Forward! The valley widened and we came upon the charred skeletons of the vehicles of another convoy. We passed the graves of those who had traveled in them.
More woods—more bends. No one could tell what might be waiting for us beyond a bend. Our tank churned around the bend.
Halt! A lone guerrilla was standing on the road waving a white flag. For a second time the convoy stopped bumper to bumper. The guerrilla spoke fluent French. “You cannot move on,” he said, his face full of hatred. “The road is mined. We had no time to remove the mines.”
I glanced at Erich Schulze. He began to laugh, loudly, hysterically. “Wonderful,” he mumbled, dropping from the turret. He leaned with his head against the armor shaking with laughter. “Hans, you have pulled this one all right… Don’t ever tell it in Hanoi or they’ll call you the bloodiest liar who ever lived.”
I walked up to the guerrilla. He was a young man, maybe thirty years old, wearing a gray canvas overall and a pair of French army boots. His bearing told me that he was of some rank. We stood for a while sizing up each other. I could see no fear in his eyes, only hatred, defiance, fanaticism—the well-known symptoms of the “Red Malady.”
They had mined the road but had changed their minds.
“We need thirty minutes to free the road,” said he and the muscles in his face twitched. The man was nervous, outplayed, frustrated.
“Tres bien, man ami,” I replied quietly. “Do it fast.”
I jerked a thumb toward our three captive guerrillas prominently roped to the turret of the tank. “Your comrades are not very comfortable up there and we have yet a long way to go.”
“It will be your last ride, you swine!” he sneered, his eyes ablaze with savage courage. “We will skin you alive for this!”
“You may swear as much as you like, mon ami,” I shrugged. “You are holding a flag of truce.”
“Yes!” Schulze interposed, stepping to the guerrilla. “Would you mind putting it down for a moment? Just long enough for me to smash your face, you little yellow ape, you jungle midget. We have eaten bigger boys than you are for breakfast in Russia.”
“Hold it, Erich!” The guerrilla fixed his eyes on me.
“You are in charge here?”
“It could be___”
“You have my wife and children with you.”
“Most unfortunate.”
“I want to see them.”
“At your beautiful little town of Yen Bay—let us hope.”
“I want to see them now!”
“If you wish to surrender,” I suggested, lighting a cigarette, “you may even join them on the truck. The ride is free.”
He spat contemptuously, barely missing my boots. A tough one! “I shall never surrender,” he hissed, his voice full of malice. “I shall see you all dead and rotting in the jungle.”
“The Russians wanted the same and they had a great deal more bullets than what you have, mon ami,” Schulze sneered. “And they were the masters. You are only little apprentices. That little.”
He showed it with his open fingers. “If you want to see us dead, you will have to kill us nine times over.”
Standing in the bend we could see a dozen camouflaged men working on the road further down, digging up mines, filling ditches, removing more logs.
“Where is your esteemed Commissar Thiu?” I spoke to the terrorist. “This is a good time for mutual introduction. I would like to see him.”
“You will see him soon enough,” said he. “Thiu always inspects the enemy corpses!” A witty one as well.
Schulze stepped right up to him. The frail form of the five-foot Viet Minh seemed to shrink even more against the background of Erich’s muscular shoulders and six-foot-two-inch frame.
“Your Thiu spent a long time in Russia, learning the Communist ways of setting the world afire.”
He spoke slowly but his voice was a long spell of threats. “You will soon learn that we have also attended some classes in Russia. Thiu won’t be the first Red commissar whom we have hanged.”
“That I can believe,” the guerrilla sneered, pursing his lips in contempt. “Using women and children to shield your tanks. Great fighters are you—you Germans! The French must really be hard up to have needed you here to fight their wars.”
Schulze smiled. “You don’t like our kind of warfare, do you? But you will see more of it, worse than what you are seeing now. The days of your hide-and-seek games with the Legion are over. You may have played your killing games with the apprentices, my friend, but now the professors are coming, the experts. Do you know what the Russians used to call us? The headhunters! That’s right. And we know the rules of all your games. We have played them before a thousand times against those who taught you. You may run into the jungle when you see us coming but beware when you see us leaving, for you may find no village to go back to.”
There was a yell, and the guerrillas vanished from the road.
The emissary glanced at his watch. It appeared an expensive one, probably taken from the wrist of a French officer. “You may start in ten minutes,” he said. “We shall let you pass here. We have no choice. You leave our people at Yen Bay.”
“Don’t worry, friend. We always keep our part of a bargain.”
He snapped. “Don’t call me a friend. It is an insult!”
“I will remind you of that when we meet another day,” I replied.
“I hope we will meet.”
“So do we.”
We drove on and reached the next village without trouble. There we released some of our hostages and took new ones. Knowing the Viet Minh, I doubted if they would care much about a dozen strange civilians from a distant village. I decided to keep our involuntary cargo up-to-date all the way.
It was getting toward noon and the sun began to blaze in earnest. Riding abreast the tank turret, the three Viet Minh chieftains really suffered. Schulze released them during our rest in the village and gave them food and water. One of the guerrillas, the former company leader, had had enough. Having come from the neighborhood, the man appeared increasingly distressed when the time came to get on the road again. While he was being escorted back to the tank, he told his guard that he wanted to speak to Schulze (Erich had comforted him with a few cigarettes during the morning ride). “I want to talk to your commander,” he whispered. “I must see him alone.”
“So be it,” Schulze nodded without demanding an explanation. We had heard similar requests before. When a guerrilla decided to say something it always had to be in private. I walked a few dozen yards into the jungle and Erich brought the man over.
“What’s up, Tan Hwan?” I spoke to the man without preliminaries.
He glanced around nervously, making sure that we were well out of sight and hearing; then he said with great urgency in his voice, “You cannot go on this road to Yen Bay…”
He broke off abruptly as though still not quite decided how much to tell. “It is… it is…” I offered him a cigarette. “What is wrong with the road, Tan Hwan?”
“Everybody will die. You, the women, the children.”
“The others have not been hurt.”
I was becoming a bit impatient with his long prologue before getting to the point. “What is it, then?” I snapped. “Say what you want to say.”