by Bing West
“The battalion commander’s right behind me,” McGowan said, “so grab her trousers and your clothes and get in the storeroom, and keep these girls quiet or we’ll all end up in the DMZ.”
The jeep jounced up and the lieutenant colonel hopped out, returning McGowan’s salute.
“I’m on my way to regiment, Sergeant,” the colonel said. “I dropped by for a minute to see how you are making out.”
“Yes, sir. Would you like to inspect the men’s rifles?”
“Rifle inspection? Where do you think we are—on some parade ground? No, I just want to take a look around. Rifle inspection! Sometimes I wonder about you, McGowan. That’s as crazy as your stunt the other night. If that VC battalion had attacked, you’d have been wiped out. You know that, don’t you?”
“No, sir, I don’t think so.”
“Well, I’m not here to argue with you.”
The colonel walked briskly to the squad tent and strode through with barely a glance at the inside. Then he entered the adobe building by the same side door McGowan and his naked companions had used only minutes before. He almost tripped over the cot in the messhall.
“What’s that doing here?”
“These are my quarters at night, sir. I sleep apart from the men.”
“That sounds sensible. But you should put your cot away when you’re finished with it.”
“Yes, sir.”
To the colonel’s left was the storeroom, a piece of canvas draped over its doorless entranceway. Directly in front of him was the doorway connecting the small messhall with the large village office. The door was open and a mob of PFs and village officials were peering in, those in the back rows jumping up and down to peek over the heads of those in front. They were all laughing and exchanging loud remarks and several were trying to catch McGowan’s eye while pointing furtively toward the storeroom.
“What is all this, Sergeant?” the colonel shouted. “I can hardly hear myself think.”
“It’s nothing, sir. I’ll take care of it,” McGowan replied, glaring at the PFs. “Di oi, di oi. Dung noi. Quay lai, quay—”
“Never mind, McGowan. You don’t have to impress me. I know you can speak some Vietnamese. I don’t have the time for them anyway.”
The colonel turned and walked back out the side door, McGowan lingering for a second to give the PFs the finger before running to catch up with him. The colonel climbed into his jeep, took McGowan’s salute and drove off without saying another word.
The fort exploded. The Marines came running forward to clap McGowan on the back and the PFs tumbled out of the village office and joined the throng, one PF strutting around in imitation of the colonel while another, playing the role of the sergeant, flapped his arm up and down as though saluting constantly. The Marines who had hidden in the storeroom came forward to claim they had made love to the girls standing up while the colonel was in the messhall.
The story was all over the village by evening and the advisers at Binh Son heard it from the district chief the next day. Eventually it made its way to Combined Action headquarters in Da Nang and at least one general learned what had happened. But none of McGowan’s superiors ever mentioned the incident to him, except by innuendo. On the other hand, McGowan asked Trao not to do him any more such favors.
Not that he had to worry about the battalion commander, for shortly afterward all Marine units left Chulai and moved farther north to fight the North Vietnamese. Their place was filled by an amalgam of separate Army brigades, called the Americal Division. The Marines at Fort Page, and those at the few other Combined Action Platoons scattered in the Chulai area, were staying. The Army had agreed to look after them and General Walt felt he would be reneging on a promise to the Vietnamese if he pulled them out. None of the combined-unit Marines volunteered to leave.
As the Marines pulled out, the Army moved in to the same prepared positions, thereby eliminating much construction work. On April 7, 1967, when Charlie Company moved by truck from their perimeter out on the sand dunes, an Army platoon took their place. The Americans at Fort Page assumed the platoon was there to stay and paid no attention to the transfer until the next day, when a group of villagers shuffled into the fort to excitedly claim that the company position was empty and that people were stealing ammunition.
While not quite believing the story, McGowan and Gallagher borrowed bicycles and pedaled the two miles to the position. They found the barbed-wire gates wide open, and not an American in sight. The ammunition bunkers had been partially rifled and gear lay strewn about. As they stood gazing at the scene in dumb surprise, they glimpsed a woman, already outside the wire, running down the back of the hill. She was clutching two white phosphorus rocket rounds.
