The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  Sgt. Holtzauer elbowed his way through. He shot the men a disgusted look and picked up the helmet upside down to keep Mangrum’s head from falling out. He placed it with the rest of the corpse and rolled all of it together into a poncho. When the med-evac set down, flattening grass with its blades, the sergeant motioned for men to help him carry the wrapped corpse. Blood oozed from the ends of it.

  Some of Herbie-Boy’s squad buddies had already helped him to the chopper. “Lucky bastard,” Sgt Richardson, his squad leader, consoled him. “That knee is your ticket back to the World.” Herbie looked up and saw Mangrum’s body being ushered toward the helicopter.

  “Don’t put it in here with me!” he screamed.

  The pilots gestured frantically for them to hurry. They tossed Mangrum inside onto the chopper floor. Herbie-Boy screeched and cringed against the firewall. Holtzauer gave the pilots thumbs up. The bird sprang eagerly into the air. That was the last the platoon saw of Herbie-Boy and Mangrum

  All told, it was nearly an hour before Bravo Commander, Captain Bruton the Crouton, so called because he always seemed to be about to crumble, got the company lined out and back on mission. By that time all the gooks within fifty miles knew we were on the ground and moving. Everybody knew the mission was futile, certainly now if not before, but inertia called for Bravo to go through the motions, Nothing but a hot walk in the morning sun.

  Mission plans called for Second and Fourth Platoons to sweep wide and to either side of Vam Tho in a feinting maneuver, then link up beyond the village to set up an anvil against which fleeing VC could be hammered. First Platoon and Third Herd would advance on the hamlet from this side and assault it to drive the enemy into the trap. Booby traps in the jungle slowed movements to a crawl. By the time Third and First reached the flooded rice field across which they would have to charge to reach Vam Tho, little Arles Gray of Third had picked up another Purple Heart from a booby trap that exploded and sent a sliver of shrapnel into the meaty part of his back. Doc Steinmeyer took a look, put a Band-Aid on the wound and pronounced the little private good to go.

  Vam Tho was a large settlement by Delta standards, more than one hundred hooches. It was snugged alongside a large canal lined with banana trees, melon and vegetable patches and canebrakes. The only ways in were by canal, air or footpath. Cooking fire smoke rose lazily into the somnolent morning. I surveyed it from the woodline, across the flooded rice paddies diked into squares. The fields were nearly a klick wide. About all I could make out were the tops of tin- or thatched-roof houses.

  “Look at them gooks over there,” Fortes said, glowering. “All them actin like nothin has happened, like they don’t know. They’re all VC right down to their yearlin’s and saplin’s.”

  I was in charge of the two-platoon assault. I signaled Get ready!

  Sgt. Richardson moved along his squad, checking each man and patting him on the back. Mad Dog Carter relieved himself against a tree, saying, “Fu-uck.” Donatelli knelt and prayed briefly. Daniels slung his M60 machine gun from his shoulder, muzzle pointing downrange, and rechecked his ammo feed. He carried two bandoleers criss-crossed over his chest, Pancho Villa-style. He worked tobacco around in his jaw and spat a brown stream in the direction of the viIle.

  “Let’s do the mo’fucka,” he said.

  The Hard Core glared at Vam Tho. Stomachs tightened. Sweat rolled down faces in the close heat and soaked into olive-drab t-shirts or towels draped around necks. We grabbed last swigs of tepid canteen water made palatable by Kool-Aid and waded out on-line across the field. First Platoon took the right flank of the skirmish line.

  “Fire only on my signal,” I shouted. “Understand? Keep alert. Watch where you step.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  A thin trickle of laughter skittered along the line, Laughter as balm.

  The assault started in a shambling, water-wading walk with the line dress-right-dress. Halfway across the paddies, somebody issued a yodeling rebel yell. The line surged into a trot, then into a splashing gallop as more rebel yells erupted. The ragged rank of green bore down upon the village with savage shouting, weapons ready.

  And not a shot was fired.

  First and Third cautiously entered the edge of the village past where the fighting ditches and defensive emplacements were abandoned. Chickens with bare asses, honking geese with wings flapping indignantly, and squealing pigs fled the attack. Living bamboo formed fences around plots of family truck crops. Children peeked through the fence with frightened, curious eyes. They fled before the baleful invaders.

