The Village (2 page)

Binh Nghia belonged to the Viet Cong. By 1964 the National Liberation Front was the full-time government in five of the village's seven hamlets and controlled boat traffic moving toward the fishing beds at sea. The village chief and hamlet elders walked three miles each afternoon so they could sleep inside the district compound. In the fall of the following year came the Big Flood of I Corps, an inundation by the rain and sea which exceeded any catastrophe in living memory. Binh Nghia was cut off from outside military aid as bridges were washed away and roads flooded under. The regular military forces of the Saigon government were occupied with guarding and repairing the district towns and the province capital city, leaving the village militia to cope by themselves. Two strong local-force Viet Cong companies roamed from outlying hamlet to hamlet, village to village, destroying or dislocating the Popular Forces (PF) militia and declaring the villages liberated. Binh Nghia proved no exception. By 1965 the government of South Vietnam (GVN) had conceded all its seven hamlets to the Viet Cong.

Not so the two dozen militiamen whose families still lived in the village. With no place to go and no reason to run farther than they had to, they had flocked to the top of a steep hill surrounded by open rice paddies, about a half-mile outside the village. During the daytime, when there was some assurance of reinforcements from the district, they would dart forward, nosing around the edges of the nearest hamlet, sniping at any exposed VC cadres. At night, knowing they were without support, untrained and cherishing no hope of success, they abandoned the village to huddle at the top of the hill. There they awaited the night when the enemy, annoyed by their pestering defiance, would choose to accept the dozen or more casualties necessary to assault and finish them.

 

To the men of the 1st Marine Division who were stationed in the district, Binh Nghia was just another village, with nothing peculiar to mark it. If the Marines approached on a large-unit sweep, they would find no traces of the enemy. If they happened to pass through one of its hamlets on a small patrol, they would likely receive some harassing fire from distant treelines. The villagers were uncommunicative, but not sullen. Among the Americans, Binh Nghia had no special reputation.

Still, when the call went out for volunteers to live with the Vietnamese forces in the village, the response was enthusiastic. General Walt had asked the commander of the Marine battalion in the district to select twelve men. The first rifle company polled produced over one hundred volunteers. The primary reason was comfort. For the Marine riflemen, assignment to the village would be an escape from the routine harassments of duty in a rifle company. Many thought they would be out of the dust or mud. They would sleep on cots instead of the bare ground. There would be no more jungles to hack through or mountains to climb—no more leeches, vipers or trench foot. There would be no first sergeant barking at stragglers. Life in the village would be sweet and easy. Or so it was rumored.

General Walt had laid down two stipulations concerning the volunteers. First, they had to be seasoned combat veterans. That was not a difficult requirement to meet. The Marines had been fighting the 2d NVA (North Vietnamese Army) Division on and off since midspring, and most of the riflemen had been engaged in at least three rough operations. Second, Walt asked the battalion officers to send only men who could get along with the villagers. Major Braun had been emphatic on that point, and it slowed the selection procedure. It took eight days to pick twelve men. The officers were aware from their own surveys that over 40 percent of the Marines disliked the Vietnamese. The problem was particularly acute among the small-unit leaders—the lieutenants and sergeants—whose opinions had considerable effect on their men. In addressing the problem, the Marine command had written that its surveys “suggest that of our squad leaders graduating from NCO Leadership School less than one in five marches (
sic
) forth with a positive attitude toward the ARVN and PF, and that probably one-third go forth with a strong dislike for the local people. This is not just academic. It is costing us lives.”

The noncommissioned officer chosen to lead the volunteer squad was known to like the Vietnamese. His name was William Beebe and he was a career Marine. Only twenty-one, he had been in the service for four years, although he was still a corporal. Of medium build but with powerful, tattooed arms, Beebe was a scrapper and a stickler for alertness in the field. On large-unit sweeps, his squad frequently took the point and scouted ahead, with Beebe easily distinguishable from his men by his habit of shouting and waving his arms. He was forever signaling his men to spread out and pay attention to where they were walking.

