For the Sake of All Living Things (71 page)

For four hours they meandered like a segmented toy snake held together by reeds. What he was searching for he knew not. How his team coalesced pleased him. There was no talk. Little noise. To their north, east and south U.S. or RVNAF bombs were exploding. To the south, across the canal, there was the distinctive sound of battle. Pa Kham was being hit hard by the NVA. Overhead, intermittently, were the sounds of helicopters, Mohawks, A-130s and T-28s. Still Sullivan’s team roamed. At intervals he keyed his radio handset in preestablished patterns, breaking squelch on the radio monitored at Chhan Samkai’s mobile bus TOC. Four kilometers out, along the canal levee, they spotted the first fire. It took nearly half an hour to close on it. At first only Sullivan and Suong crept forward on their bellies. Sullivan expected a mortar or rocket station, manned by trail guides, waiting, ready, for the team to occupy the site long enough to launch their ordnance then flee. What he found was an old truck hood with a small wood and bamboo fire beneath. “To cook on?” Sullivan whispered to Suong.

“I don’t know,” Suong said. “Hard to cook like that.” Fifty meters east they found a second fire with half a hood. Then a third under a fender where the canal turned south. Farther, a fourth, and with this one not only a hood and fender but bed staves covered by a ruined tarp. Sullivan keyed the transmit bar of the radio. The find, he felt, was significant. Suddenly a forward air control plane fired a white phosphorus marking rocket into the levee by the first fire. “Holy Shit!” Sullivan scrambled out of the radio, dropped over it. “Birddog Oscar Victor...” He searched for the frequency the forward observer should have been monitoring as a second rocket exploded beyond them, bracketing them. To Suong, “Get em out a here!” Back to the transmitter, “Birddog Oscar Victor One...this is Juliet Sierra.” Again. Again. Hastily. The rockets burned white hot.

“Juliet...this is...”

“Stop the bomb run. Friendlies. Repeat...” Jets shrieked in, loud, low, all sound enveloped in their engine roar. Sullivan tucked, rolled to his side screaming into the handset, unable to hear his own voice, expecting napalm or strafing. Instantaneous sound abatement. No fire. No bombs.

B-52s now unloaded their ordnance sixty kilometers away, southwest of Kompong Thom against suspected and verified elements of the NVA 91st, and in a radius about Pa Kham. The latter brought the bombing within terror distance of Nam Thay and Hans Mitterschmidt, who were in position to observe the destruction of the fake convoy. They didn’t understand the fighter-bomber runs without ordnance. “Because of the levee?” Mitterschmidt questioned.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Thay said. “The imperialists aren’t concerned with such things. Not here”—he chuckled—“where no one is watching.”

“No?” Mitterschmidt was somber.

“Perhaps. That would explain why they used dive-bombers instead of B-52s. But not why the bombers didn’t engage the targets.”

“What might explain it,” the German speculated, “is another advance in through-the-clouds night target detection.”

“You mean you think they could see them?”

“What else? Tomorrow night the 209th attacks Tang Kouk, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then we should follow them. We’ll go along the canal. I want to see the targets.”

The battle of Chenla II raged on four fronts. Despite the heavy use of aerial bombing, the outgunned, outmanned and out-maneuvered national forces were being mauled. Throughout the day of the twenty-eighth, Colonel Um Savuth’s forces pushed south from Kompong Thom, advancing only a few kilometers behind a wall of nearly fifty B-52 sorties plus close-in tactical air and helicopter support. Another nearly fifty B-52 sorties struck in the plantation zone east of Pa Kham.

In Phnom Penh Lon Nol ranted and raged, condemning criticism of his personal control, urging his holy warriors to follow his
kboun
, his orders, as holy writ, and sending urgent requests to U.S. Admiral John McCain, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, for more helicopters and amphibious vehicles.

In NVA-held Rumlong the living were rooted from holes and hovels, herded, classified, arrested and prepared for evacuation. Captured national troops were detained for “political retraining” and marched west into the swamps. Police, village officials and council members were sent northeast; civilians southeast across the paddies. Those suspected of working for the CIA were taken to the nearest treeline never to emerge.

