Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  In the midst of the mayhem, near the front of the column, an olive drab neckerchief tied over his mouth and nose, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Manh Tuan stood on the passenger seat of his jeep as it inched forward. The tall and lanky artillery commander rode at the head of his battalion’s convoy of six jeeps and twenty-four trucks. Each of the two dozen tactical cargo vehicles pulled a 105-millimeter howitzer and had its six-ton capacity bed filled to the top of its canvas cover with ammunition for the fieldpiece that it towed. Along both sides of the caravan, soldiers from Tuan’s unit trudged wearily through the haze of exhaust fumes and airborne dirt. The men toiled under the burden of heavy field transport packs, stuffed tight with bandoleers of small-arms rounds, grenades, and other low-echelon weaponry, along with bits of their personal belongings, strapped to their backs, and rifles slung across their shoulders.

  Despite traveling on this slow road for two days now, Tuan still searched relentlessly among the sea of cars and countless faces that surrounded him, looking for his family. Silently, as he unceasingly shifted his eyes, looking rearward and forward, he hoped that his wife and sons had somehow managed to drive their car well ahead of this rolling traffic jam. He prayed that by some miracle they now waited for him at the seacoast, where Interprovincial Highway 7B ended, in the town of Tuy Hoa.

  From time to time, throughout the past two days, he had noticed uniformed reservists from the local militia, members of the Pleiku and Kontum popular force and regional force, walking with their rifles on their shoulders and their families in hand, randomly scattered among the endless flow of civilians. Finally, recognizing one captain from the regional force, Lieutenant Colonel Tuan asked the man why the PF and RF units had not executed the screening movements up and down Highway 14, as General Phu’s plan had provided.

  “No one ever issued such orders to us,” the captain had replied. Then he smiled and added, “These men would not have done it anyway. You know they still would have taken their families and fled with everyone else.”

  Tuan laughed and waved the captain forward. Such a failure in communications did not surprise him at all. Nothing in this mission had gone right. Confusion had only grown worse since the operation began. At the redeployment’s onset, even before many of the units had assembled in the column, senior leaders had mysteriously evaporated from the scene, scattering like cowards. Most of them had caught the last helicopter flights to the safety of the coast, leaving responsibility for the actual movement of their forces, and the risk, to their subordinate field staff and unit commanders such as himself. To a man, the generals had all disappeared well before the first trucks had even begun to roll.

  TWO DAYS EARLIER

  “I HAVE AUTHORITY here, not that tyro,” Brigadier General Tran Van Cam growled at Colonel Le Khac Ly. The chief of staff stood wide eyed, almost speechless, and now more confused than ever, hearing the command’s deputy for operations vent his indignation while the lead vehicles of the convoy sat with their engines running, prepared to depart and thus initiate the redeployment of the II Army Corps from Pleiku to the coastal plains. “Colonel, or rather should I say the recently promoted Brigadier General, Tat remains my junior. I will not take orders from any subordinate, especially not from a newly pinned brigadier!”

  “General Cam, sir,” Colonel Ly said politely, “I do not believe that General Pham Van Tat has issued you any orders. Therefore, I do not understand your anger.”

  “It is not your concern, Colonel,” General Cam snapped.

  “Sir,” the chief of staff responded, “I am doing my best to execute Major General Phu’s orders. I believe that General Tat merely reminded you that General Phu had left you behind to jointly oversee our redeployment and to coordinate with General Tat regarding our counteroffensive of Ban Me Thuot. I beg your pardon, sir, but General Phu did not hand sole command to you.”

  “Colonel Ly, I should charge you with insubordination right now,” General Cam growled. “By virtue of my rank, I hold sole command. I share that with no one!”

  “Yes, sir,” Colonel Ly said respectfully.

  “I cannot waste any more time standing here,” General Cam fumed. “I will establish my headquarters at the point where this pitiful highway reaches the coastline, at Tuy Hoa. Unless you have something further to say to me, I am now leaving on my helicopter.”

  “No, sir, and good-bye, sir,” Colonel Ly said, deeply relieved to see the difficult brigadier depart, and watched as the deputy for operations boarded the Huey and flew away.