But Beebe had another side. He disliked rules and details, and somehow he could not imagine himself making out pay rosters and guard rosters and equipment rosters the way the first sergeant did. When not on an operation, he would run the risk of buying a bottle of local whiskey for his squad. Hard liquor in Vietnam was against regulations, and Beebe had been caught and fined more than once. While his tactical performance was excellent, his relaxed attitude toward garrison regulations had prevented his promotion to sergeant. The village volunteers thought they had the right kind of leader in Beebe. Life in the village would be sweet and easy.

On June 10, 1966, a dozen Marines left behind an American base camp with its thick barbed wire and canvas cots, solid bunkers, soupy ice cream and endless guard rosters, and went to live with some Vietnamese in the Vietnamese village of Binh Nghia.

Their destination that day was the stumpy hill where the village militia, called Popular Forces or PFs, huddled each night. The Marines never climbed that hill. At its base, they were met by Lam, who had with him fifteen police and eighteen PFs. Lam had decided to abandon the hill outpost because it took twenty minutes to walk from there to the nearest hamlet. With the arrival of the Marines, Lam felt his force was strong enough to move closer to the village.

The police chief had selected as his new headquarters a three-room adobe villa which sat at the outskirts of the third and largest of the hamlets called Binh Yen Noi. The villa, which had been deserted by a rich landowner in 1950 when the Viet Minh had first taken the village, looked south across a wide expanse of paddies. Its backyard was a short expanse of shrubbery which ended near the back door of a thatched house.

After explaining that the first order of business was turning the villa into a fort, Lam asked if the Marines could provide the necessary materials. Beebe replied that he personally could requisition none, and since his company commander was leaving shortly, tiny supplies requested by the company would take weeks and perhaps months before arriving. Unfazed, Lam said they could build their own defenses without outside help. He promptly called a meeting of the villagers, explained that his men and the Americans had come to stay, and asked for volunteers to build the outpost. About forty villagers responded, a majority of whom were related to the PFs.

Beebe expected the police would force the other villagers to cooperate. Instead, Lam himself set to work and his men followed. All that first day under the hot sun the combined force and the villagers toiled, digging a wide moat around the villa, filling sandbags and propping them up as an inside wall, splitting sections of bamboo into thousands of short, sharp stakes and studding the moat walls with them, erecting a high, spindly bamboo fence thirty yards outside the moat on the theory that the wood would cause the premature detonation of recoilless rifle rounds aimed at the fort. They worked with shovels, hoes, axes and knives. Slats were not nailed to the rickety fence; they were tied with bamboo cord. The mud scooped out of the moat served both to fill the sandbags and to cement them in place. Several Vietnamese, obviously specialists at the task, were busy sinking a deep well in what had been the courtyard of the villa. Boys and some young women spent the day shuffling back and forth from the nearby treeline to the open fort, carrying buckets of fresh water. The boys liked to follow after the Americans, although they would jump to carry water to any policeman who shouted at them. They paid no attention to the local PFs, however, and dawdled when asked to bring them water. It was obvious the villagers did not respect the Popular Forces.

At twilight, Lam called a halt to the work. Most of the villagers went home, the women in one group shuffling ahead to prepare the evening meal, the men in another group ambling slowly behind and talking animatedly among themselves. A few women stayed at the fort, bustling about in a clatter of pans, shrieking to each other, preparing fires and setting plates down in the dirt. Then they, too, departed and a quiet peace fell over the scene, as the men scooped rice and chunks of meat from the simmering pots and sprawled among the sandbags to enjoy the evening meal. There was no wind and the crickets were starting to chirp. Across the paddies in front of the fort the sky was pink and red and soft.

While the Marines enjoyed the meal and the sunset, Beebe conferred in private with Lam. By the time he rejoined the Marines, several of them had fallen asleep.

“Let's wake up,” he said. “Here's the word. We're expected to go out tonight. The police will pull guard here. All we have to do is patrol with the PFs.”

“All?” Lance Corporal Gerald Faircloth said. “All? We spend the day like a bunch of ditchdiggers and now we're supposed to have patrol duty at night too?”

“Shut up, Faircloth,” Beebe said. “We haven't been here long enough for you to start bitching. The police aren't infantry. They can take care of the fort, but that's all. It's up to us and the PFs to handle the patrols. Anyways, only four of us have to go out tonight. You're one of them.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Faircloth asked.

