The Village (25 page)

One burning noon in late July Mr. Lee, the district census grievance chief, rode his bicycle into the fort. It was Lee's task to wander about the hamlets and talk privately with individual villagers, guaranteeing anonymity and asking about grievances against both the Viet Cong and the government officials. When the grievance taker was true to his pledge and not afraid to travel afield, he sometimes received valuable information, which, when reported to higher Vietnamese headquarters, was sifted for political acceptability before being acted upon. The Chinese Mr. Lee was an honest man, and he came to the fort because he had a piece of information which required immediate action. He was supposed to report only to district headquarters, but he told Suong and McGowan he had pedaled to Binh Nghia instead because he was tired of the slow, ineffectual, bureaucratic responses at higher levels.

“What is the information?” Suong asked.

An officer from the NVA 409th Battalion had come to Binh Son to discuss dwindling food supplies. There was a plan afoot for the main forces to come in and pin down several PF units while the local Viet Cong moved a massive rice shipment upriver. It was to be a twenty-four-hour operation and Binh Nghia was one of the villages involved. Lee had been told that the liaison officer from the 409th would sleep the next night at the home of a ranking member of the Viet Cong district executive committee. At the mention of the 409th Battalion, which had participated in the attack upon the fort the previous September, Suong had sprung alert.

“Where will he be?” Suong asked.

Lee had known Suong would respond.

“Dong Binh,” he said.

McGowan had to laugh. Dong Binh was at the foot of Charlie Company's old position, on the back side of the sand dunes, right next to the Chulai airfield fence. From Suong's expression, McGowan knew they were going there. It was useless to tell Suong that the district chief would be upset, or that Lee worked for the CIA, or that Dong Binh was a mile outside their patrol boundaries. Suong was not going to allow either the National Police or the CIA to deprive him of revenge. McGowan also sensed that Suong, although he did not come right out and ask for help, wanted the Marines' aid in working out a foolproof plan.

They worked at it all day, consulting with only a small number of Vietnamese and Americans in order to avoid a leak. First they talked of hiding two men with shotguns inside the suspect house and trapping the man when he came through the door. Luong squelched that idea by pointing out that the cadre's wife might have a secret signal to warn her husband not to enter.

Garcia suggested waiting until three in the morning and then, with the assistance of the Army, surrounding the entire hamlet. They could then arrest the men in the morning. Trao said no, he knew of tunnels which had been dug in Viet Minh days that extended for hundreds of yards. It was possible, even probable, that at least one such escape route had been redug and the cordon troops would walk right over the men.

Colucci, who was visiting from his new unit, suggested combining the ideas. He pointed out that the ground around Dong Binh was sandy and a small patrol of good tacticians could move right up to the house and wait for the men, while the Army could ring the hamlet with observation posts and keep a company-sized reaction force ready to cut off escape routes if the small ambush failed.

McGowan borrowed a motor scooter and drove to Army brigade headquarters, where he was warmly received. The operations officers listened attentively to his plan and told him they were more than a bit envious of his information. They kidded him, pointing out that the combined unit was already patrolling a six-square-kilometer area, and now he was proposing to advance their boundary another kilometer, which were the dimensions generally given two rifle companies. Perhaps he intended to patrol all of Chulai eventually? McGowan explained why the 409th was so important to the PFs and to the Marines who had been at the fort the previous September.

“The 409th NVA reinforced the P31st District Force in that attack. Suong and Lee figure the NVA liaison officer who planned that hit is the guy who's coming back tonight. There are a lot of people at the fort who want him, sir,” McGowan said. “They figure they owe him.”

“Well, Mac,” the army operations officer said, “in that case we'd better give you some help. It will be your show, but let us revise a few aspects of this plan, O.K.?”

With the completed plan, McGowan returned to the fort and went over the details with an excited Suong. The two sergeants thought the plan looked good. They could only take the best tacticians in the unit and together selected six Americans and ten PFs, an acknowledgment that several PFs were better than Americans.

