The Village

by Bing West

  “Hey, you dumb bastards, it’s us. It’s us,” Norwood yelled.

  The two forces met at the top of the dune.

  “Are they still there?” McGowan asked.

  Norwood was scoping out the trench.

  “Yeh. Your burst must have pinned them down, too. They’re staying in the trench. Let me try a LAW. Then we can mop them up.”

  Luong was opposed. So was Suong. They wanted to pinch in on the trench from two sides and not fire until the enemy did so. McGowan agreed, so they split the force and moved on the trench by bounds. Luong, as usual, was out in front and first to reach the trench.

  Even then he did not fire. Instead, he stood erect and started screaming at the occupants of the trench. Under his threats seven men and three women slowly climbed out and cowered together. Not one had a weapon. They were villagers, not Viet Cong.

  They stammered out their story. Around dusk that evening a squad of Viet Cong had crossed the river and entered My Hué Number 1. They had come straight to the houses of these people at the rear of the hamlet and told them to take their picks and shovels and come with them. They had herded them out into the dunes and pointed to where they wanted the trench dug. They did not say why. Two guards had stayed with them. They had almost finished when suddenly firing started. The guards had run away and they had hidden in the trench.

  Suong told the villagers to go home. The CAP force headed back to the fort, Luong and Norwood kidding each other, McGowan and Suong smiling in bemused relief.

  Weapons and violence were part of these young men. Their hardened attitudes toward physical danger and death were reflected in their humor, sometimes tastelessly. To them, comedy could be tragedy avoided; it could also be danger faked.

  One day a Marine took a grenade, removed the firing mechanism and screwed back on the pull pin and release lever. For a while he horsed around with the other Marines in the fort, throwing the defanged grenade back and forth like a baseball. McGowan watched them and said nothing.

  Then the Marine saw Luong approaching. After winking at the others, he staggered out of the fort as if drunk. Weaving along, he threw his arms askew and Luong, grinning tolerantly, held him up. Then the Marine dangled the grenade. When Luong reached to take it away from him, he pulled the pin and threw it straight up in the air.

  In an instant, Luong had dropped his rifle, thrown the Marine flat, spun around, caught the grenade and in the same motion flipped it underhand into the paddies while going flat himself. Five seconds went by and nothing happened. Then the Marine started laughing, followed tentatively by the Americans and the PFs in the fort. Luong stood up, looked at the Marine and hit him full in the mouth. The American went down and Luong stormed into a silent fort. He strode up to McGowan and just stood there looking at him as if to say: How can you call yourself a leader and let one of your men do something that stupid?

  McGowan apologized.

  But it might be that bad luck and bad judgment run in streaks, for McGowan shortly compounded his embarrassment by a more serious error. Frequently the unit did not report weapons captured during a firefight, a dodge started by O’Rourke in an effort to ensure that the men could keep deserved war trophies. Subsequently a change in regulations permitted soldiers to keep bolt-action rifles but not automatic weapons. Having captured several of the latter, the unit kept them hidden at the fort as backup weapons. A few days after the grenade incident, McGowan was sitting at the sturdy wooden dinner table cleaning an unloaded enemy submachine gun. Alfano was standing in front of the sergeant, chatting. In answer to a question, McGowan raised his head and brought up the barrel of the gun. As he did so, the bolt slammed home and the weapon fired.

  The bullet just missed Alfano’s right eye.

  For a few seconds neither man moved. Then McGowan handed Alfano the gun.

  “Here,” he said, “you shoot me.”

  Short of an earthquake, McGowan did not think things could go any worse than they had for the past few weeks, so he allowed the two-man rover patrolling with the special rifles to continue, although only the best tacticians could participate. The patrol rotated among five Americans and five Vietnamese. Without action the novelty soon wore off and the rovers became just another type of patrol.

