Bayonet Skies

by John F. Mullins

  It was, the troopers agreed, a hell of a state of affairs. Six months just about got you used to the place. You learned the terrain, established relationships with your counterparts, ideally got enough of the language to get by, and then you were gone. It had been the same in the early days of Vietnam. The Army had finally wised up and had sent the 5th Special Forces Group in its entirety to Vietnam for PCS tours starting in 1965. They’d also started the policy of allowing SF troops to “extend” their tours—many of them staying far longer than they probably should have. Many of them would never go home. At least, not under their own power. You can only go to the well so many times.

  And so the same happened for Thailand, largely, the cynics among them said, and cynics are part and parcel of the Special Forces, because it cost too much money to pay them TDY. A new company was formed at Fort Bragg, designated D Company of the 1st Special Forces Group and, after pre-mission training, was sent to a place called Lopburi, the ancient Thai capital, located ninety-three miles north of Bangkok.

  The new company quickly found itself in combat. If any trooper had volunteered for D Company expecting to find himself in a paradise (Bangkok was at that moment a destination for R&R for troops from Vietnam), he was in for a surprise. The CTs fought, and fought hard. It was an unsung war, and the SF troopers liked it that way. You didn’t have to worry about some sorry-ass journalist showing up at your camp and demanding to be taken out on patrol.

  Still later the SF troops, who had now been designated the separate 46th Special Forces Company, trained the Thai contingent to Vietnam, and some of them accompanied the unit, now known as the Royal Thai Volunteer Regiment, in-country. Others remained behind to advise and train the Border Police who were now fighting infiltrators from Laos and Cambodia.

  The effort was so successful that the 46th Company was disbanded in 1974, most of the troopers—much against their will—returning to the land of the big PX.

  But the war was still on. The North Vietnamese, emboldened by their successes in South Vietnam, were now casting their eyes toward the only nation in the region that had the audacity to reject the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  Forty-sixth Company was gone. Official Special Forces involvement in the training of Thai troops was gone. Nobody believed it was time to quit. Hence the very quiet program of which Captain (P) Finn McCulloden was a primary member. Lieutenant Colonel (P) Sam Gutierrez had been appointed an assistant military attaché at the Embassy in Bangkok, and as his first act he had recruited McCulloden as the primary trainer for the Thai Border Police.

  It was, Finn had thought, a damned nice assignment. The CT threat was largely gone, due to the actions of his predecessors. Gutierrez had called him up shortly after he had been assigned to the Infantry Officers’ Advanced Course at Fort Benning and had asked him if he would take it. A year of Thai language training at Monterey. A short stint in Washington, where he’d learn the diplomatic skills necessary to a member of the military mission, assigned to the State Department, in Thailand.

  Not much getting shot at.

  The last part was okay, and not okay. The peacetime Army was, he concluded, a hell of a boring place.

  The exercise ended with the recruits swarming over the objective, firing down at the silhouette targets inside, dropping grenades into the deeper holes. Finn noted that most of the troops just pulled the pin and dropped the grenade. That would have to come out as a part of the critique. The grenades had a four-second delay, plenty of time for someone inside to scoop it up and throw it back at you. Accepted procedure was to pull the pin, let the spoon fly, count one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, then drop it. All the while your mind was whirling with the possibility that instead of a four-second delay you might have far less, and the ’nade would go off in your hand.

  The only good thing about that, if you could call it anything like good, was that there was absolutely no chance you’d be maimed. Finn had seen the results of one such incident when one of his Mike Force troopers back in Vietnam had picked up a grenade and had tried to throw it back at the enemy. It had gone off the instant it left his fingertips, blowing his arm off at the shoulder, laying open his chest as neatly as would have a coroner’s scalpel at autopsy.

  Finn fired the green star cluster that signified end of exercise, and the formerly grim assault group immediately turned into a happy, chattering group of teenagers. Grinning, slapping each other on the back, laughing at and harassing one of their group who had fallen on the final assault and had torn a gaping hole in his pants.