Faircloth was a hard young man, not given to smiling or socializing easily. He stayed to himself and bothered no one. And on the other hand, no one pushed him. Tall and wiry, he had the hand-and-eye coordination of a basketball forward. He was an expert with a LAW, or Light Anti-Armor Weapon, a three-foot piece of fiberglass tubing enclosing a self-propelled rocket which could stop a tank or blow up a bunker. On operations, Faircloth had been his company's antibunker specialist. Beebe wanted Faircloth along on the first village patrol.

For the patrol's point man, Beebe selected Corporal Phillip Brannon, an experienced tactician with an outgoing personality. Unlike Faircloth, Brannon enjoyed joking and horseplay and by his grinning, gangling manner invited practical jokes and childish horseplay. Not that he was all fun and games. He claimed that back home in West Texas he had hit a running jack rabbit at seventy yards with a .22 rifle, and those who had watched him fire his M-14 automatic rifle believed him. Not that Brannon was given to bragging. Self-deprecatory in his humor, he had the knack of communicating with the Vietnamese despite a limited vocabulary. Brannon loved to pantomime, and by exaggerated motions of clumsiness and wry expressions of face, he evoked the language of laughter. But Beebe had not placed him at point because he made people laugh; Brannon walked first because he carried a fast rifle.

Beebe himself was going on the patrol, and PFC L. L. Page pestered him to be the fourth Marine. Page was the youngest of the group, of average height and less physically tough than most of the volunteers. Beebe felt responsible for him. Page had desperately wanted to go to the village, and Beebe thought it was a good idea because Page, with his unassuming manner and lack of egotism, wore well in close quarters. Beebe had argued with the battalion officers that he could teach Page tactics while they were in the village. So Page went on the first patrol.

Wanting the PFs to make a good impression, Lam had asked Nguyen Suong to go on the patrol. The Popular Forces had no formal rank structure and the district chief had never even appointed a leader for those at Binh Nghia, supposedly because he did not want to waste a good man on a suicidal assignment. Suong had gradually emerged as the unofficial PF leader. Of medium build and mean eyes, Suong was distinguishable mainly by his gold front tooth and the sharp creases in his green utility uniform. His neat dress deceived the Marines.

“He doesn't look like a field soldier to me,” Brannon said. “He's too clean.”

Lam insisted otherwise.

“Well,” Beebe said, “let's get going and find out what has people so shaken up about this ville.”

The four Marines stood in a group waiting while Suong talked rapidly and forcefully to two PFs. The PFs were shaking their heads and replying nervously, but Suong kept jabbing his finger at them and answering in strong tones. Beebe looked quizzically at Lam.

“Those two have not seen much combat,” Lam said. “Suong say to them that they be safe with Marines.”

Finally, one of the PFs walked reluctantly past the Marines and stood in front of them. He was to be the guide. Brannon stepped up behind him. Each time the PF would turn nervously around, Brannon winked and smiled. The PF did not seem encouraged. Beebe stood behind Brannon, followed by Suong, Page, another PF and Faircloth.

“Di-di,” Beebe said, gesturing at the point PF.

In the dimming light, the patrol passed through the incomplete breastworks in front of the fort onto the main path which led eastward straight across open paddies for a quarter of a mile before turning north and disappearing into a black mass of trees which surrounded the hamlet of Binh Yen Noi. The same treeline paralleled the path all the way to the fort, passing not thirty yards to the rear of the moat. But before entering cover, Beebe wanted to see how the patrol looked in the open.

It looked miserable, more like the parody of a heel-and toe race than a combat patrol. No sooner had the PF at point struck the main path than he hurried eastward at a pace better suited to a cross-country race. Brannon tried to keep up, while at the same time juggling his equipment to keep it from rattling, forcing his gait to have the grace of a drunk ostrich. For the first few steps, Beebe had held his pace to a crawl, placing his weight carefully. Before he could adjust, a fifty-yard gap had opened between him and Brannon, whom he could barely see. Fearful of having the patrol split into two segments less than a minute after leaving the fort, Beebe broke into a trot, the speed of which increased for each man back in line, finally forcing a flabbergasted Faircloth to run as fast as his legs would carry him to join up with a column rapidly disappearing into the darkness. Hearing the footsteps pounding up behind him, the point PF broke into a run to stay out in front, where he assumed he was supposed to be. With momentum begetting more momentum, the patrol was thundering toward the black and ominous treeline with all the stealth of a berserk elephant, the equipment of the men jingling and jangling with every step.

