The Eaves of Heaven (11 page)

THE SOUTH
DECEMBER
26, 1963

17. T
HE
A
MBUSH

I
t was 1963, the day after Christmas. The lowering sun glowed, a blighted smear on the marshy sky, a hand’s length above the horizon. The rice fields lay empty, abandoned as still as night, not a bird in sight. A chill was in the air.

My mind was already focusing on the dinner my wife had waiting for me. Afterward, she wanted to take the baby to the park in the new stroller I gave her yesterday. Anh loved having strawberry ice cream by the town square.

The day’s work was done. We felt accomplished as we drove out the gates of An Binh, the last hamlet on our payroll delivery route. There were four of us in a Ford Bronco: the driver, two armed escorts, and me. The car smelled faintly of the sweet rice wine and peppery boar jerky that Tinh and Truc, the escorts, had bought from the villagers. I had just finished disbursing over forty thousand Vietnamese dong to the last three units under my command.

After the military training at Thu Duc Academy, I was a lieutenant in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. My first commission was as the new commander of the Rural Development Task Force (RD), a paramilitary organization aimed at winning over the people in the countryside. I was chosen based on my college education, because RD commanders must also work with advisors from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Fortunately for me, the RD office was in Phan Thiet, and I was able to move Anh and the baby there, where she could be closer to her mother. And I was able to see my wife and child almost every day.

It was as safe a post as I could have dared dream for. The most dangerous part of my job was the payroll trips in the countryside. While I usually stayed overnight on my visits with the troops to boost morale, I never lingered longer than necessary on these trips for fear that a rogue group from the Regional Force or the Civil Defense Force might stage a fake Viet Cong attack to hijack the payroll.

Along the side of the road, the troops walked in single file. With money to celebrate the New Year, all were in a payday mood, cheering, waving as we drove past. Except for the old World War II carbine rifles on their shoulders, they looked like villagers in their black cotton peasant smocks—thirty-five cadres, including six women. They faced a long march, at the end of which were drinks and games at the camp with the regular regional army. Many salaries would be drunk and gambled away by dawn tomorrow.

About a third of a mile from the hamlet, we approached a creek running at an angle to the road. Its shrubby banks skirted within forty yards at the closest point. The moment my eyes strayed into the trees by the creek, I felt a distinct sense of unease as if the sky itself was askew. My escorts had gone quiet in the backseat. I glanced at the driver. Chan had a puzzled look on his face.

The first shot came with a dull metal puncturing sound. I turned and glanced at Tinh, who sat behind me. His mouth was agape in disbelief, blood blossoming on his shirt. A deafening barrage of machine-gun fire rang out. The Bronco shuddered under the onslaught of bullets. Windows exploded, spraying glass shards.

“Ambush!” Truc yelled.

Chan stomped on the accelerator, swerving away from the woods. The windshield shattered. A tire blew. The vehicle fishtailed across the road. Then we were weightless as the Bronco plunged off the dirt road. First I saw the sky, like a fractured mirror; then the rushing ground. The car slammed into a ditch, hurling me into the dashboard. Everything went black.

When I opened my eyes, my hands were bloody, as was my face. I was sprawled across the front seats, half jammed into the foot well. The embankment canted the truck at an odd angle, exposing part of its undercarriage to shots fired from the trees across the road. Bullets punched through the passenger-side doors and floorboard. Truc and the driver were already out of the car. I scrambled across the seat after him, sliding out headfirst.

Chan was saying something. I couldn’t hear him over the blizzard of slugs shredding the car at hundreds of rounds per minute. He shouted into my ear, asking if I had been hit. He wiped away the blood pouring from a gash in my forehead.

“Oh, God. Aahhh…I’m hit. Help!” Tinh cried from inside the car.

Truc sprang to his feet and reached for his friend. A wet, popping fleshy sound. Truc jerked up as if straightening to stand at attention. His blood splattered all over me. The bullet went straight through his head. He toppled backward and splashed into the rice paddy, boots sticking out of the water not two feet from me. Murky red water closed over his pulpy, mangled face.

A jolt went through me; my mind was seized. Every part of me rejected what I saw. I couldn’t breathe. I had seen countless corpses, but I had never seen a man shot dead in front of me.

I hadn’t noticed the gunshots tapering off. Chan and I remained on our backs, half submerged in the paddy. I felt ill, nauseous. Above, a mottled, gray heaven. Time seemed bizarrely out of phase, the air fragrant with rice wine and musty earth.

Reports of gunshots came from another direction. Down the road our men were coming to the rescue. Sergeant Viet led a charge with half of his men. The others retreated back into the hamlet.

“Help me! Aahhh…I can’t move,” Tinh moaned.

With Viet’s men drawing the machine gun away from the Bronco, Chan pulled Tinh’s arm from the outside while I climbed into the cab and untangled Tinh’s feet, which were caught under the seat. Light shone through ragged holes in the doors. The first bullet, the one that got him, was meant for me—the highest-ranking officer who invariably sat next to the driver. Had we been going a fraction of a second slower, the sniper would have found his mark.

Tinh mumbled. No, he was sobbing. There was blood in his teeth. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I don’t want to die.”

Chan and I could only look at each other. The bullet was still lodged in his upper right chest. Neither of us had tended a gunshot wound before.

Remembering my rank, I forced myself to wiggle three feet up the shallow embankment to assess our situation. I thought I could pick off a few if I sighted them in the shrubs. I loaded Truc’s carbine and peeked over the road. The light was against us. A hail of bullets raked the ground in front of my face, clumps of soil popping like firecrackers.

“I can’t see them.”

“If they charge, we’re dead,” he said, clearly as frightened as I was.

We fired a few rounds toward the creek to let them know we were armed. The quick return volleys nearly got us. We wiggled back down the embankment with our faces firmly pressed to the ground. I could feel bullets hammering into the earth.