“Dung lai! Dung lai!” McGowan hollered. “Lai-day. Lai-day.”
The woman had almost reached the edge of a treeline. At McGowan’s commands to stop, she ran faster. McGowan dropped to one knee, quickly sighted and squeezed the trigger. Hit in the arm, the woman fell. The Marines walked down to her. McGowan poked with his toe at one of the rockets.
“If we tripped one of those things up at My Hué some night, it would really fry us,” McGowan said. “Get her evacked and watch the hill. I’m going into Chulai.”
The sergeant walked down the road to Highway One and stopped the first jeep he saw. Thirty minutes later he was at division headquarters, where a joint Army-Marine task force was overseeing the division shift. In bitter tones he reported the mixup to a concerned colonel, who ordered a replacement company flown in by helicopter. Believing it closed the incident, McGowan accepted a jeep ride back to the fort. On the way he asked the driver to swing by the company position to see if Gallagher had been relieved of guard duty.
As they drove through the small hamlet of Dong Binh, near the company perimeter, he noticed that no children were running about and that some people were peering at him from the entrances of the family bunkers. On the hamlet’s outskirts he could see a group of Marines clustered, so he was more puzzled than worried. As the jeep drew nearer, he saw another group, a bit farther away, identifiable in their black outfits as RDs. The Americans and the Vietnamese stood with rifles pointed at each other. No one was talking.
“What the hell is this?” McGowan shouted as he jumped from the jeep. “Put those guns down.”
“Talk to those assholes first, Sarge, they started it,” Swinford replied.
“If that dude with the BAR keeps eyeballing me like that, I’m going to blow him away,” another Marine said.
The RDs were equally close to killing, and in their anger and nervousness spoke too rapidly for McGowan to understand.
“How’d it start?” McGowan asked.
“All we did was take the grenades off them. They were strutting around Dong Binh with ammo from the hill,” Swinford said. “They didn’t want to cooperate, so I slapped their honcho around a little bit. You told us to get that stuff back.”
“Yeh, but we’re not playing Wyatt Earp. Where are the PFs?”
“They di-di’d out of here when those jerks drew down on us. They don’t want anything to do with this.”
The situation was beyond McGowan’s authority and language ability. The RDs were ignoring him, and he feared a firefight even if he got the Marines to back off. He walked to the jeep radio and dialed the district frequency. In a loud voice he asked Captain Dang to come to Dong Binh immediately.
Dang, and his adviser, Lieutenant Colonel John Jarvis, arrived within fifteen minutes. The Marines said they were trying to recover stolen goods. The RDs said they did not consider it stealing to take grenades from an abandoned position. And in any event, the Marines had no right to push them around.
Dang berated the Marines for physically mauling the RDs. He berated the RDs for selfishly gathering loose grenades while ignoring the looting by villagers. The RDs responded that the villagers would hand in the explosive items in return for the rewards American units offered for ordnance found and reported. Dang did not accept the res
ponse as legitimate. Even if most villagers did take the explosives for profit rather than politics, the few who would pass on ammunition to the guerrillas could cause many deaths, including those of RDs. He ordered the RDs to help the Marines in searching the hamlet.
Before leaving, Jarvis drew McGowan aside.
“Don’t let Dang’s ass-chewing get to you,” he said. “Actually, he’s sort of pleased with the RDs for standing up to you. So am I. I didn’t think they had it in them.”
“Well, sir,” McGowan replied, “if you run across a good interpreter, I could sure use him. I don’t want to end up with any of my men gut-shot just so some RD will feel more like a man.”
As Jarvis had predicted, the RDs felt better about themselves for having stood up to the Marines, who hadn’t shown much respect for them since the night Trung was killed and his two companions ran away. Because the RDs had been willing to take the Marines on in a gunfight despite the disparity in fighting skills, the Marines modified their harsh opinion. For the few remaining weeks the RDs were in the village, the Marines worked more closely with them.
