When I got back, two enlisted men were loading her Rover with ten-pound bags of rice and wheat.
"Black-market rice for the Jarai villagers," she said. "They're hurting. They haven't much stored, and the VC have been exacting an extra rice tax from the hamlets, or buying it with chits. The colonel bought this load out of his own pocket."
Each vehicle carried a PRC-10 radio, just in case. I ran a quick check on ours and reported our imminent departure, then placed my rifle and web harness on the floor and took the driver's seat on the right side. The doc slid into the passenger seat to my left. We pulled out of the MACV compound a little after eight and turned right, toward town. Over the radio, Colonel Bennett ordered me to maintain a wide interval with his jeep: fifty yards. They would eat our dust the entire way. We passed through Cheo Reo quickly and picked up Road 2 heading north toward An Khe.
The VC mined roadbeds with pressure-sensitive devices and electrically detonated explosives. In the irrational belief that increased speed would allow us to outrun a blast, I pushed the speedometer to thirty miles an hour, so we bounced uncomfortably over the pocked roadbed until finally my jarred innards and the Rover's shocks demanded I slow down. The road was abysmal. I stayed in second gear and checked on the vehicles well behind us. Colonel Bennett wore his steel helmet. The others had opted for cotton boonie hats, flattened against their foreheads by the onrushing air. They fondled their weapons and scanned the sides of the road.
We eased by Montagnard villages but soon even the rice fields thinned out and we were surrounded by the vast emptiness of the Highlands. After a few kilometers of scrub and savanna, the adrenaline backed off and I distracted myself by examining my passenger.
Dr. Roberta was large boned, with a strong-featured face and thick curls cascading to well below her shoulders. Not the kind of hair you wanted in a tropical climate, but she obviously thought it her best feature and put up with its challenges rather than cut it off to accommodate the humidity and grit. She'd tried to tie it down with a kerchief but it streamed out behind her, buffeted by the blast of hot air as we bounced down the bumpy road.
I said, "I'm surprised the Special Forces medics couldn't handle this delivery."
"Probably could. Berets have a rule, though: one medic in camp at all times, and they've only got one at the moment. The mom's nearly due and the child is presenting feet-first. It hasn't inverted. Could get tricky."
"A breech birth."
"Right. I've seen an awful lot of them here. Medical care in this country is beyond inadequate. Not many Montagnards make it to adulthood." She turned to me, hair fluttering across her face. "They're old by forty and plain lucky if they live much beyond that."
"What brought you to Viet Nam?"
"The Quakers. I worked for an Aussie missionary doc for a bit. After that, at Patricia Smith's Montagnard hospital in Kontum. Worked a couple of seasons with Dr. Pat and decided to start my own clinic. The shortage is desperate. All of South Viet Nam has seven hundred doctors."
"The whole country?"
"Afraid so. And half of them are military. It's even worse for the Highland tribes. The hospitals the French built for them are in utter disrepair, and Vietnamese facilities don't really accept Yard patients."
"How did you land in Cheo Reo?"
"I was holding a day clinic in a village halfway between Kontum and Pleiku City. Colonel Bennett had brought them rice. Just bought it with his own money when he saw they were half starved. Anyway, he pitched in. Took patient histories for me and kept talking about the lack of health services for the tribes around Cheo Reo. The staff at Kontum gave me their blessings and all the medicines they could spare. I packed up and came down."
"And the local Vietnamese were okay with you setting up a Montagnard clinic?"
"Nah. They were outraged. Mind you, I never said the clinic was only for Yards. I just brought along a couple of nurses who happened to be Montagnards and, what do you know, the Vietnamese wouldn't come near the place. I wasn't surprised but, hey, they've got the Korean medical team all to themselves. Not that they like Koreans either. Me, I've got maybe a hundred thousand Montagnards to service and only the one of me to look after them all."
"They walk in from the province districts?"
"Sure. Me going to them would be impractical, never mind dangerous."
