by Bing West
At four that morning, Suong led his PFs and Americans from the fort, back into the still hamlet, back to the corpse of Ba Bao, whom Thuc had shot. By twos and threes, the Americans and the Vietnamese picked their positions, near the marketplace, near Tinh’s house, near the body. They waited, as do hunters who have staked out a Judas goat for a tiger, hoping the Viet Cong would return to claim their fallen leader. It would not be until a year later that they would learn from a prisoner that the P31st District Force Company—the same men who had attacked the fort and killed the five Americans and six PFs—had lost fifteen men shot or drowned on the river that night. Unaware how extensive was the damage they had wrought, they waited while an hour passed and the dim light before dawn came. It was time for the fishermen to be stirring and for their wives to be starting the fires in the chill of the predawn. But the hamlet remained hushed as the villagers stayed in the candlelit dark of their thick shelters and listened for some normal village sounds to tell them the fight was over and who had won and who had lost. Dawn came, coloring the sky and the land, removing the chance that the enemy would venture back.
Still Suong waited, gesturing at his soldiers to be still—Suong, standing in his hamlet in his village, treating American and Vietnamese alike, claiming by his actions to be leader of them all; the Marines accepting that because it was his PFs who had held the fort after the Americans had been killed. The Marines were not racist, but they had had too much military pride; it had taken a bad defeat to humble them. Now they waited and let Suong run the patrol.
Finally with full light a villager cautiously emerged from his bunker, followed by another and another, and soon smoke from cooking fires hung like a haze over the hamlet and the toilers for the fields bustled outside, hurrying to their chores, anxious to make up time on this day which had started too late. That was how the villagers saw them and that was how Suong wanted the PFs and the Marines to be seen—Thuc and Wingrove sitting motionless back to back at the edge of the paddy, Fleming lying alongside a house, Culver leaning against a tree, Luong squatting next to an empty buffalo pen—strong, silent sentinels scattered through the hamlet like boulders along a shore. And in the paddy the body of Ba Bao, who had grown up in Binh Yen Noi and was known, and who said he was coming back after his unit had smashed into the fort and who had come back.
It was time. Suong signaled and they left their stands and no PF slipped off for a filling breakfast of thick, hot soup. They grouped on the main trail and the villagers had to edge around them to get by and Suong put them in two columns, Marine or PF making no difference. He timed it right, for White and the patrollers from the My Hués, where it had been quiet, were ambling down the trail, and White took his cue from Suong and his Marines and PFs fell in. Including the reaction force from PF Hill, the band numbered over thirty. They took the long way through the hamlet back to the fort, while the word spread before them and the villagers left their houses to watch. There was no music; nobody was in step; the rifles were carried at the various casual, careful angles of professionals.
But the Vietnamese militia and the American soldiers were marching, and the villagers knew it.
15
Escalation of the village war to the large-unit level had not succeeded in driving the combined unit from the hamlet, and the price the Viet Cong had paid in their district forces was too high to support repetition. After the 409th NVA Battalion went back to the hills, the local enemy forces in and around Binh Nghia tried to avoid pitched battles. The P31st District Force Company had lost too many men; replacements were not easily gathered. Still, during the next month the combined unit engaged in sixteen firefights—all sharp, quick clashes at night, one seeming to merge into the next, duly fought and duly recorded but hazy and scarcely remembered the next day.
There was one fight that was remembered, even though only one Marine participated. Corporal Lummis, Brannon’s friend with the black mustache and the steady nerves, was working with a small group of PFs to build an outpost just north of the My Hués when they were hit at three in the morning by a Viet Cong platoon. The enemy broke through the hasty defense and captured the post’s machine gun, which sat on a sandy knoll. As the Viet Cong turned the weapon on the defenders below them, Lummis left his safe foxhole and charged alone up the slope. The bullets struck him full in the chest. He went down, yet refused to die, kept trying to claw his way up the hill while the enemy kept firing at him until the PFs sneaked behind the gunners and killed them. They recaptured the gun and carried the body of Franklin Lummis back to the fort. Lummis was the seventh Marine to die in the village.
