Don't Mean Nuthin' Page 3

  “Buddha goi.” Buddha calls, she said. Now she smiled—the look I had seen on the face of a monk before he lit the gas that soaked his robes.

  The Hush Puppy made a crunching sound as I pushed the barrel harder against her teeth.

  “VC?” I asked. Stupid question that came from my conscience. And I knew it even before she answered with another smile.

  Raising the pistol to her forehead, I pulled the trigger. Phfffupp. The bullet went into her brain. Her head slammed into the ground. Liem’s eyes stayed open, looking straight into mine, the smile still on her lips. No muscles jerked. No blood came from the hole in her forehead. No shit ran down her legs. She looked like she was resting, daydreaming of a welcome lover. Liem’s green eyes wouldn’t let me go. But I went. It was all duty.

  The M16 was against the tree where I left it. As I picked the rifle up, Thieu and his squad hustled by. Shouts and an occasional AK round came from the rubber plantation. One of Thieu’s men was dragged by another Ranger, blood on a limp right leg. I followed the squad into the darkness of the jungle.

  * * *

  “Bo di,” I said two hours later to the Ranger on the trail ahead of me. Stop. The message passed up the line, and the squad melted into the bush that surrounded us. Over the last two hours, we had been moving as fast as the jungle and rice paddies allowed. The squad had avoided the dikes that were always booby-trapped and gave a target to snipers and patrols even in the dark. The Viet Cong owned the night.

  “Lieutenant Thieu. D`ay,” I said to the soldier. Here. The Ranger whispered to the man next to him. While I waited for Thieu, I tried to cut the fucking leeches off my legs with the Gerber. At least I could get part of their slimy bodies off without firing up a cigarette, suicide at night in the middle of the Mekong.

  Leeches meant I had been in the water too long. The sewage that floated in the paddies gave me jungle rot. Or made the case I already had worse. I moved my toes. The green skin that was left barely covered the bones. They ground together like chopsticks.

  No matter where my mind tried to go, it jumped back to green eyes and the smile of a dead woman. I shook my head and tried to focus on anything but the feeling that I had done something terribly evil. But there were just more faces. A gallery of evil. Like Thi Myong, the veterinarian in Chau Doc. I killed him at a meeting of the local GVN, Government of Vietnam, council. An old man, Myong was never alone. Phoenix agents claimed he was a tax collector for the NVA. Myong’s death was designed to be a message for everyone on the council, but I would need time to escape. The Chau Doc council was certainly infiltrated by the VC. I went to the meeting as the new liaison between the US military and the local government. I brought an ice pick sharpened to a needlepoint and a folded red handkerchief.

  Three hours of squabbling in Vietnamese, most of which I didn’t understand. Should Chau Doc declare itself a “neutral zone”? The ceiling fan barely moved the dense air in the tin-roofed building. Would the VC and Americans respect the neutrality? Sure. For the time it took a Zippo to light off the first hut with a suspected VC. Or just for grins.

  Time for an ice-cold bia. Beer. Myong stood against the plaster wall, no one beside him, white safari shirt hanging over his belt and the beginning of cataracts making his black eyes gray. I walked toward Myong with a smile of greeting, hand in my pocket. The other councilmen were gathered around the tub of beer. When I reached Myong, one quick jab to his chest with the ice pick and he slumped to the wood floor. The handkerchief over the tip stopped any blood from spurting. “Heart attack,” I yelled. “I’ll get a medic.” I jogged out the door and into the night while the others went to Myong. The move was called “quinella” because you picked a winner.

  * * *

  Thieu appeared next to me through a clump of liana vines that hung from the trees like black, wooden stalactites. He squatted in front of me, the butt of his M16 on the decaying leaves that covered the jungle floor.

  “You get the feeling that something’s up?” I asked. “We’re only a klick from base, and it’s too quiet. No artillery. No flares. No crickets. No patrols. Better keep alert.”

  A drop from the afternoon’s shower fell on the shoulder of my flak jacket. I rubbed my finger in the water and licked it. It tasted the same as the rainwater I used to drink out of the barrel under the eave of my uncle’s cabin back in The World.

  “Vang,” Thieu said. “Men say same. We go slow. Two minutes.” Thieu stood and slid into the dark.

