Authors: Bing West
Mr. Minh, the hamlet chief of the island of Binh Thuy, sent a boat to Binh Yen Noi to pick up the pursuers. They were ferried to the island and in the waning twilight were taken to the marketplace, where Minh and hundreds of villagers were gathered. The bodies of the three militiamen killed in the trading boat had been removed in preparation for burial, but the bodies of the two Viet Cong killed on the mud bank by Luong lay on display with their rifles at their sides. They would await claiming by villagers from the Phu Longs the next day.
Minh gave a short public speech, thanking especially Luong for his actions. He told McGowan that the VC rarely attacked his PFs in force on land. It had been primarily by means of river ambushes that the Viet Cong in 1964 had forced him and the other hamlet officials off the island. The Viet Cong had not employed the ambush on a daily basis. They did not have to; instead, they had struck just often enough to instill a high level of uncertainty about death into the normal actions of normal people. They had set traps along the river, and killed the militia one and two at a time, until no one associated with the government could get into a boat with other villagers. The villagers did not want to be killed themselves or have their boats sunk. The PFs were cut off from the people, even from travel with their own families. The VC then were free to tax all who used the river, while the PFs lost face among the people.
That afternoon when the trading boats had wallowed in half sunk with the dead PFs and the wounded and the screaming villagers, Minh had feared 1964 all over again. But because of the seven pursuers, the Viet Cong could not claim a victory. They had suffered equal losses. The people had seen the bodies and the boat race.
Three PFs. Three VC. A small incident on a warm spring afternoon on a flat river full of boats. A one-line entry in the I Corps daily situation report. Nothing but a few added statistics at the Saigon level.
On May 7, trading boats again set out from Binh Thuy, carrying PFs and villagers alike.
The PFs and the Marines were often seen in each other's company during off-duty hoursâa PF hitchhiking with a Marine to Quang Ngai City, a Marine sitting behind a PF on a motor scooter, a PF handing a Marine a family shopping list for the PX, a Marine drinking hot tea in a PF's home on a lazy afternoon. The disagreements which arose were generally those one expects among men who share cramped quarters for a year: a blaring radio when someone else wants to sleep; a tasteless practical joke; neglect in returning an article loaned; selfishness in the use of commonly shared items such as rifle-cleaning materials.
But on two occasions incidents of serious physical strife did occur between the Marines and the Vietnamese. In one instance the PFs solidly supported the Marines. One afternoon Joe came limping into the fort, quietly slipped into the squad tent and lay on his side with his face toward the canvas, his shoulders shaking. Observing this, Garcia called out to McGowan, “Hey, Sarge, you better come over here. I think Joe's hurt.”
McGowan came over and sat on the edge of the boy's cot.
“Joe? What's the matter, Joe? Want me to get the doc?”
“No.”
“Well, what is it? Come on, why are you crying?”
Between sobs, Joe told of leaving the fort that morning to play with some other boys over in one of the My Hué hamlets. They had been kicking a ball along the main trail when a man rushed out of a house, screaming at them to get out of there and to stop making so much noise. The resentful homeowner was the brother of the wealthy official who had been taken away by the police the morning after the fort had been overrun. Seeing Joe among the boys, the man reached out and grabbed his arm, cursing at him while swatting him on the head with his free hand. Joe said the man smelled of Ba Xi De, a strong, home-brewed rice liquor, and was ranting about the Americans and PFs. When Joe ducked to avoid the blows, the man kicked him hard in the buttocks. Joe was knocked down, and before he could scramble away, the man had kicked him repeatedly in the back.
The man was lucky. Wingrove was not at the fort when Joe limped home. Wingrove probably would have killed him. Instead, it was McGowan who left the fort on the run. When he reached the man's house, he found a crowd had gathered, having anticipated that someone from the fort would come. His arrival was greeted by murmurs of approval, as the villagers congratulated each other on their knowledge of American, or just human, behavior.
The man who had struck Joe was quite tall, almost six feet. Still McGowan had the advantage of two inches, forty pounds, a dozen Golden Gloves fights and uncounted brawls in New York City and in the Marine Corps. It was not much of a fight. McGowan insulted the man and spat on the ground. The man, drunk enough to be reckless, pawed and kicked ineffectually at McGowan, who then stepped back, planted his feet and let go a right cross which knocked him out.
It was the only time that McGowan struck a Vietnamese, and he worried about possible resentment among the villagers. But Trao told him that what he had done was all right. The villagers understood. In fact, they would not have understood if the Americans had done nothing.
In the second instance of serious physical contact, some of the PFs blamed the Marines, while some of the Americans blamed the PFs. A Marine new to the unit caught a PF walking out of the squad tent with a transistor radio. The Marine accused the PF of stealing and brushed aside the PF's response in Vietnamese, which he could not understand. He snatched the radio back and tried to slap the PF across the face. The PF ducked and drew a knife. The Marine lunged, grabbing the PF by both wrists, and in the ensuing tug-of-war the PF was slashed across the forearm.
