Free The Village by Bing West Page A

to launch patrols into the My Hué hamlets at the far northern end of the village and they had to ambush the river night after night. The Viet Cong had to learn fear and they had to learn they could not row supplies past the village. Then, Sullivan believed, they would leave Binh Nghia alone.
    His first night in the village, Sullivan led a patrol to ambush at a river crossing. He weighted the patrol heavily with Americans—two PFs and six Marines. It was to mark Sullivan’s style in the village. He did not like to rely on the PFs, and he found communications with them particularly hard.
    â€œSometimes,” he said, “it is difficult to get the PFs to open fire on the VC. So we use the PFs as our eyes and ears. It is the Marines who do the actual fighting. You cannot always depend on the PFs to advance with the Marines.”
    Still, Sullivan put a PF at point in the belief that a Vietnamese soldier could spot a Viet Cong at night before an American could. At dusk, the patrol filed out of the fort, passing across the stagnant moat studded with bamboo stakes and through the tall bamboo fence.
    The PF at point turned left and walked twenty yards to an outer fence. Three unarmed villagers, serving as gate openers and sentries, looked at them blankly for a moment. Then one noisily pushed open the gate; another lifted a wooden mallet and began tapping against a bamboo pole: tap—tap—tap—tap—tap—tap—tap. Supposedly, this was the villagers’ signal that there were no Viet Cong nearby. If there were, the first beater to see them was supposed to change the tempo of his signal, and all other listening posts would repeat the warning. The Marines did not like the system and looked at each other uneasily, bothered by the racket of their exit. The beaters, from Viet Cong families, were impressed into service. Why they should risk their lives to warn a GVN patrol was beyond the understanding of the Marines.
    In column, the patrollers moved east across the rice paddies and entered the main street of Binh Yen Noi. The street was a straight, narrow dirt path leading northeast, overshadowed by palm trees and thick brush and lined with thatched huts. The villagers were still awake and the Marines heard chatter from many houses. Lights shone from some doorways and fell across the street. The Marines hurried across these lighted patches.
    The villagers knew a patrol was passing. It seemed to the Marines that some warned the Viet Cong by signals. In one house, a man coughed loudly and falsely. Farther on, an old lady shifted her lantern from one room to another as the patrol neared, then shifted it again after the patrol passed. The PF at point hurried on.
    â€œThat really bugs me,” PFC Sidney Fleming whispered to Brannon. “We should go in there and shove that lantern down her throat.”
    â€œThe PFs must know what they’re doing,” Brannon replied.
    â€œBullshit. They’re scared.”
    â€œSo am I. You should be too. Some PF’s liable to shoot you for a Cong.”
    A skinny, impressionable young man with a wispy mustache and jaunty air, Fleming believed the Viet Cong were invisible at night because they wore black pajamas. So on patrol he insisted upon wearing a black beret, black chinos and a gaudy black shirt with a button-down collar.
    About two hundred yards past the marketplace, the path veered close to the river and the underbrush had been uprooted to shape a mud landing for sampans. As the patrol drew abreast of the tiny cove, they noticed a large boat beached bow first and lighted by lanterns which glowed dully. Three or four men, busy tossing sacks of grain onto its deck, did not stop their work or even look up as the patrollers filed by within thirty feet of them. The PF at point paid the scene no attention and hurried on into the darkness. The Marines did likewise, some shielding their eyes so as not to lose their night vision to the lanterns.
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