In 1968, the war was at its height. Fighting was still in progress that had begun during the Tet Offensive earlier in the year (see my earlier post, “Cho Lon.”) That offensive was the massive North Vietnamese/Viet Cong effort which threatened even Saigon itself, including the American Embassy, and began to swing American public opinion against the war.
I’d been out of the Marine Corps a year and a half, and that summer was between my junior and senior years at Colorado College. Jim Martin and I went to Southeast Asia as student journalists.
These two stories are from my week-long visit that summer to a US Special Forces camp in the Vietnamese highlands, near Vietnam’s borders with Cambodia and Laos. This was where I met Krip, and where I watched as his body was carried into the dispensary where I was helping tend the wounded. This first part describes the camp, and the people who inhabited it.
Mangbuk
1. The Camp
In late June I went to a Special Forces colonel, showed him my journalist’s credential, and asked him to send me to the most remote outpost he could think of. The colonel was busy. He looked for a moment at the map on his operations board with little flags representing friendly and enemy units, and spoke to an aide: "Send him to Mangbuk."
The tiny, toylike Piper took off from Kontum and crossed unbroken jungle until we came over a clearing with several long, very low, tin‑roofed buildings surrounded by earth‑and‑log revetments. The level dirt space to one side of the camp turned out to be the airstrip.
The pilot, with more brutal ability than grace, dumped the Piper on its ear and we plummeted steeply down to the strip. "Comin' in too low over the jungle is a good way to get shot down," he explained as he was climbing out of the cockpit.
The airstrip was the camp's lifeline, with journalists its least typical cargo. (A few days later, I would watch from the far side of the airstrip as the "A" team's resupply chopper landed and disgorged, among other "necessities," two young Vietnamese prostitutes whose ao dais - the long, flowing silk garment traditionally worn by Vietnamese women - flashed like rare yellow and red urban orchids through the cloud of hot dust raised above the airstrip by the chopper's rotor wash.)
The camp at Mangbuk was a few kilometers east and a little north of the joining of the borders of Cambodia, Laos, and the Republic of Viet Nam. From there it was a half hour by spotter plane to Kontum, and a shorter hop farther south from there to Pleiku, which was II Corps headquarters. Saigon was a distant place, seldom spoken of.
Mangbuk was home and base of operations for a Special Forces "A" team: 2 officers, a team sergeant, 2 weapons men, 2 medics, 2 radio operators, an intelligence sergeant, and a demolitions specialist and engineer. The objective of an "A" Team operation was to provide a nucleus of specially trained and equipped officers and non‑commissioned officers as a professional focus for the activities of indigenous paramilitary forces. Such forces were called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups: "CIDG" for short.
In the Vietnamese highlands, most CIDG groups were composed of Montagnards, the aboriginal hill people who lived there. The particular tribe of Montagnards who lived around Mangbuk and who comprised the CIDG there were the Sedang.
The Sedang, like the other Montagnards, were short, dark brown people who lived in small huts of poles and woven sticks in jungle clearings. They had traditionally made their livelihood by hunting and by making war on other tribes; in 1968 many of them lived on the salaries (about $21 a month for privates) paid them by the U.S. government, or by the Saigon government with U.S. money. The Sedang religion saw the world as by nature a hostile place; they expected to die young and usually did. Death often came from wounds received in combat or from the emphesema which was a result of living their lives in huts with fires inside but no smoke‑holes. Boys started carrying carbines and going on patrols when they were thirteen or fourteen; a person in his or her forties was getting old.
Life at the camp was a strange mixture of comfort and combat. The team house, where the Americans lived when not on patrol, was finished ‑ along with the dirt and steel matting airstrip in front off the camp ‑ by an Army engineer outfit before the site was first occupied in May, 1966.
The house was a long, low wooden structure with a second level underground. The lower level was a bunker with a concrete floor, windowless concrete walls, and a heavy ceiling built over massive log joists, designed to withstand impacting mortar rounds. Most of the space was a dimly lighted sleeping area with neatly arranged rows of low steel bunks, wooden footlockers, and a few gray metal wall lockers. At the foot of the stairway leading upstairs, a row of flak jackets and helmets, ‑ one for each man ‑ hung on the wall. Several U.S. service pistols, .45 caliber semiautomatics, also hung in holsters there.
