by Eric Meyer
I wondered where this was going. “No sweat, Sir.”
“He’s still scared of us, still worried we’re about to put a bullet in his head. So, he said he’d only work with you. They tried to persuade him otherwise, but he was insistent. He said his only hope of staying alive was if he worked with a man who’d already saved his life.”
I could see where this was going, and I was already preparing myself mentally for the better alternative, a long prison sentence.
“I can’t do it, Sir. If it means the tunnels, there’s no way.”
It was like I was talking into thin air, and he continued as if I hadn’t said a word.
“Of course, we’ll return you to your old unit under Master Sergeant Morgan, and Jesse Coles will take the lead when it comes to exploring any tunnels you find. This is a good chance to clear your name, Private Yeager. Do this for me, and I’ll do something for you.”
I could feel the terror rising, the thought of those stinking, poisonous, and claustrophobic places where only a madman, Vietcong, or a tunnel rat would boldly go. I didn’t feel bold. “Sir, I can’t…”
“Orders, Private Yeager. You’re going back.”
I’m gonna die. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. He may as well put me in front of that firing squad. At least the firing squad would be quicker and a deal less painful.
Chapter Eight
MACV After Action Report – Lessons Learned
Operations against tunnel complexes: The following experience of the first Infantry Division in the Di An and Cu Chi areas is representative of tunnel operations to date:
Tunnel exploitation and destruction: in both operations the tactical situation permitted the employment of the following techniques:
1. The area in the immediate vicinity of the tunnels was secured and defended by a 360-degree perimeter to protect the tunnel team.
2. The entrance to the tunnel was carefully examined for mines and booby traps.
3. Two members of the team and the tunnel with wire communications to the surface.
I must have blacked out for a second, for I thought I was dead. But I wasn’t dead; I was still standing in front of the Colonel.
“I’m setting aside the charges, Private. If everything goes well, you’ll be free and clear. No court-martial for shooting that prisoner…”
“He was about to shoot us, Sir.”
Once again, it was like I opened my mouth, the words came out, and yet they were silent. “As well as the charge of evading arrest, and who knows, you may even get a promotion.”
“I don’t want…”
“Of course, if things don’t work out, none of it makes a spit of difference.”
It was obvious the phrase, ‘if things don’t work out’ was a euphemism for if I died out there like he expected, just a nice way of offering me a gift-wrapped obituary.
I walked out of there and across to where Sergeant Morgan and the other guys were standing, staring into the Triangle. Smoke was rising, and we could see flames where the jungle was on fire after the massive bombardment and several napalm strikes.
I heard a passing soldier say, “When we go in there, we’ll be lucky to find anyone alive.”
I’d been in there, and I knew different. And now I was going back. Jesse Coles was standing apart from the others, and he too was staring at the Triangle. Yet unlike the other men who were pointing out places where the smoke and flames roiled thicker than others, his expression was like it always was. Vacant. Above ground he was a fish out of water. Outside of his element, waiting for the next tunnel, for the next venture into the dark, terrifying world of the tunnel rat.
Morgan gestured for me to join him. “I gather the Colonel talked to you.”
“He did.”
“So, you’ll be back with us, keeping an eye on our tame VC. Did you know Lieutenant Tam specifically asked to come along as well?”
I didn’t know, and I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea.
He shrugged. “It could be useful having another Viet along, someone who speaks the language. Just in case Minh tries to double-cross us. It’s a good idea.”
I still thought it was a terrible idea. She wanted the same as I wanted, the death of Commissar Trinh. But she wanted more. She wanted to remain within arm’s length of one of the men who’d raped her, and I had little doubt she’d put a bullet in our newest Kit Carson Scout the moment she had a chance.
“When do we leave?”
“At dawn. They just bombed the crap out of the Triangle again, and the artillery is waiting for night when Charlie comes out to play. They’re preparing to throw a few thousand shells at the likely targets, so we won’t be able to move in until then.” He chuckled, “You should chill out, Carl. Get a good night’s sleep, and with any luck we won’t run into any serious opposition when we go in. If he’s on the level, Minh will help us locate the tunnels, although if that bombardment was successful, we may not even see a Vietcong. At least, not a live one.”
