Читать книгу Beyond Survival - Gerald Coffee - Страница 12

4

The “Fiery Forge”

The only real security we have is the certainty that we’re equipped to handle whatever happens to us. Too often we try to build strength through position, possessions, family or friends, social and religious rituals—all the outer trappings by which we form our identities. Stripped of them all, we have to draw from what is left: our basic sense of identity as human beings. From there true security is born.

The next evening my guards and the officer who had presided at my bizarre firing squad led me back along the levee paths to Highway 1, the main north-south artery in North Vietnam. We had actually crossed it a few nights earlier, but it was so insignificant I never guessed it could be that snaking red line on the briefing maps on which we had expended so much energy and ordnance. A few months earlier, Air Force General Curtis LeMay had suggested we bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age. In a few months, I would be convinced that most North Vietnamese wouldn’t have known the difference.

Electrification outside the cities and larger villages was still a long way off. I supposed this contributed to the simple pattern of the people’s lives: early to bed and early to rise. Their existence was as visually drab as it was routine. Thus far I had seen no one, except some of the small children who had visited me, wearing bright colors. The dominant schemes were dark blue, black, and white and uniforms of khaki and olive drab. Indeed, were it not for the tranquil tropical-agrarian beauty of the countryside and the sloping verdure of the mountains to the west, I surmised their lives would have been unendurable.

With the exception of military people and goods, mechanized transport was almost nonexistent. I had seen all sorts of people stopping through the village, weaving under huge loads of straw, manure, rice seedlings, and pieces of equipment. Even most bicycles were reserved for official transport. Eventually I would read of and see depicted in propaganda films the stories of famous bicycle porters, renowned for the huge loads they could lash onto their bicycles and then push across high jungle passes to South Vietnam to supply their troops there. The overall simplicity and almost total lack of technological development of North Vietnamese society contributed to their seeming indestructibility.

Our trek from the village took about an hour. We rendezvoused with a jeeplike vehicle on Highway 1, where I was turned over to another officer, a guard, and a driver, all with uniforms more matching than anything I’d seen so far. After receiving some papers and a small package—probably containing my dog tags and wallet stuff—the young officer in charge ordered me into the back seat alongside the guard, cuffed my wrists together in my lap, and ordered the driver to head out into the night.

We traveled northward for several nights. Like most of the other travelers, we spent the better part of the daylight hours beneath heavy tree canopies or, when such natural cover was not available, beneath intricate networks of camouflage netting. Almost all vehicles were heavily camouflaged as well. Headlights were seldom used but when they were, they showed only through the bottom third of each lens. The rest was painted over.

Although we traveled each night from dark to daylight, we seemed to be in no hurry. We stopped frequently at small villages and hamlets so the people who might be up and about could be rounded up for the treat of seeing firsthand the “black-hearted American Air Pirate” from so far away.

In the early evenings before getting underway, impromptu rallies were staged by the local political cadres. The villagers, young and old, were encouraged to take out their anger and frustration (whether they had any or not, it seemed) upon me. Their frenzy—like that of my original captors—was played like an instrument by their cadre, who exhorted them through chants to a near-crazed pitch and modulated their intensity while he lectured them.

One time a husky young peasant who appeared to be retarded became more frenzied than the rest. With what seemed like the strength of three men, he wrenched my cradled arm away from my body and twisted it back and upward. I spun my torso around and up, trying to diminish the pressure. Too late! I heard and felt the crack in my forearm where what little mending of the bone fibers had begun was instantly undone. The strobelike pain was blinding as I crumpled to the ground, hugging my bent forearm tightly to my chest. I hardly noticed the sharp kicks to my torso and buttocks that followed.

