Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  Orange sparks and gray smoke blew out of the sandbagged nest, and the machine gun went silent.

  Not looking back nor hesitating to survey the damage, he and four of his men ran past the corner of the headquarters building just as mortars fired by his own company now exploded on the roof. In the shadowy, yellow light from the illumination flares dangling beneath the small parachutes overhead, Reung could see the great white ball looming in front of him.

  Then his eyes caught the muzzle flash of the machine gun in the tower as it opened fire on the five Viet Cong. Two of his soldiers dropped to the ground and returned the volley, causing the men in the tower to duck behind their parapet of sandbags. Le Van Reung and the other two guerrillas dashed back to the side of the building and ducked past the corner, where they immediately opened fire on the tower so that their two comrades on the ground could maneuver back too.

  Beyond the tower, through a space between a line of trees, the guerrilla squad leader noticed another tall chain-link and barbed wire fence. Behind it, he could see sodium vapor lights mounted on tall poles and the silhouettes of several men trying to climb the barrier while many others scurried frantically behind them.

  “The stockade, do you see it?” he shouted to his comrades and pointed to the gap in the trees, the lights, and the fence with men now clinging to it. “This tower does not guard their back perimeter, but the entrance to their prison.”

  Feeling inside his satchel, Le Van Reung plucked out two hand grenades and clipped them by their long, spoonlike triggers to the waistband of his trousers. Then he looked at his men, who stood with their backs plastered flat against the wall to avoid the hail of machine gun fire that poured at them from the tower.

  “When I run,” he said, “you open fire on the tower, and do not hesitate for an instant until I am standing beneath it.”

  Then he looked at the young man who had lain next to him in the ditch, nervously clutching his new rifle, and said, “You must follow me to the tower. No more than a hand’s width behind me.”

  Reung turned his eyes to the other three men of his squad who had followed him to the rear of the headquarters. “If we draw fire from the prison,” he said in a calm voice, “you must divide your shots between it and the tower.

  “If a substantial number of guards remain in the stockade, they will probably kill the two of us. In that case, you must immediately retreat and report what we have discovered.

  “I suspect, however, that the guards have joined their comrades in the safe confines of the main building here. Otherwise the prisoners would not attempt to so boldly climb the fence, as they are doing. Unfortunately, even if they manage to get over the top of it, the guards in the tower will cut them down, unless we eliminate their position.”

  Reung gave his comrades a nod, then took hold of his partner by the shoulder and pushed the toes of his sandals hard into the sod, launching himself in a suicidal charge for the tower. Driving his legs with all his strength, he didn’t look at anything except the four white uprights of the structure. As he ran, he could hear the heavy breathing of his terror-filled cohort pounding his feet in step behind him.

  In that same instant the earth began to explode in front of the two men, where the bullets from the machine gun in the tower chopped a line across the ground toward the pair.

  “Go right!” he shouted to the comrade who ran with him, while Reung sidestepped left and then dodged to the right.

  The ground that they had just crossed only a few strides earlier ripped open, and clods of earth and lawn grass splattered through the air as the machine gun churned a deadly line chasing the men. Then it stopped for an instant and started again cutting in front of them.

  Just as Reung turned to glance over his shoulder to see why his men had not yet fired their rifles into the tower, he heard their gunfire erupt. Then the trail of machine gun bullets began to splatter across the ground in an erratic pattern. The enemy had finally ducked his head.

  A matter of hardly six seconds had seemed an eternity when Le Van Reung and his partner reached the legs of the tower.

  “Aim your rifle up the ladder and fire bursts into the entryway; otherwise those soldiers up there will shoot at us or may even drop grenades down here,” Reung said.

  While his frantic partner sent sporadic, short sprays from his Kalashnikov into the tower floor, Le Van Reung quickly pulled several sticks of explosive from the satchel he wore strapped over his shoulder and hip. Then he tied them on each of the legs and linked them together with high-velocity explosive engineer cord, with which he also wound several wraps around the structure’s four main supports and primary girders. In one of the white, claylike charges he shoved a shiny metal blasting cap with a six-inch length of fuse crimped in it.

