Red Flags (15 page)

"Evil shit." Grady sat down on the edge of the table, one foot up on a chair.

"Sentenced four men to death," Bennett went on. "The first two in Pleiku. They tied them to poles on the soccer field, with a thousand Vietnamese looking on, cheering and munching pineapple-on-a-stick like it was a football match. The firing squad killed one straight off, succeeding in wounding him a second time. Propped him up, bleeding, and shot him again. Wounded him a second time. He looked like Saint Sebastian, just pierced everywhere. The crowd jeered. A French priest pleaded with the soldiers. The third volley finally killed him."

Bennett put away his handkerchief and stood for a moment with arms folded. "Two of the condemned were from here and were brought back to Cheo Reo for a hurried execution. Bob Reed, our local missionary, got called to the airstrip and was told they were going to die that day. At the barracks, the Montagnards got a last meal. They didn't eat. They prayed with Bob, then were taken to the edge of town and tied to posts in front of a crowd of onlookers and a nine-man firing squad. The two prisoners searched the faces, looking for friends. The one Yard called out to someone, ‘Oh, Uncle. Come and take my hand before I die.' Nobody stepped forward. So Bob asked the Vietnamese captain to wait. He walked out to the posts, placed his hands on their shoulders, and said a last prayer."

"The execution was quick," Grady said. "No cheers, no applause."

Cox lit a menthol cigarette. "Since the mutiny at Phu Thien, the Vietnamese Special Forces keep their distance. They're petrified of the Yards."

"Can't blame them," Bennett said.

Captain Cox leaned against a wooden post. "The only bright note was that one of the few Montagnard army officers got appointed our new camp commander."

Grady smirked. "No slope officer would take the slot."

"You have any FULRO rebels among your strikers in the camp?" I said.

Cox laughed, expelling smoke. "Here? Only a couple hundred."

"You're okay with that?" I said.

Grady shrugged with indifference. "They're not a problem to us."

Cox looked at his sergeant suspiciously. "Especially since certain Green Beret noncoms have been known to drive them around, helping them recruit young Yards from the different villages."

Grady sat silent, avoiding looking at the captain.

"It does get a little old," Cox went on, "having Yards on our payroll who the ARVN field police are looking to lock up. Luckily they haven't the balls to make arrests out here."

Grady snorted in derision. "Yeah, good luck with that."

"What's trickier," Cox said, "is the hundred or more Montagnards we bed down with each night who are VC."

Checkman started. "
Here?
Inside the camp? Viet Cong?"

The captain smiled, amused. "In every Special Forces camp. There are VC all through the ranks of the Montagnard and Vietnamese militias. It's a great deal. They get to keep an eye on our every move, and we train and feed and pay them. Three squares, a bunk, and free military training, all courtesy of Uncle Sam."

Grady harrumphed. "No way to know which ones are VC until they're cuttin' your throat or the wire and swingin' open the front gate for their comrades."

"Could that happen?" Checkman said, incredulous.

"Already has," Grady said. "Thirty VC agents in among the Yard strikers at Plei Mrong sabotaged the mortars and cut the perimeter wire, then turned their guns on the defenders. They let their friends in and took down the Special Forces camp. Same thing at Hiep Hoa and four other camps."

Cox said, "We're always finding soil dumped in the feed tray of the fifty cal, or rags stuffed in the mortar tubes."

"God Almighty." Checkman grew pale, his freckles darkening.

Cox slapped him on the shoulder. "So watch your back tonight, young man."

Checkman swallowed hard. "I need my own Nung."

We all laughed. The radio squawked: "One Six. This is Dog Six, we're twenty klicks out."

Cox took the mike and acknowledged. "The general's inbound," he said.

T
HE GENERAL HAD
half as many stars as Westmoreland but arrived with nearly as many birds. The first two helicopters bore down on the camp from the west and shot across it breaking left and right, looking like homicidal sperm, guns trained on us.

"Gunships," Cox said, shielding his eyes, "carrying nails and gun pods."

Meaning, armed with seven fléchette rockets strapped on either side and electronically operated Gatling guns tethered to both flanks. They circled low and close, the visored door gunners bug-eyed. Grady waved with his whole arm, like a little kid, as the general's Command-and-Control ship swooped close overhead, trailed by his chaser.

