The Phantom Blooper (19 page)

Master Sergeant Xuan and I drop back as rear guards, even though we still have not taken any fire from the puppet troops and don't expect to.

The Phuong twins move fast, carrying Nguyen Mot on a hammock, protected by Nguyen Hai. Bo Doi Bac Si and Battle Mouth help Song, who is straggling.

Commander Be Dan says,
"Mao! Mao! Truc Thang!"
--"Hurry, helicopters!" He drops back to protect the unit.

We are fifty yards from the treeline when a Huey gunship zooms in upon us with an ear-numbing roar. The Huey is olive drab, round and awkward-looking, but fast, a big mechanical dragonfly with men inside, floating in the air, spitting fire.

Master Sergeant Xuan aims an RPG at the gunship but is hit before he can fire.

Commander Be Dan returns fire while I double-time back to help Master Sergeant Xuan.

The Huey swings around and makes another gun-run, fires a cluster of pod rockets. As the rockets slant in on us we open our mouths to ease the pressure our eardrums may suffer from the shock waves of concussion.

I crawl to Master Sergeant Xuan. Half of his face has been blown off. He tries to speak, but he can't make his mouth move. I try to pull the RPG from his hands, but he won't let go. I put my foot against his chest and push. Finally Sergeant Master Xuan lets go of his weapon, but only because he is dead.

As the chopper swings around for another pass, Bo Doi Bac Si appears, firing his folding-stock M-1 carbine.

I pick up the RPG launcher--I'm going to need it.

I run to Commander Be Dan. He has been shot in the neck and one of his ears has been blown off. His AK-47 assault rifle has been hit. One round has torn open the rust-brown metal of the banana clip, exposing a row of bullets like sharp golden teeth.

The Commander looks up at me, trying to read his medical condition in my eyes. He reaches up to touch the bloody shreds on the side of his head where his ear used to be, and groans.

The gunbird comes in low, machine gunning us with electronically timed three-second bursts. The chopper pilot is high on war. He's already patting himself on the back for a job well done. The chopper hovers over us, a bloated green vulture, a swooping, chattering, metal carrion bird, rotor blades hacking like motorized machetes.

Flat on my back, playing dead, I see bloodred circles stenciled with black widow spiders. I can see the pilot's face before he drops his sun visor and squeezes his thumb on the red firing button on the toggle switch. The pilot is an up-and-coming young executive in the biggest corporation the world has ever seen, and through his gunsights people on the ground are not human beings at all but are only
A
s running toward his report card.

Bo Doi Bac Si runs, drawing fire.

The Huey takes the bait, rolls slightly to starboard.

Commander Be Dan picks up the B-40, fires the rocket, then collapses. The RPG
swooshes
from the end of the launcher like a tiny space ship and the door gunner inside the chopper sees it coming a fraction of a second before it hits the gunship.

The fuel cell explodes. Rockets and ammunition cook off and secondary explosions rip the chopper apart.

The gunship comes straight down. It just drops, fire falling out of the sky trailing black smoke. The Huey splatters across the deck as an ugly smear of torn metal and burning gasoline, rotor blade bent, fuselage split open. The men inside burn in their machine.

The Phuong twins have come back to fight. They put the commander, who is unconscious, onto a hammock, sling their rifles over their backs, and lift him up.

"Tien!"
I say, and we all head for the treeline.

Two more choppers are coming in fast, half a mile away.

Bo Doi Bac Si drops back to cover us until we are safely within the treeline.

I think about making a run for it, but where would I go? A chopper is down. The angry choppers coming in are going to kill anybody on the ground on sight at five hundred yards.

We're all deep inside a tunnel when the gunships rumble over the treeline. The gunships buzz in tight circles while door gunners pour bullets down hot and heavy, firing without a target, trying to shoot down the jungle itself. We listen to the choppers making themselves crazy and firing up pods full of rockets for a long time.

We sit in the tunnel until night comes, listening to ourselves breathe. The air is so thin that one of the Phuong twins faints and has to be revived. This tunnel is not used regularly anymore and the drainage sumps are clogged and overflowing. We're trapped in a black hole in the ground and we are wet and miserable.

