The Phantom Blooper (18 page)

For the first time I look at an American compound with the eyes of an attacker. The Special Forces compound is not very big, just another sandbagged dot on some Army general's grid map. But it does look mean. Nothing human could ever survive its firepower: long-range artillery on call, air strikes on call, mortar shells, howitzer shells from tube-sighted 105s, .50-caliber machine guns, antipersonnel mines, Claymore mines, thirty yards of leg-ripping barbed wire secured by engineer's stakes and festooned with trip flares, and a thick wall of sandbags which will be illuminated by a golden string of muzzle flashes from automatic rifles.

But so far the compound has been silent. No one awake except a few drowsy sentries I've bored with my political speech.

As silent as ghosts, the sappers go in, calm and professional, their minds focused to a burning point, their naked bodies covered with grease and smeared with charcoal. Each sapper has spent his final hours alone, deep in the jungle, building his own coffin and writing his name on his coffin with mud. A hundred yards from the wire the sappers lie down and then crawl forward on their bellies, into the black barbs of the concertina wire, armed only with wire cutters.

Close behind, the second wave of sappers drag bangalore torpedoes into position. A third wave waits in the shadows with satchel charges strapped to their backs.

While the sappers are cutting the wire, illumination shells from a mortars section inside the compound burst overhead, lighting up the battlefield, just a routine periodic illumination.

The light from the flares catches the second wave of sappers in the open and half of them are cut down as sentries in the compound open fire. The surviving sappers run into the wire, shove bamboo bangalore torpedoes up into the wire as far as they can, then, lying next to them, detonate them.

While the Nungs inside the compound watch the sappers blow themselves up in the wire, the third wave attacks. The sappers who are not killed fall down and pretend to be dead. Under fire, they wait.

Someone gives an order,
"Sung coi!"
--"Mortars."

The assault troops advance aggressively. Each fighter carries one mortar shell and drops it into a mortar tube as he passes. All along the edge of the jungle, mortar tubes
tonk
, and the first wave of assault troops charges forward.

By the time the mortar shells dropped into the tubes by the first wave of assault troops arch in and
bang
somewhere inside the compound, the enemy mortar crews inside the compound are already dropping shell after shell into their own mortar tubes--
thump-thump-thump
--illumination rounds shot out, followed by H. E.--high explosives.

"DAI LIEN!"
--"Machine guns!" The jungle sparkles with green tracers, going out.

Our first mortar shells fall short and kill our own troops. The range on the mortar tubes is adjusted.

The compound perimeter opens up with everything in the world that shoots. Muzzle flashes wink like fireflies. The
Chien Si
human wave attack advances, not returning fire.

An enemy grenade bursts ten yards from where I lie with Master Sergeant Xuan's reserve force. We do not return fire.

"XUNG PHONG!"
is the order, and the second wave of assault troops echoes back in unison:
"XUNG PHONG! XUNG PHONG! XUNG PHONG!"
--"Assault! Assault! Assault!"

The Liberation Army attacks, a fearless horde of shadows.

Moments after the first wave of assault troops has been shot to pieces the second wave hits the wire.

The sappers with satchel charges now rise up as one man, pull fuses, and fling heavy canvas blocks of TNT into the perimeter bunkers. A few of the sappers are shot down before they can throw, but all of them are shot down after they throw.

As the satchel charges lift the bunkers up in slow motion, spilling sand in sheets as sandbags burst and sandbag walls are blown apart, the second wave is coming through the wire, walking on bloody stepping-stones that are the backs of dead comrade-soldiers.

Our mortars do not lift their fire until our assault troops are being wounded by our own shrapnel.

The third wave advances into the gray cloud of smoke boiling across the compound. All we can see now are the blue and orange flashes of RPGs--rocket-propelled grenades.

Inside the compound the fight is a noisy toe-to-toe show-down of hot-blooded man-killing. It is over very quickly. One minute they're overrunning the wire, the next minute they are grenading the bunkers.

Someone blows a whistle and the Liberation Army pulls out without hesitation, leaving the Special Forces compound blown up and on fire, leaving the Nungs and the Green Beanies and their spook bosses overrun and fucked up totally.

