Last Man Out (40 page)

Jim D., the new CIA base chief in Can Tho, asked if it was tenable, and I told him it was and that the only thing I feared was fear itself. If the local Communists had not attacked when only the two of us were there, I figured they would not attack now just because I was alone.

After I put Terry on the plane, I called aside the chief guard, Loi, and told him that his job was being changed from ensuring that his men changed shifts on time, stayed awake at night, and received correct pay. From then on, his main job was to be my bodyguard—that is,
body
guard. He was to think about the safety of my body at all times. He was to move his bed to the room of the guardhouse nearest the corner of the main house where I slept, and he was to be within several steps of me all day. If I was
in the office, he was to be in the office. If I ate at noon in the house, he ate at noon in the house.

Loi stood almost at attention. Wide-eyed, he took in everything I said.

If I went to division headquarters, I wanted Loi to go to division headquarters. If I rode the motor scooter at night, he rode his motor scooter with me. If there was any danger, anything out of the ordinary, he was to get between me and it. I wanted him to take spears in the chest. I wanted him to die before I died. I wanted him to be a living, walking, talking shield. That was his job. If he didn’t want it, I would get someone else, either there or in Can Tho.

Loi, after waiting a second to be sure I was finished, said he understood. He said he would take spears in the chest if he had to. “What are spears, anyway?” he asked.

The first night after our talk I was riding my motor scooter, with Loi right behind me on his. The route, which I had taken before, ran past the market and out to the northern edge of town, then on a built-up road to a bridge and back by the orphanage and home.

At the edge of town, Loi came up beside me and sputtered, “Where are you going?”

“Down to the bridge.”

“No, no, no.”

“Why not?”

“Bossman, the bridge belongs to the local VC,” he said.

When I told him I had been going there for weeks, he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand and said, “Are you crazy?”

So I didn’t go there anymore, but I checked Loi’s information and found that it wasn’t entirely true. The VC tax people were there only some of the time.

Also, when Terry left I asked one of the interpreters to help me have a talk with the cook. The kitchen had been Terry’s responsibility. He paid the cook and bought the things she needed in Can Tho. Her name was Ba Muoi. In English that’s number ten. She was the tenth child born in her family. Naming children by number is an ancient Vietnamese custom that promotes family unity by giving each child a place. Ba Muoi knew how to prepare about nine dishes, which she served on a rotating schedule. We almost knew what day it was by the meals she prepared. I asked
her to vary the menu. It would make my stay much more pleasant. I liked Vietnamese food. Don’t always cook Western, I told her, give me some down-home Vietnamese food. For example, I said, I pass the market often and see these giant frogs. I used to hunt frogs as a kid, and I want some frog legs. Try fixing me Vietnamese frog-leg food.

There was some distance between what I intended and what I had for my next meal. I think maybe the phrase “down-home” got garbled in translation.

Ba Muoi went down to the market and bought some frogs. She put them on her cutting board, chopped them up from the heads to the ends of the legs, and served them in a soup.

I had frog soup. Not fried frog legs, but frog soup, with frog lips, frog eyes, and other green stuff swimming around in it. I had lived with the mountain people of Laos for a couple of years and eaten some odd things, but I had never seen anything as unusual as that woman’s frog soup.

I told her to go back to her nine meals.

She was walleyed. When I told Brenda, she said that was what she expected me to say—my maid was a walleyed older woman—but I said it was true and that she was a grandmother, too. Because Ba Muoi’s eyes looked out opposite sides of her head, she had a blind spot in front and had to walk with her head cocked to one side.

Ba Muoi had been working at the U.S. compound in Vi Thanh since it was built years before. Someone, sometime, had told her to make up the beds at eight o’clock in the morning, so she would come into my bedroom to make up that bed at eight o’clock, whether I was in it or not. And I swear she went into Terry’s room to make up his bed for months after he left. She’d go into his room and say “Oh,” and then go into the kitchen.