  About two weeks after the rovers’ initial misadventure, Norwood again drew the duty, with a PF named Nguyen Thi Tri as his partner. Again Norwood headed for the dunes behind My Hué, leaving the fort after midnight amid the kidding of the guard and radio operator. It took Norwood and Tri over two hours to cover two map kilometers, Norwood being edgy about the route and moving slowly. The back stretch of the village seemed quiet enough, however, and after lying in a likely ambush spot for an hour, the two headed home. They were stiff from the wait and their sweaty clothes were chilly, so coming in they moved along at a brisk pace, Norwood’s uneasiness having been dispelled by the dull, familiar routine of another patrol without contact.

  Despite their haste, the sand absorbed their footfalls, so they were midway across the dunes when a figure loomed up right in front of Norwood. Norwood fired in a frenzy. The figure fell, Norwood leaping on top of him with Tri a step behind. Five other men were lying in a row. Norwood pivoted to gun them.

  “No shoot, no shoot,” Tri yelled.

  He had had a second to look while Norwood was moving. The ambushers were Americans.

  “Man, you almost killed me,” yelled the man whom Norwood had shot. “Look what you done to my rifle.”

  The man, an Army staff sergeant in charge of an ambush team from a nearby rifle company, held out an M-16 with a stock smashed by bullets. His team had been assigned an ambush position two miles to the north, but he had not felt like walking that far. When the patrol was halfway across the dunes, the sergeant had radioed his company that he was in the assigned position. Then he had his men flop down in the soft, empty sand, set out claymore mines to their front and rear, and go to sleep, rotating one man awake. At three, it was the sergeant’s turn to guard the ambush and, to fight off drowsiness, he had stood up to stretch just as Norwood walked by.

  On two rover patrols in less than a month Norwood had almost killed or been killed by his own, and he was too shaken to talk coherently. Tri used the ambushers’ radio to call the fort. McGowan and Suong were awakened and ran to the spot, guided in by Tri’s hand flare.

  Upon seeing McGowan, the Army sergeant started to scream at Norwood, who was still in a state of shock.

  “That asshole almost blew me away,” he yelled. “What sort of kooks do you have in your outfit anyway?”

  McGowan wasn’t listening. He handed his M-16 to Suong, turned and hit the staff sergeant in his open mouth. For the second time that night the man was knocked down.

  The next day McGowan was ordered to the Army battalion headquarters to report the incident. Upon hearing his story, the battalion commander ordered the sergeant relieved. Then, noticing McGowan’s worn M-16, he commented that his unit had recently been issued a supply of the new over-and-under combination rifle and grenade launcher. He thought that the Marines at the fort might be more in need of them than his troops, so he would issue a dozen on indefinite loan.

  “Sometimes,” McGowan said to Colucci that evening, “I feel like an ass.”

  The next day he personally carried back to the Chulai provost marshal’s office the four weapons he had stolen weeks earlier. He recited a lame story, which was accepted without questioning, and returned to the fort with the four battered M-16s. When he arrived, his men were wiping the packing grease from their XM-1332A special rifles.

  22

  Given the firepower of their new weapons, further retention for tactical purposes of the captured weapons was unnecessary, and the Marines had reluctantly concluded that it was idiotic, if not impossible, to smuggle automatic weapons into the United States as souvenirs. But no one suggested that they turn the weapons in legally; they represented too much hard work and commanded top black market prices among other U.S. units. The combined uni
t held a meeting and decided that the times of petty trades had passed. They would barter as one single package the captured weapons and other war booty, such as paper flags, holsters and belt buckles. The word went out, and from the Navy Seabees came back the most interesting proposal: a 100-volt generator in return for the entire collection, provided two pistols were added. A valued status symbol among Vietnamese leaders on both sides of the conflict, the pistol was the one weapon prized above all others by the PFs and village officials. In a year of fighting, the combined unit had captured only three. They had gone to Trao, Suong and Thanh. None offered to give his up in the trade, and the Marines held little hope of capturing another.

  “What do the Seabees expect us to do,” Garcia said, “go over to the Phu Longs and ask some VC company commander to give us his?”

  But toward the end of April the Seabees trucked in the generator in exchange for the enemy weapons on hand and a promise that they would receive the next pistol captured.

