Red Flags (21 page)

"What's funny?" I said.

"The first sergeant just heard this from Pleiku. General Vinh Loc, head of Two Corps, is gonna hold a fucking Heroes' Day up there to honor an outstanding American officer and an enlisted man for their courage in battle."

"You sending out your uniform to be starched?"

"The officer they're gonna honor is that prince who called in artillery on his own damn position." Miser sniggered. "Think he'll show for the do?"

The proprietor produced a loaf of hot French bread. Miser tore off the end and passed the baguette to me. Checkman and Rowdy stared at Miser flicking worms from his piece and declined the great-smelling bread.

"Thanks for comin' out," Miser said. "I couldn't face another mess-hall meal."

"Yeah." Rowdy nodded. "Another morning of fuckin' shit-on-a-shingle and foreskins-on-toast."

The proprietor put out our bowls. The
pho
had cooked for hours: a boiling soup of oxtails and beef bones, anise, onion, cilantro, hot chili pepper, lime, black pepper, cinnamon, and scallions that he ladled over flat noodles.

"Lay it on me," Rowdy exclaimed, rubbing his chopsticks together.

"Fuck," said Miser. "We could be in Saigon, drinking artichoke tea, chowing down on geckos pan-fried in batter cooked to perfection." He sampled his soup. "Armadillo, duck eggs, watermelon with guava, durian ... Instead we're ordering boiled-bone soup and noodles out in the sticks."

I held the tin spoon at my lips, enjoying the aroma.

Even more pungent, twenty feet away a barrel stood open, waiting to be sealed. In it symmetrical layers of silvery fish alternated with layers of salt. After the fish rotted and liquefied, it would be nuoc mam. A bottle of it stood on the table. The flavor wasn't bad once you got past the idea of it.

"Nuoc mam." Miser curled his nose at the dark liquid as he dumped it in. "God, the stuff smells like my ancient aunt."

"Essence of armpit," Rowdy said, making a face and waving off the offer of it.

"At least it's not durian fruit," I said.

"Thank God," Rowdy exclaimed. "Durian smells like my
dead
aunt Mae."

Miser scowled. "It's a fuckin' acquired taste, you peasants."

The same way he'd grudgingly come to appreciate durian, I realized, Miser had developed a thing for Viet Nam, loath though he was to admit it. He was tight with lots of Asian old boys from Kontum down to Cholon. It occurred to me he wouldn't ever leave Indochina of his own volition.

Rowdy and Checkman started arguing about which meat tasted more rubbery, elephant or dog. In all probability neither of them had ever tasted elephant, but that didn't mean they couldn't argue. In the middle of it, Checkman spotted his favorite whore carrying her shopping basket and ran over to flirt, which clearly made her nervous. The public attention was bad for business. There weren't enough of us in Cheo Reo to keep her solvent without Vietnamese clients, who were easily bent out of shape by Americans bedding their women. Fraternizing with American soldiers was frowned upon; sleeping with them, even worse. Word would get around fast and it could be a while before any local fancied her.

"
An com,
" she said, pushing back her big head of hair and hurrying on.

Rowdy took her in from the back. "What a choice mama. What'd she say?"

"She said to eat my rice."

Checkman's ability to speak the language certainly gave the boy an advantage with the ladies, though he seemed oblivious to the Vietnamese resentment of us American mongrels consorting with their women, or his woman's concern about associating openly with him.

Miser grunted and bent to his work, wolfing down his food.

I reached for my wallet to pay.

"Don't bother, Captain."

"What?"

"I'm part owner of this emporium."

"No kidding?"

"I'm workin' on a steam-and-cream also," he said, drinking the last of his bowl. "But my partners are getting a lot of pressure for me to kick back to the civil authorities—in appreciation for their letting me operate in this thriving metropolis."

"What are you gonna do?"

"Me? I told 'em I'm not paying sixty bucks a year to any grafting slope fucks."

"So you're finding the area more attractive than you thought."

"Yeah. It's virgin territory. A frontier, really. Wide open. It's gonna grow like crazy when the shooting stops."

"If this fighting ever ends, maybe the Yards can figure out a way to benefit too."