"A slick shadowin' the boss," Grady said, "in case the old man's Charlie-Charlie bird goes down and he needs
immediate
"—he drew out the syllables—"rescue."

I cupped my hands above my eyes and looked up. The customary altitude for a general was twenty-five hundred feet over his troops, well out of range of ground fire. Commanders formed a kind of airborne chain of command: the general on top in his plush C-and-C chopper, brigade commander in the middle, battalion commander below him, all of them laid back in their flying armchairs, demanding answers and issuing instructions while the shit flew on the ground.

The general's helicopter banked and flared, hovered level, and descended. Twenty feet above the ground, Major General Donal stood on the skid, flanked by two troopers in flak vests, their assault weapons pointed skyward. As the chopper touched down, they stepped off as if from an escalator. An aide jumped to the ground behind them. They all looked like they'd just come from the dry cleaner's. Two stars shone on each of the general's lapels and on the front of his cap.

Camp commander Siu Broai snapped off a salute and welcomed Donal to Camp A-226. The pilot kept his rotors cranking, reducing the rotations but keeping them spinning, just in case. The three other choppers circled, zooming in and out over the fortifications, adding their pulse to the anticipation. The Montagnards stayed under cover, staring out from doorways and windows at the commotion.

Colonel Bennett and Captain Cox saluted the general and invited him to inspect the honor guard. Smiling broadly, he strode by the Yards standing at rigid attention in a variety of mismatched partial uniforms, most of them barefoot, one in a loincloth and olive-drab shirt bearing French medals. Next to him, a twelve-year-old in fatigues wearing ammo pouches and bearing a carbine. The general didn't pause. Quickly done with the military courtesies, he clapped Colonel Bennett on the shoulder and made straight for the open-sided hut just inside the wire where the shaman waited, holding a live chicken upside down by the legs.

The rest of us drew closer to witness the general sealed to the tribe forever. Donal assumed a profound expression appropriate to the honor. He had waived the all-day, all-night blood sacrifice, and—by placing his unshod foot on a bronze ax head—he skipped directly to the moment the shaman places the brass band around his right wrist. The general tried to fake the required sip of rice wine from the giant jar but actually sucked some in when a large roach skittered out the top, startling him.

Bending, Cox whispered, "An acquired taste, sir." Donal gave a brave grin, eyes a little wide.

Back at the helipad, Sergeant Grady was finishing negotiations with the general's helicopter crew, war souvenirs and currency discreetly changing hands. An aide signaled the pilot to crank it up. The prop increased rotations. After the briefest discussion, the colonel and Captain Cox escorted the general right to his command ship, its rotor slicing the air at full power. The din was deafening. To my surprise, Colonel Bennett accompanied the general aboard. The bird pulled pitch and rose aloft to speed away, rejoined by the gunships.

"Captain," Cox called to me as he returned, beret clamped in place against the rotor wash of the chase ship lifting off.

I leaned toward him to hear over the rising noise.

"The general invited the colonel to lunch at his mess. Wanted Dr. Roberta too, but she had to decline. Sorry I couldn't get us on the guest list. I hear he serves real coffee. With real cream from the Navy."

"I didn't bring my mess jacket or calling cards anyway," I yelled in his ear, my eyes slits. "And I'm not wearing any skivvies."

"Me either," Cox shouted.

Dr. Roberta watched the chase ship rise, her clothes plastered to her body by the wash.

"Well," Cox yelled, "she's wearing hers."

Dr. Roberta and I loaded her Land Rover with more rice, a bottle of Lysol, and four large plastic jugs of treated well water. I ran a quick radio check and we set off.

"Anything I should know about how to behave when we get there?" I said.

"Yeah. Spirits control everything. Some are good, most bad. The Montagnards spend their lives trying to keep them placated. You can easily violate a taboo. For starters, stand still if you sneeze. No kidding. It's hellishly bad if you don't."

"Got it," I said. "Okay. What else?"

"Don't relieve yourself in the village. That's a total no-no for outsiders. If you have to go, go beyond the fences."

"Right."

"Only use your right hand to shake with."

"What?"

"Why are you smiling?" she said.