When the fight was broken up, the PF claimed he had intended only to borrow the radio. Most of the Marines and PFs believed his story, although some PFs blamed him for the fight because he had not asked permission first, while others blamed the Marine for his short temper. Suong did not hold the PF in high regard.
McGowan had little respect for the Marine, whom he considered to be one of the three Americans in the fort who were barely squeaking by, either because of strained relations with the Vietnamese or tactical sloppiness on patrols. When he learned that a man would not even try to understand the Vietnamese, and clung to a belief that his only job was to shoot people, McGowan had him sent back to the line outfits. This he had done twice, in addition to his flat rejection the previous March of the five Marines on the truck.
In the case of the knifing incident, he and Suong agreed that the blame rested with both parties, and so they put both the PF and the Marine on probation. Any more trouble from the Marine, and McGowan would transfer him out. If the PF persisted in his sly ways, Suong was going to bring him to Captain Dang, the mere mention of whom impressed or frightened most people.
But there were some who didn't respect Dang, especially those in the VNQDD who, among other things, controlled the rice market in Binh Son and paid the farmers one low fixed price, despite the excess demand in I Corps for rice. Dang had worked with Robert Ressugie, his U.S. AID adviser, to break the VNQDD hold over the farmers. At the same time, he and his military adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Jarvis, were pressuring the Vietnamese and American authorities to take action against the black market operations being run in the district town by the Korean forces who had moved into the province in late 1966. As Third Country nationals, the Koreans were not subject to Dang's jurisdiction. They were stealing mainly from the American bases around Chulai and using Binh Son town as a storage and trade depot. Dang had no authority to confiscate the truckfuls of cigarettes, C-rations and medicinal supplies which were unloaded and stored in houses less than a quarter of a mile from the district headquarters. The provost marshal of the Americal Division told Jarvis bitterly that the Army could give no American the authority to move against the Koreans.
In the end Dang was defeated in Binh Son district not by the Viet Cong, but by a corrupt element of the VNQDD or Nationalist Party and a coalition of Vietnamese and Korean racketeers. In late spring there were banners flying in Binh Son, saying in Vietnamese: “Down with Dang, Despot and Oppressor of the People.” Quang Ngai radio reported that spontaneous, simultaneous demonstrations had broken out in several of the larger villages in the district, Binh Nghia being prominently mentioned.
The morning of the demonstrations McGowan saw a group of about fifteen people carrying banners walking in from Highway One toward Binh Nghia along the main trail which passed directly in front of the fort. The PFs were greatly disturbed, yelling back and forth to each other and looking toward Suong for instructions. Suong and Trao huddled briefly with some of the village officials, and then Suong walked over to where McGowan stood waiting, shrugged and in a resigned voice said: “VNQDD.”
It was as though he knew the ending was foreordained regardless of what he did. When the marchers drew abreast of the fort, the PFs had collected on the road to meet them. Both sides started shouting and arguing in the manner speakers use when they are addressing those supporting them, not those opposed. The VNQDD faction maintained their half of the dialogue for an hour, then left, having been close enough to the village to claim a demonstration.
Dang was relieved as district chief by Major General Nguyen Lam, the Vietnamese Commander of I Corps. When Ambassador William Koren, representing the U.S. Mission in Saigon, protested the firing, Lam acknowledged that Dang was a fiery, energetic and honest captain, a credit to the Army and a popular figure among the villagers. But, Lam went on, Dang had been overzealous in prosecuting other elements besides the Viet Cong and he had made enemies who were powerful, too powerful for Lam to stand behind the captain. He was sending Dang to a district which had a weak VNQDD faction and no Korean forces.
Shortly afterward Lieutenant Colonel Jarvis was transferred from the district, having thoroughly exacerbated the commanders of the Americal Division for his Dang-like attitude concerning the rights of the people. The senior province adviser had feared for Jarvis' safety, since it was widely rumored that some Koreans were offering a contract for his removal.
Jarvis was replaced by the assistant adviser, Captain Phil Volentine, a rugged, forthright person with scars on his forearms and a Southern accent which he struggled manfully to overcome when speaking Vietnamese. He had attended language school in Hawaii and spent much of his time in the hamlets, trying to improve his conversational ability. Volentine dropped by Binh Nghia to tell Suong and McGowan that, like the advisers before him, he was on call whenever the combined unit might need help or a favor.
McGowan soon called.
It was on a hot day in June. The few Marines in the fort were sun-bathing in shorts and sandals when an old lady came bustling in, dragging a young girl in tow. She marched straight up to McGowan and started yelling in shrill, rapid Vietnamese.