Underground rooms contained officers' desks, communications equipment, and the team's Tactical Operations Center, where dispositions of friendly and enemy units were noted on wall maps, and the team's patrols were planned.
Upstairs was the dining room, where two small wooden tables and a few chairs stood on the bare concrete floor. One wall held a display of crossbows, spears, and long knives that looked like scaled‑down versions of a Samurai sword; these were weapons which the local Montagnard tribesmen fought with before the Americans armed them with M‑1 and M‑2 carbines. Some of the older men still hunted with crossbows.
The kitchen was built onto the back of the house. There a confused group of six Montagnard boys, ranging in age from about eight to thirteen ‑ one an orphan named Nei whose parents were both killed by the VC, the others from villages near the camp ‑ cooked meals for the team members and themselves on a butane range scrounged by the team sergeant, MSgt Robert F. Williams, from a supply outfit at Cam Ranh Bay. The boys were each paid 800 piasters, or about $6.75, per month by the Americans.
Directly off the dining room was the team room, which had the feel of a hunting lodge, with a bar, refrigerator, portable television, Akai stereo tape recorder, several large wooden chairs with foam cushions, and a low, round table for the nightly poker games. If the team room was surprisingly comfortable for a highland outpost, it was not deceptively so. Anyone entering from the dining room passed a gun rack with four M‑2 automatic carbines and a flare pistol; on the facing wall a similar rack supported four riot guns ‑ short‑barreled, 12‑gauge pump shotguns ‑ with receivers open. Mounted on wooden panels around the room were several captured weapons: a Chinese AK‑47, a Chinese K50 submachine gun, a US Springfield 1903 bolt-action rifle, a Chinese model 53 carbine, a French MAS 36 rifle, and a Russian PPSH 41 submachine gun.
A large, homey brick fireplace centered in the north wall lent an air of gentility to the room. But even this was subject to reminders of time and place: Captain John F. Moroney, team commander, told of the time their mascot, a black female cat named Satan, methodically lined up eleven dead rats, one at a time, on the hearth.
Outside, between the team house and dispensary, was a long concrete‑capped underground bunker which would be an emergency dispensary in case of an all‑out attack. Now, it was a living area for some of the Montagnards. There was almost no light, and the shadowy movements and low utterances in the Sedang dialect gave an impression of other‑worldliness to a stranger walking through.
The remoteness of the area from the nearest American units lent a special dimension to the tactical situation. Mangbuk was not within range of any artillery except its own two 105's, which were not yet operational at the time of my visit. The region caught both the northern and southern monsoons, which meant that from August through March, the camp could be weathered in for thirty days or longer at a time, without benefit of either resupply or air support for defense of the camp and assistance of the patrols which had to comb the surrounding hills. In a war peculiar for the fact that mostly air power had kept American and Vietnamese forces in contention for control of the country, the garrison at Mangbuk was at times very much on its own.
Almost to a man, the men of the "A" team liked their jobs. Camp life was a far cry from most of the things which normally made garrison duty the bane of military life: inspections, police calls, and the boredom that sets in when mundane chores are made to sound like the most important tasks ever faced. Relationships were informal, even with the officers. There was no saluting, except by the Montagnards. Discipline was not enforced; it was a matter of mutual consent. Moroney gave an example: "You saw the liquor in there," he said. "I don't have any rules about it. In most outfits, you'd see guys drunk all over the place. I don't have any trouble. My people know what they have to do, and they drink when they know they can afford it."
The men of the A Team were almost of one mind concerning the rightness of their efforts, and generally of American presence in Vietnam. When told that most U.S. college students opposed the war, their reactions ranged from disagreement to anger. "I don't agree with all of our policies either," said Sp/5 George Rogers, the team's demolitions man. He was a former college student himself. "But I still think we should be here."
Sergeant First Class Les Thorington, the senior radio operator, was a professional with 21 years of service. He tried to sound as though it made no difference to him: "I don't pay no attention," he said, then paused. Then he got wound up. "But my own opinion is that they're just showin' their stupidity. Hell, they don't know anything about SEATO, or any of these other treaties. You got a commitment, you keep it, that's all."
