Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  "I think I know where," he said.

  We drove back through town and hung a right onto a track. Ignoring caution, we went some kilometers and pulled up outside a Montagnard village near a river: half a dozen longhouses and a Western building with a corrugated metal roof. I pointed to two spears suspended above the gate.

  "What are those about?" I said.

  "A Jarai warning—contamination."

  John drove in. A slight figure stood in front of the largest longhouse, seemingly waiting. Before I could even make him out, I recognized the glove. At Little John's feet rested a small valise made out of sheet metal repeatedly printed with a beer logo. He must have been relieved that Big John had found him but was too shaken to show it. Instead, he seemed rigid.

  "Someone say Saigon police look to me," he said. "I hide. Two police drive into village at sundown. I run into bush."

  That they had come all the way from Saigon and knew to look for him at the village had made him worry they might also know the emergency meeting place. Instead of going to the rendezvous point, he had snuck cross-country to the leprosarium, a place deeply feared by Vietnamese.

  "Mother here," he said, "father here. He indicated the couple standing nearby. The woman looked normal except for malformations of her feet. The old man stood holding a cigarette, blowing smoke out of an opening in his face roughly where a nose might once have been. One foot was an ulcerated stump.

  Little John and his parents quietly embraced. Their son was a liability for all sides. He would never be safe in Cheo Reo and they all sensed it. He clutched them both, loath to let go and eager to leave. Finally he was ready and we drove away. Little John sat motionless behind us, the valise on his lap. I looked back at the receding figures. He never did.

  Ruchevsky stashed Little John in our room and got on the radio to his superiors in Pleiku while I guarded our guest. When John returned, we reloaded our magazines and waited.

  Ruchevsky said, "I've gotta get Little John out of the province—to protect him and what's in his head. But once he goes ... Little John's the go-between with everybody working for me. How am I going to operate without him?"

  "Chinh didn't have to risk doing anything to you," I said.

  "You got it. The bastard neuters me without harming a hair on my head."

  "So far."

  Ruchevsky sighed. "They're about to get another chance. We still have to get Little John past the two gentlemen from Saigon."

  "And Chinh's soldiers at the airfield."

  Checkman appeared with instructions: "Go to the airstrip immediately."

  "Right," I said and gathered up Little John's valise and my rifle.

  We loaded Little John back into our jeep and I drove us out, our weapons across our laps. A good seventy yards from the tiny sentry box that secured the otherwise deserted airstrip, we stopped and sat. Two ARVNs slouched by the guard post.

  A minute later a field phone rang in the sentry's booth. A moment passed. The barrier pole came down. Four South Vietnamese soldiers emerged from hammocks slung in a grove of scrawny trees. They milled around nervously until ordered to assume positions on either side of the barrier, rifles at the ready.

  A shiny speck approached from the east and came straight in. A twin-engine Beechcraft, brilliant silver against the roiling black sky. It landed and taxied onto the round apron just beyond the sentry box and stopped, shut down its engines. Onto the wing stepped a civilian in mirror sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt, hefting the most fantastic-looking assault weapon, like something out of an old British sci-fi movie, with a normal barrel sitting above a fat barrel. Evidently it fired two calibers, atomic and apocalyptic. He stood on the wing in open defiance. The South Vietnamese soldiers circled one another, confused.

  "Okay," John said. "Tien. Advance."

  I stepped on the gas and we rolled forward at a steady five miles per hour.

  "John," I said, "promise me you aren't going to put Little John aboard and jump on yourself."

  "Damn, I hadn't thought of that. Great idea." He squinted at the ARVNs. "Take your safety off."

  "It's not on."

  "Whatever you do, don't speed up or stop. Just drive."

  My foot never went near the brake. We just rolled toward the lowered barrier, the longest fifty yards I'd ever driven. It was clear we weren't going to stop. At the last possible second the barrier came up. We passed onto the apron and right to the waiting plane. Clutching his beer-can valise, Little John mounted its two steps in a flash and disappeared. The man on the wing dropped to the ground and slipped inside, drawing the hatch closed after him. The engines turned over and revved. The plane spun back onto the metal-plate runway and rolled right into its takeoff.