  Thieu and his men were Hoa Hao Buddhists. They hated the North Vietnamese and anyone on the NVA’s side. The Hoa Hao sect was a minority in South Vietnam that worshipped the Healing Buddha of Tay An. It was a Mekong Delta farming sect. Their beliefs were focused on a love of the land and agriculture. The Hoa Haos had Four Great Debts of Gratitude that drove their religion. Great Debt number three was we “must be ready to sacrifice ourselves for country when required.” The North Vietnamese were invaders who had persecuted the Hoa Haos and their country. Death did not scare the Hoa Haos. They were as fierce as the Nung mercenaries and the Montagnard tribesmen.

  We moved back onto the trail, Thieu on point, me on trace.

  Unexplainably, a dry palm leaf brushed my fatigue, making the sound of paper rubbed together, an anomaly in the monsoons. Phung Hoang. The VC posters drew the Phoenix program as a huge eagle with a snake in its mouth, always flying above a poor, defenseless peasant. The GVN printed a comic book that was distributed all over South Vietnam called The Ba Family. In it, the Phung Hoang was said to “provide security and prosperity to the people.” The Ba family was praised for turning in two new neighbors as NVA tax collectors. The comic didn’t say what happened to the NVA after they were arrested, but the Ba family got a written commendation and a public thank-you. Rumor had it that all nine of the Ba family, women and children included, were decapitated by the NVA. Their heads were mounted on Vespa motorcycle handlebars and given a joyride around the city square. Luke the Gook knew how to get revenge.

  The only sounds were the water drops from the trees. No wind to rattle the leaves. The moon came out from behind the clouds every few minutes, and the speed trail was well traveled and muddy. Smoke tree branches tickled my face. The path was made for Little People.

  A booby trap exploded in front, sounding like a .50-caliber toe popper. The trail was lit up by AK-47 and light machine gunfire. A pineapple grenade went off twenty yards in front of me. As I dove into the bush, bullets ripped into the trees over my head, and Rangers fell to the trail in death throes, arms and legs dancing like broken dolls, without firing a shot. The noise was worse than a Huey landing next to me. It would be over in seconds. I had to di di mau out. Now. My knees scraped on roots and dead branches as I crawled away on all fours as fast as I could, for the moment, not caring how much racket I made.

  Ricky-tick, boy, or you’ll be rat food and some zipperhead will be one hundred thousand piasters richer. We were so close to base, I knew I’d only have to hide for a while. The VC wouldn’t risk staying here in case the marines charged to the rescue. But no radio to call in the arty. Phung Hoang assassination teams were on their own.

  The firing stopped. I was only twenty-five yards off the trail and without the M16 that was now the prize possession of a VC. My hand touched a banyan tree. The monsoons had made a hole between the foot-wide roots of the tree. Palm ferns surrounded the hole. I crawled in and pulled leaves over my body, brushing as much rotted vegetation and mud on top as I could reach. I waited.

  VC moved slowly through the bush, quiet as wild boars. “Lai di, gan con ran.” Come out, Night Snake, a VC said.

  Fuck. It was an ambush, and I was the target. The VC were anxious or desperate enough to call out my name in the bush.

  “Gan con ran,” the soldier said, “we send you Hanoi Hilton. Lai di.”

  The VC would have to put their sandals on my face to find me. The NVA didn’t issue flashlights. I closed my eyes and practiced the slow breathing learned at Benning.

  The strap
s of the nylon-aluminum flak jacket pinched my right side. I was in a fetal position, webbed helmet covering my face. Something crawled into the gap between my camo shirt and pants and slowly made its way toward my balls. Dead branches poked my arms. The bush was alive with muted sounds of VC. They were close. But close was only good with horseshoes. And grenades.

  “O dau, gan con ran?” Where are you? The ferns next to my head rustled. The thing in my pants bit a chunk out of my crotch. A bayonet poked into the dirt six inches from my arm. The sour-milk smell of VC filled the hole. I held my breath. The bayonet jabs moved away.

  In the distance, the 105s restarted their nightly bombardment from the base.

  “Di di mau bay gio,” a VC barked. Go now. VC moved quickly through the bush. My flak jacket loosened as I let out a long breath and sucked in the decaying earth smell of the Delta.

