contained and for what purpose. “Shall I proceed?” Zeisl asked grimly.
I nodded. “Make it quick.”
The troops began to gather. Some of them bandaged, others uninjured. No one spoke; all stood in bitter silence. Riedl kneeled down beside a wounded comrade to wipe his perspiring forehead and to shoo off the flies. Zeisl filled a syringe with a lethal concentration of morphine. Noy, who was watching the preparations, and thinking that all we wanted to do was ease the suffering, suddenly bent down for the empty vial which Sergeant Zeisl had discarded. She looked at it, then turned toward me with her eyes wide open.
“Sergeant do wrong!” she exclaimed pointing at Zeisl. “Gives them too much. The men die. He is mistaken.”
“He is not mistaken, Noy,” Pfirstenhammer drew her aside gently. “We cannot carry them and we cannot leave them here either. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” she answered and her eyes began to fill. “You kill them!” She looked around bewildered, looking at Karl, at Eisner, at me. We all averted our eyes. Noy began to sob. “You cruel people… you very, very cruel people.”
“Come, Noy,” said Karl, placing an arm around her shoulders. “You should not look.”
“You are worse than the Viet Minh,” she cried, “for even they help their wounded.”
“We cannot help them, Noy. You are a nurse, you should know better.”
“You why not call helicopters?”
“It would take hours before the copters could come. Do you think they can live that long? Or that we can live that long? The Viet Minh will gather more men, then attack again and again.”
“You are not God,” she sobbed, “you cannot give or take life.”
Karl led her away gently.
Sergeant Zeisl delivered the injections, replaced the needle in a small vial of alcohol, and put it away in his kit. He turned. Facing the six men on the ground, he raised his hand for a last salute.
“Attention!” I commanded. The ring of troops froze.
“Salute!” And as Sergeant Krebitz proceeded with his gloomy task of collecting identity tags, watches, wallets, and pocketbooks from the men who were leaving us forever, the troops began to hum, then sing in a low tone, the old , German soldier’s song, “Wacht am Rhein.”
I read their names from the list in my hand: Heinz Auer, Rudolf Forcher, Leopold Ambichl, Josef Bauer, Josef Edler, Anton Gebauer, and twenty more. Although the Free World has yet to honor them, they had fought the enemy of all mankind for ten long years and in battlefields ten thousand miles apart. The same enemy in different uniforms, in a different disguise. They had done more to preserve freedom and civilization than many much- decorated generals and celebrated statesmen. Only they received no medals for their deeds. Not even a decent Memento mori! They were forgotten and forsaken heroes. We could not give them as much as a decent burial. We placed them in a deep crevasse and blew rocks over the makeshift tomb. A single line in German was inscribed on a jagged boulder: “Deutschland-Poland-Russland-Nord Afrika-Indochina 1939-1951, 27 comrades.”
We had no time to count the enemy dead but they must have numbered several hundred. Removing the weapons, grenades, ammunition, and papers of those who had fallen on or immediately below the ridge, we descended the southern slope, still under sporadic enemy fire. But the very boulders which had sheltered the guerrillas before now provided us with cover. Keeping low so as not to silhouette ourselves against the moonlit sky, the battalion descended. Covered by the MG’s of Gruppe Drei we entered the woods, and followed a path which we sighted and compass-marked from the ridge.
A few hundred yards inside the forest we passed a small clearing, but as we penetrated deeper and deeper, the forest became thicker. The trail led straight toward Muong Son, but that was precisely the place where I no longer wanted to go. The enemy seemed well informed about our destination and that concentration of Viet Minh troops below the ridge was the very last “coincidence” I was willing to digest.
We were moving deep within enemy-controlled territory and far from French fortifications or patrol routes. We could march without fearing mines or even traps; we could even use our flashlights, shielded with green plastic. My idea was to advance as far as possible, then rest for the remaining hours of the night. At dawn I intended to leave the path and to move west, penetrating still deeper into the Viet Minh “hinterland,” seeking a favorable spot to vanish into the jungle. As we had often done we would cut our own trail, starting a few hundred yards from the regular path without being connected to it.
We had, in the course of months, cut several secret trails in the guerrilla-held areas. Since our routes had no connection with the existing paths, it was very difficult for the enemy to detect them. Arriving at an existing path we never continued directly opposite but fifty paces to the left, or to the right. In each section my men left a few innocent-looking objects to serve as “markers”—a casually bent bough tied with threads, a discarded tin holding a few cigarettes, an old lighter, or something similar. The disappearance of the marker would tell us immediately that strangers had come across our trails. Naturally no guerrilla would ignore a lighter or a fountain pen on a tree stump.
Having marched for over two hours without finding a suitable place for camping out, Sergeant Zeisl suggested that we should stop because of our wounded comrades. “We will have to remove two bullets tomorrow,” he reminded me. (Two of the men were marching with bullets in their flesh.) “They have lost much blood and need a rest.”
I decided to camp down where we were. Eisner dispatched advance and rear guards to cover the trail with machine guns. Sooner or later the enemy would catch up with us.
“Change the sentries as frequently as possible, so that everyone can have some sleep,” I told Bernard.
At dawn two platoons went up and down the trail to plant mines and primed grenades triggered with boughs or trip wires. Another group advanced a mile to discard cigarette butts, empty tins, and other “evidence” of our presence far beyond the point where we intended to leave the trail. A hundred yards inside the woods the trailblazers began to cut a new path. Very cautiously, careful not to leave tracks or break branches, the troops left the trail. I was confident that the guerrillas would bypass the place. Discovering our planted evidence farther up, they could easily march headlong into our mines.
Around ten A.M. we stopped at a shallow creek to cook a meal and to attend the wounded. With the help of the girls, Sergeant Zeisl extracted the two bullets and changed the bandages of the others. I thought it was time to give the troops a well-deserved rest.
“We will camp out here until everyone is fit again,” I told Eisner. For a moment he looked surprised.
“It might be a week, Hans… or even more.”
“So what?”
“You are forgetting about action Transit.”
“To hell with action Transit,” I growled, massaging my aching temples. My head was throbbing like a steam engine and I could imagine how the two men with bullets just extracted from their flesh must have felt. “What if we blast a few wretched Viet Minh convoys? It won’t stop the war. They can wait.”
I swept an arm about the woods. “This is a good place. We have ample shade, water, and we are far from villages and trails. The enemy has no idea where we are. A week later we may hit them like a bolt out of the clear sky.”
I lowered myself to the ground with my back against a tree and closed my eyes. “We need a rest, Bernard. Especially the wounded ones, including me. I am weary.”
Eisner nodded. “I will give the word to build shelters,” he said.
“Do that, Bernard—but tell the men not to make much noise.”
We were to camp along the creek for eight days. By the afternoon we had a triple row of small huts, made of branches and leaves, on either side of the creek. Suoi and the nurses were presented with a cozy little hut, “furnished” with love and appreciation. It even had beds—thick layers of dry leaves, covered with towels, in place of mattresses—and a table. In order to insure their comfort and privacy, Sergeant Krebitz and a few men from Gruppe Drei built a bathing hut for the girls right in the creek. They had become very popular with the troops who kept referring to them only as “our angels,” not only because the girls cared for the injured ones with tender zeal and were always ready to help and never complained of hardship or fatigue, but also because their very presence, their cheerfulness and ever-present smiles, seemed to uplift everyone’s spirit.
Game appeared to be plentiful in the area. Carrying the silencer-equipped rifles, our Abwehrkommando left for short hunting trips every day and brought back deer and wild boar. Xuey and the girls prepared wonderful native
