The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Read online

  “Anybody going to be asking around about all this stuff?” Pete asked his young executive officer.

  “Like who?” C.C. responded innocently.

  “Like Army CD investigators?”

  “Does it make any difference, Skipper?”

  The scar on Pete’s lip stretched into a crafty grin. “That’s my boy,” he approved. “I was just asking.”

  Frogs dressed out in new camouflage and jungle boots turned cocky. Most of them actually developed a swagger following parachute training with the South Vietnamese Army’s 6th Airborne Brigade at Vung Tau on the seacoast. The more competent they became as jungle fighters, the more confident they grew. They turned aggressive in their training patrols. Morale was up. Piss Hole declared the Nguoi Nhai ready for combat.

  “Soon,” Pete assured him.

  As the Nguoi Nhai progressed, Pete and Lump consolidated their training into that of Lump’s Biet Hai river rats to prepare both outfits for joint canal and river ops. The Biet Hai were a bunch of pirates, mostly former VC whom Lump and his exec, Chief Petty Officer Callahan, had transformed into a formidable band of cutthroats whose exploits had caught the attention of both friend and foe in the Delta.

  Lump was advisor-commander of River Division 51 of the Riverine Patrol, what remained of Operation Game Warden as it was being turned over to the Vietnamese. Vietnamizing the war. One section of the patrol with ten PBRs—Patrol Boats, River—and about fifty-five men operated out of Shit City. Lump had moved Callahan, POI McBride and the other section up-river a few miles to reinforce an ARVN junk force at Junk Force Base 35. Junk and Riverine bases had been established along Delta tributaries in efforts to pacify the countryside and cut off water trails used by VC for movement of their troops and supplies.

  “Base 35 is smack in the middle of Commander Minh’s AO,” Lump explained. “He’s going to take a serious crack at it sooner or later.”

  During his previous Vietnam tour, Pete had worked with a Viet junk force and was impressed with the use of boats in the Delta where the terrain was at least fifty percent liquid. Boats provided speed, mobility and surprise. At first, however, Pete was less than enthusiastic about Lump’s PBRs. While junks were heavy and slow, they were constructed of wood and offered at least some protection from small arms fire. PBRs were dark green converted civilian cabin cruisers, each thirty-one feet long and ten-and-a-half feet wide at the beam. They were constructed of fiberglass.

  “Glass boats?” Pete muttered, looking them over. “You go out and throw rocks from glass boats?”

  Lump chuckled. “But they’re fast glass boats and they pack a wallop.”

  The PBRs were only lightly armored, as they depended upon speed and firepower for their survival. Each boat was powered by twin 220-horsepower diesel engines cranking out a speed of about twenty-five knots. Twin 50-cal machine guns mounted at the bow and a single 50 on the stern gave it a real bite. Although Pete might have had his reservations, his Nguoi Nhai made great sport of running up and down the My Tho with Lump’s Biet Hai target-practicing with the machine guns. Shooting stumps or snakes or anything else that presented a target.

  “These boys of yours are just about ready, Pete,” Lump said.

  Pete nodded. “Let’s see how froggy they really are.”

  He and Ensign Cochran loaded the company into six-bys and drove to the seacoast near Vung Tau. As Piss Hole formed up the men on the beach, he and the others cast curious glances at the hamlet of little palm-thatched hooches nearby. To save face among his subordinates, Piss Hole pretended he knew what was going on. He shouted orders and snapped everybody to attention, executed an about face and saluted the Ohmja Nguoi Nhai. Pete had become ‘The Old Frog,” a title of exceptional respect in the company.

  Pete returned the salute. “We’re going for a test swim,” he announced. “We’re swimming across the harbor.”

  Even Ensign Cochran permitted the sea an uncertain glance.

  Tiny palm-thatched hooches in the hamlet set out over the water at the ends of narrow piers. Toilets. Everything from the village went into the sea—human wastes, refuse, and garbage. A symbiotic relationship in which wastes attracted fish, people caught and ate the fish, then returned them to the sea in the form of more wastes to attract more fish. The fish also drew sharks,

  Piss Hole thought it prudent to mention it. “Him shark in water.”

  “We’re the biggest, boldest sharks in the ocean,” Pete declared.

