The Village

by Bing West

  “There is no charge,” the merchants would say.

  31

  The end came quietly in October of 1967, after two and a half months without a firefight or even a sighting of a Viet Cong within the confines of Binh Nghia. Although the village officials insisted the enemy still skulked in the shadows after midnight, the savage struggle for Binh Nghia was over. The PFs were patrolling in the My Hués in teams of two, like cops on a beat. The enemy had placed his priorities and his manpower elsewhere. The Marines were no longer needed; the PFs could do as well. It was time for the Americans to leave.

  District and Marine headquarters had agreed that McGowan’s men should be transferred to Binh Thuy Island, three hundred yards out in the river from Binh Yen Noi, a world away from Binh Nghia. Trao and the village council vehemently disagreed. District’s arguments that the shift was for the greater common good of the war effort fell on deaf ears. These Americans belonged to Binh Nghia; let Binh Thuy find their own Americans.

  McGowan’s men were of two minds. The newer ones were anxious to go to a place where the Viet Cong came in every night, and the PFs were afraid to leave their fort. The older ones had seen all that; Binh Nghia was their village. They wanted to stay. So did McGowan. But when in September Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman, who had replaced Walt as commander of Marine forces in Vietnam, had asked him if the PFs could stand alone, he had felt obliged to say they could. That reply had marked the Marines’ remaining time in the village. The last few days his men were at the fort, villagers kept coming up to them and urgently, desperately insisting that the Viet Cong would come back if they left. McGowan believed them. He considered it preordained that the PFs would be tested. He was betting they would hold.

  Seventeen months after they had arrived, the Americans left the Vietnamese village of Binh Nghia. There was a flurry of good-byes, and the dozen Marines climbed into the boats from Binh Thuy and paddled away.

  McGowan lingered after the others had departed, searching for Suong, who had not come to the fort that morning. All the others had been there—Trao, Bac Si Khoi, Luong, Tri, Missy Top, even Mr. Buu—all except Suong. It was no use looking for the PF leader when he did not want to be found. Nevertheless, McGowan tried, going to his house, going to the marketplace, sending boys out looking for him, making an effort before admitting it was useless. At last he headed toward the river bank, shaking hands one last time with the throng of villagers walking with him, stopping and turning around for one final look when he reached the boat. And there was Suong, pushing his way through the crowd.

  McGowan looked at him.

  “I have to go, Suong,” he said. “The Americans have to go.”

  “I know,” Suong replied.

  They shook hands, strongly. No smiles. No playful shoves.

  “Chao, Suong.”

  “Chao, McGowan.”

  Epilogue

  1967

  In December of 1967 I revisited the Chulai area. I checked in with the staff of the Americal Division, where a Civil Affairs colonel and a major, who was the Public Information Officer, offered to drive me to Binh Son district headquarters. They did not want me to go to Binh Nghia without permission. At the district hill fort, we were greeted by Captain Volentine, so I knew there would be no difficulty in returning to the village.

  Volentine didn’t like the way things were going. In the three months since I had last been there, he said, both the Army and the Koreans had moved in more forces. But their deployment concepts, in his opinion, had not improved the security of the district. He said most Army troops were far out in the hills and the Koreans were behind a massive defensive barrier.

  The VC did not appear to be hurting, yet the district had been so quiet he felt the enemy was up to something big. He considered the Revolutionary Development (RD) teams a liability since, by Saigon order, they required a high degree of PF protection and had done nothing he could judge to be of lasting value. When hard-pressed, many broke and ran. Although several hamlets had been labeled “Ap Doi Mois” (pacified New Life hamlets), he said he had never seen one where the people were actually organized or where they expressed in any way a spirit of hostility toward the VC. The people in the district town volunteered no information; be felt the VC could move into town and he wouldn’t know it. He said his conviction of deterioration in security was a gut feeling and that he hadn’t proved it to the brass.

  Binh Nghia, he said, had been doing all right since the Americans left. Although Buu, the village chief, had moved back in once McGowan had gone, Suong and Trao seemed to have things under control. A PF had been blown up one morning by a booby trap set near the fort, but aside from that there had been no serious incidents in the locale.

  In the town of Binh Son PX goods, liquor, narcotics, medicinal supplies, American cigarettes, silk and prostitutes were being sold. The Americans could not take action because Binh Son was in a Korean sector, and the Vietnamese officials did not want to act because they were getting rich. Volentine did not believe U.S. AID was much help to the people, but the rake-offs—up to 50 percent—were making the middlemen and the contractors wealthy. He considered the district chief a middleman who looked out only for himself, in no way comparable to Captain Dang.

  Volentine was convinced the level of accommodation between the VC and Vietnamese officials was both high and foolish. He thought it was high because the district police chief was so corrupt that only a poor man stayed in jail over three days, and neither the police chief nor the district chief would arrest the known NLF members who worked in Binh Son. He thought accommodation was foolish because the VC broke it at will.