Another night we stopped at an isolated dwelling between villages and just off the road. The driver and my guard seemed to be familiar with the teenage girl who came out to meet us. She offered directions to the officer who trudged ahead up the road leaving the four of us at the vehicle. After the usual flashlight in my face and the relating of the pitched battle for my capture, and the wide-eyed “oohs” and “aahs,” there commenced among the three of them the universal ballet of the sexes—the one rehearsed infinitely through the ages. There was the young warrior’s boasts of heroics and dragons slain, the girl’s flashing smiles and coy glances, their teasing threats to throw her to me, her mock horror and pleading little dance. It could have been at the local drive-in, the gathering place of my youth, or at a squadron beach party where young sailors flexed and preened for the nearby girls who pretended not to see. To the three of them at the moment there was no war, no captive to be guarded.

Their mood was almost festive as they led me to the largest hut of the small complex. Inside were five or six people and a boy of five or so. They were seated or squatting around a low wooden table with several bowls of rice, fish, and sauce. Two of the typical small oil lamps imparted a warm familial air to the room. After a light exchange between the girl and the others—perhaps introductions—I was gestured to sit nearby and was given a cup of tea and a sort of packet of sticky rice surrounding a core of pork and fat, all bound tightly by strips of banana leaves. I guessed it was a field ration because of its compactness and density, and it looked like it would keep well. A year later I would learn that it was a bahn-chung, a traditional delicacy prepared for and eaten only during the annual Tet, the twelve-day New Year’s celebration for which this family was so happily preparing.

Their focus on this celebration was all the more understandable when I realized that it represented the only yearly break in an otherwise terribly gray and stoic existence. Tet represented not only the “new beginnings” celebrated by Westerners on the calendar new year, but was also a special time of reunion and family togetherness. The bahn-chung was one of several Tet delicacies that could be provided only by months of sacrifice and scrimping. The rest of the year’s diet consisted mainly of rice, greens, gourd-type vegetables, and limited fowl and pork—all kept on the hoof. Cows appeared to be sparse and most milk must have come from the goats I had seen. All drinking water had to be boiled and was as often as not consumed as tea.

After more tea, I was ushered to a smaller room where the flickering light barely revealed a carved wooden bed that framed a wicker mat stretched taut. Two wooden blocks for pillows denoted the head from the foot. I accepted the invitation to lie down, not realizing it would be the last even remotely real bed I would feel beneath me for years. The child was brought in by his mother, who laid him down beside me. Although I must have looked scary with my hair singed and my face blotched with Mercurochrome, he had shown no fear of me from the beginning. Even now, after some reassuring coos and whispers from his mother he seemed nonplussed about retiring next to this foreign “monster from the South China Sea.” The guard sat on the floor in the doorway so he could continue to chat with the others and observe me as well. Before dozing off, I was struck by the contrast with our previous stops, with the beatings and the hatred generated by the cadres trained for that purpose. That all seemed like another world, compared to the simple warmth and comfort I felt from the presence of my tiny bedmate. I slept soundly for two or three hours.

Traveling on to the North each night, we encountered convoys of trucks almost constantly, long lines of heavily laden vehicles heading South to resupply the Viet Cong guerrilla fighters and what regular North Vietnamese troops were already there. The convoys had the right-of-way, so we would pull off to the side of the narrow track. There the guards would smoke or talk with the drivers of other northbound jeeps and trucks. I was usually kept out of sight but not necessarily covered up, so I could observe the activities and surroundings fairly easily. I was struck by the accuracy of our intelligence reports, which had indicated huge volumes of resupply traffic under the cover of darkness. Even when the highway was illuminated by parachute flares to catch a convoy by surprise, the preplanned pull-off and camouflaged parking areas were spaced so frequently that from an attack pilot’s viewpoint, dozens of trucks could seemingly disappear in only a few minutes.

It didn’t take long to realize that most of these safe havens—used during the daylight hours as well as during threat periods at night—were in and around rural villages, and the suburbs of Vinh City and Than Hoa. Civilians, under the direction of military logistic supervisors, were always available to refuel both vehicles and drivers. In fact, I was fed fairly well during this time, with my cook or food bearer always rewarded with a glimpse of me and a description of my capture.