“Hey, Joe, tell her to slow down,” McGowan said. “She's going too fast for me.”
“She say Americans shoot at her in boat,” Joe said. “She say her daughter lose ten thou ps. Uh, Americans steal. She say you come, you see. I think maybe you better go.”
McGowan took Joe, Swinford and Nguyen Tri and followed the women back to their boat. After they had climbed in and squatted down, the old lady started the small outboard and they putted upstream. The Marines carried rifles but had not put on shirts. As they were passing the My Hué hamlets, they heard firing just above the village boundaries and saw a fishing craft sharply veer from mid-channel and head toward the river bank.
“Looks like one of those mobile check points the Army runs,” Swinford said. “But those crazy bastards are shooting over the bows.”
“Let's keep going and see what they say to us,” McGowan said. “Di Son Tra.”
With the women muttering nervously, the boat held its upstream course, the Marines looking straight ahead and ignoring the small group of Americans on the bank clustered around an armored personnel carrier with its 50-caliber machine gun pointed out at the river.
Crack! A red tracer round flew across the river several yards in front of them.
“Christ, that was a .50,” Swinford yelled, jerking a round into his M-16 magazine.
“Easy with that thing,” McGowan said. “They could tear us up. Let's pull in.”
As they headed to shore, the fishing boat, having passed the check point's cursory inspection, glided by them outward bound. As soon as the boat bumped land, McGowan jumped out and seized the initiative.
“Who's in charge here?” he demanded of the seven Americans.
“I am,” a second lieutenant replied. “Who are you?”
“I was sent down from district to talk to you, Lieutenant,” McGowan said. “The district chief has a report that you're harassing and stealing from the people. And just now you fired at me. Do I look like a Viet Cong?”
The lieutenant, assuming his shirtless interrogator was Volentine, could not stammer out a coherent reply. The old lady pointed out the machine-gunner on top of the personnel carrier as the thief, and when the lieutenant ordered the man to empty his pockets, piaster notes tumbled out. McGowan told the young officer to take his men back to their battalion headquarters and that a report on the discipline of his crew would follow.
When McGowan had been a young boy, his grandmother used to tell him stories by the hour of how it was when she was a little girl in Ireland. She talked about the thatched house that she had lived in, about drawing water from the wells, of trying to milk a skinny old cow, of having to scrounge for firewood, of running through the cold winter rain to a crowded one-room school. McGowan thought Vietnam and his grandmother's Ireland had a lot in common. Frequently his grandmother had spoken about the times of The Trouble. When the English soldiers had driven by in their trucks, she and the other children never knew whether to hide or run after them. If the soldiers were in a good mood, they would sometimes throw food; but if they were returning from a sour operation, they would sometimes shoot at the farmers in the fields. As far as McGowan was concerned, American line troops were equally unpredictable.
McGowan went to district headquarters and called on Volentine for help.
“Sir, we've had it with that new battalion,” he said. “Our old battalion wasn't the greatest, but at least they kept the line troops out of the village. Last week this new battalion tried to pull a sweep on Binh Yen Noi, using tanks. Thank God they never even got down the road as far as the fort before one of those monsters slipped off the bank. They wrecked the road and part of a paddy pulling the damn thing out, but at least it stopped them. And they looked at us like we were some kind of freaks.
“Do you know what Suong is doing right now? He has a work crew tearing up the road at the other end of the village, just outside My Hué, where that check point was, so only motor scooters can get into Binh Nghia from either end. You'd think we were the VC, having to build a fortified village. And just now I was almost blown out of the water by one of their amtracs.”
“That battalion was in War Zone D before coming up here, Mac,” Volentine said. “It may take a while to settle them down. Let me try talking to the battalion commander. Who knows? He might be reasonable.”
It happened he was, and Volentine was able to call McGowan that same evening with a promise that American troops would stay out of Binh Nghia and that there would be no more check points.
This especially pleased Thanh, who considered check points by outsiders to be insulting, visible evidence that he was not doing his job. Such appearances were important to him, for he was being considered for a higher police post at the province capital. Since the job opening was a result of the wide publicity attendant on the stabilizing situation in Binh Nghia, he wanted the village to appear as peaceful as possible. This struck McGowan as ironic, for during the spring Thanh had seemed displeased with the lessening action, since a prominent criterion of efficiency in the National Police was the number of arrests made.
In late June, Thanh was formally offered the job he had sought, and announced he was leaving. A cruel, fanatical, strange, hate-filled man, in his year in the village he had arrested about 150 out of a total population of 5,000. Some were dedicated Viet Cong and about two dozen were never seen again. But most were part-time helpers or reluctant abettors of the Viet Cong and had returned to Bihh Nghia after short terms in the district jail.