  Piss Hole squared his shoulders. “Ohmja Nguoi Nhai go with us?”

  Pete picked up his tank, mask and fins and, with a tight grin that stretched his scar, walked toward the water. Ensign Cochran followed. Piss Hole translated the mission requirement to the rest of the company, which had watched Pete’s preparations to enter the sea with alarm. It was said sharks in this region were larger, more numerous and more aggressive than anywhere else in the South China Sea.

  With but an instant’s further hesitation, Piss Hole stepped forward, collected his own diving gear and trailed the two Americans into the gentle lap of salt water on sand. Pol Pots, the camp cook who had nonetheless fallen into the spirit of re-training, came next. Then, one by one, the entire company, as if in a ritual ceremony, solemnly gathered their equipment.

  The swim lasted an hour. A curious bullhead shark looking fully twelve feet long glided into the middle of the swimmers, causing a moment of anxiety but not panic before it passed on through, wide tail fanning. Pete actually poked a smaller shark with the point of his blade. He did a little water dance, brandishing the knife, as the shark shot out of sight.

  “The fucking sharks are afraid of us the same way the Viet Cong will be afraid of us! “Pete shouted in triumph once the company reassembled ashore.

  “Ohmja Nguoi Nhai, Commander Minh not same-same shark,” Piss Hole cautioned.

  “Let Commander Minh receive this message!” Pete trumpeted, thrusting high the middle fingers of both hands. “Get out of the way, Minh! The Nguoi Nhai are gonna kick some serious ass!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “We could always use more training time,” Lt. Brauer said. “But the troops are cocky and starting to hoot with the owls, talking the talk. Mister Cochran, lets stand-up the company. Now they got to scream with the eagles and walk the walk.”

  But not too fast. Pete wanted to get the Nguoi Nhai blooded, but not hurt. He gradually extended combat patrols out beyond the relative protection of the army base, out into the Delta VC land where Minh and the other warlords operated with near impunity. Lump’s Biet Hai stuck relatively close to the waterways, while infantry from the army’s 9th Div largely avoided the mangrove swamps and reed jungles where nature was as much the enemy as hard-core Viet Cong. Pete also began night ops. VC liked to move in the dark, to bring forces into position, to re-supply. The Ho Chi Minh Trail that began in Hanoi ended in the Mekong Delta.

  The patrols all returned to Shit City without making contact. Even ambushes, the favorite tactic of both friend and foe, hiding along a trail or stream to shoot up any enemy who happened along, turned up dry holes. The Nguoi Nhai failed to even see a VC. It was almost like Commander Minh, having had contempt for the Shit City Frogs when they operated under Pete’s predecessor, still deigned to extend enough respect for the retrained unit to fight it. Minh had to know through his spies that the Frogs were now tight, tough, gung-ho and formidable.

  It was only a matter of time until Pete’s Frogs and Minh’s fighters clashed. It had to happen sooner or later, hunted and hunters moving about in the same AO. A tenent of guerrilla warfare was that each side strived to choose the place and time for the contact and to fight on its own terms. Once it happened, the struggle for dominance began. The AO wasn’t big enough for both Minh and Pete.

  Pete saw the opportunity for some action when he received word that Colonel Bob Hackman’s 4/39th Battalion of the 9th Infantry was going to conduct a daylight sweep at the edge of the Nam Can Forest in Commander Minh’s territory. Hackman had earned a rep
utation for always being able to scare up some bad guys. The Nguoi Nhai slipped into the forest before dawn, set up an ambush position alongside a trail well used by the VC, judging from sneaker prints in the damp earth, and waited for Hackman to push the enemy toward them.

  “Commander Minh, he too smart, smart like tiger smart,” Piss Hole predicted.

  “Sgt. Piss Hole, did you ever skin a tiger?” Pete asked.

  “No, Ohmja Nguoi Nhai.”

  “I have.”

  While the ambushers waited for someone to come along, they had little to do except keep quiet, wait and try not to give themselves away by snoring or slapping at mosquitoes or ants. They went into position on edge and ready. A brief burst of rifle fire from somewhere to the south helped keep them primed for a while. Gradually, however, the edge wore off in the somnolent morning heat and heads started to nod.