The other radio operator, Sgt. Gary M. Dixon of Sacramento, California, was more adamant. Considerably younger than Thorington ‑ Dixon was in his mid‑twenties ‑ he reacted angrily to criticism of the Johnson administration and of the present state of society in general, seeing the question as one of loyalty or disloyalty. "Look," he began, "with all the stuff we've got over here, and with all the guys that are getting greased, this has gotta be right. It's just gotta be right."
Dixon raised his voice above the engine noise of the truck he was driving, and took one hand off the wheel and clenched his fist for emphasis. He was short and muscular, and with his green beret cocked a little to one side and his shoulder harness supporting a belt with a .45 semiautomatic and enough pistol and rifle ammunition to fight a small war by himself, Dixon gave the impression of a soldier so fiercely loyal to his own way of life that he would personally invade Hell if he thought there were any danger of the place going communist.
"Way I figure, communism is our enemy," he continued. "I don't know, maybe I'm screwed up. Maybe there's a lot of bad reasons for bein' here. Maybe even most of the reasons are bad. But hell, there's still a few good reasons, and I think they're worth it. If only ten percent want freedom, then we should help the ten percent." Like many American soldiers, especially those in elite units, Sergeant Dixon was impatient with the limitations politics had placed on the way the war was being fought. He would have liked to see the North invaded, and would have taken part in such an invasion himself.
And what if the North were invaded, but then China entered the war? "I'd rather fight China now than twenty years from now," he answered.
Dixon's ideas concerning domestic politics followed similar lines. He deplored former California governor Pat Brown's reluctance to clamp down on student protest at Berkeley, and lauded Reagan's more forceful approach. Goldwater, he said, was a man to be respected for taking a firm stand against communism, and the hippies who hung out at Haight Ashbury were a lot of screwed‑up people who only hurt society. Civil rights demonstrators jeopardized a system the preservation of which was much more important than anything they could gain by demonstrating. He named a couple of leftist magazines, saying that they were obviously influenced by the communists, or at least by thinking which was no different from communism.
About protest in general, Dixon summed up: "There's just too many people sayin' what's wrong with the United States, and not enough sayin' what's right about it."
The community at Mangbuk was a strange, triangular affair. The Americans had Vietnamese Special Forces (Luc-Luong Dac Biet) counterparts, and the idea behind this and similar operations was to get the local Montagnards organized into an operational military unit and then to turn control of the unit over to the LLDB. The Montagnard companies, although they had their own command structures and went on regular combat patrols, had no official military status. They are a "Civilian Irregular Defense Group," a euphemism for mercenaries. They were recruited, trained, armed, and paid by American and Vietnamese Special Forces units.
Each patrol leaving Mangbuk had two missions: the obvious one of making contact with the enemy, and a secondary one of bringing entire village populations back to Mangbuk to become part of the community here. This both denied recruits and rice growers to the Viet Cong, and provided new recruits for the CIDG companies. Team Sergeant Williams said that each time a new group of villagers was brought in, there was a great reunion of friends and family members.
Given the longstanding animosity between Montagnards and Vietnamese, the plan to phase Montagnard CIDG units into complete Vietnamese control was an interesting one. The Montagnards lived in that country before the Vietnamese were pushed southward by upheavals in China centuries ago; they knew this and continued to resent the latecomers' sovereignty over what the Montagnards considered their territory. On the other hand, the Vietnamese thought the mountain people to be inferior and uncivilized. A Vietnamese student at the University of Dalat had recently commented to me: "We never did anything for them before. We help them now, because we need their loyalty. After the war, we will probably ignore them again."
The mutual dislike of these two nominal allies had yet to openly erupt at Mangbuk. But it had at other camps, and the reasons why it had not happened there gave some cause for doubt that the shaky alliance would ever improve.
The hills surrounding Mangbuk were inhabited exclusively by Montagnards. With no Vietnamese to compete for rice lands, building sites, and so forth, the village scene, at least, was quiet. The only Vietnamese with whom the Montagnards came in contact were the few Vietnamese Special Forces men at the camp. There, friction was minimized by the presence of the Americans, whom the Montagnards respected and obeyed almost without question.