  “Now we must run for the trees!” Reung shouted to his comrade and took an old brass cigarette lighter from his pocket and ignited the fuse, which lit with a shower of sparks and a plume of thick, white smoke. “We have less than thirty seconds!”

  When the three guerrillas who had given Reung and his partner covering fire saw the two men tumble behind the line of trees and shrubbery, they ducked back around the corner of the building. In an instant the explosives cut the legs from beneath the tower. The structure crashed onto the lawn.

  When it hit the ground, it spilled out the pair of South Vietnamese soldiers and their machine gun. The two men cried for help and fought to get to their feet, but the three guerrillas at the corner of the building quickly silenced their voices and ended their struggles with two short bursts of 7.62-millimeter copper-jacketed lead.

  When the explosion destroyed the tower, the concussion sent the men who were climbing on the fence tumbling to the ground. The remaining prisoners retreated backward, stunned and confused.

  Before any of the confined men could again approach the fence, Le Van Reung took the two hand grenades from his waistband and rolled them at each corner of the stockade’s front gates. As the two fist-sized bombs tumbled across the ground, he shouted, “Grenades!” and dove behind the trees with his partner just as the blasts sent debris and metal fragments through the air.

  Instantly, a score of screaming prisoners charged at the damaged gates and pulled what remained of them off their hinges. They ran past the two guerrillas and charged across the lawn and parking lot at the front of the police headquarters. The newly freed men ran past several platoons of Viet Cong who advanced on the front of the building, firing at the South Vietnamese soldiers still shooting at them from the rooftop, and disappeared into the darkness.

  For Reung, it seemed as if he had opened a birdcage and all the captive creatures suddenly flew away as hard as they could bat their wings. Not one of the men had stopped to thank him or his partner, or even acknowledge their presence, much less attempt to rejoin their comrades in battle.

  “We may have only released a jail full of cutthroats,” Reung said and began laughing with his cohort, who squatted with him by the trees, next to the entrance of the empty stockade.

  Before dawn, Le Van Reung and his platoon destroyed the large, white geodesic dome and the electronics that it contained. The two dozen prisoners that he and his men freed apparently scattered into the city of Ban Me Thuot and disappeared. He never heard anything more said about them.

  “ATTACK! ATTACK!” Nguyen Duc Cui shouted into the handset of his radio, repeating the words of the 320th NVA Division’s commander, who stood ceremoniously among several of his key staff officers in the organization’s combat operations and communications center.

  Cui’s friend from Hanoi, Nguyen Sinh Tuan, had anchored his camera on top of a stack of radio boxes in the command post and tried to photograph the momentous event. Although he had a flash unit tucked inside his equipment bag, he almost never used it. The light from even a small strobe could travel miles at night and tended to blind everyone nearby. So the photographer kept the powerful little light put away in a black leather pouch, zipped in a side pocket on the satchel with other things th
at he rarely used.

  The dim glow from a string of three small lanterns suspended beneath the tent top seemed immediately absorbed by the dark green canvas above them and hardly rendered enough illumination to even trigger Tuan’s low-grade black-and-white film at any of his twenty-year-old Leica M3’s available preset shutter speeds and widest light openings. So he braced the camera as solidly as he could, closed the aperture back to f8 to allow at least a reasonable depth of field for the picture’s focus, turned the shutter-speed dial to bulb, which would lock it open as long as he held down the release, and began to shoot.

  With each frame, he pressed his finger on the button and counted slowly under his breath, guessing at the timing as he bracketed two-, three-, and four-second-long exposures. He hoped it was enough.

  Even if the pictures turned out too poor to use, he would never lay fault on the trusty Leica, his favorite of the three cameras that he carried. If it could not make the photographs under this dismal available light, then nothing could, especially given the inferior quality and unpredictable variance of the Soviet-manufactured 35-millimeter film that he had to use.

  He felt lucky, however, that he at least had such an excellent camera, no doubt appropriated from a captured Westerner and then relegated to him. His superiors would have never authorized the purchase of such an expensive and finely tooled piece of photographic equipment. Even in used condition, Tuan knew that the Leica would have cost the purchase price of more than two rifles, perhaps three, or possibly even more.

