Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  It will end soon, he had told himself. He thought that nearly five years ago when the Americans started leaving. Yet it seemed to him to have only gotten worse.

  The thought came to mind again two years ago that coming January when the Americans signed the Paris Accords and by March of 1973 had removed all their forces from Vietnam. This measure to bring peace allotted protected land areas for the National Liberation Front’s Provisional Revolutionary Government, sanctuaries for the Viet Cong where the South Vietnamese forces could not come. But they did come, attacking villages with helicopters and rockets. Retaliation, they claimed. They boasted of their victories.

  Land disputes occurred daily. South Vietnamese forces attacked villages held by the Provisional Revolutionary Government, claiming that the area belonged to the Republic of Vietnam. It was simply an excuse to attack Viet Cong forces where they lived.

  Reung picked up his rifle, checked its chamber, and began the long walk with his comrades. They would attack at sunset, with the light in their enemy’s eyes.

  STAFF SERGEANT WALTER W. Sparks wiped dust from the lenses of his glasses and then looked again at the name etched on the sword’s blade: Robert E. Cushman.

  “It really does belong to the Commandant,” he said to himself as he let the blade slide back into its nickel-silver scabbard trimmed with polished brass.

  The seasoned Marine admired the weapon’s Mameluke hilt and handle. Sultans of the Barbary Coast awarded United States Marine Corps officers the right to wear the Mameluke sword in honor of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon’s victory over the Barbary pirates. That band of early nineteenth-century Arabic outlaws had preyed on international merchant ships sailing from northwest African ports and had pillaged the villages along the coastline for many years, until O’Bannon and his company of Marines, in 1805, annihilated them.

  “Exotic,” Sparks said as he polished his fingerprints from the handle’s brass crosspiece.

  Albert A. Francis, the Da Nang consul general, had asked his old friend, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, to send his sword for the Da Nang security detachment’s annual November 10 Marine Corps birthday-cake-cutting ceremony, which they would celebrate Saturday night, November 9. General Cushman regarded the invitation as a sincere honor and sent the sword with his blessings and his prayers.

  That afternoon, Francis had called Sparks to his office and issued him a special charge, a duty, to a Marine, nearly as precious as that of protecting the Holy Grail.

  Sparks immediately saw it lying on the consul general’s desk. He recognized that the black leather case contained a sword, having one of his own, and he also noticed the initials R. E. C. imprinted in gold letters on its flap.

  “You got a sword, sir,” Sparks quickly said as he presented himself at attention before Francis.

  “Not just any sword, Gunny,” Francis replied. Even though Sparks was a staff sergeant, the consul general called him gunny. “This is the Commandant of the Marine Corps’s personal sword.”

  “No shit, sir,” Sparks said as Francis opened the top flap of the leather case, exposing the blue cloth sheath that contained the ceremonial weapon that symbolizes positions of military leadership.

  “I have it on good authority,” Francis said, sliding the cloth-wrapped piece halfway out of its container, “that General Cushman personally handed this sword to a C-130 pilot who flew it to El Toro and gave it to another C-130 pilot who carried it to Okinawa.”

  Francis untied the strings that held the cloth sheath fastened shut and slid it down, exposing the Mameluke handle, and then withdrew the sword from its nickel-silver and brass scabbard.

  “I picked it up personally from Lieutenant General Herman Poggemeyer at III MAF headquarters and brought it back to Da Nang with me this morning,” Francis said and handed the sword to Sparks.

  “Guard it with your life, Gunny,” the consul general said.

  Filled with a sense of special duty, Sparks proudly carried the sword to his office.

  Al Francis had done something exceptional for the Marines there, Sparks concluded and the Mississippi staff sergeant would remember the gesture with great warmth for the consul general for the rest of his life.

  The man could have gotten any of the dozens of parade swords that Marine Corps Base, Camp Butler, III MAF, or Third Marine Division, had on supply back on Okinawa for their cake-cutting ceremony at the Da Nang consulate. But Francis had taken the extra step to get a significant sword for a special celebration, what would prove to be the last Marine Corps birthday observance in Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam.