  The colonel from Civil Affairs, listening to our conversation and becoming more irritated as the hours went by, objected to the use of the word “accommodation.” Volentine reached under his chair and picked up a burlap bag. A few hours before our arrival, he said, a little boy was walking with the bag across the highway bridge eighty yards from district headquarters, when he saw two combined-unit Marines walking up the street toward him. He stopped short, looked around, then smiled at an American soldier walking past on his way to town for an afternoon’s liberty. Hand in hand, the little boy and the soldier, who was new in the country, walked off the bridge past the two Marines.

  When the Marines asked what he had in the bag, the boy tried to run away. They caught him and opened the sack. It was filled with shotgun and carbine ammunition. They gave the sack back to the boy, who ran straight to the house of a PF official. The Marines followed, broke the door down, and caught the man and the boy stuffing the bag into a corner.

  They then sent for Volentine, who searched the house and arrested the PF. The district chief arrived, however, said Volentine had no such authority and ordered him to leave the house immediately.

  The Civil Affairs colonel said he should go through channels with his complaints. Volentine laughed and said Binh Son was a showcase for pacification. It was one of the most heavily American-advised districts in Vietnam, with four officers and five NCOs. There were ninety PFs guarding the seven-room compound, which was so close to the main highway from Chulai that some of the outer strands of barbed wire straddled the road’s drainage ditch. Due to the accessibility of the compound, all sorts of official visitors arrived every week, and Volentine had told his story straight. In turn, a very high-level pacification official told him he was perhaps not fit for the job because he was overly critical. That worried him because he wanted to get promoted. He was told large rake-offs were a normal part of aid distribution and that he should not buck the system. He was convinced his superiors listened to him but accepted only the optimistic parts of what he said. He had been ordered to pay off the police chief to collect more information, rather than try to get him relieved.

  The colonel told Volentine to cheer up, that we were winning the war and that the Americal Division had the NVA regiments out in the hills completely on the run. Volentine looked at him for a full ten seconds before replying. Then, the burlap bag s
till in his hand, he said, “Colonel, that’s your war, not mine.”

  Volentine invited me to stay the night, so that we might talk at length about some of the enemy intentions and about the situation, village by village. The next day we would catch a boat to Binh Nghia. The colonel hastily interjected that I had been invited to the senior officers’ mess as the general’s guest. It was agreed that I would come back the next day to stay over and go back to Binh Nghia.

  I took my leave, accompanied by two very glum staff officers. Anxious to allay their obvious displeasure with him, Volentine added as we left, “Don’t get me wrong, Colonel, I’m all for the little guy—the PF. But he needs good leadership, and I mean that word the way we use it; you know, a guy who watches out for him, and goes to bat for him, gets him his pay and his food supplement, trains him and leads him. Right now he doesn’t have it. But I’m behind that little PF 100 percent.”

  The colonel saluted but did not reply. On the way back in the jeep, the major said, “Boy, that guy was pretty pessimistic—sounded like sour grapes to me.”

  The colonel responded, “I’m not sure about Volentine; maybe he’s been out here too long.”

  At dinner that evening, the three generals were interested in discussing security strategies in response to enemy capabilities. I related what I had seen farther north in Dai Loc district, where one night in early November the VC had laid waste several villages with the thoroughness and savagery of Apache raiders, despite the nearby presence of a Marine battalion. As a consequence of the fear thus instilled, the people afterward refused even American medcaps for their wounds. One general thought that the disruption proved his point that the people went with the winner—the incident at Dai Loc had happened because the people had not been provided security.

  “Give them security,” he said, “and they’ll give you information and cooperation.”

  He thought Binh Son was an example of this, where the PFs “can hold out by themselves because no enemy are there.” Through ceaseless battalion operations, the enemy was being pushed back into the hills and losing the initiative. The colonel from Civil Affairs was sitting next to me, but he said nothing throughout the meal. It was he who had mentioned to me the recent refusal of medcaps in the Chulai area, but he had also mentioned that there were certain things the general did not want to hear.

  While we were talking, Captain Phil Volentine was dying. A mixed NVA/Viet Cong battalion came in on one of the routes Volentine said they habitually used. At six that afternoon, 150 of them were seen moving east down the valley toward Binh Son. District was warned, but someone thought they were going to hit some outpost, and so the district headquarters took no special precautions.

  General Vo Thu, commander of Viet Cong Military Region V, had personally ordered the attack against Binh Son district and his men were thoroughly prepared. It was windy and raining when the bangalore torpedo went off and the enemy rushed through the wire. The senior adviser later said the PFs were awake, but no Americans had checked the watch and if the PF sentries were awake, they weren’t alert. The VC came through unopposed, methodically shot their way through the PFs stumbling in the trenches and blasted the buildings. All the Americans except one huddled together with several Vietnamese in a bunker. Alone, Volentine raced to the command bunker to direct operations and there was killed when satchel charges crumpled the structure.

  The attack started before midnight and went on until dawn. Helicopter gunships arrived half an hour after the first call for help; Korean and American troops converged on the town at dawn, six hours later. There was no pursuit of the enemy forces; no one bothered to even ask in which direction they might have gone. As they always do, the VC mined the main approach route (in this instance, Highway One), and the first two Americans to drive up in a jeep the next day were blown to bits.

