Page 15 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)
South Vietnam
AMIUH SAT IN THE dirt, squatting opposite the commanding officer’s hooch at Phu Bai waiting for his two American teammates to emerge. Amiuh had never been inside.
He wore his tiger stripe camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt given to him by the Americans. Rubber sandals made from worn-out tires were on his feet and a bracelet crafted from spent brass casings was on his wrist. It was engraved with etchings that resembled bamboo.
At irregular intervals, green Army jeeps, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, and soldiers on foot would pass between him and the hastily constructed plywood building with its small front deck. All seemed extremely out of place in Vietnam.
He made the sign of the cross with his rosary.
He had carried the wood beads and brass Cross of Lorraine crucifix since he was a child.
It was pressed into his small hand by a French Catholic missionary as Amiuh sat crying in the smoldering ruins of his village, burned to the ground by soldiers who came from the north.
The priest was familiar to eight-year-old Amiuh.
He had been in their village for months and was often visited by the Americans with their strange green hats, headgear that could neither protect from the sun nor shield from the rain.
He had heard his father say that it made them look French.
The priest’s light blue eyes were streaked with blood vessels.
He had been crying too. His normally pale face was dark with soot.
Amiuh remembered looking down at the cross in his bloodstained hands. The crucifix was not like the ones he had seen in the parish. Instead of the traditional cross, this one had an additional and longer horizontal bar below the shorter one.
All these years later the cross never failed to bring him back to the night of fire and death.
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord…”
The Vietnamese soldiers had come to the village before, had beaten the men and done things that Amiuh did not understand to the women.
They had threatened to destroy the village if the tribe continued to welcome the Americans, and if they continued to follow the teachings of Christ. The soldiers from the north did not like Catholics. Amiuh could not fully comprehend why.
Amiuh moved his hand from the cross to the first large dark wood rosary bead, made from the wood of a banyan tree, his eyes never leaving the hooch across the dirt road.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”
His father had told him to run when the carnage began, so that is what Amiuh did.
Other mothers and fathers had done the same.
He stopped in the thicket at the edge of the village.
That’s when he saw the longhouse begin to burn.
His father rushed forward only to be struck down with the butt of a soldier’s rifle.
Amiuh continued to watch as his mother and two sisters were pulled from his family’s thatch hut by their hair, flailing in the dirt, backlit by the growing flames.
Young Amiuh could feel the heat on his face.
Even at this distance, he could hear the soldiers laughing.
Other men from the village were kicked and beaten as their wives and daughters were dragged from huts that soon also began to burn.
Then came gunshots. His sisters’ screams, rising over the laugher and shouting of the soldiers, anchored Amiuh in place.
Amiuh moved to the next three small beads, contemplatively rolling them one at a time between his fingers.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…”
He watched as a baby was torn from his mother’s arms and impaled on the sharp bayonet attached to the end of a soldier’s rifle. The man held the baby aloft as the others cheered, their ovations rising to a zenith as the soldier pitched the child into the thatch of a burning hut.
“Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was, is now, and ever shall be…”
Amiuh’s breath was coming more rapidly as one of the soldiers turned from the melee in the village’s center and began walking toward him.
Amiuh could not move his feet. It was as if the vines and roots of the jungle had taken hold, as if they had decided to make him a witness to the carnage.
The man stopped walking, leveled his rifle at his hip, and held back the trigger, spraying the tree line with bullets.
Amiuh heard the crack as one passed by his head. He would never forget that sound.
He watched the soldier fumble with his rifle. Young Amiuh knew another barrage of bullets would follow and that this volley would surely find him.
He squinted his eyes against the intense heat of the burning longhouse, toward his family. His father lay unmoving on the ground. It looked like some of the soldiers were on top of his mother and sisters.
The soldier had finished reloading his rifle and leveled it at the tree line again.
Now, instead of keeping him anchored in place, the screams of his mother and sisters merging with those of the other villagers caused him to trip backward, breaking away from the grip of the rainforest. Amiuh got to his feet and followed his father’s orders. He turned and ran.
He moved to a large bead and began to meditate on the Sorrowful mysteries.
“Our Father…”
The bullets flew past as Amiuh propelled himself deeper into the jungle.
He ran until exhaustion set in, until he was far enough away that he could not hear the screams of his mother and sisters or the laughter of the soldiers, until he could not hear the gunshots.
He found a rotting log, lay down next to it, and closed his eyes, willing away the images of his burning village. Alone.
And into the Annunciation from the Gospel of Luke.
“The angel Gabriel…”
When the sun rose, Amiuh slowly made his way back to the village. He had always been friends with the jungle. It was as much his home as his village.
He began the first decade of Hail Marys.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…”
He smelled it before he saw it. The odor of death told him that life would never be the same.
He paused at the edge of what was left of his village and watched as others, the survivors, returned from the depths of the jungle, some stumbling amongst the rubble, some floating like ghosts lost in a sea of ash and flame.
