Saigon (44 page)

On a forested mountainside three miles from Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Devraux’s fortified bunker, Ngo Van Doug, the eldest son of his father’s one-time hunting camp “boy,” was at that moment straining against a long rope of plaited jungle vines that was cutting bloody weals into his bare shoulders. Groaning and bathed in sweat, he was helping a hundred of his men drag a massive Chinese 105-millimeter howitzer up the side of a sheer ravine under the austere gaze of Dao Van Lat, who wore a neatly pressed khaki tunic without rank insignia, which along with his prematurely gray hair marked him as the senior political commissar at General Vo Nguyen Giap’s headquarters. Each time the long- barreled weapon was shifted even an inch or two up the precipitous slope, the group of artillerymen clustered around it forced massive wooden chocks under its rubber-tired wheels to stop it slipping back again, and each time Lat nodded his approval. 

“The ravines are deep — but none of them are deeper than our haired of the French!” chanted Lat rhythmically whenever the company paused for breath, and all down the perspiring line of men the chant was repeated in a ragged chorus before a new effort was made. 

“I-leave now and heave hard!” yelled Dong intermittently, and each time his orders won an immediate response from his men; their feet slipped and slithered on the rocky sides of the ravine as they strained at the ropes, but always the ponderous artillery piece was jerked another foot or two upward. 

For three days Dong’s company had been dragging the heavily camouflaged gun up the mountain, moving it no more than a yard a minute, half a mile in a whole day. To ease its passage, a long trench had been hacked out of the limestone by hand, arid a camouflage of thick foliage had been woven into wide nests strung across the gully above their heads. The gun was the last of’ twenty-four 105-millimeter howitzers which General Giap’s351st Heavy Division had dragged undetected through the five hundred miles of mountainous jungle between Dien Bien Phu and the Chinese border; the other twenty-three were already concealed on the other mountain peaks, and Dong’s company had been accorded the honor of siting the last one in recognition of his brave leadership in many earlier battles. But he arid his men had already been toiling that morning for several hours, having risen long before dawn, and their strength and their spirits were beginning to flag; all of them knew it would take another whole day to haul the long-range weapon up to the camouflaged casemate which sappers had hewn from the summit of the rockface high above them, and Dong, after seeking Lat’s approval with an inquiring look, ordered a halt. 

Many of the company were no more than boys in their middle teens, and as soon as he gave the order to rest and eat, they collapsed in heaps on the mountainside. Several minutes passed before they were able to drag themselves upright again, and then they gobbled down their fist-sized rations of cold boiled rice like hungry wolves. As he watched them, Dong’s thoughts raced back to the wretched year and a half he had spent on the Vi An rubber plantation. Just like the youths before him, he and his brother, Hoc, had often sunk down weak with hunger among the rubber trees to bolt their meager rations of rice, but their only concern had been to survive the bestial conditions in which the foreign plantation owners made them live and work; the new generation had at least been given the chance to fight to free itself from the hated French colonialists who had oppressed their nation for so long. How fortunate they were compared to poor, dead Hoc! 

Although they too were close to exhaustion, they had the pride and dignity of soldiers! 

Moved by these thoughts, Dong began sauntering quietly among his troops, offering a few words of encouragement to each of them in turn as they rested; all listened respectfully and nodded as he moved on —— to them he was already a heroic figure. They knew that the stoop of his narrow shoulders had been made more pronounced by the long years he had spent crouching in the cells of Paulo Condore after his arrest in Hue in 1936, and he had never lost the gaunt, undernourished look with which he had emerged from prison in t945. When he learned of his father’s death in the course of the French coup d’état, he had volunteered immediately to fight with the Viet Minh, and on account of his courage and his bitter hatred of the French, he had been recruited into General Giap’s regular battalions in the north Soon after the outbreak of war in December 1946. During the next eight years his tall, round-shouldered figure had become a familiar rallying point in the thick of battles fought by the 59th Regiment of the 312th Division, and he had risen to the command of first a platoon, then a company. During those eight years of bloody warfare, he had been wounded many times, and he still carried irremovable shrapnel splinters embedded in his shoulders from a grenade blast that had almost killed him in 1951. 

As Dong moved solicitously among the men under his command, Lat watched him carefully, noting with approval the respect which they instinctively showed him, and when he finally came over to sit by him, Lat patted the company commander lightly on the shoulder. “You handle your men well, comrade,” he said quietly. “You’re wise enough to know that’s the way to get the best out of them.” 