  “To get rid of the VC,” someone murmured, “you have to first get rid of their fuckin slope-headed squint-eyed seed.”

  No one remained in the settlement except kids, women and a few old men so bent and wizened they remained seated on the ground at the doors of their hooches and watched without change of expression. The VC often mortar-bracketed likely LZs to give their main forces time to clear out and hide in the jungle. Boonirats were clearly disappointed not to have encountered resistance upon which to vent their anger and frustration over what occurred on the LZ.

  I walked all the way through the village with Sgt. Holtzauer and RTO Donatelli. I stopped where the trail crossed a log pedestrian bridge spanning the canal and disappeared into thick banana groves on the other side. I reached down and picked up a ten-round box of 7.62 ammo for an SKS. Charlie must have dropped it as he fled. Holtzauer nodded grimly.

  Silent women peered stone-faced from their doorways. A commotion attracted my attention. I broke into a trot and discovered some of the grunts had cornered a youngish Vietnamese. Daniels had him by the throat and was shoving him hard up against a hooch wall. The gook was naked except for a pair of dirty khaki shorts. One leg was missing from the knee down. He was so skinny he looked about to cave into his own rib cage.

  “You VC. VC! VC!” Daniels shouted in the affected pidgin of American GIs, spewing tobacco spittle in his captive’s face. The other boonirats stood around them in a circle, grinning without humor.

  “No! No VC!” One Leg protested. “VC numbah ten. ‘Melican numbah one! No VC! No VC!”

  “You fuckin lie. All’a you’s VC. You go boom-boom us. You kill us. You boom-boom off my buddy’s head.”

  Daniels’ eyes bugged out on their stems from rage. The Viet croaked unintelligibly as the big black man’s hands closed his windpipe. His face turned scarlet. Fingers fumbled at Daniels hand before his arms fell limp to his sides.

  “Daniels! Turn him loose.”

  “Lt. Kaz, the mo’fucka is VC, I be tellin you.”

  He kept choking the man, who sagged on his one leg.

  “I said, turn him loose.”

  “Choke the cocksucker, Daniels” Mad Dog Carter cheered. “Waste the mutha.”

  Sgt. Holtzauer bowled through. He was as tall as Daniels but more solidly built. He jerked Daniels back. The half-dead Viet dangled like a puppet in the gunner’s big grip. Daniels glared. Then he relaxed suddenly and flung his victim to the ground.

  “Okay, okay,” he sulled. “But I be tellin you. I feel it. We gonna be back to this shit hole an they gonna off some more’ a us.”

  One Leg cowered on the ground, massaging his throat and trying to catch his breath. Mad Dog stepped up and aimed his M16 at the Viet. Everyone froze. Mad Dog pretended to squeeze the trigger. Click! he said and laughed uproariously when One Leg flinched and cried out.

  “Just once,” Mad Dog said, “I’d like to look one of these motherfuckers in the eyes and blow him all the way back to his ancestors.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I felt relieved when old Lump returned from the latrine, almost tottering because it was late and he was tired. My memories shut back down in deference to his—I didn’t have to follow them back to that second time in Vam Tho, to what Bugs Wortham called a different day.

  Lump sat down and commenced talking right away, as though in a hurry to get it over with. There was not simply one war in Vietnam, he said. There were many war
s. All of them were different. My war had certainly been different from Pete’s, even though we fought in the same AO. All were waged simultaneously with minimum communications between them. Each fighter became convinced that if he won his war, the war itself was won. Pete always claimed the war had to be fought that way to keep the brass, politicians and bean counting bureaucrats in the dark and off our asses. American soldiers were winning the war, American politicians were losing it.

  Although Commander Minh seemed to have shown little interest in Pete’s capture of the VC woman Mhai, he certainly must have taken notice of the new and improved version of the Nguoi Nhai. Pete turned the little Frogs into a competent and motivated outfit. They were kicking ass and gaining infamy up and down the My Tho River and all through the Nam Can Forest. Working with Lump Adkins and his River Rat Biet Hai, Pete kept Commander Minh and the other VC warlords off their feed and on their feet.

