The Village (19 page)

Swinford jumped up. He was close to tears.

“You can go to hell, McGowan,” he shouted. “You can all go to hell. Screw your vote. I don't give a crap what any of you do. I've been waiting for them to come back ever since Sullivan. I'm not going to run from those little bastards. I'm going to stay here and blast them. They're not getting
this
fort. They're not getting
this
ville. I'm not leaving here no matter what. And you're not getting me out of here. I'll lock myself in the storeroom and I'll blast any mother who tries to come through the door. So help me God I will.”

For several seconds no one spoke. Then Garcia said: “I'm with Paul. It was all for nothing if we leave now, I mean, what are we going to say to the PFs?”

“Yeh,” Gallagher said. “There's no way I can see bugging out.”

“We can hold,” Colucci said.

“All right,” McGowan replied. “Then it's settled. We stay.”

“We'll visit you in the brig, Sarge,” Gallagher said.

The Marines filed back out into the courtyard and approached the silent PFs.

“What are you staring at, Luong?” Wingrove asked. “Let's di-di on out of here. We're wasting time.”

The PFs laughed and the patrols joined up and left the fort.

McGowan called back to company.

“Charlie Six, this is Lima Six. Cannot—repeat, not—leave this position. We have two—repeat, two—patrols already out and the RDs are in the hamlet. No radio contact with these units. If we leave, we'd get ambushed by our own men. Over.”

Company relayed the message to battalion, where no one was willing to accept responsibility for ordering a move under such circumstances. Instead, as a career hedge in case of a later disaster, Charlie Company was told to inform McGowan that battalion had wanted him to move while there was still time.

About ten in the evening the enemy scouts started slipping into Binh Yen Noi, a few men moving cautiously, dodging from shadow to shadow, hugging the sides of the houses, avoiding the paths and coming slowly, very slowly. Alerted by the stillness of the hamlet and the absence of lights and of people, as well as by contact with some of their secret cadres who told them the defenders were prepared, the scouts darted back and forth trying to reassure one another to go deeper into the hamlet and draw closer to the fort. At length, one man braver than the rest sneaked as far forward as the stalls at the marketplace while the others hung back and waited to see what would happen.

The scout knew his business. When he drew near to the bushes on the far side of the marketplace, he went down to one knee and bobbed his head back and forth, trying to catch any strange silhouette against the skyline. He was looking straight at a group of patrollers, and his suspicion was evidently so strong that at any second he might raise his rifle and fire.

Deciding one of the patrollers might be killed if that did happen, Luong shot the man in the chest. As he crumpled to earth, the other scouts scurried away and Luong knew it was over. They would signal the main body not to cross that night. The fort's defenses were too strong and poised. But throughout the rest of the night the Marines, PFs and RDs waited in their positions, while a reaction platoon at Charlie Company played cards, strummed guitars, loaded magazines and waited for the firing, and while the artillerymen and pilots at Chulai dozed fitfully, waiting for the call to help.

It was not for nothing. In a sense, it was the most important battle the Americans at Fort Page ever prepared to fight. They had chosen to stay; the PFs knew it, and soon so would the entire village.

The next morning the villagers streamed back into the hamlets. Upon hearing about the repulse of the enemy battalion, they treated the PFs and RDs as heroes. For the next few days the PFs could not buy a drink, as they were invited from house to house to sip rice wine and boast of their defense of the village. In the retelling, the cautious retreat of the enemy was exaggerated until it became a full-fledged rout under fire. With the PFs absent from duty, the Americans were forced to do more patrolling, since they stayed away from the parties, both because some were not invited and those that were dared not risk expulsion from the CAP by getting drunk at night. Although the Americans were free to roam during the day, it was hard to interest a PF who had been drunk the night before in starting all over again at ten in the morning, with children scurrying about and women yelling at him to do some constructive work for a change.

The PFs were enjoying themselves hugely. The previous June their prestige had been so low even a child would not fetch water for them, and now they were local celebrities. But the Americans, most of whom could not speak the language and few of whom sensed the historical significance of the successful defense, seemed forgotten in the festivities, or just taken for granted. They continued their usual routine: linger at the fort, wander around the hamlets, and patrol, patrol, patrol.

Few of the Americans had been able to convince any girls in the village to sleep with them. The hamlet elders at first had strongly disapproved, and any girl who bedded down with an American risked a public beating. After several months, when the Americans in the combined unit were accepted, that deterrent was lifted. But still the villagers had a strict moral code, and the physical environs did not lend themselves to private lovers' trysts. A Marine had to convince not only the girl but her parents, and, in some cases, her brothers. That done, he had to find seclusion without leaving the hamlet boundaries and then coax the girl to bed during the daylight hours. To hurdle all these impediments required language skill, facial charm, diplomacy, long patience and much luck. In most cases, a Marine's courting skill simply did not match his desire. Most remained celibate while in the village, some taking solace in their virtue, others making occasional trips to whorehouses in the shack towns along Highway One. The three Americans who were sleeping with girls in Binh Nghia had to contend with Trao's scowls, and the knowledge that he was just waiting to be able to report to McGowan a parental complaint.

