never see, but his children might.
He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and his life did not particularly matter, he had given himself up to struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier's life:
1) Defend the Fatherland, fight and sacrifice myself for the People's Revolution.
2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.
3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.
4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary Army.
5) Carry out other missions of the Army.
6) Help consolidate internal unity.
8) Preserve and save public properties.
9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.
10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.
All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at Kham Due, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in order to take more land before documents were signed.
Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.
Slow plan.
Quick advance.
Strong fight.
Strong assault.
Strong pursuit.
Quick clearance.
Quick withdrawal.
He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7, knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an example of one of the camps.
Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.
The column moved in the classical structure of an army on the quick, derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history since Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the world on that principle.
So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men units per flank, he had his second best people, also sappers, at the point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.
Fortunately, it was cool, the rain was no impediment.
The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited because the weather was holding, low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white phosphorous.
That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It meant nothing to them to burn his people like grasshoppers plaguing a harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears nothing.
Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old.
Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris: the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire, it was there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the French have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under the eye of God? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright Indochinese like himself from their yellow ness
But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had I known how hard it would be?
Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could understand no other way, he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and rescue them with their mighty air power
Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic God from them, moved south and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the godless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult's leader, Ba Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by Indochinese. It sickened him.
Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and beautiful women, it was a city of corruption,
