Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  “I do love you,” she said, her voice muffled in the pillow.

  God, I hope that’s always true, he thought. Because I don’t know what I’d do if it weren’t.

  Chapter 4

  He and his team had been on a scuba recovery mission, retrieving the bodies of two helicopter pilots who’d crashed into Lake Falkensee, when he got a radio message. Report back to Bad Tölz. Immediately. He jumped in the BMW and tore up the roads, wondering the entire time what had gone wrong. Was something the matter with Alix? His mind, always fertile, had dreamed up all sorts of scenarios, each worse than the last, by the time he got back to the Kaserne.

  When he got there he was surprised and alarmed to see Colonel Casey waiting for him. Oh, Lord, he thought, what the hell has gone wrong?

  “We’ll be driving to Stuttgart,” the colonel peremptorily told him. “The staff car is right outside.”

  He thought it better to hold his questions until they were out of the Kaserne. He was beginning to think that at least he wasn’t in trouble. Otherwise he would have been met by MPs instead of the group commander.

  “I don’t know,” Colonel Casey said to his questions as they threaded their way through the German traffic. “All I know is that we got a message, said to have you at EUCOM as soon as possible. That I was to personally make sure you got there. I thought maybe you could shed some light on it.”

  “Not me, sir.” Jim was baffled. EUCOM, European Command, was the Special Forces Detachment (Europe) higher headquarters. At least in matters dealing with tactics. Administratively they came under USAREUR, a fragmentation of lines of command that led to no end of confusion. But, again, this told him that he wasn’t in trouble. If they were setting him up for a court-martial he would be going to Heidelberg, not Stuttgart.

  The colonel had obviously come to the same conclusion, and further, that the captain beside him was more important than he had suspected. He hadn’t really had to accompany the young officer to Stuttgart; he could have delegated the mission to any one of the staff officers. But he was consumed with curiosity. And determined that if anything good came out of it, he was going to be one of the beneficiaries.

  He set the task for himself of being pleasant to the captain. He asked about the mission at Lake Falkensee, told him that he had gone to see the captain’s wife just before picking him up at the airport and made sure she wanted for nothing, wanted to know if the captain wanted anything to eat or drink along the way.

  Jim was amused. Other than ass-chewings, this was the most the colonel had spoken to him since he had arrived at Bad Tölz. It might have been a pleasant drive, had it not been for the fact that he was going crazy, trying to figure out what it was all about.

  He had done nothing in the last three years to either distinguish himself or get into any major trouble. After Vietnam there had been that one more mission, the one he still had nightmares about, then the Infantry Officers’Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Russian Language School at Monterey, and finally assignment at Bad Tölz. He was, he knew, an adequate team leader, better than some of the others but about equal to a few. So it had to date back before that. Well, he would know soon enough. Best to sit back and enjoy the attention. It would end soon enough, he knew, and it would be back to normal. What the hell, he thought. This way I’ll get to see Alix sooner. That ought to make her happy.

  “Imagine my surprise,” General Edward D. “Tink” Miller, chief of staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army, said, “when the first name to come out of the computer was yours.”

  Jim sat in silence, wondering even more now what was going on. Upon arrival at Patch Barracks they were told to report immediately to the bubble. This room, buried a hundred feet underground and shielded from any sort of electromagnetic radiation, was the most secure structure in Europe. From here the war would be conducted, if it ever came to that. In the meantime it served admirably as a secure briefing room, ensuring that even the most intrepid and resourceful intelligence service would get no hint of what went on inside.

  Colonel Casey had been stopped at the door by an armed officer, who paid no attention to his argument that since Captain Carmichael was a member of his command, he was entitled to know what was going on. Jim had been fingerprinted, his prints compared with a card he knew must have come from his records in Washington, searched, and allowed to pass through. Inside were only General Miller and his aide, who, Jim saw, was wearing the starred blue ribbon indicating he had been awarded the Medal of Honor.

  “I’d just told someone,” the general continued, “about a young captain who thought he had a better way of running things. Then this thing came up, we fed in the parameters of the person we had to have for it, and voilà! There you were.”

  “I don’t know if I should be grateful or frightened,” Jim ventured.

  “The captain has a sense of humor.” General Miller chuckled. “Isn’t that nice, Captain Sloane?”

  Sloane, Jim thought. Bentley Sloane. I’ve heard of him. Sloane shifted and he caught a glimpse of the captain’s right shoulder. He was wearing the combat patch of the Special Forces. Boun Tlak, Jim thought. He won the big blue at Boun Tlak. Something funny about the whole thing, I hear.

  “Captain Carmichael, everything I’ve learned about you, and the experience we had at the debriefing in England, leads me to believe that you are an intelligent, brave, and dedicated young officer. Would you agree with that assessment of yourself?” the general asked. He went on without waiting for a reply. “We have a mission for which you are, among all the officers in the United States Army, uniquely qualified. I’m sure you’re going to like it.”

