The Village

by Bing West

  Visits to families in the hamlets became more frequent after McGowan loosened the security regulations upon which he had insisted during the early spring. Captain Volentine had instructed the Marines to be meticulous in material matters on such visits. Four bottles of warm beer cost a PF one-tenth of his monthly salary. As host, a PF could be put in debt after a few visits by a thoughtless, guzzling American friend. So the Marines bought the beer for such visits. Enterprising small merchants quickly saw the profit potential, and by midsummer there were five small concession stands crowding each other for first spot where the main trail from the fort cut into Binh Yen Noi. At a dollar a bottle, a Marine could buy beer and a chunk of dirty ice. The same price was charged to the villagers. Credit was accepted, and some Marines ran up bills of $60 a month.

  The combined unit enjoyed daily an evening meal, helicoptered in by the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, who at the end of April had assumed responsibility for Fort Page. The food was good and plentiful; it was a luxury not previously provided by Marine headquarters. The unit’s standard of living had improved under Army care and they were able to save their C-rations for visits in the hamlets. The families with whom the Marines ate sold such canned goods in the district town, after setting aside the choicest items, such as thick chocolate, for home consumption.

  The Americans visited where they were welcome, which was not everywhere. Some families, with relatives in the Viet Cong, hated them. Some could single out one or two Marines and PFs for special blame for a particular firefight. Other families feared the presence of any sort of government authority in the village, be it RDs, PFs or Americans, because it might attract a main-force attack. Still others would take their chances with the combined unit rather than have the VC in control and be threatened by American bombers and the terrible swift helicopters; but they sought to minimize retribution by obeying commands of both sides while voluntarily befriending neither.

  Still, after a year many families had invited the Marines to their homes. Some had relations who fought against the Viet Cong; others had girls or young boys who knew the Marines; and some invitations were the result of chance meetings. Whatever else they may have been, the summertime invitations were a signal that the inviters did not expect Viet Cong retribution for their actions. Nor were the invitations given out of fear of the Americans. There was no awe of the unknown in the villagers’ dealing with the Marines. They were not the anonymous giants of the tanks, jets and helicopters. These Americans lived in their village, ate their food, worked with their men, died in their paddies. If a villager had a complaint about a Marine, he could tell Trao the man’s name and what he had done. Or he could take direct action.

  McGowan found that out when he dropped in at Missy Top’s for lunch one day. The house was large, with three rooms, two hearths, and sturdy wooden columns supporting a sloped thatched roof fifteen feet above a clean stone floor. Wingrove and Swinford were sitting on the edge of a wooden bed, chatting with Luong and Khoi. The Americans had each brought a box of C-rations and several warm beers, and soon the five of them were belching loudly and rehashing old patrol stories, kidding each other about mistakes made. Top and her mother were busily preparing a lunch of steamed rice topped with duck’s eggs and sprinkled with dried shrimp, with side dishes of peanuts and bananas.

  Drinking steadily and regaling each other, the men ignored the women, accepting as their due the food served to them, mumbling a perfunctory “Cam on, ba,” and returning to their beers and sea stories. Top sat down with them and tried to look bright-eyed and interested, but her presence went unnoticed by her guests and she retreated to the kitchen, where she broke down in tears.

  Her mother tried to comfort her, then walked to the doorway to glare at the men. She arrived just as McGowan spilled his rice bowl, splashing egg on the floor and squishing it around in a vain attempt to toe the yolk out of sight behind the leg of the bed. Mrs. Top stormed back to the kitchen, seized her bamboo broom, swept out into the front room, yelling “ingrate” and “ill-mannered” in Vietnamese, and proceeded to beat McGowan about his head and shoulders.

  McGowan ran from the house, pursued out of the yard by Mrs. Top, who was shouting that he could not come back until he learned how to behave himself. The others had followed Mrs. Top from the house, her daughter giggling through her tears, the Americans and PFs laughing and cheering until Mrs. Top turned on them, saying they were no better than McGowan was and to get out of her house and not come back for a week.

