When I opened my eyes, my hands were bloody, as was my face. I was sprawled across the front seats, half jammed into the foot well. The embankment canted the truck at an odd angle, exposing part of its undercarriage to shots fired from the trees across the road. Bullets punched through the passenger-side doors and floorboard. Truc and the driver were already out of the car. I scrambled across the seat after him, sliding out headfirst.
Chan was saying something. I couldn’t hear him over the blizzard of slugs shredding the car at hundreds of rounds per minute. He shouted into my ear, asking if I had been hit. He wiped away the blood pouring from a gash in my forehead.
“Oh, God. Aahhh…I’m hit. Help!” Tinh cried from inside the car.
Truc sprang to his feet and reached for his friend. A wet, popping fleshy sound. Truc jerked up as if straightening to stand at attention. His blood splattered all over me. The bullet went straight through his head. He toppled backward and splashed into the rice paddy, boots sticking out of the water not two feet from me. Murky red water closed over his pulpy, mangled face.
A jolt went through me; my mind was seized. Every part of me rejected what I saw. I couldn’t breathe. I had seen countless corpses, but I had never seen a man shot dead in front of me.
I hadn’t noticed the gunshots tapering off. Chan and I remained on our backs, half submerged in the paddy. I felt ill, nauseous. Above, a mottled, gray heaven. Time seemed bizarrely out of phase, the air fragrant with rice wine and musty earth.
Reports of gunshots came from another direction. Down the road our men were coming to the rescue. Sergeant Viet led a charge with half of his men. The others retreated back into the hamlet.
“Help me! Aahhh…I can’t move,” Tinh moaned.
With Viet’s men drawing the machine gun away from the Bronco, Chan pulled Tinh’s arm from the outside while I climbed into the cab and untangled Tinh’s feet, which were caught under the seat. Light shone through ragged holes in the doors. The first bullet, the one that got him, was meant for me—the highest-ranking officer who invariably sat next to the driver. Had we been going a fraction of a second slower, the sniper would have found his mark.
Tinh mumbled. No, he was sobbing. There was blood in his teeth. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I don’t want to die.”
Chan and I could only look at each other. The bullet was still lodged in his upper right chest. Neither of us had tended a gunshot wound before.
Remembering my rank, I forced myself to wiggle three feet up the shallow embankment to assess our situation. I thought I could pick off a few if I sighted them in the shrubs. I loaded Truc’s carbine and peeked over the road. The light was against us. A hail of bullets raked the ground in front of my face, clumps of soil popping like firecrackers.
“I can’t see them.”
“If they charge, we’re dead,” he said, clearly as frightened as I was.
We fired a few rounds toward the creek to let them know we were armed. The quick return volleys nearly got us. We wiggled back down the embankment with our faces firmly pressed to the ground. I could feel bullets hammering into the earth.
Down the road, Viet’s men entered the sniper’s range. Immediately, the three leading cadres crumpled to the ground as if they had run into an invisible fence. The rest dove over the side of the road. Our rescue squad could not come closer.
“Lieutenant!” Viet shouted to me, his word barely audible between the bursts of machine guns.
“I’m fine. We’ve got one injured and one dead.”
“They’ve got us pinned, Lieutenant. Can you make it to our position?”
There was nothing else to do. I shouted, “We’re going to try.”
We gathered the two escorts’ rifles and ammo belts. I put my Colt .45 into my rucksack along with the payroll ledger, to keep it from getting in the mud. We began crawling across the paddy, our faces in the rice stalks, chests skimming the water, arms and legs deep in water and gooey mud. We dragged Tinh between us by his armpits. Every time we pulled, Tinh groaned in pain. Chan paused and looked to me. I shook my head. More than a hundred yards and three footpath dikes separated us and our men.
Choking with pain, Tinh yelled for us to stop, but we kept dragging him. He jerked away, gasping, “Leave me. I can’t make it. Leave me.”
“You’ll make it,” I said.
“Leave me!”
Chan snapped, “Shut up! We’re not leaving you here!”
