The Phantom Blooper (15 page)

Ha Ngoc shuffles through the book to a dog-eared page, then suddenly decides to tell Commander Be Dan a Viet Cong joke. I try to follow, but my Vietnamese is not up to the test. Something about how many Comrade Lizards have been killed by the latest American shellings, as the enemy cannons make war on the trees. It seems that Comrade Lizard is quite a hero of the revolution because it costs the Americans so many valuable bombs to kill him. So even with their supernatural supply of big shells the Americans will never win, because in Viet Nam even the lizards fight back with a strong spirit.

Ha Ngoc laughs at his own joke, but Commander Be Dan ignores Ha Ngoc. The Commander is examining his right leg, burning off leeches with his cigarette and then massaging the triangular bites.

Ha Ngoc, thinking perhaps that he has overlooked an important chapter, goes back to reading his book.

At noon, when the hot sun is vibrating in the sky like a brass gong, we saddle up. Ha Ngoc struggles into his radio harness. I give him a hand lifting the heavy radio and help him adjust the straps.

Down the hill the
Chien Si
are laughing uproariously at Battle Mouth's latest antics. Battle Mouth, with his pack on his back, is sitting on the ground, struggling to get up, but without success. Someone has tied Battle Mouth's pack straps to a root.

"Tien,"
says Commander Be Dan, and we move out.

Ha Ngoc teases me. "Now, Bao Chi, don't you be an Elephant." An Elephant is an Army grunt in the field, so named for the way in which American columns glide through the jungle undetected. I laugh.

After a few hours the horizon of palm fronds opens up and we emerge from the jungle onto a paved road. We file past an old French kilometer marker, a stubby white tooth of cement with fading red numbers.

A mile down the road we come to a pattern of bomb craters. Only a few of the bombs have hit the road, which is one of the great network of paved roads, cart trails, and jungle paths known to the Viet Cong as the Strategic Trail and to the Americans as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The craters in the road have already been repaired by the road menders, because this is hard-core VC country.

We pass a deserted banana plantation. The moaning wind that lives inside the big house sounds like the voices of the vines have climbed inch by inch up all the walls. The windows are black holes. The porch that goes all the way around the house has only a few planks remaining that have not been broken. In one of the empty windows sits a baby monkey. The baby monkey watches us with intense interest, his eyes too big for his head, his face almost human.

On the outskirts of a large village we see a work crew of hundreds of men, women, and children, a
Dan Cong
Worker Brigade.

We see a huge blue-gray Molotova Russian army truck being refueled with gasoline which has been stored in old wine bottles.

The
Dan Cong
are repairing the road. The men drag boulders down out of the hills with ropes, levers, and brute force. The women pound on the boulders with sledgehammers, splitting each stone into chunks. Children with hammers pound the chunks of stone into smaller pieces. This back-breaking process is known as how to make gravel in Viet Nam.

Building the Strategic Trail and keeping it open in spite of the greatest aerial bombardment in history is an incredible ball-busting monster victory against all odds that is exactly the kind of miracle American pioneers once performed in another time, another place, when there was a wild frontier and only the grunts had the nerve to go there, before the Wild West became tame enough to become infested by pogues, pencil-pushers, and schoolmarms, who came out on the railroad, and stayed, and spread, like the plague.

Commander Be Dan holds up his hand.

Halt. The Commander barks out an order and the
Chien Si
form into a column of twos. I fall in beside Ha Ngoc.

"Tien!"
says the Commander, and we march into the village in formation, standing tall, lean and mean, like Parris Island recruits marching down the grinder on graduation day.

"Compatriots!" says Commander Be Dan to the workers, proudly. "We are the liberation forces!"

The cheers of the workers along the road bring out Self-Defense Militia sentries, followed by the village elders.

The section halts at the Commander's order. We snap to attention, ignoring the heat, insects, and the hot asphalt under our rubber sandals.

Commander Be Dan is greeted by the village elders and a Viet Cong officer under the big bamboo star over the village gate. The elders are a fireteam of dignified and ancient men, bowing and smiling. The Viet Cong officer is about eightenn years old.