  The electricity resulted in a quantum jump in the quality of life at the fort. There were lamps by which to read without squinting, and floodlights to guard the wire. From the PX a Sony television set was bought, as well as a record player and dozens of albums, and plans were made to purchase a refrigerator. The villagers who lived nearby started buying or stealing wire and stringing electricity lines to their houses. Trao toyed with the idea of running a main line through Binh Yen Noi.

  The luxury of simple modernity had drawbacks. The generator was a monster which gulped gas and snorted, clanged, rattled and shook all through the night, forcing conversations to be shouted and the men to sleep with jackets wrapped around their ears. McGowan believed the music and light lulled his men, dulled their fighting edge and put them in the wrong mood for night patrols. The men wanted to schedule their patrols so as not to miss “Laugh-In” or any special with Joey Heatherton, their favorite from the Bob Hope Christmas tour. Little Joe’s pals kept popping in at dusk to watch the TV show “Combat”; then they would have to stay overnight, worrying their parents by their absence and annoying the Marines and PFs by their giggles, or a patrol would have to walk them home. Suong worried continuously about sappers cutting the wire unheard and slipping in. The anxieties of the two leaders grew, and they came to look on the generator as a symbol of complacency and an invitation to disaster. Four weeks after it arrived, they decided to get rid of it.

  Again they sought trading bids, while asking their men what they might take in exchange. Doc Blunk and Bac Si Khoi knew what they wanted. Each morning, often in the gray predawn, their patients bustled into the fort, frequently barging right into the squad tent, tripping over rifles, scattering socks and boots, screeching “Bac Si! Bac Si!” and pawing over the squirming figures on the cots until they found Blunk. Rules and regulations did not work since many claimed that their particular cases were genuine emergencies, and the guards on the dawn watch spitefully enjoyed upsetting the sleep of their luckier comrades. Since the guard rotated, the disturbances forced a cycle of revenge, with each guard remembering the morning he had been awakened.

  The corpsmen suggested a trade for timber. If they had their own dispensary, the squad tent would be much quieter; if McGowan was determined to take away the lights, the Marines might as well sleep soundly.

  Hearing that lumber might be coming, old Mr. Minh, the timid chief clerk of the village, pestered McGowan, arguing that he and the other clerks needed a place of their own to work. It was impossible to keep records and request requisitions in the main room of the fort amidst the racket of the Marines eating and strumming guitars and the PFs screaming at each other over their playing cards and Khoi with his wailing babies and district headquarters sputtering over the radio each hour. Besides, how would it look to give Khoi, who was not even thirty, his own building, when the hamlet and village officials had no place where they could conduct private business?

  As the rumor of an upcoming trade spread, Trao became the target for the invective of irate parents. Why should the officials demand a new office, they asked, while the children had to attend school in the grass? As the combined unit had furthered its combat control, more and more families from My Hué had sent their children down to the school at Binh Yen Noi. Even with two classes a day, all the children could not crowd under the one scraggly thatched roof. What would happen when the rains came in the fall, and they could not sit outside in rows along the side of the road? Trao suspected that Ho Chi was secretly urging the parents to complain, but as the chief official whose re-election depended upon popularity rather than influence, Trao was not about to back the professional clerks who were clamoring for the village office. So Trao tried to convince McGowan to trade for a schoolhouse.

  Unable to decide, McGowan brought his problem to Lieutenant Carlson at district, who was firm in his advice. He said whatever McGowan decided was his own business, but he should not have to wheel and deal to provide the village with certain basics, such as a school. There were official Vietnamese channels for requesting that sort of help, and if Trao did not use them now, he would be completely at a loss when the Americans left.

  Trao reluctantly agreed to send in the official requests for school building materials, while at the same time telling McGowan he would never get them.

  With the village school supposedly a Vietnamese matter, McGowan put out the word that he needed only enough lumber and fly screening for a small dispensary and village office in return for the generator. A nearby Army battalion responded to those trade terms immediately.