Tinh started cursing, then begging. We ignored him. A few more yards, he shrieked and went abruptly limp.
“He passed out.” Chan sighed.
Although there was half a foot of paddy-water, most of Tinh’s body was caught in the deep muddy bottom. We struggled to keep his face above the water and our heads below the level of the road. Bullets whizzed scant inches over our heads. Limbs laden with mud, we crawled a few paces, paused shaking with fatigue, and then started forward again. When we came to the end of the field, we heaved Tinh onto the dike, rolled him over to the next paddy, and scrambled after him as a hail of bullets strafed the ground and water all around us. Foot by agonizing foot, we wormed through the sludge.
It took us an agonizing hour to rejoin our troops. Viet and I organized an orderly retreat with sharpshooters covering the rear while the main group crawled back to the hamlet. The Viet Cong moved their guns and hounded us the whole way. Every time we tried to stand up, they raked us with bullets. It was sunset by the time the whole group retreated into the hamlet. I collapsed on the ground with the rest of the men, too tired to move or think of what to do next.
“Khanh, Cung, Thien, Binh, each of you go to one corner of the hamlet. If you see anything, shoot to alert us!” Viet stomped about, shaking up the men. “It’s going to get dark soon. We must set up our defenses before they attack.”
He turned to his radioman. “Radio! Call headquarters!”
The team had a PRC-7 handheld radio roughly the size of a small loaf of bread with a single preset channel linked to headquarters, which, in our case, was a small room back in Phan Thiet manned by one veteran. I sighed with relief when his voice came over the radio. Hearing Viet reporting our situation at full volume startled me into realizing I should gather my wits quickly and set a plan to defend the hamlet.
“You’re hurt, Lieutenant,” said one of the team’s nurses, examining the gash in my forehead.
I waved her away and told Nhan, Viet’s second in command, to take the three women cadres ahead and set up a triage. I took the radio from Viet and talked to Lieutenant Lan, my assistant at headquarters. Our radio man had reported the attack two hours ago and asked for support, but Lan said Captain Trieu, the Province Military Chief of Staff in Phan Thiet, was waiting my for report. I said we desperately needed reinforcement. If the Regional platoon camping in the hills marched immediately, they could be here before nightfall. Lan said he would go and talk to Captain Trieu personally.
We carried the wounded to the community center in the middle of the hamlet. Villagers watched from a distance. Someone must have known about the ambush or seen guerrilla movements in the fields, but we hadn’t received a single signal, not even the usual vague whispers: You had better leave now, or That road is bad. Still, I couldn’t blame them. If anyone had tipped us off, he would be murdered before the week was over.
Our team had worked here for more than a month and was on friendly terms with the locals. Children came for a closer look at the wounded and ran back to tell their parents. A little girl slipped her hand into Nurse Nhung’s hand and walked along, smiling. The village head came and asked if we needed anything. I told him to have people stay in their houses in case of an attack. I didn’t want to get the villagers involved. I took the lead and tried my best to look confident for the men.
Since early last year, more than two thousand strategic hamlets had sprung up throughout the South in an attempt to insulate villagers from communist propaganda and prevent Viet Cong (VC) infiltration into the populace. People were forced to move either into the
hamlets or further out toward the VC-controlled areas. Naturally, everyone, including the VC underground, moved inside, and in spite of all the government promotions and American subsidies, strategic hamlets became ready shelters for the VC sympathizers and a severe hardship for the peasants. They had to live in these squalid settlements and were allowed outside to work at dawn and expected back at dusk. Villagers walked miles each day to work in their own paddies. Their gardens lay neglected; productivity suffered.
An Binh was a typical hamlet built like a rectangular fort with its back to the river. Though its construction was sound, the design was medieval. Except for the waterfront, which was strung with barbed wire, the hamlet was enclosed by a three-foot dike topped with a sturdy six-foot fence of dried indigo branches as thick as a man’s forearm. Just behind the fence was a four-foot-deep trench to stand in for defending the perimeter. The main avenue ran down the middle of the hamlet, straight from the front gate to the river. Two smaller streets, going east and west, intersected perpendicularly with the main. The hamlet had a community center, a playground, and some thirty-odd bungalows, closely packed and cheaply built.
