by Robin Moore
Sergeant Menzes finally found his deliveries and, slinging the packages in back, where four grinning Vietnamese strikers were sitting, he reverently placed the precious orange mailsack on the front seat between us and drove off.
The roads to Muc Tan weren’t at all bad. The strikers listlessly watched the sides of the road for ambushes, and from force of habit I snapped out the stock on my carbine, chambered a round, and held it pointed directly up the road for instant employment. “Guess you’ve been on some of them bad roads,” Menzes said with a chuckle. “The only trouble we’ve got around here is with our so-called allies.”
“I recall Captain Hillman and Sergeant Rucker telling you a few things about that,” I replied. “Didn’t appear to me you all really took them seriously.”
“We sure found they was right, sir,” Menzes said ruefully. “In fact, if anything things is worse. But I guess Captain Farley will tell you all that. He’s pretty disgusted.”
The medic concentrated on his driving. “Nice road,” I said, “smooth, plenty of open space on both sides.”
“Sure. This is the main road to the rubber plantation. Very important to them Frenchies. We never have any trouble on it because the plantation pays off the VC to leave them alone.”
Soon the entire south side of the east-west road was deep in rubber trees. We drove for three miles before reaching the camp. True to what I had heard, this was the neatest Special Forces camp, the most perfectly laid out, I had ever seen. All the barracks were correctly aligned snow-white cement-block structures with attractive, pitched-shingle roofs. The camp’s outer walls were straight, clean concrete embankments with perfect half-circle cement machine-gun emplacements all along them. At the entrance to the concertina, which stretched around the entire perimeter, two strikers in starched fatigues brought themselves up to attention and saluted smartly. We drove twenty yards inside the barbed-wire perimeter along the walls to the gate into the main fort. Again two immaculate guards came to attention and saluted as we drove through.
I whistled appreciatively at the orderly, military interior. “Nothing wrong with this camp.”
Menzes shrugged in reply and brought his truck up in front of the long, tree-shaded sparkling-white headquarters building. Immediately, Sergeant Hanks emerged. “Mail come?”
The medic tossed him the orange mailbag, and just as Hanks was turning to go back into his office with it he noticed me. He welcomed me profusely and took me along the row of doors to one over which the sign COMMANDING OFFICER U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES DETACHMENT A—799 shone out in gold letters on a blue background, perfectly matching the colors of the Special Forces shoulder patch. Captain Farley, seated at a metal desk, contemplating a sheaf of correspondence, looked up and came around to shake my hand.
“Hiya, Zack,” I said. “If I knew what a nice camp you had I’d have come here before on R and R. Where’s the swimming pool?”
Farley smiled wanly and showed me to a chair.
“The mail came in, sir,” Hanks said. “I’ll sort it and bring yours in. Where shall I put our guest’s ruck, sir—in the guest room?”
“There’s an extra sack in my room. He can bunk in there. If we get attacked I’ll be able to watch him.” Both he and the sergeant guffawed loudly at this highly unlikely possibility.
“You picked a good time to come,” Farley said when Hanks had left.
“Pickins told me about the operation and I thought it might be interesting.”
“I’m not talking about that. It’s the last day of the month. Pay day for the strikers and construction workers. You’ll have a chance to see Lieutenant Chi in his best form.”
“Hillman’s favorite counterpart?”
“Even Hillman hadn’t caught up with this larcenous little genius.” He looked at his watch. “Come on, I’ll show you something. You remember my XO Lieutenant Cooke? Well, he and Sergeant Reilly are supervising paying the strike force. You wouldn’t believe it, I suppose, but we have one hell of a high desertion rate at this camp.”
I showed my surprise. “Damned right,” Farley said grimly. “That smart, conniving, cheating, politicking camp commander Chi has everything all figured out.”
We started to cross the cement parade ground toward a building outside of which stood a long line of Vietnamese strike-force troopers. I stared at them—so unusual was it to see civilian irregulars looking so crisp and military.
