Part 31 (1/2)

5.

The Viet Cong machine gunner, concealed in a clump of palm trees about a hundred yards from the ca.n.a.l, curled a forefinger around his trigger as soon as he saw the ARVN column emerging from the shade of Hamlet Three. s.p.a.cing themselves carefully ten yards apart in accordance with their commander's orders, the government troops began to spread steadily across his field of fire like pop-up targets on a fairground rifle range. They were little more than silhouettes under the fierce flood of sunlight, but he could distinguish easily the bigger Americans among the smaller Asian troops; the taller, long-striding one near the front, the other, bulkier man humping a radio pack halfway down the line.

The guerrilla's captured Thompson machine gun, oiled and cared for more carefully than any other possession in his young life, was set up at right angles to the marching column halfway along the dike, and he had to curb his impatience to begin firing at once. He was under strict orders to wait until the last man was well clear of Hamlet Three; then the whole column would have to take cover down the far side of the bank where the fifty improvised mines were buried at two-yard intervals. They had been made from captured 105-millimeter sh.e.l.ls, and the fuses in their tips had been replaced with percussion caps linked by wire to a detonator hidden in undergrowth at the edge of Hamlet Three; there, another guerrilla waited to activate all of them simultaneously thirty seconds after the machine gun opened up.

Before he left the cover of the trees, Captain Staudt, acting on an impulse, had called up the American major at headquarters and asked him to divert two armed HU 1-Bs to the area immediately; hairs that had sometimes p.r.i.c.kled on the back of his neck in France in 1944 and amidst the bare hills of Korea nearly a decade later, hadn't felt quite comfortable suddenly. The major had promised he would get the choppers over as soon as he could, but they were supporting another skirmish at the moment. As he walked on across the dike, Staudt scanned the fields on either side ceaselessly for suspicious signs; an unnatural hush seemed to have fallen over the paddies, and he was certain now that his scalp had begun to tingle. He turned to look back at Captain Hoang, but the Vietnamese officer was walking near the back of the column, ignoring him, his lips still pursed in an expression of petulance and affront.

Staudt, cursing under his breath, turned to peer forward again, and he happened by chance to be looking directly at the clump of trees where -the machine gun was concealed at the moment it opened up. He saw the first muzzle flashes spurt from the weapon as it began to hose the column from front to rear with a long unbroken burst of fire, and for a moment he stared at it stupefied. Then with the shrieks of half-a-dozen dying men ringing in his ears, he flung himself to the ground and swiveled to face the attack. Keeping his head low, he peered out under the rim of his helmet and began yelling for those around him to return fire on the tree clump. But there was no response, and when the machine gun began raking the column again in the opposite direction, he heaved himself reluctantly backwards off the dike into the paddy.

Fifty yards behind him Captain Hoang had gone over the edge the moment the machine gun started firing, screeching orders for his men to do the same. He fell straight into a small pit filled with three-foot-long bamboo spikes, and at least half of his men tumbled cursing into similar traps. But their oaths were drowned seconds later by the roar of the fifty howitzer ”mines” exploding as one. Geysers of earth, flames and muddy water rose among the tumbling, shrieking bodies, and into this inferno the two other machine guns concealed in a gun port at the base of the bank poured long new bursts of withering fire.

One of the mines blew off both Lieutenant Trang's legs and hurled his broken body high into the air above the head of the horrified Gary Sherman; dazed with shock, the American stood up, looking wildly around for cover, but despite this foolish mistake - or perhaps because of it he miraculously survived the first bursts of the twin machine guns. The squat Vietnamese sergeant with the M-79, in the eye of the storm with him, also escaped unscathed, and he remained crouching on the ground by his feet, his face frozen in an inane grin of fear.

His commanding officer, Captain Hoang, however, was less fortunate; as he twisted and flapped like a speared fish at the rear of the column, trying to free his feet and legs from the punji trap, he caught the eye of Ngo Van Minh, the eager young son of the Viet Cong's battalion commander. Settled comfortably in a sniper's nest in a tree bordering Hamlet Four, Minh watched Hoang intently, squinting through the sights of his gleaming World War Two Garand rifle, and when the company commander finally extricated his legs and flung himself gasping with pain on the bank, the boy squeezed off one careful shot. It missed by several feet, but taking his time, he fired carefully again, and this bullet hit Hoang low down in the back. His third shot, entering between Hoang's shoulder blades, killed him, and the elated boy, seeing the ARVN commander stop moving suddenly, defied all his orders and began scrambling down from his hideout.

