The Point Team (3 page)

Katie glanced at it without reading its contents. The letter was typed and signed by someone with the last name of Vanderhoven.

“You’re Eric Vanderhoven?” she asked.

The youth nodded. “I hate it here. You got to get me out.”

She smiled. “Is that why you came up to me on the street?”

He nodded. “I suppose you are a leftist. That’s why you’re here. Those are the only Westerners they let into Vietnam.”

“I’m not anything political,” Katie said vehemently. “I’m just interested in people.”

“Sure,” he said, with veiled sarcasm in his voice.

Katie turned on him angrily. “You know something? You’re a kind of snotty unpleasant kid.”

“This is a kind of unpleasant place. I have to survive. You want to make a real film? About how we live? What it’s really
like here when you have no foreign passport and no food?”

“I didn’t come all this way just to put Vietnam down,” Katie told him.

The youth looked at her with scorn on his face and
moved a little away so that she could no longer talk with him.

In a little while eight army trucks with canvas coverings bumped their way over the open ground and raised a cloud of red
dust by the far side of the compound. Unarmed soldiers piled out of the vehicles and into the bamboo compound. They went to
the nearest group of women and children and led the women to one truck and their children—even the babies, which they carried
gently—to another. The women being separated from their offspring screamed, thrust out their arms, struggled, collapsed …
It was no use. They were led, carried, or dragged to one of the trucks. When that truck was filled, it drove off, and the
soldiers began to load another.

The women crowded into the compound backed away from the soldiers and protectively clutched their young ones to them. Their
voices rose now in a high-pitched, continuous wail.

Jake was still having trouble picking up the sound on his equipment.

Roger returned from his forward position among the weeds and loaded a new video tape in his camera. “I need an unobstructed
view of the trucks, but there’s no way for me to get any closer without being seen.”

“This sound quality is shit, Katie,” Jake complained. “I got to take the mike in closer.”

“There’s no way you two can do that,” she said. Jake and Roger were six-footers, and very, very conspicuous.

“I know how to work the camera,” Eric volunteered, his sullenness suddenly evaporated. “Mitch and Red can do the sound if
you show them how. They won’t spot us. I guarantee it.”

Roger and Jake’s expressions showed their unwillingness to hand over their equipment.

“This is too good to miss,” Katie pointed out. “You got to let them.”

While they were making up their minds, there was a big
outburst near the trucks as women struggled with the soldiers. Roger and Jake knew they had to cover the news, no matter
how. They handed over the camera and sound gear. After a brief lesson on what knobs and dials to turn, all four youths crept
forward through the weeds around the edge of the clearing. The three Americans watched anxiously as the boys maneuvered into
position and filmed the scene at the trucks.

Roger said, ‘They seem to be doing OK. But his camera movements are jerky, and he’s zooming in and out too fast.”

Katie grinned. “You’re both afraid the kids’ stuff will be better than yours.”

Roger laughed. “So long as the union doesn’t get to hear of this, I don’t care.”

They saw the boys creep forward, practically out into the open, as the soldiers lost their original patience and pushed, battered,
and kicked the hysterical women. Some carried a baby, hanging by an arm or a leg, in each hand and tossed it for another soldier
to catch inside a truck. They might have been loading heads of cabbage, for all the care they showed.

They saw Eric take the video camera off his shoulder and give it to the boy with him. He came back alone to the three Americans,
stooping as he ran through the weeds.

“Bring back my camera!” Roger growled before Eric had a chance to say anything.

“Tomorrow at seven in the evening. Same place as we met you today.”

“To hell with that!” Roger snarled and went forward.

The three boys had already disappeared with the camera and sound equipment.

“We’ll make you a film that’ll show you how we have to live,” Eric promised with a sneer. “Not some pinko tourist crap like
you would have shot.”

He sneered at them once again and disappeared among the weeds.

* * *

Green mosquito netting concealed each of the still forms of Lt. Tranh Duc Pho and his fifteen men as they waited in a line
on the jungle slope above the muddy river, nearly four hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh City and fifteen miles inside Vietnam’s
border with Laos. They stared down from higher ground at what once had been part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Occasional Montagnard
tribesmen passed by, then a group of Vietnamese peasants, then seven armed Montagnards with heavy backpacks—the lieutenant
did not stop these smugglers since he had bigger game in mind. He and his men lay concealed in the jungle for four hours—fighting
off the fierce tiny wildlife that bit and stung them even under the protection of the netting—before they saw what they had
been waiting for.

