The Village (7 page)

A few nights later Brannon wanted to return to the graveyard where Khoi had been killed. Returning from two successive patrols, he thought he had seen movement in that area. Sullivan agreed to take a look and told Faircloth to bring his LAWs and join them. The sharp-eyed Riley volunteered, as did Luong. The sixth member of the patrol was PFC Fleming, dressed in his black outfit.

At midnight the patrollers went out through the squeaking gates and past the clattering beaters. They followed the trail for a few hundred yards before cutting right and tiptoeing along a paddy dike. Several times a patroller slipped off and splashed noisily into the paddy. To Luong and Brannon, running a tandem point, the splashes had the effect of fingernails being screeched along a blackboard.

“Nobody here but us Cong, Luong,” Brannon hissed.

When they reached the burial mounds, the patrollers spread out in line, slipped off their rifle safeties, and in crouching postures slowly advanced. In less than a minute Luong was satisfied they were alone in the graveyard, and to communicate that fact he audibly snapped the safety of his M-1 back on and stood erect with the weapon over his shoulder, muzzle first. Exasperated, Sullivan insisted the Marines keep searching for another five minutes before acknowledging that Luong's judgment was correct.

The graveyard had been dug outside the Binh Yen Noi hamlet in a marshy corner between the Tra Bong River, which ran north from the district town, and a tributary stream which ran east past the fort. At the intersection of the streams, fishermen had built bamboo fish weirs. From the graveyard, three lighted lanterns were visible in the vicinity of the weirs. Although night lights on the river were forbidden since they could serve as beacons for the Viet Cong, some stubborn fishermen persisted and the PFs, knowing the economic necessity of night fishing, refused to enforce the order.

“As long as we're here,” Sullivan whispered, “why don't we watch those lights for a while?”

The patrollers settled in behind the gravestones. If the Viet Cong tried to move up the tributary, they would have to pass through the weirs.

After an hour of waiting, the patrol was alerted by the disturbed squawkings of ducks and geese. Also hearing the geese, the tender of the lanterns on the weirs juggled and moved the lights. Next a light shone through a clump of bushes on the far bank and the Marines heard the dull sound of wood scraping against wood.

“They're carrying a boat over the fish traps,” Sullivan whispered.

Riley had been watching to the rear.

“There's someone moving in on our right flank,” he whispered.

“Cut him off,” Sullivan hissed.

Riley and Brannon moved down the bank to prevent an enemy probe.

Faircloth was listening to the paddle splashes near the fish traps.

“I think I can hit that next boat when they climb the traps,” he whispered, clutching his LAW.

“Go ahead,” Sullivan replied.

Faircloth knelt on his left knee. He placed the short fiberglass tube on his right shoulder. The tube wavered up and down, then steadied. He squeezed the lever. Flame spurted from both ends. One hundred yards away there was a bright flash. The Marines started sweeping the river with automatic-rifle fire. Riley emptied a magazine into the bushes along the bank to his right. Overhead, a mortar flare blossomed.

“There they are,” Riley shouted.

The firing caught two Viet Cong in a round wicker-basket boat trying to cross the river behind the fish traps. In the sudden light, they were easy targets. They dove overboard as Riley and Brannon opened fire. The tracers ripped through the boat and whipped the water. Standing on the bank, the two Marines changed magazines and waited to see if the Viet Cong would resurface. They did not. The light boat rocked to and fro. The surface of the river was calm and shone brightly under the flare.

“I guess that's that,” Riley said.

Brannon did not have a chance to reply. Bullets hummed between them. Both were diving off the bank before they heard the sound of the machine gun. They sprawled in the rice mud behind the paddy dike. Without lifting his head, Riley yelled, “It's coming from the other side. They've got us spotted. Get them off us.”

To the Marines crouching fifty yards away, the acrobatics had provided an interesting spectacle. Since their main position had not been seen by the Viet Cong, they were not under fire. Not wishing to expose their position by chancing a random burst of small-arms fire at the machine gun, Sullivan's group took their time preparing to open fire.

Faircloth extended another LAW. He gauged the distance at one hundred yards, under good lighting from the mortar illumination. Having hit point targets at two hundred yards, Faircloth was confident. He sighted in, then paused.