When it's night we crawl out of the stinking pit and stand up, breathing deeply and coughing, mud-people in the moonlight.

I walk point. The Phuong twins carry Nguyen Mot. Nguyen Hai and Bo Doi Bac Si carry Song. Commander Be Dan insists on walking, so I give him Battle Mouth to lean on.

Limping forward, I wave my hand.
"Tien, Dong Chi"
--"Forward, comrade sisters," I say to the tired, pretty Phuong twins.

And then I lead the fighters back to the village.

A week after the victory of the Nung combat fortress, life in the village of Hoa Binh is back to normal except that now I am not treated as a prisoner of war but as a trusted Viet Cong soldier. I'm halfway home.

I'm working in the rice fields with the people when Song comes running to get me. I'm wiping the sweat from my face with a black-and-white checkered Front fighter's bandanna, which was awarded to me formally by Ba Can Bo in front of the whole village.

My next step to freedom: earn a weapon.

"Follow me," Song says.
"Di di Mau"
--"Go fast."

Confused, I drop my rice sickle and bundle of rice stalks onto the paddy dike. I follow Song, double-timing.

The rice threshers raking mounds of unhusked paddy in the village common freeze when they hear the sounds of approaching helicopters.

Song and I hide in a tunnel under General Fang Cat's "office."

General Fang Cat is a
Nguy
, a "puppet soldier" in the Arvins, the army without a country, a Vichy zip with a sense of humor. His "office" is the fieldstone foundation of what was once the finest hooch in the village. The hooch was blown up by the General's cannons. General Fang Cat never negotiates a business deal until he has made certain that everyone understands his terms.

Song crawls deeper into the tunnel and brings back an AK-47 assault rifle. She chambers a round.

We wait.

Once a month General Fang Cat visits to pick up his
Tien ca phe
--his "coffee money." In America we would call it grease, a bribe.

Hoa Binh lies within the General's Tactical Area of Responsibility. Marines cannot enter the General's TAOR without his permission. In his monthly Hamlet Evaluation Reports, General Fang Cat lists Hoa Binh as a leper colony and the area around the village as one hundred percent pacified. His reports look good on paper and make a lot of other people look good, so everybody is happy.

While we wait in the tunnel, Song tells me about the old province chief, Colonel Chu, who announced his visits to the village by dropping captured
Chien Si
fighters out of his helicopter--alive.

One day Colonel Chu's puppet soldiers took ten men from the village, bound them, and laid them in a row in the road. Colonel Chu drove a truck toward them as they struggled frantically against their bonds. He ran over them, smashing all of their heads.

Colonel Chu and his soldiers routinely raped the women of the village and any who resisted were sent away to rot in tiger cages as
Tran Cong
--"Communist sympathizers."

Front agents in Quang Tri booby-trapped Colonel Chu's private toilet with a dud howitzer shell.

Colonel Chu flushed himself right out of being a problem.

General Fang Cat is not an evil or sadistic man, only greedy, corrupt, ambitious, and realistic. His worst flaw is that he is constantly plotting coups against the Saigon government. If he were arrested during a coup, his replacement would be poorer than the General, more hungry. The General is "full." He has been successfully corrupt and powerful for so long that his greed has lost its edge.

We hear the crunch of boots in broken roofing tile. We see an Arvin snuffy, then another. General Fang Cat's Arvin bodyguards pull their M-16s around by the barrels, butts dragging in the dirt.

Song takes aim at the puppet armymen.

"What are you doing here?" I say.

Song says, "Security."

"So what am I doing here?" I say.

Song says, "Uncle does not trust
Dai Tuong
Fang Cat. And Commander Be Dan does not trust you. You might defect. Maybe the Black Rifles pay the puppets beaucoup money for you."

We watch. As General Fang Cat struts onto the ruined foundation, Song sights him in.

Dai Tuong
Fang Cat greets the Woodcutter with a smile. He obviously likes to smile because it gives him a chance to show off his gold eyeteeth.

"
Chao ong, Dai Tuong
Fang Cat," says the Woodcutter, bowing.

"
Kinh Chao ong,
" says General Fang Cat, bowing. "Greetings, honored sir."