  "Small victories," Ruchevsky said, watching it climb. I never saw Little John again.

  18

  FROM OUR SHARED desk, Ruchevsky gathered up a miniature bottle of cognac made out of paper, a tiny paper television, an equally small paper motorbike, and a refrigerator, playing cards, an air conditioner, and stacks of black-and-white paper money. The miniatures were an Asian thing—for burning—luxury items the deceased could enjoy in the next life. Since the next world was spiritual, converting the paper miniatures into smoke to pass them over was as effective as burning the real things, and considerably more affordable.

  The miniatures were for Tri's memorial ceremony. His widow and their four children wore traditional mourning garb: coarse white garments with large patches. Neighbors stood along the wall next to a table laid with food and drink, the few relatives wearing white headbands. Custom forbade mention of Tri's name. A color print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung behind the altar, partially obscured by flowers. The widow and kids were reciting the rosary.

  Ruchevsky hadn't told her how her husband died or that we'd cremated him. Fire was an especially bad end and left con hoe, very unhappy ghosts, to plague the relatives. To explain why the body hadn't been recovered, he told her Tri had drowned and was swept away, which was only a marginally better death than being murderously butchered and cremated. To help his disquieted ghost, the widow had hired a local sorcerer to call forth her man's spirit from the river and capture it in a jar, which now sat on the ancestral altar next to offerings of rice and wine and the burned-paper replicas of major appliances.

  Candles flanked the charred-paper remnants and joss sticks burning in a vase of sand. Ruchevsky placed an envelope with the solacium payment on the altar: the sum allocated by the United States to compensate for an unintended civilian death. Thirty-five American dollars. In a separate envelope, John slipped the widow four hundred more in piasters, liberated from the strongbox under his bed.

  The snatch was on. Two ships would lift Colonel Bennett and a small force of a dozen officers and men, nominally going out to reconnoiter trailheads. Talk about fingers in dikes. A third chopper would follow, carrying the six of us in full camo to our insertion point.

  We didn't want the ARVN or anyone else seeing what we were up to, so we didn't use the airstrip. At dawn we set out in a truck and jeep for the abandoned Special Forces A camp at Buon Beng. I hid one trembling hand in my pocket and clutched my weapon hard with the other.

  Over his shoulder, Colonel Bennett casually said, "You're somber this morning, Captain."

  "Yes, sir. I'm not looking forward to engaging the enemy at close quarters."

  "You're in good company," Bennett said, "historically speaking. The Union forces collected twenty-four thousand muzzleloaders from the fallen after the Battle of Gettysburg. The rifles were stuffed with minié balls they'd only pretended to fire. It happens war after war."

  You could see him relax as he spoke. It was easy to imagine him lecturing at West Point, far from this war.

  We rolled up to the empty gate. The structures were overgrown and crumbling. Sergeant Grady and Captain Cox were waiting along with their Montagnards, Rot and Willie. Both wore sleeveless black tunics, carbines slung over shoulders and crossbows in hand—the Montagnard version of silen
ced weaponry. The shafts were each a foot and a half long, the arrowheads wound with threads soaked in poisons that would "fry your wiring in seconds," Grady said. "They left 'em stuck into an antjar tree all night, absorbing the poison sap."

  Cox confirmed it with a nod. "Believe it. Plus, they can put a shaft in your eye at forty yards. You can't see the arrows fly, they go so quick."

  "Just don't give them any grenades," Grady said. "Yards can't throw for shit. Vietnamese either."

  Colonel Bennett ordered a few saplings cut down that might interfere with the helicopters' landing while Ruchevsky and I changed into camouflage fatigues in a roofless bunker and set about turning ourselves into walking bushes. Grady mixed camouflage grease with insect repellent.

  "I've got the natural advantage here," he said, smiling, as he dabbed on a few strokes of the bug-dope-and-camouflage-grease paste and passed the rest. "Don't forget the backs of your big white ears."

  Our silenced CAR-15s were already expertly camouflaged. Even the black pistol grips were taped to break up their solid color.

  "We're gonna look like crazy minstrels," Sergeant Grady grumbled, "wearin' overgrown hydrangeas."

  Jarai Willie grinned.

