he first time you met a member of the Vietcong there was a sharp sense of disappointment. He was not, it turned out, very different; he was simply another Vietnamese. When you saw him he was usually either kneeling and firing at you, or he had just been captured—or, more often than not, he was dead: the bodies were always lined up, their feet in an orderly row. The guerrilla wore little, perhaps a simple peasant pajama suit, perhaps only shorts. He was slim and wiry, and his face would remind you of your interpreter or of that taxi driver who drove you to My Tho. Only the haircut was different, very thin along the sides, and very long on top and in front. It was a bad haircut, and like the frailness of the uniform and the thin wallet with perhaps only a few pictures of some peasant woman, it made the enemy human. But one's sympathy did not last long; this was the same face that had been seen by the outnumbered defenders of some small outpost before it was overrun.
There were not many operations in which the Vietcong were caught; few prisoners were taken in this war. One of the few exceptions to this that I ever observed took place in April 1963, when I accompanied the new armed-helicopter units in the upper Camau peninsula on what were known as Eagle flights. An Eagle flight was risky business; it meant that a small number of elite troops circled above the paddies in the choppers, looking for likely targets. When an objective was sighted the helicopters dropped out of the sky, virtually on top of a hamlet, and the troops made a quick search, probing and scouting. If the enemy was there, other regular units, waiting in the rear with other helicopters, would be thrown in quickly. But dropping swiftly out of the sky and exploring the unknown with a handful of troops was sometimes terrifying; the helicopters have the visibility of a press box, but you were watching a war instead of a football game. When you plunged earthward, little men sometimes rushed to different positions, kneeled and started firing at the press box while your own tracers sought them out.
On that day in April the 21st Recon Company, a particularly good outfit composed largely of troops who had fought with the Vietminh during the Indochina war, was with us. We were scouting a Vietcong battalion, moving along a line of villages which we thought the battalion had been using as its main line of communication in that region. But this was the upper Camau, almost completely enemy territory, where one could find a Vietcong squad in virtually every village.
It is perhaps deceptive to use a word like ''battalion'' here; when such a unit attacked a given point it might number three hundred men, but immediately afterward it would break up into small groups slipping into neighboring villages and awaiting the signal for the next operation. A single large force would make too good a target for the Government; besides, by splitting up, more men could indoctrinate more peasants, and no single village would have to take on the task of feeding three hundred extra mouths.
At about eight-thirty in the morning we saw some movement in a village below, followed by a
few light crackles around us. It was ground fire; the bait had been taken. We came in low over the village and saw some men scurrying to positions. Three of the helicopters, including our own, dropped their troop load while the others circled and strafed some of the positions. We were making our advance on the treeline under fire when we saw a man in a black suit desperately running across the open field. It was the dry season and the fields were covered with sun-caked mud. Suddenly a helicopter descended almost on top of the man; he stopped and held up his hands. The Vietnamese commander ran over to him. There was no weapon on this Vietcong; neither was there any of the bowing or scraping that local guerrillas posing as farmers sometimes employed.
The captured man was angry and defiant, and at first a little scared as well—until he saw me and spat at me. The commander slapped his face very hard and said something in Vietnamese. Later I was told that the captain had said to the prisoner, ''The Americans are very kind. They do not kill, and they are always telling us not to kill you, but I am not so kind and I will kill you. You will see.'' The interpreter thought this was very funny. ''You know, the enemy takes these young boys and they tell them how fierce you Americans are, and so they are all convinced that the Americans will eat their hearts for breakfast as soon as they are captured. The captain is right; you have no real taste for war.'' The Vietnamese commander interrogated the captured guerrilla and told us that he was well indoctrinated. ''They are taught well to hate,'' he said a little apologetically.
It is true that the Vietcong were better at hating than our Vietnamese, though at times Government troops could be very cruel. Once, south of Bac Lieu, Vietnamese Marines had fought a particularly bitter battle but had captured a number of Vietcong prisoners. According to a Vietnamese friend of mine who was there, the enemy were very cocky and started shouting anti-American slogans and Vietnamese curses at their captors. The Marines, who had lost an officer that day and were in no mood to be called lackeys of the Americans, simply lined up the seventeen guerrillas and shot them down in cold blood. ''They had to believe their own propaganda,'' my friend said.
