The Village (10 page)

Several hundred yards out on the white dunes, O'Rourke called a halt. The open desert was the safest place to take a fifteen-minute rest. The men collapsed and lay breathing through dry mouths. They had left their canteens behind because they sloshed back and forth when half empty. During the day the temperature had risen to 109 degrees and the night was not much cooler. On the dunes with nothing but cactus and small bramblebushes and ridge after ridge of sand there seemed no escape from the thirst and the heat which had caked the dry spittle to the roofs of their mouths and had each man silently damning a climate which left him cold and wet and shivering one night and thirsty and hot and sweating the next.

All except Luong, who stood for a moment looking down at his prostrate companions, and then gestured to them to follow him. Unquestioning, they trudged after their new guide, fighting their way through loose sand ankle-deep up a steep slope and down the other side, following the course of a wash around two more ridges before coming to a flat space about the size of a football field, surrounded by dunes. There they saw the crumbled sides of what once had been a stone house, while a few feet away stood a stone well, and perched on the well's edge a rusty bucket trailing a short piece of frayed rope. Luong laid down his rifle, took off his crossed bandoliers of ammunition, stepped out of his sandals, rolled up his trousers, grasped the rope in his teeth, placed the bucket behind his back and climbed down the side of the well, disappearing into the blackness. A few moments later the delighted Marines could hear the bucket being dunked, and when Luong appeared, he was grasping a gallon of water. Twice he repeated the procedure, slaking the thirst of every Marine. Afterward they lingered longer than the originally allotted time, reluctant once their mouths were again wet to leave the soft and comfortable sands, to stop looking up at the stars, to walk away from a place which had brought peace and succor to them.

“It's four-thirty,” O'Rourke said. “The hell with My Hué tonight. It'll be getting light in another hour. Let's go back in.”

Reluctantly the men got to their feet, their sweat now dried and caked in white crusts on their shirts, their calf muscles cramped. In their first tentative steps back toward the hamlet they looked like tottering old men. As they entered the clammy dark of the hamlet's foliage, the patrollers revived almost despite themselves, instinct overriding fatigue. They avoided the main trails when they could, twisting their way laboriously through the backyards, often just guessing where they were, not especially concerned about directional errors because they were the only patrol out, resigned to enduring until light.

They had almost reached the back side of the marketplace when Riley halted suddenly. The patrol jerked up short and for several minutes nobody moved. Riley walked silently back to O'Rourke and whispered: “I thought I heard something on the path to our right. Did you?”

“I'm not sure,” O'Rourke whispered. “We were still moving when you stopped. Go ahead, but take it slow.”

They proceeded at a creep for a few minutes, when again Riley halted, this time going down on his knees, placing his rifle on the ground and flattening out. His head pointed toward a path six feet away. The other members of the patrol quietly lay down about ten feet apart and faced in the same direction. O'Rourke crawled to Riley's side.

“I know for sure I hear someone behind us. They're coming up this path,” Riley whispered.

“Do you think they've heard us?” O'Rourke asked.

“No—too far away.”

O'Rourke scooted back and warned the others. Sullivan and Fielder pivoted about to protect the rear and right flank of the patrol. Riley, O'Rourke, Brannon, Lummis and Luong faced the path and waited, having slipped off their safeties.

They heard the enemy approaching, not the steady noises of careless footsteps but the intermittent crunches and snaps of people walking cautiously but not cautiously enough. The middle of the path was obscured in dark shadows. The ambushers could not see any figures approaching; they could only gauge the distance by ear. O'Rourke thought he saw a man pass by him, but he could not be sure. He heard another man getting close.

Not one of the Marines could remember who sprang the ambush. All were agreed that the seven rifles opened up within the same second. Swinging his weapon back and forth, each patroller fired until he had emptied a magazine. It was strictly area fire at sounds. Not one Marine could actually see a target or be sure that he had hit anything. Then O'Rourke and Riley rose to their knees and heaved two grenades back down the trail in the direction from which the Viet Cong had come.

“Cease fire!” O'Rourke yelled. “Riley, block for us to the front. A couple of you guys search the area.”

The action had lasted eight seconds.

Lummis and Brannon stepped out of the bushes, peering at the ground in front of them.

“One,” Lummis said.