As night closed upon the Northern Corridor on 28 October, the NVA counterattacked Colonel Um Savuth’s column at Kompong Thom. Now the disillusioned and demoralized nationals did break as the NVA 91st approached. In unopposed frenzy, the
thmils
, behind four T-54 tanks, killed three hundred FANK soldiers. Again the loss was listed in the aired reports: two APCs, eight two-and-a-half-ton trucks, four Land Rovers, twenty jeeps, eight buses and a 105 howitzer. To the south, by midnight the eastern hamlets of Pa Kham were in the hands of NVA infantry. Mortars shelled the city as troops advanced behind recoilless rifle and rocket-propelled grenade fire. Then the big guns were turned on Tang Kouk and on the units trapped on the road south of that town.

At one in the morning Nang screamed the most anguished, horrible, painful cry he could produce. Then he squatted silently. All evening his regrouped unit had trotted the paths of the forest edge, had passed within meters of its NVA ally with complete impunity. Of the original 342-man KT 104th, 146 were killed or missing in action. The entire 4th Company was gone. The
neary
platoon of Met Nu had vanished. The 108th had also been tricked, pulverized. A few stragglers joined Nang’s group. From the 180 boys that Nang, Duch and, finally, Eng, with a severe facial wound, had collected, they put together two companies. Nang had appointed himself, without opposition, battalion commander.

A minute after Nang’s shriek, Met Puc, at 120 degrees from Nang, emitted an eerie blood-curdling laugh. Then silence. Just north of their attack routes, at the edge of the plantation lands before the paddies, the NVA 209th Infantry Regiment had set up a combined listening post-observation post, rear headquarters, transfer station. In the perimeter there was banging, clattering, the sounds of stumbling. Then Met Puc again laughed, Met Rham growled, roared, others hissed, howled, producing an evil inhuman chorus. Then all ceased. Quietly they moved clockwise two to four meters about the 209th’s small rear detachment. The Viet Namese radioed for help. Monkey Platoon of the 2d Company froze, waited. Minutes later they again exploded in shouts and guttural shrieks. An NVA soldier opened fire. Then another. And another. The yotheas lay flat. The yuon rear guard, to a man, fired high, spraying AK-47 projectiles in a 360-degree arc, spraying so high that troops facing a second NVA listening post actually fired upon their brothers.

The yotheas remained still, quiet. At two in the morning, as the NVA ground attack on Tang Kouk commenced, Nang screamed like a monkey thrown to crocodiles. Immediately the LP again radioed for assistance. How easy, Nang thought. How easy it is. Puc laughed his weird laugh, Rham roared his spitting vomiting roar, Met Krom hissed his nasal hiss. Up trail a reserve squad approached the LP. Before they arrived they were beaten and knifed to death. To the far west the cacophony of battle was intense. A trickle of wounded were brought to the station.

“Did you see anything out there?”

“Anything? Like what?”

“Spirits?”

“Spirits!”

“It’s terrible. I tell you they’ve surrounded us.”

“Tag this comrade and send him to the hospital. There are more wounded. I must go. Spirits, indeed!”

The trickle ceased. A bomber dropped its ordnance close by and four yotheas entered the perimeter dragging Viet Namese bodies. Silently they met the rear guard. More yotheas pulled in bodies. Amongst the score of Viet reserves there stood thirty yotheas. Nang dropped the ankle tie of his dead NVA soldier. He looked wide-eyed crazy into the face of the receiving yuon. Then suddenly he shrieked and all burst into growls, laughs, hisses. They leaped upon the yuons, stabbing, slashing, impaling with bamboo daggers until all station personnel were dead. Nang stiffened his hatchet hand, chopped, smashed skulls until they burst, shouting madly as he hit, “For my hand. For my land. For Kampuchea.” Then, “On to their rear.”

The yotheas moved through, cleaning the site of every weapon and cartridge, every piece of usable clothing and gear, every radio, battery, boot, telephone wire and medical kit.

Along the canal Hans Mitterschmidt stopped. This scene had to be filmed. No one would believe it. “I must have more light.”

“Do you—” Nam Thay began. He shook his head in amused disbelief. “They couldn’t have dropped them from the air.”

“But how else?”

“I don’t know. They would have burst if the planes had dropped them.”

“Then who has been here? One more torch.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Just one more. One moment. They won’t react so fast. Bamboo bombs! They bombed the convoy with fake bombs!”