When the RDs departed in mid-April, claiming they had once again pacified the Binh Yen Noi hamlet complex, they left behind little evidence of their stay. They had organized no village militia, and if they had infused the villagers with a hatred of the Viet Cong, it did not manifest itself in actions, or even in words spoken publicly. The RDs did leave behind two physical memorials. One was a truck garden, on the edge of which they had solemnly erected a plaque reading: “Anti-Communist Vegetable Garden.” Unfortunately, the garden had not grown, and the pompous sign presided over a bunch of weeds.
The other memorial was the rickety bamboo fence they had insisted the villagers build around the My Hué hamlets. Shortly after the RDs left the village, a dozen Viet Cong paddled across the river, entered My Hué, rousted several villagers out of bed and had them tear down a section of the fence. Through the village gossip system, the PFs at the fort heard of the VC presence, but when a reaction force arrived, the VC had already gone, leaving behind a gap in the bamboo fence.
The PFs gathered some villagers and rebuilt the fence.
A week later the VC gathered some villagers and tore it down.
The PFs rebuilt it.
The Americans thought the struggle over the fence, which had little tactical value, was silly. Trao, who had opposed the original construction of the fence, recognized the absurdity of the contest yet insisted the PFs could not afford to lose since the Viet Cong had decided to make an issue out of it. The PFs had to fight back.
So late one night Trao and Suong slipped into My Hué and pulled up several sections of the fence. In the post holes they placed grenades with the spoon flush to the wood; by repacking the post with dirt, they made sure the grenades would not go off so long as the fence remained standing. But ripping up the fence would be Russian roulette. At dawn they gathered the residents of My Hué and told them what they had done. The message naturally got to the Viet Cong, who were then faced with the choice of forcing some villagers to commit suicide or of leaving the fence alone.
The RD fence received no more attention.
21
The newcomers of the U.S. Army had their own way of doing things, and the Marines at Fort Page were delighted to see the emphasis which was placed on expanding and improving facilities at nearby Chulai airfield. The Non-Commissioned Officers’ Club was soon air-conditioned and stocked with an inexhaustible supply of chilled beer. By April six of the twelve Marines at the fort held the grade of sergeant. The rank did not affect the workings of the unit. Each man knew his job, and the dirty chores, like clearing out the two-holer, were rotated among all. Promotion basically meant more pay and cold drinks at the NCO Club. On slow and stifling afternoons, the sergeants liked to hitchhike dusty rides to the air base.
One evening Colucci and Sergeant Norwood returned to the village to report between burps that the Army had a new weapon, the XM-1332A, an M-16 underslung with a grenade launcher. Aggressive and quick-moving, Norwood was particularly keen to fire the weapon.
“My God,” he said, “with one of those things, I’d be a walking tank. And would you believe it, they carry them in bags to keep the dust out—I kid you not. I don’t think they’ve ever fired. Even chopper guards have them.”
“What do the bags look like?” McGowan asked. “We might make a trade.”
Based on Norwood’s description, Missy Top sewed four bags in four days. The following Sunday Norwood and three other sergeants from Fort Page, their battered M-16s in the fresh new bags, strolled up to the large Chulai messhall a little late for the weekly steak dinner. Like skis at a mountain resort, hundreds of rifles rested against the messhall wall. Many were bagged. The sergeants split up and individually peeked and poked around until each found a bag containing one of the new weapons. Then each made his swap, one battered M-16 for one brand-new XM-1332A.
McGowan hoped to use the weapons to find the enemy and to keep a fine tactical edge on the combined unit. The pace of the fighting had slackened. No longer would one out of every two or three patrols engage the enemy; it was becoming more like one out of every thirty or forty.
