The Throat (52 page)

As the
reader will understand, I thenceforth took a great interest in the
developing career of young Captain Franklin Bachelor.

I
declared myself a convert to such as Bachelor, a partisan of the
"Irregulars." I probed for tales, and heard such stories as those with
which the Moor did seduce Desdemona.

The
picture that emerged from the tales about Bachelor became disturbing.
If so for me, how much more so for Those Who Must Not Be Named, who had
encouraged him? Incalculably, yes. It was because of this disturbance,
registered in the highest places in the land, that the hapless Jack (I
believe) Ransom, a Captain of Special Forces, first became enmeshed in
the insane Bachelor's treacherous web, resulting in the final
conspiracy—the ultimate conspiracy—of silence. From which silence,
leaks an undying shame. I intend to expose it in these pages.

The task
of a man like Bachelor was to exploit the existing hostility between
ordinary Vietnamese and local tribesmen by organizing individual tribal
villages into virtual commando units, strike forces capable of the same
stealth as our guerilla enemy. Another goal was to win support for our
government by actively assisting the life of the villager. To build
dams, to dig wells, to develop healthier crops. It was imperative that
these men speak the language of their tribesmen, live as they did, eat
the food they ate. The goal was the training of guerilla soldiers to be
used in guerilla warfare.

Bachelor
soon showed his true colors by turning his villagers into a travelling
wolf pack. After several months, the pack established permanent camp
deep in a valley of the Vietnamese highlands.

It was
at this time that Bachelor's reputation was at its peak. The ordinary
soldier idealized Bachelor's achievements. His superiors valued him
because he consistently provided intelligence on the movements of the
enemy. The rogue elephant kept in communication with the pack.

Here we
come to the heart of the matter.

It is my
belief that Bachelor had begun to dip into that most dangerous of
waters, the role of intermediary—you could say, double agent.

Operating
first from his secret base in the highlands and then an even more
heavily defended redoubt further north, Major Bachelor became a
trafficker in information, a source for intelligence about troop
movements and military strategy that could be gained in no other way.

Even I,
deep in my duties, heard of instances in which our forces went out to
surprise a battalion of North Vietnamese, reported (by Whom?) to be
making its way south by devious routes, only to encounter no more than
a few paltry squads. Were we victorious? Absolutely. On the scale to
which we had been led, by our intelligence, to expect? The response is
negative. It must have been some such reasoning that caused They Who
Must Not Be Named to dispatch a young Special Forces Captain, Jack
Ransom, into the highlands to contact Major Bachelor and return him to
the leafy vales of suburban Virginia for interrogation and debriefing.

My feet
hurt, and my back never gives me a moment's peace. Writing is as I have
found an activity draining, depleting, and infinitely interruptable. No
sooner does a good sentence billow up to the mind's forefront, than
some wretch appears at the door of my modest but comfortable retirement
cottage in a sensible sector of Prince George's County. He is
delivering an unwanted package, he is begging for food, he is looking
for some phantom person represented by an illegible name scribbled on a
dirty scrap of paper. I return to my desk, attempting to recapture the
lost words, and the telephone goes off like an exploding shell. When I
answer the demonic thing, a heavily accented voice inquires if I really
do wish the delivery of twenty-four mushroom and anchovy pizzas.

And! At
all hours a juvenile from the neighboring house, a once presentable
house now gone sadly to seed, is likely to be throwing a tennis ball
against the wall before my desk, retrieving the ball, hurling it again
at my wall, so that a steady drumming of THUMP THUMP THUMP intercedes
between me and my thoughts. The child's parents own no sense of
decorum, duty, discipline, or neighborly feeling. On the one occasion I
visited their pestiferous hovel, they greeted my complaints with jeers.
It is, I am certain, from these pathetic folk that the pizza orders,
etc, etc, originate. I hereby inscribe their name so that it may
reverberate with shame: Dumky. Is this what we fought for, that a
whey-faced, slat-sided, smudge-eyed spawn of the Dumkys is free to hurl
a tennis ball at my modest dwelling? When a man is trying to write in
here, a man already working against backache and sore feet, sweating
over his words to make them memorable?

