we won’t be of much help. It will take us three to four days to reach the stockade.”
All the same we sent a message to the commander, asking him to stand fast. Without delay we headed back to base, where we could get the relief on the road.
We left Hanoi in a small convoy of trucks and jeeps, our customary way of leaving the city, to travel as far as it was reasonably safe to go on wheels. For some time I had been aware that our garrison was under constant enemy surveillance; when we moved, the Viet Minh knew about it. Therefore our measures of deception began from the moment we rolled through the gate. When our destination was somewhere southwest of Viet Tri, we departed toward the northwest; never taking the direct route but skirting or traversing the town, performing diversionary turns while the men in the last vehicle were constantly on watch for motor scooters, cycles, or even cars that seemed to follow the convoy. When a vehicle appeared suspicious we requested the nearest military checkpoint to stop and entertain our unwelcome escort for some time.
On that particular day, Schulze requested our driver to stop the jeep at Suoi’s place. “I won’t be a minute!” he excused himself and raced up the stairs. Five minutes later he returned, hand in hand with the girl. “She’s always wanted to come along,” he stated flatly, and before I could open my mouth, he helped her aboard and off we raced after the convoy.
“The headhunters plus one,” he stated flatly. I glanced at Eisner, who seemed not the least concerned.
“Did you know about this, er… arrangement of Erich’s?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he replied, “the whole” battalion knew about it—except you.”
Suoi was probably the smartest-looking “Legionnaire” in the entire outfit. She was wearing custom-tailored battle fatigues complete with belt, a pair of miniaturized paratroop boots, tropical helmet, and a small shoulder bag. Obviously Schulze and Suoi had been plotting the coup for some time. During the past few weeks the girl had told me occasionally that she wanted to come along on our next expedition, but I had never taken her seriously. She had said that she did not feel like sitting at home for weeks, that she wanted to do something useful. “After all,” she had said, “the battalion has adopted me!” Now there she was, braids, ribbons, battle fatigues and all, casting bewitching smiles and fluttering eyelashes at me, pleading in a tone of mock consternation, “I hope you don’t mind my coming?” I felt like answering, “Like hell I don’t mind,” for I had enough problems without the additional worry about Suoi’s welfare, but said instead, “Well, Suoi, we are not going by jeep all the way, you know.”
“Oh, I know that,” she replied quickly. “I grew up in the hills and I am not afraid of walking.”
“She wanted to come,” Erich insisted. “She wanted to help us.”
“And naturally you complied.”
“What else could he do?” Eisner cut in. “Suoi’s eyes would melt a tank turret.”
“I will take care of her, don’t worry,” Erich reassured me.
“You are crazy… taking a young girl on a murder trip.”
“Hell! How about all those girls with the Viet Minh, Hans?”
“They are trained guerrillas, Erich. Your Suoi can’t even fire a bloody gun.”
Schulze’s eyes kindled. “Are you so sure?… Hans, you will be surprised.”
“Are you telling me—”
“Wait and see, commander sir!” I saw all right. The convoy stopped at a river to let the engines cool. As the men settled down to eat, Erich walked up to the embankment and erected a small pyramid of empty tin cans. Taking a submachine gun from the jeep, he handed it to Suoi. “Now watch the show.” He winked at me.
With four short bursts, Suoi demolished the pyramid, sending the cans topsy-turvy into the river. Only two of them remained standing.
“Voila!” Erich exclaimed, casting a triumphant glance at me. He took the gun from the girl and handed her a rifle. “Now get the remaining ones, Suoi.”
Holding the rifle in the best professional manner, she took aim and fired twice. One of the cans went flying, the other one bounced and toppled over—a glancing shot. A third bullet then struck home and flung the tin into the river The troops cheered openly. There was amusement in Eisner’s eyes and Riedl chuckled. “So much for our defenseless little ward,” he said.
Suoi turned halfway toward me, holding the rifle in a casual manner. She was blushing but held her chin up; her eyelashes flickered in what Karl used to call “a starry look of the first magnitude.”
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