  Sparks had liked Al Francis the moment he first met him. The man was sincere and didn’t act like a bureaucrat despite his long career in State Department service. Eloquent and polite, the consul general still, however, showed an edge, something common among many natural-born leaders. He carried a presence that spoke of honor, loyalty, and integrity. Marines pick up on these traits in a person very quickly because they so highly prize them. Sparks recognized the qualities in Francis immediately on the day he first shook his hand.

  “Quite a guy,” Sparks said to himself as he again admired the sword, unsheathed in his office, and began polishing its metal with a chemically treated cloth. He knew he must make sure that all of his men understood what Francis, as well as General Cushman, had done for them.

  Sparks, a lanky, square-jawed Marine with a deep-South drawl, had arrived in Da Nang only weeks earlier with an infantry platoon sent to bolster the Marine Security Guard detachment protecting the United States Consulate there. Although well trained and equipped, no one in the platoon except the staff sergeant had ever experienced any level of armed conflict. Even Sparks’ grass time was limited to that of a junior radioman operating off Hill 55, southwest of Da Nang several years earlier.

  It worried him that his men had never before seen combat, had never yet looked the devil in the eye.

  When Sparks had first come to Vietnam, he had the benefit of a transition to enemy fire. His battalion sent him on short-range, heavily armed patrols to introduce him, and other newbees like him, to combat.They did not just throw him to the wolves. However, for his men, their only benefit of transition would come in surviving an enemy’s initial assault: getting rid of the shakes fast, controlling their fears, and staying focused while the world crashed around them.

  Could they deal with it? Would fear make them choke? Would panic grip them at a decisive moment and cost them their lives? He could only hope that his Marines took their immediate-action drills and training seriously.

  Meanwhile, intelligence reports and barracks talk kept the Marines and consulate staff edgy.

  Colonel John M. Johnson, III Marine Amphibious Force G-3 (Assistant Chief of Staff, Operations), had briefed Sparks about the situation. Enemy aggression had grown exponentially in the mountains west and north of Da Nang since summer, corresponding directly with the significant reductions in American aid. Growing unrest among South Vietnamese forces, splintering from commands because of internal corruption and fear-mongering, left Americans in Vietnam and military forces in Okinawa feeling uneasy.

  Recognizing the unrest, military commanders of forces that would have to carry out any Vietnam bailout missions began pushing and testing their troops. Business had suddenly become serious with a high operation tempo. Reaction drills became daily events. Rumors spread.

  During the late summer of 1974, scuttlebutt among Marines based on Okinawa repeated these tales among their ranks. Stories of South Vietnamese forces selling their combat support to each other, bartering lives by the mortar round. Battery commanders charging cash by the shot for artillery fire to support frontline troops. South Vietnamese warlords hoarded stockpiles of equipment and ammunition, making themselves wealthy selling the booty left behind by the Americans to the troops on the front lines who were fighting for their lives.

  When Walter Sparks returned to Vietnam in the fall of 1974 as the staff noncommissioned officer in charge of a virgin platoon of M
arines, his instincts told him that this tour of duty would not last long. He only hoped that the lives of his men would endure longer.

  Carefully sliding the Commandant’s sword back in its cloth sheath and slipping that inside the leather carrying case, the Marine looked out his office’s upstairs window. There he gazed at the peaceful flow of the river just beyond the street that passed in front of the consulate. He watched a lone man standing at the back of a small, flat boat, pushing a long tiller from side to side, gliding it upstream. The man slowly angled his craft to the water’s far side where lights shone from the windows of a multitude of concrete block and stucco houses, densely packed in neighborhoods. The city looked serene.

  Turning his attention left, toward the center of Da Nang, the staff sergeant could see radio towers, their red lights flashing as evening grew slowly darker. Beyond the city, the silhouettes of the mountains rose against the sunset. On their slopes he could see the crimson streaks of tracers pouring from one position into another. Among them, orange flashes burst, spraying fire skyward.

