Page 27 of Cry Havoc
And into the Annunciation from the Gospel of Luke.
“The angel Gabriel…”
When the sun rose, Amiuh slowly made his way back to the village. He had always been friends with the jungle. It was as much his home as his village.
He began the first decade of Hail Marys.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…”
He smelled it before he saw it. The odor of death told him that life would never be the same. He paused at the edge of what was left of his village and watched as others, the survivors, returned from the depths of the jungle, some stumbling amongst the rubble, some floating like ghosts lost in a sea of ash and flame. He saw mothers wailing over the bodies of dead children. Bodies of once strong, vibrant men were twisted in unnatural positions, littering the ground, and he saw his mother and sisters, naked, sprawled in the dirt, their necks and stomachs awash in blood. His father lay nearby.
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…”
Amiuh ran, passing burnt bodies, naked bodies, mutilated bodies. He fell to the ground and clutched his mother’s neck, her eyes wide and unmoving. Even at the young age of eight, he knew her soul was with God. He crawled to his sisters a few yards away. He wanted to cover them, to hide what had been done to them, but there was nothing left with which to do so. The entire village had been burned to the ground.
Eventually he stood and moved to his father, though he did not look like the man he knew, the strong hunter who provided so much for the village. His head was oddly distorted. When Amiuh sat to cradle it in his lap he saw that the other side of his father’s skull was missing. Hair, bone fragments, andbrain matter littered the ground behind him. Amiuh’s little fingers tried to close the gaping wound but he succeeded only in staining them with mushy goo still seeping from his father’s head. He felt even more alone than he had that night in the jungle. As the sun rose higher the stench became too much. Amiuh stood and turned away from his mother, his father, his sisters, and his family home. He looked to the parish.
He continued through the Rosary he knew by heart.
“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope…”
Amiuh was sitting in the pew, his short legs still unable to reach the dirt floor, his bare feet dangling above the ashes, when the priest found him. The single rough-hewn pew was all that remained of his village parish.
His fingers moved back to the tarnished brass Cross of Lorraine crucifix, the Croix de Lorraine as the priest had called it, as a dust cloud from a passing jeep washed over him.
The priest had told him that the Cross of Lorraine was carried by someone named Joan of Arc in something called the Hundred Years War. He told the young Montagnard that it was also a symbol of independence.
“Your mother and father, your sisters, were freedom fighters, just like Joan of Arc,” the priest had said. “When the Blessed Mother revealed the rosary to Saint Dominic in 1208, she told him that it would be a ‘weapon of war and a battering ram for heresy.’ So too shall you become.”
They had rebuilt and the Americans had come in greater numbers, some in civilian clothes and others in military uniforms wearing the green berets. They had fortified the village with sandbags and taught the men and boys how to shoot, arming them with a variety of modern weapons.
Now that he was older, he knew that the U.S. Army Special Forces worked with parish priests in Montagnard villages to arm and train their parishioners to aid in the effort against North Vietnam. The missionary who lived in their village was part of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group—CIDG—in a program called Fighting Fathers. Amiuh had learned that theFighting Fathers Program was developed by an American president, by the one who had led the allies to victory in Europe before his successor had been killed in a place called Dallas.
He tried to push what had happened to his family that day the village was burned from his mind, finding solace in the word of God, and in the words of the priest who had turned him into a fighter.
Amiuh was one of many Montagnard orphans who were raised communally by the surviving villagers. His understanding of French grew steadily under the tutelage of the missionaries, and his English improved through the lessons from the Green Berets who stayed with them for a year at a time.
Just a few years later he had been tested in the jungle, hunting a tiger alone with a crossbow to prove his worth. The poison that tipped his arrows was made from the white sap of the Cong tree, strengthened by adding red pepper and boiling it before use. The poison was taken on the ninth day of the first month of the lunar year; the tribal elders told him that was meant to increase its potency. The solo hunt was a rite of passage for all Boute Montagnard boys. The Boute tribe believed that in order to become a man, a boy must hunt alone, tracking and killing a gaur, elephant, or tiger. Boute women would not marry one not yet considered a man.
A tiger claw dangled from around his neck on a dried sinew string. He was now a hunter as had been his father. He had married a woman who had also lost her parents that dark night. Together they had a young son named Tuan. Amiuh vowed that his child would never have to endure what he had that night in the jungle.
Now when Amiuh ventured into the bush, he was not alone. Instead of a crossbow, he was armed with a CAR-15 rifle. And instead of a tiger, he now stalked men, NVA. He was part of a team, a team tasked with killing those who had taken his parents and sisters, and no one did it better than the two men who were now inside the commanding officer’s quarters.
Amiuh would wait—they had finally captured an NVA prisoner. Thatmeant a Seiko watch for him, just like the Americans wore. He also knew it meant American money for Quinn and Tom and time away from Phu Bai for what he heard them call R&R—rest and relaxation—to an island called Taiwan or neighboring Thailand. While they were away, Amiuh would visit his family and continue to teach Tuan how to hunt. His wife and child would be proud of his watch. One day he would place it on his boy’s wrist.
When his two American teammates returned from R&R, they would go hunting again. They would kill more NVA. And Amiuh would be wearing his watch.
“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope…”
CHAPTER 6
TOM REECE AND FRANKQuinn stood at attention in front of their commanding officer’s desk. Dust was visible in the morning light pouring through the room’s single window and making its way through cracks in the walls and floor. It mixed with the humid air, heavy with the unmistakable stench that emanated from the wax coating applied to the canvas material of the roof. It was tinged with the slight smell of mildew that clashed with the aroma of diesel exhaust coming from generators and smoke from burning feces blowing in from the burn pits, each distinct odor battling for supremacy.
They had cleaned up and changed into their garrison tiger stripe uniforms after turning their NVA prisoner over to the MPs at the Phu Bai FOB 1 brig. Wanting to get ahead of the shitstorm that was sure to follow their unauthorized training mission, Quinn had written up a quick after-action report and left it on their CO’s desk well before sunup.
The CO had sent a courier to rouse them at six a.m.
Lieutenant Colonel Konrad Backhaus sat at his wooden U.S. Army field desk. Two steel file cabinets were against the wall to his right on either side of a small window. The space was illuminated by a single uncovered bulb that hung from the ceiling and a desk lamp that Tomwas certain had been in the inventory for decades. Maps of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and China were tacked to the plywood walls. Target boxes were placed over specific areas in Laos. A CAR-15 was leaning in a corner.