  The Frogs ran more ops during Pete’s first six weeks at Shit City than his dead predecessor, Lt. Lundgren, had conducted the entire previous year. Recon patrols, prisoner snatches, raids, ambushes. Frogs penetrated deep into enemy territory by dugout canoes and infiltrated underwater to blow up a munitions factory posing as a hospital. They parachuted onto Skunk Island to disrupt a high-level summit meeting between local NLF and Hanoi war planners. No longer could the NLF move troops and supplies freely by day or night without fear of being hit. As the Nguoi Nhai grew bolder with each success, Pete struck deeper and deeper into the Nam Can Forest. He would win his war. Fuck everybody else.

  “Cut out their hearts and their minds will follow. Progress in action,” he growled in mockery of the Progress Is Our Most Important Product signs in the offices of Captain Draper’s Navy MAAG in Saigon.

  At least once every two weeks or so, U.S. field commanders were required to report to Military Assistance Advisory Group headquarters for debriefing. MAAG then submitted exaggerated reports to Washington about how the war was winable—providing more troops, aircraft, ships and money were committed to the effort.

  Pete and Lump mounted an M60 machine gun to the navy-gray hood of the badly repainted Jeep quarter-ton Lump had commandeered from the army, dubbed the little vehicle Turncoat, and used it as their personal vehicle. Whenever they needed to travel to the capital, they joined one of the army convoys for security. The trips offered them a welcome opportunity for a night at the bars and strip joints as soon as they finished their obligations at MAAG.

  “Well, Mister Brauer,” chunky Captain Draper asked pleasantly each time, always in the same words. “How are we enjoying our tour of duty in South Vietnam so far?”

  “We are enjoying it just fine, sir. “

  “Wunnerful, wunnerful,” the captain crooned, rubbing his palms together briskly. “It seems that your reputation for being able to agitate God Himself has followed you into the Delta. Enemy assessments indicate your Vietnamese Frogmen are giving a good accounting of themselves. The Pentagon is pleased, and so am I. If the U, S. had more advisors like you and Mister Adkins in Vietnam, this war would have been over last Christmas.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “However, there are some issues that concern me.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “I have your report—and yours, Mister Adkins—about the ambush on the VC tax collectors near Vam Tho about six weeks or so ago.”

  “Six enemy KIA,” Lump put in.

  Captain Draper nodded thoughtfully. “The Viet Cong are apparently reporting to their superiors that the ambush took one VC prisoner.”

  Intelligence from all naval and Marine Corps assets in the theater of war was funneled through MAAG and the theater commander on its way to Washington.

  “A female,” Captain Draper resumed, looking up through thick eyebrows. First at Pete, then at Lump, who were both pictures of innocence. “Would either of you gentlemen know anything about that?”

  “We left six bodies at the scene, sir,” Pete said, noncommittal. “We left in a big hurry.”

  “Not seven bodies?” Captain Draper asked as he seated himself behind a polished desk that looked half the size of a football field. Progress Is Our Most Important Product rode the wall large behind him.

  “There might have been seven,” Lump said. “Some of them could have sunk in the water. We turned in all their documents.”

  “Yes, yes, gentlemen. Have I mentioned that it is against Navy Regulations and the Geneva Conventions to hold captives without reporting their presence to higher command?”

  By that time Mhai had been moved to Father Pierre’s mission and was almost recovered from her wounds.

  Captain Draper stood up. “Very well, gentlemen. Submit your After Actions and other paperwork to the chief yeoman. That is all.”

  On their way out, Lump murmured, “I told you we should have fed her to the fish.”

  During Pete’s last Vietnam tour, Saigon still retained the freshness of a southern French town. Stuccoed buildings in pastel shades of buff and cream, red-tiled roofs and gaily-painted shutters primly overlooked palm-lined streets. Straight shaded boulevards led into spacious parks. The French called the city “Paris of the Orient.”

  Saigon was now as worn-out and corrupt as a blowzy old harlot. Occupying armies almost always turned ladies into whores. Beginning at the Ton Son Nhut Airport on the outskirts, streets were lined with massage parlors, truck washes across the way from “steam-and-cream” joints, acid-age bars displaying Day-Glo posters, ultraviolet lights and pulsating rock music. At the top end of Tu Do, the main high street, stood the grand residential and ministerial buildings. Farther down Tu Do were shops, cafes, hotels, and restaurants slowly fading into the seedy waterfront district of tailors, curio shops, bars and brothels.