"Never happen," Miser said. "They'll get screwed no matter who wins. The lowlands are overpopulated as hell. The Central Highlands, they're practically empty. The Vietnamese will go home after the war's over and start makin' babies. They've already got their backs to the sea. They got no choice but to push into the mountains. They'll log the timber, burn jungle, grab up land. It's beautiful country. Their only problem is the Yards, and they're afraid of 'em. Whatever they do with the tribes, it ain't gonna be pretty."

"Why don't you drive the boys back?" I said. "I'll walk."

"You sure?" Miser bit into the plastic tip of a Hav-a-Tampa and lit up.

"I'm sure." I nodded.

Miser scowled and headed for the jeep. Checkman and Rowdy finished their bowls and bounded after him. They vaulted into the back, and Miser rolled out.

"Captain."

I looked up to find Dr. Roberta standing over me. She was wearing slacks and a wrinkled khaki shirt, looking disheveled and disarming.

"Doc."

Nearby, on a raised platform overhung with canvas, an old woman squatted beside a perfect cone of rice she was selling. Her young granddaughter stared openly at Roberta's exotic Western features.

"Would you like some breakfast?" I motioned to the place on the bench next to me.

"Thanks, no. But I wouldn't turn down some coffee."

I ordered
deux café sua,
two filtered coffees sweetened with condensed milk. She slid down beside me and took out a mentholated cigarette.

"How are you?" she said, lighting up, enjoying the luxury of the day's first drag. "You still look a little feverish," she said, exhaling.

"Just tired. Could use some caffeine."

The coffee arrived, smelling of chicory.

I said, "Any word on the new mom at Mai Linh?"

Roberta perked up. "Ed Sprague says she's doing well. The baby too. Eating like a little water buffalo."

We finished our coffees and she accompanied me back toward the MACV compound. Roberta walked with arms crossed. As we passed through the small market square, I noticed Colonel Chinh having a morning coffee with Whalen Lund in the corner café.

"No doubt they're discussing some new strain of rice that will grow like gangbusters in the hills," she said.

"Or the net for their tennis court."

Roberta looked at me, amused. "You are an iconoclast."

Near the South Vietnamese garrison, she pointed to a large metal shed with galvanized siding and a corrugated roof.

"That's Colonel Chinh's magic warehouse. The rice harvest of the entire province is hauled into town twice a year and stockpiled under that roof, allegedly to deny the enemy food supplies."

"What's magic about it?" I said.

"The way the rice disappears. Goes right out the back, onto the local market. Meanwhile, very little comes out the front door, and the Montagnard villages in the province go hungry. Makes me livid."

"What about donated rice?" I said. "The stuff Lund and his pals bring in?"

"All sold too. The flag and handclasp symbol right on the bags."

A group of young Vietnamese men and women in conical hats had just finished clearing brush and ground wood from the bare field adjacent to the MACV compound. They started drifting back toward town along the worn path that ran diagonally across the field. They came toward us at an angle as we walked up the road, away from them and toward the gate. Roberta looked hard at them.

"Something wrong?" I said.

"Who are they?"

I shaded my eyes. "Just kids the first sergeant hired for some day labor, cleaning up that empty area so the guards' sightlines aren't impeded. Why?"

She studied the retreating figures. "Have you seen any of the older ones before?"

"No. They look like local youths."

"The girls, they're northerners."

"How do you know?" I said.

"Young Vietnamese women all wear their hair long. North Vietnamese cut theirs straight across. See? All their hair, right across."

"Catholic refugees probably," I said. They were nearing the edge of town, strolling casually. I stared too, trying to catch the outline of a weapon.

"What's the matter?"

I said, "Vietnamese men don't collect ground wood unless they're charcoal makers. They think it's beneath them."

"You might mention this to someone," she said.

Back at the compound, I went to the office to tell the colonel.

"Northern visitors?" he said. "Casing us?"

"Seemed that way."

He leaned to the side and called past me: "Private Checkman."

Checkman's flaming hair and face appeared in the doorway. "Sir?"

"Have Sergeant Durando put an extra American guard on the perimeter during daylight and ... four on at night. One on each wall. Ask First Sergeant Mote to have the fifty-caliber on the northwest corner checked."