  The district chief was not killed, but fifteen PFs were. Volentine was the only American casualty. The few people in the jail were freed. And the district headquarters was completely leveled. The next morning it was a black, smoldering clump of earth and charred corpses at the top of a little hill, separated from clusters of silent, staring Vietnamese by three rows of barbed wire.

  In the town itself, one section of six houses was reduced to charred stubble, but no one asked why the VC had singled them out.

  The American advisers were “proud of those little PFs. They really fought like hell.” In the Saigon English newspaper there was a three-line blurb about an attack on a district headquarters in Quang Ngai, with one U.S. adviser killed and fifteen PF casualties. At the Army division headquarters, those working on the after-action report were trying to tabulate the final count from the rumors that the helicopters and artillery had killed “35 or 40 of them” in that battle. So in the monthly summary, the Binh Son attack could go down as just another enemy-initiated incident; the overall kill ratio was about three to one favoring the PFs, statistically indicating continued allied effectiveness.

  The province senior adviser was putting Volentine in for the Silver Star.

  I did not get to Binh Nghia that trip.

  1968

  With unfortunate bureaucratic predictability, American and Vietnamese officials devoted their energies to rebuilding the district compound—at the expense of providing reaction forces to the outlying PF platoons in villages such as Binh Nghia. Suong was ordered to leave Fort Page and take his platoon to the top of PF Hill. When he objected to moving away from the village, he was told district could not guarantee support if he was hit. What district said, the Viet Cong knew. Suong moved.

  The district and the village were quiet during the early part of 1968. The Viet Cong shifted south the P31st District Force Company so that they could aid in the Tet attacks against Quang Ngai City. They battled with the ARVN forces for three days and failed to take the city. When they limped back to Binh Son district, they were in no condition to fight again for several months.

  The most egregious event in the district during 1968 occurred at Son Tra hamlet, where Colucci had established a combined unit. The people in Son Tra were refugees moved from the Phu Longs. There were among them few, if any, Viet Cong families, who had preferred to stay in the area controlled by the P31st. Le Quan Viet, the VC district chief, had warned the people not to move, and the lack of Viet Cong families among the refugees allowed him to punish the people directly without fear of retribution.

  There were over seven thousand people in Son Tra, and sharing responsibility for security arrangements were Colucci’s combined unit, a U.S. Army platoon and a fifty-man Revolutionary Development team. Between the three units there was bad blood, and since they could not agree to patrol together, they divided the hamlet into three separate security sectors. On the night of June 28 the RDs were supposedly guarding the western approaches to the hamlet. The guards, however, had deserted their posts to join a large poker game.

  The Viet Cong knew of the game and came through where the guards were supposed to have been. The enemy moved swiftly toward the center of the hamlet, using flame throwers on the houses and shooting the people as they ran outside. From the southern end of the hamlet Colucci’s combined unit counter attacked, passing by the Army platoon’s hill position without radio contact. Mistaking the PFs for VC, a machine gunner on the hill opened up on the Marines and PFs, keeping them pinned down for twenty minutes.

  That was all the time the Viet Cong had needed to blast and burn their way down the main street and cut their way back out of the hamlet, leaving behind eighty-five dead civilians.

  Also in late spring, the P31st attacked the Binh Nghia PFs. They crossed the river and stole through the back sections of the Binh Yen Noi hamlets, creeping up undetected to the foot of PF Hill. They had their attack route plotted and their bangalore torpedoes and satchel charges ready. All they needed was for their lead sapper to clear a path through the wire. The man stripped off his clothes and plastered himself with mud and dirt so he would blend with the bare earth beneath the barbed wire and wigg
led forward, holding a dozen strips of bamboo cord between his teeth. He had to worm his way through five separate rolls of concertina wire. He inched up to the first strand, grasped a coil of wire and tied it back to its neighbor. He did the same with the adjoining coil, opening a gap of about a foot, and slithered through. He was at the second roll. Through. The third. Through. The fourth. Through. The fifth. He tied back the coils and looked up.

  There was Suong, squatting on his haunches, his elbows braced against the inside of his thighs, his two hands wrapped around the butt of a 45-caliber pistol. Suong shot the sapper between the eyes. Nobody else tried to come through the wire that night.

  I visited Binh Nghia several times in the summer and fall of 1968, usually accompanied by Charles Benoit, a Yale graduate who had spent four years in Vietnam and had extraordinary fluency in the language and a deep compassion for the people. Suong would not believe that Benoit, speaking Vietnamese as well as he did, did not work for the U.S. government and so he made a strong effort to convince us that things were going badly and that he needed the Marines. Speaking to Benoit in Vietnamese he said:

  “The Viet Cong have come back. They go to My Hué every night. We’re not afraid of them, but if we get into a firefight in My Hué 1, we’re not going to get any help from district or from the U.S. Army for several hours. My men and I know this for a fact. We got into a fight out on the sand dunes last month and it was two hours before we had illumination. We captured an M-79 grenade launcher anyways. If we have to fight alone, I want it the way it was last year. With the Marines we had enough firepower to fight anybody, and we could always get helicopter medevacs.”

  “Why not recruit your own People’s Self-Defense Force,” Benoit asked, “like they are doing in the hamlets near Saigon?”