“So that's what they were doing in those bushes with a light. Setting up a gun to cover their movement,” he said, as if discussing a subject of purely academic interest.

“Come on, come on,” Sullivan replied, before yelling to Riley and Brannon: “You two just stay put.”

“I don't believe it,” Riley groaned. “Will you guys fire?”

Faircloth fired. The explosion was muffled by the bushes. The chatter of the machine gun stopped.

“You two dingers can come home now,” laughed Sullivan.

Crouching low, the two Marines trotted in from the flank. The patrollers formed a hasty circular perimeter, lay down and waited to trap any infiltrator who might have crept close during the firing. The last flare hissed out. For ten minutes they lay still, listening. They could detect no human movement.

Then from the weirs came a deep groan which floated across the waters like a distant ship's foghorn.

“My God,” Brannon said, “they're rising from the dead.”

“We'll see about that,” Fleming replied, squirming to bring his weapon into a steady position. “Let's see how long the dead can swim with an assful of lead.”

The groan turned into a cry like a dog wailing, then the wail stopped, to be replaced by a few words: “Nghia Quan—dung ban.”

At the words, Luong who had also been waiting to shoot, jerked up and said urgently: “No shoot, no shoot. No VC. No VC.”

Fleming relaxed his firing position as Luong walked to the water's edge and shouted. Out of the darkness a trembling voice responded. Luong shouted again, giving instructions. His voice was followed by the sounds of someone half-tripping over the wooden weirs, half-splashing in the water. A few minutes later a figure appeared waist-deep in the black water, hobbling painfully toward the shore, jabbering nervously all the while. It was a thin old man, clad only in tattered shorts. His body was lean and taut with lumpy, vein-striped muscles formed by decades of hard work. One calf was gashed and blood was streaming down his foot.

Luong knelt and peered at the wound under the feeble rays of a flashlight. Satisfied with the examination, he slapped the man encouragingly on his trembling thigh and swiftly bound the wound.

“That's a million-dollar wound the old man has,” Brannon said. “Someone should shoot me like that so I can go home.”

With Luong supporting the injured man, the patrol returned to the fort, where Sueter, the Navy corpsman, attended the fisherman. A tall, relaxed young man with a friendly bedside manner, Sueter laughed as the old man, who enjoyed being the center of attention, insisted on showing him how he wanted the bandage wrapped.

“It's a clean wound,” Sueter said. “If he'd keep it dry, it would heal in a couple of weeks, but I know he'll be out on the river again tomorrow night.”

“Not if Thanh has anything to say about it,” Sullivan replied.

With his wound tended to, the old man had begun to scold the PFs, many of whose fathers he knew, for allowing the Americans to fire at the Viet Cong as they were crossing his fish traps.

But when Thanh stood before him, the old man stopped talking. As were some of his Viet Cong counterparts, Thanh was a fanatic. He pursued his cause of anti-Communism with the divine absolutism which characterized religious excesses in the Middle Ages. To him torture was a methodological problem, not a moral dilemma.

Softly the police chief began asking questions, abruptly dismissing many of the old man's faltering replies with a wag of his hand, as though he were brushing aside frost on a window, the better to see in. The old man talked and talked and talked, and Thanh listened and looked and probed. The others sat and listened, the Marines bored and yawning at what they could not understand, the PFs listening carefully and murmuring to each other.

The old man described the enemy troops who had crossed his fishing weirs. His description confirmed the report that the politician Phuoc had given to Lam a few weeks earlier: VC district force troops were moving into the village nightly to attack the combined unit. The district Party committee had agreed to devote a priority effort to its neutralization or destruction. Binh Nghia would be controlled by the Party.