In the opening barrage from the enfilading machine guns, Captain Staudt had been wounded in the chest. Wincing with pain and cursing the G.o.dd.a.m.ned soldiers and officers he was fighting with and the G.o.dd.a.m.ned country he was fighting in, he lay three-quarters submerged in the mud of the paddy, radioing the coordinates of their position for the helicopters and the T-28s which he was calling in to make a napalm attack on Hamlet Four. When he had replaced the handset, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the British television crew had managed to scramble up the dike onto the path and against all the odds had almost reached the cover of the trees. One of them, the cameraman, was hobbling badly with a leg injury, and he saw that Naomi Boyce- Lewis was helping to support him, her arm about his shoulders. Not far away his camera lay shattered by a mine, and tangled skeins of film were spread around among the writhing bodies of wounded and dying Vietnamese No more than two dozen of the troops, as far as he could judge, had escaped injury altogether.

Staudt began shouting fresh orders for fire to be directed along the bank at the machine gun nest, but n.o.body responded; those terrified Vietnamese who hadn't already been killed were obviously pretending they had, hoping they could escape that way, and he fished his own Armalite out from under the water where it had fallen. But even before he tried to fire it, he saw that mud and slime had clogged the moving parts, and cursing the weapon as well as the soldiers around him, he flung it away.

The Thompson that had first raked the column from across the ca.n.a.l had strewn half-a-dozen dead or dying bodies along the dike path before unaccountably falling silent; the mines and traps together had killed and maimed perhaps another thirty or forty men, and most of the two dozen or so ARVN troops who had survived these onslaughts had dived Into depressions in the shallow paddy field to avoid the heavy-caliber machine-gun fire. A few, like Gary Sherman, after getting over their astonishment at finding themselves alive, had scrambled back up the bank to get clear of the deadly hail of frontal fire, and as he went, Gary had grabbed the petrified sergeant with the M-79 and hauled him bodily across the dike into the waters of the ca.n.a.l; crouching chest-deep to gain protection of the banks on both sides, he ordered the Vietnamese in sign language to load the grenade launcher. Christened ”the elephant gun” by its users, the M-79 was a new weapon just introduced to the war. It looked like an enormous single-barreled shotgun, and its sh.e.l.l-shaped grenades sprayed enough hot metal in all directions on impact to kill everything within a twenty-yard radius. When the Vietnamese had loaded the weapon, to give him cover Gary straightened up suddenly and fired a long burst from his Armalite in the direction of the machine gun nest in the foot of the dike. The Vietnamese at his side grinned toothily, whether through relief or fear, Gary couldn't tell, and lifted the unfamiliar weapon to his shoulder. Because it was designed for ranges up to several hundred yards, the little sergeant had to adjust its sights repeatedly, and it took him several trial shots to get his aim; but with the American officer firing covering bursts and urging him on, he worked fast, slapping sh.e.l.ls into the breech in quick succession, slamming it closed and firing. His fifth grenade turned out to be right, and it rose in a gentle arc to drop accurately into the corner of the paddy below their direct line of fire. Immediately both machine guns fell silent, and the Vietnamese turned his gap- toothed grin on Gary again, this time undoubtedly beaming with delight. But as the American patted him on the shoulder in congratulation, he realized suddenly why the Thompson across the ca.n.a.l behind them had stopped firing; from the corner of his eye he saw two platoons of black-garbed main force Viet Cong rising from their camouflaged foxholes on the opposite side of the field to begin charging through the muddy water towards them.

To Captain Staudt, lying prostrate in the muck of the paddy field, the skirmish line of Viet Cong seemed to be walking on water. He could see Captain Hoang slumped motionless on the hank of the dike, and since there were no commands coining from the point, he a.s.sumed Lieutenant Trang must be out of action too. At last, he realized, he had what he'd wanted so desperately for the past year - operational control! But the line of guerrillas was only twenty yards away now, close enough for him to see their narrow-eyed faces contorting with hatred as they splashed towards him with bayonets fixed, and he knew then that for him operational control was going to last about five seconds more. Hauling his pistol from its holster he took careful aim at the guerrilla racing ahead of the line - then with a palpable sense of shock he realized it was a woman and his finger faltered on the trigger; a second later several bullets from her revolver slammed into his head and chest, killing him instantly.