* * *
A few days later the combined unit gained a member who perked up everyone’s spirits. Wingrove was taking an afternoon walk by himself through the smallest and bleakest of the village’s seven hamlets, at the northern edge of the My Hué area, an uneven line of one-room huts and parched vegetable patches strung out along the sand dunes. Wingrove had wanted to be alone, away from the other Americans and the clamor of the fort, and My Hué was the hamlet least visited by the Marines or the PFs. He was walking along absorbed in his own thoughts when he heard the shrill voice of an angry old woman interspersed with the sobbing pleas of a young boy and the harsh whacking of a bamboo cane. Wingrove winced and walked on, the loud cries following him to the next house, where a housewife stood, joggling an infant on her hip and mumbling insults at her invisible neighbor. Seizing upon Wingrove as the first person to whom she could talk, she continued her diatribe against her shrieking neighbor, only small snatches of which the Marine could understand. When Wingrove did not reply, the housewife repeated her story twice more, each time in simpler Vietnamese terms. Wingrove lingered because he was flattered that a villager thought he spoke her language well. After the third recitation, he had gathered that the boy being whipped was frequently so punished and that he was an orphan kept to tend cows and buffaloes. Since he was big and rich, the woman asked, why didn’t he do something about it? It was not good for her children to see a boy treated like that.
Wingrove was trying to explain why he could not when the boy shuffled by, hair disheveled, cheeks wet with tears, thin shoulders sobbing beneath a filthy and torn shirt. His head came up to Wingrove’s waist and he looked about six years old. Wingrove smiled and spoke softly to him. The boy sniffled and walked on as though he had not heard. Then he stopped and shyly turned to peek back. Wingrove winked. The boy took a few more steps, stopped and turned again. Wingrove knelt down, smiled and offered a piece of gum. Slowly the boy walked back.
An hour later Wingrove returned to the fort with the boy perched on his shoulders. White sensed that this was not just another youngster from the marketplace who had tagged along to watch Wingrove make one more funny face before scampering back to rejoin his shopping mother.
“He followed me home, Sergeant,” Wingrove cracked. “Can I keep him?”
Before the sergeant could ask any questions, Wingrove was pleading his case to the other Marines who had gathered around, describing the conditions under which he had found the boy. He concluded by mentioning that the boy’s “aunt” wanted a case of C-rations in exchange.
The boy stayed. The only English he knew were the words “Hi, Joe!” so he was dubbed Joe. The Marines gave him a cot in their new squad tent, but it was some time before Joe used it. Instead, he would wait until the others had gone to sleep and then scamper with his blanket over to Wingrove and curl up contentedly on the end of the Marine’s cot. If Wingrove was gone overnight on patrol, Joe would pick the cot of some other Marine, who would always act startled and yell at Joe to get the hell back to his own bed, but somehow the discovery always came in the morning. The slightest rebuke caused Joe to burst into tears. Telling him to stop only made it worse, and the Marines were forever injuring the boy’s feelings and being too lavish in their efforts to make amends. The attention and special position would have spoiled many boys, but not Joe. He was polite to everybody.
His days as a lonely buffalo bo
y were over. Ho Chi, the schoolteacher, tutored him at night, in addition to school during the day, to make up for the years he had lost. The PFs corrected his Vietnamese grammar, as best they could, and he picked up English at an amazing rate. Especially adept at mathematics, he loved the game of Monopoly and any card game. His concentration was ferocious and he liked to gamble, providing it was against the Marines, whom he could beat. He was wary of a few of the PFs, who treated him as an equal at a poker table. By selecting his opponents carefully, Joe could often double or triple his weekly allowance of one dollar. He kept his money in a large tin can and said he was saving it to go to high school.