The National Police let it be known that they were not replacing Thanh with anybody else; the situation in Binh Nghia no longer required a full-time policeman, of whom there were not enough to go around. The unanimous choice of the village council to fill the vacancy was Trao. So before leaving, Thanh turned over to him a list of agents and informers in the village, with instructions for drop procedures to pay them and collect information. Thanh had been proud of his agent net and claimed no one could take out of the hamlets an excessive amount of rice or materials without detection and arrest. The central market at Binh Yen Noi was especially watched, and each trading day two or three of Thanh's agents would keep track of who bought which large orders.
In the spring the Marines had briefly tried their hand at information gathering. They had authority to pay cash rewards for intelligence, an incentive system the Vietnamese did not have. In late March a woman had come to the fort complaining of a stomachache, but once alone with Corpsman Blunk, had asked to see Suong and McGowan. In return for 2,000 piasters, or $18, she drew a sketch of a field near My Hué hamlet which contained a hideaway. The next day the PFs probed the spot with long, sharp poles and discovered two bunkers, each neatly lined with bamboo and large enough to hold two or three men for weeks on end.
But McGowan soured on buying intelligence when he learned that another combined unit habitually bought weapons for $25 apiece from district officials and then turned them in at Chulai, claiming they had paid informers $50 for each weapon. Worse still, Thanh had complained that the high American rates threatened to undercut his system for gathering information. So McGowan had abolished the practice of payment and subsequently relied upon the arrangements of the village officials for local information.
Trao seemed relaxed and casual about his new additional job, but his easygoing manner was deceptive. If it seemed at times that he was not aware of what was going on, it was because he had others watching for him.
One morning in mid-July two old ladies bustled into the fort claiming they had important news for Trao. While a PF pedaled off to fetch the hamlet leader, the old ladies sat on a bench in the fort's main room, enjoying the curious glances of the Marines and the frequent questions of the PFs. Much to the exasperation of Suong, they would not tell why they had come until Trao arrived. Then they burst out with the news that two women whom they did not know were shopping in the market and had bought over sixty kilos of rice. Trao, Suong and McGowan hopped on bikes and set out for the market, Suong as he left yelling at the old ladies for their dalliance.
In response to inquiries at the market, people pointed to a side trail which ran down to the river. Trao was at the bank in less than a minute and there were the women, poling a boat toward mid-channel. Trao shouted at them across the flat water while Suong fired a few shots in the air. The women came back.
Stacked in the boat were several bags of rice. Suong questioned them on the spot, while they were still trembling. They readily admitted being from the Phu Longs and buying the rice for the P31st District Force Company, both facts being self-evident. Trao wanted something more.
For over a month the Viet Cong had been stockpiling rice in the Phu Longs, preparatory to moving it into the mountains for the main forces. Unable to penetrate Binh Nghia in force and organize a major takeout, the enemy was trading closely stitched bamboo mats and carefully woven fishnets for small quantities of rice. Women from the hamlets of Binh Nghia had only to find the contact and in the evening stash their rice at a certain spot along the river bank, returning in the morning to pick up well-made goods. Trao did not care about a piddling amount of smuggling. Obviously, enough rice had not been crossing over; otherwise the Viet Cong would not have risked a large purchase in the open market.
But he did want the name of the contact in Binh Nghia, the man or woman who was whispering to certain women where along the bank they should hide their trading rice. Justifiably fearing beating or torture, the women from the Phu Longs told him. Trao then gave the women a choice: they could sell back the rice in the market, pocket the money and settle in Binh Nghia without their boat, or they could go to the district jail for ricerunning. The women chose jail, where they were held for two weeks and then released, a normal district sentence for small acts.
While Trao and Suong rode off in search of the VC contact, McGowan lingered on the bank, looking across toward the Phu Longs, and the three tiny scrub islands sticking up just short of mid-channel. He was thinking of mounting a private interdiction effort against the P31st. When the sergeant returned to the fort, he saw that Trao had arrested the VC contact, a man whom Trao had known for years.
The man had been beaten, but refused to talk. Trao wanted to know where the VC were crossing, and when they were next due in. Suong yelled at him, Trao screamed at him, he was slapped back and forth. Not a word. Trao drew out a pistol, cocked it, grabbed the man by his hair, jerked his head back and pushed the muzzle against the man's nose. Still he did not speak. Why should he? Trao was not a real police chief. He was a gentle man who won real elections because people could talk honestly with him. Trao was not like Thanh. Trao would not shoot.
Trao did shoot, roaring with rage and shaking with fear, seeking to scare the man and succeeding in scaring himself, pulling the revolver aside and jerking when he meant to squeeze the trigger, intending for the bullet to miss and for the man to talk. Instead, the bullet creased the man's cheek and tore his ear off. Blood gushing, the man stood petrified. Trao was trembling.
Suong offered to take over.
“No,” Trao said. “Get him out of here. Send him to district. It's over. Get him out.”