  "What's he so jolly about?" I said to Grady.

  "Oh, he had hot-shit dreams last night. He seen deer. Good omens. Me?" Grady muttered, "We seen crows this morning. Don't tell young Willie, though. It's bad Yard juju. Last time one landed on a bunker we were building, they made us tear it down."

  I said, "Maybe we should tell the colonel and call it off."

  Grady scowled. Turning to the Jarai, he announced loudly, "Remember, fellas, we're goin' after Vietnamese. Man, this is your chance to knock their dicks off."

  The colonel shot him a look.

  "Well, hell, sir," he said sheepishly.

  Ruchevsky approached, weapon in hand. I cleared my throat.

  "What're you gawking at, Rider?"

  "You look like a topiary on acid."

  Grady frowned. "What the flamin' hell is topiary?"

  "A fancy overgroomed plant," I said. "Only this one happens to have a gun barrel sticking out of its ass. You could use some additional pruning." I pulled off some extraneous branches. "What do you think, sir?" I said to the colonel.

  Bennett pursed his lips. "You're still a little overfoliated, John." Ruchevsky yanked away a few more.

  Barefoot in their loincloths and black shirts, the two Jarai took in our strange costumes with some curiosity. They could blend into the woods in a second just as they were. We worked hard and still couldn't match the effect.

  "Can we get a Geiger counter too?" Grady chirped. "I wanna try findin' some of that plu-to-ni-um. I think I can get good coin for that shit in Cholon."

  "Hey," I said. "I'm hearing rumors the Japanese are buying up beachfronts in Viet Nam, looking to the future. And that we've secretly found oil offshore. Hell, why not plutonium? It gives me hope there's really a good reason for all of us being here."

  "That's more than I've got," said Cox, all business.

  Helicopters were approaching. Cox called us together.

  "Stick to the center of the trail. The VC don't mine the middles, only the sides, where growth hides the devices. Don't step on piles of leaves or brush. Don't dive off the trail if we run into NVA. If you see knotted rattan or a knotted fern, that's a VC warning of booby traps ahead. A stick laid straight down the trail—same thing."

  The three choppers landed on the smoke canister Grady had tossed out onto the unused helipad. We boarded the last ship as Bennett got everyone else on the first two and lifted off. We lay on the floor and slid the doors shut. The soldiers in the other two made a show of their presence on board, riding with doors open, feet out. All three choppers headed northwest, twenty feet over the river.

  A few minutes into the flight, we left the river and rose over the unbroken canopy of heavy jungle. The air was chill at altitude. Morning fog flowed down from the higher mountain valleys and billowed out of the passes onto the lower elevations. The first false insertion was in a long narrow opening in the jungle, eleven minutes into the flight. Our chopper circled like a gunship. The other two touched down for four seconds and lifted off again. The second spot was at a river's edge. An unlikely place to insert.

  "Okay, dudes," Grady yelled over the slipstream. "Be heroes, not zeros."

  We piled out and were gone in an instant.

  The flight would make three more decoy stops to try to confuse anyone observing its progress. The colonel and his patrol would bail out at the sixth and last.

  Twenty yards into the green, we deployed in a circle, feet touching, weapons at the ready. We were far beyond any U.S. artillery fan or the seven-mile range of Chinh's howitzers, not that we could have relied on the ARVN gunners. If we got spotted, we'd have to call for Army gunships and the Air Force to save our butts. We lay motionless in the underbrush beneath single-canopy trees that towered over us. No movement anywhere, no signal shots announcing our presence.

  Twenty minutes ticked away. We hadn't been detected yet. The adrenaline backed off. A foot touched mine, passing Grady's signal to move. From here on, rank meant nothing: we were playing by Special Forces rules. Grady, with the most experience, was the leader and would call the shots.

  We set out, Jarai Willie leading, Grady following, me third with the radio, Ruchevsky and Cox, Rot walking drag. We zigged and zagged for nearly an hour, looped an eight to backtrack on our trail, and set an ambush for anyone following us.

  Nobody. Twenty more minutes passed and we moved off again through vines and tangles. As we trekked over a ridge, I managed radio contact and reported in, whispering "Crazy Fox" into the mouthpiece. Cheo Reo acknowledged. I depressed the mike button once, signing off.