His routine was that of the Marines. He rose at dawn, washed, scrubbed his teeth and took his turn setting the breakfast table and doing the dishes. Then he trotted down the road to school, returning at noon. If none of the Marines were doing anything special, such as going to the PX, Joe would wander out to play with his new friends. He quickly found out that his position at the fort enhanced his popularity, so he soon was conducting tours of the fort, selecting times when there were few PFs present, since they tended to be less tolerant than the Marines.
But Joe had given the Marines reason to be tolerant. For the privilege of eating a strange and enormous breakfast, the schoolboys would leave their hamlets at dawn, run to the fort, set the table, eat with the Marines, clear the table, do the dishes and dart off to school to tell their envious classmates of their adventure. With a politician’s instinct, Joe rotated the breakfast privilege so that all the boys got a chance to eat at the fort.
The Marines held no illusions that they might reap significant military benefits from the goodwill they were gaining in the village when the schoolboys told their parents about their eating adventure. The Americans were not trying to win the hearts and minds of the villagers so that they would rise up and drive out the Viet Cong. They did not expect the average farmer or housewife to provoke retaliation by providing them information simply because they acted as decent human beings. So could the Viet Cong. Through their breakfast guests, the Americans anticipated only one benefit: escape from washing dishes.
The dozen Americans felt that the five thousand villagers accepted them. They ate in their houses, went to their parties, and to their funerals. Psychologically, this made the Marines’ job easier; they probably would not have stayed in the village otherwise. In light of Binh Nghia’s history of Viet Cong influence, this acceptance was puzzling. To the north and south there were villages in which the Viet Cong had assumed control later than they had in Binh Nghia but where there was staunch opposition to the government and to the American presence.
Luong offered a partial explanation for Binh Nghia’s lukewarm attitude toward the Viet Cong. The local Communist movement, he said, had originated across the river in the Phu Longs, and the hostility between the Phu Longs and Binh Nghia was generations old, focused on a feud over fishing rights. It was natural that the Phu Longs assumed economic as well as political power when the Viet Cong were on the rise and this was done at the direct expense of fishermen from Binh Nghia. So later when the Viet Cong came across the river to spread the gospel, there were many in Binh Nghia who resented them and any cause they represented.
The police chiefs—first Lam and then Thanh—had fed this resentment with money and had built up a spy network. Thanh was proud of this information web and scorned as petty gossip the rumors the PFs heard in the hamlets. But it was higher headquarters which, one day in November, warned Thanh that a three-man assassination team, supposedly trained in North Vietnam and carrying a telescopic rifle, was reported to be in the district. The government presence in Binh Nghia was said to be their special target.
The Marines tended to shrug the warning off, saying that a man with a gun was a man with a gun and that if there were only three assassins, they would take them on in a firefight any day. Thanh was more nervous. He asked for a Marine guard whenever he left the fort and he told the PFs and village officials not to go off alone, not even to visit their wives. It was obvious not all the listeners took Thanh seriously, and the police chief was resigned to the inevitability of some deaths.
One morning the man who ran the village rice-polishing machine and his wife set out in their sampan for the district town of Binh Son. The next afternoon fishermen retrieved their bodies from the mouth of the river. Their arms had been bound behind them and their throats had been cut. A childless couple, they were buried without great ceremony in the cemetery of Binh Yen Noi. Thanh had lost two undercover agents. He would have recruiting problems in replacing them.
Next it was a pretty nineteen-year-old girl who lived in the barren hamlet of My Hué Number 3. The resupply truck for Charlie Company took a road through the dunes which cut close to her house, and she had sometimes smiled at the whistling, waving Marines, not inviting bedding offers but just being friendly. So when one day the company gunnery sergeant stopped and asked if she had time to wash some of their laundry, she leaped at the offer, which meant wealth for her family. Thanh did not know her; she spoke no English; she gave the Marines of the regular unit clean clothes and a bright smile and nothing more. The assassination squad entered her house late at night, accused her of aiding the Americans and told her she was going to the mountains to be a Viet Cong nurse. When she denied working against the Viet Cong and refused to go, the Viet Cong leader took out his pistol and shot her in the temple in front of her mother and her father.