Conscious that his ultimate task was to strengthen the reluctant partnership and to put himself out of a job, Captain Moroney didn't see that happening soon. With the job of coordinating patrols, improving camp defenses, bringing in villagers, and running a refugee camp, he felt he had to stay on top of the whole operation if it was to work at all. "Hell, this is supposed to be a joint effort," he said. "We're really supposed to be advisors. But when it comes right down to it, there's no doubt in anybody's mind." He tapped his chest. "We command."
Much of this second part is about Tin, a Montagnard warrior who had a history of switching sides in the war, but who was so valuable to the Americans that they kept him on their team.
Krip, the young Montagnard who is one of the two children to whom this book will be dedicated, appears near the end of this chapter…
2. Soldier Tin
Master Sergeant Robert F. Williams (home of record: Las Vegas, Nevada) was showing me around the compound. The trenches had been dug in a zig‑zag pattern so that an enemy grenade or man would only be effective for a short distance should it or he make it over the revetment and into the trench. The trench was punctuated at strategic points by flimsy blockhouses which doubled as machine gun emplacements and homes for Montagnard families.
Of the low, tin‑roofed buildings similar in construction to the team house, one was a dispensary, and another, in Williams' words, was "the Yards' chow hall". The last syllable of the French word "Montagnard" sounds like "yard", so that's what the Americans called them.
We went inside the chow hall. It was dark, cool, and smelled and felt of bare wood timbers and earth. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see dim figures squatting about on top of rough wooden tables, eating rice and boiled meat from metal pots with their hands. Williams was telling me how a Special Forces "A" Team and a CIDG unit worked together.
"We're s'posed to be mostly just advisors, but you know that's bullshit. We command, and it turns out, we do most of the fighting. What we do is send out Yard patrols, anywhere from a squad to a comp'ny with one American along to run the show and keep radio contact with the team house...here's Tin. You heard about him yet?"
The dark figure stood and saluted as we came up to him. (The Montagnards at Mangbuk saluted all Americans regardless of their dress or status; it was as if they assumed that we were all soldiers, just as they were all soldiers.) In the dark, I couldn't see any difference between Tin and the others.
"He was with the VC for four years," Williams was saying as we went out into the sunlight, blinding now against our enlarged pupils. "Then he came over to us. Some of the 'yards still don't trust him; they say he's different. For that matter, some of the guys on the team won't turn their backs on him. Hell, I trust him. Absolutely the best man on a trail I ever seen. Never wears shoes, walks like a cat in the jungle, sort of feels it when we're gettin' close to somethin'. 'Fact, he is half animal. But he sure knows that goddamned jungle."
All the Montagnards were primitive people, and there seemed to be an openness and absence of guile in their faces which I associated with their primitiveness, and which I liked them for, as did most Americans who knew them. It was as if their looks cut across cultural barriers with a bridge of pure humanity. By "looks", I mean both the way they appeared when we looked at them, and the way they looked at us, the way their eyes communicated who they were.
I saw Tin later out in the compound, in the daylight. He had a primitive look about him too, but it was somehow startlingly different from the simplicity which I saw in the eyes of the others. Williams was right. Tin was wild: in the way he moved, in the way he stood still, and most of all in his eyes.
I stayed with the team about a week. One night, the night I especially remember, started out pretty much as usual: the orphan children who cooked and cleaned for the Americans had cleared away the dishes, a routine squad‑sized patrol of just Montagnards was sent out for the night, and the team members sat around the team house playing cards, cleaning weapons, listening to the tape recorder, or just talking.
I was downstairs, or in the kitchen or somewhere out of the way, when I felt that something was wrong. By the time I got to the team room, every motion and every sound by every man there was tersely professional.
Captain Moroney was talking to the man who had been on radio watch to keep contact with the security patrol. The Montagnard was excited, confused, and having a hard time with his pidgin English. Moroney was trying to calm him down and get the story about what had happened.
"Tin, he shoot...pow!...he...CIDG...he...."
"Looks like we've made contact," Moroney was saying. The other Americans were already moving to their weapons: magazines slid into receivers, bolts clicked home; men shrugged into flak jackets and buckled on cartridge belts. Moroney told his American radio operator to advise Kontum of the VC contact and stand by for details.
"Anybody hit?" Moroney asked the Montagnard. "CIDG ‑ he hit?"