Down the road, Viet’s men entered the sniper’s range. Immediately, the three leading cadres crumpled to the ground as if they had run into an invisible fence. The rest dove over the side of the road. Our rescue squad could not come closer.

“Lieutenant!” Viet shouted to me, his word barely audible between the bursts of machine guns.

“I’m fine. We’ve got one injured and one dead.”

“They’ve got us pinned, Lieutenant. Can you make it to our position?”

There was nothing else to do. I shouted, “We’re going to try.”

We gathered the two escorts’ rifles and ammo belts. I put my Colt .45 into my rucksack along with the payroll ledger, to keep it from getting in the mud. We began crawling across the paddy, our faces in the rice stalks, chests skimming the water, arms and legs deep in water and gooey mud. We dragged Tinh between us by his armpits. Every time we pulled, Tinh groaned in pain. Chan paused and looked to me. I shook my head. More than a hundred yards and three footpath dikes separated us and our men.

Choking with pain, Tinh yelled for us to stop, but we kept dragging him. He jerked away, gasping, “Leave me. I can’t make it. Leave me.”

“You’ll make it,” I said.

“Leave me!”

Chan snapped, “Shut up! We’re not leaving you here!”

Tinh started cursing, then begging. We ignored him. A few more yards, he shrieked and went abruptly limp.

“He passed out.” Chan sighed.

Although there was half a foot of paddy-water, most of Tinh’s body was caught in the deep muddy bottom. We struggled to keep his face above the water and our heads below the level of the road. Bullets whizzed scant inches over our heads. Limbs laden with mud, we crawled a few paces, paused shaking with fatigue, and then started forward again. When we came to the end of the field, we heaved Tinh onto the dike, rolled him over to the next paddy, and scrambled after him as a hail of bullets strafed the ground and water all around us. Foot by agonizing foot, we wormed through the sludge.

It took us an agonizing hour to rejoin our troops. Viet and I organized an orderly retreat with sharpshooters covering the rear while the main group crawled back to the hamlet. The Viet Cong moved their guns and hounded us the whole way. Every time we tried to stand up, they raked us with bullets. It was sunset by the time the whole group retreated into the hamlet. I collapsed on the ground with the rest of the men, too tired to move or think of what to do next.

“Khanh, Cung, Thien, Binh, each of you go to one corner of the hamlet. If you see anything, shoot to alert us!” Viet stomped about, shaking up the men. “It’s going to get dark soon. We must set up our defenses before they attack.”

He turned to his radioman. “Radio! Call headquarters!”

The team had a PRC-7 handheld radio roughly the size of a small loaf of bread with a single preset channel linked to headquarters, which, in our case, was a small room back in Phan Thiet manned by one veteran. I sighed with relief when his voice came over the radio. Hearing Viet reporting our situation at full volume startled me into realizing I should gather my wits quickly and set a plan to defend the hamlet.

“You’re hurt, Lieutenant,” said one of the team’s nurses, examining the gash in my forehead.

I waved her away and told Nhan, Viet’s second in command, to take the three women cadres ahead and set up a triage. I took the radio from Viet and talked to Lieutenant Lan, my assistant at headquarters. Our radio man had reported the attack two hours ago and asked for support, but Lan said Captain Trieu, the Province Military Chief of Staff in Phan Thiet, was waiting my for report. I said we desperately needed reinforcement. If the Regional platoon camping in the hills marched immediately, they could be here before nightfall. Lan said he would go and talk to Captain Trieu personally.

We carried the wounded to the community center in the middle of the hamlet. Villagers watched from a distance. Someone must have known about the ambush or seen guerrilla movements in the fields, but we hadn’t received a single signal, not even the usual vague whispers:
You had better leave now,
or
That road is bad.
Still, I couldn’t blame them. If anyone had tipped us off, he would be murdered before the week was over.

Our team had worked here for more than a month and was on friendly terms with the locals. Children came for a closer look at the wounded and ran back to tell their parents. A little girl slipped her hand into Nurse Nhung’s hand and walked along, smiling. The village head came and asked if we needed anything. I told him to have people stay in their houses in case of an attack. I didn’t want to get the villagers involved. I took the lead and tried my best to look confident for the men.

Since early last year, more than two thousand strategic hamlets had sprung up throughout the South in an attempt to insulate villagers from communist propaganda and prevent Viet Cong (VC) infiltration into the populace. People were forced to move either into the hamlets or further out toward the VC-controlled areas. Naturally, everyone, including the VC underground, moved inside, and in spite of all the government promotions and American subsidies, strategic hamlets became ready shelters for the VC sympathizers and a severe hardship for the peasants. They had to live in these squalid settlements and were allowed outside to work at dawn and expected back at dusk. Villagers walked miles each day to work in their own paddies. Their gardens lay neglected; productivity suffered.

An Binh was a typical hamlet built like a rectangular fort with its back to the river. Though its construction was sound, the design was medieval. Except for the waterfront, which was strung with barbed wire, the hamlet was enclosed by a three-foot dike topped with a sturdy six-foot fence of dried indigo branches as thick as a man’s forearm. Just behind the fence was a four-foot-deep trench to stand in for defending the perimeter. The main avenue ran down the middle of the hamlet, straight from the front gate to the river. Two smaller streets, going east and west, intersected perpendicularly with the main. The hamlet had a community center, a playground, and some thirty-odd bungalows, closely packed and cheaply built.

The center of the hamlet was a two-room community house with a packed-dirt floor. The nurses had set up a triage in the meeting room, so Nhan, Viet, and I withdrew to the classroom. I sketched the hamlet’s layout and its surroundings on the chalkboard. We sat on little benches around a knee-high children’s table and planned our defenses.