  Within a week the villagers had both buildings up, and two days later a midwife came to the fort, escorting a woman on a stretcher who was expecting a difficult delivery and wanted Blunk’s help. Blunk was flattered and excited. The other young Americans were nervous. That night at Fort Page a baby boy was born within ten feet of the spot where Brannon had died nine months earlier. McGowan’s liquor supply went down that night.

  The quick sprouting of the two wooden structures mocked the bureaucratic germination of the request for the schoolhouse. Although district had approved and forwarded the requests to province, province had not replied. Nothing. Not a word. Trao was embarrassed to use his new office while the children sat in the grass and dust.

  Finally McGowan had had enough. He went back to district and called on Lieutenant Carlson.

  “Sir,” he said, “I cut Trao out of that generator trade because you said do it through channels. Well, now what do we do?”

  “We’ll still go through channels,” Carlson replied. “Only we’ll go, not a piece of paper.”

  In Carlson’s jeep they drove the ten jolting miles to Quang Ngai City, arriving at the province headquarters at noon. Both the American and Vietnamese staffs were on their two-hour lunch break, habitually taken to avoid the sapping heat. Carlson asked directions to the home of the AID chief, and a few moments later they parked their jeep in front of a clean, attractive, whitewashed two-story colonial villa with a long patio, gardened shrubbery and a high fence topped by watchtowers and Vietnamese guards. Dust-caked, their green utilities baggy and soiled, McGowan lugging along his M-16 like a child attached to a rag doll, the two Marines walked onto the veranda and knocked on a closed door. An American in a clean white shirt and pressed trousers carrying a cold beer opened it.

  “You fellows lost?” he asked.

  When Carlson explained whom they wanted to see and why, they were invited into the air-conditioned room and offered beers, which they eagerly accepted. After the AID chief had heard their story, he promised the materials would be delivered through Vietnamese channels within a week.

  “We’d invite you to lunch,” he concluded, “but—”

  “No, no,” Carlson interrupted, “we’ve got to be going. But thanks for asking, sir.”

  “That’s quite all right. Anytime I can help, you just give me a ring. The province chief’s a good sort, really. The reason your district is so low on his list of priorities is that he thinks the Americal Division hel
ps you out.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carlson replied, looking at McGowan. “Thanks very much.”

  The two Marines walked back to their jeep.

  “Well, Mac,” Carlson said, “I guess that’s the price of fame. You see what happens when the word gets out about your deals? Trao gets no help through channels.”

  They started the drive back.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” McGowan mused, “there’s something I don’t understand. Why didn’t we stay for lunch? That room was an iceberg. Man, that felt good. Why did we leave so sudden?”

  “Just looking out for your interests, Mac. I don’t want you to get spoiled.”

  “Come on.”

  “I don’t think we were actually invited.”

  “Oh. It sure was nice, though.”

  Two weeks later the building supplies arrived in Binh Son. McGowan borrowed a dump truck from the Americal Division and drove up to the district headquarters with a working party of Marines and PFs. He was directed to the warehouse, where a Vietnamese clerk met the truck. In Vietnamese, McGowan asked where he would pick up the timber and the fifty bags of cement. Grinning, the clerk said there were only forty. McGowan couldn’t believe it. The clerk seemed to have no leverage for a shakedown. He told the man he was stupid.

  The clerk shrugged and said, “All right, there’s your cement.”

  He pointed to a heap of shredded bags which had been left out in a rain, soaked through and hardened into heaps.

  “You are stupid, stupid,” McGowan said. “Why should I give you ten bags, or take those useless lumps? People should not pay you. They should laugh at you.”

  With that McGowan told two PFs to watch the clerk, while he led the rest of the working party into the warehouse and took fifty bags of dry cement.

  Shortly later, when McGowan drove the truck up to the site of the new school, he was greeted by Trao and a dozen armed PFs. Under guard nearby were twenty laborers, who set to unloading the cement. It reminded McGowan of a chain gang, and he asked Trao why.