  Made in Germany during the mid-1950s, the old M3, with its range finder-focus eyepiece offset to the left above its lens, took remarkably crisp and deeply sharp photographs. Tuan loved the camera too because it weighed only a few ounces, had a wonderful feel and balance, and possessed a shutter that operated so smoothly that he could hand hold remarkably sharp available-light pictures with exposure speeds as slow as one-eighth of a second. Most significantly for Tuan, the Leica’s unique shutter made no discernable sound when he snapped a frame, perfect for subtly capturing an unposed picture of a comrade on a patrol or for recording on film timeless moments in a busy CP, where the noise of a clicking camera would certainly distract and irritate people.

  Thus Tuan quietly worked in his small world, taking pictures with the little Leica, much like the great French master, Henri Cartier-Bresson, unnoticed. He had transformed himself into just another piece of furniture, out of the way and unimportant. Around him, officers and soldiers hurried in circles, buzzing quick words to each other and scurrying back and forth. Slowly and methodically, the unobtrusive photographer attempted to work magic, capturing the historic, nervous moments on his sorry film.

  In the midst of this busyness, Nguyen Duc Cui sat with his head and shoulders leaned over a table piled with radios. There he worked, straining to hear the static-ridden, anxious conversations that flooded through his earphones. Since late afternoon he had labored, totally focused on his duties, with his friend Tuan’s presence completely out of his thoughts.

  He had no more than uttered the commander’s signal to the division’s units when bursts of artillery fire flashed from the masses of gun batteries stationed all along the horizon. In a matter of moments, the entire world seemed to rumble beneath his feet. The initial assault on Ban Me Thuot had begun.

  Cui’s unit held the primary mission of eliminating all enemy access to aircraft and air support. They sought to accomplish this by seizing control of the ARVN’s L-19 landing strip, on the city’s northeastern outskirts, and the South Vietnamese Army’s much larger Phung Duc Airfield, located three kilometers to the west.

  With North Vietnamese ground forces severing all overland routes for enemy reinforcement, resupply, or additional support, and with the two primary air bases under Communist domination, the ARVN’s hapless Fifty-third Regiment, assigned to defend Ban Me Thuot and the surrounding province of DarLac, as well as neighboring Quang Duc Province to the south, stood virtually cut off.

  To make matters worse, nearly all of the Twenty-third ARVN Division’s regional force and popular force units, primarily composed of Montagnard platoons and expected to support the Fifty-third Regiment in defending Darlac and Quang Duc provinces, defected to the enemy.

  Most of the Montagnard soldiers in the Ban Me Thuot region belonged to the separatist group, Front Unifie pour la Liberation des Races Opprimees (Unified Front for the Liberation of the Oppressed Races), and defected to the North Vietnamese Communists as a group under their FULRO banner. Weeks prior to the attack, their chief had met with political representatives from the politburo in Hanoi, who had promised him, in exchange for the Montagnard defection and guarantee of noninterference, the establishment of an independent, self-ruled Montagnard state. In their agreement, the Communists had pledged to cede to the Montagnards, at battle’s end, the remote regions north and west of Ban Me Thuot, near the Cambodian border.

  (At battle’s end, however, the popular force and regional force defectors would suddenly find themselves at the bad end of a double cross by their new allies. When the shooting stopped, the Communists quickly turned their guns on the Montagnards and took them prisoner alongside the South Vietnamese soldiers who surrendered at Ban Me Thuot. Even the Montagnard chief who negotiated the deal with the representatives from Hanoi spent several years in a so-called re-education camp.)

  Not only did the Montagnard soldiers betray their loyalty by laying down their arms against the Communists, but in many cases worked as reconnaissance scouts for the North Vietnamese, leading their units safely through South Vietnamese weak lanes and gaps so they could strike deep at the heart of the ARVN defenses.

  With turncoat Montagnards showing the way, regiments from the NVA’s 316th and 10th divisions closed a three-prong attack from the southwest while on the opposite side of the city the 320th NVA Division launched two fronts from the northeast, one at Phuong Duc Airfield and the other outside the L-19 airstrip. This tactic trapped Ban Me Thuot’s defenders inside a ring of fire.