The center of the hamlet was a two-room community house with a packed-dirt floor. The nurses had set up a triage in the meeting room, so Nhan, Viet, and I withdrew to the classroom. I sketched the hamlet’s layout and its surroundings on the chalkboard. We sat on little benches around a knee-high children’s table and planned our defenses.
A devout Catholic from the North, Viet was forty-two, a small man, dark and wiry, with disproportionately large forearms. He had migrated to the South with his family in 1954. Viet had been fighting Communists since he was a teenager, first as a member of his village civil defense, later as a soldier in the French indigenous force. His native village, Bui Chu, was a Catholic bastion that had suffered and fought bitterly against the Viet Minh until the very last days before the Geneva Accord.
Viet’s second in command was a tall, lanky southern farmer with mild, easy manners. Already in his mid-fifties, Nhan was still as fit and alert as a man half his age. Unlike Viet, who fought on religious grounds, Nhan had a vendetta. His eldest brother, a village chief, had been murdered by the Communists ten years ago while Nhan was fighting under the French. His brother’s death brought hardship on the entire clan. Nhan retired after the French withdrew in 1954, but several consecutive crop failures set him back into working for the government.
We debated over why the VC attacked our truck prematurely instead of waiting to ambush the whole team. It also seemed bizarre that they did not try to enter the hamlet while we were pinned down outside. We were certain about two things. First, the ambush didn’t make sense. Second, our twenty-seven men could not hold the hamlet without prompt military reinforcement.
“How many rounds of ammunition do we have left?” I asked Nhan.
He smiled as though I had asked him how many guests we were expecting for dinner. It was one of those all-encompassing smiles that could be a response or an expression for a dozen different emotions.
“Just under fifteen hundred rounds left.”
“Order the men to shoot sparingly,” I said. “Make every bullet count.”
Viet shook his head. “It’ll be tough since we’re up against AK-47s. Our green recruits were pretty shaken up by them. Half of my men ran back to the hamlet at the first shot. They didn’t stay around long enough to hear my orders.”
I chuckled. “I was pretty shaken up too.”
Viet said, “The local guerrillas don’t have these kinds of armaments. We’re definitely up against the National Liberation Front’s regional force.”
“In that case…” Nhan sighed. “It could be a whole NLF company. A whole company will overrun us in no time.”
“Then we all die,” Viet said.
“Maybe our Regional Force will reinforce us soon enough,” Nhan replied.
“Don’t count on it. We’re bastards to the big military brass in Phan Thiet. Besides, those cowards at headquarters never stick their heads out unless they absolutely have to.” Viet snickered. He was a hardcore crusader, one of the very few people I’d met who wasn’t afraid to die.
I radioed Lan. Our strategy depended on whether or not we could count on reinforcement. Lan said Captain Trieu, the Province Military Chief of Staff, refused to send troops unless we were actually attacked. I said if we were under heavy attack, it would be a funeral march because by the time they got here, we would be dead. It wasn’t good enough. I told Lan he would need to do better and signed off.
“Too bad there’s a half-moon tonight; otherwise we could try to sneak out of this hamlet and run to the hills,” said Nhan.
Viet dismissed that notion with a flip of his hand. “Even if we’re lucky enough to have cloud cover tonight, they’d still hear us sloshing through the paddies.”
“We will just have to figure out a way to last as long as we can,” I said.
WE called the team into the classroom. Heads hung low, they shuffled inside and squatted on the ground. Like all RD teams, this one was a mix of draft-dodgers and retired soldiers, some too young to shave, some too old to fight. They had enlisted for the back-breaking work of building bridges, roads, houses, and schools; teaching children; and providing basic health care. They had to be paramilitary propagandists for the government and good Samaritans for the villagers. The ARVN looked down on them as draft-dodgers and the Americans’ peons. USAID secretly used them as decoys to provide cover for the American intelligence operatives—a fact I had recently learned.
