The minutes ticked by. Then a blinding flash of fire illuminated the sky, followed instantly by a second blitz. The hills thundered and from the village exploding shells spiraled skyward. We could see huts flying in every direction. Moments later the place was engulfed in flames.
“Which is the way to Son La?” I asked one of the natives. Son La was in the opposite direction from where we really wanted to go. Numbly the man showed us the way. “Let them go!” I told the guard. “Except for those who were caught with a weapon.”
Fifteen men had been caught with weapons on them. They were taken to the paddies and shot.
We continued on the road for a mile. Walking between me and Erich, Suoi was unusually quiet. “Do you feel tired?” I asked her. She shook her head but said nothing.
“It is the village,” Erich remarked in German. “It reminded her of her own place.”
“We did not kill anyone except the armed terrorists.”
“Even so. She thinks that those people, too, have lost everything—their homes, their food, their livestock.”
“We are not the Salvation Army!” Eisner interposed. “They ought to learn that no one may play war games and get away with it unpunished.”
We spotted our advance guard, stationary on the roadside.
“There is a trail running due west,” Sergeant Krebitz reported. “Xuey considers it safe. He is already way ahead with Schenk.”
The battalion left the road and took to the hills.
12. DIALOGUE WITH AN AGITATOR
A most extraordinary event was brought about by a simple routine raid on a “liberated” village where no French troops had set foot for several months. Our search parties had discovered a group of terrorists in a hut, dozing off the aftereffects of the rice liquor. We collected their weapons, then bayoneted them where they lay snoring on the bamboo mats.
Summoning a group of villagers, Sergeant Krebitz ordered the corpses taken out and buried in the woods. The headman, sinewy and heavy cheekboned, informed me that all the guerrillas were strangers—none of them belonged to his village. He implored us not to burn down their dwellings for, as he said, “We can do nothing but obey the Viet Minh. The French are far away and the guerrillas can come and go here at will.”
The man was probably telling the truth, for although many of his people, among them women and children, had gathered about the hut to watch the bodies being taken away, no one cried or lamented over the dead terrorists. Instead the women asked my permission to remove some clothes from the dead, especially their bulky sandals fashioned from segments of old tires. Allowed to do so, they literally stripped the corpses, taking even the torn, blood-soaked pajamas.
Their motive was not greed, as Suoi explained to me later. The pajamas would not be washed and put into use, she said. On the contrary, the tribesmen would carefully preserve everything that belonged to the guerrillas. Should another Viet Minh unit occupy the hamlet (as it was expected the moment we departed), they would find the pajamas beflowered and displayed above the house altars, on the walls, with candles burning around them: homage to the dead “patriots.”
This simple trick would save the people from the vengeance of the terrorists.
But the sixteen drunken “liberators” were not all the enemy the village yielded. Barely through the burial “ceremony” we spotted Riedl’s four troopers coming down the trail, driving two gagged prisoners toward us. One of them, a bespectacled, mild-looking character, appeared more like a schoolmaster than a terrorist. The men reported briefly that the two had been caught while trying to escape through the outer perimeter which Helmut and Karl had established a mile down the trail. None of the fugitives had been carrying a weapon but the dignified-looking Viet Minh, about forty-five years of age, had been carrying a number of papers which he had tried to discard in the tall grass when my men challenged him. A glance at the papers was enough to tell me that Riedl’s catch was a valuable one: the prisoner turned out to be a certain Kwang Lien-hu, a Chinese political officer and adviser to the provincial Agitprop section of the Lao Dong. His companion was a smaller fish, only a district propagandist of the Viet Minh, Kly Nuo Truong. The name had a certain familiar ring but I could not recall where I might have heard it.
I handed Eisner the papers. He studied them briefly, whistled, then he lifted his eyes to the prisoners. Turning slowly, he folded the papers and handed them back to me. “I guess we had better start looking for a golden rope, Hans,” he commented quietly.
In many ways we regarded a Viet Minh propagandist as more deadly than a terrorist who was carrying a machine gun. The guerrilla “brain-washers” were the ones who induced the indifferent or uninterested peasant to exchange his hoe for a gun and embark on a rampage of murder. We had standing orders to call in copters for any important Communist functionary whom we captured, but frankly speaking we never really bothered with sending anyone to Hanoi or elsewhere. As long as our General Staff refused to study the basic literature on Communism or guerrilla warfare, interrogation of the Viet Minh prisoners would do little good for the troops in the jungle. I had sent back scores of reports and documents throughout the years, some of them related to vital and often immediate enemy threats which could and should have been averted by a simple countermeasure. Nothing had been done; my reports had been swallowed up by the insatiable desk drawers of the General Staff. The Legion fought and died as usual and, as though nothing had happened, the Viet Minh could even carry on with an attack our HQ had known about a week in advance. So whenever we captured a terrorist leader we interrogated the man, gave him the third degree if necessary to obtain all the information that was important for our own campaign and security, then dispatched him to the only perfect Communist paradise, as Karl had put it—hell! On that particular occasion, however, Schulze had a different idea and, just for the fun of it, I allowed him to have his way. Erich suggested that instead of executing the party cadres, we should hold a “panel discussion” with them in front of the whole village. We would discuss both ideology and politics. “The Communists have been talking to these people for years,” Schulze explained. “Everyone was obliged to listen but no one was ever permitted to ask impolite questions, or to oppose the agitators; the people could only bow to whatever they were told, accepting the party dogmas—criticizing nothing. Now they will have to listen to me too. Let the two tovariches partake in a truly democratic dialogue. We will permit them to say whatever they feel like saying, then we shall tell the people what we think of it.”
Eisner chuckled. “Are you planning to shoot it out with a provincial agitator? He will crack your arguments in no time, making you the laughingstock of the whole village.”
“Nonsense! All they can do is to parrot some hackneyed slogans.”
Eisner laughed. “That’s what you think, my friend, but they are professionals and whatever they parrot they will parrot it well. String them up and be done with it.”
“Nonsense!” Erich waved, dismissing Bernard’s suggestion. “Up ’til now we were killing them all. Now let us talk a bit—it might work.”
Riedl agreed. “They aren’t going to run away, Bernard, you can hang them later.”
He turned toward Pfirstenhammer. “What do you think of Schulze’s idea, Karl?”
“I am fascinated! Especially about finding out how much Erich knows about Communist ideology.”
Schulze ordered the troopers to untie the prisoners and the two were seated on an improvised bench made of empty crates and planks. We seated ourselves in a similar fashion. Erich’s “dialogue” was to be a welcome diversion from our dreary routine. The villagers, about one hundred men and women, had been requested to bring mats and sit down. Xuey explained to them briefly what we were up to, an explanation our prisoners acknowledged with a wry smile of contempt. Xuey and Suoi stood by to interpret for us.