The Village (8 page)

“Sullivan hell. I'm going for O'Rourke. You watch those two and don't move.”

As silent as a crab on sand, Riley scurried between the bushes along the bank to the spot where O'Rourke was supposed to be lying. It was empty. This made Riley stop crawling and cast his eyes about frantically for a few seconds until he saw O'Rourke's head and rifle. He crawled on his stomach up the embankment until his face was only inches from O'Rourke's.

“They're out there,” he hissed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

By way of reply, O'Rourke only smiled and held up a grenade. By now the other patrollers were crawling in toward the lieutenant, having seen Riley slip by. The activity among the patrollers alerted the two infiltrators, who froze among the shrubs. Blending with the dark shadows, they waited for the moment of danger to pass.

“Let me throw the grenade,” Riley whispered.

“No,” O'Rourke whispered. “Let them get closer.”

“Aw, come on. I spotted them. Let me throw.”

“All right. But let them move in first, so we don't miss.”

Riley put down his rifle and picked up the grenade, holding it in his right hand and hooking his left forefinger through the pull loop. O'Rourke squirmed to snuggle his stock into his shoulder and placed his cheek along the wood of the receiver. They waited. Several minutes eased by.

Then, either having decided they had been detected or thinking better of their chilling game, the two shadows moved, fast and away. Riley responded while the two Viet Cong were still getting to their knees in preparation for their sprint to the rear. He jumped to his feet, jerked the pin and flung the grenade with the body motion of a javelin thrower. The Viet Cong were running at a diagonal to the Marines and Riley's excited throw carried the grenade right over the heads of the runners. O'Rourke let loose a long burst of tracers at the fleeing figures, and in three seconds it was over, with nothing to shoot at except blackness and the fading sound of fast feet.

“Damn,” O'Rourke said. “I wanted them.”

And with that he was off, weaving like the halfback he once had been, rifle held high, moving forward at a driving run to close behind the Viet Cong and cut them down. Sullivan up and moving. Then Riley. O'Rourke out fifty yards, seventy-five, one hundred. Down flat at a dike, rifle on bipods in front of him. Searching, listening, straining.

Nothing. Nothing but the hoarseness of his own breath and the pounding strides of the others coming up behind him. Sullivan flopped down, followed by Riley. All listened for a moment before admitting that the Viet Cong were gone.

“I think I hit one,” Riley said.

“You mean you might have brushed one with that fast-ball of yours,” O'Rourke replied. “The idea was to blow them up, not set a world's record for the longest grenade throw.”

“Sorry, I got a little excited.”

“No big thing. This ambush was compromised long before we got here. The VC were playing with us. We're just going to have to think these things through more. It's going to take more planning. Let's head back in.”

When they returned to the fort, the Marine sentry yelled to Sullivan, “Battalion wants the report, ASAP, Sarge.”

O'Rourke, distinctly out of spirits, said, “Let me have that damn thing. Horse Three, Horse Three, this is Charlie Five. Saw two VC, threw one grenade and fired sixty rounds. No friendly casualties. No enemy casualties. Over.”

The radio sputtered.

“Horse Three, I told you what I saw. You can do what you want with it. Over.”

The radio sputtered again.

“Aye-aye, sir. Out.”

Garcia spoke up. “What did battalion want, Lieutenant?”

“They're claiming one VC probably killed and one wounded,” O'Rourke replied. “The operations officer said no Marine can fire sixty shots at an enemy and miss.”

By August the twelve Marines had engaged in seventy firefights and their dress reflected the experience they had gained. Brannon and several others bought camouflage uniforms sewn skin-tight so when they walked down a black trail their passage would not be betrayed by the swish-swish of pants' legs rubbing together. Sueter took to wearing black-and-green-striped shorts and a green T-shirt, paying in mosquito bites for his silent passage. Lummis favored Levi's and sneakers. Although no American could match Luong, who went barefoot whenever he had point, the Marines were improving. From the start, the Marines could shoot better than the Viet Cong. Long hours on the ranges of boot camp under the tutelage of stern drill instructors had seen to that. And after hundreds of patrols in the village the Marines were learning to move as well as the Viet Cong. The wish to keep on living was seeing to that.

Staying alive was a matter of minimizing one's own mistakes while capitalizing upon those of the opponent. Plus a little bit of luck and much common sense. Like the night O'Rourke tried to force the Viet Cong into error. He had a simple plan.

“Sullivan,” he said, “I'll go out first by the main trail and set in near the market. You give me a fifteen-minute head start, then take the back trail up to the dunes. With both entrances to Binh Yen Noi covered, we stand a good chance the Cong will be tipped off about at least one ambush. If they are, they'll move in right by the other one. When you get into position, fire a green flare. That way the Cong will think you're coming back in, but I'll know you're in position and it's safe to fire at anyone moving.”

O'Rourke took Lummis, Fleming and two PFs and left the fort shortly after dark. The night was cloudy and the shade trees lining the trail beyond the marketplace cast the path in such pitch blackness that O'Rourke set his men in less than a foot from the trail. Lying on their stomachs, they waited, watching the skyline for the signal flare.