  Won’t be that way if they ever have to do the real thing, Finn thought sourly. They’ll be looking back down the hill at the ones who didn’t make it, hear the wounded calling for help, seeing the torn-apart bodies in the holes. Bodies of kids a lot like them. Smelling the blood and shit and explosives smoke and the retch-inducing odor of those who had died hours or days before and had been left to rot because to expose yourself to try to bury them was to assure you’d join them.

  His assistant advisor, who had been following the group closely to assure no one pointed a weapon in the wrong direction or otherwise endangered his comrades, evidently shared his opinions. With a few sharply worded commands in Thai he had them clearing their weapons, assuming something like a military formation, and marching back down the hill to the waiting trucks that would take them back to base camp.

  Finn walked that way too, reaching the trucks just as Lieutenant Benjamin “Bucky” Epstein was slamming the last tailgate shut.

  “Good job, B,” he said.

  Epstein acknowledged the compliment with a nod, signaled the truck driver to start up, walked back with Finn to their waiting Jeep.

  “They’ll do, I guess,” he finally said as Finn started the Jeep and, staying well back to avoid the choking cloud of dust thrown up by the deuce-and-

  a-half truck, followed it back into camp.

  Finn knew that his subordinate was probably mentally comparing the Thais with the Montagnard troops of the Mike Force and the strikers of Camp Boun Tlak, and was finding the comparison unfavorable. Of course those troops had been left behind by the abandonment of the country by the Americans, a constant source of mental pain for the both of them.

  Bucky Epstein had been a staff sergeant during the epic twenty-four hour battle for Boun Tlak and had been instrumental in staving off the attack by elements of two North Vietnamese infantry regiments, with an NVA artillery regiment in support. For those actions he had been awarded the Silver Star and had, at the recommendation of Captain Finn McCulloden, been offered a direct commission as lieutenant of infantry.

  Epstein had been openly contemptuous of the offer. He’d been exposed to entirely too much of the dog-ass officer corps, he told the startled general who’d made the offer. He sure as hell didn’t want to be one.

  It had taken the combined efforts of Finn and Sam Gutierrez to convince him otherwise.

  “You’re goddamned right there are some sorry-ass officers in the corps,” Sam had said. Everyone knew, without it being said openly, that one of them had certainly been a lieutenant at Boun Tlak who had endangered and then probably saved the camp. “That’s why we’ve got to have some good ones. There are going to be other wars, and troops who are just babies now are going to have to go out there and fight them. You want them to be led by a bunch of people who can’t pour piss out of a boot, even if the directions are on the heel? Because that’s sure as hell what’ll happen. The good people will leave, the bad ones will be promoted, and someday, when the stakes are higher than they are in this pissy little war, we’ll reap the results.”

  Epstein had finally, reluctantly, come around to their way of thinking. Then it had been another major task to convince the insulted general to reissue the rejected offer.

  It had taken even more effort on the part of Finn McCulloden to keep Epstein in the Army later. Both had been assigned to the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Finn to the Infantry Officers’ Advanced Course, Bucky to the Infant
ry Officers’ Basic Course. The latter was where, according to the Army, you learned to be an officer. As such it was filled with newly graduated Reserve Officer Training Course (ROTC) lieutenants coming out of college.

  Many, if not most of them had been thoroughly contaminated by the slant of what was being taught in the schools. Some thought the sputtering war in Vietnam not only immoral, but illegal. Others who at least accepted what we were doing there thought that it was being fought badly, being lost by the very ones who were fighting it. Their only commonality was that they looked with deep suspicion at the second lieutenant whose uniform bore the weight of several rows of ribbons, some from the American Army and others from the Israeli, where he had fought with distinction as a sergeant in the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six Day War.

  The Special Forces combat patch on his right arm didn’t help. Nobody was foolish enough to call him a baby-killer, but you could tell, he said to Finn one night at happy hour at the club where both had gone to drown their sorrows, that the thought was there.

