The Village (29 page)

It was no ordinary VC who lay in the marketplace; it was a man whose reputation was feared throughout the district, a killer who had been the PF leader in the village but who in 1963 had gone over to the VC and had since risen to become a company commander. He had long terrorized his former PF colleagues, for he liked to hide in their houses at night to catch them alone when they came to visit their families. At first he would try to persuade them to join him, but later he came just to kill. Mr. Minh estimated that over the years the renegade had executed close to two dozen PFs. Foster was a hero.

He repeated the shooting performance a few weeks later, when he was taking a patrol along a treeline bordering some paddies swollen with rain. It was fairly open terrain and, ahead of him several meters, Foster saw a few men with weapons, chatting idly. Thinking they might be PFs out where they shouldn't have been, he whispered, “Nghia Quan? PF?” The group froze, then lit out running. Foster raised his M-16 and fired, saw a man go down, crouch back up and hobble on. A general firefight ensued, each side testing the strength and position of the other. At first Foster thought his five-man group might get the worst of it and was preparing to pull out, when the enemy fire slackened. Foster's group then decided the enemy were just trying to provide cover and time for their wounded comrade, and so pressed in. Two sides fighting for the life of a man.

When the VC flinched first and pulled out, the fight became a search in the paddies. A PF found a weapon lying in the open, left perhaps in the hope that its souvenir value might be enough and the PFs and Marines would turn back. But they knew the man was near, and that his friends had left him. The searchers were passing by a dark mudhole filled with water when they heard a splash close at hand. The Marine at rear guard wheeled with his shotgun, firing as he turned. Alone, with a leg mangled by bullets, the man had sought refuge in the hole. But he slipped and splashed and died in the mud on a warm summer's evening.

The villagers knew that man also, and news of his death added to Foster's prestige. It seemed for the first time to the villagers of Binh Thuy that Americans could fight in a way that meant something and that their PFs were beginning to hunt the VC, instead of the other way around.

Pressure from the enemy side slackened significantly in the hamlet adjacent to the fort, but remained high in the outlying areas. The rice was high and the VC wanted the harvest. Word was passed to the fort that a band of thirty were taxing each night in Chau Tu, Foster's hamlet.

So he set out that same night to protect that hamlet, taking two Marines with him. Their trip across the paddies and through the treelines went quietly enough, but as they neared the hamlet, a series of flares silhouetted them. They hunkered down to wait for the illumination to flicker out. But it persisted, along with the dull sounds of artillery, for the Viet Cong were harassing the district headquarters, four miles to the southwest.

The Marine at point had just decided to move on despite the light when he saw a face peering at him from some nearby bushes. Just as he turned to warn the others, Foster, hearing something, stood up and said, “Nghia Quan? Nghia Quan?”

That was how Foster died, making sure he did not shoot one of his PF friends by accident. The Viet Cong who shot him ran away.

It was growing dark on a cold, drizzly evening a year later when Benoit and I walked back into Binh Nghia. We had planned to spend the night with a combined unit across the river, but at five that evening Marine headquarters had called, refusing to allow two unarmed civilians to stay in a hamlet where there were Marines and PFs. A colonel in an air-conditioned office said it was too dangerous. Having been evicted, we hitchhiked part way and walked the rest into Binh Nghia, only to find PF Hill deserted.

“What do we do now?” Benoit asked.

“Find some bushes and hide until dawn?” I said.

“I think we might be a little bit too late,” Benoit replied. “Look behind you.”

We were standing at the foot of the hill, with open paddies on three sides, and out of the treeline on the fourth side about fifteen yards away had stepped a group of men dressed in black pajamas with a few odd bits of khaki, carrying assorted types of weapons and staring hard at us.

“Know any of them?” Benoit asked.

“No. They're not PFs. If they're Cong, I want to see you talk us out of this.”

“It's simple. I'm going to tell them there's a reward on you and I'm turning you in.”