If Montagnards from everywhere came to her clinic, she had eyes and ears in places I had no way to get to. She could be invaluable, but I couldn't risk asking her anything specific, not yet.
A barefoot Montagnard in a loincloth stepped out of the scrub into the road. Instinctively, I put a hand on my rifle. The old man bowed deeply, bush ax resting on his bare shoulder as we rolled by.
"What was that about?" I said.
"The bowing? Colonial etiquette. The French insisted on deference. They used to shanghai the tribesmen to clear the land and work for them as laborers. The Montagnards couldn't read, so the French made them put thumbprints on contracts that practically enslaved them. They were like press gangs: cutting roads into the wilderness, chopping down forests, harvesting crops. Most plantations employed many thousands—thirty-five, forty thousand."
"Are we talking actual slavery?"
"Practically. They'd get paid five piasters a day. Three or four cents, when the plantations were making fortunes for their owners. The Communists collect eighty grand a year in tribute from them. Despite the merciless exploitation, the French encouraged the tribes to believe they'd be autonomous someday. The Communists, they flat-out promise it once the American war is won. I practice my Jarai and Rhade listening to their propaganda broadcasts."
"Do the Yards buy it?"
"Many have. The North generally deals better with the mountain people. When the French returned to claim their colonies after World War Two, the Communists retreated into the mountains, and Highlanders' aid was vital. The top Red general learned some of their languages and won their loyalty against the French. He made a tribesman his second in command. The old warriors I treat brag about their units all the time: the One Twenty-sixth Rhade, the One Hundred Eighth Jarai, the Eight Hundred and Third Bahnar..."
I scratched a bug bite. "So why aren't all the Montagnards around here supporting the North?"
"They just don't trust Vietnamese." She held her hair to keep it from whipping into her eyes. "The tribes have no great loyalty to either side. Or to one another, unfortunately. They're insular. And there must be sixty different tribes. The whole country was theirs once, before the Vietnamese forced them into the Highlands and kept the coast and the lowlands for themselves. When the French colonized Indochina they barred Vietnamese from the mountains. Ran the Highlands like their private preserve."
"The Vietnamese didn't protest?"
"Not really. They were happy to stay away. They're convinced the rivers here give you malaria. That the mountains are haunted, full of primitives practicing sorcery and cannibalism and performing cruel sacrifices. At the turn of the century, the Vietnamese told their French masters that living here in the forests like wild beasts were feral men with footlong tails who fed on children. An expedition was sent in to capture some for the Paris zoo. That attitude persists."
"So why are they here at all if they can't stand the Yards?"
"The government coerces Vietnamese to relocate, especially Catholic refugees and Buddhist villagers. It offers Montagnard land to entice them. Mind you, the government doesn't buy—just grabs what it wants. They'll even bulldoze Montagnard graveyards to get tracts they want."
"No wonder the Yards are pissed."
She struggled with her hair again and recaptured some of it, wedging tufts under her kerchief and braiding the rest into a manageable tail.
The scrub thickened. We rolled past tall bamboo and trees towering more than a hundred feet high.
I said, "You mind if I raise the rifle up?"
"Be my guest."
I drove one-handed and put the M-16 across my lap.
She tipped her head
to the side. "And what's your story?"
"Wisconsin farm kid. My old man's a World War Two vet. County cop. I grew up with manure and sideband radios. Wanted to be a lawman too. He wouldn't have it. I went to agricultural college. Aside from great ice cream at the college dairy, there wasn't much else to recommend it. Didn't want to take up farming, so I joined the War Corps to see the world."
"Why the multiple tours?"
"Didn't think it was safe to stay home."
"You didn't feel safe back in the States?"
"Didn't think it was safe to have me there."
I maneuvered around a gaping hole.
"It's too tame back in the U.S." I said. "I'm comfortable in Viet Nam. It never seems hard to leave but it's hard to stay away."
She recaptured a wisp of hair. "Le mal jaune, the French call it. The yellow fever."
"Viet Nam keeps adrenaline levels up even when things are dull."
