He said, “Lieutenant… I have been studying in France. I am an engineer—”
“To the point, Tan Hwan!” I cut in sharply. “I am not curious about your life story.”
“I’ve decided to quit this senseless war,” he went on quickly. “I want to see my country free but not at such a price. Intelligent people do not shoot at each other. They talk. This is becoming more and more senseless, more and more out of hand.”
“We did not start it, Tan Hwan,” Schulze interposed. “And if you are an engineer, you should be intelligent enough to know that if the French really wanted to fight, no Viet Minh could ever defeat them. What do you want to tell us about the road?”
“Will you set me free?”
“Do you want to change sides?” I asked him somewhat skeptically.
“I don’t want to change sides. I want to save those women and children, and your lives as well. Then I want to get away from it all.”
“Turn around!” I commanded briskly.
He obeyed, turning slowly—a puzzled look, mixed with anxiety, on his face. Taking my knife I cut away the ropes around his wrists.
“Now, suppose you tell us about the road.”
“Bamboo bombs!” he exclaimed. “Hundreds of them… only ten miles from here. Do you have a map?” Schulze opened his map case for the former guerrilla leader.
“Here!” Tan Hwan pointed out a section of woods. “Right here, near the streams. You can never pass.”
“By now the guerrilla commander knows that we took hostages.”
“Kly wouldn’t care. He was educated in China and for him only the Party matters. If you blow up on the bombs, he will display the corpses of the women and children as though they were massacred deliberately by you.”
“I see___” So it was to be bamboo bombs, I thought. I had seen a few of those devilish native inventions: a ball of bamboo leaves packed solid under a netting of wire, filled with high explosive or grenades and hundreds of short, sharpened bamboo fragments, stakes with their points frequently poisoned. Fitted with a primer to act on pressure, or by trip wire, the football-size bombs could easily mow down a platoon. Also, since they were green, it was almost impossible to spot them against the foliage.
“Many of the bombs are suspended from the trees,” Tan Hwan explained. “If they fall on the trucks, they will kill everyone.”
“How do you know so much about them?” He paused, wiped his perspiring face, then said, “I designed them, Lieutenant The whole trap, and many others before.”
“You must have killed quite a few Frenchmen, Tan Hwan.”
“I know,” he admitted. “I saw them dying. They died horribly.”
He asked for another cigarette. Schulze gave him a whole pack. The man broke four matches trying to light his cigarette.
“Is there an ambush in the making as well?” Erich asked.
“No, not immediately. The men are farther up in the hills. But they could not remove the bombs anyway. The Viet Minh will attack only after the bombs have exploded. I know a bypass,” Tan Hwan added after a pause. “Will you still set me free?”
“You are free! I am going to give you a pass to Hanoi.”
“I don’t want to go to Hanoi. I am going to Saigon. No one knows me there.”
“Where is your family?”
“I have no family. The Japanese killed them.”
“We will get you to Saigon, Tan Hwan.”
We had to cover up his sudden defection, and I knew the best way of doing it. I told Schulze to escort Tan Hwan farther down the road where he could board the tank without being seen by his companions or the civilians. I drew my revolver. “Now yell!” I told him. “Yell as loud as you can… Long live Ho Chi Minh… Down with the French colonialists.”
As he yelled, I fired five bullets into the woods. “Now you won’t have to be afraid of any Viet Minh revenge, Tan Hwan,” I told him as I reloaded my gun. “Cheer up! You have just been executed. Old Ho might even give you a posthumous medal.”
“Come!” Erich urged him and the two walked down the road. I returned to the convoy. The two other guerrillas had already been returned to the tank turret. I ordered them removed to truck eleven.
They had seen us marching off with Tan Hwan, had heard the yells and the five shots. Now they saw me returning without their companion. “You shot him!” one of the captives yelled at me. “You killed him in cold blood… Remember this day, officer… Remember this day.”
The man cursed all the way back along the convoy, lamenting the fate of the “martyred” Tan Hwan.
Mounting the tank, I called Pfirstenhammer in the troop carrier. “Karl, you stay put with the convoy for about five minutes, then follow us.”
“O.K., Hans!” Driving on with the tank we picked up Schulze and Tan Hwan. Similar tricks had worked well in occupied Russia where we used to “execute” a large number of turncoats every day, especially for the benefit of their families still living in the shadow of Stalin and the secret police.
Forward! Tan Hwan was as good as his word. He showed us the bypass, a cleverly arranged diversion through a dry, shallow ravine. But we could not leave that deadly booby-trapped section of road behind for other troops to fall into. Tan Hwan had already mentioned that the guerrilla camp was farther up in the hills and that the enemy was waiting for the explosions before attacking the convoy.
It did not take long for us to prepare a counter-trap. Leaving the convoy in the sheltered ravine we hauled ten large gasoline drums and a few ammo cases onto the road. At a safe distance, Riedl parked two trucks at awkward angles, one of them with its front wheels in a ditch, with its doors and windows wide open. The vehicles appeared to be broken down and abandoned. The tank was driven partly off the road, its turret turned around with the gun pointing against a tree barely five feet from the muzzle. Around the tank and the vehicles we planted a few oily rags and dumped some diesel oil on the ground.
Not far from the trap a narrow footpath ran up towards the hills, the path of the terrorists. “They should be coming down on that path,” Tan Hwan explained. “When they hear the explosions, they won’t be long. There is no other way for them to come.”
Taking a hundred men from the convoy we proceeded to establish a ring of steel about the place. Schulze and thirty headhunters took care of the path. Pfirstenhammer, with two platoons carrying light machine guns and flamethrowers, went down the road to seal the escape route toward Yen Bay. Eisner and forty men deployed on the far side of the “abandoned” vehicles, between the road and the ravine. Riedl remained in charge of the convoy and I stayed in the tank with Tan Hwan, the driver, and the two gunners.
I called to my companions in German. We never spoke French on the wireless. Everyone was ready.
Eisner fired a short burst into the gasoline drums. They burst into flame and began to explode, setting off the ammo crates; in a matter of seconds the place looked like hell, with thick black smoke rising above the woods. Ten minutes later Schulze radioed: “They are coming, Hans!”
“Let them pass!” I signaled to Eisner, who thereupon sent a couple of men to set fire to the rags which had been scattered near the vehicles. The scene was indeed very realistic. Everything on the road seemed to be afire. “They are passing now,” Schulze reported again. “About two hundred of them.”
“Hold your fire, Erich,” I warned him. “It is damned difficult,” he replied in a subdued voice. “We could kick them in the ass.”
I closed the turret hatch down to a few inches to permit observation and soon saw the first batch of guerrillas spilling from the bushes, swarming onto the road. “Xung! Phong!” they screamed. “Forward! Kill!” The “dead” tank suddenly came to life. Backing onto the road, we began to fire point-blank into the terrified mob. Eisner and his machine gunners began to play their own music and from the trail Schulze closed in with guns blazing. We had the enemy in the bag.