There it
goes, the tennis ball. THUMP THUMP THUMP.

The
reader will forgive the above outburst. It is this damnable subject
that raises my ire and my blood pressure, not my squalid neighbors.

I heard
from many of my confidants that Ransom and another officer were sent
into the highlands to locate Bachelor and bring him, as they say, "in
from the cold." They Who Must Not Be Named wished to question the man,
but doomed their own venture by permitting word of Ransom's mission to
reach Bachelor before the Captain did himself. This can happen in a
thousand ways—a whisper in the wrong ear, an overseen cable, an
ill-advised conversation in the officers' club. The results were
foreseeable but tragic nonetheless.

After a
difficult and dangerous journey, Ransom succeeded in locating the
degenerate officer's secret encampment. I have heard differing versions
of what he came upon, some of which I reject on grounds of sheer
implausibility. I believe that Ransom and his fellow officer entered
the camp and came upon a scene of mass carnage. Bodies of men and women
littered the camp—their prey had fled.

What
followed was another strange increment in the legend of Franklin
Bachelor. Captain Ransom entered a roofless shed and discovered a
Caucasian American male in the remains of a military uniform cradling
the stripped and cleaned skull of an Asian female. This man,
half-crazed with exhaustion and grief, declared that he was Franklin
Bachelor. The skull was his wife's. He and his subordinate, he said, a
Captain Bennington, had been away from the encampment when it had been
overrun by the Vietcong who had been searching for him for years—the
enemy had slaughtered more than half of his people, burned down the
camp, and then
boiled the bodies,
eaten the flesh, and reduced
Bachelor's people to skeletons
. Bennington had pursued the cadre
and
been killed.

When
Captain Ransom delivered his man to The Shadows, it was discovered that
he was in reality the Captain Bennington supposed murdered by the VC.
What had happened was that Franklin Bachelor had actually persuaded his
subordinate to submit to interrogation and possible arrest in his
place, while Bachelor himself fled into the jungle with the remnant of
his wolf pack. Bennington was found to be hopelessly insane, and was
confined to a military hospital, where I am sure he repines to this day
for his lost commander.

The
official story stops here. Yet an awkward question must be asked. How
likely is it that there would be a VC assault on Bachelor's camp only a
short time before the arrival of Captain Ransom? And that Bachelor
would behave, in this case, as reported?

Here is
what transpired. Bachelor knew that Captain Ransom was on his way to
take him back to the United States for questioning. At that point he
murdered his own followers. In cold blood, he dispatched those who
could not keep up on a high-speed escape through rough terrain. Women.
Children. The old and the weak, all were executed or mortally wounded,
along with any able-bodied men who opposed Bachelor's scheme. Then
Bachelor and his remaining men boiled the flesh off some of the bodies
and made a last meal of their dead. I believe it iseven possible that
Bachelor's people
voluntarily
accepted death, cooperated in their own
destruction.
He held them under his sway. They believed he
possessed
magical powers. If Bachelor ate their flesh,
they would live in him
.

Bachelor
retained his core group of tribesmen, and I have no doubt that not a
few of the spinning, whirling savages daubed in mud and covered with
feathers who looted my orderly shelves at Camp White Star were among
them. Those fellows, barbaric to the core, would be hard to kill and
impossible to discourage. To this core group of fanatical savages he
had added stray VC and other lawless bandits. They had armed and
outfitted themselves so stealthily, and with such deadly force, that
the Army that supported it never suspected its existence. What they had
been looking for was another secret encampment, far enough north in the
rugged, fog-shrouded terrain of I Corps to be safe from accidental
discovery by conventional American troops and to be strategically
well-positioned for intelligence purposes. Bachelor was now about to
begin playing his most dangerous game.

His
legend increased when he began again transmitting infallibly accurate
reports of North Vietnamese troop movements from his newfound redoubt.
To all intents and purposes, "the Last Irregular" had indeed returned
from the dead. His reports concerned the North Vietnamese divisions
moving toward Khe Sanh and vicinity.

