For the Sake of All Living Things (70 page)

Throughout the afternoon more sorties were flown. Every inch of the rice land was filmed and analyzed. North of the Chinit River elements of the NVA 91st Division were observed making a swing back north through the swamp forest toward Puk Yuk and Kompong Thom. The planes shifted to the new area. The NVA 5th Division, north of but on line with the 7th, split, elements heading toward Baray. Again the planes shifted. Long columns of refugees were identified, some streaming along the government-controlled corridor toward the enclaves, other columns, in the “liberated zones,” trudging into the upper Chinit and Sen valleys. The rice lands between and about Highways 6, 7 and 21 looked deserted. In the past month four hundred hamlets had been abandoned and torched. Every farm animal had been killed.

Late in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth clouds again formed over the land and by evening a thick tully fog sealed the fields under an impenetrable layer of mist. Again the attacking ground forces came, came from the earth like rodents, like ants, came as if the subterranean sanctuaries were endless, held endless resources of men and materiel. Artillery batteries attached to the NVA 91st Division broke off and trailed south to within range of Rumlong. The 130s which had so shaken Mitterschmidt a night earlier raised their tubes toward Rumlong, well within their thirty-kilometer range. Mortar teams were trucked through the forest and down paddy dike roads to treelines. Rocket teams prepared hundreds of launch tubes. Mitterschmidt waited. This time he would not go forward but instead film the activity at the mobile command and control bunker now on the outskirts of Phum Bos Kanda on Highway 21, the largest city within the plantations.

The attack on Rumlong was by the book. As soon as darkness gripped the land, infantry units moved down prepared trails following the blipped lights of trail guides, moved quickly because they knew the trails were secure, because there was no need for point-slack teams scrutinizing every step or flank squads offering their protection. As they moved, the 130s launched a series of salvos aimed at the city’s heart. This was not terrorist shelling but obliteration shelling. The 130s fired sixty rounds then moved along preestablished trails to preestablished supplied positions three kilometers away and again fired at Rumlong. While the field guns changed positions to avoid bombers the 122mm rocket teams launched their devastation by delayed fuses. In the air, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft easily pinpointed the launch sites but the launch teams were long gone when the targets were bombed. Then, from the west, new NVA artillery units, 107mm guns, lobbed their horrible projectiles into the city and along tangential highway sections. And NVA infantry closed and waited. The shelling did not cease. By midnight more than 600 rounds had landed on Rumlong, another 250 on the highway. Between explosions hysterical human shrieks stabbed into the blackness, penetrated to the ears of the NVA infantrymen creeping closer, closer. Still the shelling did not stop. B-52s box-blasted target coordinates in the plantations with iron bombs and seeded the paddies with time-delayed and external-stimuli fused CBUs (cluster bomb units—bombs comprised of grenadelike bomblets, the cluster exploding above the earth and fusing and dispersing the bomblets like some evil milkweed pod opening and spreading its seed). Still the shelling continued, still the infantry advanced. Within Rumlong three quarters of the buildings were destroyed, leveled, reduced to rubble. Of the 12,000 residents and perhaps half that number again of refugees, the death toll would never be known. Most dead were already buried in the rubble, luckily buried, buried never to be exhumed.

FANK units at Rumlong tucked their heads between their shoulders. All day they’d built flimsy shelters believing that they and the bombers had repulsed the enemy, showing by that very flimsiness their belief that Buddha would now, after their first ordeal, protect them. “No longer are there the 105s to attract enemy attention,” soldiers told one another. “What would they want here? We’re nothing.”

The shelling shifted. The 130s, 122s and 107s stopped. Now the 120mm mortar teams set their hand-dropped projectiles, to tube. Drop, launch, change elevation. Drop launch change elevation. Four hundred rounds from four tubes in twenty minutes. The FANK sector tactical operations center (TOC) lost all radio contact with its units in the first minute. By the tenth it had lost all but one receiver, which could pick up only a unit at the Tang Kouk airfield. The unit could transmit but not receive. Over and over again the TOC radio operator heard his counterpart begging for reinforcements and air or mortar support. Then there was a crackle of white noise and silence.