The rear-guard reserve under Master Sergeant Xuan holds its position while hundreds of fighters of the Liberation Army flow past in the returning darkness. Wounded fighters limp along on crude, freshly cut crutches. Friends haul dead comrades away by the wire loops on their ankles.

Life in the shit is a rush, but you come down hard. After thirty minutes in a firefight you feel like you've pulled a double shift at the coal mine. Everybody's ass is dragging.

In the safety of the jungle the fighters call out the names of their units to one another in the darkness, and the attack force breaks up and reassembles into small local units for the march home.

The rear-guard unit waits for an attack from the compound, or the arrival of a reaction force from another command. But the only movement inside the compound is a lone figure, stumbling around blindly, calling for help in that unknown language sometimes invented by dying men.

Our scouts report that a reaction force is ten minutes away. Moments later, an avalanche of bombs and shells hits the fields of fire from the direction of our attack, while we in the rear-guard withdraw in the opposite direction.

In the jungle I see Song squatting beside the trail, trying to bandage her hand. Battle Mouth is with her, but is of no help; he appears to be in shock.

I squat down and look at Song's hand. A piece of shrapnel is embedded in the loose flesh between thumb and forefinger. The shrapnel is a shark's tooth of steel, black and silver, and the wound is oozing red blood.

I search until I find Bo Doi Bac Si.

Bo Doi Bac Si sponges the wound clean, then clamps down on the piece of shrapnel with shiny little pliers. Song grits her teeth and whimpers. I hold her wounded hand steady and Bo Doi Bac Si pulls out the jagged chunk of metal. Bo Doi Bac Si bandages the hand quickly and hurries off to help the other wounded, handing me a tiny blue and white tube of ointment "for her cuts."

I wash Song's legs and feet with water from my canteen.

I wipe the deep cuts clean with her black and white checkered Front bandanna. I massage greasy yellow ointment into deep ugly gouges left by barbed wire.

As I bandage Song's legs and feet with captured battle dressings, four American prisoners are led past us on their way to the Hanoi Hilton. Their hands are bound behind their backs with wire and they are roped together neck to neck. The prisoners stumble and collide. They see me. They stare back at me in stunned disbelief as they are led away. The first two prisoners are Special Forces officers. The last two are both over forty, wearing new jungle utilities with no markings or insignia, both of them too pale and too beefy to be lifer light colonels. I've seen men like this before: spooks. Errand boys playing God. They look at me like they've seen a ghost.

I help Song to her feet and we listen. When we bear calls of "Hoa Binh!" we rejoin Commander Be Dan and the Hoa Binh fighters.

Our casualties have been light. One of the Nguyen brothers, Nguyen Ba, is dead, his body blown to bits, vaporized. Another of the Nguyen brothers, Nguyen Mot, is unconscious in a hammock being carried by the Phuong twins. His right arm is off at the elbow and the stump has been neatly bandaged. The third Nguyen brother, Nguyen Hai, walks beside the hammock and holds his brother's hand.

After a lot of loud and forceful persuasion I finally motivate Battle Mouth to move down the trail. Battle Mouth is a zombie with a near-terminal case of the thousand-yard stare.

Commander Be Dan and I lift Song onto a hammock and carry her.

As dawn comes up on the outside world, we fade away, deep into the triple-canopy jungle, where it is night, where it is always night.

Deep in the steaming wet darkness of the rain forest we emerge from a shadow-shrouded path onto a riverbank. In the river's foul-smelling water, bullfrogs
croak-croak
and
plop
, unseen.

Through the ground mist moves a phantom giant, an artillery piece being hauled away on the back of an elephant.

We hear voices and the sounds of men digging in the earth.

It begins to rain. The raindrops thump the black earth and big jungle plants brush against our hands and faces. The jungle plants are wet and shiny in the moonlight and movement makes them look like living things. Through holes in the triple canopy we glimpse a dirty lemon moon. We can see clouds and a black metal sky.

We trudge past an ancient, crumbling pagoda, Buddhist temple ruins built by men who kicked the living shit out of Kublai Khan and his Golden Hordes. In the darkness the pagoda is bone white. The broken walls are being swallowed up by creeping jungle vines. Inside the pagoda, in a bed of red roofing tiles, sits a bronze Buddha, green with age and corroded, fat-bellied and smiling.

