! — over and over. The MASH surgeons, who thought they were immune to the screams of the suffering, dug out the ball bearings one at a time. Obviously, operating on a human being without anesthesia was something new to them. After about fifteen minutes of waiting to hear something of tactical value, other than screams, I told them to put him out. And they did. Of all the difficult-to-forget days in my war experience this was the worst. There was a lot of blood.
The work of the war ground on, day after day. Duties for officers were assigned on rosters. In this way the combination of upcoming side tasks, some dangerous, some trivial, could be planned for and possibly avoided by circuitous means. I tried to avoid the duty of having to account for stolen or missing property. It is surprising that property is so important in a war, but in the Vietnam War the army was never sure what the outcome was going to be. Vehicles, weapons, generators, and even cooking equipment had to be accounted for. A commander taking over a unit would be responsible for all the unit’s properties, and he would want to be somewhat sure that it existed. If it was gone or destroyed there had to be some piece of paper.
This curious form was called a “report of survey,” which meant that we had looked for it and here’s what we saw. I was handed several assignments to account for stuff. A soldier in one Phuoc Vinh unit had gone crazy and driven off with a jeep, south to Saigon. He had been caught when he sold the jeep somewhere in the clogged warrens of Bien Hoa and was jailed for a few weeks. I was supposed to go down to Saigon and get him to sign something admitting the theft. Flying down to Saigon, to the replacement compound, we were fired on several times, which is unpleasant at best. And the jeep thief wasn’t there anyway; he had already been shipped back to the States for punishment and discharge. The jeep wasn’t retrieved. Whatever risk I had been forced to take to account for the jeep was totally unjustified, certainly in my mind. The report of survey closed with the choice of words “taken by person or persons unknown.” A quick, non-dangerous look around, maybe ten minutes’ worth, could have arrived at the same conclusion. I returned by truck, somewhat safer.
I also was periodically assigned to certify casualty reports. When a US soldier was killed and brought back from the field, his body was taken to an impromptu morgue called the graves registration unit. Reports of deaths to be sent to families had to be done as quickly as possible. Commanders had to write something about the bravery of the soldier and the pride of the nation and so on. But mistakes were often made, which were unforgivable and embarrassing, resulting in angry parents, distraught wives, and outraged congressmen. The army had reported sons and husbands killed who weren’t. The worst part of checking was a required visit to the graves registration morgue. I was supposed to see the body, open the body bag, check the ID tag, and sign off that I had done so. The graves registration unit, with its odor of death, its pounding refrigeration trailers, and its cemetery mood, was possibly the most miserable duty in the entire army. The dead were nearly all young, and their deaths all unexplainable.
Daily life at Phuoc Vinh grew worse. I lived in a sort of bunker made of wooden boxes filled with sand. Around the base the engineers had built a wall of sandbags as well. The entire hunched structure was covered with green canvas tarpaulin held in place with more sandbags. For a while I was on a night duty, manning the radio and communicating with the helicopters that flew around looking for signs of enemy activity. We had to know where our helicopters were so the artillery didn’t shoot them out of the sky. I had a bunk bed in my room, and for a while a slightly crazy American warrant officer pilot lived with me. Then he moved out and I had the room to myself for a few days. This was actually a rare luxury on Phuoc Vinh base.