I don’t know if he really believed that, or if he was fooling himself. Not that it made any difference, the mission of his small team was recon, and that meant going looking for the enemy. Live enemy, not corpses. Pinpointing them for artillery and airstrikes, or for helicopters to land troops to surround and destroy them. Besides, in spite of all the bombs they’d dropped over the Triangle, I knew the truth. Nothing short of a direct hit would be sufficient to destroy them. I also knew Commissar Trinh was still out there. Still alive, and sooner or later we would meet. One of us would die. The way things were going; I was odds-on favorite to buy the farm.
Once again, Jamie Erskine’s Huey ferried us into the Triangle, and he put us down outside a village by the name of Ben Suc, reckoned to be the main VC center of operations. Following the saturation bombing and artillery shelling, elements of the 1st Infantry Division, along with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment had begun their thrust into the Iron Triangle. The hammer was advancing, and we landed in a maelstrom of heavy gunfire. Evidently, the enemy weren’t all dead.
Jamie shouted to Morgan, “I’m expecting a call to evacuate the wounded from Ben Suc. Everything’s gone crazy. Everyone shouting for a dust off, and everything that can fly is already in the air bringing back the wounded. So, I’ll stick around for a while and see what goes down.”
“It’s appreciated, Jamie.”
The Huey didn’t touch down. Instead, it hovered a few feet above the ground, and we jumped out. The helicopter took off with the gunners firing long bursts, returning fire, and bullets flew both ways, chewing up the jungle around us. Some coming so close they punched holes into the aluminum fuselage. And then the gunfire abruptly ceased as fast as it had begun. We crouched low and raced toward the nearest cover, a thick area of trees and vines. Before we entered, we fired several bursts into the trees, just in case the enemy was lurking in ambush.
They weren’t, and we breathed a sigh of relief they’d gone. We began a search of the immediate area. No more Vietcong waited in ambush, no AK-47s spewed out long lines of bullets to rip into the Imperialists. We did find five bodies, three VCs ripped apart by heavy fire from the Huey, and two small pigs lying on the ground side-by-side, torn apart by our gunfire.
Morgan took a bearing and pointed south-west. “We’ll head that way. According to my calculations that should take us close to where we believe Commissar Trinh and his pals are holed up. Remember, he’s our primary objective. The brass wants this guy dead.”
“When we find him, he’s mine!” Tam shouted.
I saw Minh, who was at the front with Jesse Coles give her a sharp glance when he heard the unmistakably female voice. We’d have to keep them apart as much as possible. Nobody needed to predict what would happen if she got close enough to put a bullet in him. The career of the Army’s latest Kit Carson Scout would end prematurely.
We started walking, pushing through the interminable jungle, following a narrow game trail. Probably the same one used by those t
wo unfortunate pigs that came to an untimely end. At one time, Minh held up a hand for us to stop, and we crouched low. We’d almost reached a crossroads, and while waited, hardly daring to breathe, a line of black pajama clad men almost silent in rubber sandals, their heads covered in the floppy jungle hats they sported, strolled past a few meters in front of us.
They didn’t look our way, and it wasn’t hard to work out why. They looked tired, disheveled, wild-eyed, and I almost pitied them for the bombing that had caused them to shit their pants. As well as come close to wiping them out, although I held back on the pity. When men are trying to kill me, I tend to lose sympathy for them. These guys were a spent force, at least for now, and they were running. It could have been from our troops advancing from the west. We waited until they were long gone, and Minh beckoned us forward.
He wasn’t armed. He may have been an employee of Uncle Sam, but trusting him with a weapon was something altogether different. Jesse stayed close to him, and I noticed them talking in low murmurs. Probably swapping tales of the tunnels, and while I was trying to work out what they were saying, the VC hit us. They looked like the same outfit we saw go past earlier, so they must have taken a wrong turn. When they discovered their mistake, they came back and found us.
