Three weeks after the echoes of the Saigon catastrophe were dying, I got the call from up north, from Hanoi, from Bull Simons.
"You looking for action?"
"Always, sir," I said.
"Then grab your shit and get up here. I've got a hot one that'll prob'ly get us both massacred, and I could use a light colonel to run my reaction force."
"Doing what, sir?" I asked.
"Not even on a scrambler, Richardson."
"What about my company?"
"Turn it over to your exec. It's approved, upstairs. Way, way upstairs. You'll be on TDY for at least two months. Or maybe forever."
He told me where to report. I packed a duffle bag full of my favorite weapons, two bottles of Johnny Walker, and a couple changes of socks, and grabbed the first flight down to Saigon, then from Ton Son Nhut north to Hanoi.
I reported to a certain room in the airport terminal, and an unmarked jeep took me, and three other Special Forces types Simon had volunteered, into the city.
Hanoi was not only a city in ruins, with the only new construction either the slap-up pressed-beer-can shacks the Vietnamese entrepreneurs specialized in, or military prefabs.
The people looked at us coldly, then away. Even the beggar kids stuck out their hands without a grin, without any chatter, as if we owed them.
Everyone knew us for the enemy.
I felt with a shiver we didn't belong here and never would.
The jeep took us to the Metropole Hotel. That had once been the hotel for the elite, back when the French were here. Now it was a safe house for CIA and other disreputable sorts like Special Forces.
Simons was waiting to brief us.
The mission was quite simple: Intelligence had somehow-I wasn't told how-found out where Ho Chi Minh, his main general, Vo Nguyen Giap, and the main command structure of the Communists were.
Bull Simons proposed to take a fifty-man team in after them.
"Assassination?"
"Don't ever use that word," he said, and there wasn't a smile on his face or voice. "We're to take Uncle Ho into custody. If he resists…" Simons shrugged his massive shoulders.
"Can I ask who approved this? Just out of curiosity, sir?"
"No," Simons said. "You can't. But I'll tell you there isn't any higher authority for us. And that doesn't mean Westy, either."
There were only two men above General William C. Westmoreland, Commanding General of all US Forces in Vietnam, Admiral Harry Felt, in Hawaii…
And President Nelson Rockefeller.
I knew enough, maybe more than I should.
Simons moved us from the safe house to a villa outside Hanoi, while the fifty men trickled in.
I wondered if the Bull had gone quite mad picking me, for the men that came in were true legends: men like Dick Meadows, who'd snatched more prisoners with his recon teams than most American line battalions; Jerry "Mad Dog" Shriver, a man with the coldest eyes in the world, who seldom changed his clothes, and slept with a suppressed greasegun on his chest; David «Babysan» Davidson, who looked just like his nickname, who'd spent one out of five days of his life in Vietnam; Bob Howard, the most decorated soldier in all of America's history; supersniper John Plaster, others.
I complained to Simons that maybe I was out of my league, and he gave me a wintry smile.
"Look at it this way, Richardson. I need me somebody who won't go pulling an Audie Murphy, and will cover my ass, or my flanks, and not go yodeling forward like a Custer."
"Thanks, sir. I think."
I thought that if this mission were a disaster, it would be years before Special Forces would be able to rebuild its strength.
But failure wasn't on the agenda.
And then there were fifty of us. All of us were Americans, except for ten hand-picked Montagnards, Rhades. All of them had served in our camps for years, and were as trusted as any roundeye.
NOFORN, as it was said. No foreigners, who might just have loose lips or, as we'd found on occasion, those whose real loyalties were with Ho Chi Minh.
We got some details on where we would be going: a big cave complex, very, very near the Chinese border.
"So there'll be no room for fuckups," Simons said cheerfully. "If you happen to go and get killed, try to look like a dead gook."
He still didn't tell us the name of the caves, or their exact location.
We trained hard, and fast, for everyone knew of operations that had great intelligence and looked good, but by the time people quit farting around and went to the field, the bad guys were long gone.
We couldn't find, or build, a duplicate of our target, so we concentrated on just learning how the others operated, how they thought, since none of us were familiar with the others' style.
That meant running patrols, big patrols, sweeping south of Hanoi. There were more than enough Viets in the jungles and paddies to make the training most realistic. We took half a dozen casualties in firefights, inflicted far more. Replacements came in, and we kept training.
We would fight in ten-man teams, another new thing, and so we practiced fire and maneuver, again and again and again.
Others built satchel and link charges, and everyone spent a lot of time on our improvised ranges, going through immediate-action drills to counter an ambush, firing everything from pistols to the two little 60mm mortars we'd take in as our artillery.
We would, if the shit hit the fan, be able to call in Air Force and Navy fast movers, fighter-bombers, but we were, Simons said, out of range of «real» artillery. "Except for the bad guys, of course," he added.
There was a problem with insertion-if we flew out of Hanoi, every Viet who could look up would report our half dozen helicopters.
Simons decided we'd go in by sea. He got big HH53 Sikorskys and their pilots, from the Air Force. "Twice our minimum requirement," he told me. "Fucking choppers break a lot."
When we got the go, we'd fly out to waiting carriers off Haiphong, the carriers would steam to a certain point, and we'd take off again. The HH53s, normally used for rescue purposes, were fitted for midair refueling. We'd refuel, go in on foot from a landing zone. The choppers would return to the carriers.
When… if… we made contact, they'd immediately take off from the ships and fly in to a certain point, refuel, and then come get us.
"Which means we could be on the ground getting killed for a while," Meadows said.
"You have a problem with that, Captain?" Simons demanded.
"Not at all, boss," Meadows said. "Just trying to figure out how many magazines to take."
And then the bad things started happening.
I was very glad I was out in the bush, running up and down and back and forth. When I creaked back in, there was a message to report to Colonel Simons. Immediately. Which meant before a shower, a beer, or even a balls-scratch.
"You are very damned lucky, Colonel," he growled.
"Why so, sir?"
"Because you've been out there in the tules for a while, so you can't be the rat-fink."
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
"Somebody's leaked," Simons said, and explained.
Somebody had talked at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
William C. Westmoreland had shown up in Hanoi, expressing interest in how «his» Special Forces were doing. Worse, also interested and in Vietnam on a "fact-finding mission," were two hard right-wing Republican politicos: Richard Nixon, who'd somehow avoided disgrace in the aftermath of the Kennedy attempted assassination; and John Connolly, once a Democrat, who'd milked the fact that he'd been in the limo with Kennedy in Dallas as far as he could, then jumped parties, looking for a national office.
Neither of them, I knew, was to be trusted in the slightest.
I supposed the ticket, in three years, would be Richard Nixon for president, Connolly for veep. They were smoking funny cigarettes-America doesn't elect losers, like Nixon was after Kennedy won in 1960, and everyone distrusts a fence-jumper, figuring a man who'll sell his own out once will do it again, if it benefits him.