  28

  One burning noon in late July Mr. Lee, the district census grievance chief, rode his bicycle into the fort. It was Lee’s task to wander about the hamlets and talk privately with individual villagers, guaranteeing anonymity and asking about grievances against both the Viet Cong and the government officials. When the grievance taker was true to his pledge and not afraid to travel afield, he sometimes received valuable information, which, when reported to higher Vietnamese headquarters, was sifted for political acceptability before being acted upon. The Chinese Mr. Lee was an honest man, and he came to the fort because he had a piece of information which required immediate action. He was supposed to report only to district headquarters, but he told Suong and McGowan he had pedaled to Binh Nghia instead because he was tired of the slow, ineffectual, bureaucratic responses at higher levels.

  “What is the information?” Suong asked.

  An officer from the NVA 409th Battalion had come to Binh Son to discuss dwindling food supplies. There was a plan afoot for the main forces to come in and pin down several PF units while the local Viet Cong moved a massive rice shipment upriver. It was to be a twenty-four-hour operation and Binh Nghia was one of the villages involved. Lee had been told that the liaison officer from the 409th would sleep the next night at the home of a ranking member of the Viet Cong district executive committee. At the mention of the 409th Battalion, which had participated in the attack upon the fort the previous September, Suong had sprung alert.

  “Where will he be?” Suong asked.

  Lee had known Suong would respond.

  “Dong Binh,” he said.

  McGowan had to laugh. Dong Binh was at the foot of Charlie Company’s old position, on the back side of the sand dunes, right next to the Chulai airfield fence. From Suong’s expression, McGowan knew they were going there. It was useless to tell Suong that the district chief would be upset, or that Lee worked for the CIA, or that Dong Binh was a mile outside their patrol boundaries. Suong was not going to allow either the National Police or the CIA to deprive him of revenge. McGowan also sensed that Suong, although he did not come right out and ask for help, wanted the Marines’ aid in working out a foolproof plan.

  They worked at it all day, consulting with only a small number of Vietnamese and Americans in order to avoid a leak. First they talked of hiding two men with shotguns inside the suspect house and trapping the man when he came through the door. Luong squelched that idea by pointing out that the cadre’s wife might have a secret signal to warn her husband not to enter.

  Garcia suggested waiting until three in the morning and then, with the assistance of the Army, surrounding the entire hamlet. They could then arrest the men in the morning. Trao said no, he knew of tunnels which had been dug in Viet Minh days that extended for hundreds of yards. It was possible, even probable, that at least one such escape route had been redug and the cordon troops would walk right over the men.

  Colucci, who was visiting from his new unit, suggested combining the ideas. He pointed out that the ground around Dong Binh was sandy and a small patrol of good tacticians could move right up to the house and wait for the men, while the Army could ring the hamlet with observation posts and keep a company-sized reaction force ready to cut off escape routes if the small ambush failed.

  McGowan borrowed a motor scooter and drove to Army brigade headquarters, where he was warmly received. The operations officers listened attentively to his plan and told him they were more than a bit envious of his information. They kidded
him, pointing out that the combined unit was already patrolling a six-square-kilometer area, and now he was proposing to advance their boundary another kilometer, which were the dimensions generally given two rifle companies. Perhaps he intended to patrol all of Chulai eventually? McGowan explained why the 409th was so important to the PFs and to the Marines who had been at the fort the previous September.

  “The 409th NVA reinforced the P31st District Force in that attack. Suong and Lee figure the NVA liaison officer who planned that hit is the guy who’s coming back tonight. There are a lot of people at the fort who want him, sir,” McGowan said. “They figure they owe him.”

  “Well, Mac,” the army operations officer said, “in that case we’d better give you some help. It will be your show, but let us revise a few aspects of this plan, O.K.?”

  With the completed plan, McGowan returned to the fort and went over the details with an excited Suong. The two sergeants thought the plan looked good. They could only take the best tacticians in the unit and together selected six Americans and ten PFs, an acknowledgment that several PFs were better than Americans.

