"They pass a shed with Montagnards bundling cannabis plants. This is the third entry from the end, just before their comrade checks out from dysentery and before they turn north. They're in the province at that point. Somewhere vaguely west of here."
Rubbing his eyes, Ruchevsky said, "They trek down in small groups and get assigned where needed when they arrive at their destination. This soldier was a replacement. Most are joining NVA divisions. Some are getting assigned to the local VC battalions, which are filling out their ranks with northerners as they lose men. Here's his trail ID." Ruchevsky laid a small rectangle of paper alongside the notebook: D-384. "The D stands for doan—group."
"What does this trail ID tell you?"
"Nothing much. The first and last digits always add up to seven. That's all I know."
His name and rank followed: Nguyin Thanh Sin, private in the People's Army of Viet Nam.
"His group was hiking north," I said, "not toward the coast?"
"Their comrades are camped up in the mountains, getting supplied and refitted. It's like a rear area for the NVA."
Ruchevsky took a cigar from the ledge. "Did you notice the items bought in bulk? Either they're stocking up so they can avoid contact with civilians to keep their location unknown, or they're camped somewhere where there are no locals to provision them or eavesdrop." He lit the cigar. "Gathering their strength."
"Maybe rehearsing their upcoming campaign for the monsoon season," I said.
"That's what I need to find out." Ruchevsky puffed until the end glowed.
He stared at the picture of the three Red soldiers going off to the defining adventure of their young, uncertain lives, a small flag stretched between them, their faces smiling above it. TOAN THANG printed across the bottom. Complete Victory. Odds were none would see home again.
"How many NVA are out there in the province, do you think?" I said.
He gave me a wary look and dropped his voice. "You really want to know?" Ruchevsky buttoned his shirt. "Something like five thousand."
"Holy shit. What's five thousand to fifty-two of us? A hundred to one?"
"Fifty-three if you count me." He tucked in his shirttails. "They're not about to risk manpower like that to take down this little compound."
They wouldn't have to. They didn't need anything approaching such numbers to overrun us. Two hundred and a dark and stormy night would do it. "Right," I said.
The gong signaled supper, but neither of us could face food. We decided to drink our dinners instead. Westy set 'em up on the bar and we knocked them back without speaking. I threw mine down quickly so no one would notice my shaking hands. Ruchevsky was quaking slightly too.
"We look like two alkies," I said, downing another shot. "You ready for AA?"
"Assassins Anonymous? Hell, yeah."
After the third round, I excused myself and went to the signal shack to check on the encrypted transmission of my report. If I had another drink, I knew I wouldn't stop.
The sky was darkening again, a blanket of black clouds fighting the remaining light. The rainy season would soon be upon us. A huge swarm of winged termites had found an open door in a new hootch lit with fluorescent lights. The residents stood outside, staring through the screened upper walls at the creatures shedding their wings in some kind of frenzy. The bugs covered the screens inside and out, as well as most of the concrete floor. Every surface in the hootch rippled under a mass of tiny frantic bodies. Two of the Montagnard night guards appeared with broad sticky leaves and started rolling up the bugs to cook them.
I left the guys to their show and continued toward the signal shack to pick up the perfunctory confirmation of receipt. At the four-foot-high wall of sandbags across the front, Sergeant Rowdy, Geronimo, and some other enlisted stood peering into an empty cookie tin from home. Inside, in slow motion, two fierce-looking beetles clutched and slid across the bright metal, pincers at the ready.
"They're not fightin' yet," whined one of the privates. Deros, the compound's hound, barked with excitement.
"Fuck," said Geronimo and doused the pair with lighter fluid. Sergeant Rowdy set it off. The beetles hissed in anger or maybe agony as their bodies roasted. I stepped behind the backup-generator shed and leaned on the sandbags, my stomach churning. After more than three years in country, I was hardly the innocent. But today I felt like a murderer. I'd been in Asia long enough to believe the universe wasn't going to give me a pass. There'd be redress.
As I walked back toward my quarters, the sky opened. Rain dropped like a curtain. In an instant I was soaked. A couple of young men came out hooting and hollering, soaping down as they showered in the downpour. On the walkway outside my room, I sat on the elevated edge and let the cataract cascade down on me from the overhang. I lay back. The bottom of me disappeared, cut in half by water.