Then a North Vietnamese artillery officer came to the gate of Phuoc Vinh base and surrendered. His name was Kuat Minh Ngoc. Our commander — who despite my snarky comments about him was actually one of the better full colonels I had met — wanted to keep Kuat Minh Ngoc at our base as long as possible. By the rules Kuat had to be turned over to the South Vietnamese army as a prisoner, not a pleasant prospect. He was extremely sick with malaria and probably would have died if he had stayed in the forests much longer. He decided that he wanted to surrender and live. He may have been sincere. He had been in the woods for two years, living in holes and ducking American artillery. We gave him quinine, some food, and soon he felt better physically and more at peace with his decision to switch sides. He seemed to be an extremely gentle person from a family of pineapple and tapioca farmers in the North. After three days, during which he lived in the top bunk in my room, we had to decide what to do with him. I began bringing his meals over to him and got no complaints about the food. We had gotten some information from him, some numbers about the supply of mortars and rockets that the colonel considered useful — actually none of what he told us was of any use — and he might have told us more, but he couldn’t stay with us. He recuperated, sleeping in my room for about a week, talking to us every evening. My .45 automatic pistol hung in its holster on the wall during all this time, because it didn’t occur to me to put it someplace safe. This was rather stupid of me, a safety lapse I mentioned to no one.
Reluctantly we turned him over to the South Vietnamese army, and he disappeared in a truck headed south for reeducation. I had grown to like him, and I was sorry to see him go. The colonel was surprised to hear that he was gone. After a day of thought he told me to investigate how we could get him back and make use of his knowledge of the enemy artillery strengths. The granting of such an exception to the rules could only come from the US embassy in Saigon, about fifty miles to the south. The rules on surrender had been strictly worked out between the US and the South Vietnam diplomats, and only they could make exceptions. This meant driving down to Saigon, finding the embassy, making the request, getting the approval, and then finding Kuat Minh Ngoc wherever he was getting reeducated. You would think there would have been some foresight or protocol about a situation like this, but there wasn’t.
I took two enlisted troops with me in a jeep, one driving, one riding shotgun, with me and my interpreter in the backseat. I could have made the trip by helicopter, but I had resolved that unless absolutely necessary I would stay on the ground. But I didn’t know where the embassy was, or how to find our way through the endless crowded shantytown outskirts of Saigon where the roads lost all definition. An Asian city in the middle of a war spends no effort making the approaches clear to the traveler. There were no maps. We drove around, up and down a selection of promising routes, blocked by sludgy canals and haphazard markets. I had made two mistakes. First, we were using up our gas, and second, it was Sunday. Sunday in the army was just another day since the war went on endlessly. But for the US embassy, following State Department rules, Sunday was a day of rest. So was Saturday. The embassy, even in the middle of all the fighting and confusion, stuck to a schedule of a proper ambassadorial workweek. So when we finally found the embassy compound, the very same place that would later become world famous for helicopters leaving the roof as the North Vietnamese army entered the city, the gates were locked. A young Filipino guard was on duty.
I had made a contact with a full colonel who was working, and who fortunately saw us from his window. He came down and told the Filipino guard to let us in. This took some time and a frustrating phone call from the guard to someone. The colonel seemed to have no requisite authority. The whole thing was becoming asinine. We, the colonel and I, looked completely idiotic in front of the enlisted men, something that was to be avoided if possible. The colonel took me up to his office and typed an impromptu letter to someone in the South Vietnamese government to allow us to take Kuat Minh Ngoc back to Phuoc
Vinh for additional intelligence research. Or something. The letter struck me as completely unconvincing. I thanked him, and we got ready to leave. It was also interesting to see a full colonel typing.
In the compound of the embassy buildings there was a car pool and some gas pumps. We were nearly out of gas, and we tried to fill up. But the pumps were all locked for the weekend. Another assiduous Filipino showed up and explained, excitedly, that we couldn’t have any fuel because this was state department gas and could not be used in any military manner. It was his job to protect it. The idea that we were all on the same side didn’t impress him. He wasn’t impressed when I took out my aforementioned .45 pistol and waved it at him. Or when I pointed it at his head with loud instructions to unlock the pump. Looking out the window, the colonel/typist saw this contentious scene and came running down. My driver and shotgun man were aghast that an American colonel could not order a Filipino guard to unlock a gas pump to provide gas for an American army jeep. But the guard was obdurate. Scared to death with Americans waving weapons at him, but obdurate.
Lieutenant Dangerous Page 12