Dong nodded his thanks, but his face remained furrowed in a frown of concern. “A lot of them are out on their feet, Comrade Commissar. And I was just thinking they remind me of my own young days on the rubber plantations. Our French bosses often drove us until we dropped then —. but we’d have given our right arms for the chance to shoot back at the bastards with a gun like this!” 

Lat stared thoughtfully at the rough-voiced peasant for a moment. “Then why don’t you tell them about it, Dong?” he said quietly. “Perhaps it will help them forget their weariness — inspire them to greater efforts.” 

Dong nodded obediently and, snatching off his palm leaf helmet, he leaped to his feet and waved it above his head to attract attention His voice shook with emotion as he gave a stumbling account of his life on the plantation, describing the leaking hues, the frequent deaths from fever, the dawn burials of dead friends in the gray jungle. H is face grew dark with anger as he spoke of the beatings administered by the Corsican plantation director, and when he arrived at the point where his young brother was dragged screaming from the hut during a night of torrential rain, his voice died away altogether. On the ground around him the exhausted soldiers stopped eating and looked up expectantly. 

“My brother, Hoc, was raped by the labor recruiter,” said Dong at last in a fierce whisper. “But he got his own back the next day by splitting open the Corsican’s head with his coupe-coupe — and when they saw this, the other coolies attacked the rest of the French pigs. But because we were ignorant and badly organized, the revolt was crushed, and a year later Hoc was butchered by the French with their stinking guillotine. My mother died too in one of their filthy prisons, and my father was badly wounded in 1931 when French planes bombed ten thousand peaceful marchers at Vinh. 

Although one of his arms was left paralyzed, my father still helped the Viet Minh take over Saigon in 1945. Then just as I was being released from Paulo Condore, the French murdered him too and smashed our new government...’ Dong’s words had poured out in an emotional torrent and he paused with heaving chest to regain his breath. When he glanced around uncertainly at Lat to seek his reaction, the commissar inclined his head slightly in a little gesture of encouragement. “But my story, comrades, isn’t unusual,” continued Dong, turning back to his men. “Most of you have got mothers, fathers, uncles or friends who’ve suffered like this too. I’ve got a wife and children of my own, and when my children were born I vowed they’d never suffer like this. Now at Dien Bien Phu we can show the French swine what we’ve been storing up for them all these years, can’t we?” 

Dong’s impassioned outburst had stunned the men to silence, but although they were obviously moved, they gazed at him uncertainly. Seeing this, Dao Van Lat moved quietly to Dong’s side and placed an arm about his shoulders. 

“Comrades, I can verify part of your brave commanders story,” he said in a calculatedly quiet tone. “I was marching at Vinh beside his father and saw the French bombs drop into our midst. Hundreds of innocent men, women and children were killed — and among them was someone who was very dear to me.” Lat paused and scanned the faces of the young Soldiers around him again: 

their expressions were rapt, and he saw to his satisfaction that his skillful intervention had won their interest immediately. 

“She was a girl, comrades, who was not only young and beautiful but also brave and patriotic,” he went on. “1 loved her and she loved me, and she was marching beside me that day because she was as dedicated as I was to freeing her country from foreign tyranny. Her death caused me the greatest agony, and since then I have had to live with that agony every day of my life, because I organized that march.” Lat lowered his head for a moment, overcome at the memory, and when he looked up again his face bore a strained expression as though he was reliving an intense physical pain. “It was especially hard to bear, comrades, because even before that day of horror, we had made a special pact to deny ourselves the pleasures of physical love for the sake of our country! I feared that often I wasted my energies pursuing the gratifications of the flesh. Therefore, to devote myself completely to the cause of our revolution, I took a knife and removed from my living body the means of such wasteful gratification!” 

Dao Van Lat stopped speaking and remained silent for almost a minute, gazing up towards the mountain peak in a theatrical attitude that at the same time expressed the real pain he still felt at the memory. Until that moment he had inspired in the young soldiers the kind of respect customarily accorded to remote scholar figures, and this unexpected display of emotion astounded them; as the full significance of what he was saying sank in, they stared back at him in an awestruck silence. 