General Fang Cat is tall and slender and wearing a starched tiger-striped fatigue uniform, with a shoeboxful of medals, badges, and insignia on his chest. He's wearing cowboy holsters with a matched set of jade-handled chrome-plated .38-caliber revolvers.

The General and the Woodcutter sit in bamboo chairs in the center of the leveled foundation. The Woodcutter gives the General a small red envelope. The General nods, smiles.

General Fang Cat complains that he needs more money. The Americans have begun to question his battle reports. Battle reports are required to conceal his losses due to desertion.

A lot of General Fang Cat's troops buy their way out of the Army with forged medical discharges. Of course, all of these soldiers are still listed on the rolls so that General Fang Cat can continue to collect their pay and their rations.

The three million piasters the General owes for the office of province chief has to be paid, plus the one million piasters he owes for his general's stars. The Woodcutter is an honorable man, says the General, and will understand the necessity to pay one's debts. Without additional money he's not sure how long he can go on generating the large volume of paperwork required to keep the village of Hoa Binh safely out of the war.

Because of his desperate need for money, the General is now forced to desperate measures, which include selling ammunition, C-rations, and even medical supplies to his own troops. The General points out that he does not allow his troops to rape the village women. His men do not steal chickens or pigs. And none of the young men of the village have been press-ganged into the Army.

The General no longer feels the need to blow up Hoa Binh with his cannons to win medals. He has lost interest in medals and has stopped buying them. Now all he wants is to save enough money to take his family to Paris, drink vintage wine, and have French servants for the rest of his life.

General Fang Cat's philosophy is live and let live, as long as he gets his end of the deal in cash.

The Woodcutter listens politely, then says, "One hundred American dollars. And we will not fight in your region."

The General says, "Five hundred."

"One hundred."

"Five hundred and your village is safe."

"One hundred," says the Woodcutter, "and you may defecate successfully. "

General Fang Cat laughs. "Yes, Colonel Chu, my old commander. What a leech he was. He died rich."

The Woodcutter nods. "Yet even the poorest peasant may defecate successfully without the fear that he is sitting on angry explosives. "

General Fang Cat thinks about it, nodding. He slaps his hands together. "One hundred," he says. "For now."

The Woodcutter raises his hand and the Phuong twins bring a pot of green tea and two bamboo cups.

As they drink tea, General Fang Cat explains to the Woodcutter that he understands the Woodcutter's position regarding the underaged half-white girls being forced to work as whores in the village of Khe Sanh. Families with half-white girls who resist are denounced under the CIA's Phoenix Program and

"eliminated." The General wants only for the Woodcutter to understand clearly that the General has no control over the Americans and is in no way involved in or responsible for this crime against the people.

The Woodcutter listens closely, then nods. "You will not be harmed. We have had word from the forests. We know that you are not involved. A decision has been made in the forests and this problem will soon be resolved."

General Fang Cat relaxes, sips his tea.

The two men drink tea in silence.

"It is a bad thing," says the General, "when the Long Noses make whores of our children."

The Woodcutter says, "Yes."

"The Americans," says General Fang Cat, and puts down his teacup.

"Yes," says the Woodcutter, not looking at the General. "The Americans."

An hour after General Fang Cat's chopper has faded into the purple horizon the Woodcutter and I are fishing, hauling black nets from the river.

A short round comes in,
bam
.

The fireball explodes into long streamers, a spider of thick white smoke as big as a house. Hissing splinters of phosphorus sputter through the air trailing white plumes.

It's a short round of Willy Peter--white phosphorus. The stink of white phosphorus is distinctive and not easy to forget.

A burning child comes running. Her clothes have been burned from her body. Her face is all open mouth and animal eyes. It is Le Thi, Song's star pupil and teacber's pet. The little girl claws at her burning flesh, digging for fire with her fingers. Her attempts to brush the Willy Peter off only spreads it and ignites it.

By the time we get to her she is holding her arms away from her body, afraid to touch herself. She's screaming non-stop. Her face is twisted into something ugly by the pain. Her body heat ignites the splinters of white phosphorus and the air feeds it. The splinters burn through flesh, sizzling until they hit bone.