Hanson squinted against the glare and the roar of the helicopter. A wrecked APC dangled beneath the hollow belly of the chopper, smoke-blackened, a jagged hole just visible in its side. The smell of mo-gas, hot metal, and dust blew across the road.
A family of four Vietnamese passed him, balanced like a circus act on a Honda motorbike, the transistor radio that hung from the handlebars wailing a Vietnamese song.
A Huey gunship loped along the perimeter like a green steel wasp, and farther off, at the base of the green hills, a C-130 transport leveled off like a big crop duster and trailed a silver mist. The sunlight made an oily rainbow in the defoliant.
A jeep passed him, slowed, and stopped. The driver turned and called back to Hanson, “Where you headed?” He was wearing a green beret, but he had a strange yellow patch on his fatigue pocket, a yellow skull with a jagged leer.
“CCN,” Hanson said.
“Hop in. That’s where I’m going.”
The jeep rattled down the road, a tape recorder on the floorboard playing a Beatles tape, “. . . the magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away, dy-ing to take you away, take you today…”
The driver turned to look at Hanson, laughing, his eyes dancing. “Sound track,” he shouted, pounding the steering wheel, the jeep lurching off the shoulder of the road. “What a war, huh? Rock ’n’ roll war.
“Hey, what you going to CCN for?”
“I think I want a job.”
“Ha. We got some openings. We got openings. Go talk to Sergeant Major, he’ll fix you up. Tell him Silver sent you. Abadabadaba,” he said, flicking an imaginary cigar. “Say the magic word and get a job. No. As you were. Better not mention my name.”
They barreled down the road, Silver bobbing his head to the bass line on the tape recorder.
“You believe in reincarnation?” he shouted over the music.
“Sometimes.”
“Me too! I want to come back as an electric bass guitar. Plug myself in and just, you know, vibrate!”
The Vietnamese guards at the gate waved the jeep through. They drove down an alley of barbed wire, beneath the skull with the green beret, and up to the wood-frame operations center.
“Here it is. Sergeant Major’s in there. Huh!” He laughed down in his skinny chest. “Maybe you two can make a deal.”
Hanson hopped out and thanked him.
“That’s okay. That’s all right. Probably see you around.” He popped the clutch and disappeared in the dust.
Hanson walked through the last of the wire and beneath another grinning skull and the words WE KILL FOR PEACE. There were rows of barracks behind the operations center, each with a skull over the doorway and the name of a state beneath it: Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana.
A soldier walked out from behind one of the barracks. He wasn’t American or Vietnamese. He was stockier and darker than a Vietnamese, and his handsome features were broader. He was a Montagnard, a “Yard,” an aboriginal hill tribesman. The Yards were the niggers of Vietnam, despised for centuries by the Vietnamese who called them savages and who methodically killed them off whenever they could. Special Forces had been recruiting Yards, training them, and paying them to fight since the early sixties.
He looked like an Eskimo in jungle fatigues and combat gear, wearing a pack as big as his torso and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. His body was hung with green hand grenades, and he wore a silver peace medallion the size of a hamburger patty around his neck.
Another Montagnard, this one with shoulder-length hair and wearing only a loincloth, watched from the shadow of a gun tower as Hanson walked up to the operations center. His name was Rau. He had been watching for Hanson, the new one Mr. Minh was expecting. The one he’d seen in his katha.
Hanson knocked at the screen door of the operations center. Back in one of the barracks someone was playing “Summertime” on a bugle. He knocked again and thought he heard a voice inside.
The room seemed black as he stepped in out of the shrieking, hallucinatory noon sun. He could hear a reciprocating fan in a corner of the room, whirring, thumping to a stop, then turning back. He could feel the hot air it was pushing touch his face. The smell of hot wiring and oil was strong in the room, and he could hear the squeal and bark of a single sideband radio somewhere.