  Jim Carmichael felt his testicles draw up, a sure sign of apprehension. Nothing about this boded well. When a three-star general started giving you a pep talk, you were about to get screwed. With or without the benefit of a kiss.

  “Do you remember a fellow by the name of Y Buon Sarpa?” the general asked.

  Good God, Jim thought, I haven’t heard that name in eight years. He nodded, reluctantly. “I thought he was dead,” he said.

  “No, not quite. Not the fault of the Vietnamese. They certainly tried hard enough to kill him. Both the Saigon government and the boys from Hanoi. Didn’t have many friends, did Y Buon Sarpa? You know the reason well enough, don’t you, Captain?”

  Indeed I do, Jim thought. Y Buon Sarpa had been one of the founding members of FULRO, acronym of the French term for the Unified Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races. FULRO represented the aspiration of the hill peoples of Southeast Asia for freedom. The Montagnards were regarded by the Vietnamese, both North and South, as primitives, little better than animals. Before the war in Indochina they had been left alone. There were few things in the rugged mountains the Viets needed. The terrain they occupied was, however, strategic. Control the Central Highlands and you controlled Vietnam.

  The South Vietnamese government, before the Americans came, practiced near genocide, bombing at will the Montagnard villages. The North Vietnamese entered those same villages and disemboweled anyone who would not support them, then carried the young men off to serve as pack animals. Little wonder, then, that the Montagnards got fed up with the whole thing.

  Perhaps it was the Special Forces teams that showed them the way. Jim didn’t know. The Special Forces had also recognized the strategic value of the Montagnards, but had taken a different course than the Vietnamese. Teams were inserted into the hills, made contact with the ’Yards, as they called them, and won their trust. The ’Yards were trained, equipped, and led by the men in the Green Berets, becoming a potent fighting force.

  They also gained an appreciation of their own potential power. While the Montagnards lived the life of the hunter/gatherer and thus appeared to the outsider as primitives, they were anything but. All the ’Yards Jim had met were keenly intelligent, quick to learn, and possessed tribal knowledge that was often of far more use than the so-called civilized skills.

  The Special Forces border camps became hotbeds of
FULRO organizing. And, if the truth be known, most of the SF were in full agreement with their aims, though it was the official policy of the U.S. government to support official South Vietnamese policy. At first the organization was political, the Montagnards wanting to take their rightful place in the supposed democracy that was South Vietnam. But when those aims were thwarted, and FULRO was banned, the policy became one of clandestine organization with a view toward armed struggle.

  It was into one of these border camps that young Lieutenant James NMI Carmichael had been thrust, on his second tour to Vietnam. He’d been warned that unrest among the Montagnards was building, that something was likely to happen. But no one had expected the extent to which it happened.

  “Sarpa was, what? Your interpreter?” the general asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Jim replied. “At the time we had no idea of his rank within FULRO. The Saigon government thought the company commander, Y Buon Tlieng, was the leader. The Vietnamese Special Forces were keeping a close eye on him. ’Yards were pretty smart. They knew that would happen, so they let the Viets think what they wanted. All the time Sarpa was organizing things right under their noses.”

  “And you got to know Sarpa pretty well.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Jim nodded. “He was with me on every patrol. Probably saved my life more than once. Taught me how to speak Bahnar. We became good friends.”

  And more, Jim thought. They’d had that closeness that only combat veterans can have, men who have depended upon one another for their very existence. He didn’t know if he could explain that to the general, or if he should even try. If the general was capable of understanding, he would know what Jim was saying without explanation. If he was not, no amount of words would make it so.

  “So much so that you broke Army regulations and defied the policy of both the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments,” General Miller said.

  “Guilty, sir,” Jim replied. Was that what all this was about? Had the actions he had taken as a young lieutenant come back to haunt him? He knew very well what the general was talking about, though he didn’t know how the man had found out about it. He had thought it all buried in the years since. Should have known better.

  It had come to a head one evening in August 1965. The Montagnards had been getting more and more disturbed over what they regarded as promises broken by the Saigon government. One of the conditions under which the ’Yards had agreed to support Saigon had been that they would gain autonomy over their areas in the Central Highlands; have their own provincial governors, representation in parliament. The generals who ran the country had, of course, no intention of following through; thought instead to bleed the Montagnards dry and then repopulate the hills with lowland Vietnamese who were regarded as more reliable.

  Rumors of an uprising had been flying about for months, but when nothing happened the government relaxed. It was what FULRO had been waiting for.

  The team leader had been absent that night, off on R&R to Hawaii, leaving Jim in charge. Intelligence had indicated that there were no specific threats against the camp, so normal watch procedures were in effect. Two of the Americans were awake at any given time, one in the radio room and one roaming the perimeter. Jim had just finished his watch and was drifting off to sleep when the team sergeant, who had just replaced him on watch, shook him roughly.

  “We got problems, Trung Uy,” Master Sergeant Ed Miller said, his familiar Bostonian twang making him recognizable even in the dark. “You better come.”