Thanh told the old man to go home in the morning and to spread the word that the old ways were finished. The enemy's use of the villagers as signalers and porters must stop. A villager could continue to work for the Viet Cong, but he was now put on notice that the penalty could be death, as the Marines were instructed to shoot at anyone moving outside his house after curfew. There was no way the Marines could tell in the dark whether a person was a Viet Cong or a farmer forced to help the enemy that night. Thanh believed that the accommodation between the Viet Cong and most of the villagers was based, not upon political ideology, but upon the villagers'sense of self-preservation. The Viet Cong were stronger than the PFs, and it was wiser to obey the stronger side. He wished to upset that accommodation by weighing in with an outside force which posed the ultimate threat—that of death—to a villager who undertook the simplest act to help the Viet Cong, such as carrying a sack of rice or waving a lantern.

Thanh was partially bluffing. If a villager could be identified, as was the old fisherman, he would not be jailed, let alone executed, provided the police and the PFs believed he had been impressed into service by the Viet Cong. The villagers knew that once they could talk to the PFs, they would be safe. But Thanh was pointing out that there was little chance of talking with one of the American night patrols. For carrying a sack of rice, a man could die, not because the Americans wanted to kill him, but because they could not tell him from a Viet Cong in the dark of night.

The Viet Cong could not match that threat. For them to deliberately kill a villager who refused porter or signaling service would expose their own families to retribution. The choice was up to the villagers, and much depended on how active and aggressive they judged the night patrols to be.

Night after night three or four patrols went out, and night after night one or more of them made contact with the enemy. Each contact required a situation report, and every situation report was briefed to the generals at division and corps level. By mid-July, Fort Page was known throughout the high command as the scene of more night action than any other village in I Corps, and I Corps was the most violent area in Vietnam. Its reputation for contact was making the fort a celebrity stop, and in late July Marine headquarters wrote a capsulized history of the unit to pass out to high-ranking officers and visiting members of the press. The handout read in part:

Not all Americans shared that euphoric belief. The district adviser, Major Braun, was concerned with reports that as the Marines at the fort became more proficient in patrolling, they tended to shoulder more tactical responsibilities and to shove the PFs and even the police aside. Acting on Braun's concern, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel John S. Woods, sent a lieutenant named Thomas J. O'Rourke to the combined unit. Ostensibly, O'Rourke would be in Binh Nghia to give tactical advice to Sullivan, not to command the Marines. Unofficially, Woods wanted O'Rourke to convince Sullivan and the others to work with the PFs and to make a report on the real situation in the village.

O'Rourke was readily accepted by the men. As the executive officer of Charlie Company, the unit which sat on the dunes behind Binh Nghia, he had known the Marines before they had volunteered for their independent duty. He had a reputation for tactical shrewdness, acquired by two years of infantry work in Southeast Asia. A former college halfback, O'Rourke was muscular and well coordinated, and in the field he pushed hard and insisted that his men sweat rather than take the obvious paths. But when not in combat he mixed easily with his men and could laugh at a joke about himself.

The night of his arrival, he decided to tag along on the patrol Sullivan was leading. Nguyen Suong, the quiet PF with the gold front tooth, assigned the PFs while Sullivan selected the Marines. But when Suong called to one Vietnamese, Sullivan interrupted.

“Him number ten with Marines, Mr. Suong,” Sullivan said. “Him no go with Marines.”

“O.K.,” Suong replied.

“What's the matter with him?” O'Rourke asked.

“Last night he was at point,” Sullivan replied, “and he suddenly yelled ‘VC, VC!' hit the deck and started blasting some bushes. So the Marines started firing too, including a machine gun and an M-79. After we had burned off a couple of hundred rounds, that idiot got up laughing and said ‘No VC.' He pulled the stunt because he was tired of the patrol and wanted to go in.”

“Is that all a PF has to do to avoid patrolling?”

“What else can we do?”

“Let's bring him and take along a tough PF who'll smack him if he goofs off. A couple of hours of sweating at point and he'll think twice about pulling a smart-ass stunt again.”

“All right.”

Suong was pleased by the reconsideration, since it would help him with discipline among the PFs. The reluctant patroller, whose name was Tam, was placed at point and O'Rourke took up a position right behind him, followed by Suong and Sullivan and several others. The patrol plan was to take the main trail into the Binh Yen Noi hamlets, past the market and on to an ambush site along the river.