He made out a dark form behind a desk, came to attention and saluted. “Specialist-Four Hanson, sir. Request permission to speak to the sergeant major.”
“At ease, son. You’re speaking to him. What can I do for you?”
“I want a job with CCN, Sergeant Major.”
The man behind the desk smiled, and Hanson could just make out his eyes and cheekbones and the white of his teeth.
“Do you know what we do here, Hanson?”
“I have a general idea, Sergeant Major.”
Hanson began to see more clearly, his eyes adjusting to the room. The sergeant major looked to be in his early forties, with the strong jaw and high cheekbones of a Southerner. He had a pleasant Southern accent, and his voice was mild, almost fatherly, the voice of an interrogator.
A narrow blackboard ran the length of the wall behind the sergeant major, and it was sectioned off in green boxes. The name of a different state topped each box, and beneath each of the states there were six smaller boxes with names written in them in chalk: two American names at the top and four Montagnard names below those. Several of the boxes had been erased, a smudge of white chalk where a name should have been. Hanson could just make out parts of the erased names, ghostly in the smeared chalk dust.
“We’ve got jobs, Hanson. See those empty boxes behind me?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major.”
“They’re all dead or medivacked.” He watched Hanson for a few seconds, then laughed. “Do you have some kind of death wish, son? Do you have something against Communists? Do you think you can help,” he said with a smile, “win the war? Do you think it matters what you do over here?”
The door opened and closed behind Hanson, lighting the room for a moment so that he could see Sergeant Major’s dark, ironic eyes. Someone moved a chair and sat down on the far side of the room.
“Who are you, Hanson?” Sergeant Major asked him. “You don’t look like you belong here. You look like a nice, intelligent, sensitive college boy.” A laugh rose from the far side of the room and Hanson felt himself blush in shame and anger.
“Why aren’t you back home taking part in student antiwar self-criticism sessions, going to rallies and getting laid? That’s where I’d be.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m listening. Why do you want a job with us? Give me your best pitch.”
“I think I can contribute more to the Special Forces mission—”
“Why don’t you save that for the captain?” Sergeant Major said, interrupting him. “It’s a nice opening, and he likes that kind of speech, but I want to know why you want a job with us. We’re talking about hundred percent casualties, and nobody really cares. Talk to me, son.”
“Sergeant Major, I was drafted. I was doing fine without the Army or this war. They put me on a bus, shaved all my hair off, issued me baggy clothes, and put me into a barracks full of seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquents where NCOs screamed at me for sixteen weeks. I didn’t want to go to war with those people.
“So I signed up. I signed up for an extra year in the Army so I could volunteer for Special Forces. I went through all the training—I was a nice college boy. I was happy being a college boy, but they said I had to go. It wasn’t my idea.
“But when I went through the Special Forces school, I kind of got to like it. Which surprised me more than anybody. I liked the people I met there. I spent over a year with them getting ready for combat. Then I finally get here, my friends go off to A-teams, and they assign me to work with some regular Army warrant officer in the S-Two shop, drawing circles and arrows on maps.”
“Ah,” Sergeant Major said. “Mr. Grieson. He runs an efficient S-Two shop. A thousand confirmed kills, as he likes to remind p
eople in the NCO club.”
The voice on the other side of the room said, “Immaculate violence. And very nicely charted on his Day-Glo map collection, too. ‘Some may call us armchair commandos,’ ” the voice said, imitating Grieson’s Texas accent, then laughed.
“Too neat for you, Hanson?” Sergeant Major said. “You just want to go out there on the ground and see how it feels to kill folks?”
“Sergeant Major, I didn’t go through all that training to work in an office. I’m ready. If I come all the way over here and don’t get into combat it’ll be like getting into bed with a beautiful woman, then rolling over and reading a book. I’m a good soldier. I’ll do a good job for you. Get me out of that S-Two shop.”
“Why don’t we give him a chance?” the voice behind him said. “Rau sent me over here. He says that this might be the guy Mr. Minh was expecting.”