  Pete was on the point of calling off the mission when along the trail came a VC riding a bicycle with an AK-47 rifle slung across his back. It was a bright morning, fresh and dry, and the guy was actually whistling a tune as he rode. Like there wasn’t a war going on at all and like an entire U.S. infantry battalion wasn’t stomping around in the boonies looking to nail him and his guerrilla comrades.

  He rode directly past the claymore mines and through the point element of the ambush before he sensed he was no longer alone in the woods. He stopped whistling and stopped peddling. He coasted along on the bicycle with a dumb expression on his face, looking straight ahead like a kid walking through a cemetery at night. You didn’t see the pratas, the ghosts, if you didn’t look for them. The jungle absorbed the hiss and whisper of bicycle tires.

  The ambushers were also dumbstruck. They watched the bicyclist with their mouths open and their eyes transfixed on the guy. Pete with the forward element sprang to his feet and shouted, “Catch that silly sonofabitch!”

  Successful guerrilla warfare required intelligence. Intelligence came from a variety of sources, one of the best being captured enemy soldiers.

  Nguoi Nhai leaped out of the bushes. Piss Hole jumped on the VC’s back with a flying tackle. He and the VC and the VC’s bicycle went down in a wreck. Soon, the dazed guerrilla sat hog-tied in the middle of the trail. The entire company burst into laughter. The VC looked around and couldn’t resist a sheepish grin of his own.

  Pete shook his head and with a wry grin said, “The eagles have landed”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I was with Colonel Hackman’s 4th Battalion. We made several sweeps against Commander Minh,” I said to Lump Adkins as the old warhorse stood at his window with the drapes drawn back, gazing west toward San Diego Bay and the Abe Lincoln moored at North Island. While the sun was just setting here, it was about to rise over Vietnam. I was sweating while I listened to Lump’s account of Pete Brauer’s Vietnam; my own returning memories were so powerful.

  “Pete was tough. God knows that man was tough,” Lump said in a sad muse. “He carried a Marine K-Bar that he kept so sharp he shaved with it in the field. He and the Nguoi Nhai parachuted onto Skunk Island to raid a VC munitions factory. They came upon this gook sentry. Pete crept up on him and cut the poor bastard’s head clean off with his K-Bar. He was standing there holding the head by its hair when the rest of the company caught up. He laughed and tossed the severed head to Piss Hole, who was almost as tough as Pete whom he idolized. Piss Hole caught it, cut off its ears, and threw it to Ensign Cochran. Cochran almost freaked out on them.”

  Lump sighed at the sunset. There had been so many suns. For both of us.

  “Pete was tough,” Lump repeated. “That’s what makes it so hard to understand about Mhai.”

  He drained off the last of his Bud and crushed the beer can in his fist,

  “Used to before they started making ’em out of aluminum I could crush a real beer can like that,” he said. “Probably couldn’t do it anymore. Arthritis... Want another beer, Colonel Kazmarek?”

  “Anchors aweigh, Commander Adkins.”

  “Let me make a head call first. That’s another thing about getting old. You have to piss all the time. Just dribble. Goddamn.”

  When he came back into the room, it was my turn to be standing at the window looking out. For some reason I was remembering Dong Tam the army post and the little hooch city outside the main gate. The gooks would send a B-40 rocket across the wire every few nights and mortar us once a week or so. Just so we didn’t get too comfortable with our PX and movie theaters and EM and Officer’s Clubs. Not that I spent a lot of time at the base. Colonel Hackman kept his battalion, which he called “The Hardcore,” out in the bush most of the time, putting pressure on the enemy. Trying to kick the enemy’s elusive ass and run up a body count tally on his dic board. Hackman and Pete Brauer would have gotten along well together.

  “Do you ever wonder about Vietnam?” Lump asked from behind me. “Ever wonder what it’s like now? Ever think about going back?”

  “Pete and I talked about it sometimes. He said he hadn’t left anything there to go back for.”

  Lump handed me a beer. It was getting dark in the room. He turned on a light.

  “We all left something behind,” he said.

  We sat in easy chairs facing each other again and sipped our beers. I was learning that you couldn’t rush the old seaman. He would proceed at his own pace, no matter what. The alcohol warmed my insides, and it took away a lot of the years so that I could look back more clearly. As clearly as I wanted to, as clearly as I dared.

