Up Country (49 page)

I said to Susan, “This is the only way into the valley from Vietnam, but the Americans never went in overland because this pass was an ambush waiting to happen. We flew in by helicopter and brought everything we needed by air.”

The blacktop had mostly disappeared, and as we got higher, the clouds drifted across the slopes, a mist rose off the ground, and it was getting cold. Mr. Loc was not too bad a driver and took it easy. We hadn’t seen a vehicle or a human being in about twenty kilometers.

Susan said, “I’ve never been this far into the interior. It’s spooky.”

“It’s like another country. Totally different from the coastal plains. Lots of Montagnards up here.”

“Who are they?”

“Hill tribespeople. There are lots of tribes with different names, but collectively we called them Montagnards, after the French name for them.”

“Oh. Now we call them ethnic minorities, or indigenous peoples. That’s politically correct.”

“Right. They’re Montagnards. Just means mountain people. Anyway, they used to like Americans and hated the ethnic Vietnamese, north and south. We armed them to the teeth, but the trick was to get them to kill only North Viets and Viet Cong, and not kill our ARVN allies. I think their motto was ‘The only good Vietnamese is a dead Vietnamese.’” I asked her, “Have you ever heard of the FULRO?”

Mr. Loc’s head turned, and we made eye contact. Now this idiot would go back and report that I was here to lead a Montagnard insurrection.

Susan said, “I saw some photos once in the war museum of—”

“Right. Me, too.”

Susan thought a moment, then said, “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen a hill tribesman.”

“Not even in the Q-Bar?”

She ignored that and asked me, “Are they . . . you know . . . friendly?”

“They used to be. They’re actually quite pleasant, if you’re not Vietnamese. Maybe you should re-comb your hair.”

I looked up and saw Mr. Loc staring at us in the rearview mirror. The man obviously understood what we were saying, and he didn’t like this talk about FULRO and the Montagnards’ hatred of the Vietnamese.

We crested a rise in the road and started down. The pass was still very narrow and twisting, and partly obscured with fog and mist, so we couldn’t see down into the A Shau Valley.

“Look, Paul.” Susan pointed to a ridge on which stood a long structure of logs and thatch, built on stilts. She asked me, “Is that a hill tribe house?”

“Looks like it.”

As we got within about a hundred meters of the longhouse, three men with very long hair, dressed in what looked like multicolored blankets, appeared on the ridge above us. Two of them were carrying AK-47 rifles, and the other had an American M-16. My heart skipped a beat, and I guess Mr. Loc’s did, too, because he slammed on his brakes.

Mr. Loc stared at the three armed men, less than fifty meters from us now, and said something to Susan.

Susan said to me, “Mr. Loc says they are Ba Co or Ba Hy tribesmen. They aren’t allowed to carry rifles, but they hunt with them, and the government doesn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.”

This was a piece of good news. I liked the idea of armed civilians that the government couldn’t control. I just hoped they remembered that they liked Americans.

The three tribesmen were looking down at us, but not making a move. I decided to make sure they knew only the driver was a Viet. I stood on the seat and waved. I shouted, “Hello! I’m back!”

They looked at one another, then back at me.

I called up to them, “I’m from Washington and I’m here to help you.”

Susan said, “You want to get us shot?”

“They love us.”

The three tribesmen waved their rifles, and I said to Mr. Loc, in English, “Okay, they say we can go. Move it.” I sat.

He threw the vehicle into gear.

We continued down the pass into the valley. Susan said, “That was incredible. Damn, I should have taken a picture.”

“If you take their picture, they cut off your head and try to stuff it into the camera.”

“You’re being an idiot.”

“I’ll tell you what they used to do to North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong—they’d skin them alive, then filet them with razor knives, and feed the pieces to their dogs and make the prisoner watch as the dogs ate him, piece by piece. Every time they captured an enemy soldier, the dogs would go crazy with anticipation. Most enemy soldiers killed themselves rather than get captured by the Montagnards.”

“My God . . .”

“I never saw this . . . but I saw the aftermath once . . . I think it made us feel good that we weren’t quite that psychotic yet.”

She didn’t reply.

