She said, “Do you think I can take care of myself, commander?”
“Where did you learn to shoot?”
“On the army range on Sunday afternoons,” she replied smiling. She took a spare magazine from Erich, reloaded expertly, put the gun at “safe,” and handed it over to a trooper.
“Do you want to see her with a pistol, or hand grenades maybe?” Erich inquired grinning. “Can she drive a tank too?”
“Not yet,” he laughed, “but she is an apt pupil, Hans.”
I ran a finger under my nose to repress a smile. “Did the colonel know about your little exercises?”
“Of course. He had to sign her pass to enter the range.”
“The colonel was very nice,” Suoi interposed. “He gave me a pistol.”
“A what?” From her shoulder bag she pulled a small holster. Out of it came a light, ivory-handled, Italian Beretta automatic. “Pretty, isn’t it?” she asked. “I was afraid of putting it on. I thought you might consider it childish.”
I stepped up to her and snapped the holster onto her belt-rings. “Wear it then, General! When you have to shoot you don’t have time to look for it in your bag.”
I had my first feelings of foreboding from the moment I noticed the absence of the Tricolor and the sullen stillness that hovered over the entire compound. Even from the small hill where we stood the stockade presented an appalling spectacle. The multiple coils of barbed wire which circled the perimeter showed wide breaches; the palisade was blasted at several places and heavy logs lay scattered around the gaping holes. Every building appeared damaged. We spotted the burned skeletons of a dozen vehicles and a large number of corpses.
“They’ve had it!” Eisner remarked grimly and lowered his field glasses. “But they keep on building forts.”
He turned briskly. “Krebitz!” Sergeant Krebitz stepped forward. “Off the road everybody!” Eisner commanded. “Troops single file… distance twenty yards. We are cutting through the woods.”
He turned to Suoi and said quite harshly, “You will stay right here, behind me. Understood?”
“Oui!” she nodded, blushing slightly. “You don’t have to shout.”
A truly feminine way of taking an order, I thought, repressing a chuckle.
We wasted no time discussing the situation. The garrison had been exterminated, and since the enemy had not been pursued, we expected to find the dirt road and every regular path around the stockade booby-trapped and mined. The enemy had had ample time to prepare traps, as they had done on many occasions in the past. The only sensible thing for us to do was to leave the road, avoid the paths, and cut a new trail to the stockade while Gruppe Drei searched for traps on the regular approaches. Every step in the area could mean sudden death. Where the Viet Minh experts had been at work, every inch of a trail had to be surveyed—a lengthy procedure.
Among the prominent Viet Minh deserters who had come over to our side was a squat little man, Ghia Xuey, now the honorary “commander” of Gruppe Drei, working hand in hand with Sergeant Krebitz. Xuey had been a guerrilla company commander until a tragic mishap induced him to switch sides in 1950. During a raid and the ensuing roundup of French “collaborators,” a neighboring Viet Minh detachment had executed Xuey’s family along with a group of other “traitors” in a village near Thanhhoa. Xuey could not reveal his painful secret, for the others would no longer have trusted him. With a resolution that only an Oriental mind can muster, he buried his grief deep within and even celebrated the victory with the assassins of his parents, wife, and three children. He bided his time for revenge. One evening when the culprits were asleep, Xuey stabbed the commissar, slit the throat of the propagandist, then set up a machine gun twenty yards from the sleepers and emptied the magazine into the lot. He surrendered to the French at Nam Dinh and offered his services against his former comrades. Xuey was, of course, welcome and most generously treated. It had taken us four months of constant persuasion and ample paperwork for Colonel Houssong before Counter-intelligence finally consented to Xuey’s reassignment to our battalion. Xuey himself preferred to work with us, a diversion from the dreary training routine at the Special Forces camp. He said that he no longer believed that the ideas of Marx and Lenin should be spread by any means, including murder. “True Communists do not kill,” he stated bitterly. “They are supposed to build life where there was none. People who murder in the name of Communism are nothing but ordinary bandits and should be dealt with accordingly.”
Xuey was worth his weight in gold. He moved in the jungle like a panther. Nothing escaped his searching eyes; no crushed grass, no awkwardly lying bough or bent twig. He noticed marks on the ground, however faint, and he could read a trail as ordinary people read books. We were immensely glad to have him with and not against us. His incredible abilities in the jungle made me shiver at the mere thought of having a guerrilla with similar talents tracking us! With Xuey’s help we succeeded in destroying over two thousand terrorists, and I could not recall the number of my own men whose lives had been saved by Xuey’s alert eyes. He recognized a trap in the most innocent disguise; he knew well enough what to look for. He was and always remained a bitter man. In all our months together I never saw him smile. The loss of everyone he loved, and at the hands of those whom he had most trusted, had turned him into a ruthless agent of death.
“Take good care of him,” Colonel Houssong said when he introduced Xuey to us. “He is worth a Viet Minh brigade!” The colonel was right.
After four years in the jungle we were fairly competent trailblazers. We had developed a system that permitted a relatively rapid advance through dense forest which usually consisted of a wild variety of thorny brushes, weeds, and creepers. The foremost six men advanced cutting a path wide enough for them to pass; close behind them ten men enlarged the path as they went, and the next six men then polished off the passage. Immediately behind the trailblazers marched two cartographers whose job was to mark the newly cut trail on the map and to control its direction with the aid of magnetic compasses. Otherwise the trailblazers could have gone around in circles without ever noticing it. Moving in the jungle resembles flying in the clouds. When the average visibility shrinks to less than twenty yards, man will lose his sense of direction. Strangely enough the larger tracts of unbroken forests are usually less dense than the smaller patches of a few hundred yards or more. Where the trees grow sparsely, sunshine penetrates more effectively, inducing the growth of creepers and bushes. Thick overhead foliage shuts out the sunlight entirely and rainwater partially. This retards the growth of vegetation on the ground level.
We arrived at the perimeter wires safely while Gruppe Drei was still halfway up the hill searching for road mines and traps. Xuey, who had gone off to survey one of the trails, suddenly called us. “Keep right behind me,” he cautioned, “and don’t touch anything, not even a twig.”
He walked about a hundred yards into the woods, then lifted a hand for us to stop. Lowering himself to his knees in front of a small bough that bent casually over the footpath, he carefully removed some leaves to expose a thin wire. I noticed that the upper point of the bough was delicately hooked into another branch. The wire ran from the center of the second branch. A glimpse was enough to know what it was.
“A bamboo bomb!”
“Very deadly,” Xuey nodded. His comment was superfluous. We all knew what those hellish bombs could do. :_ From his pocket, Xuey extracted a ball of thin cord and, working with great prudence, tied the loose end to the bough. Then rising slowly, he motioned us to retrace our steps. He followed us, gently playing out the cord as he went. When we were about eighty yards from the bough, he stopped and told us to take cover.