Farley laughed bitterly. “Oh they look good, all right. Christ, you’d think we were back in garrison instead of out on the Cambodian border. That’s how Chi keeps his embezzling going so successfully. This is the best-looking camp in Vietnam. We get inspected about three times a week. Any time a wheel wants to see a Special Forces camp, this is where they come. But Chi is so rough on his strikers, he’s such a damned stickler, that these civilian kids can’t take it. About the middle of the month he starts shoving them in jail for five days if they have a shoelace untied. And the jail is something we don’t show visitors. It’s a pit where Chi throws the strikers for punishment. At least twice since I’ve been here cobras have fallen in and bitten prisoners. Just the threat of the pit scares these strikers into deserting. But the Viet top brass think Chi is some military mastermind and any little disciplinary action he sees fit to carry out is fine with them so long as the visiting VIP’s are impressed.”
Farley balefully watched the line of men move into the headquarters building to receive their pay. “In the last eight or ten days Chi has scared at least fifty men, maybe more, into deserting. Then what he does is collect their pay for himself. He even stuck my interpreter into the pit for telling me how many men deserted last week—we got him out; my men took him out by force before he’d been in more than a couple of hours. Chi sent a radio message to the Vietnamese LLDB major at the B team that I was interfering with his discipline. But Colonel Train knows the score now and told me to forget it.”
We walked into the building, past the line of cleanly dressed, subdued strikers, and up to the table where two LLDB sergeants were sitting. The two Americans, Lieutenant Cooke and Sergeant Reilly, were passing them neatly stacked piastre notes, which they in turn passed to the strikers as they signed the paybook. Lieutenant Chi, a sullen-faced Vietnamese in the camouflage fatigues and beret of the LLDB, was standing behind the table watching the proceedings.
“How many of them have you seen come through twice so far?” Farley asked, not bothering to lower his voice for the benefit of the Viet paymasters.
“I’ve challenged about four of them, sir,” Sergeant Reilly answered. “But Lieutenant Chi and these swinging dicks”—he indicated the two LLDB pay-clerks with a jerk of his thumb—“started giving me a hard time and swearing the strikers I called were coming through legally. What are you going to do?”
“Why don’t you make them dip their hands in indelible ink each time they’re paid?” I suggested.
Wearily, three sets of American eyes stared at me. Then Farley said, “We already tried it, but Chi sent word to Saigon that the Americans were insulting the integrity of the Vietnamese. That ended that.”
A striker came through, looking nervously at the four men behind the stacks of money on the table. He glanced for a moment at Lieutenant Chi and then took up the pen to sign the paybook.
“Hold it,” Lieutenant Cooke said.
The striker paused with raised pen, looking up uncertainly.
“I know goddamned well this one’s been through before,” the XO said. “What do you think, Ramsey?”
“I’d say you’re right, sir. Goddamn it though, it’s sure hard to tell.”
Lieutenant Chi approached the table. He said something to one of the Vietnamese at the table who repeated the camp commander’s Vietnamese words to Cooke. “Lieutenant Chi says he has been watching carefully and this man has not been through before.”
“We could search him to see if he has any money,” Cooke said, more in explanation to me than making a serious suggestion, “but he’d be clean. Chi’s me
n take the money the minute these guys go through the line. If he’s a repeater, the only way he’ll get his own pay is if we give it to him now. If we don’t, there’s an investigation, Chi raises hell with the B-team commander, and we’re in for about twenty-five pounds of paper work and this poor guy doesn’t get paid. Shit!” Cooke glanced back at Captain Farley. “We’ll pay, I just don’t like that little crook to think we’re absolute dickheads.”
The money was paid, and the line progressed under the eyes of Lieutenant Chi. Cooke shook his head, his face grim with disgust. “These thieves give me such a case of the ass I don’t feel right for a goddamned week.”
“Have you paid off the construction workers yet?” Farley asked.
“No sir. They come next.”
“When you’ve finished with them, come to my office and we’ll start tightening the old noose,” Farley said. “Reilly, I’m sure glad you were a bookkeeper before you got into the Army.”
“Yes, sir,” Reilly said enthusiastically.