Some of the older Marines, who had been in the village with Sullivan, were not adapting well to the slower pace of combat. For some, the shooting had made up for the sweat and the danger for the boredom. Flirting with death held an almost sexual excitement: the guerrilla grenade answered by the rifle, the lurking “Hello, Marine!” shouted from the darkness around the fort answered by a “Fuck you, Charlie!,” the nightly blind man’s game of hide-and-go-kill played against a skilled enemy whom they felt they knew, the villagers’ open awe when they kept going out with prices on their heads and the P31st District Force Company trying for them and the North Vietnamese having come in.
But it was slowly changing. Even without the Americans, the PFs were patrolling frequently in small groups. The enemy did not choose to fight as often. The Marines weren’t so special any more. Without a daily dose of danger, some resented the daily toil and drudgery, the night patrol passing through full paddies, then lying sopping wet in rough dirt at four in the morning, the stinging empty wait with the mosquitoes and ants, the diarrhea, the daily clean-up at the fort, filling sandbags, burning waste, standing guard. It was becoming too routine, the pay-off in a shootout occurring less and less. Suong and Thanh admitted the enemy was beginning to avoid the village, but they insisted some Viet Cong were still moving in and out, only they weren’t as anxious to fight any more. Suong claimed that the combined patrols of six men were too big and too noisy and that the Marines smelled and so the Viet Cong could avoid them.
McGowan felt that action would pick up due to the new weapons. Their firepower meant that the size of patrols could safely be cut down. With less noise, the chances of encountering the enemy would be better. He decided to test the theory right away.
The evening after they had stolen the new weapons, Norwood and Colucci set out for My Hué as a two-man patrol. In addition to the over-and-under rifles, Colucci was packing two LAWs in case he saw some sampans, while Norwood carried a night-seeing Starlite scope.
“After all this, man,” Norwood said, “we better get something.”
They left at dusk and those at the fort settled down to wait and to monitor the radio. The hours went by dully. Two close-in patrols went out, sniffed around the marketplace and the school yard, and came back in by different routes, having seen or heard nothing unusual. Only the guards and radio operators were up at three when Norwood’s excited call came in.
“We see them. We see them,” he whispered. “Ten or twelve of them digging a trench line.”
The Marines and PFs scrambled awake and clustered around the radio, jabbering among themselves.
“Knock it off. Will you guys shut up, dung noi—dung noi,” McGowan shouted. “I can’t hear a word he’s saying.”
Norwood was trying to describe his location.
“Out the
back gate of My Hué 1. On the dunes. You know, near the place where the people take a crap.”
“Norwood, people shit all over the place. You have to do better than that.”
“I can’t. What do you want me to do? Get out my map and turn on a light? Come out the back gate and I’ll pick you up.”
“O.K. We’re on our way. Don’t take them on alone.”
Fifteen heavily armed Marines and PFs quickly left the fort, half-striding, half-trotting in their haste. Luong took point and coursed up the main trail. By the time he reached the front of My Hué Number 1, those behind him were strung out and breathing hard. Without slowing down, he jogged toward the back gate, the others coming on fast lest they miss out on the firefight. Fearing an ambush as the patrol was funneled through the gate, Luong veered off the trail and struck out across a paddy dike which connected with the dunes about three hundred yards away from the gate. This was a mix-up in Norwood’s instructions, and McGowan, well back in the column, broke from the dike and splashed through the rice shoots in an effort to catch and stop Luong.
He was too late. Crouched behind a scrub-topped dune, Norwood and Colucci heard the splashing and turned to see a line of dark figures running at them. Norwood raised up, yelled “Look out!,” jerked an off-balance burst in the direction of the line and followed Colucci over the top of the dune.
Directly in front of him, Luong had seen a man pop up and was already diving face first off the bank into the water when the rounds zipped by him. At the same time, with the instinct of practiced reaction, rifles all along the line were throwing full magazines against the empty dune. Colucci and Norwood thought they would soon be killed. Then they heard McGowan shouting orders.