All that saved us was they were in a bad state, worn out, hungry, and half asleep. If they’d been a top-notch outfit, they’d have torn us to pieces. Tam heard them first, and they were too close for her to call a warning. She did the next best thing, dropped to one knee, and opened fire with her M1. Two men went down, but the rest, although worn out, beat up, and dispirited, still had plenty of fight left in them. They returned fire, and all of a sudden we were in the middle of a gun battle we didn’t need. And suddenly they didn’t seem as dispirited and demoralized as we’d first thought.
There was no subtlety in their tactics, no running from cover to cover, shooting from behind trees as they advanced. They’d taken too much from the bombing, napalm, and artillery, and they saw a chance to hit back. Came at us on the run, twenty men with AK-47s spitting bullets manufactured in faraway Russia, and we dropped flat and shot back. Within the first few seconds, we’d reduced their numbers to twelve, but they still kept coming. Things quickly got worse. They’d evidently been heading for a meet up with another unit, and new men came charging in to join the battle.
I heard their commanders screaming orders, and they sprinted at us in their determination to kill. We fired and fired again until our barrels were red hot, and still they came. I counted fifty men, a horde of hate and spite racing toward us. They were fifty meters away when I saw fifty more materialize from the jungle to join them. We were in serious trouble, and I heard Morgan on the radio, calling for air support.
I didn’t see how it could happen. Everything that flew was in the air, and I doubted they’d spare any of their precious assets for a tiny unit trapped under fire. But that day our Guardian Angel, by the name of Jamie Erskine, was flying overhead. He’d been as good as his word and waited around. The Huey zoomed in like the black Angel of Death. Erskine knew his stuff, passing the enemy on one flank to allow the door gunner to fire on the enemy, performing a tight turn, and coming around to give the other gunner a chance. He flew past a half dozen times, and the M-60s chewed into the ranks of the VC.
Some of the enemy tried to take on the helicopter, pointing their guns upward and firing at the fast-moving rotorcraft. The chances of a hit were slim, and at best they punched a few more holes into the already perforated fuselage. The sheets of 7.62mm bullets hammered at them from the sky, and some tried to run, pursued by a hurricane of gunfire that ripped through their ranks, tore through their bodies, and tossed them to the ground like yesterday’s garbage. They were confused, they were frightened, and for men who were already running from the awesome might of the United States military, this was too much. They’d seen an easy kill and discovered to their cost it wasn’t quite so easy.
Some ran toward us, and I never knew if they were pressing their attack or had forgotten where we were located, but we were ready and waiting. I saw Minh try to scuttle into deeper cover. Maybe he was trying to get away and maybe he wasn’t, but Morgan grabbed him with his left hand as he knelt, holding the M-14 with his right and firing repeatedly. And then it was all over. As quickly as it had begun, it ended, and the jungle floor was littered with bodies. None of them were ours, and Morgan got to his feet cautiously.
“Check the bodies. Make sure none are faking.”
We checked, and although none were faking, we found several who were severely wounded and beyond hope, so we put them out of their misery. Erskine’s Huey was still flying circuits around us, and Morgan called him up on the radio.
“Jamie, next time we meet up do me a favor.”
“What’s that, buddy?”
“Teach me how to fly a helicopter. I’ve had it with this job.”
“You won’t say that when North Vietnamese Triple-A comes up at you out of nowhere. You’ll be glad you stayed where you were, you know the casualty rate for helicopter crews?”
“Bad?”
“If I were you, I’d forget the flying.”
“Got it, and thanks.”
We resumed our patrol, and we came across the results of some of the bombing. In places the jungle resembled a vast opencast mining site. There were always bodies, many bodies, and we also came across what had once been a tunnel system. The massive bombardment from the B-52s had churned up the ground, collapsing the tunnels, and here and there we saw a boot sticking up from the earth. Sometimes a head, just the head, there was no body attached.
