The Phantom Blooper (17 page)

The printer is watching me closely as he speaks, pen poised, as though he expects me to reveal the secrets of the universe in twenty-five words or less. Suddenly I realize that I am being interviewed for a Front newspaper.

"Khoung Biet,"
I say-"I don't know."

The printer nods, disappointed, but easily convinced that I really don't know.

The printer looks at his wristwatch. He says, "You know, some of the big shots here want to send you to prison in Hanoi. But you have a powerful friend in the Front, Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region." He looks at his wristwatch again. "Come with me, please."

The printer says to Commander Be Dan, "Comrade Major, may I please speak with you?" and the Commander joins us. We walk past strange humming machines, manned by workers, chugging away, smelling of Cosmoline and oil, factories under the earth.

We pass a huge tent. Inside, seated at a long narrow table, are fifty or sixty North Vietnamese Army officers in short-sleeved khaki uniforms, red collar tab rank insignia heavy with brass stars. The officers are eating, drinking tea, playing cards, dropping sugar cubes into their coffee, telling jokes, telling lies, laughing, smoking pipes and cigars, reading newspapers.

We see a religious shrine ten feet high, a brass Buddha.

We enter a large chamber filled with a couple of hundred
Bo Doi
snuffies squatting on a floor of beaten earth covered by palm fronds. The
Bo Doi
are all nineteen years old, healthy and strong, with regulation haircuts and clean khaki shirts and shorts. They are so squared-away, they must have junk-on-the-junk inspections five times a day, or maybe it's junk-on-the-hammock.

Many of the
Bo Doi
are writing in small pocket diaries. Others are eating snacks, sleeping, writing letters, reading letters from home, or telling sea stories to their comrades and passing around photographs of pretty girls they claim are their girlfriends.

At the far end of the chamber is a small movie screen.

The printer, Commander Be Dan, and I squat and wait. After a few minutes the electric lights are lowered and a film projector switches on. The projector hums, rattles noisily, wheezes, snorts, and threatens to explode. Finally light appears on the screen and we see an old Charlie Chaplin film with French subtitles.

We watch the flickering, jerky black-and-white images on the screen. The
Bo Doi
laugh and cheer. "Charlot! Charlot!" They laugh, slapping their stomachs and thighs.

Charlie Chaplin flickers across the crude rice-paper screen, looking sad. He's up in the Yukon someplace, looking for gold, but not finding any. So he makes a federal case out of eating his shoe.

The Bo Doi laugh so hard that there are tears in their eyes. "Charlot! Charlot!"

After the movie Commander Be Dan and I thank the printer for taking us to the movie. We say goodbye to the printer, bowing, then shaking hands.

Commander Be Dan and I walk back to our area and fall into our hammocks. Before we go to sleep Commander Be Dan says to me in English: "I liked that movie."

Master Sergeant Xuan wakes us up. We pick up our gear and hump out of the main tunnel complex and down long dark tunnels that get smaller and smaller until, crawling on our hands and knees, we emerge from darkness into blinding sunlight.

We march down again, toward the lowlands.

Climbing down rocky mountain trails is some real number-ten-thousand humping, the worst. The whole process of walking down a steep incline is clumsy and strains all the wrong muscles. Our backpacks shift back and forth and throw us off balance. My bandaged leg hurts until it goes numb and I have to look at it to see where it is to check my footing. Every few hours a fighter falls, tumbling headlong down the trail, but the worst injury is a broken arm.

At a waterfall Commander Be Dan calls a halt and we eat a meal of glutinous rice and tomatoes.

Speaking over the roar of the waterfall, Commander Be Dan informs us that we will reach our destination by twilight and will be going into battle tonight. We're instructed to take a break for a couple of hours so we'll be fresh for the battle.

Without taking off our sweaty clothes we walk barefoot on slimy moss-covered rocks and into the green water. The fighters dive in. I sit down on a submerged rock and rub my leg.

Song stands on a stone ledge under the waterfall. The water is a monster shower, a collapsing column of wet silver dissolving into sparkling white foam as it hits a jungle pool. Song plays a game to see how long she can stand up under the weight of the falling water before it knocks her into the pool. Then she climbs out of the water and tries again. Soon the fighters are all competing in the game and are yelling and laughing like children.