  They thought security had been tight, with only those selected being briefed. But the next morning when Brown, one of those who had been picked, strolled into the marketplace, a girl asked him why the Marines were not going to ambush in My Hué that night. Flustered, he asked where she had heard the news. She told him her PF boyfriend had just told her. Brown dragged both the girl and the PF back to the fort, where Suong privately questioned the PF. He found out that the PF, a good fighter, just could not resist bragging to his girl and teasing her with his superior knowledge. Suong was furious at the breach of security. The girl said she had told no one else until Brown came along. That Suong did not believe any woman could have done. Still, he decided to stick to the original plan, while holding the girl and the PF at the fort for the day.

  An hour after dark on that night of July 24, sixteen men left the fort in two separate patrols. They met again near PF Hill and climbed into the back of a covered Army truck. They drove north through Dong Binh without attracting suspicion, for vehicles passed through dozens of times a day and the brigade that day had ensured that at least one truck rumbled through the hamlet each half-hour. As the truck neared the far outskirts of the hamlet without slowing down, the patrollers jumped out and rolled into the bushes. They lay quiet for a few minutes, then sneaked into the hamlet.

  Splitting into teams of three and four, they crawled toward their preassigned ambush spots. The hamlet was not strange to any of them. It held less than fifty houses, almost half of which were strung out along the road. The air hung heavy with heat and thick with the smell of food, and the sweat dropped off the patrollers as they moved on their hands and knees along the hedgerows. The silent sand was their ally, and the teams crept undetected to their ambush sites, where they settled in, prepared to spend all night.

  Suong, McGowan and Colucci crawled up to the house of the district committeeman. They heard the woman inside puttering in her kitchen and inched forward until they were at a corner, with a clear view of the short path which ran from the front door to a slatted wooden gate in a high thorn hedge. They sat down, their backs against the wall of the house, and waited.

  Within an hour the hamlet had quieted down as most of the children and many of the adults went to bed. After the woman in the house had finished eating and cleaning her dishes, she had blown out her lantern, but McGowan had not heard her climbing into bed and he could imagine her sitting in the dark, waiting. He could only hope that the dark house was not the signal for danger. He did not think so. Their approach, he was convinced, had been utterly silent in the sand. And yet…

  At the far end of the hamlet, a dog barked—one uncertain, testing bark; then a series of quick, challenging yips which stopped suddenly, as if his owner had jerked on the rope around the dog’s neck and dragged him indoors.

  McGowan peered into the blackened face of Colucci, who was leaning forward, genuflecting on his right knee, with his sawed-off pump shotgun balanced across his left thigh. Colucci nodded vigorously to McGowan. Suong, still sitting, was glaring at the hedge as if he thought that, with just a little more concentration, he could stare right through the bramble tangle. On impulse, McGowan pointed at the gate and the three slithered forward until they were right under the hedge. Colucci, being farthest back, wiggled past the other two and snuggled against the hedge on the other side of the gate.

  It didn’t seem that they waited any more than five minutes before they heard a murmur of voices followed by the slight scuffing of loose pebbles on the hard-packed road and then the men were there, two of them, standing at the gate, chatting, like neighbors on a gentle summer weekend night pausing in the soft dark before going inside to drink a cold beer.

  As one of the men fumbled to unlatch the gate, Suong stood up and shot him in the face. The Marines had no warning. He just did it. One small bang from his carbine, no louder than a cheap firecracker, had broken the spell of a peaceful summer evening.

  The other man stood frozen for an instant, gaping at Suong and at the black faces of the Americans who had popped up on either side of Suong. For that moment no one fired, and McGowan was sure they had a prisoner. He was still thinking so when the man bolted, turning and running in one blur of motion. Suong, thrusting forward over the gate, sent his shots wild and blocked McGowan out of the action. The man was a second and a step away from a deep drainage ditch and a chance to run a gauntlet of ambushes. But Colucci was raising the shotgun and squeezing the trigger, and the hamlet reverberated with the ugly, final sound, like a sledgehammer on glass.