"Men," she said, shaking her head. "You're adversarial-violence junkies."
"What can I say? Guys like it. It's practically erotic."
"Not something most people would admit to." She glanced over. "Say more."
"This one night my first tour, I slept on top of a ruined bunker in the jungle. The ARVN platoon I was out with, they pitched a lean-to next to it. Their sergeant worried that I was so exposed. Tried to talk me into coming down off the roof. I was stubborn and stayed out under the stars. Two in the morning we got mortared. The very first round lands right on them. Me, I didn't get a scratch."
"You felt lucky."
"I felt awful. My breath wouldn't stop quaking, I kept shivering. But the morning was indescribable and everything was completely clear. I was scared, elated ... starving. Devoured breakfast."
She leaned closer, the better to examine me. "You actually like this war."
"Well, it sure wipes away the mundane. Nobody worries about smoking or the condition of their liver. Everything's now. There's no later."
"You're a prisoner of your hormones." She smiled. I couldn't tell if she thought I was amusing or hopeless.
"The male is a destroyer," I said. "We kill for peace. It's our idea of a good time. We like to knock other people down, whether it's in a game or like this—for keeps."
I downshifted on a long slope to make it less jarring as we bounced over ruts and in and out of holes. "You must get an equivalent charge in your line of work, like when you've got five minutes to save a limb or a life."
"Sure, but it doesn't come from mayhem. I couldn't cope if it did."
"You would, and you'd like it."
She gave me a skeptical look.
"It's true," I insisted. "You do now."
"I don't think so."
"Remember your first incision? First cadaver?"
"Yes."
"How did you react?"
She hesitated. "Almost threw up."
"Because it seemed unimaginable—violent—cutting into flesh. Even a corpse's. And now?"
She didn't answer.
"See? You got used to it. Our work isn't so different. You can do something other people get nauseous even thinking about." I looked at her. "Everything's war and violence in this place. Without it I'd be just a security guard with a radio and you'd be another do-gooder ministering to the needy in a backwater nobody ever heard of. The war raises our work to a high calling."
"Is that right?"
"Yeah. I bet you've done more doctoring in the last three years than you'd do in a whole career back home. Bet you treat diseases and wounds your colleagues only read about."
"True," she conceded. "Plague, beriberi, every kind of tuberculosis imaginable—bone, brain, lung, skin ..."
"Illnesses they only know from history books." I looked her in the eye. "You ever fire a weapon?"
"No."
"You should. It's a kick, putting the sights on a tiny figure. Dropping it."
"Godlike?" she said, pointedly.
"Like making an incision."
She shook her head.
I said, "I wouldn't know what to do without Viet Nam anymore. I've given in to the fever. You too, I bet." I turned back to the road.
"You are such a boy, Captain Rider. Boys want to hog all the fun and danger."
"Life's too fucking short not to." I knit my brow. "You're not exactly a homebody yourself."
"You know what the Vietnamese call us?" she said.
"Khi dot? Big monkeys?"
"That too, but I was thinking khong goe."
"I don't know that one," I said.
"It means, loosely, ‘people who don't know who they are.'"
"You think I'm in Southeast Asia chasing myself?"
"Something like that."
I said, "Isn't this as straight as life gets? Doesn't this mess let you face yourself and make you grateful for morning?"
"So you like what you see in your shaving mirror?"
"Not completely, but here I accept me—who I've always been—without apology."
She made a face. "Have you been reading Kierkegaard or something? Give me a fucking break. Where was this cow college you went to—Amherst?"
I laughed. She snatched the baseball hat off my head and smacked me with it.
"Ow!" I squirmed. "Hey, Doc."
She smacked me again. "Hold still. I'm trying to beat some sense into you."
"Ow!"
"You're right about violence," she said, "I do like it," and she swatted me one more time.