Commander Be Dan bows to each man, salutes the local
Chien Si
commander, then shakes hands all around.

There is some polite conversation, ending with the local commander's proud declaration to Commander Be Dan, "Comrade Major, we have forced the Americans to eat soup with a fork!" This must be the punch line to a joke, because everyone laughs.

Executing a perfect about-face, Commander Be Dan gives us the order to fall out.

The sun is low in the sky, so everyone relaxes. Twilight is safe time because the daylight air raids are over and it's still too early for the night raids. We are escorted through the village to a huge bonfire, where the women of hte village have prepared a feast. Village trail watchers must have reported that we were on the way well in advance of our arrival.

The familiar murmur of activity and the smells of food, farm animals, and cook fires remind us of our village and we feel a little homesick. But not for long, because we are made welcome.

As usual, I am the star. In show business at last! Everyone is curious about the
Chien Si My
, the American Front fighter. Some people speak to me in French. Others ask me if I am
Lien So
--"Russian." But most of the villagers are eager to try out an English words they know on me, either to show off or to test the accuracy of their pronunciations.

I am becoming more famous than Jesse James. Little kids follow me around in mobs. They are happy and healthy kids, not at all like the sad and dirty little savages in the occupied zones. Instead of yelling, "You give me one cigarette! You give me one cigarette!" they ask politely,
"May o day?"
--"Where do you live?"

The children all love me, but from the adults I get mixed reviews. One woman glares at me with hatred. As I walk by, the woman snatches off her sandals and throws them against a wall.

A mangy dog lopes by, yapping at a yellow butterfly.

All of the kids want to touch my nose. As soon as I sit down they crowd in to touch my nose. Each time a kid touches my nose he goes into a spasm of hysterical laughter, as though my nose is absolutely the funniest thing any of the kids have ever seen.

We are fed in style on fragrant roast pigs and yams, with optional side order of elephant steaks, monkey stew, and dog meat cold cuts, all cooked over a bonfire fueld by coconut shells.

Little girls, bashful with strangers, give us flowers, then giggle and hide their faces with their hands. The men and women who were working on the road when we arrived pat us on the back. These are the people Mao talks about in that Little Red Book that Ba Can Bo is always reading to us back in Hoa Binh, hte people who are like an ocean in which the Front guerrillas swim while the enemy drowns. The VC Nation.

Beneath an obelisk of concrete topped with red metal stars, four teenaged girls with matching blue guitars sing "A Hard Day's Night" in Vietnamese. They are not good musicians, but they are very energetic. They get confused and forget the lyrics. They hit sour notes on the guitars. When they make a mistake they blush and laugh it off and the audience laughs with them.

The village elders and the local
Chien Si
commander have got Commander Be Dan in a huddle, all of them squatting in a semicircle on the village common. With bullets they draw maps in the dirt. Each person of influence lobbies for an enemy position to be attacked.

I drink rice wine. I drink a lot of rice wine. I drink rice wine flat on my back on some gunnysacks full of unhusked rice, surrounded by twenty of the village children, who have adopted me and my nose.

As I fall asleep the mountains grumble and metal talks to the earth.

We sleep late the next day and leave the village at twilight. From now on we'll be marching only by night because we are leaving the Liberated Zone.

The village is deserted. The
Dan Cong
have been out on the road since dawn, making big rocks into little rocks.

The village elders wave goodbye.
"Trang,"
they say--"Victory." And they say,
"Gia Phong"
--"Liberation."

We march down a dirt road that has been camouflaged from air recon by planting saplings into holes every few yards, saplings that are dug up and replanted every time the road is used by trucks.

After we turn off the road and enter a treeline we cut green leafy twigs and tie them to our clothing, knapsacks, and weapons. Ha Ngoc the radioman and I laugh as we carefully decorate each other with fresh greenery until we both look like shrubbery with legs.

We come out of the treeline and walk along a riverback. We load onto a ferry barge to cross the river. The ferry barge is constructed of heavy timbers, hand-hewn and bolted together. The weathered wood is bleached white above the waterline. Two giant ropes hold the barge in place as a man poles it across.