“Going native on me, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Major asked him.
“Who knows, Sergeant Major? But God knows we need some names on the blackboard if we want to get some of these operations moving again.”
“Okay,” Sergeant Major said to Hanson. “Be back here at fifteen hundred hours to talk to the captain. Put on some fresh fatigues. All you have to do is say ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir.’ I’ll handle the details.
“I don’t think I have to tell you not to mention this to anyone. Go ahead and do what your warrant officer wants, and smile when you do it. I’ll have your orders cut by tomorrow, and by then it’ll be too late for them to do anything about it. We have priority on personnel procurement.”
“I’ll walk him out to the gate,” the voice said.
“Okay, Hanson, take a walk with Lieutenant Andre. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
“Come on, college boy,” the lieutenant said, laughing. He was a dark-haired, wiry man a few years older than Hanson. “I had to put up with that ‘college boy’ shit, too. They get tired of it after a while,” he said as they stepped out the door into the blinding sunlight.
“Where do you think they’ll send me, sir?” Hanson asked him.
“You came at a good time. We’re setting up a base camp near the DMZ. It’s still under construction. We’ve got two companies of Vietnamese strike force and two companies of Yards for security. We’ll be doing some patrolling with them. It’s a good place for you to get your feet wet. There’s enough people on a strike force patrol that you’re just one of many. On a cross-border team, when the little man is shooting, he’s shooting at you. The only problem—they probably told you about it at Bragg—is the Vietnamese and the Yards hate each other, but we’ve got to use the Vietnamese and run them on patrols because of the politics over here. We’re hoping we can get rid of them once we go operational as a launch site.”
“What was that you said in there about someone ‘expecting’ me?” Hanson asked him.
“Well,” he said, and took a few more steps. “Okay,” he said. “Here it is, take it or leave it. There’s this Montagnard up at the camp. He doesn’t have any rank, but he’s basically the head honcho of the Yards. The Yards call him Chicken Man, but we just call him by his name, Minh. Only we call him Mr. Minh. The man has got some balls. He also…”
The sound of rotors drowned him out as a pair of Cobra gunships pounded past overhead.
“He also is kind of a shaman, a priest, to them. He can predict things sometimes. That’s what the Yards say. He said that a new guy was going to show up here today, looking for a job, and that we should give him one.”
They walked toward the gate and the grinning skull.
“Yeah,” Lieutenant Andre said, “like I said, you can take it or leave it.
“Anyway, welcome to CCN.”
CCN, Command and Control North, was one of the units under SOG, Surveillance and Observation Group. The names of the illegal cross-border units were kept as vague as possible and changed from time to time. The individual soldiers in the units might be referred to in official reports as “detection operation systems personnel,” or “border control structure components.”
The soldiers in the units usually operated in six-man teams, two Americans and four Montagnards, and were members of the U.S. Special Forces. No Vietnamese were involved in the real workings of the unit.
The units went on reconnaissance patrols and prisoner snatches into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Approximately 80 percent of the reliable intelligence about enemy troop movements came from these patrols but was attributed to other sources, such as captured documents, friendly villagers, aircraft spot-tings, and enemy defectors. Vietnam, some said, was a “polite war,” and it was illegal to cross borders.
Most of the security precautions were not taken in an attempt to confuse the enemy. The enemy knew the day a unit had its name changed or when a new launch site was planned. Their spies and sympathizers were everywhere, from maids to field grade officers. No, the complex, often ridiculous security measures were part of an effort to protect the Special Forces operations from American political and military investigation.