Not one had raised his weapon, and as they crowded in around us, they were staring the way one does when trying to recall the name of a person he has met casually once or twice. I stood, as usual, dumb and foolish while Benoit carried on his usual rapid-fire conversation, but I was damned if I was going to ask him what our status was, and at length, when he thought he had kept me on tenterhooks long enough, he said:

“Remember last year Suong told us he couldn't be bothered with a people's self-defense force? Well, you're looking at part of them. They say Suong has over one hundred of them under arms. They remembered us from before. They knew we looked familiar. They just couldn't place us.”

We found Suong together with his PF platoon near the marketplace in Binh Yen Noi Number 3. He greeted us warmly and told me he had a surprise for us: we were going to My Hué. I said, “Oh no, we're not; I know the VC are still there. He doesn't have to prove it each year we visit him.” When Benoit phrased my objections in colorful Vietnamese, the PFs howled with laughter. Suong said they were going to My Hué. We could stay where we were, alone. We would be safe—probably.

So we all went to My Hué, arriving shortly before nine while lights were still on and the children were playing along the main trail and radios were blaring. Suong didn't even have a point ten yards out in front of us and Luong was carrying his rifle casually by the barrel. We came to the cluster of houses where Colucci's RD friend, Truong, had been killed almost three years earlier and Suong turned off the path.

Amid smiles of welcome we entered a medium-sized house and sat down to thimbles of whiskey. I looked at Suong to see if he had already been drinking. He caught my disapproving glare and laughed delightedly, explaining to Benoit that this was his surprise. How did I like being treated like an old grandfather in My Hué, where, when he had first met me three and a half years earlier, we had fought our way in and out, night after night?

He told me not to worry; his men were everywhere. Not the PFs. The PFs were special. They didn't handle ordinary security patrols; they were the praetorian guard, reserved for the most difficult missions. Each of Binh Nghia's seven hamlets now had an armed self-defense group of ten to twenty men. The PFs had no fort. They roamed from hamlet to hamlet at night, Suong deciding on the spur of the moment where they would go so the Viet Cong did not know where they were or what to expect. On the other hand, he usually knew when the Viet Cong were coming. One night a small group of Viet Cong had sneaked into Fort Page and blown up the empty adobe building, but Suong said that was a trivial matter, since the fort had already been abandoned for several months. He generally had advance warning of serious attacks through his intelligence net of deserters and draft dodgers. He did not report them to the district officials as long as they kept their eyes and ears open. The new police chief—Bac Si Khoi—agreed with the method. Trao had not had the time to manage the village and keep up with police matters. The village council had not thought the village needed another Thanh, so Khoi it was, although he spent as much time at the dispensary as at the village office.

But then the enemy threat had diminished. The P31st was not what it had been. American planes had caught the company in the open somewhere over in the Phu Longs and the villagers said the company was hurt terribly. Le Quan Viet, the district leader with one hand, had been captured. Suong did not know how, but he had heard that for the five days he was held at district he had refused to eat or drink and had not spoken one word. Suong had not heard about him since he was taken away from district in a helicopter.

In early November, the 95th Sapper Company, a mixed NVA/VC unit, had attacked Binh Nghia. Suong said it had been like the old days. His intelligence was so exact he knew which trail they were going to use and all his PFs and self-defense forces were clamoring for one of the select ambush sites. The PFs waited until the 95th's lead platoon was part way across a small paddy before springing the ambush. Suong claimed that the 95th didn't even try to fight back. He thought that was rather disgraceful. The PFs buried the men they killed because all were strangers to the village and had no kin-folk to care for them. Suong stored away the seven AK-47s his men captured. He said each was worth one M-79 grenade launcher from the Americal Division. The district chief had given a party at Binh Son for Suong and his men.

During the night, as PFs and self-defense troops wandered in and out of the house, Benoit and I heard from at least thirty different individuals that they had been part of the paddy ambush against the 95th. Suong had told us privately that it had been Luong, as we expected, and about five others who had done the greatest damage to the Viet Cong. But Suong also smiled tolerantly when the others boasted to us and never said a word to contradict them. The victory was shared by all.

