by J. B. Hadley
Tranh Duc Pho took things personally. These were his mountains, his jungles, his rivers. He said who went where. The tribal villages in the mountains and the Vietnamese farmers in the foothills supplied him and his men with women, food, and shelter. His father and brother unloaded ships at Haiphong. Tranh Duc Pho was the star of the family—a miniature warlord!
The green-brown water of the muddy river slid silently by twisted roots of giant trees on its bank. The lieutenant and his fifteen men reached a pathway that wound among the tree trunks alongside the river. They carefully checked a section of the pathway and withdrew to cover.
The lieutenant briefed his men in a low voice. “This was one of the branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that supplied the area around Da Nang during our war with the American imperialists. Unfortunately, heroes no longer walk on it today. It’s the only trail around here that the hill tribes don’t booby trap. So, apart from the river itself, it’s the only line of transportation. They wouldn’t dare try the open river in daylight. And they were moving overland when spotted yesterday. Unless we’ve already missed them, chances are they’ll be along here in the next few hours.”
He arranged his men in a long line on higher ground above the trail. The men covered themselves with green mosquito netting and settled down to wait.
Katie Nelson and her crew were at the meeting place on time, along with their three Vietnamese “guides.” The three Americans had found that they were free to wander alone in the city so long as they had no video or sound equipment with them. When they were set to make tapes, they found themselves accompanied always by “guides” who appeared from nowhere to escort them to “suitable locations” or chased away certain individuals from them.
Jake and Roger took all this passively, being used to this kind of treatment all over the world, from Lebanon to Guatemala to Indonesia. But Katie was not going to stand for it.
“I want to film ordinary people eating their midday meal,” she told one of the Viet guides, who all spoke a smattering of English. She pointed down a street of ramshackle houses. “Down there.”
“No, no, madam,” the Viet said. “Dirty, lazy people down there. I bring you nice place.”
“There!” Katie insisted.
The wiry Viet, a few inches shorter than the pretty American woman, eyed her for a moment and then spoke rapidly in Vietnamese to his two colleagues.
“You wait here,” he said to the three Americans. “We find you a house to film in.”
The three Viets went down the street a way, peering into houses as they went. Then all three entered one newly painted house.
The Americans were alone less than a minute when they heard a call. The voice came from a shady lane overhung by large-leafed, flowering trees. Katie pushed her way past some of the branches.
“Follow me,” an American boy about thirteen told her. He was dressed in a Coca-Cola T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.
“Eric,” Katie called after him, “where are you taking us?”
“You’ll see,” he said shortly, and nodded to three other American boys his own age.
They brought up the rear behind Jake and Roger.
“Follow me,” the youth repeated. It was a command.
They trailed him down the lane, turned into a rocky roadway lined with shacks, and then followed the bank of a filthy river that stank of sewage. Shacks and boats lined the muddy bank, and children played at the edge of the offal-strewn water among clouds of flies.
“You want to stop and film this?” the youth challenged Katie.
“No, Eric. This is poverty and ignorance. I don’t have to come to Vietnam to shoot scenes like this.”
Eric sneered. “I think maybe you’re too friendly with the communists here to show something they mightn’t like. Otherwise they’d never have let you, as an American, come here in the first place.”
“I want to be fair,” Katie said firmly. “Deliberately searching out a place like this is not fair. I could do that in any country.”
“This isn’t what I brought you to film,” Eric told her. “What I’m going to show you near here, you won’t find in any old country.”
Roger changed his video camera from one shoulder to the other, glad of the pause, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.
“You speak real good English, all four of you,” he said. “How do you manage that?”
One of the other boys pointed to Eric. “He makes us talk it all the time. The people who watch us talk Viet and French perfectly, but they don’t understand our English when we talk fast and use slang.”
“It’s our badge,” another said.
“They don’t want us, so we show we don’t need them,” Eric summed up the conversation abruptly. “Let’s go.”
Eric set out along the riverbank again, beyond the last shack, along a path among rank eight-foot-high weeds and saplings. Katie followed him, then Roger, then Jake, with the three other boys behind them. Although they could see nothing because of the huge weeds, they smelled the river nearby.
The cameraman and sound man lugged their equipment through the midday heat uncomplainingly. As long as they weren’t being shot at, they had nothing to gripe about. However, Katie Nelson had led a more pampered existence up till now in her TV career and was becoming increasingly agitated.
She suddenly froze. “I think I saw a snake! Over there! A large green one!”
“Leave it alone,” Eric told her. “I got worse to show you than snakes.”
Katie shuddered and obediently scampered past the reptile’s lair.
Jake and Roger exchanged a look. They had no need to say to each other what they felt about this damn insolent kid dragging them around. Yet both felt amused that he was pulling such a number on Katie. Neither of them had managed so far to get the upper hand with her. They were her crew. She let them know that. Now here was this kid leading her into who knew what kind of shit … But Katie had a nose for a story. Maybe this would be one. They respected that, kept quiet, and trudged after her.