  “Maybe the thing with Mhai,” Lump continued, apparently having given it some thought, is what people didn’t see about Pete, what he wouldn’t let them see. Deep down he was a lonely, sensitive bastard. He was an artist, a painter. Did you know that, Jack?”

  “I never knew of him to pick up a paint brush in the more than twenty years I lived next door.”

  “I talked to him on the phone a few times, but I never saw him again after Junk Base 35.But I’m getting ahead of myself. Do you want to hear it?”

  “I want it all.”

  “I’ll tell you what I can. I heard some things, but all I personally know was before and up to Junk Base 35.”

  He shook himself like a chill had slithered up his spine. He got up heavily and walked to the window. City lights were flickering on all over San Diego. He came back and sat down, groaning with the effort.

  “God, how I hate getting old,” he said.

  He sat there for a few minutes, contemplating getting old. Then he began reminiscing where he had left off

  “After they captured the VC on the bike, they brought him back to Shit City where Piss Hole and a couple of other Frogs damned near drowned the poor bastard dunking him upside down in a big water urn before he decided he would either have to talk or join his ancestors. Torture ain’t something we like to talk about, but it happened.”

  “A lot of things happened we don’t talk about”

  “The VC were much better at it than we were,” Lump said.

  I recalled a provincial school run by a South Vietnamese history teacher who was strongly anti-communist. My platoon had bivouacked near the school on a couple of occasions and I had talked with the teacher. One day the school door busted open and three VC tromped in carrying rifles. They said they came because of the teacher’s dissemination of false propaganda. One of the riflemen shot the teacher in cold blood. As a warning to other children and their parents who might be tempted to accept pro-government instruction, the assassination squad then hammered sharpened pencils into the ears of some of the children.

  “Commander Minh put a stop to a lot of that stuff along the My Tho, I hand him that,” Lump said. “He was into winning hearts and minds. But he wasn’t the only VC commander in the AO. Atrocities still happened. On both sides.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The Nguoi Nhai didn’t drown their prisoner, but they would have if he hadn’t talked. He told them about some tax collectors from the National Liberation Front that were supposed to arrive
at Vam Tho by boat in two nights. Vam Tho was more-or-less Minh’s command post. The hamlet had been ordered to prepare to feed at least seven or eight visitors. That meant high-ranking NFL officers and other VC dignitaries were accompanying the tax men.

  “Vam Tho?” I asked. I felt my voice quaver.

  “You know it?”

  “I... Yes.”

  “I heard something unusual happened there at Vam Tho, but that was after I was already evacuated.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The large hamlet of Vam Tho clinging to the side of canal Six upriver on the My Tho from Dong Tam and Shit City and about ten or twelve kilometers interior from Junk Base 35 had long been a stronghold and control point for VC domination of the Nam Can Forest. The 9th Infantry Division ran hammer-and-anvil missions against it from time to time, but the enemy always managed to fade into the jungle ahead of the assaults. GIs found nothing left behind except inscrutable old papasans, mamasans squatting around cooking fires with their mouths stained red from chewing betel nut leaves, and kids in ragged shorts. Grunt platoons swept through and VC flowed back into the area behind them, like water filling a water buf’s tracks in a stream.

  Shortly before dusk on the night the VC taxmen were supposed to arrive in Vam Tho, Pete and C.C. Cochran loaded two fire teams of Nguoi Nhai aboard one of Lump Adkins’ PBRs and set out upriver, towing three sampans. Lump was at the helm. They would stop en route at Junk Base 35 to pick up local River Rats as guides and to allow Lump to check on Chief Callahan, McBride and the base’s defenses.

  Lump radioed ahead. McBride was out on a security patrol with some of the River Rats, but Chief Callahan met them at the piers when the PBR pulled in shortly before nightfall and tied up among the other river boats and junks. Callahan waved nonchalantly from the beach. He was a stereotypical Texan, tall and lanky, but with a baby face rare on a man in his thirties and working on a third combat tour along the river.

  “The Chief has all his shit packed in a single rucksack,” Lump said to Pete and Cochran by way of introduction.