In the ca.n.a.l Lieutenant Gary Sherman brought his Armalite to bear on the advancing enemy, but it jammed without firing another shot, and he watched helplessly as the Viet Cong closed with the remnants of the company, some shooting and stabbing with their rifles, others wielding crude, village-smelted knives. Methodically amid the butchery, the front rank of the guerrillas began wresting rifles, ammunition and radio packs from the dead troops, and on his orders the sergeant at Gary's side fired his last two grenades at the second wave of attackers. But the speed of their advance made them a difficult target, and although one or two crumpled into the mud, the majority ran on and the last gaggle of ARVN survivors began flinging themselves into the ca.n.a.l in a desperate effort to escape the final act of the carnage in the paddy field.

Almost all of them had already tossed their weapons aside and they ignored Gary's desperate attempts to rally them. When he spotted one man still clutching his M-2, he rushed through the water to wrench it from him, and resting his elbows on the ca.n.a.l bank he sighted on the nearest Viet Cong, a dark-clad figure racing towards the head of the column where Lieutenant Trang lay dying. Like Captain Staudt before him, Gary Sherman experienced a moment of shock when Tuyet Luong turned her head in his direction; she hadn't noticed him until that moment, and he saw the expression of alarm spread across her unexpectedly beautiful face as she caught sight of his leveled rifle. For the briefest instant their eyes locked, and the startled American delayed his shot; then Tuyet ducked out of sight below the bank and was gone.

A moment later the two HU 1-Bs called in by Staudt as a precaution burst into view above the trees, their rotors thumping and stirring the quivering air above the battlefield. Immediately a whistle shrilled and the guerrillas broke off from their grisly task to begin racing back towards the camouflaged tunnel entrances in the far, bank. In the few seconds it took for the heavily armed helicopters to swing around and start their attack, most of the guerrillas disappeared, dragging their war booty behind them, but out 'on the field the lone figure of young Minh was left struggling through the mud. From his sniper's nest in the tree he'd had to run twice as far as the rest of the two platoons to get in at the kill, and he had arrived among the prostrate government troops only moments before the helicopters appeared. He had seen the American captain toss away his Armalite, and after Tuyet Luong had shot the captain dead, Minh had been forced to grub around beneath the muddy water to find it. In his anxiety to catch up with his comrades he had fallen twice, and now as he panted across the field, weighed down by his Garand and the prized trophy of the new Armalite, he looked up and saw the first American helicopter sliding down through the air above him, bringing its guns to bear.

Because he was long-limbed like his father and a fast runner, he was sure he could dodge and sprint to Outwit the unwieldy aircraft, despite the weight of the weapons he carried, and as he quickened his pace he gloried in the unexpected excitement; fir a long as he could remember he had ached with impatience to grow up to be the kind of hero his father was, and now he'd be able to boast a little of how he had killed the Diemist captain with his third shot and then outwitted the American gunners in their iron skybirds. Perhaps he had disobeyed orders, But as soon as his father saw the new Armalite he would be proud of him, he was sure!

When the fiery red tracers from the HU I-B's six-barreled machine guns punched into the muddy water just ahead of him, Minh turned abruptly aside arid set off in a fast zigzag towards another set of tunnel entrances fifty yards away. The other helicopter, seeing this, swerved to cut him off, pumping its 7.62-millimeter bullets into the paddy at the ferocious rate of six thousand a minute - but, again Minh swerved from its firepath and doubled back on himself, throwing them off his track.

Inside the first helicopter, the American gunner seated beside the pilot bent intently over his mirror gunsight, and a little grin of satisfaction began to spread across his face. ”Okay, buddy boy,” he said quietly, ”I think you've had all your fun for today.”