Mr. Loc turned and looked at me. It was not a very nice look. I said to him, “Drive.”

The pass widened and became less steep. The ground fog lifted, and we could see the A Shau Valley, dotted with patches of white mist, which looked like snow from here.

I stared at the valley, and it was very familiar. Not only did I never think I’d see this place again, but when I was here, I thought this was the last place I’d see on this earth.

Susan was looking at me and asked, “Remember it?”

I nodded.

“You flew in. Then what?”

I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said, “We flew in from Camp Evans, the First Cavalry Division’s forward headquarters. A huge flight of helicopters carrying infantry for an air assault. It was April 25, and there was a window of good weather. We came in from the northeast, over these hills that we just drove through. In the north end of the valley is this place called A Luoi, which was once a Viet village, but by that time, there was no trace of it. That’s where this road ends. At A Luoi, there was once a French Foreign Legion post that was overrun by the Communist Viet Minh, back in the ’50s. The Communists then controlled this valley, which was called a dagger pointed at the heart of Hue. So, in the early ’60s, the Special Forces
arrived and set up a camp, right in the middle of Indian Country at A Luoi. They rebuilt the French airstrip, and recruited and trained the Montagnards to fight the Viet Cong and the North Viets.”

We were almost at the floor of the valley now, and I could see the small river that ran through it.

I continued, “The valley opens out into Laos over there, beyond those mountains, and a branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail runs right into the valley. So one day in 1966, the enemy massed his forces in Laos, thousands of them, and overran the American Special Forces camp, and the Communists controlled the valley again.”

We were now entering the flat valley, and Mr. Loc sped up a little.

“After the Special Forces camp was overrun and the surviving hill people fled, this whole valley and the hills and mountains became a free-fire zone, a dumping ground for the air force. If they had to abort a precision bombing mission because of weather, they’d unload their bombs in this valley. When I got here, this place looked like Swiss cheese. These huge, house-sized craters became firing holes for us and them, and we’d fight, crater by crater . . . in the valley, in the hills, in the jungle up there.” I looked to the southwest and said, “Somewhere over there near Laos is the place called Hamburger Hill, where, in May 1969, the army had about two hundred men killed and hundreds more wounded, trying to take this useless hill. This whole fucking valley was drenched in blood for years . . . now . . . it still looks gloomy and forbidding . . . but I see that the Viets and the Montagnards are back . . . and I’m back.”

Susan stayed silent awhile, looked around, then said, “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to come back here.”

“Yeah . . . but . . . it’s better than reliving it in bad dreams . . . like the guy at the Cu Chi tunnels . . . you go back, look it in the eye, and see that it’s not what it used to be. Then, the new memory replaces the old one . . . that’s the theory. But meanwhile . . . the place bums me out.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No.”

The road headed toward the resurrected village of A Luoi, which I could see in the distance. Around us, where there had once been elephant grass, bamboo, and brush, fields had been cleared for vegetable farming.

I said, “So, now it’s April 1968, and the American army wants the valley back. So we air-assault into here, and I’m sitting in a Huey with six
other infantry guys, not happy about any of this, when all of a sudden flak starts to burst around the chopper. We’d never been shot at with Triple A—anti-aircraft artillery—and this was absolutely terrifying . . . these big black air bursts, like in a World War II flick, are filling the sky, and huge chunks of shrapnel are whizzing through the air around us. The chopper in front of me got hit in the tail rotor and the whole aircraft spun around, throwing infantry guys out the door, then the chopper fell like a rock and exploded on the ground. Then another chopper gets hit, and by now our pilot is in a rapid vertical descent, trying to get below the flak. So there’re two choppers down that I could see, each carrying seven infantry and four crew, so that’s twenty-two killed before we even hit the ground. We lost ten more choppers on the initial air assault. Meanwhile, we’re drawing machine gun fire from all these hills around the valley as we’re descending, and our chopper takes a round right through the plexiglass windshield, but we’re okay, and the pilot gets us about ten feet off the ground, we jump, and he gets the hell out of there.”