They thought security had been tight, with only those selected being briefed. But the next morning when Brown, one of those who had been picked, strolled into the marketplace, a girl asked him why the Marines were not going to ambush in My Hué that night. Flustered, he asked where she had heard the news. She told him her PF boyfriend had just told her. Brown dragged both the girl and the PF back to the fort, where Suong privately questioned the PF. He found out that the PF, a good fighter, just could not resist bragging to his girl and teasing her with his superior knowledge. Suong was furious at the breach of security. The girl said she had told no one else until Brown came along. That Suong did not believe any woman could have done. Still, he decided to stick to the original plan, while holding the girl and the PF at the fort for the day.

An hour after dark on that night of July 24, sixteen men left the fort in two separate patrols. They met again near PF Hill and climbed into the back of a covered Army truck. They drove north through Dong Binh without attracting suspicion, for vehicles passed through dozens of times a day and the brigade that day had ensured that at least one truck rumbled through the hamlet each half-hour. As the truck neared the far outskirts of the hamlet without slowing down, the patrollers jumped out and rolled into the bushes. They lay quiet for a few minutes, then sneaked into the hamlet.

Splitting into teams of three and four, they crawled toward their preassigned ambush spots. The hamlet was not strange to any of them. It held less than fifty houses, almost half of which were strung out along the road. The air hung heavy with heat and thick with the smell of food, and the sweat dropped off the patrollers as they moved on their hands and knees along the hedgerows. The silent sand was their ally, and the teams crept undetected to their ambush sites, where they settled in, prepared to spend all night.

Suong, McGowan and Colucci crawled up to the house of the district committeeman. They heard the woman inside puttering in her kitchen and inched forward until they were at a corner, with a clear view of the short path which ran from the front door to a slatted wooden gate in a high thorn hedge. They sat down, their backs against the wall of the house, and waited.

Within an hour the hamlet had quieted down as most of the children and many of the adults went to bed. After the woman in the house had finished eating and cleaning her dishes, she had blown out her lantern, but McGowan had not heard her climbing into bed and he could imagine her sitting in the dark, waiting. He could only hope that the dark house was not the signal for danger. He did not think so. Their approach, he was convinced, had been utterly silent in the sand. And yet…

At the far end of the hamlet, a dog barked—one uncertain, testing bark; then a series of quick, challenging yips which stopped suddenly, as if his owner had jerked on the rope around the dog's neck and dragged him indoors.

McGowan peered into the blackened face of Colucci, who was leaning forward, genuflecting on his right knee, with his sawed-off pump shotgun balanced across his left thigh. Colucci nodded vigorously to McGowan. Suong, still sitting, was glaring at the hedge as if he thought that, with just a little more concentration, he could stare right through the bramble tangle. On impulse, McGowan pointed at the gate and the three slithered forward until they were right under the hedge. Colucci, being farthest back, wiggled past the other two and snuggled against the hedge on the other side of the gate.

It didn't seem that they waited any more than five minutes before they heard a murmur of voices followed by the slight scuffing of loose pebbles on the hard-packed road and then the men were there, two of them, standing at the gate, chatting, like neighbors on a gentle summer weekend night pausing in the soft dark before going inside to drink a cold beer.

As one of the men fumbled to unlatch the gate, Suong stood up and shot him in the face. The Marines had no warning. He just did it. One small bang from his carbine, no louder than a cheap firecracker, had broken the spell of a peaceful summer evening.

The other man stood frozen for an instant, gaping at Suong and at the black faces of the Americans who had popped up on either side of Suong. For that moment no one fired, and McGowan was sure they had a prisoner. He was still thinking so when the man bolted, turning and running in one blur of motion. Suong, thrusting forward over the gate, sent his shots wild and blocked McGowan out of the action. The man was a second and a step away from a deep drainage ditch and a chance to run a gauntlet of ambushes. But Colucci was raising the shotgun and squeezing the trigger, and the hamlet reverberated with the ugly, final sound, like a sledgehammer on glass.