  The Jarai led us under heavy canopy that arched ten stories over our heads. The deeper we went, the thicker and higher the green ceiling soared over us and the easier our movement, because the lower growth was thin in the diminished light.

  The canopy turned a deep emerald. Nothing snapped or rustled on the jungle floor: the mossy deadfall underfoot muffled our passage. It was as still and dark as a cathedral. The jungle grew larger and we shrank. The trees dwarfed us. We were insects. The air sweated, saturated with moisture. Every surface dripped and glistened in the murk. The humidity was total, a jungle sauna. We were soaked.

  Soon we couldn't see much beyond thirty feet. Whole sections were impassable, blocked by tangles of tree trunks uprooted and toppled by the raging growth. We diverted around them, under them, human specimens in some giant's terrarium.

  The huge roots of triple-canopy trees formed steppes of ferns and moss. Parasites and fungi gnawed at everything living, us included. I brushed away termites, worms, ants, centipedes, straw-thin land leeches, and scratchy-sticky vegetation. Our skin, our hair, our clothing were smeared with decay and growth.

  Forty minutes farther in, the canopy thinned. Willie led us along a broad animal track, so wide that I hoped we wouldn't meet whatever had made it. Probably wild boar, judging from the path's width and height where it tunneled through growth. The track took us to a shallow brook hemmed in by water palms. We bunched up behind him, preparing to cross. Willie found a breach in the palms and stepped into the water and stopped. He raised a fist—danger—and summoned Grady forward. Willie pointed at the water. I saw nothing and shrugged at Cox, who was kneeling alongside me. He leaned against my ear and whispered, "Clay mud flowing down. Somebody's upstream."

  We crossed carefully, one at a time. It always surprised me. Like all flowing water in Viet Nam, it looked cool but the stream was warmer than my body and not the least bit refreshing. The flora thinned further as the canopy cover increased. Birds chirped, lots of them. Willie led us toward the sound until we could see feathers flashing, vivid orange and yellow against the green. Parrots, myna birds, canaries, skylarks scattered and took flight. Willie pointed to the reason for the gathering—a cache of rice bags piled on a low platform with a tarp r
oof. Each bag was imprinted with the logo of the American international aid program: one dark hand, the other white, clasped beneath a Stars and Stripes shield. A bag at the bottom had split open, drawing the beautiful, wild crowd.

  A path led toward the stash of rice from the other side. Willie followed it. Forty yards on, stumps of young trees and saplings dotted a light area where strong, straight timber had been cut down for construction. Tracks went every which way. Willie took one, seemingly at random. We passed garden plots next to a flooded bomb crater. Something broke the surface. Reflex swung our rifles toward the splash.

  Fish. The crater was stocked with live fish.

  We had stumbled upon a base camp for a hundred men. An NVA company. The occupants couldn't be far. Wet shirts hung on branches. Thirty feet away, the unmistakable odor of human waste announced their latrine. A-shaped bunkers bulged out of the ground, covered with earth, some interconnected by trenches. Outside a large one, built from heavy timbers and soil, were impressions in the hard ground, unmistakably a mortar's, probably an 81-millimeter. Like the camp, the bunkers were empty. Nobody home.

  Three Bren-like Czech ZB-26 rifles and cans of their Mauser ammo lay tarnished and damaged alongside rusted grappling hooks trailing ropes—devices the enemy used to drag their dead from the battlefield to their improvised graves. A volleyball net of woven vines stretched across a dirt patch. Huge trees arched high overhead, their canopies thick and dripping. Around the court stood bamboo platforms: classrooms with easels, mess platforms with chopsticks protruding from empty number-10 cans, storage platforms with nylon sheets protecting mounds of salt, sleeping platforms with mats—one of them occupied.

  We trained our CARs on him. Cong in the flesh. Barefoot, in dark green shorts and armless gray undershirt. The scourge of our Free World Forces. He slept with mouth open, dead to the world, the crook of his arm across his eyes, ribs protruding. He was tiny, maybe ninety pounds, frail, half naked, hair spiky, unkempt, consumed with fever from the look of him.