The Village (16 page)

The villagers also knew that whatever the crisis had been, it had passed with the arrival of the helicopters. Gradually, they drifted away from the fair, until only the teenagers were left, giggling and laughing in their large tents. Several Marines and PFs stayed with the RDs to protect them, while the others walked back to the fort. Suong was unusually talkative at four in the morning as he and White checked the sentries at the market one last time before plodding back in. He said the story that the Viet Cong had tried to kill the villagers would be known in every hamlet the next day. That they had tried and failed was the worst possible combination for them. The villagers had been given the most powerful reason not to like them while not being made to fear them more. Suong believed the mortar attempt was a stupid, desperate act.

Faircloth was on the front post when the two leaders walked into the fort.

“You're going to have to sack out on sandbags, Sarge,” Faircloth called out. “All the cots are taken.”

“Why? We have six guys still out on patrol.”

“Yeh, but all the village honchos are here. They've been straggling in by ones and twos for the last two hours. You're too late.”

It had been over three months since the village officials had dared to sleep in the fort.

 

“I felt good about that,” White said later. “It had taken us a long time to work back and we had lost Lummis along the way. But we kept hanging in there and finally the village officials had enough trust in what we and the PFs could do to stay overnight. I had to move in some extra cots, but it was worth it. It was sort of like a Christmas present and a good-bye present all wrapped up as one.”

White was due for relief in December, but he did not want to leave until the unit had a new leader. He had chosen nobody from within it. The men had lived together too long to accept the sudden elevation of one of their own to the position of final authority. They could all fight well; what was needed was someone who could think in a crisis without giving way to gang consensus. White had discussed the situation at length with Charlie Company's new commander, Captain Dave Walker, a veteran leader with a scar across his neck from a 30-caliber bullet.

Walker said he was watching a twenty-year-old sergeant named McGowan. In November he had sent the sergeant to the besieged Special Forces camp at Ba To to take over a squad. The sergeant had fought in the hills for a month. He had made dozens of patrols and lost nobody from his squad. Unlike many other NCOs, he had not sold the weapons his squad captured to the Vietnamese for personal profit, despite pressure from some salty squad members.

White went back to the fort and discussed the candidate with his men. Two of the Marines, Swinford and Corporal Ed Gallagher, had served with McGowan a year earlier on board a Navy cruiser. Gallagher, a new replacement at the fort, liked him. Swinford, a rugged youth who had been in the combined unit for several months, did not. Before they were corporals, McGowan had became a sergeant. Both agreed he deserved his promotions but differed on whether he was right for the unit.

“He won't screw you,” Gallagher said. “He's a tough bastard. He'd throw hands with you, but he wouldn't go running to the CO.”

“Man, he just got over here,” Swinford objected. “They were fighting by regiments at Ba To. What good is that going to do him here? He's green. We don't need a green man in charge.”

A tall, husky, black-headed Irishman, Vincent McGowan had fought in the Golden Gloves and tended bar in his father's tavern in New York City. Calm under pressure and confidently self-reliant, he had an easy smile and an outgoing manner. Since Christmas, Captain Walker had been sending him out on patrols to gain familiarity with the terrain and the style of small-unit fighting in Binh Son district. Knowing he was competing for command of a unit with a large reputation, McGowan had been trying unsuccessfully for a solid night contact to impress Walker. On the night of January 7 he took an eight-man patrol out from the company perimeter and across the dunes, in order to set up an ambush well to the north of Binh Nghia. The route was new to him and the patrol was being guided by a corporal scout who had been with Charlie Company several months. After a three-hour trek, McGowan was convinced that the scout was lost and that the patrol was moving in a wide circle. But then the scout insisted that they had arrived at the right ambush site, so they burrowed in along the crest of a scrub-covered dune, with eight automatic rifles pointing down on a path twenty feet below.

Half an hour later they heard voices and the jangling of equipment.

The ambushers crawled closer together and slipped off their safeties.

“Fire when I do,” McGowan hissed.

On the path below a line of eight figures appeared, men walking haphazardly, with little space between them, their rifles dangling loosely. The scout strained forward to shoot.

McGowan grabbed his arm and shook his head fiercely. The figures on the path trudged on and out of sight.

“What's the matter with you?” the scout whispered. “You chicken?”

“Shut up and give me the radio,” McGowan replied.

The sergeant called the company and asked if there were any friendly patrols slated for his map grid square that night. Told no, he asked for a check on the nearest patrol. The reply came back that one mile south the Fort Page unit had a patrol out. McGowan asked if it was eight men strong. The company checked. It was. And Swinford was the patrol leader.

The next morning White and Swinford went to Charlie Company to see McGowan.

