by Bing West
“Man,” he said, “I never seen a tracer like that warning shot that VC sentry fired off. It was sort of a light, eerie green and it just seemed to float over our heads, like a flying saucer.”
“Where was the sentry?” someone asked.
“At the market. Near where a big boat was being loaded.”
Nguyen Thang Thanh, who had taken over the police after Lam’s death, had been slouching at the edge of the crowd, only half-listening. At the word “boat,” he straightened up and seized one of the PFs, speaking fast and excitedly. The PF answered nervously and Thanh bore in, drilling him with question after question.
The next morning Thanh left the fort with a strong force of PFs and police. They returned near noon, driving in their midst two men and three women, their faces bruised and their arms bound behind them. Throughout the afternoon Thanh methodically beat and slapped the captives.
It was the first time the Marines had seen Thanh in action. His arrival the previous day had created a stir among the glum police, who had nudged each other, giggled nervously and hastily straightened their uniforms. Thanh had spoken less than three sentences the entire day and had ignored the Americans. Over six feet tall, he was thin as a reed and wore black pajamas with sleeves too short, revealing knobby wrists and skinny forearms. His eyes were hidden behind glasses tinted smoke-gray and his walk held a slight mince. To the Marines, he did not compare favorably against their memory of the respected and courteous Lam. On his chest Thanh had tattooed the words “Sat Cong”—“Kill Communists.” The PFs claimed the Viet Cong had slain his wife and all his children except one, a four-year-old boy whom he had brought with him to the fort and who knew how to shoot a pistol.
The Marines watched as Thanh beat his prisoners. When one woman refused to talk, he rubbed a wet cloth with lye soap and pressed it against her face. The woman struggled to breathe and sucked into her throat the stinging lye. He drew back the cloth before she suffocated, let her gasp for air once, then slapped the rag back against her face. Eventually, the gagging woman started to speak in sobs and Thanh extracted the information he sought.
He then explained to the Marines that the boat they had passed the previous night near the market belonged to the Viet Cong. When the patrol walked by, the enemy had been loading it with rice for their main forces in the mountains. The chore was particularly pressing since the Viet Cong had the 3rd NVA Division to feed as well as their own. Thanh explained that members of VC committees had either bought and hoarded the rice themselves or taxed it away from the other villagers. Although the boat the Marines had walked by had drifted downstream unscathed, Thanh said the Marines’ fire had destroyed two sampans and caused a third to overturn.
Of his five prisoners, Thanh believed none was valuable. They were only workers doing as they were told. The PFs knew them all. They came from two separate families, both of which had relatives in either the district or main-force Viet Cong units. The only formal political ties to the Viet Cong to which any would admit was membership in 1964 in the Farmers’ Liberation Committee. That was a totally harmless admission, since in 1964 the Viet Cong controlled the entire village and had organized the populace into a myriad of committees.
Satisfied he would learn nothing of further value from the five, Thanh put them in two sampans and sent them downriver to Binh Son with only one guard. There was no reason for them to try to escape. If they were successful, they could never return to their village and their families. The district chief, on the other hand, would lecture them for ten days at his indoctrination center and then let them go home. Once back in the village, they would thereafter be carefully watched by the PFs and their families. If there was among them a secret party member, he would continue to aid his cause. But as for the others—the peripheral helpers of the revolution—their usefulness to the Viet Cong was finished. None of them would want to be brought before Thanh a second time.
7
A few nights later Brannon wanted to return to the graveyard where Khoi had been killed. Returning from two successive patrols, he thought he had seen movement in that area. Sullivan agreed to take a look and told Faircloth to bring his LAWs and join them. The sharp-eyed Riley volunteered, as did Luong. The sixth member of the patrol was PFC Fleming, dressed in his black outfit.
At midnight the patrollers went out through the squeaking gates and past the clattering beaters. They followed the trail for a few hundred yards before cutting right and tiptoeing along a paddy dike. Several times a patroller slipped off and splashed noisily into the paddy. To Luong and Brannon, running a tandem point, the splashes had the effect of fingernails being screeched along a blackboard.