  The war stopped at the city limits of Saigon, except for an occasional bicycle bomb rolled into an open-air cafe, the snatching of a prisoner, or a political assassination. Spying and the search for intelligence was what kept the city a sort of neutral no-man’s land where off-duty VC and off-duty American GIs drank in the same bars, ate in the same cafes and screwed the same goodtime girls. An undercurrent of intrigue and conspiracy ran through the city like black Delta mud. Sometimes it seemed every whore, bellhop, waiter and cabbie in the city was a spy trying to pick up intel for one side or the other.

  Pete took Lump to his favorite watering hole at the Majestik Hotel near the American Embassy. The ground-floor Paris Fan bar survived from the French days and retained the Asian colonist decor from a Humphrey Bogart movie. It was cozy with slowly-turning ceiling fans, lots of bamboo, easy listening American and French music and classy nude dancers after sundown. It was quiet in the afternoon. The officers wore civilian clothing to avoid conspicuousness. American soldiers in civies could pose as Russian, French, English, Australian, Belgium or any of a dozen other nationalities that glutted the city hustling intelligence or attempting to make a buck off the war.

  They were well into their second drinks, coming down from field tension, when Lump noticed a street urchin ease into the bar and whisper to the mamasan. Both looked toward the Americans. The urchin left and the mamasan came to their table.

  “Someone at door wish speak with you,” she said to Pete, pointing at the back door.

  Pete looked. “There’s no one at the door.”

  “Outside.”

  Lump dropped a cautioning hand on Pete’s arm. Both had been in-country long enough for the VC to have placed bounties on their heads.

  The mamasan glanced at Lump, then said to Pete, “Someone wish speak you alone.”

  Pete wore a loose Hawaiian shirt worn tail-free to conceal the .45 pistol tucked into his waistband. He resettled the weapon closer to the front as he rose to his feet.

  “I’ll check it out,” he said. “If I’m not back in three minutes...”

  He ambled toward the back door. As soon as he was out of sight, Lump jumped up and rushed out the front door to cover his friend by circling around the hotel to the back alley. Someon
e was also waiting for him outside. He felt a stiff jab in the middle of his back.

  “We go back inside bar, wait,” a gruff voice ordered in pidgin.

  Lump had no choice but to return to the Paris Fan ahead of a diminutive Viet wearing a wispy beard on his chin and a little deadly pistol concealed underneath a jacket slung nonchalantly over his gun hand. They sat at the same table the Americans only recently vacated. The Viet kept the pistol trained on Lump underneath the table. He ordered more drinks.

  “You pay,” Lump told him, The Viet smiled without humor.

  Pete found no one outside the back door when he stepped into the alley. The door on a spring closed softly behind him. Curious, he picked his way through trash to where the alley opened onto a busy side street. A whisper of sound behind caused him to turn. A tall Vietnamese stood smiling at him.

  “You are Ohmja Nguoi Nhai,” the Viet said.

  He was as tall as Pete, maybe taller, which gave him exceptional stature in a country whose average height was less than five and a half feet. He appeared in his mid-thirties. Broad forehead. A sharp thin nose. Straight mouth. Dark eyes more round than slanted. Obviously, he had European ancestry. The French had occupied Indochina for a long time. He wore black peasant trousers, sandals and a white cotton shirt loose enough to conceal a weapon.

  “Don’t worry,” he said in perfect English, still smiling. “You would be lying face down in the alley by now if my intent were to kill you.”

  Pete had been had. A wry abashed grin tugged at the scar on his lip. The man looked vaguely familiar.

  “I am Ohmja Nguoi Nhai, the Old Frog,” Pete acknowledged. “How did you know?”

  “A good soldier has his sources. I am certain you must have your own as well. If the Americans had many warriors like you, we would have no choice but to submit to your hegemony. I have heard much good things about you, Mister Brauer, in Vam Tho and Dong Tam. That you are a good man and a good leader. I understand you wanted to meet me.”