A stairway of stone leads down from the pagoda into the river. Tired soldiers of the Liberation Army, bare-chested and bony-kneed, like muddy skeletons, squat on the cracked stone steps, black string tied to their thumbs, fishing.

Down along the riverbank men and women are laughing. Lanterns bounce as hungry Front fighters, spearing giant bullfrogs, splash and fall.

Walking-wounded fighters bow and offer us frog soup orbarbecued frogs' legs, hot and fragrant in bamboo bowls. Smiling, flashing gold teeth, they dangle living bullfrogs in front of our faces. The bullfrogs are pale green; their legs have been tied together with black string and they are as big as cannonballs.

We bow and say "thank you" to our comrade brothers and sisters, but march on, thinking only about how eager we are to be back in our home village where we can stand in our own fields.

Beyond the pagoda fifty teenaged farmers, strong young men and women, are hard at work, chopping soggy clods of cold mud out of the jungle floor with hoes, then planting the red seeds of the future into rich black soil without saying goodbye.

Feeling the weight of the darkness, we follow Commander Be Dan, ignoring sore muscles and pain and the thoughts of our dead and wounded, and ignoring our need to sleep. We are bones clothed in shadows and we are going home.

Behind us in the steaming night rain a tired and hungry people are burying their dead in graves by the river.

Heading home from the attack on the Special Forces compound, we walk for a week, sleeping during the day, too tired to talk, until we come to the river crossing where we met the blind barge man. The ferry barge has been burned and sunk, a block of charcoal like a five-ton bar of black soap dissolving in the water.

We search the riverbank for a safe crossing, without luck.

We see the rotting carcass of a water buffalo in a mud hole. The black mass smells horrible and is alive with maggots and flies.

We hide in tunnels until noon, the safest part of the day. Nguyen Mot is dying, we think, and Song is half out of her head with fever. Song objects to a daylight crossing. Commander Be Dan decides to risk a daylight crossing, which surprises everyone.

Master Sergeant Xuan returns from scouting and leads us to a pontoon bridge. We crawl through reeds and watch Arvin puppet troops on the opposite bank of the river. The puppet troops are laying shiny new barbed wire. The barbed wire has shiny sharp teeth. The Arvin snuffies are not working very hard. One Arvin holds an engineer stake in place while another pounds on it listlessly with a sledgehammer.

The bridge security sentries are relaxing in hammocks, protected from the hot sun by canvas slung on clothesline like miniature Arab tents. Four Arvins are on the bridge, throwing a bright orange Frisbee and giggling at bad catches, drafted peasant boys who can't read and who don't know which end of a gun the bullets come out of, all four of them talking nonstop.

They haven't got any heavy guns in yet, no M-60, no mortar tubes, and they can't set Claymore mines until they've finished stringing wire. Nobody looks like an officer. There are no American advisers.

"BAN!"
says the Commander, and the fighters open fire.

At the sound of firing, Song gets up off the hammock we've been carrying her in and picks up her pea-green Swedish K submachine gun. She resists my attempts to make her lie back down so violently that I don't try to stop her.

The Frisbee players are all cut down. The wire stringers are hit and the wounded start screaming.

Master Sergeant Xuan fires an RPG at the tarpaulin and it is blown apart.

There is no return fire.

The Commander calls out to the puppet troops across the river,
"BUONG SUN XUONG!"-
-"Brothers, lay down your guns!"

But the surviving Arvins are already too far away to hear him. The puppet troops don't lay down their weapons, they throw them down and run like hell. Arvins know how to run, especially if it's at night and they're on guard duty. Big Sale Today: Arvin Rifles!--never fired and only dropped once.

The only sound is the whining of one of the Frisbee players, shot in the stomach, as he tries to pull the pin on a hand grenade.

Commander Be Dan gives us a hand signal:
Tien! Mao!

We run across the pontoon bridge, a span of perforated steel planking American military engineers put together from a kit.

Song shoots the wounded Frisbee player in the face. The round takes off the top of his head.

On the other side of the river we turn left and run past the stacked coils of barbed wire and two dead Arvins. Enemy weapons are picked up. We run along the riverbank and head for a treeline.