  Finn had it somewhat easier, in that his classmates were fairly senior captains and a few majors, all of whom had at least one tour in Vietnam. Some of them were facing another tour immediately after graduation, as district and regional advisors to the Vietnamese army under Nixon’s Vietnamization Program.

  And many of them would later die or be severely wounded in the 1972 Easter Offensive, when the NVA came perilously close to cutting the country in two.

  Finn might have joined them, had it not been for Sam Gutierrez’s offer. It hadn’t been a hard sell to convince the colonel that the mission would be immeasurably improved by the inclusion of a certain lieutenant.

  Finn and Bucky had often been joined in their Friday-night sessions at the Benning O Club by Finn’s old friend, Jim Carmichael, who if anything had an even worse attitude than they did. They’d get riotously, uproariously drunk, hazard the ever-present Military Police to drive to one or another of their favorite hangouts, and try without too much seriousness to get laid.

  Since the choices downtown were either professional girls or local talent who saw a wedding ring slipped onto their fingers as a path out of dead-end jobs in Columbus, they more often gravitated to the club annex, located in the middle of an officers’ housing area.

  There the choices were often worse. Women whose finger showed the tell-tale dent of absent wedding rings, their husbands either still in Vietnam or away on exercises or temporary duty. Sad-eyed girls whose former husbands were now residents of one or the other national cemetery, looking to get back to a life they’d once known, and loved. Women whose husbands were neither absent nor dead, but were probably out on a quest of their own.

  Thus they often ended up in one or the other of their bachelor officer quarter (BOQ) rooms, drinking until drinking no longer had any real effect, seeming to get more and more sober with each shot.

  The pattern continued into the weekends, ending finally on Sundays when they’d collapse of exhaustion, the only uninterrupted sleep any of them ever got. Back to class on Monday, a few beers at lunch to take care of the raging hangover, later in the week the beers augmented by a few shots, until by Friday afternoon all semblance of discipline, reason, and motivation had disappeared. Whereupon the entire cycle would repeat itself.

  It hadn’t been much better in Monterey, where Finn and Bucky had gone to study Thai and Jim to take Russian, except they’d had to study much harder to pass. At least there they only drank heavily on the weekends.

  And the choice of ladies had been considerably upgraded. Jim, lucky bastard that he was, Finn thought, had met and married a beautiful girl who not only put up with his foibles, but seemed genuinely to love him.

  Neither Finn nor Bucky had been so lucky, but they hadn’t wanted for companionship, either. Finn still corresponded with a flight attendant he’d met on a trip to San Francisco, and was planning to meet and spend a weekend with her the next time he got down to Bangkok.

  Bucky preferred to not get even close to serious. His needs at Monterey were taken care of by the increasing number of female soldiers now attending language training, girls who would leave on their own assignments and who he knew he’d never see again. Here in Thailand he made the occasional trip down to Bangkok, happily sampling the smorgasbord that was Patpong Street.

  They wheeled up into camp and Bucky went to supervise weapons cleaning. Finn entered the headquarters building, intending to get started on the paperwork that always accompanied efforts of this sort. He was surprised to see Sam Gutierrez, up from the Embassy in Bangkok, sitting at his desk.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Sam said without preamble. “We just got reports the NVA is moving troops toward the border. SIGINT says regimental and divisional support units are following them.”

  “Shit!” Finn said.

  “To say the least,” Sam said.

  It looked like the long-expected invasion of Northern Thailand was about to begin.

  Chapter 8

  His sergeants were present at 0800; pale, sweaty, looking as if dying would be infinitely preferable, but there. Of course, he didn’t feel much better himself.

  “Doesn’t look like you’ve changed much, Jim,” Mark Petrillo said. Mark was clad in comfortable-looking civilian clothes and sported a gold Rolex President on one wrist and a heavy gold ID bracelet on the other. He’d gained weight since Jim had last seen him in Vietnam, now had a substantial pot belly.