Inevitably, the conversation drifted back to McGowan, White, Brannon, Sullivan and the others. Suong said that he would like them, those that were still alive, to see the village again.

But Suong would not have been there to act as host. In a sense, the PFs had done their job too well. By 1970 Binh Nghia was so peaceful that the new American district adviser had termed it an “R & R” (Rest and Recreation) center. He and the district chief had agreed that Suong and his well-armed PFs could better be used elsewhere. There was no need of them in Binh Nghia; the self-defense force could look after things. So the Binh Nghia PFs were transferred to the Phu Longs. They could visit their own village and families on weekends, maybe.

The village council was reorganized. With relative peace, a new splinter political party emerged and vied with the VNQDD for local control. They triumphed and Trao was thrown in jail for two months as a draft dodger. The PFs tried to defend the man who had worked so steadfastly in the dark days, and their loyalty to him was a strong reason for their transfer. Trao was released from jail on the condition that he go with the PFs. Naturally, Khoi was sent back to the PFs.

The war has passed Binh Nghia. To be sure, there are still secret Viet Cong agents and villagers sympathetic to their cause scattered through the seven hamlets. And there is a self-defense platoon and a village government in Binh Nghia. But the savage struggle of 1966 and 1967, the months when the fight went on night after night after night, when neither side would quit or admit defeat, that period has long since gone. That was when the Marines fought there and lost nine dead—Page, Brannon, Sueter, Glasser, Fielder, Sullivan, Lummis, Fleming and Foster. The Americans are gone, the living and the dead. And the PFs who fought beside them and carried on after them—Lam, Thanh, Suong, Luong, Khoi, Tri—they are gone. And the leaders of the village council—Phuoc, Trao, Buu—they are gone. And the Viet Cong who were the guerrillas and who were in the local force companies, they, too, are gone. All gone, some dead, some replaced by others.

Fort Page is gone, too. The adobe building still stands, but only as a cracked, crumbling shell. Its walls are streaked and forlorn, like the World War II defenses along the coastlines of the United States. Once the weather frayed the sandbags along the trench lines, the wind blew the sand away. Over the seasons, the rains beat on the sides of the moat and caved them in eventually, washing away the punji stakes. The villagers took away the wood from the village office built for old Mr. Minh and from the dispensary built for Blunk and Khoi; once the fort was abandoned, there were other uses for its wood.

In the decade of the 1970s, one would have to look twice to see where Fort Page had once stood. But if you know the trail through the paddies, you can walk among the weeds, cross the shallow dip which was a moat, pass by lumps of rain-pressed earth once called breastworks and stand on a flat place so hard packed the grass does not grow. At the far end of the flat place, which was a courtyard, squat the crumbled remains of a building and in front of the remains sits the stump of a flagpole. In front of the stump, a square stone thrusts up from the hard ground just high enough to stub your toe. A few weeks before his death, Volentine had presented the stone to the PFs as a memorial to their departed American friends—the living and the dead. Screwed to the top surface of the stone in Ozymandean solitude is a salt-crusted bronze plaque. On it are chiseled the words:

CAP LIMA
—
ONE
FORT PAGE
DEDICATED IN HONOR OF PFC L. L. PAGE
KILLED IN ACTION
—21
JUNE
1966
7
JUNE
1966—14
OCTOBER
1967

If it is late in the day when you stop to read the plaque, the sky behind you might be soft in a sunset of pink and purple, orange and red. Toward you from the hamlets will drift the full smells of evening: wood smoke and steamed rice, chicken broth, fish sauce and fried shrimp. The sounds, too, will wash over the fort—a baby crying, crickets calling, a farmer shouting to his neighbor, children laughing, frogs croaking, a mother screeching at her little boy who is dawdling on the back of a huge water buffalo while supper goes cold. If you linger, you will see warm yellow lights begin to wink on amid the darkening green of the treeline.