Sullivan was in the most foul mood of his life. Half the buildings in Tang Kouk village had been blown apart by artillery. Three of the APCs on the highway were destroyed. One still burned, its flames licking up into the night blackness like long red yellow snake tongues flicking at unseen morsels. The lone tank perched on the road, useless, out of fuel and ammo, its crew having expended every round for cannon and machine guns, sitting, terrified, under orders to remain to create the illusion of strength. FANK mortar men kept continual flares in the sky east and west of the highway and over the canal, ensuring their army’s visibility to enemy observers. Still NVA infantry did not attack. At Chhan Samkai’s command post, now on the ground behind the bus, everyone, everything, was in disarray. The lieutenant colonel himself was studying topographic maps, not for ways to counter the enemy’s moves or to assist target acquisition and forward observation for FANK, American, South Viet Namese and Thai fighter-bombers, but to find a retreat route through the western swamps and to organize a rearguard action.

Sullivan was deeply conscious that his role as a military equipment need-and-use observer was ludicrous, yet he was not an advisor, did not have even the limited authority of an advisor. His jaw clenched, as he watched Chhan Samkai’s seemingly casual, negligent, command. His teeth ground as he waited for the commander to issue commands which never came. His fists squeezed tight at his sides as he thought of the half-assed commitment of his own country, a halfway move which simply ensured slower death, a life-support system for a brain-dead nation which for no reason he could find needed to be brain-dead, a commitment to keep it, the Cambodian body, alive for a little longer, which amounted to no commitment at all.

“Explain once more,” Sisowath Suong yelled to him over the tremendous noise of incoming artillery, diving jets and exploding bombs.

“Has he opened it?” Sullivan shouted back, and Suong, an obscure smile on his face, yelled the question into the transmitter. Back and forth, back and forth, question question answer translation answer. Was that advising? Telling an infantryman on the front line in the paddies via interpreter via radio how to use—ready, aim and fire—a LAW, a light antitank weapon?

At 0300 hours on 29 October 1971, the NVA 209th launched its first attack, a point thrust, at the bridge ramp. FANK’s forward line ran from the road, two hundred meters out along the levee, then north parallel to the road, behind a paddy dike. Every fired weapon in use in Southeast Asia except .45s and flamethrowers had an effective range greater than two hundred meters. The only weapons in common use which could not reach the main body of the FANK force on the road were thrown weapons, grenades. The Viet Namese did not use this to great advantage. Their point hit head to head with emplaced cross-fired machine guns and a determined platoon of FANK riflemen. The large artillery pieces ceased firing. Communist mortar rounds now seemingly fell at random in the paddies before and behind the frontline dike, all over the road, and back into the swamp where the dependants had clustered, had set up camp, terrified yet convinced of their own foredoom, unable to dig in or to flee. Horrible cries, distressed anguished wails, rose and spread over the blackness like a blanket of abomination, spread to the road and into the paddies where the chorus rattled the very souls of the fathers, husbands, defenders.

NVA reinforcements moved up. Using small, 57mm, recoilless rifles, firing from outer dikes, the attackers engaged the machine gunners. FANK soldiers returned fire for fire. Allied jets dived, swooped in, strafed the field between facing lines, dropped cluster bombs with external-stimuli fuses essentially mining the entire area. NVA gunners countered by shelling the fields, exploding the mines and clearing paths for their infantry advances. The fields transformed from wet paddies green with filled rice to massive yellow-brown mud ponds with floating splintered straw and ash.

The Communist infantry withdrew, the heavy artillery recommenced, then again stopped and was supplanted by mortars. Again the NVA ground troops attacked. This time into Tang Kouk village, at the canal and at four points between. From behind, a unit of NVA river commandos rose from the canal, climbed the shattered bridge and with a medium, 75mm, recoilless rifle, destroyed the last FANK APC.

Government troops broke.

For Sullivan, for Suong, the command post was no longer of consequence. The commander had withdrawn into himself to prepare for his fate. Most of the staff personnel had fled to the dependant camp or into the swamp. The bus caught fire, flared, then smoldered. All radios were abandoned.

“Which way are you going?!” Suong grasped the American.

“There.” Sullivan paced east. He had his PRC-25, an M-16 and all the grenades he’d been able to police up from the deserted CP.

“Wait!” Suong ran back to the bus.

“Fuck that!” Sullivan called. He leaped off the road and let gravity jerk him down the embankment.

“Sullivan!” Suong shrieked, his voice cracking. His small hands grasped an M-60 machine gun. Over his shoulder and about his waist were a dozen cartridge belts.