Two Montagnards with American M16 rifles at the ready walked abreast along the path, scanning the forests to either side of
them. They didn’t spot the men hidden above them.

A minute behind them came the first of the bicycle bearers. Each bicycle was laden with goods wrapped in cloth. So much was
tied to the frame of the machine that each bike looked like a bloated maggot with handlebars and wheels. The lieutenant counted
thirty bicycles, each steered by a man walking alongside it. Twenty men walked beside the bicycles, unburdened except for
their M16 or AK47 rifles. He knew there would be a rearguard of three or four more men. So he and his fifteen men would be
up against at least twenty-five men with rifles, plus another thirty who probably carried pistols at least and perhaps could
reach easily for a rifle in the baggage on the bicycles. There was only one way for him to do it.

As the Montagnards wheeled the laden bicycles along the path, the lieutenant’s men sighted along their rifles and waited for
the signal to fire. They were outnumbered but had the advantage of surprise. With bated breath, they held
their fire. The lieutenant would be the first to shoot. That would be their signal to let go with everything they had.

Tranh Duc Pho’s rifle was on full automatic. He found the front sight’s post in the notch of his rear sight, settled on one
man’s chest, pressed his finger on the trigger, and swept the gun barrel to the right. The thirty 7.62-mm rounds in the AK47’s
magazine emptied out of the muzzle in a matter of seconds. The first man collapsed like a wet paper bag, and those behind
him were cut down before they knew what was happening as the gun barrel swung to the right. Two bicycles fell as the men sank
in the hail of lead from this single rifle. Then the rest of the unit joined in.

Some of the Montagnards died as they raised their rifles in self-defense. Others were zapped in the back as they turned to
run. Most of the rest were butchered as they cowered behind the laden bicycles or simply stood without moving, immobilized
by shock.

The unit’s fifteen AK47s sang out together like a crazed hive of killer bees before the lieutenant’s burst of fire had finished.
Their burst of fire was equally short, lasting just a few seconds before they had to replace the box-type magazines. The line
of men wheeling the bicycles and their accompanying guards crumpled under fire. Their shouts of fear turned into screams of
agony as the lead projectiles burrowed into their flesh and shattered their bones.

Seven Montagnards unaccountably remained standing, untouched by this sudden holocaust. They fled panic-stricken down the path,
back the way they had come. The lieutenant had completed loading a fresh magazine into his rifle and sent a burst after them,
bringing down the last two.

“Get after them,” he yelled to his sergeant. “Take half the men and bring back at least one alive.”

As they ran down the path after them, Tranh Duc Pho brought the rest of his men down to examine the dead and injured.

“Finish them off,” the lieutenant ordered.

The men used handguns to deliver a single bullet to the forehead of each fallen man. They were well trained at this kind of
thing and left nothing to chance.

“You want this one to talk, Lieutenant?” a soldier asked, dragging a Montagnard to his feet from beneath a bicycle. “He’s
wounded in the arm only.”

Tranh Duc Pho answered, “Hold him till we catch one of those who got away.”

In a short while the sergeant and his men came back with two of the escaped Montagnards walking in front of their guns with
hands clasped behind their necks. The lieutenant indicated where the two men were to stand.

“Do you understand Vietnamese?” Tranh Duc Pho asked.

“I do.”

“So do I.”

Tranh Duc Pho turned to the man wounded in the arm. “And you?”

“Yes.”

Pointing to the wounded man, the lieutenant said, “What’s in that baggage tied to those bicycles?”

The man hesitated a moment and saw no reason for not parting with information which the lieutenant could easily get for himself
simply by stooping and ripping the cloth covers.

“M16 rifles, M60 machine guns, and M79 grenade launchers,” the man said. “There’s ammunition for the rifles, not for the others.”

“All American weapons,” Tranh Duc Pho jeered.

The wounded man nodded.

“Where did they come from?” the lieutenant demanded.

