To Kill the Pope (10 page)

“I'm not making excuses,” Tim answered quickly, controlling his rising anger. They were standing in the hallway of Kurtski's Can Tho villa, facing each other like gladiators.

“I am trying to explain why I acted the way I did. I just don't believe that executing peasants wholesale, including women and children, just for the hell of it, makes much sense. As you know, one of the villagers was killed when he wouldn't talk. I had to assume that the same would have happened with other adults there. True Thien obviously is firmly in Viet Cong hands. And I fail to see how mass executions are going to help us win the hearts and the minds of Vietnamese peasants. Isn't this what John Kennedy had urged us to do?”

Kurtski stuck the stump of his cigar in his mouth.

“Fock hearts and minds,” he declared. “And fock Kennedy! . . . Anyway, Nixon is your boss now. . . .”

O
VER THE NEXT
two years, Tim Savage led scores of Phoenix sweeps across rice paddies and stretches of jungle. He lost count of the raids as if trying to forget each of them, the only way to preserve his mental equilibrium. Sometimes Romeo succeeded in capturing Viet Cong guerrillas, including, on a few occasions, regional chiefs, and extracting valuable intelligence after hours upon hours of persuasion, interrogation, and torture. Tim rebelled in his mind and heart against torture methods, but soon acquired enough controlled detachment to accept it as an operational necessity. It was astonishing how easily it came to the best of men in combat environment. Like others, Tim rationalized this acceptance, still believing to a degree in the cause for which Americans were told they were fighting in Vietnam.

But Tim never participated personally in applying torture in interrogations, leaving it to his Romeo subordinates. By the same token, Tim himself never shot dead a captured Viet Cong, though begrudgingly he accepted Kurtski's insistence that some prisoners had to be killed for their refusal to cooperate and the others
after
cooperating as an indispensable part of the eradication of the guerrilla infrastructure. One rationalization inevitably led to the next one.

When Romeo found villages empty, as if inhabitants had been forewarned in some fashion and fled in time, Tim had them torched. At the very least, it destroyed rice caches and arms and ammunition, usually concealed in cave shelters under sleeping platforms, and deprived the Viet Cong of local sanctuaries. When guerrilla sympathizers were identified, the villages naturally were burned down. To use Kurtski's word, it taught the enemy a “lesson.” Tim felt sorry for the peasants—he assumed that old people, most of the women, and, presumably, the children had very little
to do with the guerrillas—but it was war, after all, and the enemy had to pay a price. And, of course, the Viet Cong had their share of killing Americans, to say nothing of the South Vietnamese.

Unquestionably, Phoenix operations in the Delta were hurting the Viet Cong in important ways. Captured COSVN documents confirmed it to the joy of the planners in Saigon. But, overall, the war was going very badly for the South Vietnamese and the Americans. A major American incursion into the Parrot's Beak border area in Cambodia, just west of the Delta, had failed to halt the flow of supplies from North Vietnam to its regular Army units and Viet Cong guerrillas in the south. It had occurred a year or so after Tim had been assigned to Phoenix, and he remembered his shock and dismay upon hearing on the radio in his room in Can Tho about the student demonstrations back home against the Cambodian incursion—and about the four students shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio.

And there was more and more death before his very eyes, and not only in the villages raided by Romeo. Tim had witnessed on innumerable occasions carpet bombings by the high-flying B-52s of suspected communist concentrations in the Delta and the spraying of the countryside by Marine Aircraft Wing jets with napalm and white phosphorus. Uncounted villages were erased from existence, thousands of peasants were incinerated, and Viet Cong guerrillas, when spotted, were turkey-shot strafed from Cobra helicopter gunships. Tim became sickeningly familiar with the stench of burned human flesh. But nothing seemed to work.

*  *  *

In Can Tho, the spring of 1971 was so stifling, with temperatures soaring well over one hundred degrees and Delta humidity just below one hundred percent, that even Sonia Ryan was too drained to engage in mechanistic sex with Tim Savage—and presumably others. Between missions, Tim spent most of his time in the swimming pool and the air-conditioned officers' club, drinking cold beer and wondering how much longer it would all last.