I lie back on a submerged rock. Only my face is out of the water. The sun is warm on my face. I close my eyes and relax. The soothing roar of the waterfall makes me sleepy.

After our bodies are clean we sit in the sun in our wet clothes. We watch as Commander Be Dan builds a sand castle on a rock. A flat rock is a VC desk. The sand castle is a "U.S. Combat Fortress." The Commander uses stones and twigs to mark key positions, the mine fields, the heavy machine guns, the strongest bunkers.

The target, explains the Commander, is a Special Forces compound being used as a base of operations by a secret unit of Nungs--Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese origin, mercenaries who fight under CIA control. The Nungs have been attacking Montagnard villages while disguised as North Vietnamese Army troops. This is a CIA propaganda ploy to induce the Montagnards to join the fight against the liberation forces. Our mission is to destroy the compound.

Commander Be Dan tells each fighter precisely what his or her personal responsibility will be during the battle.

My assignment is to talk to the compound defenders to keep them awake all night before the attack. I will not be in the assault forces because I have not earned the right to carry a weapon, because I am too tall and would confuse the fighters, and because I have a minor wound on my leg. I will remain with Master Sergeant Xuan's rear-guard force, which will cover the withdrawal of the assault troops.

Truong Si
Xuan gives me a look that says he is disgusted to be saddled with me, a freak American surrenderer, excess baggage, some kind of silly publicity stunt, a fucking tourist.

Master Sergeant Xuan is a thin man, all bones, muscles, and sinew. He is about seventy years old but looks like he could run up mountainsides all day with a water buffalo on his back and spend the night breaking bricks with his head. He's a tough motherfucker from way back, with ugly shrapnel scars all over his face. He always gives orders to his troops in a threatening tone, as though he'll kill you on the spot if you even hesitate.

After detailing the battle orders, Commander Be Dan invites everyone to make comments or criticisms. We rehash the plan for an hour or so, until every fighter is in agreement with what is to be done, and how. I point out that the Americans string barbed wire to funnel attack troops into mine fields. The fighters nod their approval of my information, but, as usual, they already know about that. Some changes are made in the plan, based on comments from the fighters. Now that the attack plan is set, discipline will be strictly enforced.

"HOAN HO!"
we say--"Hurrah. Let's go!"

As the section saddles up I slip off into the bushes, looking for a place to pee. I do a quick about-face when I see Nguyen Hai, one of the Nguyen brothers, sitting with his back against the base of a tree, eyes closed, mouth open. One of the Phuong twins is with him. Her head is in his lap and is bobbing up and down.

Thinking about the advantages of a coed war, I hurry back to the section, giggling like a teenaged kid--which I am.

We hump down and down, and then we're in a haunted mangrove swamp. Set close together and rooted in smelly water stand hundreds and hundreds of scaly, pale green tree trunks. The smelly water is like sewage mixed with vegetable scraps and inhabited by poisonous snakes.

We are very careful in the swamp because the craters from B-52 lake-bombs are invisible under the waist-deep water. A fighter humping a full load of gear can suddenly sink twenty feet.

As we leave the swamp we see smoke. Black smoke. Too much smoke for cooking fires. We see red fire on the horizon.

We double-time.

Within minutes we hear small-arms fire, scattered, unopposed. Then we hear screams.

Commander Be Dan recons the ville with his field glasses, sends Master Sergeant Xuan to the left with one squad and Song to the right with another, with orders to attack when they hear firing. I stick asshole-to-elbow with Master Sergeant Xuan.

As the section converges upon the Montagnard village we see maybe fifty men in khaki shirts and shorts, wearing small brown pith helmets and North Vietnamese rank insignia, their uniforms and weapons camouflaged with fresh leaves and twigs.

Nungs, disguised as North Vietnamese Army soldiers, are burning the village, killing the men, raping the women.

We come in fast and open fire at the Commander's order:
"Ban!"

The Montagnard huts sit on short stilts. The Yards wear loincloths. The men are scrawny and have bony chests. The women are bare-breasted and sickly. The children have bloated bellies due to malnutrition.