“Blown away?” O'Rourke asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Luong walked forward and struck a match in front of the faces of the two men. He grunted once but said nothing.

“Get their rifles,” O'Rourke said. “We'll head in by the main trail. Make sure you have fresh mags in those weapons. Fielder, take point.”

It was growing light when they arrived back at the fort. Thanh was waiting, having heard the firing. Luong spoke to him, identifying one of the dead guerrillas by name. Thanh took out the book in which were recorded the name and affiliations of every adult in the village, with a special roster of those who had joined the Viet Cong. It contained about two hundred names. Thanh drew a neat line through one of them.

A few nights later, O'Rourke was again engaged. It was a short patrol designed to set up an early-evening ambush along the river in an effort to catch the enemy when they first entered the village. With the lieutenant were Garcia, Brannon and PFC John Glasser, a thin, bespectacled young man who handled the supply job for the combined unit. Choosing a likely vantage point on the river bank, O'Rourke placed Garcia and Brannon on the flanks, keeping Glasser, who had less experience, with him. The sky was overcast and visibility limited. There was little wind. When they did not make contact in the first hour, O'Rourke judged it unlikely that any Viet Cong would be crossing near them, so he decided to tutor Glasser on the different night sounds they were hearing. When Glasser showed keen interest and whispered question after question, O'Rourke became absorbed in responding and neglected to keep close watch on the river.

After an hour of conversation, O'Rourke decided to abandon the ambush and shift farther up the bank, so he moved away from Glasser to signal to his flankers. That done, he crawled back to his original position to take one final look around. What he saw made him grasp Glasser's arm.

“Look,” he whispered, “two of them.”

“Where?”

“Right there, right in front of us.”

Almost directly to their front, down the bank near the water loomed two figures, their outlines just barely visible against the background of the water.

“There?” Glasser whispered.

“Yes, can't you see with those glasses? Lie flat. I'll take them. Just don't move.”

O'Rourke could hear Brannon and Garcia coming up behind him. He knew he should wait so that they could all fire together, but he was furious with himself for breaking the cardinal rule of strict attention when on patrol.

“Screw it,” he thought. “I'll drop both of them myself.”

As Glasser watched in amazement, O'Rourke lined his automatic rifle up on the crouching enemy and squeezed the trigger, hugging the rifle to his shoulder to hold down the recoil. The red tracers streamed forward in a blast of light and sound, struck their targets full on and ricocheted skyward in a screaming cascade of white and red.

O'Rourke had poured twenty bullets into two rocks.

Silence. The sound of embarrassment while O'Rourke realized what had happened. As he had talked, the tide had dropped, exposing the two enemy stones to his refocused attention and angry fire. Now Glasser was looking at him as Sancho Panza must often have looked at Don Quixote.

Predictably, Brannon was the first to speak: “Sure looked pretty, Lieutenant.”

Then Garcia: “That was still some damn fine shooting.”

Brannon again: “Yeh, and those rocks would have fooled me. It's like you keep telling us: play it safe.”

Garcia turned to Glasser.

“You were lucky to be here, Glasser. That's some of the finest shooting you'll ever see. You remember that for your next patrol.”

For a week O'Rourke lived with the fear that he would be forever nicknamed “The Rock,” but the incident was never mentioned. Brannon and Garcia were looking after him.

 

In mid-August the frequency of contacts started to drop off, and the PFs heard from the villagers that the Viet Cong were starting to move by side trails to avoid contact with the combined-unit patrols. Then one day Thanh received information that a favorite enemy route was the narrow track upon which Larry Page had been killed two months earlier. That morning the police chief had arrested a short, muscular man garbed in tattered farmer's clothes who claimed to own a half-hectare of paddy just north of My Hué. He was not on the census rolls of the village, recently updated by the industrious Phuoc, and since Thanh was not in the habit of arresting every male he saw, it was apparent someone had informed the police that the farmer was not who he said he was.