We left the LLDB headquarters, Farley and Chi exchanging correct, grim nods. Back in the office we said nothing for a few moments and then Farley spoke out. “Chi’s LLDB team right this minute is down at the contractor’s office on the north side of the camp. We always have a hell of a lot of construction work going on. They like this camp so much in Saigon that anything we want in new construction gets the OK. And Chi, as camp commander, picks the contractor. He takes a piece from the contract or on his profits, and he’s got another trick. His LLDB team picks the workers from the villages around here. Every one of them kicks back a percentage of their pay check. The Americans get the blame for this because Chi’s men tell them that they kick back to us. The whole thing is a stinking business. And try and get Chi to go out on a combat patrol to the border!”
“So, Zack old man, what are you going to do for the next four months of your tour?”
“We’re going to establish an FOB on the Cambodian border and fight the VC. The hell with Lieutenant Chi’s garrison duty.”
“And just how do you intend doing this?”
“Sergeant Reilly is my secret weapon,” Farley answered, smiling. “He should be an FBI accountant. We have two Vietnamese interpreters on our side. The one we took out of the pit and one other. They’ve been able to quietly get the names of all the deserters this month. It cost us some bribe money but it was worth it. Reilly can show on paper exactly how much Chi took this month on deserters.
“We also have one of the contractor’s supervisors on our side. The interpreters even found out that Chi has been gambling in town. In the past two months he’s lost and owes the equivalent of $300. That’s a hell of a lot of money for a lieutenant in the Vietnamese Army. We got a statement from his gambling friends that he is not only $300 in the hole but that he lost another $300 in cash.
“It’s cost money but we’ve built up a hell of a case. Just as soon as Reilly gets his figures laid out, I’m taking the whole dirty mess to the B team. That’s as far as I can go. Then it’s up to Colonel Train. He said that up to now we didn’t have real proof and accusations would only drive a wedge between us and the Vietnamese.”
“Isn’t Colonel Train coming over for this operation?”
“Right. And his counterpart Major Tri too. But I don’t think this is the place to clobber Chi. We’ll do it at B-team headquarters. Oh, we’ve got a lot of other little surprises. Chi’s medics are stealing our antibiotics and selling them in town, and of course that stuff goes right to the VC. We’ve tried to put a stop to that, but Chi complains that the Americans refuse to give them enough penicillin for their wounded. And that’s a goddamned laugh because we get so damned few wounded.”
Farley stood up and paced his small office in frustration. He stopped at the map on his wall and hit it with his fist. “If we’d go up here on the border where we’re supposed to be maybe we would have a few dead and wounded, but we’d stop the VC from coming in through our area.” He looked at his watch. “There isn’t a damned thing more I can do today. I need a little nerve tonic.”
“I have some Jim Beam in my ruck. I’m with you, Zack.”
Half an hour later we were sitting in the teamroom drinking a bourbon and water when Reilly walked in, an angry expression on his face.
“Sir, Ho Vang Minh is missing.”
Farley jumped up. “What do you mean, missing? We haven’t been out on any operations with Minh.”
“He’s missing right out of this camp.”
“How can that be? Minh would never go AWOL.” Farley turned to me. “Minh is our second interpreter. He’s been Reilly’s number one helper on this report we’re making.”
“I think Lieutenant Chi knows what you’re doing, sir. Maybe he grabbed Minh. Lieutenant Cooke and Hanks and I went down to the pit but he wasn’t there. None of the LLDB are talking, you can bet the rest of that bottle of Beam on that.”
Farley looked worried. “Well, have a shot while we try and figure out what happened. Where’s Lieutenant Cooke?”
“He’s trying to make the LLDB tell him where Minh is.”
“I hope he doesn’t try so hard he gets us all in trouble,” Farley muttered. “Cooke has a way of getting physical when he gets the ass with our counterparts.” The captain took a long drink and set the glass down. “What could Lieutenant Chi find out from Ho Vang Minh if he had him over in one of their barracks now and was working him over?”