In normal times, there is no love lost between the Montagnards and the Vietnamese.

We spread out. Move and fire. Fire and move. We give the impression of a much larger force than we are, barely thirty fighters, no match for fifty Nung mercenaries.

The new widows are running from dead body to dead body. When each of them finds the right dead body, she wails in agony. Then they all are wailing in agony, and the wails join together into a horrible song.

We follow the retreating Nungs, pressing them, never giving them time to think about turning around and making a stand. As we charge through the village we yell,
"XUNG

PHONG!"
. . . "Comrades, advance!" And we say, "We are the Liberation Army!"

We see an old woman, squatting on top of a table, moaning, holding her stomach--somebody's gutshot grandmother. Bo Doi Bac Si drops back to help her.

The Nungs are tough sons of bitches. They drop a man back every twenty yards. Each man dropped fights until our point men kill him, which takes time.

I try to stay close to Master Sergeant Xuan, as ordered, but my leg has started bleeding again and I lag a few yards behind.

A Nung sniper fires at us from the branches of a tree. Master Sergeant Xuan orders me to stay put, then tries to flank the Nung, exposing himself to draw fire. The Nung fires. Somebody fires back. The Nung falls out of the tree like a sack of dirty laundry.

Commander Be Dan waves us forward. As we advance, Master Sergeant Xuan pauses and kicks the dying Nung sniper in the balls. The Nung groans, looks up at us without fear or pain. When he sees me, he's confused. Master Sergeant Xuan ends the Nung's confusion with a burst of AK.

We chase the Nungs until we come to flat open ground that has been bulldozed and defoliated, leaving the Special Forces compound a clear field of fire.

A single howitzer inside the compound starts banging out rounds. We fade back into the jungle as a shell bursts harmlessly in the treetops.

We all know that the Phantom fighter-bombers have been called and are already in the air and will be coming in on bomb runs within twenty minutes.

The Nguyen brothers appear, proudly escorting two bound Nungs they have taken prisoner. The Nguyen brothers are still New Guys.

"Good!" says Commander Be Dan. He waves the Nguyen brothers back. Master Sergeant Xuan steps forward and butt-strokes each Nung prisoner to the ground, then fires a bullet through each of their heads.

Commander Be Dan looks at his wristwatch, then at his map. We follow him to a new position and wait for night. We can hear the Phantom fighter-bombers booming overhead and we can hear the bombs. With our ears and with our feet and with our bones we can hear bombs hitting the edge of the jungle.

We wait for night.

The night is our friend.

For hours, repeating the same speech a hundred times, I talk into an olive-drab battery-powered bullhorn. I read word for word from a script written for me by Ba Can Bo, our political cadre:

"Come, brothers, I say. "You are fighting on the wrong side. Turn the guns around.

"This country is not yours.

"We do no harm to your homeland.

"Why have you come here to kill our men and women and destroy our homeland?

"Do not join with the Saigon lackeys in using armed forces to suppress the just struggle of the South Vietnamese people for freedom and independence.

"Armymen! You are sons of the great American people who have a freedom-loving tradition. By your barbarous acts, inflicted upon patriots in their own land in the name of deceptive contentions, you besmear the honor of the U.S.A.

"Refuse to obey all orders to carry out mopping up operations to kill the Vietnamese people, to destroy their crops, burn their houses.

"Say 'No!' to the White House gangsters. You are fighting on the wrong side. Honor the memory of your ancestors. join us in our struggle for justice. Turn the guns around . . . "

Commander Be Dan meets with a Chien Si officer. They bow, salute, and shake hands. The officer is smoking a cigar.

The jungle is full of
Chien Si
fighters now, hundreds of them.

Hoarse, I join Master Sergeant Xuan's rear-guard unit. I imitate my comrades-in-arms by tying black comm wire around my ankles so that if we are forced to go into combat and I am wounded I can be dragged to safety. Or to a burial. The
Chien Si
fear that if they are not buried in
Xa
--in their home ground near their ancestors--their souls will be doomed to wander for all eternity, forever alone.

The assault troops check their weapons and move to their attack positions. The Nguyen brothers tie their rifles to their web belts with long pieces of string so that if they are wounded they won't lose their weapons.