The Special Forces camp looked ancient and primitive, a fortress more suited to catapults and boiling oil than modern assault rifles and mortars. The dry moat encircling it was filled with sharpened bamboo spikes and three concertina coils of barbed wire. One roll rested on the other and ran up the side of the earthen parapet. Within the wire, claymore mines were fixed in concrete posts so they couldn't be pinched or swiveled around by sappers at night and redirected against the camp. Home-brewed fougasse in plastic jugs—jellied-napalm cocktails—lay half buried in the sides of the earthen wall. Lethal speed bumps. The VC version used blood and sugar to jell the gasoline. The Berets detonated fougasse and the embedded claymores electrically.
Dr. Roberta pointed out low shrubs growing amid the coiled barbed wire. "Kpung," she said, "poisonous as snakes. One scratch from those nettles will inflict a week of excruciating pain."
The camp was a five-sided star, each side one hundred meters long. At each point a machine-gun barrel protruded from a bunker. Over the gate, a sign in several languages posed the Green Berets' standing challenge to their enemies: ANYTIME, ANYPLACE. A human skull wearing a green beret sat atop a post. A ring of machine-gun bunkers and earthworks in the center formed a second line of defense, a fort within the fort. Mortar tubes at facing sides of the camp tilted toward each other so they could each defend the other's side of the wire in an attack.
Jarai kids were everywhere. Barefoot and bare-breasted women, the dependents of the Montagnard militiamen, poured out of two fortified barracks. Dr. Roberta pointed out the Bahnar tribesmen mixed in among them, easily identified by their long, mangy hair. Half clad, wrapped in gray Navy blankets, they looked squalid, like forlorn street people.
Outside a smaller building, Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers in speckled tiger fatigues and silk scarves lounged on fortifications in studied postures of boredom, red berets tilted low on their brows. Even motionless, they managed to convey disdain and contempt and elicit wariness, like teenage gangsters. All they needed was a street corner and a victim.
I parked at the inner ring of defenses by the Green Berets' team house and got out. The colonel's jeep and the truck pulled up behind us. My gaudy shirt and hat drew stares.
"Di uy, you are down, man," a black Special Forces sergeant teased. "Thems some fly rags." He offered a fist and we dapped as he introduced himself. "Grady. Demolitions. Welcome to Fort Sucky-Sucky."
The doctor needed no introduction. The team members lined up to greet her and salute the colonel. They all looked gaunt and underfed
. Several Montagnards rushed forward to welcome Bennett warmly. I changed back to my jungle fatigue shirt and boonie hat while they all caught up.
The Special Forces captain, George Cox, popped out of the team house flanked by two intimidating Nungs in black Aussie bush hats and black uniforms. He welcomed Colonel Bennett with a salute and shook hands with the doctor. "Ed," he called out and a sergeant emerged from an open-sided tent, stethoscope looped over his neck and kids bunched all around him. Brass bracelets chinged faintly on his wrists.
"Ed Sprague," Roberta exclaimed with real verve. Arm in arm, they walked off to speak privately above a growing sea of children, curious to see the pig-colored woman. Other youngsters cornered Checkman, fascinated by his head of red hair, which he obligingly lowered for them to touch. He smiled, passed around candy, and tried out his linguistic skills, but they didn't understand Vietnamese.
"Colonel," said Cox, "Captain Rider—this way," and he led us into the inner, second defensive perimeter to the command post at the camp's center. "During the day, only Americans and Nungs are allowed beyond this point," Cox said over his shoulder. "Once they accept your money, Nungs will watch over you, waking and sleeping. They're great fighters—loyal, ruthless—and handsomely compensated to cover our backsides. Sixty bucks a month, more than a Vietnamese captain. Pisses off the Vietnamese no end." He grinned. "Even so, after sundown it's Americans only inside the Alamo."
Checkman and I trailed behind Colonel Bennett and the Special Forces captain as they stepped up into the elevated bunker. Mahogany logs formed the roof, their ends exposed. Firing ports and weapons circled its walls. The whole structure was encased in sandbags many layers thick and topped with antennas.
Cox turned and said, "I'm sorry you missed our intel sergeant. He just took out our nightly five-man patrol."
Red Flags Page 10