"Yeah, Tin, he shoot...CIDG, he hit...two, t'ree, four...Krip, he dead."
"Oh, fuck...look, you tell CIDG he come home, okay? Right now." The Montagnard hurried out, stumbling. "Well," Moroney said to his own men, "let's get out there." Suddenly remembering that he had an atypical factor to consider, Moroney looked over at me. He reached behind himself, snatched a .45 pistol with its belt and holster from its peg on the wall, and tossed it to me. "You were a Marine, right? You'll know how to use this, then." I buckled it on.
The patrol had not been far away, and had started back right after the shooting. Moroney and his men met them in the jungle on the far side of the airstrip. We could tell from their flashlight beams that they were soon on the way back in, and that for some reason Moroney expected no further contact with the VC, or he would not have used the lights.
"Well, mister reporter, looks like you get a story after all," the medic said to me on his way out of the team house. "Wanna come down to the dispensary and watch me sew 'em up?" I followed him out.
Down in the dispensary, we started clearing off the operating table and the benches for patients who could sit. Tucker, the medic, got out a bottle of intravenous solution and hung it on a stand above the operating table. "Always need that, no matter what else happens," he grinned. "We ain't got any blood, but at least we can replace some of the fluid...wonder how many are hit...fuck, I hope this don't keep me up all night."
First we heard excited voices coming from the direction of the camp gate, then shuffling and scraping noises. Then they burst into the room. One man had a shattered hand, one had a bullet through his leg, one had a bullet through his groin, and one had a bullet through his head: it had entered under his chin and come out through his left temple. He should not have been alive, but he was. It was Tin.
Tucker looked quickly at each of the four wounded. It was triage time. He paused for a moment between Tin and the man with the bullet through his groin, trying to decide which one to see to first.
Moroney came in and pointed at Tin. "Keep that bastard alive," he said. "He shot 'em."
Tucker motioned for the stretcher bearers to get Tin onto the operating table; the other wounded were laid on benches behind the partition.
"What?" Tucker asked. "What happened?"
"I donno yet, exactly. But there were no VC. He shot 'em." Moroney pointed again at Tin. "That's why I want him alive. I want to talk to him."
The team's second medic was seeing to the three other wounded in the adjoining room, and was being helped by a couple of Montagnard boys who were still too young to fight but who had been taught to assist in the dispensary. I was the only man in the room who wasn't busy.
"Does this sort of thing make you nervous, or can you give me a hand?" Tucker asked. Tin was writhing and groaning and tearing the IV needle out of his arm; he smelled of mud and blood and fear‑sweat, which has a much stronger and more acrid smell than sweat that comes with exertion. I recognized it from having smelled it on myself many times during my own Vietnam tour.
Tin was hard to handle; his fear made him strong. I cut his clothes off and we lashed him to the operating table with thick hemp rope. Then we had to lash his arms down too to keep him from tearing the needle out, and when Tucker finally got some sulfa powder and a dressing of sorts on the messy part of the head where the bullet had come out, a Montagnard boy and I took turns holding his head against the table so he wouldn't turn it sideways and tear off the dressing and the mangled tissue that protruded from the exit wound low on his left temple. I had to lean over him to hold his head; I saw the wound up close and felt his pulse thundering through his temple above the wound and saw his left eye, cocked crazily because the bullet had passed just behind it. When he shuddered, I wondered if it was like having ahold of an electric eel. The Montagnard boy looked at me across the shuddering Tin with eyes which were curious, but otherwise showed no emotion.
"Any bets?" Tucker said aloud. "I bet he don't last till morning." He slapped Tin on the belly. "Fucker don't deserve it anyway," he said. "If the skipper wasn't so hot to talk to him, I'd pull the tube on him right now."
I went back to the dispensary to help with the stretchers when the medevac choppers came. It was dark, moonless. A Huey sat down on the airstrip just beyond the gate, but kept its rotors going at full power in case we were attacked and a quick liftoff was necessary. The gunship escort clattered about in the nearby night sky. The only points of light in our universe were the blinking red tail‑rotor lights on the choppers and one blinding white floodlight on the parapet which shone straight down in front of the gate.