“Catch him, Brannon, catch him,” Beebe wheezed.

“Catch him hell,” Brannon panted back. “It'd be a lot easier to shoot him.”

“What's the word for ‘stop'?”

“I don't know. But I know the word for ‘water.' Will that help?”

“Screw it. Hold it up. I'm not going up against that treeline like this.”

The two Marines jogged to a halt and leaned forward, hands on knees, to catch their breaths. Suong came panting up, followed at a few seconds' interval by each of the other patrol members.

“I don't believe it,” gasped Faircloth, trying to untangle the straps of two LAWs from his neck. “I just don't believe it.”

“What'll we do now?” Page asked. “Go back in?”

“Go back?” Beebe replied. “Page, you're out of your gourd. We just came out. I'll camp out here before I'll go back and face those others. We can't go back in. We'll have to wait.”

The men sat down along the side of the road and waited. Five minutes passed, ten minutes.

Brannon spoke. “Don't look now but here comes Native Dancer. Walking. Slowly walking. Vee-re slowly walking. Like he's all alone and doesn't like it.”

Up the path from the treeline, in a half-crouch, with his rifle at the ready, came the PF point. He was moving slowly and making no noise.

“Now that's good movement,” Brannon said. “He does everything right. He just does it sort of backward.”

Suong went forward to talk with the point. When he came back, he pointed at the treeline and whispered, “VC, VC.”

“I think it's a crock,” Faircloth said. “He's just trying to cover up for that guy screwing up.”

“You're probably right,” Beebe said. “But at least Suong's taking point. Let's go.”

They entered the treeline, and the visibility dropped from fifty feet to five. Houses were spaced near the path, which was overhung with coconut and banana trees and bordered by thorn thickets and broad-leafed shrubbery. In places the vegetation so overgrew the path that no light from the sky entered, and in those black tunnels each patroller proceeded by sound and guess only. He could see nothing.

Suong moved quickly, too quickly for the Marines, who feared an ambush at any second and who were sure that the noise of their passage was traveling ahead of them. Once in the hamlet, the PFs wanted to stay close enough to the Marines to touch them at all times. If a PF felt a gap was opening between him and a Marine, he would run to close it, heedless of the crackling branches breaking under his feet.

After several minutes, Suong turned off the trail where there was a gap between two houses and waited until the others were bunched close behind him. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled forward until he had passed the houses and was kneeling at the edge of a clean-swept backyard. After motioning Beebe to creep alongside him, he stabbed his finger toward the other side of the yard.

Understanding that they had arrived at their ambush position, Beebe gestured to Faircloth and Brannon to lie down between the PFs facing the yard. He motioned to Page to twist around and watch the direction from which they had just come. Beebe and Suong lay side by side in the center of the small line and waited.

From the houses around them, they heard the murmur of voices, the clatter of pots, and occasionally the sharp, hacking coughs of the sick. Lights from the fires and the lanterns in the houses winked unevenly at them. The air close to the ground was windless and musty, smelling of decayed leaves, old fires and many humans. Without wind, the mosquitoes were hovering around the men, probing for a piece of skin where sweat had wiped away insect repellant, their buzzing near the ears a distraction from concentration on the job at hand.

So Beebe never heard the Viet Cong. He would never have seen them either had Suong not suddenly begun nudging him hard and pointing across the yard. Where Beebe had been looking blankly for an hour, he now thought he saw a shadow move. Straining to mark the spot, he slowly started to lift the rifle to his shoulder when a noiseless figure darted across an open corner of the yard and disappeared behind a house. Thoroughly startled, Beebe half-rose to his knees and his rifle barrel clanked on the ground. At the sound, a second figure appeared where the first had just been and disappeared in the same instant.