One weekend morning at eight o’clock, I heard her come into the house while I was still in bed. I got up and walked over to the closet to get dressed. Intent on making up my bed, she walked into the bedroom. Because the curtain was still pulled, it was dark in the bedroom and she apparently did not see me. She headed for the light on the bedside table where I kept a 9mm pistol, loaded and cocked, when I slept. I had been reading late
the previous night and had dropped my glasses on the floor beside the bed. They were in Ba Muoi’s blind spot and she stepped on them, mashing them flat. She stepped back and cocked her head to one side to see what she had crushed. When she saw that it was my glasses, she backed out of the bedroom, leaving them flat on the floor.

I went outside a few minutes later with my flat glasses and I said, “Hey, what happened to my glasses?”

She said she didn’t know.

One night some VC came into the cluster of houses across the field from the compound. They carefully put together wooden troughs, aimed them across the field, placed rockets in them, and fired the rockets in our direction.

What we pieced together later was that some merchants had slipped through the VC checkpoints without paying taxes on the goods they brought into town. The VC tax collector was letting the merchants know that he wasn’t happy with this.

The first rocket whizzed over the compound, exploding in the market beyond. Loi came tearing out of his room and ran to my bedroom window.

He started yelling, “Hey Boss, Boss, Boss, Boss!”

Another rocket came zinging overhead and Loi dropped to the ground, but then he was back on his feet by the window, yelling, “Hey Boss, hey Boss, Boss!”

Another rocket whipped by overhead and Loi kept yelling, but I didn’t hear anything. The air conditioner was going and I was in a deep sleep.

One of the guards at the rear of the compound had a night-vision scope. He yelled to Loi that he could see the VC across the field. It looked like they were getting ready to fire again. Loi ran around to the front of the house and hit the screen door to the porch with his shoulder. It flew open, but the front door was secured by a small bolt lock. Loi slammed against it as another rocket flew overhead.

I began to come awake as Loi burst through the front door, and I was wide awake when the rocket exploded in the market behind him. When Loi charged across the living room into my bedroom, I was certain that he was an attacking VC or North Vietnamese. I
reached for my 9mm and Loi saw me going for the gun. He screamed and jumped to stop me from shooting him.

Adrenaline was surging through my body. I had the strength of a thousand men, and Loi and I wrestled mightily—until I recognized him and calmed down.

Another rocket went off in the market. Trying to protect my body, as I had ordered him, Loi was lying on top of me.

“Get off me, you fool,” I said.

My routine during the day remained unchanged. I would wake up around 0730, breakfast at 0800 while I listened to the news on the radio, and then take a Jeep ride to the operations section of 21st Division headquarters to get a report on military activities in the lower Mekong Delta over the previous night. If there was a serious incident, my subsequent visit to the intelligence section would usually focus on the implication of the incident to the overall security of the region. I often visited the Special Police offices on the way back to the compound. If they had a VC suspect in the interrogation center or if they had special intelligence on VC/North Vietnamese intentions, I would go over their reports. We also ran several joint operations and I would meet with the individual South Vietnamese case officers to discuss developments. Some of the bilateral operations were substantive, but most were obviously fabricated to get money from me or to give the Special Police an excuse to travel out of Vi Thanh. As I reported to Can Tho once, “Some of their stuff is chicken salad, but most is chicken shit.” They produced little intelligence.

In the afternoons I usually went back to the division, but most of the time I wrote reports and managed the few unilateral CIA operations run in the province. The Air America courier flew in from Can Tho twice a week. I would go days without seeing an American.

At night I refused to be idle. If I grew tired of reading, I invited the guards and translators to play chess. As a group, collectively, they knew how the pieces moved. I faced Loi across the board and the guards and translators stood behind him. Talking fast in Vietnamese among themselves, they discussed every move, sometimes arguing, sometimes poking at different pieces on the board. When they finally came to a consensus on a move, Loi
slowly and cautiously advanced a piece. As I reached toward the board to make my next move, often without much of a wait, they looked at me and back to the board, paused, then started talking again. They never won a game.

