grabbing at a bamboo rafter that supported the roof. His eyes seething with hatred, his fists clenched, he replied defiantly, “You may take our weapons but we shall have new ones before the sun rises.”
Without warning, Sergeant Krebitz struck him with the back of his hand. The man toppled over a low bench and crashed to the floor with his lips ripped. “Before the sun rises you will be a dead hero, you scum,” Krebitz growled.
“Take them out!” I ordered the troopers. “The kids too.”
As they were being led out, Pfirstenhammer handed a length of bamboo to a trooper and pointed out the man Sergeant Krebitz had struck. “Give him a dozen strokes for the good of his soul.”
Krebitz was already pulling away mats and boxes, searching for trapdoors. Outside the civilians were led to the paddies, where the men had to lie down with their hands extended, facing the water; the women and old people were permitted to sit, but also facing the paddies.
From down the road came Riedl. “Anything there?” I asked him.
“Guns and grenades,” he replied, “and plenty of them.”
“Keep looking.”
More people were brought forward and taken to the rice fields. Ransacking the huts, my troopers dumped weapons and ammo on the road. The local terrorists had an incredible selection of weapons ranging from vintage muskets and swords to submachine guns. In one of the huts, Sergeant Schenk seized a bow with twenty-six arrows, every one of them poisoned. The owner was taken to the woods and executed immediately.
Sergeant Krebitz selected weapons and ammunition that we could use, and the rest of the terrorist hardware was taken to the trucks, marked for destruction. “Let’s have a look at those trucks,” Schulze suggested. “I wonder where they got them?” We found Eisner already busy examining the vehicles. “Look at this,” he said, “Soviet Zises with Chinese plates.”
“Don’t tell me they came all the way from China.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.”
“There is no road,” Erich interposed.
“Not that we know of,” Eisner agreed. “But keep searching. We might find a couple of tanks too.”
Beneath one of the dwellings, Pfirstenhammer discovered a large underground shelter packed with guns and ammo. “Mortar shells,” Xuey interpreted the inscription.
“Over one hundred crates, each containing eighteen shells,” Karl remarked. “Two thousand rounds.”
“You had better get busy,” I told Sergeant Krebitz. He nodded and began to work, arranging primers and fuses. I ordered Schenk to march the villagers down the road. “Half a mile will do. We are going to blast the dump along with the trucks.”
While Krebitz and Gruppe Drei mined the dump and the trucks, Corporal Altreiter and fifty men gathered foodstuffs: rice, bundles of dried fish, fruits, and sugar cane were distributed among the troops. Half an hour later we evacuated the settlement.
“They will see the blast from Peking,” Riedl remarked, waving a thumb toward the village.
“Let them!” Pfirstenhammer shrugged.
Schenk and company were waiting on the road with the prisoners. Krebitz glanced at his watch. “In three minutes…”
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
