My feet hurt, and my back never gives me a moment's peace. Writing is as I have found an activity draining, depleting, and infinitely interruptable. No sooner does a good sentence billow up to the mind's forefront, than some wretch appears at the door of my modest but comfortable retirement cottage in a sensible sector of Prince George's County. He is delivering an unwanted package, he is begging for food, he is looking for some phantom person represented by an illegible name scribbled on a dirty scrap of paper. I return to my desk, attempting to recapture the lost words, and the telephone goes off like an exploding shell. When I answer the demonic thing, a heavily accented voice inquires if I really do wish the delivery of twenty-four mushroom and anchovy pizzas.
And! At all hours a juvenile from the neighboring house, a once presentable house now gone sadly to seed, is likely to be throwing a tennis ball against the wall before my desk, retrieving the ball, hurling it again at my wall, so that a steady drumming of THUMP THUMP THUMP intercedes between me and my thoughts. The child's parents own no sense of decorum, duty, discipline, or neighborly feeling. On the one occasion I visited their pestiferous hovel, they greeted my complaints with jeers. It is, I am certain, from these pathetic folk that the pizza orders, etc, etc, originate. I hereby inscribe their name so that it may reverberate with shame: Dumky. Is this what we fought for, that a whey-faced, slat-sided, smudge-eyed spawn of the Dumkys is free to hurl a tennis ball at my modest dwelling? When a man is trying to write in here, a man already working against backache and sore feet, sweating over his words to make them memorable?
There it goes, the tennis ball. THUMP THUMP THUMP.
The reader will forgive the above outburst. It is this damnable subject that raises my ire and my blood pressure, not my squalid neighbors.
I heard from many of my confidants that Ransom and another officer were sent into the highlands to locate Bachelor and bring him, as they say, 'in from the cold.' They Who Must Not Be Named wished to question the man, but doomed their own venture by permitting word of Ransom's mission to reach Bachelor before the Captain did himself. This can happen in a thousand ways—a whisper in the wrong ear, an overseen cable, an ill-advised conversation in the officers' club. The results were foreseeable but tragic nonetheless.
After a difficult and dangerous journey, Ransom succeeded in locating the degenerate officer's secret encampment. I have heard differing versions of what he came upon, some of which I reject on grounds of sheer implausibility. I believe that Ransom and his fellow officer entered the camp and came upon a scene of mass carnage. Bodies of men and women littered the camp—their prey had fled.
What followed was another strange increment in the legend of Franklin Bachelor. Captain Ransom entered a roofless shed and discovered a Caucasian American male in the remains of a military uniform cradling the stripped and cleaned skull of an Asian female. This man, half-crazed with exhaustion and grief, declared that he was Franklin Bachelor. The skull was his wife's. He and his subordinate, he said, a Captain Bennington, had been away from the encampment when it had been overrun by the Vietcong who had been searching for him for years—the enemy had slaughtered more than half of his people, burned down the camp, and then
When Captain Ransom delivered his man to The Shadows, it was discovered that he was in reality the Captain Bennington supposed murdered by the VC. What had happened was that Franklin Bachelor had actually persuaded his subordinate to submit to interrogation and possible arrest in his place, while Bachelor himself fled into the jungle with the remnant of his wolf pack. Bennington was found to be hopelessly insane, and was confined to a military hospital, where I am sure he repines to this day for his lost commander.
The official story stops here. Yet an awkward question must be asked. How likely is it that there would be a VC assault on Bachelor's camp only a short time before the arrival of Captain Ransom? And that Bachelor would behave, in this case, as reported?
Here is what transpired. Bachelor knew that Captain Ransom was on his way to take him back to the United States for questioning. At that point he murdered his own followers. In cold blood, he dispatched those who could not keep up on a high-speed escape through rough terrain. Women. Children. The old and the weak, all were executed or mortally wounded, along with any able-bodied men who opposed Bachelor's scheme. Then Bachelor and his remaining men boiled the flesh off some of the bodies and made a last meal of their dead. I believe it iseven possible that Bachelor's people
Bachelor retained his core group of tribesmen, and I have no doubt that not a few of the spinning, whirling savages daubed in mud and covered with feathers who looted my orderly shelves at Camp White Star were among them. Those fellows, barbaric to the core, would be hard to kill and impossible to discourage. To this core group of fanatical savages he had added stray VC and other lawless bandits. They had armed and outfitted themselves so stealthily, and with such deadly force, that the Army that supported it never suspected its existence. What they had been looking for was another secret encampment, far enough north in the rugged, fog-shrouded terrain of I Corps to be safe from accidental discovery by conventional American troops and to be strategically well-positioned for intelligence purposes. Bachelor was now about to begin playing his most dangerous game.
His legend increased when he began again transmitting infallibly accurate reports of North Vietnamese troop movements from his newfound redoubt. To all intents and purposes, 'the Last Irregular' had indeed returned from the dead. His reports concerned the North Vietnamese divisions moving toward Khe Sanh and vicinity.
The following is a mere outline of the story of Khe Sanh for those unfamiliar with this unhappy episode. Special Forces set up a camp around a French Fort at Khe Sanh in 1964— CIDG, some say at its best. When its airfield became crucially important in 1965, the marines were sent in to Khe Sanh, and for a time shared it with Special Forces and their ragtag battalion of tribesmen. The marines gradually squeezed out the Green Berets, who were unused to dealing with the efficiency, discipline, and superior organization of the Gyrenes. The 'Bru' and their masters relocated in Lang Vei, where they built
Had Ransom succeeded in bringing Bachelor back to mainland America eight months before, he would have been rewarded with a promotion and a more significant post. Having failed, the Shadow Masters had relegated Ransom to a secondary post in I Corps, where his role would have been to ensure that his 'Bru' were instructed in matters of personal hygiene and rudimentary agriculture. Now enter Franklin Bachelor.
Some time after the Green Berets and their savages had fortified Lang Vei, the camp was bombed and strafed by a U.S. aircraft. The camp was destroyed, and many women and children killed. The explanation given was that the aircraft had become lost in the foggy mountains. This tale is patently false, though believed to this day. The true story is much worse than this invention of a confused pilot. This time, Bachelor had made a crucial error. The rogue major had long harbored an insane hatred for the Captain who had forced him to leave his own best camp, and provided false information that would lead to the destruction of the Special Forces camp. But the
By 1968, both Khe Sanh and the lesser-known Lang Vei were under perpetual siege. Then came the assault the world knows well—the North Vietnamese descended on tiny Lang Vei with tanks, troops, and mortars.
What is not known, because this information has been suppressed, is that Lang Vo, an otherwise insignificant