  The veteran Marine unconsciously counted, “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three,” waiting to hear the muffled rumble of the artillery explosions on the mountainside. An old combat habit, flash-bang distance estimating.

  Calculating the time it took for the explosion’s sound to reach him after he saw the flash gave Sparks an idea of how far away from him the round had struck. With sound traveling eleven hundred feet per second, each three seconds approximated one grid square on a map, or one kilometer. The estimate’s degree of accuracy depended on wind speed and direction.

  Atop the besieged mountain Sparks could see the many antennas that used to mark the location of the III MAF headquarters. Freedom Hill, some had called it, Hill 327.

  General Lew Walt had commanded his I Corps Marines from that post. Now Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong used the facilities for the communications command center for his Military Region 1 forces in their duties of protecting Hue and Da Nang. It was only a momentary chopper hop from Truong’s headquarters at Da Nang Air Base, on the south side of Da Nang, across the Han River from China Beach and the Marble Mountain Helicopter Base.

  Sparks had met General Truong a few days earlier when he had visited the consulate to discuss current enemy activities with Consul General Francis and III MAF’s Colonel Johnson. The general seemed to contradict to the scuttlebutt about the South Vietnamese military leaders. This man clearly cared about his forces and pursued his mission with an enormous sense of duty.

  Watching the heavy machine gun fire, and the artillery and mortar barrage intensifying on the south slopes of Hill 327, Sparks tried to imagine himself there. He could feel the panic rising from his stomach. He could smell the smoke and sweat. He remembered how he felt in the midst of just such a fight, a numbness sweeping over him, everything on automatic pilot, no time to stop, consider, or think. Just time to act. Immediate action. Yank and crank. Pour hot lead at them.

  Only in the quietness after the battle did he ever start to think about what had happened, consider what he did, how many died, how close he came.

  BELOW HILL 327, WEST OF DA NANG

  SEVERAL BODIES LAY in the smoke and debris of what once had been a fence of barbed wire coils and crisscrossed steel posts when Nguyen Duc Cui crawled over the small rise that gave him a covered location from which he could watch the attack. A man with a radio on his back hugged the ground next to Cui while several other North Vietnamese officers lay a few yards away.

  Nguyen Duc Cui, a stocky native of Hanoi, was younger than many of the other officers. Yet he had risen by his own initiative from lowly line soldier to communications officer for the entire division. He had suffered severe wounds in battle and now felt justly right watching the fight from his relatively safe position.

  From the flashes of artillery and mortar explosions he could see the Viet Cong soldiers leading the charge up the slopes, behind them silhouettes of soldiers from his own unit, the North Vietnamese Army’s 320th Division.

  Cui’s unit fought here, reinforcing the Provisional Revolutionary Government forces, in blatant violation of the Paris Peace Accords, just as this attack on the South Vietnamese communications site on Hill 327 was an open offense of rules established for the cease-fire, which had commenced January 28, 1973, as part of the accords. In the sixty days that followed enactment of the peace agreement, reached in Paris by chief negotiators Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam sent home more than 150,000 of its soldiers from the battlefields of the south, in unison with the American withdrawal of its forces. However, as those 150,000 combat-weary NVA soldiers marched northward, another 150,000 fresh NVA troops marched southward, replacing the battle-worn forces on the front lines, supporting the Viet Cong. In the end, their numbers, totaling nearly 200,000 Communist soldiers opposing the more than 300,000 South Vietnamese, never changed. In all practicality for the North Vietnamese, the sixty days following the cease-fire allowed them an opportune time to overhaul their forces in the south, replacing nearly every unit with fresh combatants.

  In the orange light from the fires and explosions, Cui could see men falling, his own men, struck by grazing machine gun fire from emplacements above them. Others were blown off their feet, running too near a mortar’s impact.