“Nobody here but us Cong, Luong,” Brannon hissed.
When they reached the burial mounds, the patrollers spread out in line, slipped off their rifle safeties, and in crouching postures slowly advanced. In less than a minute Luong was satisfied they were alone in the graveyard, and to communicate that fact he audibly snapped the safety of his M-1 back on and stood erect with the weapon over his shoulder, muzzle first. Exasperated, Sullivan insisted the Marines keep searching for another five minutes before acknowledging that Luong’s judgment was correct.
The graveyard had been dug outside the Binh Yen Noi hamlet in a marshy corner between the Tra Bong River, which ran north from the district town, and a tributary stream which ran east past the fort. At the intersection of the streams, fishermen had built bamboo fish weirs. From the graveyard, three lighted lanterns were visible in the vicinity of the weirs. Although night lights on the river were forbidden since they could serve as beacons for the Viet Cong, some stubborn fishermen persisted and the PFs, knowing the economic necessity of night fishing, refused to enforce the order.
“As long as we’re here,” Sullivan whispered, “why don’t we watch those lights for a while?”
The patrollers settled in behind the gravestones. If the Viet Cong tried to move up the tributary, they would have to pass through the weirs.
After an hour of waiting, the patrol was alerted by the disturbed squawkings of ducks and geese. Also hearing the geese, the tender of the lanterns on the weirs juggled and moved the lights. Next a light shone through a clump of bushes on the far bank and the Marines heard the dull sound of wood scraping against wood.
“They’re carrying a boat over the fish traps,” Sullivan whispered.
Riley had been watching to the rear.
“There’s someone moving in on our right flank,” he whispered.
“Cut him off,” Sullivan hissed.
Riley and Brannon moved down the bank to prevent an enemy probe.
Faircloth was listening to the paddle splashes near the fish traps.
“I think I can hit that next boat when they climb the traps,” he whispered, clutching his LAW.
“Go ahead,” Sullivan replied.
Faircloth knelt on his left knee. He placed the short fiberglass tube on his right shoulder. The tube wavered up and down, then steadied. He squeezed the lever. Flame spurted from both ends. One hundred yards away there was a bright flash. The Marines started sweeping the river with automatic-rifle fire. Riley emptied a magazine into the bushes along the bank to his right. Overhead, a mortar flare blossomed.
“There they are,” Riley shouted.
The firing caught two Viet Cong in a round wicker-basket boat trying to cross the river behind the fish traps. In the sudden light, they were easy targets. They dove overboard as Riley and Brannon opened fire. The tracers ripped through the boat and whipped the water. Standing on the bank, the two Marines changed magazines and waited to see if the Viet Cong would resurface. They did not. The light boat rocked to and fro. The surface of the river was calm and shone brightly under the flare.
“I guess that’s that,” Riley said.
Brannon did not have a chance to reply. Bullets hummed between them. Both were diving off the bank before they heard the sound of the machine gun. They sprawled in the rice mud behind the paddy dike. Without lifting h
is head, Riley yelled, “It’s coming from the other side. They’ve got us spotted. Get them off us.”
To the Marines crouching fifty yards away, the acrobatics had provided an interesting spectacle. Since their main position had not been seen by the Viet Cong, they were not under fire. Not wishing to expose their position by chancing a random burst of small-arms fire at the machine gun, Sullivan’s group took their time preparing to open fire.
Faircloth extended another LAW. He gauged the distance at one hundred yards, under good lighting from the mortar illumination. Having hit point targets at two hundred yards, Faircloth was confident. He sighted in, then paused.
“So that’s what they were doing in those bushes with a light. Setting up a gun to cover their movement,” he said, as if discussing a subject of purely academic interest.
“Come on, come on,” Sullivan replied, before yelling to Riley and Brannon: “You two just stay put.”
“I don’t believe it,” Riley groaned. “Will you guys fire?”