On the other hand, I never beat Loi at tennis. Once or twice, deep into the game, I managed to even the score. Then it was as if Loi said, “Oh, what, even?” and he’d slam a serve back at me so fast that I couldn’t react, as if to say he was still in control.

I asked the compound manager to build a Ping-Pong table so we could play at night on the porch. All my people were very good at Ping-Pong; unfortunately, I was not. One night I said to Loi, who was toying with me as we played, “Loi, I can’t see. The light is reflecting off my glasses. We’re going to have to move the table so the light is over my side.” Loi said okay, so we moved the table down the porch. Not only did Loi’s side have much less light, but we had moved the table so far that he had little room to maneuver. The end of the table was less than four feet from the end of the porch.

“Hey Boss, this not fair,” Loi said. “I can’t see. I can’t move.”

“I can’t hear you. Whose serve?” I asked.

I began to win a fair share of the time, but I constantly had to put up with, “Hey Boss, this not fair.”

My evenings with General Hung were more serious. He would ask about my family, about the United States, and about current events. He had an interest in American literature and I would often talk about American authors and their works. Although I read two or three books a week in Vi Thanh, I had not read many of the books Hung asked about. For his part, Hung would talk about Vietnamese history and stories of Indochina wars. He always spoke deliberately, slowly. He smiled often, even when discussing serious issues. He was uniquely self-confident and had a calming aura about him. He was very easy to like, and we developed a deep friendship.

In February, at the insistence of his superiors in Can Tho and Saigon, Hung’s forces attacked a large North Vietnamese unit on the eastern fringe of Chuong Thien, in the infamous U Minh Forest, long a Communist stronghold. The attack was Hung’s largest operation since I had been in the province, and he agonized over the operations plan. He used what South Vietnamese
Air Force he could get. Although he had an abundance of artillery pieces left by the U.S. Army, he had difficulty moving the equipment into place because of the paucity of flyable helicopters, and he lacked the right supplies to adequately outfit his attacking force. For example, he had plenty of claymores but no activators, and plenty of artillery ammunition but rusty fuses.

As it turned out, he suffered extensive casualties.

His men fought bravely. Reports coming from the field reminded me of skirmishes in Laos. I could understand his anguish, and I knew how proud he was of his men, who were taking casualties but continuing to press the attack.

When the battle was over and the North Vietnamese had been pushed back into the U Minh Forest, General Hung was not sure if he had, in fact, secured the net advantage. He had used much of his limited resources. For what?

A few days later the most god-awful odor drifted through my compound. I had smelled it before—rotting flesh, dead people. An interpreter said the division morgue was located between our compound and the orphanage.

The bodies of many of the soldiers killed during the operation were waiting to be shipped out. In addition to limited transportation, there was no refrigeration and some of the dead were from areas completely controlled by the North Vietnamese. Mercifully, Hung managed to move the bodies within the week. We were almost to the point of abandoning the compound.

In late February a team from the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) arrived at Vi Thanh. The team consisted of four nationalities—Hungarians, Poles, Indonesians, and Iranians—westerners, most of them, with round eyes. I was excited and went to see them the same day they came in. They were civil but obviously uncomfortable with me because I was CIA. I was not to be put off, however, and went back the next day. They were correct but unfriendly.

So Loi and I went out and hit tennis balls. I felt like Robinson Crusoe with his man Friday.

The following month, Ban Me Thuot fell, and ARVN Supreme Headquarters in Saigon had to realign the standing forces under
its command to protect what remained of South Vietnam. Elements of General Hung’s command were transferred to protect the northern edge of Can Tho and the general was asked to accompany the detachment. He was assigned as the deputy ARVN commander for the area south of Saigon.

On 20 March, Hue fell.

On 30 March, Da Nang fell.

In Can Tho, General Hung was courteous to Jim D. and the officers working in military liaison out of the American consulate, but his remarks made obvious that he was more likely to be candid with me than with officers he was meeting for the first time.