In the open paddies just outside the fort, Tam moved slowly, giving each patroller time to shake down his equipment and adjust it against various squeaks and rattles. But when he entered the blackness of Binh Yen Noi, Tam quickened his pace, seeking to escape the dark by running away. O'Rourke, holding to a slow tread, let him go. Tam did not go far. Within a minute he had scurried back to the cautious O'Rourke, frantically gesturing to him to walk faster. O'Rourke slowed down even more. For a few seconds, Tam stood rooted, terror telling him to flee that dark place, the shame of flight tying his feet. As the patrol fled past him, he made up his mind, and jumped into line just behind O'Rourke, giving the Marine the point position.

From inside a house, the sound of forced coughing reached the Marines. The patrol stopped. The coughing stopped. The patrol proceeded. The coughing started again.

O'Rourke stopped and turned to Tam, who shook his head and tried to push the lieutenant forward. The rest of the patrol came up and clustered around. The man coughed again, loudly, persistently.

“What do you think?” O'Rourke whispered, addressing no one in particular.

Suong spoke up, making no attempt to keep his voice low, acknowledging the patrol's presence had been signaled.

“Yes, yes. Very bad man. Number ten. Him warn VC.”

“Let's take him in,” O'Rourke said, gesturing as though he were grabbing the man.

“No,” said Suong. “No good.”

Tam nodded his head vigorously.

“That guy must have some clout if Thanh can't touch him,” Sullivan said.

“Well, we'll make him a believer,” O'Rourke said. “We'll put the fear of God into him, then he won't be so quick to spy on us next time.”

Three Marines converged on the house, led by Lance Corporal Robert Bettie, a tall, tough young man with a calm, self-contained manner. Bettie entered through the open front door. Inside the man calmly stood waiting. When Bettie hesitated for a moment, uncertain what to do next, the man spat out a window. Bettie swung, hitting the man in the face and knocking him down. He put his rifle muzzle on the man's chest.

“When Marines pass, you no talk, you no cough.” Bettie made a loud false coughing sound. “You no warn VC no more. I come back sometime. I see.”

It was doubtful if the man understood one word, but the message was clear. Bettie walked out of the house. Suong, who had been peeking in the doorway, was laughing.

Then ahead of them rang out four or five quick, insistent clangs from a metal gong, and the heavy tone rolled through the hamlet.

“I don't believe that,” O'Rourke groaned. “Next, they'll be using sirens.”

He paused, then: “Let's move.”

“Still?” Riley asked.

“What did we come out here for?”

“Let me check with Top,” Riley said. “She'll know if the Cong are in here.”

“Good idea,” said Sullivan.

Riley took point and led them down a side path toward the river, then turned left and crossed a paddy dike to enter a copse sheltering seven or eight houses. He walked up close to the house nearest the paddies and called in a low voice, “Missy Top? Missy Top?”

Vinh Thi Top was a cute eighteen-year-old girl with a pert manner and a quick smile. She had a full, well-shaped figure and often wore tight pants and a light, white cotton shirt. She never wore a bra and she loved to flirt and tease. Almost daily a half-dozen PFs and Marines swarmed around her house and her mother was quick to profit from her daughter's popularity. Top offered to do the laundry of those Marines who liked to hang around her house drinking beer and eating fresh peanuts. It was the mother who did most of the washing and pocketed most of the money, but everyone was satisfied with the arrangement.

Top made some extra money through sex, but she would go to bed only with men she liked and when she felt like it and asked no fixed price. She took what was offered more as a gift than as payment and sometimes a week or two would go by when she would sleep with no one. Any Marine was at a disadvantage in the competition for her favors, since he had to coax her to bed during the daytime, when it was hot and sticky, and the children were running about shouting and screaming, and no room had a lock and the PFs and other Marines always tried to peek in and watch and laugh. In that environment sex was limited, but the Americans liked to visit the homes of Top and other young girls anyway, just for the companionship and the escape it provided from the war which washed over the village at dark.