“You almost killed me last night. You know that, don't you?” Swinford demanded. “You were just plain lost and screwed up.”

“Our guide got us lost, Swinford, but we weren't screwed up. If we had been, you'd be dead,” McGowan said. “Have a beer, they're cold.”

“Why didn't you shoot?” White asked.

“No Cong would dope along the way those guys did. They're too smart to do that.”

The two sergeants talked for three hours, after which White dropped by to see Walker. He recommended McGowan as his relief.

White's departure was low-key. The night before he left he took out a patrol and on the day of his relief he rose early and walked to the marketplace, accepting quick, warm good-byes from several people and scores of children. When he returned to the fort, he shook hands all around, climbed into a waiting jeep and drove to company, where he had one last talk with McGowan, passing on information he did not want anyone else to hear.

“Thanh's definitely mean,” he said. “He hates. He lives only to kill VC. The people are afraid to death of crossing him. I keep the Marines out of that room when he starts to thump. He's the only problem you might have among the Vietnamese, but there are a couple of Marines you better watch.——is a crazy drunk. Don't let him near booze. He could kill somebody.——is into the Viet merchants for $300. I've cut off his credit in the village and in Nuoc Man and I've been collecting his pay for him. He lost most of his dough playing cards with——, who's damn fine on patrol but I wouldn't have him at my house for dinner. He's a wild man in a firefight, but in the fort he looks out only for himself.

“Those are your three problem children. The others are squared away. They know their way around this village and you don't have to worry about guard duty. Everybody stays awake. Suong has a penalty for a PF who dozes off. He says he's going to give the guy one grenade and drop him off alone the next morning across the river at the Phu Longs. I believe Suong would do it. So do the PFs. Any Marine who goes to sleep on duty in the fort is out of the unit.

“There's only one other thing. The latrine should be burned off twice a week—and everybody tries to duck out of that detail.”

On January 9, 1967, Sergeant James D. White left the village of Binh Nghia. Before he reached home, his mother had received two letters. The first was written by Trao, the acting village chief of Binh Nghia. It read:

The second letter was written by Brannon's friend, Ho Chi, the schoolteacher. It read:

Mainly due to the monsoon flood conditions, January and February of 1967 were quiet months in the village of Binh Nghia, and in the absence of violence the Americans and Vietnamese grew to know each other better. But March brought both good weather and village elections, which the Viet Cong had promised to disrupt. In response, district headquarters ordered the combined unit to throw out as many night patrols as possible. To do so, McGowan wanted to use RDs as well as PFs. Although resentful of the RDs' higher pay and lazy manners, the PFs agreed to patrol with them because they owed McGowan a favor. In February the district chief had tried to transfer the PFs to another village, leaving the RDs and Americans to protect Binh Nghia. But the district chief changed his mind after McGowan threatened that the Marines would leave with the PFs. So when McGowan asked for cooperation, Suong agreed that the RDs could patrol with the PFs and Americans—provided they could keep up.

By forcing the RDs and PFs to work together, McGowan was able to send out seven patrols a night and the village was quiet until a few nights before the election. That night he scheduled the first patrol out to move to the northern tip of the village. Just two Marines were going, accompanied by three RDs. McGowan chose Colucci to lead the patrol, and gave him Brown as his backup man. Soft-spoken, thoughtful and quick-moving, Corporal “Chip” Colucci was a natural leader among both the Vietnamese and the Americans. And PFC William Brown—Brown was just tough. In a firefight he was as emotionless as Faircloth, and almost as accurate with a LAW.

Colucci chose as point man Hiep Trung, an RD with whom he had spent long hours practicing his Vietnamese, but when the patrol left the fort, Colucci decided to take point himself. For an hour, he led the way through a maze of black bypasses. When he reached the My Hués, he turned off by a narrow side path to check an inlet for boat traffic. After circling around the backs of a few houses, he lost direction and Trung stepped forward, kidding Colucci for his befuddlement. Trung led the patrol back to the main trail. Once again on the right track, the patrol proceeded northward, Trung holding point.

The path was wide, the way clear and the stars bright when a burst of bullets slammed into Trung and flung him backward against Colucci. The Marine was knocked off his feet before he knew what had happened. Then the grenades were bursting around him and he was rolling free of Trung, his hands drumming the earth for his dropped rifle, like a blind man groping for his cane. Behind him Brown was ripping off a magazine from his M-16, the red of his tracers all jumbled with the flashes of the enemy weapons, the effect like that of a can of red paint splashed against a wall. Colucci found his rifle, tore through twenty rounds in three seconds, flipped out the empty magazine, palmed in a full one and fired again, his movements as instinctive as a housewife turning on and off a faucet. His ears still echoing from the sting of the first fusillade, he was unable to hear Brown yelling at him. He only knew that within a few feet of him there were a dozen enemy and he had to keep firing. But Brown was tugging at him, trying to pull him back.