"Will do, sir." The redhead vanished.

"Anything for us in the EEIs and intel from Saigon?"

"Nothing good, sir."

"You should know," Bennett said, "the Army engineers working on the airstrip reported a dozen VC at the far end of the runway this morning. They hung around for half an hour, just observing, turned away, and left."

"I don't suppose our southern allies challenged this squad in any way."

Bennett shook his head. "Acted as if they weren't there."

***

The humidity rivaled the temperature. I sent Jessup a brief encrypted message that I might have a lead to pursue and proceeded to plow through a stack of intel paperwork until Joe Parks interrupted.

"Got a hot intel item for you, Captain. Some Yards are saying the VC have Montagnard villagers trapping gophers for them."

"For food?" I said, making a face.

"Excavation. The NVA set them loose in their tunnels to dig air shafts to the surface."

He tapped out his pipe bowl into a shiny can of sand. "Let's you and me go over to the ARVN compound and see if we can shake any useful intel loose from your esteemed counterpart."

I readily agreed, not having met the man yet, and we drove over.

Captain Nhu grinned when he was happy and grinned when he was embarrassed, and he was one or the other most of the time. Nhu was hoping to run his family's pharmacy business after the war and already had his degree. His father was a civil servant. His mother ran the family enterprises: two pharmacies in Saigon, a rice-trading company in Hue. A younger brother was an ophthalmologist in Paris. Everyone in the family spoke French and English and some Chinese.

Joe Parks and I looked over the intelligence Captain Nhu handed us. Calling it
thin
would have been too kind.
Negligible
was more like it. However the captain was occupying his time, it wasn't in the pursuit of information on the enemy. No surprise. Intelligence was hard to come by if you never left your barracks, never put out a real patrol. Without the Green Berets leading patrols out of their camps daily and our own infrequent forays, we'd be completely in the dark about the thousands of NVA infiltrators backed up in the province.

We excused ourselves at the first opportunity and regrouped on the wooden steps of the sector headquarters building.

"God," I said, "we're not getting much from him, are we?"

Joe propped his Army-issue baseball hat on his bald pate and simply said, "Nope," and repacked his pipe with fresh tobacco.

"And you're not giving him much either."

"Nope."

"So he couldn't be compromising us by sharing with third parties?"

"Is Captain Nhu feeding our intel to the enemy? No. Don't see how he could. The really sensitive items go to Chinh marked ‘eyes only.'"

Good to know, I thought, since Captain Nhu was the South Vietnamese in tailored fatigues I'd seen in the jungle-market meeting. I found Ruchevsky in our room and broke the news to him.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Shit. Is he freelancing, or is he just Chinh's bagman?"

"If he was that enterprising, I think his mama would've bought him a higher rank. I'd say he's an underling carrying the can for Chinh. Maybe fetching Wolf Man's shopping list for Mrs. Chinh."

"No wonder we get no useful intel from across the street about the NVA gathering in the mountains. Why rat out your best customers?" Ruchevsky rubbed his brow and sighed. "Well, you've certainly given me something to obsess about. Let me return the favor. I've set you up to fly the backseat on a recon with our best Bird Dog pilot. See if you can get some better intel on your assignment from the air. If anyone can find your pastures of plenty, it's Major Hopp. And count NVA noses for me while you're up there."

I went by the signal shack to check in with Miser and let him know I was headed out on an aerial reconnaissance, following up on the Aussie's lead.

"Glad to hear it," he said. "Looking at your reports going out and the intel coming in, it don't look promising for long-term investment in Cheo Reo. The sooner we can get our asses out of here, the better. The scuttlebutt ain't good."

I noticed the fresh sandbags outside. And the tear-gas canisters and masks everywhere. Ammunition boxes, grenades ...

"Sergeant Miser, you starting an armory?"

"No, sir. New procedures."

"Really?"

"There's a bad vibe. Trouble coming. We're getting ready."

He was completely serious, I realized, and it sobered me. He held up a gas mask like a stewardess demonstrating an oxygen mask.

"If we get fucking overrun, we pull our rubber cunts over our snouts, smoke the place with all these CS grenades, just saturate the area with tear gas, grab a Prick-Twenty-five for communication, and haul ass."