West of Rumlong there was new activity. FANK scouts sighted tanks. Unable to radio the visual pickup, they ran, ran like hell, ran praying, into the city to the sector TOC where they reported. Then back, running to perimeter units, attempting to rally the defenders. The shelling ceased. From the east a wave of NVA 141st infantry troops stormed the Rumlong berm under a hail of rocket-propelled grenade and recoilless rifle fire. To the shock of the NVA, thousands of FANK riflemen answered their fire with a storm of lead which broke the charge the moment it commenced and left 150 NVA dead. Now runners sprinted from the TOC to every unit and back. For the moment there was optimism even though the civilian city had died. From one perimeter came a radio and again the TOC was in contact with the outside. Immediately air support was requested and in-air diversions brought two U.S. F-4 Phantoms screaming in on strobe-light beacons. As the planes closed, long-range NVA artillery fire again exploded on the highway and in the city. Then the first two canisters of napalm exploded thirty yards off their mark and what the NVA had been unable to do, the U.S. bomber in one pass accomplished. In a perimeter section fifty meters long every FANK defender was either killed or incapacitated. More napalm wounded the enemy in the paddies, continuing to burn them even as they dove under water. From the west two NVA T-54s rolled out of the swamp-forest, rolled along undetected prepared roads to the western berm, fired point-blank at points of resistance. Behind the NVA tanks, NVA jeep-mounted 57mm recoilless rifles zeroed in on the few FANK artillery pieces, destroying or capturing them. NVA artillery continued to shell the road north and south, repressing any reinforcement action. Finally the North Viet Namese infantry assaulted again. For a minute a mad frenzied man-to-man firefight raged.

Then FANK broke. Soldiers ran to ground holes and hovels where their families hid. “Run! Run! Into the dark!” But enemy infantry cut them off, turned them like a sheepdog herds its flock, turned, turned, concentrating what they saw as subhuman cowering brown devils, then pouring in the ordnance, point-blank, firing their rifles into surrendering soldiers, into mothers with their arms hugging their children, bodies, heads exploding, chunks ripped off, smashed as if they were no stronger than ripe melons dropped from a truck onto the blacktop.

From the top of a tamarind tree in a treeline between paddies five kilometers east-southeast, Nang watched the obliteration of Rumlong. His right hand throbbed horribly. What drove him was difficult to pinpoint—whether training, indoctrination, fear, unconscious fanatical desire or simple hate. Whatever it was it drove him to struggle up the tree with three fingers shot off his right hand as cleanly as if they’d been hacked by one blow from a butcher’s knife whacking down on a cutting board, cleaving them between the knuckle and first joint. At first he hadn’t even felt the wound. His rifle had leaped from his hand as he’d fled, leaped as if it were alive and itself fleeing his grasp. He hadn’t stopped to retrieve it. There were enough small arms in Cambodia that a smart yothea never need be without. Nang had jumped from the dike into the nearest paddy, had dove under the surface water, into the thick rising rice stalks, had then attempted to pull himself through the reeds by grasping and only then discovered, surprised, his right hand had but thumb and forefinger. By day he’d hid, crawled, crab-walked in and through the field, over the low dike and into the next paddy, becoming as rigid as a dead tree trunk each time an aircraft approached. At one point he ripped strips from the end of his krama to wrap the half-inch meat and bone stubs protruding from his hand. By late afternoon he’d rendezvoused with Duch, Rath and half a dozen fighters from Met Horl’s company. Quietly, slowly, they made their way to the treeline. Three others yotheas were there, dazed, confused, ready to shoot them until realization hit and then overly apologetic, ready to assist. Someone produced a flask of gasoline, washed and disinfected Nang’s hand. Another chewed the tobacco of a cigarette into a salve and the boys bandaged Nang’s stubs with the poultice wrapped against the wound.

“Mita’s dead,” one boy had said. “I saw him fall.”

“What of Met Hon?” Nang had asked.

“He was cut in two,” Duch had answered.

“Of Eng? Horl? Van? Ith?”

“I don’t know.” “Dead.” “Shot in the legs and couldn’t run. They’ll decapitate him while he still breathes.” “His company is lost.”

During the afternoon other stragglers had arrived. “Why didn’t they fight?” “Who?” “The yuons, the stinging red ants!” “They pulled back as soon as we attacked.”

“Ssshh,” Nang had hissed authoritatively. “Listen. Let this be our lesson. We must rely only on ourselves. Allies are enemies. Enemies are enemies. Let that bind us. Spread out. Search for others and bring them to me. Let’s teach the yuons a lesson, too.”

“That corrupt son of a bitch,” Sullivan cursed under his breath. All day and all night he’d followed the military reports, talked with American forward air control and fighter pilots, heard the civilian radio, both the Khmer, translated by Captain Sisowath Suong, and the English, which he translated into French for Suong. He jammed a shovel into the road embankment, showing some dependants how to dig a foxhole for protection from artillery. “That stupid son of a bitch,” he seethed.