"I—never mind. Go on."

"When you shake hands, hold your right elbow with your left hand. That way whatever evil spirits are in you will be blocked from entering the other person."

"I've always done that but I never knew why."

It was only three kilometers to the village of the expectant mom, but we didn't see a soul on the way. The first sign of a community was a group of Jarai grave houses on a hillside. Dr. Roberta directed me onto a rough track that led us past the cemetery. I slowed the Rover to a crawl. Each tomb had four main posts and a peaked thatch roof over a raised platform, underneath which a dirt mound covered a very shallow grave. The overhead supports were elaborately carved, and the crossbeams bore mystical designs, bursts and sun symbols. Tall jars of wine and personal effects rested on the newer platforms.

"Comforts for the dead," Roberta said.

Near the graves stood lone posts with carved tops. A wooden monkey crouched on one, a plane balanced on its nose, its propeller still in the hot air. A French legionnaire braced at attention atop another, facing a bare-breasted Montagnard woman. High overhead, on a mast rising over a tall grave-house roof, two wooden birds perched on opposite ends of a horizontal stick. I pulled to a stop.

"What do you make of the carvings?" I said.

"Haven't a clue. They're so strange. Like cargo-cult art, some of it."

"Cox says they consider stealing water a heinous crime. Have you heard that?"

"The gods of water and rice are especially powerful. Stealing either is considered a high crime. Pissing off either god means major trouble for the whole village. The offender has to make amends. Not to the victim. To the god."

"Make amends how?"

"Sacrifice. Pigs, chickens ... for a really bad offense, a buffalo. Sometimes several. They ring gongs to summon the gods, beat drums, consume whole jars of rice wine. They think gods live in the jars."

"But they don't sacrifice the offender?"

"No. No capital punishment. That would be an unnatural death. The worst."

"Right."

She took in the cemetery. "Not Western, is it?"

"You'd be surprised," I said. "About thirty miles north of here, off Road Nineteen, there's a graveyard in the Mang Yang Pass where a Red Montagnard regiment decimated a French column a dozen years ago. The legionnaires who survived buried their dead standing—hundreds of them, facing toward Paris,
Mort pour la France
on every headstone. We spent part of a morning there."

"You stopped to pay your respects?"

"No. For coffee and doughnuts. God, I still dream about those doughnuts. The French-trained cooks made them for the MACV mess at Kontum. Four of us liberated a couple dozen and headed out on a small jeep patrol to try and triangulate an enemy radio transmitter. We stopped at the graveyard, ate all the doughnuts with a thermos of Army coffee, then shot it out with two Charlies we bumped into a few kilometers down the road."

"Have you been in a lot of firefights?"

"Some. Usually by accident. Small actions."

"So where have you served?"

"Mostly around Saigon these days. My first tour I was sent everywhere."

"Why? What were you doing?"

"Our radios were never intended for this climate. They're susceptible to moisture, and the jungle absorbs transmissions. Whenever somebody had problems with them, I'd get sent to fix things."

"Couldn't the Army come up with new equipment meant for the tropics?"

"Sure, but by the time the military gets it right, we'll be fighting in deserts or on ice floes."

I shifted into first gear and got us rolling again.

"You married?" she said.

"Briefly."

"That's unfortunate."

"We eloped. Didn't have much time together. The day I came home she announced it was over."

Roberta nodded. "So you came back."

We were within sight of the village, passing by fruit trees and a garden. In among the tobacco and vegetables stood waist-high stems topped with darkly ripe knobs. The notched pods oozed white lines of resin that scented the air with a sweet aroma. Roberta saw my interest.

"The sap turns brown in the air. This goes on for five or six nights running." She pointed at a dark, resin-streaked pod. "In the morning they'll collect the tar in little bamboo pots they hang around their necks."

"Smells inviting."

"The village pharmacy," she said.

"Do the Yards around here ever grow opium to sell? I mean, in large quantities?"

"Not that I've seen. They're not business-minded. This is for their own use. Drinking is a bigger thing in their culture. But they don't sell their moonshine either."

Thirty longhouses came into view, built on stilts six feet off the ground, the longest over forty feet. Entries at both ends fronted on raised porches, with notched logs for ladders.