Then word had reached Can Tho that the Viet Cong had raided Khanh Hung, down Colonial Route 4, in a daring daytime attack, killing civilian district officials and massacring the small Regional Forces garrison, capturing arms and munitions. They came well
armed with AK-47 assault rifles and B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, gifts from the Soviets and the Chinese. American and South Vietnamese commanders in the Delta were uncertain whether the raid signaled a new communist offensive in the region, but they realized that it made no sense to engage, in response, regular units in search-and-destroy operations on a large scale. The guerrillas were too elusive and too well coordinated and the terrain was too forbidding to justify the use of armor, artillery, and even heavily armed infantry. Commando-type thrusts by Special Forces' Green Berets, Rangers, and Phoenix teams seemed to be the only way to cope with the latest Viet Cong initiative. Once more, the hope was to disrupt the guerrillas' infrastructure, an objective senior officers repeated over and over in briefings like a mantra.

Four Phoenix teams were based in Can Tho, and Kurtski, in consultation with Stephens in Saigon, decided to launch all of them simulatenously; normally, the teams rotated for rest periods. Team Romeo was ordered to operate as long as their supplies lasted in a grid area south of Khanh Hung where a half dozen villages were located. They were considered as sanctuaries to be liquidated. Briefing them before they boarded the helicopters, Kurtski told the team leaders that the operation simply had to succeed. He was beside himself with excitement.

“Go, go, motherfockers,” Kurtski roared. “If necessary, I'll be there, too, to help out. Just radio me if you need me!”

At dawn of Good Friday—Tim had suddenly remembered that it was Easter week—Team Romeo reached a nameless hamlet in the heart of the southern Delta after a cautious nocturnal approach. They had been dropped by the choppers in a jungle clearing the previous afternoon. Moving into the hamlet at first light, the team came upon not only peasant families, the children hiding behind their mothers at the sight of the foreign attackers, but also an uncommonly large group of men, some of them with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. Surprised by the Phoenix foray, the men fell back behind the houses, firing aimlessly toward the perimeter as they regrouped.

The team returned the fire, and, then, on Tim's orders, withdrew into the thick jungle undergrowth. Within minutes, he realized that he had stumbled, for the first time, into a Viet Cong command post,
but also that Romeo were outnumbered and urgently needed reinforcements if they were to survive. Grabbing the radio transmitter from a Ranger, Tim called Can Tho for assistance, giving his coordinates and praying for a rapid appearance of the Hueys.

The Viet Cong and Romeo engaged in an exchange of fire though the guerrillas chose to remain inside the hamlet compound, clearly uncertain how large was the force facing them. This saved the team. Barely an hour had elapsed before three Hueys and a Cobra materialized overhead. Adjusting radio frequencies, Tim guided them to the hamlet proper. Instantly, the gunships raked it violently with rocket and machine gun bursts, leaving a dozen or so dead bodies on the ground. Then the choppers sat on grassy lots around the hamlet, letting out Rangers who rushed to surround the houses. Tim and his men raced to join them. As they came closer, Tim recognized Jake Kurtski in khaki pants, Hawaiian shirt, and a helmet liner on his head a step behind the Rangers, an M-16 rifle cradled in his arms, screaming commands.

“I told you I'd be here if you got into a focking fight,” Kurtski shouted to Tim with enormous glee. “God, I love it! . . . I love it! . . . Now we'll show the bastards what's what! . . .”

He fired a burst from his automatic weapon into the nearest house, waving the Rangers to follow him inside. Tim was running alongside. Then Kurtski yelled, “Let's grab them!”

Three youngish men in black garments and an elderly woman, also in black, were crouching against the far wall of the front room as Kurtski rushed inside the flimsy house. He stopped for an instant, emitted a guttural sound, and sprayed the foursome with a torrent of bullets. Blood gushed up in fountains onto the walls and the low ceiling. The bodies writhed for a moment, then froze into the immobility of death.

“Let's see if they have any documents on them,” Kurtski said, leaning down over the first corpse in his way, tearing off the man's blouse and searching through the pockets. “If this is a command post, I'll bet we'll find COSVN documents on them. Come on, help me look . . .”

They found nothing on the three men. Kurtski cursed, “Sons of bitches, they must've gotten rid of the stuff . . . Let's check the old woman.”