Public opinion about the war could change in the time it took to look up from your potatoes at ten seconds of garbled film footage on the evening news, and some hustling young congressman would be out to get the truth, once again, on the controversial Green Berets. By the time he got the necessary secret, top secret, and need-to-know clearances to start sorting through hundreds of confusing, euphemistic, and sanitized reports (sentences and entire pages would be missing, blank pages might have been inserted, stamped “pages 12 through 15 have been removed in accordance with letter, MACV 246 HQ US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, dated 15 June 68, as not relevant to debriefing requirements”) in an attempt to get publicity as a “concerned American” or a peace candidate, the operations would have new names, and all information would have been refiled under “Terrain Studies During Monsoon Conditions.”
Field grade and general officers in the regular Army who wanted to see all Special Forces operations discontinued—and the majority did. The regular Army has always distrusted elite units—had almost as much difficulty as the congressmen. With only a year in Vietnam, they had to devote most of their time to trying to devise some tactic novel and flamboyant enough to justify their promotion, or to orchestrate an operation big and bloody enough to make the headlines, ensuring their promotion and a medal.
Most of the Special Forces units were inserted by helicopter near an enemy-controlled area. They worked their way through the area until they found the enemy, and then directed air strikes on them.
Sometimes the enemy found the team first, and the team had to run. Drop everything but ammo, and run.
MAI LOC LAUNCH SITE
The lined yellow legal sheets fluttered in Hanson’s hands in the rush of air from the open chopper door. He kept looking past Linda’s black felt-tip writing to the jungle passing below. It was almost cold at two thousand feet. They were skirting the city of Hue, and in the river below he could see the staggered Vs of fish traps. An area on one side of the river was pocked with hundreds of craters.
“What’s that?” he asked the staff sergeant next to him, shouting over the wind and the roar of the jet turbine. “Bomb craters?” He pointed down.
“No. Cemetery. They bury them in round graves,” the staff sergeant shouted back, cupping his hands. “Put ’em in the ground sort of sitting down. That’s the kind of fucked-up people they are.”
Each of the circular graves appeared to be marked with a triangular flag on a pole.
“What?…” Hanson shouted, his voice lost in the wind and noise.
The staff sergeant pointed at the microphone/ear-phone hanging above Hanson, then took down another one for himself. After they put them on, he said, “Better than shouting, eh?” his voice shuddering with the pounding of the chopper, like someone with palsy.
“What are the flags for?” Hanson asked him.
“Land-clearing operation. They put flags on the graves so the ’dozers don’t plow ’em under.”
Then the pilot’s voice, quivering and metallic, came through the earphones. “Are you ready, Sarge?”
“Right,” the staff sergeant said. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out two 60-millimeter mortar rounds, little iron bombs the size of Thermos bottles. “Ready,” he said. “Mr. Smith, you are now driving an aircraft with the rough configuration of a fighter-bomber.”
The chopper dropped toward the river.
“Hanson,” the sergeant said, his voice shaking over the intercom as if someone had him by the throat, “we’re going in on a little unauthorized mission. There’s a machine gun just about there”—and he pointed at a bend in the river—“that fucks with Mr. Smith every time he comes up this way. We’re gonna see if he’s still around.”
The chopper dropped to a couple hundred feet, and Hanson felt his ears pop as he lifted slightly from his seat. The sergeant pulled safety pins from the noses of the mortar rounds.
At their altitude, the river threw the sunlight back like a mirror set in the dark green jungle.
Something flickered at the elbow of the river.
“There it is.”
“Mark, mark.”
Green tracers arced slowly up toward the helicopter, growing out of the darker green of the jungle, growing bigger and faster, then blinking past the open door.
The door gunner on that side began firing, adding another shudder to the chopper, the ride bumpy as a station wagon speeding down a dirt road. Red tracers from his M-60 arced down to the jungle, and he began walking them toward the spot where the green tracers clustered like bubbles before floating up at the chopper.
“Bring some pee!”
Gleaming brass poured from the breech of the machine gun and was torn away by the wind.
The chopper banked, and the other gunner began to fire. The staff sergeant leaned out the open door into a safety strap, holding the mortar rounds in each hand like iron footballs.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 20