“Damnit, Suong,” McGowan shouted, “why didn't you wait? Once inside the gate, we could have snatched them. Truoc vao—hang oi.”

Suong did not bother to reply. He had intended from the first to kill the North Vietnamese officer.

The woman from the house ran by them, flung open the gate and knelt beside one of the dead men, keening.

 

A few days later a silver-gray helicopter fluttered down unexpectedly in front of the fort. Two Americans and two Vietnamese men hopped out, all dressed in neat civilian clothes. They were followed by an attractive Vietnamese woman wearing an ao-dai, the graceful pants and gown costume favored for everyday dress in Saigon and in the more prosperous district towns and suburbs. In Binh Nghia the Marines had seen ao-dais only at weddings and funerals, and then only a few.

McGowan received a call from district telling him not to bother the visitors, who worked for the CIA. The unusual entourage strolled into Binh Yen Noi and stayed for three hours, chatting with various people and wandering about the paths. When they were returning to their helicopter, one of the Americans walked over to the fort's gate, where McGowan was sitting.

“Nice village here,” he said.

“We like it,” McGowan replied.

“That feeling seems to be shared by the villagers. We've gathered you get along here. Get much dope on what's going on?”

“Too much,” McGowan laughed. “Most of it's just scuttlebutt. You know, gossip. It's what Nguyen's cousin said his mother-in-law heard when she talked to a fisherman from My Hué.”

“What do you know about taxing?”

“Our acting village chief, Mr. Trao, says his opposite number has a list of who should pay how much. Last month we got the word he was on the trail up by My Hué stopping anybody who came along. Naturally he bugged out before we got there. He'd only been able to shake down a couple of people. They don't tax in this village any more.”

“Why not?”

“We patrol, so it can't be done on a regular basis. The villagers would bitch, we'd get tipped off, and bang!—there go your tax collectors. And if we missed them, the VC families would be forced to make up the losses. These PFs aren't fussing around.”

“Yes,” the man said dryly. “We've noticed…. You are aware that we have special teams trained to do the sort of thing you did the other night? Lee was supposed to report to them, not to you.”

“Sir, that was something personal which goes pretty far back. The PFs wanted that guy bad. So did we. His battalion did a job on this fort once. We owed him.

“I hope you're not thinking of sending any of your people around here. As far as this particular village is concerned, no friendlies come in but us. No Marines, no soldiers, no medcaps. Not anybody. Your special teams will get blown all away to hell if they come sneaking around here. One Marine from a line unit got accidentally killed that way. Nobody from the outside hunts in here. We'd appreciate it if you'd keep your people out. This is our village.”

“Well, it seems a lot of people here agree with you, so I won't argue the point. But aren't your boundaries a bit big?”

“We just sort of go where we have to.”

“All right, I'll pass the word that it's O.K. for Lee to work with you—not that he hasn't been doing so. Good luck, Sergeant.”

Helicopter visitors were not rare. Fort Page was known as the combined unit that wouldn't die. The village had been written about in
Time
magazine, as well as in several books and articles. The fort became a fifteen-minute stopping place for high-ranking commanders and for VIPs on two-week tours of Vietnam.

The Marines and the PFs did not mind. In fact, they were flattered, and McGowan felt it was good for morale for his men and Suong's to see that the top command was personally interested in them, although sometimes McGowan found the interest too personal.

When the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, visited Binh Nghia, he said that as a Navy man he knew little of ground tactics and instead wanted to spend his time questioning the men about their backgrounds and their relationships with the Vietnamese. The men found him easy to talk with, and McGowan regaled the admiral with tales about his father's bar in New York City. Upon his departure, the admiral thanked them for the job they were doing and for their courtesy toward him. He said their parents would be proud of their sons. When the admiral had flown off, McGowan commented to the others, “He was a nice old gent,” and thought no more of the visit.