Since I was a kid in Wisconsin I'd been killing creatures: slaughtering chickens, cows, pigs; shooting deer from the family deer blind out on the back acres. But I couldn't if the animal was looking at me. Didn't like it when I could see a buck's eyes either.
Admittedly, it was exhilarating to drop a creature at a hundred yards. Three hundred even better. Anything becomes an it at that distance, brought down by metal punching through at nine hundred miles an hour. From far off, it was like being in the Air Force. Hey, look what I can do! Killing a person up close was different. The sounds, the smells—they didn't leave you. The eyes.
A serious soldier in combat arms gave no more thought to capping somebody than he did to operating a lawnmower. He could waste his quarry without breaking a sweat. He'd grown used to it. I'd seen these soldiers inventory their own wounds with the same professional distance, weighing how long they could keep functioning before their ruptured hydraulics gave out. Not me.
The actual moment was exciting, almost joyful. But when the killing was intimate, the deed steadily turned back on you. Demons and yang took to coursing through the vulnerable channels of your body, the vessels that carried blood to the tissues and fragile bones just beneath the skin. For days, the tiniest nick would upset me. It sent fear rushing into my own flesh, and tremors into my fingers that showed up unexpectedly long afterward.
I'd passed some test with Ruchevsky. The next morning he was all over me.
"You gotta come see my digs downtown," he said, "and the rest of my war toys."
I'd been invited for tea with the CIA. John sported a holster on his ankle and I had a personal sidearm stuck in the waistband under my jungle fatigue shirt, a weapon I cursed—a .22 Beretta automatic loaded with two whole rounds. It was impossible to find ammunition for.
Other than the American on guard on the MACV gate and a sleepy ARVN sentry at the entrance of their garrison, we only passed two saffron-robed monks walking briskly by the side of the road. Faces peered out from holes in the walls of hovels along the way. I'd seen some dilapidated ARVN housing, but this was the worst. Just ruins.
Breakfast was under way. Soup pots, limbs, and the bums of naked kids appeared in large breaks in the walls. The South Vietnamese Army did not feed its soldiers, so groups of half a dozen military families pooled their meager allotments and prepared communal meals. Likewise the bachelors.
"You can bet Chinh's dining better than that," Ruchevsky said. "Funds we supply for constructing military housing are regularly diverted. And there's the government tit. Chinh's battalion does jack shit but it's collecting from us for the cost of combat operations and training as if all equipment and supplies were getting depleted. Used or not, it all vanishes. A little turns up locally. Most of it is sold in the markets at Kontum and Pleiku. Guess who buys most of the loot? And of course, his battalion is way under strength. He's carrying two hundred and sixty nonexistent infantrymen. Emperor Chinh pockets their pay every month—around a million piasters, fourteen thousand dollars. He also banks some serious bucks arranging government jobs."
"He sells them?"
"Never personally. From the presidential palace on down, the women are the fixers. They cut the de
als, receive the gifts of esteem, subtract their shares, and pass the rest up the ladder. Colonel Chinh's lady is a real operator. Lays off the military promotions and civil-serpent posts to the wives of the interested parties. Chinh flies down to Saigon regularly to see her. At least once a month she comes to him and receives visitors. She negotiated all his promotions."
Ruchevsky fanned himself with a manila envelope.
"Chinh grants all the licenses needed to operate anything anywhere in the province—stores, market stalls, brothels, opium dens, restaurants, you name it—and he issues trading permits for the few goods that come in or get shipped out. Of course, his wife takes the pick of the best ones for herself. Anyone shorts her on a gratuity, he yanks the license and shuts them down. Sell or rent anything, he gets a cut. If you're in business, you're in business with Chinh."
We stopped in front of a two-story stucco house with a balcony. An armed Montagnard—pistol holstered and automatic rifle in hand—met us at the door.
"Home sweet home," Ruchevsky said and ushered me in.
His villa was spacious but crude. Everything in Cheo Reo was basic, dirty, and worn. Even new structures looked played out. A frontier town without the boom, old before its time.