“No,” Colucci yelled. “Trung.”

He had to say nothing more. Brown understood. They both took to pouring out fire, emptying five magazines apiece before there was a lull, one of those frequent, momentary pauses in heavy firefights when both sides in the same interval of three to six seconds are between magazines, shifting positions, talking it over or taking time to breathe.

Brown and Colucci crawled over to help Trung.

“He's dead,” Brown whispered.

“Get his carbine and ammo sack,” Colucci whispered. “Let's get out of here.”

Together the two scuttled into a low drainage ditch which ran alongside the trail. That was as far as they got when the lull broke and the bullets started whipping around them. But now they were about a foot lower than their ambushers and the trail was between them.

“Are the others hit?” Colucci asked.

“Bugged out,” Brown replied.

“We better get up some flares,” Colucci said.

Handicapped by a lack of radios for patrol work, the combined unit relied heavily on its flare warning system. Brown and Colucci started shooting up signal flares—a green, a red, a green and a red. Knowing what the signals meant, the enemy came on again, seeking to overwhelm the two men before reinforcements arrived. But Brown and Colucci also had taped to their web gear several white parachute flares and these they sent up one after another. The short spells of glare kept the enemy from closing.

At the fort, the flares were seen and McGowan rolled out as many men as could be spared from guard duty—three Marines and one PF. He led them on the dead run straight across the dunes toward the My Hué area, a trek of two miles through loose sand. He moved at the steady, searing pace of a cross-country runner, exhorting, cursing and pushing his men to keep up. At first, the five men ran as a pack, scrambling up the dunes by digging in their feet, lifting their thighs and holding their rifles chest high as though they were splashing through the surf; churning down the dunes by letting their legs run out from under them and then pitching their upper bodies forward to catch up, using the momentum to hurl them forward several yards onto the flat sands at a sprinter's pace before physics and fatigue slowed them down. At the end of the first mile, the pack had strung out, with Bac Si Khoi, surging steadily ahead. Vainly striving to keep up with him came the Marines, gasping for breath, their arms aching, their high strides reduced to steady clops, like draft horses plodding up a steep hill. McGowan was still trying to talk, but the men had to know beforehand what he was trying to say in order to understand him. The unit's new communicator, Corporal John Kokla, had a thirty-pound radio strapped to his back and tripped face forward three times, each time pushing himself back up and stumbling on.

They made it as far as the fence around My Hué before collapsing, two men vomiting while the others knelt or lay down, gulping air. The firing sounded close. McGowan waited until everyone could stand. He was about to advance when another patrol, led by Faircloth, came panting up. Faircloth had two Marines and three RDs with him.

But when McGowan swept his force into the hamlet, it consisted of seven Marines and one PF. The RDs hung back. The reaction force bore down quickly on the sound of the firing, keeping well spread and whooping and firing as they advanced. The Viet Cong pulled off, and Brown and Colucci stood up without drawing fire, tired and happy.

“Got any ammo?” Brown asked.

“How many are there?” McGowan asked.

“Ten,” Brown replied promptly.

“Colucci?”

“Brown has it about right. One squad of them, more or less. We can take them.”

“Where are they?”

“They faded back into the ville, probably trying to make a hat for the river. We go?”

“We go.”

The enemy now had the bad position. The fence hadn't kept the Viet Cong out of the hamlet, but it stood a fair chance of locking them in. McGowan took point and the Marines swept slowly through the dark hamlet. Not a light shone anywhere. The villagers were in their bunkers. In file so they would not shoot each other, the patrollers moved among the houses, McGowan taking most of the shots because he was in front. Neither he nor any of his men saw a clear target, but on over half a dozen occasions there was a blur of shadows or a rustling of bushes and the M-16s would chatter. Twice a few hurried shots cracked back at them. The patrol made a circuit of the hamlet without bringing the enemy to bay.

“Think we got any?” Brown asked.

“Who knows?” McGowan replied.

“Better round up some villagers to carry Trung back.”

“I think Khoi's doing that now, Sarge,” Colucci said. “He just ducked out.”

“Uh-uh,” came a voice from the rear of the line, “he's gone hunting those two RD dudes who were with Colucci. He'll kill them dead if he finds them, Sarge.”

“Oh, my God. You guys stay here with Colucci,” McGowan said. “Brown, do you know where the RDs are hiding?”

“About.”

“Let's get back there.”