So the Marines were momentarily stunned when, a few days after the abortive attack, Trao drove up to the fort in the ARVN truck, lifted the back canvas and revealed two giggling, attractive young prostitutes, a pre-paid twelve-hour gift from the village council. Although most of the Marines were delighted, McGowan was appalled.

“Trao, what are you trying to do?” he asked. “Get me fired? If they're found here, I'm finished.”

Trao laughed and told the sergeant not to worry; the truck would be back to pick up the girls before dark. He said he had planned carefully to avoid interference. This explanation satisfied McGowan, but he had not questioned closely enough. Trao meant that he had Captain Dang's permission; McGowan assumed his Marine battalion commander had been called out of the district.

About an hour after the prostitutes had arrived, so did the battalion commander.

“Sarge,” the guard at the gate hollered, “the colonel's jeep is coming.”

“You've got to be shitting me.”

“Take a look.”

McGowan did.

“I've had it. We've had it. It's all over,” he said. “Those girls—we've got to hide them.”

He ran to the squad tent and burst in without knocking. Lying on one of the cots were a Marine and one of the prostitutes. Both were sweating and naked.

“McGowan,” the startled Marine yelped, “who the hell do you think you are? Get out of here!”

“The CO's coming. We have to hide her. Now. Get her over to the supply room.”

“Like this? What, are you putting me on? Is this a joke? Is everybody lined up outside?”

“——, I'm dead serious. Honest to God. It's my stripes if he walks in here. You gotta move. You gotta move right now.”

Out the back of the tent and into the side door of the adobe building they scampered—a naked Marine and a naked girl. In the small side room used as a messhall a cot had been set up to accommodate the other prostitute, who had her blouse on but nothing else when McGowan and the first couple burst in. She looked up from her work with an expression of mild surprise, while her Marine partner was too flabbergasted to say anything.

“The battalion commander's right behind me,” McGowan said, “so grab her trousers and your clothes and get in the storeroom, and keep these girls quiet or we'll all end up in the DMZ.”

The jeep jounced up and the lieutenant colonel hopped out, returning McGowan's salute.

“I'm on my way to regiment, Sergeant,” the colonel said. “I dropped by for a minute to see how you are making out.”

“Yes, sir. Would you like to inspect the men's rifles?”

“Rifle inspection? Where do you think we are—on some parade ground? No, I just want to take a look around. Rifle inspection! Sometimes I wonder about you, McGowan. That's as crazy as your stunt the other night. If that VC battalion had attacked, you'd have been wiped out. You know that, don't you?”

“No, sir, I don't think so.”

“Well, I'm not here to argue with you.”

The colonel walked briskly to the squad tent and strode through with barely a glance at the inside. Then he entered the adobe building by the same side door McGowan and his naked companions had used only minutes before. He almost tripped over the cot in the messhall.

“What's that doing here?”

“These are my quarters at night, sir. I sleep apart from the men.”

“That sounds sensible. But you should put your cot away when you're finished with it.”

“Yes, sir.”

To the colonel's left was the storeroom, a piece of canvas draped over its doorless entranceway. Directly in front of him was the doorway connecting the small messhall with the large village office. The door was open and a mob of PFs and village officials were peering in, those in the back rows jumping up and down to peek over the heads of those in front. They were all laughing and exchanging loud remarks and several were trying to catch McGowan's eye while pointing furtively toward the storeroom.

“What is all this, Sergeant?” the colonel shouted. “I can hardly hear myself think.”

“It's nothing, sir. I'll take care of it,” McGowan replied, glaring at the PFs. “Di oi, di oi. Dung noi. Quay lai, quay—”

“Never mind, McGowan. You don't have to impress me. I know you can speak some Vietnamese. I don't have the time for them anyway.”

The colonel turned and walked back out the side door, McGowan lingering for a second to give the PFs the finger before running to catch up with him. The colonel climbed into his jeep, took McGowan's salute and drove off without saying another word.

The fort exploded. The Marines came running forward to clap McGowan on the back and the PFs tumbled out of the village office and joined the throng, one PF strutting around in imitation of the colonel while another, playing the role of the sergeant, flapped his arm up and down as though saluting constantly. The Marines who had hidden in the storeroom came forward to claim they had made love to the girls standing up while the colonel was in the messhall.

The story was all over the village by evening and the advisers at Binh Son heard it from the district chief the next day. Eventually it made its way to Combined Action headquarters in Da Nang and at least one general learned what had happened. But none of McGowan's superiors ever mentioned the incident to him, except by innuendo. On the other hand, McGowan asked Trao not to do him any more such favors.