The rotors whack‑whacked and the red lights blinked and the white light blinded and the dust from the rotor wash swirled and the engines roared and men shouted in four languages, and we ran through that gumbo of sight and sound with the stretchers.
I was carrying one end of Tin's stretcher. A group of angry Montagnards were waiting for us at the gate, but Moroney and some other Americans were there too and held them back as we ran through. As we were sliding Tin aboard the chopper, one of the Montagnards broke away and came running toward us waving his carbine.
The little soldier was enraged. "Why you med'vac Tin? Tin kill CIDG! I KILL TIN!" Two Special Forces men put their bodies between him and us and disarmed him, as gently as they could manage in the face of his rage. Now I knew why they wanted me to help with the stretcher: they needed every one of their own to deal with the angry Montagnards.
The choppers took off and we turned back to the team house; Moroney stayed to cool off the montagnards. "We should've given 'im to 'em," somebody spoke into the darkness.
The story was pieced together: the squad had settled down for the night, and they had all lain down in the trail to sleep, leaving Tin on watch.
It had not been long since the Montagnards did their fighting with spears and crossbows; they still did not understand something which any infantryman in a modern army is taught from the beginning: the closer together you are, the better target you present for automatic weapons fire, or for grenades or any other fragmentation device.
That night, the members of the squad on patrol were huddled together on the trail, asleep in the illusion that their closeness gave them security, when Tin, who was on watch, for no reason that anyone could ever find out, raised his carbine and fired a long burst on full automatic, starting at one edge of the huddled sleepers and moving to the other. That burst killed one man and wounded four others; the man with the bullet through his groin also died later.
The soldier Moroney was questioning in the operations room had wakened just as Tin started to fire, and had squeezed off one quick burst at Tin. It was one of those bullets which caught him under the chin and passed behind his left eye and out his left temple.
"How you shoot?" Moroney was asking. "You shoot t‑t‑t‑t‑t... or you shoot pow, pow, one time, two time?"
The soldier made as if to hold his weapon and imitated the way it would jump when fired on full automatic. "God damn it!" Moroney threw his pencil down and turned away. "I keep telling these people to learn to fire their weapons on semi‑automatic, but they never remember when they get scared. Makes 'em feel safe to throw out a lot of lead." He turned back to the soldier: "Well, okay, you can go now. But you stay here Mangbuk, so I can talk to you. Okay?"
Later, in the team house, Moroney gave his instructions about how the incident was to be handled. Since Special Forces Headquarters at Kontum already knew there had been an exchange of fire, and since wounded CIDG soldiers would be showing up at the hospital there, a report would have to be made. Moroney did not want to lie and say that there had actually been contact with a VC force large enough to inflict five casualties, because then false information about the presence of enemy troops would be disseminated to other units in the area. But he had been warned about trusting Tin; he also feared outside meddling in a situation which he thought he could handle better himself. He decided that, after all, his official report would describe the incident as contact with a VC force, and instructed his men to keep quiet about it to outsiders.
"Oh yeah, and where's that reporter?" he turned and pointed an admonitory finger at me. "I don't want one word printed about this, you hear? It would cause too much trouble; they wouldn't understand."
The next day, small brown soldiers buried one of Tin's victims in a small coffin made of plain raw lumber. Stapled to one end of the box was a sheet of 8-1/2" x 11" typing paper with a grease pencil epitaph:
NAME: KRIP
AGE: 18
NATION: MONT
LOCATION: MANGBUK
DATE DIED: 18 JUNE 68
I stayed at Mangbuk two or three more days. The last I heard from the hospital was that Tin was still alive.
Sometimes, even now, I think of Tin. I will think that he is probably still alive, because he has already lived through what should have killed him. Other times, I think he must be dead, because he had no place to go from the hospital but back to Mangbuk, where the Sedang were waiting to kill him; and if the Sedang didn't kill him, the VC would, because he left them for the other side; and if the VC didn't get him, the emphesema would, because his people didn't put smoke‑holes in the roofs of their huts.
The longer I was in or around that war, the more I noticed – or was bludgeoned by – the racially lopsided makeup of the groups of people around me. It showed up, of course, in my dreams.
Dream: Bodies of Water
I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, rifles ready, up and downstream. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a dark‑haired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another dark‑haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark‑haired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creekbanks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creekbanks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?
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