For their troubles, RD teams were favorite targets for the guerrillas. It was much easier to take potshots at men working in the fields than it was to attack a well-armed platoon. And when they died, their families received almost no compensation.
Seeing the fear in their faces, the way they turned to me for direction, I felt the full burden of leadership for the first time. A few hours ago, I had handed them the wages of an unwanted war, like poison in their pockets, the money some would soon repay with their lives. Anxiety for my own safety vanished, and I felt strangely composed.
“Brothers, you all know our situation is precarious. I just want to give you my thoughts. You know our job is to help improve people’s lives, but the Viet Cong believe we’re traitors and spies for the Americans, so they hate us. They hate us more than they hate the soldiers.
“Now, I know you did not join RD to fight. And you know I didn’t volunteer to be in the army, so like you, I don’t want to be in a battle.”
The seven older cadres didn’t need a pep talk, but I could tell by the way their faces softened that they appreciated the honesty. Veterans didn’t follow bravado. It was a trait in leaders who led men to their death. And at the same time, I couldn’t tell them the whole truth. How could I explain to them that their own Regional Force, less than an hour’s march away, wouldn’t come to their rescue?
“But tonight we must fight because they’ve got us surrounded and outgunned. And they will kill us if we don’t fight with everything we have. If we stand together, we might get through this and see our families again. All we have to do is to hold out long enough for the Regional Force to get here. It’s our only chance of survival.”
In the next room, an injured man moaned. A shiver went through the gathering. Nhan cleared his throat and said he agreed completely with me. Viet added that he would rather get killed than captured by the VC. The veterans nodded. Pale-faced, the draft-dodgers sat in silence. I turned the briefing over to Viet, who set about explaining our defensive plan.
I TOOK the radio outside and sat on a bench beneath a lime tree in the playground. I felt as though I should say a prayer, and I wanted to say one, but I didn’t know how. I wasn’t very religious. Not many people of my generation believed in anything. True faith was rare when you saw how true believers suffered and died just as easily as anyone else. I had seen a full twenty years of war. So for a few minutes, I thought about my mother. I believed her spirit protected me.
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br /> Dusk deepened into night. A northern wind cleared the sky for a scattering of stars and a half-moon. I radioed my assistant, Lieutenant Lan, at headquarters. Lan was very apologetic, saying that he had pleaded with Trieu for every sort of concession. I was angry, but I couldn’t blame Lan. I knew Trieu was no hero. His decision was not surprising: Why should he get his soldiers killed for a bunch of paramilitary guys working for the Americans.
There was one option left: An Binh hamlet was within range of the pair of howitzers at Phan Thiet Airport. I didn’t want to mention it earlier. In the ARVN, if an officer in the field called his superior at HQ and requested one of two things, he invariably got the lesser of the two, or nothing at all.
“Ask Captain Trieu to support us with his artillery tonight when they attack. We won’t have a chance without it.”
“Good idea. I wonder why he hadn’t thought of it.”
“Of course, he did. He just didn’t bother mentioning it.”
“Then I’m sure he doesn’t want to do it.”
“Damn it! I don’t care if you’re sure or not. Just ask him!”
“OK, sorry, Lieutenant. I’ll go talk to him again.”
Even though shelling the creek amounted to little more than a gunnery exercise for his men, Trieu would most likely decline because it was his privilege. If I wanted his help, I would have to promise him a favor in return, effectively placing myself in his pocket.
“Wait! I changed my mind.”
“I’m still here.”
“Go see Mr. Richardson yourself and ask him to make that request for us. If you can’t convince Mr. Richardson, get him on the radio for me.”
Ben Richardson was the head of USAID in Phan Thiet. On the record, he was an advisor, but in reality he was our boss from both the objective and financial perspectives. Trieu wouldn’t dare refuse Richardson’s request—not unless he wanted to risk a transfer to some unsavory post.
The Eaves of Heaven Page 11