Eric, in the lead, held up his hand for them to stop and went ahead himself to investigate. He came back in a moment and waved for them to follow. Around a turn in the path the weeds began to thin so they could see the river again to their right. Ahead of them was a huge clearing in which stood a compound, seven or eight feet high, of bamboo stakes with sharpened tips. More than two hundred women sat on the bare earth within the compound, without shelter from the blazing sun. All had children. The oldest were two or three years old, and the youngest, a few months old, still being suckled at the breast.
Roger had already taken cover in a forward position among the weeds. He had no idea what the hell he was filming, but he knew a striking picture when he saw one. They could put words and sense to it later. He used his zoom lens for close-ups, panned across the sea of women and children, did retakes after making adjustments to the camera. Jake tried for sound. The women were raising an eerie, mournful keening, not outright wailing, but a sound very far from the chatter of women in a marketplace. Jake shook his head in disappointment to Katie and held up a meter.
“I need to get closer in,” he said.
“What’s going on here?” she asked Eric.
“What happened to me when I was three years old,” the youth said. “My mother and I were separated. I never saw her again. She died in a reeducation camp.”
“Will they take these women’s children from them?”
Eric nodded.
“But why?”
He shrugged. “They are judged by the state to be unfit as mothers to bring up communist children.”
“That’s inhuman!” Katie said.
“When the trucks arrive, you’ll see it happen. We’ll wait here.” Eric glanced at his watch. “They’ll be here in the next half hour.”
Katie examined the thirteen-year-old carefully as they sat hidden in the weeds near the compound. She had met him the previous day on the street, and knew only his first name and that he
was an orphan.
“Do you know where your father is?” she asked, phrasing her question more bluntly than she meant to.
Eric met her gaze angrily. “My father was married to my mother. I’m not a war bastard. Look at this.” He fished out a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “A letter from my father to my mother. It’s a copy. You keep it. He’s dead. He was a pilot.”
Katie glanced at it without reading its contents. The letter was typed and signed by someone with the last name of Vanderhoven.
“You’re Eric Vanderhoven?” she asked.
The youth nodded. “I hate it here. You got to get me out.”
She smiled. “Is that why you came up to me on the street?”
He nodded. “I suppose you are a leftist. That’s why you’re here. Those are the only Westerners they let into Vietnam.”
“I’m not anything political,” Katie said vehemently. “I’m just interested in people.”
“Sure,” he said, with veiled sarcasm in his voice.
Katie turned on him angrily. “You know something? You’re a kind of snotty unpleasant kid.”
“This is a kind of unpleasant place. I have to survive. You want to make a real film? About how we live? What it’s really like here when you have no foreign passport and no food?”
“I didn’t come all this way just to put Vietnam down,” Katie told him.
The youth looked at her with scorn on his face and moved a little away so that she could no longer talk with him.
In a little while eight army trucks with canvas coverings bumped their way over the open ground and raised a cloud of red dust by the far side of the compound. Unarmed soldiers piled out of the vehicles and into the bamboo compound. They went to the nearest group of women and children and led the women to one truck and their children—even the babies, which they carried gently—to another. The women being separated from their offspring screamed, thrust out their arms, struggled, collapsed … It was no use. They were led, carried, or dragged to one of the trucks. When that truck was filled, it drove off, and the soldiers began to load another.
The women crowded into the compound backed away from the soldiers and protectively clutched their young ones to them. Their voices rose now in a high-pitched, continuous wail.
Jake was still having trouble picking up the sound on his equipment.
Roger returned from his forward position among the weeds and loaded a new video tape in his camera. “I need an unobstructed view of the trucks, but there’s no way for me to get any closer without being seen.”
“This sound quality is shit, Katie,” Jake complained. “I got to take the mike in closer.”
“There’s no way you two can do that,” she said. Jake and Roger were six-footers, and very, very conspicuous.
“I know how to work the camera,” Eric volunteered, his sullenness suddenly evaporated. “Mitch and Red can do the sound if you show them how. They won’t spot us. I guarantee it.”
Roger and Jake’s expressions showed their unwillingness to hand over their equipment.
“This is too good to miss,” Katie pointed out. “You got to let them.”
While they were making up their minds, there was a big outburst near the trucks as women struggled with the soldiers. Roger and Jake knew they had to cover the news, no matter how. They handed over the camera and sound gear. After a brief lesson on what knobs and dials to turn, all four youths crept forward through the weeds around the edge of the clearing. The three Americans watched anxiously as the boys maneuvered into position and filmed the scene at the trucks.
Roger said, ‘They seem to be doing OK. But his camera movements are jerky, and he’s zooming in and out too fast.”
Katie grinned. “You’re both afraid the kids’ stuff will be better than yours.”
Roger laughed. “So long as the union doesn’t get to hear of this, I don’t care.”