About a week later, Xu Bui, the senior hamlet chief in Binh Nghia, a man in his mid-fifties, received a message from his family to return alone at night to his house in the My Hués. There the assassins were waiting. After capturing him without a struggle, they blindfolded and dragged him to a nearby house, where with knifes they began to pry from him information concerning the routes commonly used by the Marine patrols in the area.
At the same time a small patrol from the fort moving through the hamlet saw the light in the house where Bui was being tortured. Luong was at point and he started forward to tell the occupants to turn out the light. Thinking they were being attacked, the startled Viet Cong opened fire. The fight was brief and furious, with the Viet Cong pouring out a high volume of fire to pin down the patrollers, then ducking out the rear of the hut.
The firing was over in less than a minute, and as soon as it was quiet a woman came running from a nearby house, screaming hysterically and holding an infant, who had been shot in the stomach. The Marine in charge of the patrol dropped his rifle and took the baby in his arms.
“I shot her,” he said. “I shot her.”
The others tried to tell him there was no way of knowing whether it was a Marine, a PF or a Viet Cong bullet that had hit the baby, but the Marine was in shock and all he would repeat was “I shot her. I shot her.”
With tears in his eyes, he grabbed the handset to the radio and called the fort.
“You people call a medevac,” he sobbed. “I have a baby here who’s been shot in the stomach. I’m coming in, and I’m coming in fast. You better have that chopper there when I get there. Out.”
Taking a pistol in one hand and cradling the baby in his other arm, he set out on the dead run alone down the dark trails which led through five hamlets back two dangerous miles to the fort. The others let him try it. He had threatened to shoot them if they tried to stop him. They believed him. The Marine had been at the fort several months. He was capable. He had performed coolly in several touchy firefights.
From the fort, White sent out a patrol to clear the trail as far as they could, and then step aside when they heard him coming and stay out of his way. The patrol had scarcely reached the treeline of Binh Yen Noi when they heard the clumping feet and the hoarse breathing and ducked into the bushes. The Marine ran by with the baby, lengthening his stride and pushing for home with what was left of his strength when he came out of the treeline and saw the fort and the helicopter with its red lights blinking, blades turning and engine roaring.
At the helicopter door
a corpsman was waiting with his medical kit open while the crew chief and White stood on either side of him with powerful flashlights. When the corpsman reached out and took the baby from the exhausted Marine, the crew chief started to wave his hand at the pilot in the takeoff gesture. But then the corpsman spoke.
“Hold it,” he yelled. “We’re too late. The baby’s dead.”
A PF stepped forward and took the infant from the corpsman as the Marine who had made the run sank gasping and sobbing to his knees. The corpsman reached forward and patted him on the head and the crew chief clapped him on the shoulder and gave the takeoff signal. The pilot looked out at White and turned his gloved hands palms upward. White nodded glumly in response. The helicopter rose and whirled away. The Marines and the PF reentered the fort. They left the Marine on his knees in the paddy, crying. From the fort they could keep watch on him.
The Marine remained at the fort for several more months, but after that night he was not much good on patrol. White, who never forgot the incident, did not report it. He didn’t know how to express it.
Later that night Luong brought the patrol back from My Hué, with two prisoners carrying the mutilated body of Xu Bui, the hamlet chief who made a mistake. The prisoners, a middle-aged couple, had run a “safe” house where the three assassins had hidden. The next morning the villagers carried in a body and a carbine found in the man-grove swamp. The prisoners identified the corpse as one of the assassins, who had been wounded in the fight the previous night. That afternoon a squad from Charlie Company brought in another assassin and his rifle, which was fitted with a four-power telescopic sight. He had been spotted wandering on the dunes and had been chased down, surrendering when he saw escape was not possible.
The man was tough and Thanh was tired. Few questions were asked and none were answered. After one hour Thanh ordered the three prisoners roped together and led to the boat landing. He had them placed in a sampan and then climbed in himself. Supposedly he was going to the district jail, a trip which would take at least two hours. He was back within half an hour, alone.