“If Minh talked, Chi would know that you have him by the nuts, sir, and are just waiting for the right time to squeeze.”
“Minh is a good man,” Farley said grimly. “He almost makes up for the Chis. Minh’s the kind this country needs if it’s ever going to become a modern nation. Christ, I hope he’s all right.”
The bourbon had calmed Reilly down a bit. “Sir, Sergeant Hanks and Lieutenant Cooke both figure that if Lieutenant Chi has been talking to Minh, he thinks you’re going to hit him with everything you got while Colonel Train and Major Tri are here tomorrow or the next day. Maybe he’s panicked. No telling what he might do.”
“I just hope they don’t torture or kill him,” said Farley tightly.
The next afternoon Lieutenant Colonel Train, Major Tri and Captain Pickins arrived at Muc Tan, and with them an American intelligence sergeant who carried a polygraph. A general briefing was held in the operations room.
Lieutenant Chi was clearly suspicious of the whole mission. It had not been his idea. Captain Farley had requested permission from the B team and Train had taken to the plan and pushed it onto Tri. Even though his own man at Muc Tan had neither originated nor approved the mission, Tri decided he had better give his approval. The use of the lie detector on the spot so intrigued him he had come out to see the results for himself.
In the briefing room Chi eyed the lie detector with an expression of mistrust and fear. By this time I had learned to understand the deviousness of the Vietnamese mind and I knew exactly what Chi must be thinking. The mission was a coverup for an investigation into his activities, and the lie detector was to be used on him and his men. The new government in Saigon had made sweeping statements about ending graft and shooting any Vietnamese officer who embezzled more than 100,000 piastres, about $10,000. The first test case had yet to be made, and misappropriation of funds and equipment was so prevalent that the new premier would lose a significant percentage of his officer corps if he tried to carry out his threat. Still, Lieutenant Chi was concerned; the government might be forced into action if presented with a good enough case.
Lieutenant Chi played the game all the way. As camp commander it was his prerogative to conduct the briefing for this operation he had not initiated, did not want to carry out, and believed to be merely a diversionary scheme of the Americans anyway. He now did so:
The mission would start out at midnight, be began. Two platoons would leave camp. The first, advised by Sergeant Hanks, would start ten minutes earlier than the second, advised by Captain Farley. Both platoons would follow a course of 22
5 degrees, or southwest, through the rubber plantation. Four miles on this course would bring the platoons out of the plantation onto a north-south road along the western edge of the rubber trees. From this point on the road Hanks’ platoon would follow the road south two miles until he reached the objective village. His platoon would block the north and west sides of the village. Farley’s platoon, ten minutes behind, would block the east and south sides of the village. Then the headquarters section, using bull horns, would tell the people their village was surrounded and no one would be shot unless the villagers fired first. Sergeant Hanks, firing flare rounds from the M-79 grenade launcher, would keep the village illuminated until dawn, as the headquarters and search sections moved in and started interrogating the villagers. It was hoped that an important key to the infiltration route of VC’s through this province would be discovered.
Lieutenant Chi was careful to point out on the map that he had set up an ambush opposite a rubber-workers’ village which lay about a mile east of the road onto which the two platoons would emerge from the trees. Following their course of 225 degrees the two platoons would, during the course of their march, pass less than a mile from this village. Since it was suspected that not only the French owners of the plantation but most of the rubber workers were VC sympathizers, the ambush was a precaution against a possible VC attack on the column from this village.
Major Tri congratulated Lieutenant Chi for devising a fine plan of attack. He said that a thorough search and questioning of the villagers of the objective town should be of great value to intelligence at the B team as well as at Muc Tan, which was doing such an excellent job of border surveillance.
During the evening Captain Farley conducted a meeting of the Americans who would be going on the mission. Sergeant Reilly, saying that after all the paperwork he’d been doing he thought he deserved a change of pace, was assigned to Sergeant Hanks. When Lieutenant Colonel Train asked about the paperwork Reilly had referred to, Captain Farley said it was something he’d like to take up with the B-team company commander the next day. Train agreed.