Between them, Thanh and Phuoc broke down the man's cover in half an hour. Not a trained agent, he was unused to deceit and once he was convinced his arrest was no accident, he acknowledged what Thanh already knew: he was an assistant platoon leader in the P31st District Force Company, sent by Le Quan Viet, the one-armed VC district chief, to contact some local guerrillas and to confirm their reports concerning the tactics and habits of the combined unit. Quan Viet had become leery of casual incursions into the village and had just about abandoned the idea that the combined unit could be intimidated into ceasing its patrols. The prisoner was to determine if there were routes which could be used for rice takeouts or for the passage of main-force units without bumping into a patrol. The hamlet guerrillas claimed there were, but Quan Viet was no longer taking their word for conditions in the village.

The prisoner gave many answers in refutation of assertions by Thanh, who responded to the man's defiance by knocking him down several times. But each time he struggled back to his feet, despite his arms being bound behind him, and stood at attention, with his heels locked together. The man had courage, and Thanh did not seem to resent his attempted spying the way he did the activities of the Viet Cong Security Section. When the questioning was finished, the PFs wiped the blood from the man's face and arranged for a guarded sampan to take him to district. Thanh did not go along, and it was reasonable for the Americans to assume that the spy, who was happier (and probably better) as a soldier, arrived safely at district.

Hearing that the safest guerrilla route was the track where Page had been killed, all the Americans clamored to be included on the next ambush sent there. Suong, however, advised that only a few could go without making too much noise, and he singled out as a guide a PF who disliked patrolling but whose family lived next to the path being used by the guerrillas. The PF would not go without taking a friend, so O'Rourke made the decision that he would go and take just one other Marine. That way each American would be paired with a Vietnamese who knew the village. If the track was as obscure and overgrown as it was described, they would only get a head-on shot at the Viet Cong anyway. For his steadiness, Fielder was chosen to accompany O'Rourke.

In keeping with a cover plan, they left the fort just after dark as part of a combined patrol of twelve men and followed the main trail into Binh Yen Noi. The night was clear, with a bit of light lingering from the sunset, and even in the shadows of the hamlet each man could see the outline of the patroller in front of him. It was a patrol designed to be a shade too early and a footstep too big. From most houses they passed, they could hear supper plates rattling, and several homes, trying to catch a slight breeze on a warm evening, had not yet closed their doors in keeping with the light curfew. Some children were still playing in their front yards, and a few men, home late from the fields or the sea, were stooped over washbasins alongside their houses. Fragments of conversation, with each word clearly distinguishable, floated by the patrol. Once there were the excited screams of children and a ball sailed over a hedge and bounced by the patrollers, with a little girl in fast pursuit. Retrieving the ball, she scooted back inside her yard without once looking directly at the armed men. At least two dozen villagers saw the patrollers passing. None called out, or waved, or in any way acknowledged what they saw, lest a watching neighbor interpret the action as active commitment to the GVN cause and denounce the waver to the Viet Cong.

That was the way of it. Anyone branded as an active helper or spy for either side could not sleep in his own house at night but had to seek the protection of the armed camp which he supported. So the schoolteacher and the hamlet elders slept at the fort, while most of the hamlet guerrillas slept across the river in the Phu Longs. But when armed Viet Cong did slip into the hamlet, they would ask at certain sympathetic doors whether a patrol had passed and, with the shroud of night guaranteeing the informers anonymity, they would pick up information, just as the PFs did using the same technique at different doors. In case the Viet Cong were already in the hamlet, they would be informed that a large patrol had passed through, headed in the direction of the My Hués.

The patrol moved according to plan, paced by a point man who dallied so that they cleared the northern end of Binh Yen Noi under conditions of full darkness—minus four men. O'Rourke's party had dropped off in a patch of deep shadows and waited for several minutes for the main patrol to move well away. Then they were up and picking their way through the weeds and brambles, the PF guide in front following no path but just a general direction which took them toward the rear of the hamlet. As they went, the houses seemed to close in on them and they passed from backyard to backyard at turtle speed. It was like walking down an apartment corridor hoping no one would open his door and look out. There was no breeze and the air hung heavy with kitchen smells, and the four men were edging around the sides of houses so closely connected it sounded as though the conversation of one family would interfere with that of another.

In an hour they covered about three hundred yards, and on a map their route could best be duplicated by the doodlings of a two-year-old. Then in what seemed like just another in an endless series of backyards, the guide stopped, beckoned the Marines forward, and pointed toward the front of the house, where a square of light from the front room spilled onto the ground outside.