The pilot slid the Huey down a slow, slanting track, dropping almost to the ground behind the tiring Vietnamese boy, and the gunner rapidly traversed the four big Gatling-style machine guns mounted on either side of the landing skids. The controls were finger-light, and the ammunition belts linked to the storage holds in the rear of the aircraft jumped and quivered like living serpents as the four guns began roaring again. Minh, twisting and turning with increasing desperation, looked around fearfully as the helicopter swooped down at his heels, and to his horror he saw that this time he wasn't going to be able to avoid the great torrent of bullets kicking up a wake of spray behind him. A second later he felt himself lifted bodily from the ground and then he fell limp in the muddy water, cut almost in two at the waist. As he lay there, vaguely conscious that parts of his bleeding body littered the ground all around him, he experienced through the burning pain an even deeper agony. Could his life really be ending? Could it really be over before he'd even started to become a hero of the liberation struggle like his father?

As Tuyet Luong slid down into the moist darkness of her escape tunnel she was astonished to find Ngo Van Dong himself waiting at the foot of the shaft. His face was tense and pale, and she stared at him, at a loss for words: such a senior commander, she well knew, normally stayed in a secure area far away from the action; and his presence there could only mean that something had gone badly wrong.

”Where is Minh?” He shouted the question loudly, his face disfigured by his anger and anxiety.

”Wasn't he supposed to stay hidden in the tree?”

”He joined the a.s.sault against my orders. One of the messengers saw him go. He must still be in the field.”

”I didn't see him,” said Tuyet Luong slowly. ”But I think there was somebody who was cut off by the helicopters Dong pushed past her up the exit shaft before she had finished speaking, and when he crawled out into the bright sunlight of the field, all was ominously quiet. For a second or two he crouched motionless in the tunnel mouth, his head c.o.c.ked towards the sky - then he ran out into the paddy, scanning the few black-garbed bodies that lay half-submerged in the muddy water.

Only thirty yards from the edge of the field, he found Minh, his face and body reduced to little more than shapeless offal by the 7.62-millimeter rounds. He recognized him chiefly by the lovingly polished Garand rifle that was lying beside him, but it too, like the captured Armalite and everything else within a radius of several yards, was now stained with Minh's blood. As he stooped to pick up his son's mangled corpse, Dong heard the sudden beat of another HU 1-B's rotor beyond the trees of Hamlet Three; it had let down there in response to Staudt's last radio order to lift out the British television crew, and he saw it rising into view above the trees as he began stumbling back towards the tunnels bearing his wretched burden.

Inside the Huey, the co-pilot manning the attack weapons saw only an anonymous Vietnamese peasant in black pajamas hauling one of the dead bodies away towards a hole in the ground, and Naomi and her camera crew felt a fierce surge of heat as the twin rockets burst from the pods slung beneath the helicopter's skids. The gunner had targeted the weapons with unerring accuracy, and all those inside the Huey watched them explode with a hollow roar in the hank of the rice paddy. Ngo Van Dong was in the act of dragging his dead son into the mouth of a tunnel when he was. .h.i.t, and the rockets blasted both their bodies to fragments in an instant. A great geyser of white smoke and black earth spiraled upwards, obscuring the point of impact, and the tunnel that collapsed around them became their tomb.

6.

”The pride of a man can sometimes be his greatest a.s.set, Comrade Tuyet- but too often it's his worst enemy!” Dao Van Lat muttered the words fiercely in the quiet of the deserted command post, hut there was a break in his voice, and before he turned away from her, Tuyet Luong saw that his eyes were misting with tears. ”If Comrade Dong hadn't been so determined to make his son a hero before he was ready, they might still both be with us here now!”

Tuyet sat white-faced at the table beneath the map, watching Lat pacing agitatedly back and forth across the beaten earth floor of the cellar; the ground above their heads shook occasionally with the impact of bombs that American T-28s, called in by the dying Captain Staudt, were still dropping, and the acrid gasoline stench of the blazing napalm was already seeping deep into the tunnel network. The two Liberation Army platoons that had taken part in the ambush had already dispersed safely through the subterranean escape shafts into the jungle, but Lat and Tuyet both knew that the dozen or so women and children who had been ordered to remain above ground in Hamlet Four could not have survived the saturation bombing.