  Jim struggled back into his pants, still unpleasantly wet from the day’s sweat, grabbed his M-16, and started to follow the team sergeant.

  “You better leave that here, sir,” Ed said, referring to the weapon. “You’ll see why.”

  They walked out of the team house and were immediately surrounded by Montagnard soldiers, all fully armed. Hands searched him quickly but thoroughly. All around him were familiar faces, men alongside whom he had fought. Their features were set and angry, yet somehow not threatening. A few carried torches. It looked, he thought, like a scene out of some old B movie. The other members of the team were coming out of their bunkers, those with weapons being roughly disarmed.

  “What the hell is going on!” he demanded. He saw Y Buon Sarpa, standing with the others. “Where is the company commander?” he asked.

  Sarpa smiled, exposing several gold teeth. “I regret to have to inform you that you are now our prisoners,” he said. “Please don’t make things difficult.”

  Their hands were tied behind them, and they were marched to the edge of camp, near the latrines. Exactly twenty-four holes had been dug there, in neat rows. In twelve were the bodies of the Vietnamese Special Forces team. Each had been shot through the head.

  “We do not wish to do the same to you,” Sarpa said. “We realize that you cannot go against the wishes of your government. You are soldiers, and must follow orders. We do not expect you to join us. We do expect that you will stay out of our way. Please do not try to resist us. You will be given free run of the camp. You will not try to contact the outside, unless it is at our direction. If you will give me your word as a soldier that this will be so, you will be released. May I have your word?”

  Jim looked into his eyes. There was a pleading look written plainly on the Montagnard’s features. At the same time he had no illusions that his former interpreter would hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary.

  He considered the choices. I can demand that they lay down their arms, surrender, he thought. And almost certainly join the LLDB in the holes. They’ve gone too far by killing the Viets. They can’t back up now. Or I can try to bluff my way out, give them my word and then when the chance comes try to get the team out of here, E&E until we can get to some friendlies. The chances of that were not great. Even if they could get out they had a hundred miles of enemy territory to cross before they got to the next American camp, and it was likely it had been taken over too.

  “I give you my word,” he said. “But you must realize how futile this is.”

  “The futility is in listening to the lies of the men in Saigon,” Sarpa said. “We are finished with that. Better to die like men than to perish one by one like hunted animals.” In Bahnar he gave the command for the Americans to be cut loose.

  “Now we wish you to send a radio message,” he said. “We will list our demands. I am glad that you came to this decision, Jim. You are our friends. We would not want to kill you.”

  “Plus that would leave you without any hostages,” Jim said.

  “Yes,” Sarpa replied. “That too.”

  The Montagnard uprising of 1965 lasted less than a week. The enraged Vietnamese threatened to bomb the camps off the map, had to be restrained by the Americans, who, in a rare show of concern for the trapped Special Forces teams, told Saigon they would cut off all aid. But the end was a foregone conclusion. Saigon advanced troops on the camps; regular army supported by artillery and tanks. Cynics among the Americans said that had Saigon shown that much resolve against the Viet Cong the war would long since have been over.

  The Montagnards were promised, once again, that their demands would be considered. Which meant absolutely nothing, as everyone knew. In the end the ringleaders faded across the border into Cambodia and Laos, hoping someday to fight again.

  One of those to escape had been Sarpa, and that had been at the urging of Lieutenant James Carmichael.

  Jim had learned more about the history of Vietnamese-Montagnard relations in the week of captivity than he could ever have imagined. He’d already been a sympathizer; now he became an outright supporter. The anger he had felt at being taken captive had faded away. What else could they have done?

  The Vietnamese had demanded that Sarpa give himself up. No other demands were to be met until that happened. Sarpa was ready to do so, if it would help his countrymen.

  “You do that, and they’re gonna kill you for sure,” Jim said.

  The little Montagnard shrugged eloquently. “If it will s
erve my people,” he said.

  “I don’t know what service your death is going to render to your people,” Jim replied. “Seems to me you could do a hell of a lot more for them alive.”

  “So you are suggesting that I run away?”

  Now it was Jim’s turn to shrug.

  Sarpa considered. “And what will you do?” he asked. “When we give the camp back over to you, you are supposed to arrest us. They will expect to find me.”

  “Hell, all you guys look alike to me,” Jim said. “How can I pick out one in four hundred? Mistakes get made. And I’m just a dumb lieutenant. The army has the opinion that lieutenants can’t be trusted anyway. But if I was you, I wouldn’t be around here after tonight.”

  And Sarpa, with some of his followers, had slipped away. The Vietnamese had been enraged, had demanded that the officer responsible be punished. Had it been left up to the high command in Saigon that probably would have happened. But the 5th Special Forces Group commander in Nha Trang had argued persuasively that Lieutenant James NMI Carmichael had been responsible for the safe resolution of the incident in Camp Buon Dang and should have been commended rather than punished.

  In the end the two recommendations had canceled each other. Or so he had thought up until now, anyway.