Top was one of the few villagers openly defiant of the Viet Cong. When she was fifteen, she had been kidnaped by the VC and forced to perform nursing duties in a hospital far back in the mountains. After several months, she escaped, only to be recaptured when she was within two miles of her house. But she persuaded her two guards to let her go before they had walked her back to the hospital. The district committee later punished the guards for immoral actions and ordered Top seized and returned to the hospital. But she proved too elusive. She never slept at home, and changed residence every night. Sometimes she would wait until dark before slipping into a friend's house, and the dusk patrol often passed through her front yard on the off-chance that she would still be home. If she was, she would whisper to them what she had heard passed from house to house about VC movements that night. It was an information technique the Marines had learned from the PFs, who had several such contacts in each hamlet.

Now at Top's house, Riley kept calling, “Top? Top?” while O'Rourke and the other patrollers stood back in the shadows and kept watch. Eventually, the thatched door to the house swung up and outward like a garage door and Top stepped outside.

“VC come, VC come,” she said, pointing toward the marketplace. She placed her hand affectionately on Riley's arm, gestured to him not to shoot her, giggled and darted into the darkness down the path.

The patrol turned back toward the market. To get there they again had to silhouette themselves on the long paddy dike. They went across the open space at a jangling trot, forsaking quiet to regain some concealment.

Safeties off, they walked slowly up the trail, and when they reached the wide market, they spread out on line and gingerly moved across, ducking between the empty stalls, fingers on triggers, tense, waiting, expecting from somewhere a burst of fire or a hurled grenade.

Nothing. Through the marketplace, back into the dark, narrow trail, up through the hamlet and out into paddies. Nothing. Across a dry paddy and into the scrub growth along the river bank. Nothing.

O'Rourke was tense.

“Relax, Lieutenant,” Sullivan whispered. “These people are always imagining there are Cong all over the place. All we have to do is watch the river.”

Sullivan placed the men on line facing the water and motioned them to spread out and lie down. The night was dark with clouds and a boat could have passed by seventy yards from them without being seen. From the sounds, it was obvious that Viet Cong were on the river and on the far bank. The noise of loud splashes, as if someone had slipped off the bank, reached them and occasionally they heard the dull thunk of boat wood. Still, they saw no movement. One hour passed. Two hours. No one could pick up a definite target. Even Riley, squinting and bobbing his head, could not make out the boats he could hear moving in the shadow of the far bank.

Alone among the patrollers, O'Rourke had no concern with the river traffic. Worried about their rear, he had crawled forward to the river's edge, slowly pulled his body over the bank, twisted around and, half-lying and half-standing, set the bipods of his automatic rifle facing back across the paddy in the direction from which the patrol had come. Despite himself, twice he dozed off for a few seconds, lying in the soft, yielding mud with his head resting on his crossed arms. Each time he awoke in fear, imagining that a Viet Cong was standing just above him, about to shoot.

The second time he came awake, he peered at the shrubs along the trail with ferocious concentration, trying to squeeze the sleep from his brain. The harder he stared, the more he was certain two of the clumps were moving, yet so slowly that it was like watching the minute hand on a watch. So he fixed in his mind the location of the two objects, closed his eyes and held absolutely still for half a minute. When he reopened his eyes, the dark shadows were not where he had fixed them to be.

He looked around and saw none of the other patrollers. He had told no one he was shifting to stake out their rear, and now watching the slow stalk of the enemy, he felt more aggravated than afraid. The enemy was still over fifty yards from the patrol line, but if he fired, his tracers would pass by the unsuspecting Marines and they might fire back at him.

Riley solved his dilemma. Alerted by instinct, he had turned his attention from the river to look back over his shoulder. His eyes had immediately picked out the infiltrators and he glanced around to see if the other patrollers had spotted them. He could see only PFC Guadalupe Garcia, a shy, soft-spoken young Marine who was immensely popular with the Vietnamese. Riley crawled over to him.

“Lupe,” he whispered, “they're behind us.”

“I thought I saw something move back there about a half-hour ago,” Garcia whispered in reply.

Both men rolled onto their backs and looked past their feet toward the paddy and the bush-bordered main trail.

“See them?” Riley whispered. To him the prone figures were easily distinguishable from the other shadows.

Garcia squinted and strained for several seconds before responding by holding up two fingers next to Riley's cheek.

“Yeh,” Riley whispered.

“Better tell Sullivan.”