He saw mothers wailing over the bodies of dead children.
Bodies of once strong, vibrant men were twisted in unnatural positions, littering the ground, and he saw his mother and sisters, naked, sprawled in the dirt, their necks and stomachs awash in blood. His father lay nearby.
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…”
Amiuh ran, passing burnt bodies, naked bodies, mutilated bodies.
He fell to the ground and clutched his mother’s neck, her eyes wide and unmoving.
Even at the young age of eight, he knew her soul was with God.
He crawled to his sisters a few yards away.
He wanted to cover them, to hide what had been done to them, but there was nothing left with which to do so.
The entire village had been burned to the ground.
Eventually he stood and moved to his father, though he did not look like the man he knew, the strong hunter who provided so much for the village.
His head was oddly distorted. When Amiuh sat to cradle it in his lap he saw that the other side of his father’s skull was missing.
Hair, bone fragments, and brain matter littered the ground behind him.
Amiuh’s little fingers tried to close the gaping wound but he succeeded only in staining them with mushy goo still seeping from his father’s head.
He felt even more alone than he had that night in the jungle.
As the sun rose higher the stench became too much.
Amiuh stood and turned away from his mother, his father, his sisters, and his family home. He looked to the parish.
He continued through the Rosary he knew by heart.
“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope…”
Amiuh was sitting in the pew, his short legs still unable to reach the dirt floor, his bare feet dangling above the ashes, when the priest found him. The single rough-hewn pew was all that remained of his village parish.
His fingers moved back to the tarnished brass Cross of Lorraine crucifix, the Croix de Lorraine as the priest had called it, as a dust cloud from a passing jeep washed over him.
The priest had told him that the Cross of Lorraine was carried by someone named Joan of Arc in something called the Hundred Years War. He told the young Montagnard that it was also a symbol of independence.
“Your mother and father, your sisters, were freedom fighters, just like Joan of Arc,” the priest had said. “When the Blessed Mother revealed the rosary to Saint Dominic in 1208, she told him that it would be a ‘weapon of war and a battering ram for heresy.’ So too shall you become.”
They had rebuilt and the Americans had come in greater numbers, some in civilian clothes and others in military uniforms wearing the green berets. They had fortified the village with sandbags and taught the men and boys how to shoot, arming them with a variety of modern weapons.
Now that he was older, he knew that the U.S.
Army Special Forces worked with parish priests in Montagnard villages to arm and train their parishioners to aid in the effort against North Vietnam.
The missionary who lived in their village was part of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group—CIDG—in a program called Fighting Fathers.
Amiuh had learned that the Fighting Fathers Program was developed by an American president, by the one who had led the allies to victory in Europe before his successor had been killed in a place called Dallas.
He tried to push what had happened to his family that day the village was burned from his mind, finding solace in the word of God, and in the words of the priest who had turned him into a fighter.
Amiuh was one of many Montagnard orphans who were raised communally by the surviving villagers. His understanding of French grew steadily under the tutelage of the missionaries, and his English improved through the lessons from the Green Berets who stayed with them for a year at a time.
Just a few years later he had been tested in the jungle, hunting a tiger alone with a crossbow to prove his worth.
The poison that tipped his arrows was made from the white sap of the Cong tree, strengthened by adding red pepper and boiling it before use.
The poison was taken on the ninth day of the first month of the lunar year; the tribal elders told him that was meant to increase its potency.
The solo hunt was a rite of passage for all Boute Montagnard boys.
The Boute tribe believed that in order to become a man, a boy must hunt alone, tracking and killing a gaur, elephant, or tiger.
Boute women would not marry one not yet considered a man.
A tiger claw dangled from around his neck on a dried sinew string.
He was now a hunter as had been his father.
He had married a woman who had also lost her parents that dark night.
Together they had a young son named Tuan.
Amiuh vowed that his child would never have to endure what he had that night in the jungle.
Now when Amiuh ventured into the bush, he was not alone.
Instead of a crossbow, he was armed with a CAR-15 rifle.
And instead of a tiger, he now stalked men, NVA.
He was part of a team, a team tasked with killing those who had taken his parents and sisters, and no one did it better than the two men who were now inside the commanding officer’s quarters.
Amiuh would wait—they had finally captured an NVA prisoner.
That meant a Seiko watch for him, just like the Americans wore.
He also knew it meant American money for Quinn and Tom and time away from Phu Bai for what he heard them call R&R—rest and relaxation—to an island called Taiwan or neighboring Thailand.
While they were away, Amiuh would visit his family and continue to teach Tuan how to hunt.
His wife and child would be proud of his watch.
One day he would place it on his boy’s wrist.
When his two American teammates returned from R&R, they would go hunting again. They would kill more NVA. And Amiuh would be wearing his watch.
“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope…”