  The voices drifted away, and now I was alone. Alone, unable to move, buried in a hole, and something unknown gnawing on my flesh as it slowly chewed its way closer to the vital part of my crotch.

  Once, at Fort Lewis, the engineers were building new officer quarters near our house. I was six and out for a late-afternoon escape from the Colonel. While looking down a black hole dug for drainage, I slipped and fell nearly fifteen feet. Knocked out for minutes. Squirmed to my feet. Headache. Sticky stuff on my face. Smooth round walls. No ladder. Smell of wet cement and piss. Walls close enough to touch without extending my arms. Spiders. Dark. Screams. Hours of screaming. Echoes. Night. Stars. More screams. Tears joining the blood and drips of water pooling around my tennis shoes. Throat rough as a grenade. Voices. Mom. Flashlight. Sobbing. A rope and I was out.

  Tight dark places. Major fear. Must keep the tremors from shaking the dirt and leaves that covered me from falling off. Or into my mouth and nose. Eyes closed, I quieted the screams in my head with discipline instilled by the Colonel and the Company. Fuck. Let me out. I’ll face a squad of NVA tanks. Just let me out. Slow it down, troop. Try to get why you’re quaking in this hole and who put you there. Go to that angry place instead of overwhelming fright.

  After an hour of silence from the jungle, I crawled out of the hole, convinced there were questions that needed to be answered. The answers had been building in my mind for months in this shithole country, but I needed one final confirmation from Viper. Maybe I needed to become someone other than Frank Morgan, the Night Snake.

  Cherries flew into Da Nang nearly every day in 1970. The Boeing landed, and the doors opened to the steam bath of ’Nam. Sweat began before the new grunts stepped onto the tarmac. And didn’t end for a year—unless the trip back to The World was inside a sealed plastic bag or to a hospital for training on how to use a wheelchair. I flew in with the newbies. And a grunt beside me for entertainment. The CIA had already taken my file and trained me to be a “floater,” not assigned to any of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, PRUs, established for terrifying the local populations. My brief was to be a one-man assassination team, answering only to a man nicknamed Viper. His direct boss was Robin Comer, the cowboy honcho of Phoenix. I was intended to be the poster child of Phoenix, leaving my signature countrywide with a silenced 9mm bullet.

  Special Ops school at Benning taught me the skills I needed to sneak into bedrooms or hide in jungle ambush. Graduating at the top of the class gave me a ticket to stardom and a bounty on my head. Officially, Phoenix was supposed to use the Rand computer to classify South Vietnamese according to risk levels a, b, c, or d based on intel provided mostly by local agents or Government of South Vietnam authorities. But it didn’t always work that way. Phoenix based its philosophy loosely on an old Chinese saying, “To frighten one hundred monkeys, shoot one sleeping monkey in the back of the head.” I shot a whole clan of monkeys.

  On my first in-country training mission, I accompanied Collingsworth into the basement of a Saigon bicycle shop. We were there to question a suspected VC who had been snitched by an unnamed spy in the Choi Lo neighborhood bureaucracy. Every South Vietnamese man over fifteen was required by law to have an identity card and be fingerprinted to feed the ravenous Rand computer. This man didn’t have a card, condemning him to whatever might happen. But it was no mystery. Within minutes, Collingsworth went beyond level-one interrogation techniques and skipped to “jam a hand shovel into the left ear, making sure to penetrate the brain by hearing the sound of skull fragments crunching like you just stepped on a broken Coke bottle.” Actually, the law in South Vietnam said any suspected VC could be held for two years without trial, representation, bail, or the ability to question the accuser. Not murdered. Phoenix never cared much about laws or the Geneva Conventions, except the one that said, “Scare the monkeys out of the trees.”

  Back then, I believed. None of the men and women we greased would soon be invading the beach at La Jolla if we didn’t stop them. But they would surely spread the evil plague of Communism to places like Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Then, move across the Indian subcontinent and eventually drool on Europe, just a seven-hour flight from the boardwalk of Atlantic City. I knew this because LBJ told me it was so.