Fifteen minutes passed. A half-hour—forty-five minutes. No flare. An hour slid by. Thinking Sullivan had miscued, O'Rourke's exasperation grew to anger. He and his men would be forced to be in position all night, fighting off sleep and the mosquitoes, yet unable to fire even if they saw somebody.

He was bitterly musing on the stupidity of his position when the first of the patrol walked by. The man came silently up the soft trail and was standing directly above O'Rourke before the lieutenant heard him. Then he was so close that O'Rourke, looking up, could see his silhouette. He seemed too tall for a PF, and O'Rourke guessed Sullivan's delay had been caused by putting a Marine at point, who had become lost. The man glided cautiously on, and his place was taken by another figure, in turn replaced by a third. As the patrol passed, O'Rourke could easily hear the jangle of equipment loosely strapped to web gear, and such sloppiness increased his anger against the lost patrol. The patrollers were letting their point man do all the work. The others were just bumping along behind, making no special effort to be quiet. Not only that, but O'Rourke counted ten men and he had asked Sullivan to take out no more than six.

The last man in the patrol stopped to let out a smothered cough, his feet not a foot from O'Rourke's face. O'Rourke had a strong urge to reach out, grab the Marine by his ankles, throw him to the ground and show Sullivan's entire patrol how heedless their passage had been. Only the fear that the Marine might shoot as he fell held O'Rourke back from tripping him.

The patrol passed on and O'Rourke waited for the green flare. Waited. And waited. No flare came that night, and at dawn O'Rourke led four furious and frustrated patrollers back to the fort. It was not yet six in the morning when he kicked open the door to Sullivan's private sleeping quarters and shook him awake.

“Sullivan,” he said, “you're lucky I didn't kill you last night when you led that herd through the marketplace. And why the hell didn't you fire your flare afterward? My people were almost eaten alive waiting for seven hours because you screwed up.”

Sullivan sat up on the edge of his cot and slowly rubbed the sleep from his eyes, while he tried to concentrate on what O'Rourke had said. At length, he replied:

“Sir, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I never left this fort last night. I found we were out of green flares. You didn't have a radio and I wasn't about to go poking around the market looking for you. So I canceled the patrol.

“I don't know who you saw out there, but they sure as hell weren't Marines.”

O'Rourke next awoke Thanh and Phuoc, and told them of his brush with the strange and well-armed patrol. They promised to investigate and O'Rourke went off to sleep. By noon the heat and the noise inside the fort had dragged him reluctantly awake, and he listened drowsily to the police reports. Several villagers had given a similar report: an enemy main-force unit had come across the river from the Phu Longs and entered Binh Yen Noi. One housewife swore they spoke with North Vietnamese accents.

The rumor upset the PFs, who were not sure how they should react to the news. Even Luong seemed uncertain and looked to the Marines for tactical advice. The Marines were less concerned because they had fought against North Vietnamese units several times before coming to the village and all were convinced that the Viet Cong made the more dangerous adversary on patrols in the hamlets. The North Vietnamese moved and fought in platoon-, company- and battalion-sized units, unsuited for the village war because they could easily be detected. The Marines doubted that the North Vietnamese would risk crossing from the Phu Longs in larger than squad size, since they would have to risk being trapped against the river with no route of retreat if they were spotted and a large U.S. unit was called in.

O'Rourke was particularly determined to persist in small-unit patrolling, despite the lingering doubts of some PFs and some Americans. Fielder, Sullivan's dependable second-in-command, shared O'Rourke's outlook and volunteered to take the first patrol out the next night. Fielder asked Suong to select two PFs who needed training to accompany him. He took only one other American—Combat Culver, who constantly gambled away his pay and tried to duck out of routine garrison chores, but who seemed afraid of nothing. Culver's trouble was that once he became engaged, he grew so absorbed in the battle that he forgot to think and had no feeling for when he was overmatched and it was time to withdraw. So Fielder put him at rear guard, posted a PF at point and left the fort slightly before nine in the evening.

The night was heavily overcast, with a rain falling so softly that the drops on the leaves did not interfere with the hearing of the patrollers. The low clouds shrouded the hamlet in dark gloom, and only years of familiarity with the trails permitted the PF at point to walk at a steady pace. Fielder, as second man, followed by keeping close enough to listen to the hoarse breathing of the PF, who seemed to require more air to breathe the deeper they moved into the hamlet. Culver, listening rearward at each dozen steps, kept falling behind and losing contact, then groping his way forward like a blind man until he bumped into the others. After being momentarily left behind for the third time, Culver's temper snapped and he broke the silence.

“Tell that damn point to slow it down,” he hissed. “We're not trying to set any track records.”

The request had the opposite effect. Noting that the Marines were tense, the point man became more fearful and sped off at a fast walk, as if he thought he could outrun the blackness which encloaked him. Not a light from a house shone as they hurried on, and the early evening chatter which usually floated from the homes was missing. The patrollers moved through a black and silent hamlet, sure sign that the enemy had come that way before them and that the villagers, anticipating a firefight, had all scrambled into their family bunkers—large, thick mounds of earth with a hollow center found beside or within each house in the village.