Faircloth fired. The explosion was muffled by the bushes. The chatter of the machine gun stopped.
“You two dingers can come home now,” laughed Sullivan.
Crouching low, the two Marines trotted in from the flank. The patrollers formed a hasty circular perimeter, lay down and waited to trap any infiltrator who might have crept close during the firing. The last flare hissed out. For ten minutes they lay still, listening. They could detect no human movement.
Then from the weirs came a deep groan which floated across the waters like a distant ship’s foghorn.
“My God,” Brannon said, “they’re rising from the dead.”
“We’ll see about that,” Fleming replied, squirming to bring his weapon into a steady position. “Let’s see how long the dead can swim with an assful of lead.”
The groan turned into a cry like a dog wailing, then the wail stopped, to be replaced by a few words: “Nghia Quan—dung ban.”
At the words, Luong who had also been waiting to shoot, jerked up and said urgently: “No shoot, no shoot. No VC. No VC.”
Fleming relaxed his firing position as Luong walked to the water’s edge and shouted. Out of the darkness a trembling voice responded. Luong shouted again, giving instructions. His voice was followed by the sounds of someone half-tripping over the wooden weirs, half-splashing in the water. A few minutes later a figure appeared waist-deep in the black water, hobbling painfully toward the shore, jabbering nervously all the while. It was a thin old man, clad only in tattered shorts. His body was lean and taut with lumpy, vein-striped muscles formed by decades of hard work. One calf was gashed and blood was streaming down his foot.
Luong knelt and peered at the wound under the feeble rays of a flashlight. Satisfied with the examination, he slapped the man encouragingly on his trembling thigh and swiftly bound the wound.
“That’s a million-dollar wound the old man has,” Brannon said. “Someone should shoot me like that so I can go home.”
With Luong supporting the injured man, the patrol returned to the fort, where Sueter, the Navy corpsman, attended the fisherman. A tall, relaxed young man with a friendly bedside manner, Sueter laughed as the old man, who enjoyed being the center of attention, insisted on showing him how he wanted the bandage wrapped.
“It’s a clean wound,” Sueter said. “If he’d keep it dry, it would heal in a couple of weeks, but I know he’ll be out on the river again tomorrow night.”
“Not if Thanh has anything to say about it,” Sullivan replied.
With his wound tended to, the old man had begun to scold the PFs, many of whose fathers he knew, for allowing the Americans to fire at the Viet Cong as they were crossing his fish traps.
But when Thanh stood before him, the old man stopped talking. As were some of his Viet Cong counterparts, Thanh was a fanatic. He pursued his cause of anti-Communism with the divine absolutism which characterized religious excesses in the Middle Ages. To him torture was a methodological problem, not a moral dilemma.
Softly the police chief began asking questions, abruptly dismissing many of the old man’s faltering replies with a wag of his hand, as though he were brushing aside frost on a window, the better to see in. The old man talked and talked and talked, and Thanh listened and looked and probed. The others sat and listened, the Marines bored and yawning at what they could not understand, the PFs listening carefully and murmuring to each other.
The old man described the enemy troops who had crossed his fishing weirs. His description confirmed the report that the politician Phuoc had given to Lam a few weeks earlier: VC district force troops were moving into the village nightly to attack the combined unit. The district Party committee had agreed to devote a priority effort to its neutralization or destruction. Binh Nghia would be controlled by the Party.
Thanh told the old man to go home in the morning and to spread the word that the old ways were finished. The enemy’s use of the villagers as signalers and porters must stop. A villager could continue to work for the Viet Cong, but he was now put on notice that the penalty could be death, as the Marines were instructed to shoot at anyone moving outside his house after curfew. There was no way the Marines could tell in the dark whether a person was a Viet Cong or a farmer forced to help the enemy that night. Thanh believed that the accommodation between the Viet Cong and most of the villagers was based, not upon political ideology, but upon the villagers’sense of self-preservation. The Viet Cong were stronger than the PFs, and it was wiser to obey the stronger side. He wished to upset that accommodation by weighing in with an outside force which posed the ultimate threat—that of death—to a villager who undertook the simplest act to help the Viet Cong, such as carrying a sack of rice or waving a lantern.