“Which one you talk about?” Suong asked. He descended from the roadbed to be with Sullivan. Before them, in the paddies to the east, FANK soldiers were digging, establishing a forward line, setting mines, building fighting positions.

“Just once, just fucking once, I’d like to see you guys play your cards right. Play em without some idiot in Phnom Penh screaming orders without the slightest idea what’s happening here.”

“Ah, Captain Sullivan”—Suong laid his hand on the American’s arm—“you know what they taught me at Nha Trang? They said, ‘Sometimes a leader must make decisions which have a great effect on others. Must decide even if he has inadequate understanding of the situation.’ ”

“Yeah. But if he’s got the ability to gain an understanding and he doesn’t...Ah, Captain Suong...”

“I know,” Suong lamented. “The colonels are afraid to give him accurate reports. He thinks more about ancient glories and Angkor kings than he does about yuon armies.”

“He’s ordered a counterattack on Rumlong, hasn’t he?”

“Yes. I think we will soon attack.”

“And Pa Kham?”

“They’re being shelled like Rumlong yesterday.”

“Then the enemy’s shifting south and he’s ordering us north.”

“But Rumlong...”

“You can’t mount a countermove on this road. All you can do is feed your men in a few hundred at a time. They’ll be mowed down.”

“Please, again talk to Samkai.”

“On one condition.” Sullivan’s anger drained and he smiled mischievously.

“Yes.”

“At dusk, you come with me. We’ll take a recon squad out as far as we can.”

By dusk on the twenty-seventh early reports were confirmed, new reports were in and already civilian analysis was being broadcast. Bombing had been heavy throughout the Northern Corridor during the day, particularly during the clearest hours about noon. As he slowly inched east along a dike under the returned tully fog and clouds, Sullivan seethed over the new reports and over his own orders to withdraw, to be extracted, individually, by American helicopter. Once again NVA artillery fire commenced.

FANK the foolish, Sullivan thought. FANK the pathetic. FANK the laughingstock army in the eyes of the world as seen through the eyes of the world press. “FANK forces broke and fled.” The radio words grated in his head. Never mind, he thought. Never mind that the concentration of artillery on tiny Rumlong was greater than that on mighty Stalingrad during the winter siege of what, 1941-42, ’42-43? All up and down the corridor other FANK units were reeling, were feeling betrayed by their brothers at Rumlong, betrayed by the ease, according to rumor and radio, with which the column center had given up, been cut, putting those to the north in even greater jeopardy and trapping those south of the Tang Kouk bridge to what horrible fate. In Kompong Thom, Baray, Tang Kouk, Phnom Penh and worldwide, reports of the loss were broadcast. No mention was made of the massacre of at least eight thousand civilians and dependants. Little was made of the Viet Namese artillery barrage. Over and over the reports stressed, listed, the national army’s losses: four tanks, four APCs, one jeep, twenty buses, twenty-one quarter-ton trucks, two 105mm howitzers, one bulldozer, and one hundred automatic rifles. How many soldiers were killed the reports did not say, as if none were lost because none stayed to fight.

Sullivan and Suong’s recon team turned south toward the main canal. Only two of the eleven Khmers had been on night patrol and Sullivan had insisted they split, one at rear drag, one at midsquad, to assist and keep the uninitiated from foolish mistakes which might get them all killed. Sullivan walked point. At Kompong Thom Colonel Um Savath’s demoralized elite vanguard had begun their ordered return. Almost immediately reports reached corridor units that they’d driven head-on into the NVA 91st Division. From Pa Kham early reports indicated that the NVA had in store for that delightful town the identical treatment bestowed on Rumlong.

Night fell quickly upon Sullivan’s inexperienced team. About them, unknown to them, aerial reconnaissance aircraft detected truck traffic. Sullivan moved slowly. Suong held a hand on the American’s backpacked radio. Behind, soldiers attached one to the next by short braided reed ropes shuffled forward, feeling the mud and grass with their bare feet. Step, shuffle step, listen, look, smell. Sullivan’s agitation at the operation fell away. That his action was against congressional decree neither concerned him nor even entered his mind. He was Special Forces, a trained, experienced and highly competent soldier establishing his own mission for the protection of others. His night patrol concentration returned as if it had been in continuous use instead of in abeyance, supplanted by the slow-growing logistical and bureaucratic bullshit he hadn’t, until the patrol began, realized he hated. This was what he wished to do, wished to accomplish.