“There?” O'Rourke whispered incredulously.

“Hi—hi,” the PF nodded in reply.

O'Rourke dared not risk further conversation, but he was plainly not enthusiastic about lying in ambush within fifteen feet of some stranger's house. He looked at Fielder and shrugged. Fielder shrugged back. So they started forward, O'Rourke in the lead, poking ahead with the toe of his boot, tamping the ground ever so slightly for twigs, nudging aside mats of decaying leaves, putting the heel down, shifting the body weight to balance on the forward foot, easing the rear leg out in front, and repeating the process again. The act required balance, strong thigh muscles and patience. One step a minute was good time.

They came to the patch of light which filled a small open space between the house and a bamboo thicket through which it would have been impossible to move in silence. O'Rourke handed his rifle to Fielder, squatted on his haunches and cocked his head sideways, squinting up into the open window, watching the bobbing head and shoulders of a woman appear and disappear as she went about some household cleaning task. He waited until she was turning away from the window and then, hunched over, scooted across the six feet of light. The next time she turned away Fielder handed over both rifles. The time after that Fielder crossed over.

They waited for the PFs to copy the procedure. Like two boys being encouraged to enter deep water for the first time in their lives, the PFs would crawl to the light's edge, peer anxiously across at the vigorously gesturing Marines, glance up at the window and scoot back deeper into the shadows at each approach of the housewife. It was a clever act. O'Rourke knew they were not frightened of the woman. They did not want to cross because they dreaded being trapped alongside the Americans in a lopsided firefight with no escape except across a patch of glaring light.

After several minutes, the Marines gave up their pantomimed entreaties and swiveled around to check out their new surroundings. They had the house behind them, and directly in front of them ran a large ditch which held only a few inches of stagnant water and stank from garbage and defecation. A single board spanned the ditch, the sides of which were scantily decorated with hardy shrubs. By poking and peering at different angles, O'Rourke was able to see a slight track leading away from the board on the far side. By lying in wait at the corner of the house with the patch of light just behind their feet, they could fire at anyone crossing the plank.

With a few hand signals, they reached agreement on the plan and prepared for a long wait. Taking positions side by side so that a whisper could be passed mouth to ear, they gently extended the bipods on their rifles and set them down, muzzles toward the track. Next they set down their other equipment. O'Rourke carried in one sack a dozen magazines, each separated from the other by a burlap wrap. He placed the sack beside his rifle, and from the eight pockets of his dark-green utilities pulled and placed next to the sack three antipersonnel grenades, one illumination grenade, two hand flares and a flashlight. Fielder wore a camouflage jacket tailored to include a dozen separate pouches. When loaded, it weighed over twenty pounds. He slipped the jacket off and placed it beside his rifle. In a green T-shirt, tanned arms and a face black with grease paint, he still blended with the shadows.

Both lay down on their stomachs and waited. The hamlet was quieting down as most of the children in nearby houses fell asleep. But in the house beside which they were lying the housewife was shrieking in such a shrill voice that neither Marine feared he would doze off as long as she was awake and talking. The stink from the ditch made breathing unpleasant, and even as they lay quite still, beads of sweat rolled off their faces. The sweat washed away their foul-smelling insect repellant, and the mosquitoes soon found them and came in droves from the ditch, humming around their ears, taunting them before biting. Rather than slap them with a human sound which carried for several yards, the Marines tried to brush them off or catch and squeeze them in their hands, accepting bites on their palms and fingers for the pleasure of killing some of their tormentors. The shrill housewife added to their discomfort by pitching a bowl of water out the window, the fright from the sudden splash jerking the tense bodies of the men with the force of electricity. After a while their elbows and forearms, bone-bruised from previous patrols, ached too much and they stretched their arms straight out, letting their jaws dig into a ground prickly with tiny pebbles and allowing the weight of their upper bodies to sag against their rib cages. But, after a time their chests ached too much and twitching could not defend against the merciless mosquitoes and it would be back up on their elbows, with hands pawing at the insect-filled air. For four hours they endured the bites, and the nagging wife who just wouldn't turn out the light and go to bed, and the fetid air, and the pain of an immobile body on an unyielding surface. They endured, sustained by the vision of their enemies walking across the ditch.