killed by mortar splinters, others had died in hand-to-hand combat. Near the mess hall we discovered another dead officer.
A Viet Minh unit strong enough to exterminate a garrison of three hundred well-armed Legionnaires must have consisted of at least six hundred men. Nam Hoa was known to have commanded a group of about two hundred guerrillas, but he could have ganged up with a few local units who were equipped with mortars. We counted over a hundred spots where mortar shells had exploded. Coming from far inland, Nam Hoa could not have possessed such powerful artillery.
“There is only one man in the district who commands so many mortars,” Xuey explained. “Trengh. He also commands three hundred men. Maybe even more. His village is about twelve miles from here, on the far side of the hills.”
He showed us the direction.
We had heard of Trengh before. He had been a Hanoi police officer who, conspiring with the Viet Minh in 1949, had engineered a daring terrorist raid on a police station and had assisted the guerrillas in freeing fifty prisoners. With that coup to his credit, Trengh deserted to the Viet Minh. Ever since then his head carried a reward of 75,000 piasters dead or alive. The French had also, posted a reward of 100,000 piasters for Nam Hoa, not a very tempting reward for such an important guerrilla leader. Such financial “courtesies” were mutual. Every member of my battalion had been similarly “price-tagged” dead or alive by the Viet Minh or by the Chinese.
At the entrance to the canteen we counted sixteen European Legionnaires and a young corporal. The corporal’s eyes were open, gazing into the sun; under his hand lay a pistol which the enemy had overlooked. The magazine of the pistol was empty. The mess hall looked as though a hurricane had gone through it. Chairs, benches, tables were overturned or wrecked. Broken glass littered the floor. The smell of blood and decomposition was strong. More men lay under the debris, behind the counter and the overturned tables which they had used for cover. The walls and doors were riddled by hundreds of bullets. There must have been desperate combat inside the building, with the adversaries shooting it out at close range. My men removed twenty or more bodies from the mess hall alone, among them many Europeans. More corpses sprawled outside the building in and about a gaping hole in the wall. Still wearing their white aprons, two of the six cooks had been pressed head first into their ovens. Since, by rule, all open fires had to be extinguished while under attack, the corpses were not burned. Even so we found it a macabre bit of Red humor. The debacle culminated in the sleeping quarters, where the remaining troops had been mercilessly slaughtered. Eighty men altogether. The barracks had been stripped bare. Blankets, sheets, even some of the mattresses had been carried away. The underground ammunition depots were empty.
We stood in sullen silence, watching the demolition men as they moved from corpse to corpse looking for bombs. The bodies which had been checked were carried out to join the long lines of corpses laid out outside the palisade. Eisner dispatched two hundred men to dig a huge grave for the fallen garrison. None of the corpses wore identity tags. The brave men would probably rest as “unknown soldiers.”
Eighteen trucks and jeeps in the parking lot were burned-out steel skeletons; four 75 field howitzers were still hitched to four of the CMC’s—wrecked, but even so we could see that none of the great guns had ever been fired.
The wind wheel, which used to pump water from the well, had been knocked down. The pump mechanism was demolished. The well itself appeared intact and flashlights revealed water thirty feet below. Sergeant Krebitz examined, the well, searching for corpses, but found none. I became even more suspicious, for whenever the Viet Minh seemed to spare something important, it did so on purpose. We became doubly alert.
Had the terrorists poisoned the well? Bidding us wait, Xuey left for a nearby river and brought back a few frogs and a fish, which he then settled in a can of water drawn from the well. Ten minutes later the creatures were still alive and obviously not affected by any poison. “The well is not poisoned,” Xuey stated, “but there might be something else to look for.”
He examined the surrounding ground, then suddenly called our attention to some brownish stains which Sergeant Krebitz thought was human excrement. Moments later Pfirstenhammer found a pair of buckets with a length of rope attached. The buckets were covered with refuse. We examined the ground between the latrines and the well and spotted more bits of filth. The rest of the story was easy to conclude. The enemy had spoiled the well with refuse. Another Viet Minh joke! I decided that the next macabre joke should be played by us. I remembered having seen a small sack of arsenic in the partly destroyed food storage. The cooks had probably used it to fight rats and other pests. I sent a man to fetch the bag.
“We will preserve those poisonous pegs,” I told Eisner. “We will also take a water sample from the well and photograph the whole area, the buckets, the refuse on the ground… just in case the Reds accuse us of starting chemical warfare.”
They all turned toward me sharply. “What do you mean by chemical warfare?” Riedl queried with a puzzled expression.
I lifted the bag of poison. “This stuff here, Helmut. For if we find the camp of those bastards, I am going to fill their water with rat poison, morphine, and whatever else Sergeant Zeisl might have in excess. We will see how the Viet Minh appreciate that.”
“How about making a few cans of mustard gas?” Pfirstenhammer asked, lighting his pipe. “Its formula is very simple.”
He rattled off the ingredients. “When we return to Hanoi, I will look for the basic chemicals and next time we can mix for the Reds a real cocktail, Hans.”
10. WITH BAYONETS AND ARSENIC
We computed the possible enemy losses by fixing the number of spots where blood had been found but with no corpse to account for it. Karl and Erich were able to establish eighty-two positive and about the same number of likely places where guerrillas might have fallen. More should have fallen outside the stockade, while storming the compound. Schulze calculated over two hundred Viet Minh casualties, including the wounded.
Schulze had other computations as well. “Do you know what?” he exclaimed suddenly, glancing up from his notes. “The terrorists carried away their dead and wounded, which means that at least two hundred or more men transported nothing but corpses and the wounded.”
Before he came to the point, I already grasped the implications of what he was saying.
“How many people do you think were necessary to remove all the weapons, the ammunition, the food stores, blankets, and God knows what else, apart from carrying their own equipment?”
“Over a thousand! Thirteen hundred might be a close bet.”
“Precisely!” Erich agreed. “Nevertheless we know that no Viet Minh unit of such proportions is operating anywhere in the province or Xuey would know about them. I think we had better start looking for additional clues.”
“What clues?” Karl asked.
“Footprints! Those of women and children from ten years upward. The guerrillas alone could never have taken everything that has been removed.”
Shading his eyes he surveyed the neighboring hills. “I think somewhere in those hills we are going to find a guerrilla graveyard and the place where the population of a whole village camped out while waiting for the terrorists to seize the fort.”
I could only agree with Schulze’s reasoning. None of the corpses had been stripped naked—a frequent terrorist practice—probably because of the presence of women and children in the stockade.
“Well, gentlemen,” Erich concluded, “neither women nor children can walk very far laden with crates and sacks. I think we will discover the responsible party in a not too distant settlement, and the Viet Minh camp won’t be far from it either.”
“Trengh’s village!” Xuey added. “That is where we should look.”
I radioed a brief report to Hanoi, suggesting the dispatch of engineers to rebuild the stockade. I waited only for the signal of acknowledgment, then sent the coded signal “unit under enemy attack” and cut the set before any instructions could come through.
“The colonel is going to be mad. We are pulling that on him much too frequently,” Eisner said.