Thanh was partially bluffing. If a villager could be identified, as was the old fisherman, he would not be jailed, let alone executed, provided the police and the PFs believed he had been impressed into service by the Viet Cong. The villagers knew that once they could talk to the PFs, they would be safe. But Thanh was pointing out that there was little chance of talking with one of the American night patrols. For carrying a sack of rice, a man could die, not because the Americans wanted to kill him, but because they could not tell him from a Viet Cong in the dark of night.
The Viet Cong could not match that threat. For them to deliberately kill a villager who refused porter or signaling service would expose their own families to retribution. The choice was up to the villagers, and much depended on how active and aggressive they judged the night patrols to be.
8
Night after night three or four patrols went out, and night after night one or more of them made contact with the enemy. Each contact required a situation report, and every situation report was briefed to the generals at division and corps level. By mid-July, Fort Page was known throughout the high command as the scene of more night action than any other village in I Corps, and I Corps was the most violent area in Vietnam. Its reputation for contact was making the fort a celebrity stop, and in late July Marine headquarters wrote a capsulized history of the unit to pass out to high-ranking officers and visiting members of the press. The handout read in part:
The PFs are now confident of their fighting proficiency and realize they are quite capable of denying enemy access to their hamlet. In short, they have come to realize the VC can be beaten and that they are capable of doing it.
Not all Americans shared that euphoric belief. The district adviser, Major Braun, was concerned with reports that as the Marines at the fort became more proficient in patrolling, they tended to shoulder more tactical responsibilities and to shove the PFs and even the police aside. Acting on Braun’s concern, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel John S. Woods, sent a lieutenant named Thomas J. O’Rourke to the combined unit. Ostensibly, O’Rourke would be in Binh Nghia to give tactical advice to Sullivan, not to command the Marines. Unofficially, Woods wanted O’Rourke to convince Sullivan and the others to work with the PFs and to make a report on the
real situation in the village.
O’Rourke was readily accepted by the men. As the executive officer of Charlie Company, the unit which sat on the dunes behind Binh Nghia, he had known the Marines before they had volunteered for their independent duty. He had a reputation for tactical shrewdness, acquired by two years of infantry work in Southeast Asia. A former college halfback, O’Rourke was muscular and well coordinated, and in the field he pushed hard and insisted that his men sweat rather than take the obvious paths. But when not in combat he mixed easily with his men and could laugh at a joke about himself.
The night of his arrival, he decided to tag along on the patrol Sullivan was leading. Nguyen Suong, the quiet PF with the gold front tooth, assigned the PFs while Sullivan selected the Marines. But when Suong called to one Vietnamese, Sullivan interrupted.
“Him number ten with Marines, Mr. Suong,” Sullivan said. “Him no go with Marines.”
“O.K.,” Suong replied.
“What’s the matter with him?” O’Rourke asked.
“Last night he was at point,” Sullivan replied, “and he suddenly yelled ‘VC, VC!’ hit the deck and started blasting some bushes. So the Marines started firing too, including a machine gun and an M-79. After we had burned off a couple of hundred rounds, that idiot got up laughing and said ‘No VC.’ He pulled the stunt because he was tired of the patrol and wanted to go in.”
“Is that all a PF has to do to avoid patrolling?”
“What else can we do?”
“Let’s bring him and take along a tough PF who’ll smack him if he goofs off. A couple of hours of sweating at point and he’ll think twice about pulling a smart-ass stunt again.”
“All right.”
Suong was pleased by the reconsideration, since it would help him with discipline among the PFs. The reluctant patroller, whose name was Tam, was placed at point and O’Rourke took up a position right behind him, followed by Suong and Sullivan and several others. The patrol plan was to take the main trail into the Binh Yen Noi hamlets, past the market and on to an ambush site along the river.