“I suppose they were left behind by the Americans.”

“For their Montagnard friends,” the lieutenant continued in a jeering tone. “The Green Berets left them for you and you kept
them hidden, even after we had liberated you from the imperialists and their puppets in colonial Saigon. I have only two questions
for you, and you had better
answer them if you want to live. I know these weapons are going from one hill clan to another. Who sent them? Who was meant
to get them?”

The wounded man remained silent.

The lieutenant nodded to the soldier guarding the man being questioned. He hit him with his fist on the blood-soaked part
of his tunic sleeve. The man hardly reacted.

Tranh Duc Pho scowled. “He’s in shock. He won’t feel a thing. He’s of no use to us.”

The soldier guarding him drew his bayonet from its scabbard and sank it into his prisoner’s side, a single deep thrust. He
let the falling man’s weight pull itself off the length of sharp steel. The man lay on his face on the ground, bleeding from
the side into a great pool of blood, twitching and moaning.

The soldier wiped the bloody blade on the fallen man’s shoulder, smiled, and said to the lieutenant, “I think he felt that,
comrade.”

“You,” Tranh Duc Pho said, pointing to one of the two uninjured Montagnards. “You will feel more than he did. Where were the
arms going? Who sent them?”

This man too remained silent.

The sergeant beckoned to two of his soldiers who had taken a large metal cooking pot from one of the bicycles and filled it
with river water. The soldiers placed the pot in front of the Montagnard under questioning. They forced the man to kneel before
the pot and glanced at the lieutenant for approval. He nodded to them. One soldier lightly hit the Montagnard in the solar
plexus, causing him to expel his breath, and before he could refill his lungs with another breath of air, they forced his
head into the pot of water.

They held his head under for a full minute as the man’s arms and legs threshed in desperation. They pulled his head up, and
he puked water and sucked air into his waterlogged lungs. His eyes were round with terror.

Keeping his face close to the river water in the cooking
pot, they let him partly recover. But he could see what faced him again if he refused to answer questions.

“Can you talk?” Tranh Duc Pho asked him.

The man said nothing.

The lieutenant kicked him with the toe of his boot in the ribs.

The prisoner yelped in pain. “Yes,” he gasped, “I can talk.”

“Good. Where were the arms going?”

Silence. The soldiers slowly lowered his face toward the water. They paused to give him a last chance. The man took a deep
breath. They forced his head into the pot so that water slopped over its sides.

This time they kept him down for three minutes and pulled him out half drowned. He wouldn’t speak. They kept repeating this
until, during one immersion, the man’s arms and legs went limp. They took their hands from his shoulders, letting him lie
head first in the pot of water, and turned expectantly to the remaining live Montagnard.

“Will you answer my questions?” the lieutenant asked. “None of your clan will ever know. We will release you and you can say
you escaped.”

“I will tell you,” the man said in bad Vietnamese.

“Where were the arms going to? What clan?”

The Montagnard named a tribe three days south of them.

The lieutenant’s face twisted into a mask of rage. “Those are our friends. You taunt me.”

He struck the Montagnard a sidewise swipe with the heel of his hand above the man’s right cheekbone. The Montagnard’s right
eye popped out of its orbit and remained hanging there by its optic nerve and six muscle strips. The Montagnard stood at attention
as if nothing had happened.

“Who sent the arms?” the lieutenant barked.

The Montagnard named a tribe friendly to the Vietnamese two days to the north.

“This one is having fun with us,” Tranh Duc Pho said
through clenched teeth to his sergeant. “I want him to die slowly.”

The lieutenant strode away. He could not afford to lose more face before his men.

K
ATIE
Nelson had no time even to recover from jet lag on her return to New York. There were the producers’ questions to answer
for her one-hour special on Vietnam, the tape editors’ questions to answer, the voice-overs to record, the publicity and promo
takes, talk shows— by the time the show aired, she was prostrated from exhaustion. The special was a big winner with an even
higher audience share than anticipated, so that the network and sponsors were delighted. After it she went to Martha’s Vineyard
for a few days of peace and quiet, which as usual turned into a round of parties—she even put a couple of celebrity interviews
on tape while she was there. Then back to New York City and the everyday pandemonium and chaos of TV newscasting.