  “Where, pray tell, is General Tat?” Colonel Ly said, turning to the sergeant seated behind the steering wheel of the chief of staff’s jeep.

  “Colonel Ly,” a ranger lieutenant spoke, standing by the jeep.

  “Yes, lieutenant,” the colonel said. He recognized the junior officer as a subordinate aide recently appointed by the newly promoted ranger brigadier.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant said. “Brigadier General Pham Van Tat has flown to Kontum, where he has begun reorganizing the seven-thousand rangers that we have currently deployed there. Respectfully, sir, the general told me to convey his instructions that you should immediately proceed with the deployment, placing the Twentieth Combat Engineer Group at the head of the column. General Tat will execute a rear guard movement with his rangers protecting the convoy’s back and flanks.”

  “Very well, lieutenant, but when did you last see General Tat?” Colonel Ly asked.

  “Hardly more than an hour ago, on his way to Kontum,” the lieutenant said. “General Tat sent me here to act as an aide for you and to serve as his fire support liaison.”

  “Advise the commander of the Twentieth Combat Engineers to pull his trucks forward and lead off the column,” Colonel Ly said to the communications officer seated by the radio mounted in the right rear corner of his command jeep.

  ON THE HILLS OVERLOOKING CHEO REO

  NOW TWO FULL days on the dusty road, crawling along while even foot traffic passed by his unit’s trucks, Nguyen Manh Tuan thought of General Pham Van Phu’s optimism, suggesting that the redeployment along the 135-mile trek to the coast should take only one or two days. Cheo Reo, a town of Montagnards and peasant farmers and the seat of government for Phu Bon Province, stood just a few miles ahead of his trucks, below the long, gentle slope of Ban Bleik Pass, the last set of rolling hills west of the rural provincial capital before the land fell away to the coastal plains. The hamlet lay far from their goal at Tuy Hoa, nearly a hundred miles away, the point where Interprovincial Highway 7B terminated into Highway 1.

  Almost since the onset of the movement, problems had emerged. Even at the moment that they departed Pleiku, Viet Cong guerrillas had begun sniping at the rangers who patrolled the column’s flanks. The harassment and the losses had grown worse by the hour.

  Meanwhile, adding to the friction, every damaged bridge or small water crossing seemed to present issues to the engineers who argued about how best to deal with each obstacle that they encountered. Rather than simply lowering the blade of a bulldozer and grading off a slope so that the rolling stock could bypass the problem spot, the officers had to discuss options. Where to grade? How much to grade? How deep or how steep to cut the detour? Compounding their debates, enemy mines lay in random patterns along the roadside too. Venturing off the solid track carried with it significant risk. Thus the column could only inch forward, stopping at every rise, turn and dip. They got nowhere very fast.

  Now Tuan had begun to feel his intestines writhe with the onset of colic. His stomach had burned since day one of the redeployment. At first he simply dismissed the discomfort as jangled nerves. Even before departing Pleiku, he anticipated that the huge column could not go far down this road before the enemy moved on them with substantial numbers. His worry underscored why he had ordered his battalion to carry weaponry rather than personal belongings.

  Whether caused by stress or a bug seemed academic to Tuan; sickness now held him firmly. His bowels rumbled and his stomach boil
ed.

  Feeling ill troubled Tuan, not only because of health issues, but how would it affect the confidence of his men? Seeing him throwing up or worse would certainly unnerve his battalion. So Tuan kept his neckerchief pulled high on his face and worked hard to conceal his infirmity. Behind his bandana mask, he kept his disease, and his fear of imminent attack and ultimate capture or death by the enemy, cloaked.

  Adding to his internal distress, Tuan’s caravan of trucks, howitzers, and support jeeps had now ground to a complete stop, had shut down their engines, and had not moved for more than two hours. The bridge that crossed the wide river that stood between the final grade of the Ban Bleik Pass and Cheo Reo had much of its superstructure missing. In areas, only topless concrete columns now stood in the wide, rocky riverbed and the several narrow channels of water that flowed among the stony bars. Engineers would have to rebuild much of the structure, and the two other spans that lay just beyond it, before any vehicles could move farther.

