Before him the men passed by, no more than ten feet away, sliding effortlessly through the foliage and the undergrowth. He could smell them before he could see them. They had the odor of fish and rice, for that was what they ate. They were small, bandy-legged guys, the pros of the army of the Republic of North Vietnam, a point man, a squad leader, a squad in file picking its way carefully through the jungle high above the last path, twelve of them. They were bent forward under beige rain capes and wore regulation dark green uniforms, those absurd pith helmets, and carried AK47s and complete combat gear—packs, canteens and bayonets. Three or four of them wore RPG-40s, the hellish rocket grenades, strapped to their backs.
He had never been so close to the actual enemy; they seemed almost magical, or mythological, somehow, the phantoms of so many nightmares at last given flesh. They terrified him. If he moved or coughed, it was over: they’d turn and fire, whole minutes before he could get his M14 into action. He had a bad thought of himself dying up here at the hands of these tough little monkey-men sliding so confidently through the rain and the jungle that were exhausting him.
Almost as if one were talking to him, he heard the silence breaking a few feet away.
“Ăhn ỏi, mủa nhiêu qúa?”
“Phâi roi, chăc không có ngủỏi mỹ dêm naỳ,” came the buddy’s bitter answer, both voices propelled by the explosive lung energy of Vietnamese, so foreign to American ears and which sounded almost like belches.
“Bíhn sĩ ôi, dung nôi, nghê,” came a sharp cry from the head of the unit, a sergeant, the same the world over and whatever the army, clamping down on his naughty grunts.
The patrol moved slowly along in the dying light and the falling rain, then slowly disappeared around a bend in the slope. But Bob held Donny still for a good ten minutes before giving the okay, excruciating seconds of deathlike stillness in the cold and wet, which cramped the muscles and hurt the brain. But at last Bob motioned, and he slowly uncoiled and began to move up again.
Gradually Bob navigated his way over.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. How the hell did you see them?”
“The point man’s canteen jingled against his bayonet. I heard it, that’s all. Luck, man; it’s better to be lucky than good.”
“Who were they?”
“That’s flank security from a main force battalion. That means we’re getting close. They put out security teams when they move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the Number Three Battalion. I don’t know what regiment or nothing, but I think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division. Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so after tomorrow.”
“Is this some big offensive?”
“There’s several newly Vietnamized units there; it’d do ’em a lot of good to kick all that ARVN ass.”
“Great. I wonder what they were saying.”
“The first one says, Man, it’s raining like shit, and his buddy says, Ain’t no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back, Hey, you guys, shut up and keep moving.”
“You speak Vietnamese?” Donny said in wonderment.
“Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let’s get out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow. We kick butt and take names. You bet on it, Marine.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were pounding the shit out of them so that he couldn’t maneuver, and that main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he’d sent out Matthews with a four-man assault unit to take out the mortars and Matthews hadn’t come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way back to Korea, had done everything—gone!
The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller’s angry, angry brain.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Goddamn them, this wasn’t supposed to be happening.
Kham Duc was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn’t even bother with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he was up against hundreds, maybe thousands. And where the hell had this weather come from and how fast could this big-ass, tough-as-shit battalion get down here?
Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us.
Puller’s antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th Infantry Division, Fifth People’s Shock Army. Puller had seen his picture, knew his résumé: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo-French family and even a graduate of the École Militaire in Paris before deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of the Diem regime, he had become one of their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.
A mortar shell fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters of the command post.
“Anybody hit?” he called.
“No, sir,” came his sergeant’s reply. “The bastards missed.”
“Any word from Matthews?”
“No, sir.”
Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action in Malaysia. He’d been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger, Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG. This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965 for more than a month, under serious bombardment. He’d been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which would kill most men.
He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the tactics of the old.
But what he hated most of all was that he had fucked up. He had really fucked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his indigs that the NVA couldn’t get him during his window of vulnerability. He was responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was happening to him. And nobody could save his ass.
The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still boiled from the ground, rising to mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a shambles as were most of the squad hootches, but a unit of VC sappers that had gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure remained; most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn’t get hung up in the shit as they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of crew-served weapons.
Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They’d move at night, but probably not attack. At least not in force: they’d send probers, draw fire, try and get Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets, but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No. 3 Battalion.
Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they’d try like hell, and if they could get birds up, they’d get ’em up. But maybe the pilots were reluctant: who?
??d want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few more dinks when the war was so close to being over? Who’d want to die now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the futility? He didn’t know the answer to that one himself.
Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine, knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.
“Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick.”
It was Sergeant Blas, one of his master sergeants who worked with the Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too many tours and also didn’t deserve to get caught in a shit hole like FOB Arizona so late in a lost and fruitless war.
Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter, crouching now and then when a new mortar shell came whistling their way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.
Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but at last assembled itself into a pattern and then some details.
It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews’s head.
Three quicks and one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.
He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and his life did not particularly matter; he had given himself up to struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier’s life:
1) Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People’s Revolution.
2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.
3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.
4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary Army.
5) Carry out other missions of the Army.
6) Help consolidate internal unity.
8) Preserve and save public properties.
9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.
10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.
All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at Kham Duc, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in order to take more land before documents were signed.
Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.
Slow plan.
Quick advance.
Strong fight.
Strong assault.
Strong pursuit.
Quick clearance.
Quick withdrawal.
He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7, knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an example of one of the camps.
Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.
The column moved in the classical structure of an army on the quick, derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history since Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the world on that principle.
So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men units per flank; he had his second best people, also sappers, at the point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.
Fortunately, it was cool; the rain was no impediment. The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited because the weather was holding; low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white phosphorous. That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It meant nothing to them to burn his people like grasshoppers plaguing a harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears nothing.
Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old. Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris: the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire; it was there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the French have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under the eye of God? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright Indochinese like himself from their yellowness?
But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had I known how hard it would be?
Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could understand no other way; he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and rescue them with their mighty airpower.
Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic God from them, moved south and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the godless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult’s leader, Ba Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by Indochinese. It sickened him.
Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and beautiful women; it was a city of corruption, of prostitutes, gambling, crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk, perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them as a vessel for carrying God’s will. But his father never saw the politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants, the remove from the people.
Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems’ corruption had begun to resemble that of a city destroyed in the Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution upon itself, as it had.
He was a humble private in the People’s Revol
utionary Army, he who had sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondisement; he, a major in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.
He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly, though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years, and his passage in the west and in the south, after six months’ strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to follow.
Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could stop him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pass, a slant outside, and as he broke downfield all the blockers hit their men perfectly, and the defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him. His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them, jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper god, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.
It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness that he was not there but here.
“Huh?”
“Time to work, Pork.”