“That was twenty-four years ago,” he said at last in a low voice. “During that tune I’ve never regretted the great sacrifice I made. Nor have I ever wavered in my determination to make our nation free one day. For most of that time I’ve worked willingly at the side of Uncle Ho and Comrade Giap, and now here at Dien Bien Phu we’re at last on the brink of achieving the success of which I first dreamed all those years ago. All of us here have been chosen by history to fulfill the hopes of those millions of Vietnamese patriots who’ve died in chains. And we mustn’t fail them! Thousands of our countrymen are at this moment trudging secretly through three hundred miles of jungle, pushing bicycles loaded down with the rice and ammunition we need to win this battle. The French are convinced it’s impossible for us to supply an army of fifty thousand men in this remote corner of Tongking. They also believe it’s impossible to lift guns to the tops of mountains. But I know — and you know — that already we’ve made too many sacrifices to think of failure!” Lat paused dramatically, then ripped open the buttons on the front of his tunic. Dropping it on the ground beside him, he stood stripped to the waist before the troops, and they stared in surprise at his pale, wasted torso. “We shall not fail those who’ve put faith in us, Comrades and most important of all we shall not fail ourselves and the promises we all made long ago. Comrade Dong and I have suffered greatly at the hands of the French, arid we’re ready to give the last ounce of our strength to lift this gun to the peak of the mountain. You must do the same — now and at all times during the coming battle. Then we can drive the French out of our country and achieve the great final victory that our ancestors began dreaming about a hundred years ago!” 

Turning aside, Lat bent to pick up one of the ropes attached to the long-barreled howitzer and, looping it over his bare shoulder, he started up the mountain at a run. When Dong shouted an order for the company to join him, they rose up as one man, cheering wildly. Within moments they were arching their backs and chanting in unison as they took the strain again, and slowly the heavy gun began to shift and jerk upwards once more towards the rock chamber from which it would be able to pour lethal shells directly into the midst of the detested French enemy in the long valley below. 

“You can tell the readers of the Washington Gazette, Monsieur Sherman, that we have a very strong battery of 155-millimeter guns,” said Colonel Charles Piroth, the One-armed artillery commander of Dien Bien Phu. “We also have twenty-four 105- millimeter guns and sixteen heavy mortars. That’s more than enough artillery to do the job we have on hand here.” 

Joseph was riding in a jeep beside the lugubrious, bearlike French officer responsible for the deployment of the major defense weapons in the fortified camp. Beetle-browed and swarthy, Colonel Piroth wore the empty sleeve of the left arm shot away in the Second World War tucked tidily into a pocket of his uniform jacket, and although his manner was formally polite, he was answering the American’s questions with barely concealed impatience 

“In Korea,” said Joseph, scanning the gun emplacements they were touring, “the United States had to Concentrate artillery in massive batteries in the end to hold the Chinese and the North Koreans, I’m amazed you have so few guns here.” 

Piroth shrugged and pursed his lips in a little gesture of dismissal. “I’ve been offered more guns from Hanoi—-but there’s no need for them. I’m quite satisfied that my fire plan will be effective.” 

Now that the dust of the Viet Minh barrage had settled, trucks were beginning to move back and forth along the valley floor, the garrison’s little force of fighters and B26 bombers were taking off again to strafe and fire the hills with napalm wherever it was thought the enemy might be gathering, and other Dakotas, ferrying supplies and groups of reluctant soldiers returning from leave in Hanoi, were continuing to swoop down onto the dusty landing strip. 

“But doesn’t it worry you that the camp is surrounded by those high mountains on every side?” asked Joseph, taken aback by the artillery officer’s complacency. “Can you still sleep soundly at night knowing those peaks are in the hands of the enemy?” 

A ghost of a smile flitted across Piroth’s heavy features. “I should have thought that a correspondent of your experience, Monsieur Sherman, would have at least some slight grasp of military strategy by now. Colonel Devraux told me you’d covered the civil war in China as well as Korea, isn’t that right?” 

Joseph nodded. He had joined the Gazette in 1947 after two restless years as professor of Asian studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and when appointed as the paper’s Far East correspondent late in 5948 he had moved with Tempe and his two young Sons to Hong Kong. He had arrived in time to cover some of the climactic battles between Mao Tse-tung’s Communist divisions and the demoralized forces of Chiang Kai-shek, and when the Korean war broke out in 1950, he had reported with distinction on the fierce fighting and mass slaughter he’d witnessed amid the bleak, treeless hills of the East Asian peninsula that was so different from Indochina. “What I know about war is based on experience, colonel, rather than textbook knowledge,” replied Joseph evenly. “And giving the enemy the heights above you has never seemed like a good idea to me.” 