The tall, thin windows were draped with heavy cloth so you couldn't see in. A second Montagnard peered out through a crack, watching the exterior. Golf-ball grenades lay scattered through the room and at each window. Also sidearms and Soviet-bloc assault rifles and Type 56 Chinese knockoffs. And one Australian L1A1 self-loading rifle. All had seated magazines; all were loaded.
The house was built Chinese style: two stories high and deep. Ruchevsky occupied the front. He announced he had to pee and led me to a sort of courtyard between his building and a more modest one-story structure used by his housekeeper and the guards. Behind a curtain was the toilet, Asian style—a squat hole set in a concrete slab—where he relieved himself. Alongside it sat a Western commode with no plumbing, shifted over the hole as needed, with a cistern of water to flush. Next to the commode sat a stack of outdated magazines and yet another handgun.
"My in-house," Ruchevsky said as he peed in the floor hole. "I hope the VC never bust in here while I'm on the throne. I'd hate to check out sitting there with my pants down."
"My sergeant says he knew he was a real soldier when he could shit under fire, lying on his side like a baby."
The shower nearby was a bucket of water and a scoop. A squat table with some bowls and a brazier on the floor served as the kitchen. By the back doorway a small Japanese refrigerator ran on propane. Ruchevsky greeted his housekeeper and showed me upstairs to his spartan bedroom. A large wooden platform supported an Air Force mattress half its size, a luxury, since most Vietnamese beds were just bare planks. A stool served as a night table. In a shallow box on the bed was a snub-nosed .38 Special with an aluminum frame, the CIA's standard issue.
A trunk decorated with carved fruit sat at the foot. Weapons were everywhere. In a corner Ruchevsky had a sideband radio and an Army field phone connected to the compound by landline.
"I think it might be cooler on the deck," he said, and we stepped outside.
Ruchevsky offered me the solitary plastic chair and perched on the waist-high wall decorated with Chinese filigree. The sun baked the empty expanse of the Cheo Reo airfield and the droopy palm trees at its near end. Two huge black rubber bladders, like giant hot-water bottles, added their rubbery-oily aroma. Small figures in green fatigues were using hand pumps to siphon gas into metal drums.
"That the famous seepage?" I said.
"Gasoline in the bladder on the left. Aviation gas in the other. Comes in by air in those five-hundred-gallon tires. Heavy as hell."
The collapsed blivets, recently emptied, lay deflated alongside the runway.
Ruchevsky pointed. "After the elephant nuts get delivered, our guys transfer the gasoline from them into those bladders. Our gas, our bladders, but like Gidding said, no American comes near them after dark. Emperor Chinh's got his snorkel in there daily. One night they sucked out aviation fuel by mistake and the next day mopeds were exploding all over town. The VC pay Chinh double for petroleum."
"Still a bargain," I said, "if it saves them having to truck gas a thousand miles down from North Viet Nam."
"Yeah." Ruchevsky flipped open a box of cigars. I declined. "There's a couple of reports they're actually laying a pipeline along the trail."
"Gasoline seepage, the jungle market—what are you going to do about Chinh?"
"What are my options? Complain to Major Gidding? Or the general in Pleiku who's Chinh's patron? Or his patron's patron in the palace in Saigon? Can't. Loc is Premier Ky's boy. Chinh is General Loc's. I'd love to turn in Chinh's name to the counterterror groups and depopulate his ass, but he's too well connected.
"Every few weeks I complain about the gasoline situation. You saw how well that goes. What can I realistically turn him in for, his capitalist tendencies?" He exhaled. "I'm supposed to be rooting out Communists, not chasing corrupt officials. Gidding and Bennett don't have the stomach to take Chinh down."
I slapped a mosquito on my arm, leaving a bloody skid mark. "But selling gasoline to the Viet Cong? Provisioning them with government rice? Doesn't that cross the line?"
"The gas scam. Yeah, well." Ruchevsky puffed up a blue cloud of smoke. "Gidding and the USAID reps argue that it's sold to all comers, that locals run their motorbikes and trucks and generators on it. Some of it just happens to be bought by VC agents. Looked at that way, Chinh is an entrepreneurial patriot who sells to all without discriminating and keeps the provincial economy rolling."
"So we should just be pragmatic since there's no way for us to secure the gas depot anyway."