Not that he had to worry about the battalion commander, for shortly afterward all Marine units left Chulai and moved farther north to fight the North Vietnamese. Their place was filled by an amalgam of separate Army brigades, called the Americal Division. The Marines at Fort Page, and those at the few other Combined Action Platoons scattered in the Chulai area, were staying. The Army had agreed to look after them and General Walt felt he would be reneging on a promise to the Vietnamese if he pulled them out. None of the combined-unit Marines volunteered to leave.

As the Marines pulled out, the Army moved in to the same prepared positions, thereby eliminating much construction work. On April 7, 1967, when Charlie Company moved by truck from their perimeter out on the sand dunes, an Army platoon took their place. The Americans at Fort Page assumed the platoon was there to stay and paid no attention to the transfer until the next day, when a group of villagers shuffled into the fort to excitedly claim that the company position was empty and that people were stealing ammunition.

While not quite believing the story, McGowan and Gallagher borrowed bicycles and pedaled the two miles to the position. They found the barbed-wire gates wide open, and not an American in sight. The ammunition bunkers had been partially rifled and gear lay strewn about. As they stood gazing at the scene in dumb surprise, they glimpsed a woman, already outside the wire, running down the back of the hill. She was clutching two white phosphorus rocket rounds.

“Dung lai! Dung lai!” McGowan hollered. “Lai-day. Lai-day.”

The woman had almost reached the edge of a treeline. At McGowan's commands to stop, she ran faster. McGowan dropped to one knee, quickly sighted and squeezed the trigger. Hit in the arm, the woman fell. The Marines walked down to her. McGowan poked with his toe at one of the rockets.

“If we tripped one of those things up at My Hué some night, it would really fry us,” McGowan said. “Get her evacked and watch the hill. I'm going into Chulai.”

The sergeant walked down the road to Highway One and stopped the first jeep he saw. Thirty minutes later he was at division headquarters, where a joint Army-Marine task force was overseeing the division shift. In bitter tones he reported the mixup to a concerned colonel, who ordered a replacement company flown in by helicopter. Believing it closed the incident, McGowan accepted a jeep ride back to the fort. On the way he asked the driver to swing by the company position to see if Gallagher had been relieved of guard duty.

As they drove through the small hamlet of Dong Binh, near the company perimeter, he noticed that no children were running about and that some people were peering at him from the entrances of the family bunkers. On the hamlet's outskirts he could see a group of Marines clustered, so he was more puzzled than worried. As the jeep drew nearer, he saw another group, a bit farther away, identifiable in their black outfits as RDs. The Americans and the Vietnamese stood with rifles pointed at each other. No one was talking.

“What the hell is this?” McGowan shouted as he jumped from the jeep. “Put those guns down.”

“Talk to those assholes first, Sarge, they started it,” Swinford replied.

“If that dude with the BAR keeps eyeballing me like that, I'm going to blow him away,” another Marine said.

The RDs were equally close to killing, and in their anger and nervousness spoke too rapidly for McGowan to understand.

“How'd it start?” McGowan asked.

“All we did was take the grenades off them. They were strutting around Dong Binh with ammo from the hill,” Swinford said. “They didn't want to cooperate, so I slapped their honcho around a little bit. You told us to get that stuff back.”

“Yeh, but we're not playing Wyatt Earp. Where are the PFs?”

“They di-di'd out of here when those jerks drew down on us. They don't want anything to do with this.”

The situation was beyond McGowan's authority and language ability. The RDs were ignoring him, and he feared a firefight even if he got the Marines to back off. He walked to the jeep radio and dialed the district frequency. In a loud voice he asked Captain Dang to come to Dong Binh immediately.

Dang, and his adviser, Lieutenant Colonel John Jarvis, arrived within fifteen minutes. The Marines said they were trying to recover stolen goods. The RDs said they did not consider it stealing to take grenades from an abandoned position. And in any event, the Marines had no right to push them around.

Dang berated the Marines for physically mauling the RDs. He berated the RDs for selfishly gathering loose grenades while ignoring the looting by villagers. The RDs responded that the villagers would hand in the explosive items in return for the rewards American units offered for ordnance found and reported. Dang did not accept the response as legitimate. Even if most villagers did take the explosives for profit rather than politics, the few who would pass on ammunition to the guerrillas could cause many deaths, including those of RDs. He ordered the RDs to help the Marines in searching the hamlet.

Before leaving, Jarvis drew McGowan aside.

“Don't let Dang's ass-chewing get to you,” he said. “Actually, he's sort of pleased with the RDs for standing up to you. So am I. I didn't think they had it in them.”

“Well, sir,” McGowan replied, “if you run across a good interpreter, I could sure use him. I don't want to end up with any of my men gut-shot just so some RD will feel more like a man.”