‘Let me explain in more detail,” replied Piroth, speaking slowly and deliberately as though addressing a dull child. “Those mountains which worry you so much are very steep, and they lie two or three miles from the center of the basin here. The classic artilleryman’s strategy would be to site 105-millimeter cannon safely out of sight on the tar side and lob shells in a high arc over the top onto our camp. But I’ve inspected the mountains very carefully from the air, and I assure you they’re so steep that if guns were sited on the far slopes, the ‘yellows’ wouldn’t be able to fire them anywhere — except straight up into the-air! If they move them back far enough to fire over the top at us, they won’t be able to reach the camp at all — but in any event our own 1555 will be able to drop shells easily onto the other side of the crests and smash any batteries they set up there.” 

“But what if they site some guns inside the ring of mountains or even on the top?” asked Joseph in an incredulous voice. “What then?” 

“My dear sir,” retorted Piroth, “I suggest when you fly out you have a close look at those mountains. And if you still think that human beings can haul guns up those rock faces and through all that jungle, I shall be very surprised. However, if the yellows’ proved themselves capable of working miracles, don’t you think we should spot them? And as they struggled to carry the guns up there on their backs, do you think we wouldn’t blast them to kingdom come before they get them in place?” 

Joseph looked up at the crests again. “Those damned jungles are so thick, colonel, it’s not inconceivable that the enemy might get weapons up there without anyone seeing them.” 

“A feat like that would put Hannibal’s elephant march over the Alps firmly in the shade, Monsieur Sherman. But if your fantasy were to become reality, as soon as they opened up and revealed their positions we would neutralize them with our superior counter battery fire.” The French officer turned his heavy jowled face towards Joseph and raised his bushy eyebrows,” Have you and your American newspaper readers forgotten we’re dealing with an army of peasant foot soldiers? They’ve got only a handful of Russian trucks, no air power, no tanks. Their depots are three hundred miles away at Yen Bay, and to supply several divisions with rice, let alone ammunition, would require a sophisticated logistics operation with a massive fleet of trucks - if there was a modern road network leading to this valley, which there isn’t. Our air force is also flying Constant reconnaissance missions and is ready to bomb any concentration of troops or supplies as soon as they’re discovered. The enemy has no answer to our modern artillery and air power.” 

“But what about the March monsoon?” asked Joseph slowly. “Won’t that hamper your flyers and favor those peasant foot soldiers up in the hills?” 

“Our plans have been laid with the greatest care,” replied Piroth with a shrug. “When the ‘yellows’ come down from the hills, you will see why our men are already calling this ‘Operation Meatgrinder.’” 

The French officer raised his head and gazed absently into the heavens; white arid khaki parachutes, guided through the low clouds by a moored meteorological balloon, were blossoming from the leaden sky. Crated foodstuffs, ammunition, bolts of barbed wire, trenching tools, mosquito nets, hoots and all the paraphernalia of a military camp under siege were continuing to flutter down like ragged snowflakes onto the yellow plain, and as the jeep drove on from one artillery battery to the next, little squads of Legionnaires, dark-skinned Moroccans of the Infanterie Coloniale, Algerians and even little Vietnamese soldiers loyal to the Bao Dai government scurried quickly from the trenches to retrieve the supplies. 

“Are all your big guns set up like that, colonel?” asked Joseph as the jeep passed the sixth or seventh circular pit he’d seen in which an artillery piece was mounted unprotected on its swivel base. “Doesn’t that make them a little vulnerable to a direct hit?” 

“The guns are deployed in that manner to allow them an unrestricted field of fire. This way they can be brought quickly to bear in all directions without difficulty. Fortifying them would reduce their effectiveness.” The French officer glanced down at his watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Monsieur Sherman, I have other inspections to carry out. If there are still aspects of our artillery arrangements which puzzle you, speak to your own American colleagues at your military mission in Saigon. They’ve all made inspection tours of Dien Bien Phu — even General O’Daniel. And all of them agree that our defenses for the camp and airstrip are sound.” 

Without addressing Joseph further, the colonel ordered his driver to halt the jeep close to another gun emplacement and climbed out. He gave a crisp order for Joseph to be taken back to the central command post, then turned arid strode rapidly away to talk to the waiting gun crew.