“Good lord. You must have been—”

“Scared shitless. So, now we’re on the ground, and it’s what’s called a hot landing zone, meaning, we’re drawing fire. The bad guys are in the hills all around us, and they’re lobbing in mortar rounds, rockets, and machine gun fire. We’re landing thousands of men by helicopter into this killing zone, and we start to spread out to engage the enemy in the hills. Meanwhile, the air force is dropping napalm and cluster bombs on the hills, and the army Cobra gunships are firing rockets and Gatling guns to try to suppress the enemy fire. It was a total fucking mess, sort of like the Normandy Beach landings, but by air instead of boat. By the end of the day, the situation was under control, we’d secured the A Luoi airstrip, and we were fanning out into the hills, searching for Chuck.”

I looked in the rearview mirror and said to Mr. Loc, “We beat the pants off the People’s Liberation Army that day, Mr. Loc.”

He didn’t reply.

“Paul. Don’t.”

“Fuck him. His mommie was a Commie.”

“Paul.”

I got myself calmed down a bit and saw that we were entering A Luoi, a muddy village of wooden structures. There was one stucco building with a flag that was obviously the government building. The only vehicles I could
see were scooters, a farm truck, and two yellow police jeeps. There were electric wires overhead, so the place had electricity, which was an improvement over the last time I’d been here.

Mr. Loc stopped in the village square. There were no parking meters.

Susan and I got out, and I looked around, trying to orient myself. The hills hadn’t changed, but the valley floor had.

I said, “So, this is the shithole we fought for in three weeks of bloody combat.”

I said to Mr. Loc, in English, “We’re going to take a walk. You can report to your bosses.” I jerked my thumb toward the government building.

Susan and I walked through the small square and down a narrow path that ended in a field west of the village. Running through the farm fields was the old airstrip, a mile-long stretch of PSP—perforated steel planking—overgrown now with weeds, but still usable.

I said to Susan, “Here’s the airstrip, and at the far north end of it over there was the ruins of the Special Forces camp that the First Cav used as the command post when we landed. The engineers threw up sandbag bunkers all around the strip, and within two days, we had barbed wire and claymore mines encircling the whole runway. My company spent three days in the hills pushing the bad guys farther back, away from the airstrip. Then, we got a two-day break by manning the bunkers. My bunker was about over there, at the foot of that hill.”

I looked out over the farmland to where the hills rose, about five hundred meters away. I said to Susan, “One day, we’re sitting on top of the bunker, six guys playing poker, and Charlie starts dropping mortar rounds in from those hills farther back. And here’s what’s totally nuts—we barely looked up at the impacting rounds because we’re old pros by now, and we knew Chuck was trying to hit the command bunkers over there or the ammo dumps or the airstrip itself. So we kept on playing cards. And then—here’s the funny thing—some Commie son of a bitch up there in the hills—obviously the mortar spotter with field glasses—must have noticed us and got pissed off that we weren’t paying any attention to his mortar fire. So, he gets personal and starts directing the mortar fire toward our miserable little bunker. The rounds started walking in on us, and we realized they were getting too close when dirt and stones started falling on us. Well, I’m sitting there with three aces and about thirty bucks in the pot, and everyone drops their cards, grabs a handful of money, and jumps off
the roof of the bunker and dives inside. I jumped in just as a mortar round exploded outside and shook the bunker. I’d kept my cards, and I’m showing these idiots my three aces as the bunker is starting to come apart, and we’re arguing if I won, or if it should be called a misdeal. We laughed about that for weeks afterward.”

Susan said, “I guess you had to be there.”

“I was.”

I walked on a path between two cultivated fields, and Susan followed. The path ended in a treeline, and we went through the trees to where the small river flowed. It was a shallow, rocky river, and I recalled crossing it at a rock ford somewhere upstream. I went down to the river’s edge and stood on a flat rock. Susan stood beside me.

“One day, we crossed this river a little upstream, over there. We had only about a hundred men in the company that used to number about a hundred and sixty. We’d lost a lot of people during the Tet Offensive in January and February, then at Khe Sanh in early April. So, now it’s around April 30, and we’ve already lost a few guys here in the A Shau, and the meat grinder needs fresh meat, but no replacements are arriving, and we’re also getting low on C rations and purified water . . .”