"You heard Gidding," he said, taking out a note from his shirt pocket.
"What? We just write off Chinh as another government official trading with all sides?"
Ruchevsky blew out a cloud of pungent smoke. "You know the Vietnamese. They're pessimists. And paranoid. Hedge all their bets. They've stopped trusting each other, won't even have other Vietnamese for servants. They know all the contenders will extract the maximum from them, so they're as self-protective and as noncommittal as they can get away with being. They pledge allegiance when they have to and bury their loot ... disperse it to relatives, or convert it into those paper-thin one-ounce gold strips they like to smuggle."
"The big dippers don't bother with the gold toilet paper. They go straight for ingots."
Ruchevsky tilted his head back and groaned with joy.
"What's so funny?"
"Intel gossip from Saigon. You gotta love it. Somebody's buzzing in Westmoreland's ear that we should permanently sabotage the de-militarized zone with radioactive waste. Drop some dirty A-bombs along it. You sneak across, you glow in the dark and die."
"Are they serious?"
"Perfectly." He dropped the note in an ash tray and set fire to it with the cigar. "They're working up a similar plan to block the mountain passes between China and North Viet Nam in case the Chinese decide to join in. But neither will happen, I don't think."
"Thanks be."
Ruchevsky looked at me closely. "Secretary McNamara wants an electronic wall instead. A Flash Gordon thing with sensors and crap. God, I wish he'd go back to Ford and build some more Edsels." He slid off his perch. "It was so much simpler when it was just us and them in the alleys. It's a damned shame we're marching all these young GIs into this demented fucker. I mean, what are they doing turning this civil war–revolution combo into a children's crusade?" Ruchevsky blew on the embers of his cigar. The tip glowed orange. "They should have left it to us and kept the kids out of it."
"How long have you been at this?" I said.
"All my life, it feels like. Born in the Ukraine. My family fled toward the end of the war. Wound up in a DP camp in Germany after it was over. I came down with mumps and got put out of the place with my father—quarantined. Just then the Allies announced the immediate repatriation o
f nationals from the Iron Curtain countries—forced repatriation. We never saw my mother or sister again."
"You hate the Communists."
"Yeah. You notice how many Green Berets are Eastern Europeans? Same story. They don't care if being in Special Forces is a bad career move. They're here for maximum payback."
Muted flashes registered in the rain clouds over the mountains to the northwest. Ruchevsky checked his watch and counted silently, as if timing the arrival of thunder instead of bombs raining down from thirty thousand feet, churning the mountain jungle like a tornado. You couldn't see the planes. No booms. The bombs crackled, like cloth ripping.
"Eight kilometers maybe," he said, puffing on his cigar and looking pleased. An empty Coke can fell off the balcony railing.
"Think they hit something?"
"There's always a first time, Captain Rider."
6
BENNETT ORDERED ME to report behind the mess hall for an overnight trip to Mai Linh, the biggest of the three Special Forces camps in the province. He had to meet and greet some general. It was an opportunity to do some snooping for Jessup, but I was less than thrilled about the mode of transport. Convoys fifty trucks long escorted by armor and aircraft got attacked. Ours was three small vehicles.
Lack of advance notice offered some protection en route, but any road trip was a gamble. Either you'd get there or you wouldn't. Each of us had a weapon at the ready but, done right, a road ambush was close to impossible to counter.
I was assigned to drive the American doctor, Roberta Towns, in her tan English Land Rover. Colonel Bennett, with Private Checkman at the wheel, rode in the open jeep behind us. A sergeant and a private manned the third. Everyone was unusually clean. Even slovenly Checkman had on his best fatigues with proper camouflage insignia.
The doc was a looker, about ten years older than me—somewhere in her late thirties—and dressed in a linen blouse and slacks that showed off her figure. She'd been summoned from her dispensary in town to help with a complicated pregnancy in a village near the Special Forces camp. The doctor asked me to switch to a civilian shirt and the light blue baseball cap on the dash. She explained she couldn't afford to be seen consorting so openly with the U.S. military. I borrowed a flowery Hawaiian shirt from Miser and donned the cap. It wasn't much of a disguise but at a distance I'd pass for a Western do-gooder with questionable sartorial taste.
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