The
following is a mere outline of the story of Khe Sanh for those
unfamiliar with this unhappy episode. Special Forces set up a camp
around a French Fort at Khe Sanh in 1964— CIDG, some say at its best.
When its airfield became crucially important in 1965, the marines were
sent in to Khe Sanh, and for a time shared it with Special Forces and
their ragtag battalion of tribesmen. The marines gradually squeezed out
the Green Berets, who were unused to dealing with the efficiency,
discipline, and superior organization of the Gyrenes. The "Bru" and
their masters relocated in Lang Vei, where they built
another
camp,
despite the existence a mere twenty kilometers away in Lang Vo of
another CIDG camp of "Bru," this under the command of Captain Jack
Ransom.

Had
Ransom succeeded in bringing Bachelor back to mainland America eight
months before, he would have been rewarded with a promotion and a more
significant post. Having failed, the Shadow Masters had relegated
Ransom to a secondary post in I Corps, where his role would have been
to ensure that his "Bru" were instructed in matters of personal hygiene
and rudimentary agriculture. Now enter Franklin Bachelor.

Some
time after the Green Berets and their savages had fortified Lang Vei,
the camp was bombed and strafed by a U.S. aircraft. The camp was
destroyed, and many women and children killed. The explanation given
was that the aircraft had become lost in the foggy mountains. This tale
is patently false, though believed to this day. The true story is much
worse than this invention of a confused pilot. This time, Bachelor had
made a crucial error. The rogue major had long harbored an insane
hatred for the Captain who had forced him to leave his own best camp,
and provided false information that would lead to the destruction of
the Special Forces camp. But the
wrong
false camp was selected—Bachelor
had sent deadly destruction down upon Lang Vei, not Lang Vo, twenty
kilometers distant. Ransom still lived, and when he discovered his
error, Bachelor's wrath led him into deeper treachery.

By 1968,
both Khe Sanh and the lesser-known Lang Vei were under perpetual siege.
Then came the assault the world knows well—the North Vietnamese
descended on tiny Lang Vei with tanks, troops, and mortars.

What is
not known, because this information has been suppressed, is that Lang
Vo, an otherwise insignificant Montagnard village under command of a
single Green Beret, was likewise attacked, by North Vietnamese tanks
and troops, at the same time. Why did this occur? There can be but one
answer. Franklin Bachelor had duped his North Vietnamese contacts into
believing that Lang Vo would be the next thorn in their side, after the
destruction of Khe Sanh. And he sold out his country for one purpose
only: the killing of Jack Ransom.

Lang Vo
was flattened, and Ransom and most of the hapless "Bru" were trapped in
an underground command post. There they were discovered,
machine-gunned, and their bodies sealed up.

In 1982,
five years after my retirement here to an idyllic backwater such as had
always been my fondest dream, a much-travelled letter was delivered to
my door. I might have committed the ghastly error of pitching it
immediately into the trash, had I not noticed the strange assortment of
stamps arrayed across its back. By following the travels of this heroic
missive, as revealed by the stamps of successive postmasters, I learned
that it had passed through army bases in Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and
Illinois before travelling finally to the house of my sister Elizabeth
Belle in Baltimore, my first residence upon leaving the security of the
United States Army, and where I lived until I relocated to PG County,
as we residents know it. It had reached each destination just after my
departure from it—a hurried, unhappy, unfortunate departure, in the
final case.

My
correspondent, a Fletcher Namon of Ridenhour, Florida, had heard many a
time during his three hitches in the service of both the elusive
Franklin Bachelor and that odd duck, Colonel Runnel of the
Quartermaster Corps, who had tirelessly sought out stories of the
former. Being so intensely interested in the adventures and lore of
"the Last Irregular," he wanted me to be apprised of a story that had
come his way. Mr. Namon could vouch for the integrity of the man who
told it to him, a top-notch Ridenhour bartender who was like himself a
combat veteran, but could not speak for the man who had told it to
Namon's own informant.