The captain said that the guerrilla was probably from an elite battalion operating in the area. ''I think maybe he was a squad leader.'' Then the officer turned and spoke briefly and intensely to the guerrilla. He was telling the prisoner that they would kill him unless he talked—and perhaps they would kill him by throwing him out of the helicopter. ''The captain is very smart,'' said the interpreter. ''It will be the guerrilla's first helicopter ride and he will be very scared.'' They tied up the guerrilla and placed him in the helicopter (later we were to find out that he had indeed been frightened but did not crack), and the captain and I walked back across the open field to the village. We could hear a good deal of firing, and as always I hunched over as much as I could, but the Vietnamese officer strolled casually. He carried a small swagger stick, and he looked as if he were a large landowner inspecting his plantation. I was impressed.
By the time we reached the village the troops had rounded up two more guerrillas. They did not even pretend to be farmers; they had not surrendered until they began to take fire not only from the ground, but from some of the nine other helicopters in the area. The captain was convinced that there were other Vietcong somewhere in the village, that there had been at least five or six of the enemy stationed there. But he also suspected that the others had excellent hiding places and that we would not find them. ''They are probably dug in under this village somewhere,'' he said. He checked his watch. Time was important because the helicopters had been aloft for a long while. He told his men that they had five more minutes to search the village, then turned to the prisoners and started to talk to them. One, about nineteen years old, gave him a look of defiance and turned away, but the other, who might have been twenty-five, gave the captain a curious look. ''Maybe,'' the captain said later, ''he is a little more tired of the war and the propaganda. We shall see. The other will not talk.'' He was right; the next morning the elder one confessed that they were members of a battalion which had hit two outposts in the Camau the week before and had come here to rest. This guerrilla was tired; he had been fighting too long—for seven years—and he wanted to leave the Army.
At the appointed minute the troops were back. They had found an American carbine, and the captain was surprised because it was more than he had expected. The weapon had been found in a false thatch in a roof. The captain was pleased. ''Good troops,'' he told me. ''When they search they want to find something, and when they fight they want to kill.''
Then the helicopters returned and we all jumped in and prepared for the next assault.
The next two villages produced only some crude grenades made by an old farmer. ''The local guerrilla,'' said the Vietnamese captain. These were the lowest of the three types of Vietcong: they farmed in the day and fought at night, and they had the worst weapons. When I first came to Vietnam their arms were all homemade; by the time I left they were using French equipment and even some American M-1's. But even in April 1963, in a village where there were no other weapons, a homemade grenade or a rusty rifle had great power.
The local guerrillas were a vital part of the Vietcong apparatus. They gave the village a sense of Communist continuity, they could provide intelligence on Government activities and serve as a local security force for a traveling commissar, or they could guide the professional Vietcong troops. This last was particularly important to the success and mobility of the guerrillas; everywhere they went they had trained, local guides to steer them through seemingly impenetrable areas. Because of these local men the enemy's troops could often move twenty-five miles in five hours—which meant that a raiding force attacking at night was almost impossible to find by daylight. These local guerrillas were also part of the propaganda network, for in a village they might be the only ones with a radio. (Sometimes it was only the shell of a radio, but the local man would pretend he could hear news and would give out information of Vietcong victories.)
We flew back to the base to refuel, and then returned to the area. Shortly before noon we hit pay dirt. Out of one village came a flock of Vietcong, running across the paddies, and there was intense fire from the treeline. While five of our ships emptied their troops, the rest of the choppers strafed the area. Soon the guerrillas broke from their positions and ran for a nearby canal, where they might find hiding places. We came hurtling down on them at a hundred miles an hour, just a few feet off the ground. We were still drawing fire, but it was more sporadic now.
We bore down on one fleeing Vietcong. The paddy's surface was rough and his run was staggered, like that of a good but drunken broken-field runner against imaginary tacklers. We came closer and closer; inside the helicopter I could almost hear him gasping for breath, and as we bore down I could see the heaving of his body. It was like watching a film of one of your own nightmares, but in this case we were the pursuers rather than the pursued. The copilot fired his machine guns but missed, and the man kept going. Then there was a flash of orange and a blast of heat inside the ship, and the helicopter heaved from the recoil of its rockets. When they exploded the man fell. He lay still as we went over him, but when we turned he scrambled to his feet, still making for the canal, now only about fifty yards away. While we circled and swept toward him again he was straining for the bank, like a runner nearing the finish line. We had one last shot at him. Our copilot fired one last burst of the machine gun as the guerrilla made a desperate surge. The bullets cut him down as he reached the canal, and his body skidded on the hard bank as he collapsed.
We turned and circled again. All over the paddies helicopters were rounding up Vietcong soldiers. We landed near the village which other members of the Recon company were searching. The troops were gentler with the population than most ARVN soldiers I had seen; in front of one hut a medic was giving aid to a wounded guerrilla.