Suddenly the point stopped so quickly that Fielder bumped up against him. The path in front of them was piled high with dry brush, thorns and vines, a flimsy barricade blocking the path, with no way to step through or remove the tangle without making enough noise to alert anyone waiting on the other side.

“VC…VC,” the PF at point kept insisting, “VC.”

The blocked trail was a standard means the Viet Cong had of signaling that they were in the hamlet and did not want to be disturbed. Assuming PF compliance, it was a means whereby the enemy could avoid an unwanted engagement. Unsure of the situation, Fielder looked to the PFs.

“No go…no go,” they said. “Beaucoup VC…beaucoup VC.”

The brush could have been thrown across the trail by two local guerrillas who wanted to visit their wives, or it could be a challenge to lure the Marines into bulling their way ahead to where a main-force ambush waited.

“Let's go on,” Culver whispered. “We don't need them.”

Fielder was not so sure. One of the few Marines who was married, he had a wife and baby waiting at home for him. He exercised a high degree of common sense which had won him the respect of the more reckless Marines.

“We'd get lost in there in a minute,” he replied to Culver. “And it's for sure the PFs won't go with us. Let's go back. It's not worth it.”

“O.K.”

With obvious relief, the PFs hastened back to the fort. The Marines dawdled, knowing they had to face Sullivan. They arrived at the fort several minutes after the PFs.

“What do you mean you thought you'd get lost?” Sullivan yelled. “We have to show these people there is no place we won't go. No place. If they think there are Cong out there, then we go out—especially if the PFs want to come in.”

“We don't go with people too scared to shoot, Sergeant,” O'Rourke interrupted. “Fielder was right in coming in. Now let's take some shooters and get back out there.”

Within ten minutes, a new patrol left the gate. Riley had point, followed by Fielder, O'Rourke and Sullivan, with Garcia at rear guard. They moved back toward the barricaded path at a snail's pace, taking an hour to cover a quarter of a mile. When they were almost to the barricade, the clouds opened without warning. One moment there was a slight mist, and the next the rain was falling in thick, heavy sheets and the dirt path swelled into a small stream and the rush of the falling rain made it necessary for O'Rourke to talk to Riley in a normal voice.

“In this stuff we don't have to sweat our noise,” he said, “so move out and let's get up that blocked path before it stops.”

Within a few minutes they were at the spot where the previous patrol had turned back, and already the waters had washed away the flimsy brush barricade. The patrol did not stop, but moved on up the trail, each man straining to see in the dark and hear in the rain. Not one seeing or hearing anything. Too quickly, it seemed, they were through the hamlet and out on the open sands.

“If they were in there,” Garcia said, “I bet they ducked into a house. I don't think they think we'd come back a second time in this stuff.”

“Let's head for the front of the ville,” Sullivan suggested. “We may catch them going back across the river.”

The patrollers cut due east, moving quickly under cover of the rain, relying on Riley's eyes to alert them against any enemy traveling toward them. Within fifteen minutes they had covered a half-mile, stopping briefly when they hit the main trail just below the marketplace.

“Straight ahead to Top's house,” Sullivan said, “then hang a right and follow the river bank to the big coconut tree.”

As they moved forward, the rain slackened and soon petered out altogether, passing as quickly as it had started. The patrollers walked across the paddy dike in front of Missy Top's, their boots sticking in the mud and giving off a slurping sound with each step. While on the dike they could see each other plainly, but once on the other side, the small bush-lined path between the houses was black and they had to grope their way forward. They knew the area well, however, and none had trouble. The sounds of the suction between boots and mud being broken kept each patroller informed of the whereabouts of the others. Slurp, slurp, slurp, they went up the trail. In contrast to the tension and silence of the earlier part of the evening, the sound struck Fielder as comical, and he started to giggle. From the houses came subdued chattering and chinks of light. Evidently the villagers had no reason to believe the Viet Cong were in their section of the hamlet. In nervous relief, Garcia joined Fielder in giggling. Slurp, slurp, slurp. Next, amusement at the absurdity of the evening spread to Sullivan, then to O'Rourke, and soon all four were giggling. Back from point slurped an annoyed Riley.

“Will you guys knock it off?” he whispered. “It's bad enough up front without a bunch of girls behind me.”

“Sorry, Rile,” O'Rourke whispered.

“The Cong aren't around here, Rile,” Fielder whispered. “Look at the houses. And God knows if they're here, they've sure as hell heard us coming.”

“We're here anyway,” Sullivan whispered. “Let's set in on the river edge of the clearing.”

Cautiously they moved across a small clearing about thirty feet wide and marked by a tall coconut tree on the river bank. Out of habit, they checked around the houses on either side of the clearing. One house seemed normal. But as they approached the other, a small dog tethered to the front door started yapping, only to be screeched into silence by a sharp tug on the rope around his neck as an occupant of the house opened the door and dragged him inside. Probing around the house, Garcia nearly stumbled over a man sleeping in a pile of wet hay next to the water's edge. He was snoring quite loudly. Garcia walked over and stood looking down at him. He was soon joined by the outer patrollers.