Moving quickly, Brown and McGowan ducked back to the main trail, passed Trung's body and came to a section of the path bordered by a dense bamboo thicket. And there was Khoi, poking the bushes with his rifle like a gardener trimming shrubbery and softly, gently calling for the RDs to come out.

“Bac Si, quay lai,” McGowan yelled harshly. “Get out of here.”

Reluctantly, Khoi turned toward the Marines, raised his carbine muzzle in the air and followed Brown back down the trail. When he had gone, the sergeant had to wait only a few seconds before two frightened and dejected RDs came out of the undergrowth.

With four women carrying Trung's body, the dozen patrollers returned to the fort, where Khoi bitterly denounced those who had run away. The Marines laughed tolerantly at the anger of the PFs, remembering how unreliable at times they had been ten months before and knowing that the RDs, with their jaunty airs and urban backgrounds, were admired by the girl friends of several of the PFs. McGowan found the prejudice of the PFs toward a less professional unit rather ironic; it reminded him of the way Marines in line companies looked on the PFs.

The next morning Thanh led a patrol back to My Hué, and arrived as a funeral procession was disbanding. The villagers talked freely, saying that four Viet Cong had been killed in the action. Two had families in the hamlet and so had been buried there. The others were strangers and their bodies were carried back to the fort, where they lay unclaimed all day and at dusk were buried in a potter's field.

When Thanh had returned to the fort, he also had in tow a farmer and his wife from near whose house the Viet Cong had sprung their ambush. Under the lashings of thin bamboo whips, the couple cried out that they had had no choice. The VC had come in and threatened to shoot them if they did not tell how often the patrols came by. The VC had come back each of three nights before their ambush was successful.

For wanting no part of the war, the farmer and his wife received no sympathy or absolution from those who had chosen a side and who risked death. To keep their farm the couple had helped the Viet Cong to kill. The PFs whipped them until their screams turned to sobs and their minds seemed to have drifted beyond the pain. Then they carried them to district and dumped them in the common jail, where they languished for three weeks, after which they were released and returned to their farm.

Also, on the morning after Trung's death, the RDs were back in form, tromping through the marketplace holding aloft a Thompson submachine gun found when they had searched the shootout site at first light. After parading about the village, the RDs caught a boat to the district town of Binh Son, where they presented the captured weapon to their senior cadres. The district officials looked on approvingly—until McGowan arrived to tell the PF version of the previous night's fight. Suong, deferential and timid toward those of higher rank, was afraid to confront the RD leaders, lest they make a report which would lead to his transfer from the village. McGowan, on the other hand, accused the RDs of cowardice, thievery and boastfulness. He didn't care about the weapon, except that it had become a symbol. The PFs and Marines had fought for it; the RDs had run away. He wanted the RD district cadres to give the gun back. The PFs needed proof to squash the rumors that were buzzing in the marketplace.

The district officials tried to soothe the sergeant, explaining that the RDs were more than just fighters; they were organized and directed by a powerful faction of the VNQDD, or Nationalist Party, and provincial politics were involved. McGowan was unmoved.

For four days he appeared daily at the district headquarters. On the fifth day the district RD leader handed him the submachine gun. McGowan gave it to Suong and for a week Khoi carried it ostentatiously as a demonstrable rebuke to the RD claims of superior fighting prowess.

 

Soon afterward a gaunt Marine corporal in torn utilities stopped by the fort on his way back to base after an operation. He brought word that the combined unit had lost its eighth Marine. It was Fleming, who had gone off on the operation as a special scout and immediately attracted attention with his black beret, black utilities, wispy mustache and flamboyant manner. He was happiest at lead point, far in front of the hundreds of infantrymen moving through the rice paddies over a wide front. That way, the corporal explained, Fleming avoided the growls and scowls of staff and gunnery sergeants who were astounded at his costume. On the third day of the operation, reacting to some sudden information, they were helilifted into an abandoned paddy. Before them loomed a low, canopied hill mass, reputedly hiding an NVA regimental headquarters. The intelligence proved correct. Fleming was among the very first struck by a 50-caliber machine gun. The men talked about him after the fight, the corporal said. They talked about the Marine with the black beret who was hit in the chest and went to his knees and who wouldn't die until he had fired his rifle.

“We thought you'd like to know how he died,” the tired corporal said to the Marines and PFs gathered around him, “so the captain sent me down to tell you.”

*  *  *

There were other visitors during election time. Four university students had returned home and they were greeted warmly by the village officials, who were proud of their academic status. Bright and fluent in English, the students were surprised to see a dozen Americans wandering about the hamlets and eating in several homes. The first afternoon they were back, the students came to the fort, together with Suong and a cluster of villagers. They had been asking critical questions of the villagers about the conduct of the Marines, and Suong had warned McGowan that they disliked Americans.