''I have never taken this many prisoners before,'' the Vietnamese captain said. There were sixteen of them. He turned to one of his men. ''Show the American the poor little farmer,'' he said. They brought in a wiry young man. ''This one says he is a farmer,'' the officer said. He pushed the young man in front of me and flipped the prisoner's palms over. ''He has very soft hands for a farmer,'' the captain said. ''He has the hands of a bar girl in Saigon. He is not a very good soldier yet. In a few months, though, he might have been very good.''
The prisoner was beginning to tremble. The conversation in a foreign language obviously frightened him, and I was sure that this was why the captain was using English. I asked the captain what kind of enemy we had surprised. ''Territorial,'' he said. This was the middle rank of Vietcong guerrillas; we called them provincial guerrillas. They operated in groups of up to one hundred and were often attached to the hard-core units to beef up their strength for a major attack; they would also hit smaller outposts.
''The leadership was not very good,'' the captain said. ''If it had been a hard-core unit, there would have been more fighting and more dying. I think we surprised them.''
Before we took off again, I walked over to the canal. The little soldier's body had actually crossed the finish line; his shoulder was over the bank, his blood was still running into the canal and there was a look of agony on his face.
The helicopter pilots and the Vietnamese captain decided that they had enough fuel for one more strike. The pilots were in very good humor, pleased with the day's bag. As we skimmed over the countryside once more, they boasted of how they had made the Air Force look sick again. There was a running battle between the helicopter pilots, who were Army officers, and the Air Force over the respective merits of the helicopter and the fighter plane. In particular, the feeling was very strong between Major Ivan Slavich, commander of the armed helicopter company, and Major Bill Burgin, who was the Air Force liaison man in the Twenty-first Division. Burgin called himself ''the only law south of the Mekong River,'' and was distinguished by his violent hatred of both the Vietcong and helicopter pilots.
''Hey,'' said Slavich now, ''go back to Bac Lieu and ask your friend Burgin if he's got a T-28 that can land in a paddy, capture some Communists and then take off again.''
We hit one more village and encountered no resistance. But as I was walking toward the treeline I suddenly heard shouts and cries all around me. I was terrified, for I was unarmed and about fifty yards from the nearest soldier. Suddenly from deep bomb shelters all around me more than twenty women and children came up; they were wailing and pointing at me. Clearly, they were scared. Judging from its defensive preparations, this was a Vietcong village, and for years these people had heard propaganda about vicious Americans like me. As far as I was concerned they were dangerous too, and we stood looking at each other in mutual fear.
I yelled out to Major James Butler, asking him what to do. Butler suggested that I try to give a good impression of Americans. ''Protect our image,'' he said. Later he congratulated me on being the first New York Times correspondent ever to capture a bunch of Vietcong women. I gladly turned them over to the Vietnamese captain.
The troops were remarkably restrained in what was obviously a Vietcong village. At times the quick change in Vietnamese behavior was amazing. One moment they could be absolutely ruthless; the next, they might be talking to a prisoner as if he were an old friend. The enemy was different, however; I was told by those who had been captured by them during the Indochina war that they were not so tolerant. This was hardly surprising; much emphasis was placed in their indoctrination on teaching them to hate. They were the have-nots fighting the haves, and even after capture their feelings rarely changed.
We flew back to Bac Lieu. It had been a good day. There had been few Government losses, and there was a chance that from all those prisoners we might learn something important. Everyone was tired and relaxed and happy. If nothing else, the day seemed to prove the value of the Eagle flights. Only Mert Perry of Time, who had also come along to observe the new strategy, seemed a bit depressed. It had been a good day, he agreed, and in one way the Government had done very well. But after all, he pointed out, it was a pretty limited business, and in the long run it might backfire. There was no follow-up; no one would be in those villages tonight working with the people. These peasants had seen helicopters and they knew that Americans flew the helicopters; they had seen killing and they had seen their men disappear. The conclusions that the villagers would draw were obvious—particularly if the Vietcong were there to help them. Every man taken today, Mert said, probably had a brother or a son or a brother-in-law who would take his place after today.
We listened to Perry in silence, for we knew that he was right. The Government had scored a quick victory, but in Vietnam, victories were not always what they seemed. It was an endless, relentless war to which ordinary military rules did not apply. We went to bed that night a little less confident, knowing that although for the moment the enemy was paying a higher price, he was still out there somewhere in the darkness, living closer to the peasants and ready to seize the initiative once more.
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