”When I take the news to his family I know exactly what I'll find,” said Lat, stopping before Tuyet and gazing down at her with a helpless expression in his eyes. ”His younger son, 'Little Slug,' will be doing his duty 'looking after' his mother and sister and waiting happily for news of the battle - until now it's all been like a game to him. But then he'll see his mother begin weeping inconsolably and the rest of his life will be warped by what happened here today. His heart will grow heavy with hatred and the poison will have been pa.s.sed to another generation.” He stopped and raised his head to listen as the distant rumble of the air attack began to die away; then he began pacing again. ”I worked with Dong's father in the early days of the revolution and spent many years in prison with him. They're a courageous family who've suffered greatly, and it pains me to see their suffering continue.” His voice rose in exasperation and he punched his right fist angrily into the palm of his other hand. ”Especially as it all could have been avoided if I'd been more alert.”

”But what could you have done, Comrade Pham?” asked Tuyet in surprise. ”You couldn't have foreseen what would happen to Minh.” - ”I ignored a danger signal. I should have overruled Dong when I found out that he was letting pride cloud his judgment about his own son.” Lat swung around and came to stand in front of her, again. ”It's vital that we dedicate ourselves to our cause - but we shouldn't let it blind us to our own human needs. If we do, we could lose something more important than this war.”

”But there's nothing more important than the war,” protested Tuyet in an incredulous voice. ”How can you say the war isn't important?”

”Of course the war's important - but we should always try to strike a balance with the other things in our lives.” Lat fell silent and walked distractedly back and forth in front of her. Then he stopped and spoke again in a gentler voice. ”A long while ago, Comrade Tuyet, I did something very foolish because I was too vain and too proud. I thought there was nothing more important to me than our cause, and I was foolish enough to think I could put myself beyond all normal feeling. As a result, I hurt somebody like you very deeply He let his right hand fall until it rested on her shoulder; at his touch she stiffened in her seat, holding herself rigid, and she didn't relax even when he began speaking again.

”I've rarely spoken of this, Comrade Tuyet, but I'm telling you because something about you reminds me of her. . . . She was beautiful and brave in just the way that you are.” His voice broke with emotion and sank to a whisper. ”I thought my love for her was distracting me from the revolution, you see, and I mutilated myself with a knife to put an end to what I thought of as my wasteful desires. But ever since then my dreams have been haunted by the faces of sons and daughters who might have been ours. Having no children, no offspring, I realize now, was too great a sacrifice to make. I regret what I did with all my heart and I always will.”

Tuyet felt his hand tighten convulsively on her shoulder, and turned to find him gazing down at her with a look of deep compa.s.sion in his eyes. ”But why do you speak to me of these things at a time like this?” she asked in a mystified voice.

”Because, comrade, I sense that you are making the same kind of mistake as I made. You have lost a beloved husband and your pain has been great. But without realizing it you are destroying yourself. In trying to stifle the pain, you've stifled all human feeling. If you continue to do that, you'll forget how to feel love and kindness. Hatred can devour you from within. Soon your life will become as arid as mine.”

”Since my husband, Luong, was murdered I haven't dared allow myself to feel love for any living creature,” said Tuyet savagely. ”If I let myself weaken, somehow I know I'll only suffer some terrible new loss.”

”Don't your children deserve your love, Comrade Tuyet?” he said carefully. ”Don't they need you?”

”They are well cared for by their grandmother,” she said fiercely. ”If I let myself think of them I wouldn't be able to do what I have vowed to do - avenge Luong's death.” Her eyes flashed and her voice rasped in her throat. ”And I wouldn't be able to do what I did today!”

”What was that?” He moved around to face her again. ”Tell me about it.”

”I killed the Diemist lieutenant in cold blood - but if I'd let my feelings get in the way I might not have been able to do it.”

”Why?”

Suddenly her lower lip was trembling. ”Both his legs had been blown off at the waist by one of our mines. He was still conscious and as I bent over him to take his pistol he tried to speak. But no words came out - he could only make a gurgling noise. He was like me, Comrade Pham - a metis. I took his pistol and turned away, but then I heard the gurgling sound again. I looked around and saw him pointing to the pistol. I'll never forget the awful pleading look in his eyes. In battle you expect to find only hatred in the face of the enemy - but he really wanted me to help him die.” She closed her eyes, and Lat saw tears squeeze from beneath her lids. A moment later her shoulders began shaking silently. ”I shot him in the head with his own pistol just before the helicopters came. He didn't make any sound at all - he just rolled over on his side.”