They saw the boys creep forward, practically out into the open, as the soldiers lost their original patience and pushed, battered, and kicked the hysterical women. Some carried a baby, hanging by an arm or a leg, in each hand and tossed it for another soldier to catch inside a truck. They might have been loading heads of cabbage, for all the care they showed.
They saw Eric take the video camera off his shoulder and give it to the boy with him. He came back alone to the three Americans, stooping as he ran through the weeds.
“Bring back my camera!” Roger growled before Eric had a chance to say anything.
“Tomorrow at seven in the evening. Same place as we met you today.”
“To hell with that!” Roger snarled and went forward.
The three boys had already disappeared with the camera and sound equipment.
“We’ll make you a film that’ll show you how we have to live,” Eric promised with a sneer. “Not some pinko tourist crap like you would have shot.”
He sneered at them once again and disappeared among the weeds.
* * *
Green mosquito netting concealed each of the still forms of Lt. Tranh Duc Pho and his fifteen men as they waited in a line on the jungle slope above the muddy river, nearly four hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh City and fifteen miles inside Vietnam’s border with Laos. They stared down from higher ground at what once had been part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Occasional Montagnard tribesmen passed by, then a group of Vietnamese peasants, then seven armed Montagnards with heavy backpacks—the lieutenant did not stop these smugglers since he had bigger game in mind. He and his men lay concealed in the jungle for four hours—fighting off the fierce tiny wildlife that bit and stung them even under the protection of the netting—before they saw what they had been waiting for.
Two Montagnards with American M16 rifles at the ready walked abreast along the path, scanning the forests to either side of them. They didn’t spot the men hidden above them.
A minute behind them came the first of the bicycle bearers. Each bicycle was laden with goods wrapped in cloth. So much was tied to the frame of the machine that each bike looked like a bloated maggot with handlebars and wheels. The lieutenant counted thirty bicycles, each steered by a man walking alongside it. Twenty men walked beside the bicycles, unburdened except for their M16 or AK47 rifles. He knew there would be a rearguard of three or four more men. So he and his fifteen men would be up against at least twenty-five men with rifles, plus another thirty who probably carried pistols at least and perhaps could reach easily for a rifle in the baggage on the bicycles. There was only one way for him to do it.
As the Montagnards wheeled the laden bicycles along the path, the lieutenant’s men sighted along their rifles and waited for the signal to fire. They were outnumbered but had the advantage of surprise. With bated breath, they held their fire. The lieutenant would be the first to shoot. That would be their signal to let go with everything they had.
Tranh Duc Pho’s rifle was on full automatic. He found the front sight’s post in the notch of his rear sight, settled on one man’s chest, pressed his finger on the trigger, and swept the gun barrel to the right. The thirty 7.62-mm rounds in the AK47’s magazine emptied out of the muzzle in a matter of seconds. The first man collapsed like a wet paper bag, and those behind him were cut down before they knew what was happening as the gun barrel swung to the right. Two bicycles fell as the men sank in the hail of lead from this single rifle. Then the rest of the unit joined in.
Some of the Montagnards died as they raised their rifles in self-defense. Others were zapped in the back as they turned to run. Most of the rest were butchered as they cowered behind the laden bicycles or simply stood without moving, immobilized by shock.
The unit’s fifteen AK47s sang out together like a crazed hive of killer bees before the lieutenant’s burst of fire had finished. Their burst of fire was equally short, lasting just a few seconds before they had to replace the box-type magazines. The line of men wheeling the bicycles and their accompanying guards crumpled under fire. Their shouts of fear turned into screams of
agony as the lead projectiles burrowed into their flesh and shattered their bones.
Seven Montagnards unaccountably remained standing, untouched by this sudden holocaust. They fled panic-stricken down the path, back the way they had come. The lieutenant had completed loading a fresh magazine into his rifle and sent a burst after them, bringing down the last two.
“Get after them,” he yelled to his sergeant. “Take half the men and bring back at least one alive.”
As they ran down the path after them, Tranh Duc Pho brought the rest of his men down to examine the dead and injured.
“Finish them off,” the lieutenant ordered.
The men used handguns to deliver a single bullet to the forehead of each fallen man. They were well trained at this kind of thing and left nothing to chance.
“You want this one to talk, Lieutenant?” a soldier asked, dragging a Montagnard to his feet from beneath a bicycle. “He’s wounded in the arm only.”
Tranh Duc Pho answered, “Hold him till we catch one of those who got away.”
In a short while the sergeant and his men came back with two of the escaped Montagnards walking in front of their guns with hands clasped behind their necks. The lieutenant indicated where the two men were to stand.
“Do you understand Vietnamese?” Tranh Duc Pho asked.
“I do.”
“So do I.”
Tranh Duc Pho turned to the man wounded in the arm. “And you?”
“Yes.”
Pointing to the wounded man, the lieutenant said, “What’s in that baggage tied to those bicycles?”
The man hesitated a moment and saw no reason for not parting with information which the lieutenant could easily get for himself simply by stooping and ripping the cloth covers.