  HIGHWAY 19 AT AN KHE PASS

  “SUICIDE!” Truong Quang Thi said, reading the one-page, handwritten transcription of a flash radio message. It ordered him to immediately redeploy his North Vietnamese Army light infantry battalion from its blocking position at An Khe and move southward without delay, overland along the ridges above the Song Ba and Ea Pa rivers to Ban Bleik Pass, overlooking Cheo Reo. There, his unit would attack the northern flank of the advancing II Army Corps’ retreat along Interprovincial Highway 7B.

  “Sir?” the administrative aide who had brought him the message said. “Suicide?”

  “No, not us,” Truong Quang Thi said and laughed. “I am sorry, not us. No, the enemy. It appears that they have committed suicide. They have decided that rather than standing and fighting from their well-placed, hardened defenses at Pleiku and Kontum, they will flee down a road with no bridges that eventually only leads them into a minefield. Utter suicide!”

  “Ah,” the soldier said and smiled.

  “This message is from Lieutenant General Hoang Minh Thoa, commander of the Central Highland forces,” Truong said proudly. “I had the honor to brief him, General Van Tien Dung, and General Tran Van Tra recently. General Hoang has chosen our battalion to lead the main attack. We will annihilate Pham Van Phu’s army. Do you realize what significance this can have?”

  “Very good luck, sir,” the aide said, minimizing his words and keeping his response broad and positive so that he did not appear ignorant to his commanding officer.

  “Very good luck indeed!” Truong said. “The enemy’s blunder has embarked their entire force onto a great killing field that provides them no means of escape. They can now only surrender there, at Cheo Reo, or die.”

  JUNGLES WEST OF BAN BLEIK PASS

  NGUYEN THIEN LUONG hugged the backside of a four-foot high boulder, taking cover from the sporadic fire of the company of ARVN rangers who now pursued a platoon of guerrillas from his Viet Cong battalion. For two days his soldiers had harassed the rear and flanks of the massive column of enemy troops and fleeing civilians, taking potshots to draw their security patrols away from the protection of the main force. Like a pack of hounds chasing a slow-running fox, the ARVN Rangers invariably followed the easy trail of the retreating soldiers into the crux of an ambush set by one or more of Luong’s four infantry companies.

  With each succeeding attack, the ranger force that had responded and pursued them had subsequently grown larger and larger. The enemy had strengthened the initial squad-sized patrols eventually to full platoons. Now, a heavily reinforced rifle company of more than four hundred ARVN rangers chased Luong and a handful of his men into a narrow, dead-end valley where the remainder of his battalion had quietly converged along each side and atop the canyon’s terminal point for an afternoon slaughter.

  Near the crest of the hill that Luong and his men had begun to climb, just above the place where the guerrilla commander now took cover behind the large rock, Le Van Reung lay quietly with his shoulder snugged against the butt plate of a .30-caliber machine gun that his platoon had captured in Ban Me Thuot a few days earlier. Reung and another soldier had set up the weapon inside a blind of branches and grass that served as a key firing point in today’s ambush.

  The two guerrillas with the machine gun could see Nguyen Thien Luong flattened against the large rock, looking up the hill at them, holding one hand with his palm showing outward, signaling the battalion to continue holding their fire. The Viet Cong commander wanted the whole attacking company of ARVN rangers fully within the ambush’s killing zone when the butchery commenced, and his retreating squad of VC guerrillas safely past it.

  From the vantage points of the bluffs above each flank of the valley, and from the crest of the ridge at its end, the Viet Cong battalion dominated every inch of terrain below them. They left no spot, no dead space, where even a single enemy soldier could find cover from their fire. In Le Van Reung’s mind, this constituted the ideal ambush, quick and certain death to the enemy.

  “They will first dive for cover,” Reung whispered to his assistant, who would soon feed the belts of ammunition into the machine gun and help clear any stoppages that might occur. “Quickly, they will realize that they have no place to hide, and the more seasoned veterans will try to fight back and attack our positions. When we start killing those men, the rest of their company will disband in panic and try to run.”

  “Even if they do try to turn their fire into the center of our ambush and counterattack us, they will have no chance,” the assistant said, reassuring Reung.

  “Very true,” Reung said, watching the retreating squad of Viet Cong decoys finally run past the line of their ambush, leaving only Commander Luong and the pursuing enemy company within the killing zone.