But the admiral did, and while still in his helicopter he dictated a letter to his aide to be sent to Mrs. McGowan. It was a warm note, expressing the attitude of a father, signed by a four-star admiral with a command of almost a million men. The sergeant himself had not written home in three months, and when the admiral's letter arrived in a stark, official envelope, Mrs. McGowan feared the worst. She could not bring herself to read it. She called her sister, who lived nearby, and asked her to come over.

“Here,” she said, her hands trembling, “you open it. Something's happened to Vinnie. I just know it.”

When her sister read her the letter, they both wept in relief and joy.

Soon afterward McGowan received a blistering note from his father for the anxiety he had caused his mother by not finding the time to write, when Admiral Sharp could.

The Marine generals who visited Binh Nghia were, of course, interested in the nature of the ground combat. Under severe criticism from the Army for wasting manpower in Combined Action Platoons, the Marine command wished to clearly demonstrate the wisdom of combined units. This they were never to do to their own satisfaction, let alone that of the U.S. Army. The combined units seemed too fragile, the American role too temporary, other demands for U.S. manpower too powerful.

Almost all the generals, whether American or Vietnamese, asked the question: What would you do if attacked by a battalion? To McGowan the question was foolish, since anyone surrounded during attack had no option but to fight back. He felt depressed by the question because it indicated there was no history of the fort, that no one knew the combined unit had twice fought a battalion, once failing and once driving their would-be attackers away. And he felt angered because the question implied that combined units working in villages were too vulnerable to be undertaken on a large scale. To McGowan this attitude showed that some of his senior commanders did not understand the nature of the war. There were not enough enemy battalions to be attacking the fort continuously. The Americans who lived in Binh Nghia had grown to understand that the Viet Cong could triumph only if the threat of such an attack cowed the small unit into leaving. The Americans at Fort Page were determined never to leave because of Viet Cong pressure. Partly this was a matter of personal pride, and partly it was a feeling of obligation to the PFs and to the villagers. But McGowan and his men could only vaguely explain to generals and ambassadors what they were doing or why they were proud of it.

The U.S. Army commanders who visited Binh Nghia showed marked reserve in listening to the briefings McGowan and Suong would deliver. They rarely asked a hard or critical question. Regardless of what they believed wrong with allowing Americans to live and work with the Vietnamese, they respected the efforts of the PFs and Marines in Binh Nghia and, with the innate courtesy of the military, would not think of criticizing a sergeant's tactics in order to show disagreement with a general's strategy. In fact, quite the opposite occurred.

During a September visit by General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, McGowan found himself being drawn out on a variety of subjects, ranging from his educational background (high school; no college) to his marital plans (none) to his career plans (none). Before leaving, Johnson offered him a commission as an officer in the United States Army. The sergeant thanked the general and declined the offer. It was not being an officer as opposed to an enlisted man that made him shun a military career. It was not the Army versus the Marines. He did not know what he wanted to do, but he wanted to keep on moving. When he left the village, he would leave military service altogether.

One visitor who did not fall into the easy briefing pattern was General Creighton Abrams. McGowan considered his visit a disaster. The general hopped out of his helicopter, strode into the fort, sat down in front of the briefing map, lit a cigar and fixed McGowan with a steady stare. With easy confidence, the sergeant commenced his routine briefing, describing the physical layout of the village, the nature of the enemy, the sort of contacts encountered. There were several points in the briefing where McGowan had learned to pause, inviting an obvious question from his visitors, one which allowed him to describe a pat anecdote praising either the PFs, the villagers or the Marines. McGowan would repeat this technique until he had said a good word for everyone and used up the fifteen minutes which marked the extent of most VIP visits.

With Abrams, the technique failed, and McGowan's smugness turned to fear. At each pause in the briefing, Abrams said nothing but stared at McGowan intently. The sergeant felt himself growing nervous, stumbling over points and stuttering over words. The briefing ended on a lame note in less than eight minutes. Abrams got up, turned and strode back to his helicopter, having no more time to waste with a nervous, cocky, know-nothing sergeant. McGowan afterward was better able to sympathize with Suong, who stammered and stumbled when called upon to brief Vietnamese VIPs.