  Above the soldiers and through their ranks, thousands of tracers streaked red light and ignited small fires where too many of the burning phosphorus-tipped bullets had impacted together, setting the grass and debris ablaze. The whizzing, whispering sounds of thousands of other bullets cut through the air above Cui.

  The NVA communications officer hugged himself close to the ground behind the knoll and listened to the radio traffic of the combined forces’ commanders as they called for their own mortar and machine gun fire to suppress the enemy defenses.

  Above him, a steady yellow light now flooded the whole southwest slopes of Hill 327, coming from flares suspended beneath small parachutes, illumination rounds fired by nearby South Vietnamese Army artillery batteries. One after another they lit the sky and danced slowly toward the ground, leaving trails of white smoke drifting above them.

  Cui braced himself for the barrage of high-explosive artillery rounds that would surely follow the illumination. However, they did not come. Only the illumination rounds popped harmlessly overhead.

  Then, in the distance, he heard the thumping of helicopter blades beating the air, and high overhead the coursing sounds of jet engines screamed toward him, louder and louder.

  “Sound retreat!” his commander shouted a few yards to his right.

  Cui snapped up the handset and put it to his ear, depressed the button on the side, and repeated the order, “Retreat! Retreat! Retreat!”

  Police whistles cut through the air in front of him and at both sides. Forward commanders signaled their men to fall back, collect their dead and wounded, and evacuate.

  “Yes, evacuate,” Cui said to himself. The noise of the jet engines and beating helicopter blades raised his anxiety. Unless they moved quickly, the machine guns and rocket fire from the helicopters and the napalm from the jets would devastate their combined forces much worse than the defensive fire of the ARVN soldiers holding the hill above them.

  WALTER SPARKS TOOK General Cushman’s sword to the security locker and leaned it against the back wall. He shut the door, turned the key, and shook the handle. It would be safe there, even if a fire swept the building.

  By the time the Marine staff sergeant got outside the consulate and flagged a cyclo-taxi to the curb, the fighting on Hill 327 had stopped. A few cars and trucks sped past him as his driver pedaled behind the open compartment where the Marine sat. Sparks preferred riding in a cyclo because it was serene. The few blocks’ ride from the consulate to his apartment gave him time to relax, to feel the cool breeze off the river, to see the world unobstructed.

  As the driver pedaled through the white light from the sodium lamps that lined the boulevard, Sparks passed seve
ral people on the street with now-familiar faces. He waved to them. Recognizing him too, the people along the sidewalk each smiled and waved back. Old women selling American sodas and cigarettes from their vendor carts. A one-legged man standing by an hibachi cart cooked meat skewered on kabob sticks, hopefully pork or beef, or possibly goat, but very likely black dog.

  The Marine staff sergeant could smell the barbecue as he passed the man, and it made him hungry, so he asked the cyclo driver to pull to the curb.

  “Beef?” Sparks asked the one-legged man.

  “Yes,” the man said, picking up one of the sticks containing several squares of meat on it.

  “Pork?” Sparks then asked.

  “Yes,” the one-legged man said, still holding up the same stick and handing it to the Marine.

  “Black dog?” Sparks asked.

  “No, no,” the man said and laughed, showing a smile with no front teeth. “No black dog. No, no.”

  “Okay,” Sparks said and handed the man an American one-dollar bill. The man handed him three more sticks of meat, apparently four for a dollar, so the Marine gave two of the kabobs to the cyclo driver as they peddled away.

  The meat was tasty and sweet, delicious barbecue, no matter what origin of the flesh, even black dog. However, savoring it, Sparks convinced himself it had to be pork.

  As they neared his apartment, Sparks recognized the shapely figures of two young women who worked in the nightclub just up the block from where he lived. They wore ankle-length silk dresses and high-heeled shoes with open toes. Their black hair hung to their waists, combed straight and tied back with ribbons. False lashes caked thick with mascara made their eyes look large and round. Without their makeup, Sparks considered, a person might hardly recognize them as being the same girls.