  “Did you ever see a Montagnard slaughter a pig?” Reung then asked.

  “No,” the assistant said.

  “They run the animal into a small pen,” Reung said, “and they catch the pig by its hind feet and tie them to a sturdy post. Then, with an ample club they bludgeon him. They hit the animal on his head again and again. A pig has a very hard head, so this takes a little time. He fights for his life and screams violently and tries to bite his killer. He has no chance. Soon, the pig just collapses and lies still while the Montagnard cuts his throat.”

  “I have heard pigs slaughtered that way,” the assistant said. “They scream horribly.”

  “These men will soon die much like the pig tied in that Montagnard’s pen,” Reung said. “They too will scream horribly.”

  Seeing his squad find safety behind the ambush line, Nguyen Thien Luong put his head down and bolted up the hill, pumping his legs as hard as he could push them. Just as he had lunged from the boulder’s cover, he dramatically pointed downhill at the pursuing company of ARVN rangers, signaling his men to commence firing.

  The Viet Cong commander ran a zigzagging pattern up the hill that led him no more than a step to the left of Le Van Reung and his machine gun. Bullets grazed past his churning legs, zipping through the grass and twigs only a few feet to either side of him. He had literally gambled his life on the accuracy of his men’s gunfire and their discipline of remaining within the limits of their sectors of fire, allowing him just enough of a gap to escape the killing field.

  On the slopes and in the ravine below him, Luong could hear the screaming and chaotic firing of the desperate South Vietnamese soldiers caught in the gristmill. From second to second, a sporadic enemy bullet hissed past his ears or popped into the mud on the slope ahead of him. Similarly, the bullets sent downhill by his men whizzed farther out from his sides, snapping and popping as they clipped branches and grass. Among the loud cracks of supersonic lead and longing whines of the ricochets came the telltale thuds accompanied by anguished cries as other projectiles found their deadly marks in the flesh and bone of men who scrambled for their lives.

  Smoke from smoldering hot oil that coated Reung’s gun barrel rose in white curls as he exhausted the first belt of .30-caliber bullets and
ceased firing for a few seconds to lock a fresh string of linked ammunition into the weapon’s breach. Even holding bursts at four to six rounds, the chains of ammo seemed to fly from the metal boxes that had contained them. In the course of only a few heartbeat-paced minutes, that to Le Van Reung seemed compressed into milliseconds, the Viet Cong guerrilla had blazed several hundred rounds downhill into the writhing mayhem of enemy troops.

  Along both sides of the valley, Viet Cong soldiers poured machine gun and rifle fire into the ARVN company, filling the air with gray smoke and the smell of cordite and blood. At the same time, mortar rounds and claymore mines exploded at the rear of the enemy unit, driving the doomed rangers even more tightly into the pocket of the ambush, where the interlaced hail of bullets chewed at them like the spinning blades of a meat grinder making sausage.

  In seconds, bodies piled on bodies, and the hammered men’s gore spread over the rocks and drizzled into the ravine. Some soldiers threw down their rifles and raised their hands to surrender, only to fall dead as bullets ripped through them without regard. Others tried to fight back, while many more turned and ran, trying to escape the massacre.

  White smoke poured from the breach of Reung’s machine gun as he once again popped open the black, hinged plate that covered the weapon’s receiver and bolt, and he readied it for a new string of cartridges. His assistant blindly tossed another empty, green metal box clattering down the slope in front of them as he pulled a fresh chain of rounds from a full ammo can and laid it in place, slamming shut the breach over the top of the belt.

  One quick pull of the machine gun’s charging handle, and Le Van Reung sent a fresh dose of copper-jacketed, hardball death into the valley.

  In minutes, the narrow ravine that cut along the bottom of the canyon clogged with ARVN dead. Bodies scattered up the slopes on each side, where men had desperately tried to escape. Only a fraction of the enemy company, less than one-quarter of their original strength, succeeded in fleeing the killing field, braving their way through a barrage of 60- 81-, and 120-millimeter mortar fire, and managing to survive a high-velocity hail of deadly ball bearings blasted at them by the exploding claymore mines that lined the route leading out. More than three hundred rangers lay dead when Nguyen Thien Luong finally commanded his battalion to cease fire.