The area they’d bombarded was around a square kilometer, and if someone was planning to plant rice, they had the perfect opportunity, plenty of soft earth, most of it turned over with bomb craters. When the rains came, they had several multi-million-dollar paddy fields. There was no sign of life, no sign of the enemy.
Morgan nodded thoughtfully. “We have to face facts. He could be dead. We know he was in the area, and it’s difficult to see how anyone could have survived this amount of bombing. The chances are his body is buried in a collapsed tunnel, and he’s gone for good. We’ll go as far as the edge of the devastated area and see if we can locate any survivors. If we do run into them, I doubt they’ll be in any fit state to do any fighting.” He looked at our Kit Carson Scout. “Minh, what do you think? Have any of the tunnels survived?”
He looked blank. “Perhaps.”
“He’s not dead!” Tam shouted, “I know he isn’t dead. He’s still alive.”
Morgan calmed her and sent her to the rear, just in case she decided to take another chance to pop a bullet into Minh. Personally, I had doubts he was still alive. I didn’t see how anyone could still be alive after such a bombing, but I didn’t say anything. She was upset, and that was understandable. I’d wanted to kill him myself, but I’d settle for the B-52s doing the job instead. We re-entered the jungle and continued our patrol, but I figured the mission was as good as over. We could relax.
We found a clearing to stop and eat some chow. I found a place as free of bugs as anywhere in Vietnam and settled down for a short rest. Tam stayed on her feet, clearly very agitated at the prospect of us abandoning the search for Trinh. I was certain he was dead, and the deaths of those men in my platoon were avenged. She’d never believe it until she saw the body.
Minh joined me, probably for protection. He had it in his mind I wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to him. Not strictly true, but I didn’t disabuse him. We chatted about the Communists, and to my surprise he had no doubt about their eventual victory.
“Ho Chi Minh has tens of thousands of troops in the country, perhaps hundreds of thousands, and he’s anxious to conquer the South before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
He shrugged. “One day he will die. Before that day he wants to see the South under a Communist government.”
“Do you think he’ll succeed?”
“He must. If he
has to sacrifice every man, woman, and child in Vietnam to achieve his goal, that’s what he’ll do.” Minh waved his hand in the direction of the devastated area we’d just passed, “I have little doubt there are several thousand Vietcong buried in the collapsed tunnels, but if it was a hundred thousand, he’d send in another hundred thousand to replace them. Kill a million, and he’ll replace them with another million. How can America compete with that kind of disregard for life? The Russian Communists used a similar strategy during the Second World War. If they needed to clear a minefield, they’d march a battalion of soldiers over it, and disregard the losses. If they were short of rifles, they’d advance troops towards the Germans, and the unarmed men would walk behind and pick up the rifles of those who fell.”
“Shit.”
He grimaced. “It’s warfare, Communist style.”
“What about Trinh? Do you believe he’s dead?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No. As soon as he knew your people had uncovered his base, he’d have moved to a new position. The tunnel you discovered beneath the tree had a number of connecting tunnels, and some of them run for several kilometers, so he would have escaped without difficulty.”
“Then we’ll go after the fucker.”
He looked at me then, a long, piercing gaze, and seemed to be coming to a decision about something. “I would advise against it. He was due to meet with Madame Vo.”
“Madame Vo?”
“Have you not heard of Madame Vo?”
“Vaguely.”
Morgan glanced in our direction and move nearer. “Why don’t you tell us about her?”
“She leads a unit called the Tunnel Defense Volunteers. Their task is to protect the tunnels from the American engineers they call the tunnel rats. Madame Vo is very skilled in the art of killing, and she has personally accounted for at least ten men who entered the tunnels. Some call her the Scorpion, because she is both tiny and lethal. One of her techniques is to wait until several tunnel rats are underground, and she will wait on the surface until the first emerges into the open. As soon as she sees his head, she plunges a sharpened bamboo stake through the neck and pins the corpse to trap the rest of the men in the tunnel. They are entombed, easy to kill.”