Her face was horribly smashed by the bullets, though her eyes were untouched, now seemingly staring at the blood-stained ceiling, the sky, the heavens of this Good Friday. Kurtski ripped open the top of her black blouse. Tim Savage looked down and saw a tiny gold crucifix on a thin chain around her neck, shining like a beacon in the darkened room. Curiously, there was no blood on the crucifix.

*  *  *

Tim was awestruck. He could not breathe or talk for a long minute. He did not hear Kurtski say, “Let's round up the others for interrogation.” He just followed him mechanically to the next house, where the Rangers had assembled a half-dozen Vietnamese men. The interrogation session followed the usual routine: questions, threats, torture, execution. Kurtski had pulled the trigger on his .45-caliber Colt pistol to perform the final honors. Tim was now completely numb—he had no idea whether the murdered villagers had come up with useful information or just silence. All he had before his eyes was the smashed face of the old woman and the gold crucifix. The vision had been imprinted on his conscious memory like an image on a photographic plate.

Romeo were lifted back to Can Tho aboard the helicopters. During the short flight, Tim stared down unseeingly at the Delta landscape below—the jungle, the paddies, the dikes, the peasant huts on the edge of the watery fields, the occasional bent figure in black, the huge animals. The greenery dissolved in a blur, then into the old woman's face and the cross. He wished he had known her name. Tim began to shake uncontrollably, as though in the throes of malaria. His hands tightened on the web of the safety harness across his chest. The chopper hit a patch of violent clear-air turbulence, dropping down and rising, dropping again and struggling to regain altitude. Tim felt terrible fear. Were they going to crash? Was this divine punishment? Was he to pay for his unspeakable deeds? Was this retribution for the old woman? Was God exacting vindication for the desecration of the crucifix? And, he remembered, this
was
Good Friday.

The helicopter had steadied on its course, beginning its sharp descent toward Can Tho. Tim looked down once more at the green lushness of the Delta. What am I doing here? he asked himself.
What am I turning into? “Oh, God, how have I sinned!” he cried aloud though his words were lost to others in the grind of the rotors. It was the first time, Tim realized, that he had uttered them since confession in his early teens. He had not been to confession since those days.

In the evening, he walked from his quarters over to the officers' club. He had taken a shower and put on freshly laundered and pressed khaki slacks and his Egyptian sports shirt. Spotting Kurtski at the bar, a drink in hand, he sat on a stool next to him. It was unusual for the man to be away from his villa at night.

“Kurtski,” Tim said, “I want a transfer out of here. To Saigon or whatever.”

“What's the matter?” Kurtski asked unpleasantly. “You afraid of focking up again or you're chickening out?”

“Exactly,” Tim told him. “I am chickening out and I don't want to fuck up anymore. How soon can you get me out of here?”

On May thirteenth, Ascension Day, Tim Savage boarded a Blackhawk for Saigon. He was to report to Roger Stephens at “Pentagon East.” He did not bother to take leave of Kurtski or Sonia Ryan.

*  *  *

“I wish to resign from the Agency,” Tim informed Stephens, “as soon as it can be processed.”

He sat in Stephens' powerfully air-conditioned office, trying in vain to force him into eye contact.

“But why? Why?” Stephens asked, sounding genuinely taken aback. “You've done a great job. You have a great future with us. Langley thinks the world of you . . .”

“Well, I'm not so sure about doing a great job,” Tim said. “Certainly not by Jake Kurtski's standards.”

“Kurtski is a madman,” Stephens replied dismissively. “Pay no attention to him. He's a crazy Polack, but I keep him in Can Tho because he's fantastic at counterinsurgency. That's all. He's not a judge of people, especially not of
real
American Agency officers. But he isn't the reason you want to resign, is he?”

“No, of course, not,” Tim told him. “It's much more complicated and much more personal. It is fundamental for me. I just can't stomach it any longer. I just can't go on condoning killings
and taking part in them. I guess I should've realized it a long time ago, but I believed in what we were doing in this war. Then something happened a couple of weeks ago to make me understand how wrong it all is. It was the murder of an old woman in a village. It was not necessary to kill her. And, you know, she was wearing a crucifix on a chain around her neck . . . That hardly made her a communist guerrilla . . .”