  “Damnit, Suong,” McGowan shouted, “why didn’t you wait? Once inside the gate, we could have snatched them. Truoc vao—hang oi.”

  Suong did not bother to reply. He had intended from the first to kill the North Vietnamese officer.

  The woman from the house ran by them, flung open the gate and knelt beside one of the dead men, keening.

  A few days later a silver-gray helicopter fluttered down unexpectedly in front of the fort. Two Americans and two Vietnamese men hopped out, all dressed in neat civilian clothes. They were followed by an attractive Vietnamese woman wearing an ao-dai, the graceful pants and gown costume favored for everyday dress in Saigon and in the more prosperous district towns and suburbs. In Binh Nghia the Marines had seen ao-dais only at weddings and funerals, and then only a few.

  McGowan received a call from district telling him not to bother the visitors, who worked for the CIA. The unusual entourage strolled into Binh Yen Noi and stayed for three hours, chatting with various people and wandering about the paths. When they were returning to their helicopter, one of the Americans walked over to the fort’s gate, where McGowan was sitting.

  “Nice village here,” he said.

  “We like it,” McGowan replied.

  “That feeling seems to be shared by the villagers. We’ve gathered you get along here. Get much dope on what’s going on?”

  “Too much,” McGowan laughed. “Most of it’s just scuttlebutt. You know, gossip. It’s what Nguyen’s cousin said his mother-in-law heard when she talked to a fisherman from My Hué.”

  “What do you know about taxing?”

  “Our acting village chief, Mr. Trao, says his opposite number has a list of who should pay how much. Last month we got the word he was on the trail up by My Hué stopping anybody who came along. Naturally he bugged out before we got there. He’d only been able to shake down a couple of people. They don’t tax in this village any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “We patrol, so it can’t be done on a regular basis. The villagers would bitch, we’d get tipped off, and bang!—there go your tax collectors. And if we missed them, the VC families would be forced to make up the losses. These PFs aren’t fussing around.”

  “Yes,” the man said dryly. “We’ve noticed…. You are aware that we have special teams trained to do the sort of thing you did the other night? Lee w
as supposed to report to them, not to you.”

  “Sir, that was something personal which goes pretty far back. The PFs wanted that guy bad. So did we. His battalion did a job on this fort once. We owed him.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of sending any of your people around here. As far as this particular village is concerned, no friendlies come in but us. No Marines, no soldiers, no medcaps. Not anybody. Your special teams will get blown all away to hell if they come sneaking around here. One Marine from a line unit got accidentally killed that way. Nobody from the outside hunts in here. We’d appreciate it if you’d keep your people out. This is our village.”

  “Well, it seems a lot of people here agree with you, so I won’t argue the point. But aren’t your boundaries a bit big?”

  “We just sort of go where we have to.”

  “All right, I’ll pass the word that it’s O.K. for Lee to work with you—not that he hasn’t been doing so. Good luck, Sergeant.”

  29

  Helicopter visitors were not rare. Fort Page was known as the combined unit that wouldn’t die. The village had been written about in Time magazine, as well as in several books and articles. The fort became a fifteen-minute stopping place for high-ranking commanders and for VIPs on two-week tours of Vietnam.

  The Marines and the PFs did not mind. In fact, they were flattered, and McGowan felt it was good for morale for his men and Suong’s to see that the top command was personally interested in them, although sometimes McGowan found the interest too personal.

  When the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, visited Binh Nghia, he said that as a Navy man he knew little of ground tactics and instead wanted to spend his time questioning the men about their backgrounds and their relationships with the Vietnamese. The men found him easy to talk with, and McGowan regaled the admiral with tales about his father’s bar in New York City. Upon his departure, the admiral thanked them for the job they were doing and for their courtesy toward him. He said their parents would be proud of their sons. When the admiral had flown off, McGowan commented to the others, “He was a nice old gent,” and thought no more of the visit.