  In Vinh Lan province, the CIA used an abandoned VC tunnel for interrogations. It was surreal how every one of these chambers in all forty-four provinces was underground and gave even more of a feeling of the Inquisition. The CIA mantra wasn’t “Bleed them for Jesus.” It was “Kill a Commie for Christ.” Innocence didn’t play a role. All gooks were the enemy, especially after a smiling five-year-old tossed a grenade from her basket of flowers. Collingsworth started this interrogation by putting the man’s hand in a cage full of starved rats captured in the tunnel. He didn’t even ask the naked man a single question. When the first hand was stripped of its meat and the bones were licked white as the sand on China Beach, he switched to the other hand and then the man’s feet, all the time laughing and indicating that the prisoner’s cock and balls would be next. As far as I could tell, the man wasn’t asked one question before I left to the squeal of the rats fighting over the last chunk of flesh. Before I reached sunlight, I heard a shot from a Colt pistol. Within seconds, Collingsworth joined me at the surface, gibing me about being a “pussy.”

  The official method of recruiting locals to snitch on their fellow hamlet citizens was piasters. That didn’t mean Phoenix was above other techniques. Blackmail, kidnapping, and terror weren’t in the written rules of procedure, if they ever existed, but those routines were more popular than giving money to the monkeys. Snatching a suspected VC’s daughter from the schoolyard had a certain elegance that Phoenix bosses appreciated.

  Collingsworth was a loser. Over a Tiger beer, he let slip that he had been stranded on the Cuban shore during the Bay of Pigs farce and was lucky that he was able to steal a boat and get back to Miami. Almost all the older operatives in ’Nam had that fiasco in their portfolios. Phoenix liked to force the transfer of SEALs and Green Berets into the program, too. Sleeping most days on a cot inside a base or a hotel room was coveted duty. The nights were spent crawling into bedrooms, not in the mud. If they wanted to keep their jobs, Phoenix teams had a kill quota of fifty Vietnamese per month. That didn’t mean the victims had to be VC, just have the right ethnic background and skin color to be tallied.

  Not long after we met, Collingsworth was shipped back to The World because of the My Lai massacre. Phoenix was trying to distance itself from that wholesale slaughter of men, women, and children rumored to have resulted from intel Collingsworth provided. And the example. Phoenix operatives invalidated that opinion as “comsymp” propaganda. Communist sympathizer. Just like the misguided efforts of politicians like Senator Eugene McCarthy back home who tried to have Phoenix investigated. Of course, the budgets and actions of Phoenix were part of the “Black Ops” brief. Information was not divulged under the guise of “national security.” If Eugene only knew that a fantasy drinking game amongst Phoenix agents was to have the winning hand rewarded with a trip to Minnesota to put a silenced bullet into the traitor’s ear. The prize was called a “Mc
Carthy.”

  Over the first months of detail, I learned that Wilson Bringham was our daddy, using many of the talents he groomed in the Cold War to birth Phoenix in 1967. His major successes were in gathering intel on Soviet missile silo complexes. Many of the strategies we were ordered to carry out were developed in Budapest and East Berlin. Now, Bringham had an office in the annex of the American embassy in Saigon.

  * * *

  After wasting Liem, I snuck back to base camp from my hidey-hole in the mud, figuring my behavior lately was the reason Viper wanted me dead, though not before Liem fertilized the clay. There must be two motives for the ambush. A politically charged assassination that had to be kept quiet at the cost of a doubting agent had double benefit. It could be that recent demands to see the dossier on my next victim were getting under Viper’s slimy skin. It could be questioning the execution of so many sleeping men and women wasn’t tolerated. It could be the night I called Viper a “psychopathic serial killer in the same league as Manson.” It could be that the untreatable Saigon strain of clap that caused the front of Viper’s shorts to have a constant wet spot was decaying his brain as fast as his dick.

  Could be the ambush was coincidence. Coincidence in ’Nam was more likely to mean that you or your buddies arrived at the gate from a night enjoying the boonies still able to count to ten on your fingers. Coincidence was if a suspect emerged from the darkness of a Phoenix interrogation center. But that never happened. Besides, the VC knew my name and didn’t hesitate to whisper the fact. Maybe a VC counteragent knew about the mission to kill Liem and was trying to cover his tracks and collect the bounty on my head. Viper would know.

  The password at the gate was changed every day. That was mostly for the night, since it was clear in daylight that even a filthy white man without insignia on his fatigues was probably not a gook. I didn’t know today’s, so I hid in the jungle until sunrise before approaching.