The barge man has a muscular chest and muscular arms and legs. He's wearing faded Levi's cutoffs and has tied an olive-drab T-shirt around his forehead. He's blind.

All the way across the river the blind barge man stares at me with hatred. His unseeing eyes have pupils as white as opals. "I smell a foreigner," he says, and suddenly picks up a machete and hacks at the air around him.

Song speaks to the blind barge man sternly and he reluctantly hands over the machete.

"Gia Phong, Dong Chi,"
says the blind barge man as we file off his barge. "Liberation, comrades."

"Gia Phong,"
we all say.

As the blind barge man poles away from the riverbank he calls out to us, "Kill the American!"

We hump. We're back in the lowlands now. We maintain total noise discipline and communicate only with hand signals.

Master Sergeant Xuan finds boot tracks, large and deep, the tracks of Americans, not puppet armymen. We can see the imprints of their rifle butts where they sat to rest. Master Sergeant Xuan digs up trash from their tin-skinned food with a fixed bayonet. If their C-rations are only half-eaten it means that the enemy fighters plan to return to their base by the end of the day. Master Sergeant Xuan shows Commander Be Dan some of the empty C-ration cans. The cans are still moist inside and have been scraped clean.

The Commander puts a finger on his nose to signal "long-noses" and turns so that the section can see his signal, then looks at Master Sergeant Xuan. The Master Sergeant nods.

As the signal is repeated down the trail, Battle Mouth says in a big whisper: "I will tear off their warmongering capitalistic arms and legs. I will defecate into their water holes. I will eat their faces with my teeth. I will-"

Commander Be Dan grabs Battle Mouth by the throat. "Battle Mouth, do not speak or I will shoot you myself."

Battle Mouth pouts, but quietly.

We hump another hundred yards. In the distance, artillery
crumps
. Nearby and closing, the
whack-whack
of choppers.

Commander Be Dan first signals for the section to pick up the pace, but by the time we're all running flat out he suddenly raises his hand--
stop
--and then lowers it to the ground. We crash down onto our bellies and crawl to cover.

Ha Ngoc the radioman sniffs the air, looks back at me, points to his nose, then pinches his nose and frowns, saying silently, "I smell Americans."

While Commander Be Dan reads the terrain and signals fighters into defensive positions, Ha Ngoc punches my arm, then points to starboard. I can't see anything, but Ha Ngoc points again.

We listen for the whir of insects that tells us that we're safe, but the insects are ominously silent. A jungle full of noisy birds is silent.

Ha Ngoc makes a fist and walks his fist along the ground to say, "The Elephants are coming." The fighters call Army troopers "Elephants" because they make so much noise and carry so much equipment.

Raising myself up on painfully bruised elbows, I hear a faint rhythmic chomping sound. The sounds get louder and louder and more distinct until it is clearly the whack of a machete.

Ha Ngoc and I burrow deeper into the dirt.

Heavy boots crunch into dry scraps of rotten bamboo. Voices drift in on the wind, heavy voices, deep voices that talk slowly.

A helmet covered with camouflage canvas emerges an inch at a time from a wall of jungle that is a hundred shades of green. Half of a sweaty face appears, eyes looking up for snipers and down for booby traps and antipersonnel mines. Then a bulky sun-faded flak jacket. Then the black barrel of an M-16.

The point man is a Marine snuffy, breaking trail with a machete.

I'm not sure I can hack this shit. These are not Elephants, they're Black Rifles--Marines. What am I supposed to do, shoot them or buy them a beer? And if I try to cross over from our lines to their lines, will my ass be blown off by the Viet Cong, or by the Marines, or both? My plan has always been simple escape and evade, not suicide. Now may be the time to make my move, but I sure as shit better do it by the numbers and not screw it up.

The point man is a skuzzy field Marine with a spare set of black socks full of C-ration cans slung around his neck. He carries his M-16 pointing down the trail and his finger is on the trigger. The drag, the deuce point, is breaking bush. I can see glistening drops of sweat flying from the drag's arm as he chops through green bamboo stalks with a machete. Next comes the squad leader, followed by his radioman.