  Four of the Fifty-third ARVN Regiment’s battalions manned the Ban Me Thuot garrison and faced the brunt of the entire 316th NVA Division, heavily reinforced with tanks and artillery, plus an additional infantry regiment from the Tenth NVA Division.

  Another Tenth NVA Division regiment struck the backside of a lone battalion of the Fifty-third Regiment, stranded south of the Phuong Duc Airfield, and hammered them against the anvil created by the 320th NVA Division attacking from the north.

  Meanwhile, the remaining two regiments from the NVA’s Tenth Division, reinforced with several battalions of tanks and mobilized batteries of self-propelled artillery, patrolled the eastern flanks of the battle area, ready to welcome any ARVN relief efforts.

  A LONE SERGEANT wearing a white helicopter-crew helmet, decorated with orange, silver, and green strips of reflective tape, stood at attention by the side door of the UH-1N Huey helicopter, ready for the ARVN II Corps commander, Major General Pham Van Phu, to come aboard. Sweat rolled off the sergeant’s nose and down his cheeks, but he did not move because he could see the diminutive, nearly boylike figure of the man for whom he waited standing at the window, watching him.

  The early morning attack of Ban Me Thuot had not completely surprised General Phu. His deputy for operations, Brigadier General Tran Van Cam, had tried to persuade him two weeks ago to move more forces south of Pleiku and establish a stronger link to Ban Me Thuot.

  General Cam, as well as members of the II Corps intelligence staff, had warned General Phu that they held strong beliefs that the NVA planned to attack Ban Me Thuot. Soldiers in the field had found a diary on the body of a dead North Vietnamese officer, and analysts had found that the booklet contained detailed notes that outlined the attack plan. The II Corps G-2 section had also compiled a comprehensive report based on information from several prisoners that they had interrogated, further supporting their belief that the NVA intended to attack Ban Me Thuot. Additionally, one captured prisoner defected and told the ARVN interrogato
rs that his unit, the 320th NVA Division, had moved from the hills west of Pleiku and now stood poised to launch their attack on the airfields at Ban Me Thuot.

  Pham Van Phu faced the dilemma of having to make a commitment of his forces either in the vicinity surrounding Pleiku and Kontum, where he envisioned the enemy most likely to strike, or at Ban Me Thuot, where intelligence said the enemy now planned to strike.

  The Twenty-third Division represented II Corps’s best fighting units, and General Phu had them already spread dangerously thin. In order to properly reinforce the regiment responsible for defending Ban Me Thuot and the greater areas of Darlac and Quang Duc provinces, he would have to reinforce them with at least two more regiments. To do that required stripping the units from the defenses surrounding Kontum and Pleiku. Doing that would leave the II Corps primary headquarters and principal garrisons vulnerable. Pham Van Phu angrily refused to even consider such a move as an option.

  General Phu realized that the Communists had tried repeatedly to cut South Vietnam in half, and their current maneuvering supported his belief that they now prepared yet another effort at that goal. Pleiku and Kontum provinces stood astride the primary infiltration routes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If the Communists could take Pleiku and Kontum, they could control the Central Highlands and, using Highway 19 as their principle route to the coastal city of Qui Nhon, finally succeed in this long-sought mission.

  He would rather lose Ban Me Thuot than go down in history as the man responsible for allowing the North Vietnamese to cut South Vietnam in half. Should they gain such a foothold, then from it they could very likely overtake the entire country.

  The general then defended his position by reminding the officers who briefed him, warning of the Ban Me Thuot attack, that their own intelligence sections had intercepted significant numbers of North Vietnamese radio communications emanating from the area of Duc Co, the Communist-held territory along Highway 19, near the Cambodian border. Most of the message traffic had the 320th NVA Division signature. Phu reasoned that if the 320th Division operated there, that the prisoner who had told of their movement toward Ban Me Thuot had very likely lied. Furthermore, planting a detailed counterfeit plan on a dead officer seemed to him a likely ruse the enemy might use to add credibility to misinformation spread by the enemy soldier who fell captive to South Vietnamese forces.