  “You either, Mark,” Jim said. “How’ve you been?”

  Mark shrugged. “Bored, mostly,” he said. “Not much shakin’ in this part of the world.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” Jim said. Mark, he knew, had continued his liaison with the CIA after the Phoenix fiasco; he had been in on many of the clandestine programs that proliferated like toadstools after a rainstorm in the last days of Vietnam in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable. For all he knew, Mark was one of those officers who held dual commissions in the Army and the Agency. There had always been a very close association between the two. Too close, to Jim’s thinking.

  “Put your stuff in the van,” Mark said, indicating a plain black Ford with no windows in the back. “We’re going to be catching a helicopter over at the Thai army headquarters. It’ll take us to Nakhon Phanom.”

  Dick and Jerry did so, then stretched themselves out on the cool floor with their suitcases as pillows and tried to get some sleep. Jim rode up front with Mark Petrillo.

  “Congratulations on the promotion,” he said.

  Mark glanced at him quickly to see if he was being sarcastic. Seeing nothing in Jim’s face, he took it as it was said. “Thanks. Just goes to show if you sit around long enough and do nothing, sooner or later they’ll reward you for it. Always been convinced that if you were to lock a new lieutenant in a wall locker just as soon as he’s commissioned, and not let him out for twenty years, he’ll come out a general. Only guys like you, want to change the world, who get in all the trouble.”

  “I’d wanted to take a bunch of shit, I could have stayed home with my wife,” Jim said, a sour expression on his face.

  “No,” Mark said, “you haven’t changed a bit. Good to know there are some constants in this world. Birds fly. Fish swim. James NMI Carmichael has absolutely no respect for those whom Congress and the Army, in their infinite wisdom, have appointed over him. Going to be good working with you again, Jim. How’d they get you to volunteer for this rat-fuck, anyway?”

  Jim explained about what he had been told in Stuttgart, ending with the presence of the two American prisoners of war. “I asked the general why the government is still sticking to the story that no American POWs were left in Vietnam after the war,” he concluded. “He never did bother to answer.”

  “I can’t give you an answer to that, either,” Mark said, expertly steering the van through the jammed Bangkok traffic. “All I know is, we’d had rumors about them for years. Lots of sightings, some of which might even have been real. Some con men showing up
with bones, claimed they were from some of the people who died. Turned out to be animal bones, most of them, and the ones that were human were of Asians. So we had no hard evidence. This is the first time we knew for sure. That’s why such an all-out effort is being mounted.”

  Jim wondered how much of what Mark said was true. Or if Mark even knew what the difference between truth and fantasy was anymore. Probably no way he would ever know, but he resolved to not trust his former comrade in arms. A hard lesson, he thought. Maybe you’re getting smarter, after all.

  “You’ll get the full story at NKP,” Mark continued. “We’ve got all the equipment stockpiled there; all the stuff you asked for and quite a bit more. Sarpa wants to go on fighting the Viets, we’ll sure as hell give him the stuff to do it with.” He pulled in to the Army compound, where an Air Force CH-3 stood with its rotor already turning.

  “Get on board,” he shouted over the whine of the engine. “Got a lot of people looking forward to meeting you crazies.”

  The jungle took over once they left Bangkok itself. Flying over the smooth canopy of trees brought back even more memories. Only thing that’s different, Jim thought, is that there aren’t any bomb craters. The Thais have been spared that, so far. Maybe, if things go right, it will stay that way.

  There you go again, Messiah. Thinking that you canreally do something that makes a difference. Didn’t that get you in trouble once before?

  Disgusted with himself, he lay out on the web seat and followed the example of his sergeants. Good idea to get a lot of sleep. It might come at a premium where they were going.

  Nakhon Phanom seemed different somehow. The same buildings were there, even the command bunker from which they had gone on some of the hairier missions in Northern Laos. The runways were, of course, still shimmering in the heat. The trees still crowded close to the perimeter wire.