Several times during daylight stops I saw the results of our previous raids on these parking areas once they became known or even suspect. The areas were littered with the torn and burned hulks of dozens of vehicles bulldozed, or more likely dragged, by peasant power into isolated piles to maintain parking space for the next convoy after the recamouflage job was completed. The collateral damage to the nearby houses and buildings was extensive. Churches and schoolyards weren’t exempt as truck parks, and I saw several such complexes damaged heavily by bomb blasts.

Truck parks and supply storage areas would have been primary targets in any wartime situation, but especially here where the actual enemy, the combatant, was so elusive. During many of our stops I translated in my mind’s eye the topography, foliage, and buildings around me into the aerial image they would have imprinted on the film of my airborne cameras. I had spent hours with our squadron Air Intel officer poring over transparent negatives stretched across a light box, taking turns with the stereometric eyepiece that provided the 3–D image from two nearly identical negatives taken a second or so apart. A concentration of triple-A sites in a given area was a pretty good clue of a lucrative target. My daily observations enroute were confirming that.

I would later see propaganda photographs of heavily damaged or destroyed churches and schools—as well as pathetic pictures of maimed or burned priests, nuns, and children—with commentaries to the effect that these had been the primary targets of the “cruel and barbaric” American pilots. Worse yet, after piles of truck debris and the guns had been removed from the area, such church and school ruins were prime display areas for antiwar protestors and “international investigators” as they eagerly devoured with their notebooks and cameras the “evidence” that confirmed their preconceived opinions. Indeed, without their antiwar/anti–U.S. disposition, they would not have been welcomed by the North Vietnamese Communist government in the first place.

A few nights before arriving at our destination we became part of a long waiting line for a river crossing. A quarter of a mile ahead the overcast sky reflected the various lights of what appeared to be some major construction site. I could hear the harmonious growl of several pieces of heavy equipment, and the shouts and directions of construction supervisors and traffic monitors were constant. As we inched closer the angular hulk of the Than Hoa Bridge emerged, the hodgepodge of construction lights and flickering blue of welders’ arcs casting shifting shadows across its cantilever flanks. Dozens of people were clambering over it, repairing the damage from the latest raid. In the pulsating reflections from the heavy sky, the bridge appeared like a great iron Gulliver with Lilliputian workers scrambling all over it.

The Than Hoa Bridge was famous. I recognized it immediately from the aerial photos I had seen, especially the ones I had used in planning my last flight. We had bombed the bridge frequently, and actually hit it several times, but it wouldn’t drop. It was like a tenacious bulldog straddling the deepest channel at the mouth of the Than Hoa River. It was heavily fortified with 37mm and 57mm triple-A guns, and by now we had lost at least two or three planes and crews trying to destroy it.

We inched onto the span accompanied by much shouting and directing, and no wonder: I realized that we were actually driving on the railroad bed, tires straddling the rails and bouncing from tie to tie. Trains and trucks took turns using the same patched-up roadbed. It just took a little extra scheduling effort to make it work. The repair effort was probably increased to a near frantic pace on a night like this, as an illuminated attack through such a thick, low overcast would be improbable. As the driver felt his way along the narrow planks and steel plates that spanned the spaces where the ties had been blown and burned away, I could see the slabs of steel hurriedly welded across torn and twisted beams to maintain the load capacity of the battered trusses. Just as a broken bone heals even stronger than before because of the calcium concentration in the healing process, the Than Hoa Bridge seemed to grow stronger with the incredible mass of its repair. It was a discouraging revelation as I contemplated how many more planes and aircrew might be lost before the beast would finally be brought down.

Although much of the trip these last several days had been fascinating, full of new and strange sights and experiences, much of the time had also dragged on slowly and painfully. My shoulder, arm, and hand were swollen to the point of immobility.

Sometimes I spent hours during the day in a camouflaged vehicle haven, hidden from the sight of villagers and other drivers. I spent the time observing the scene around me—usually through a loose flap of canvas that was supposed to keep me from seeing anything. Or I would just sit quietly under my cover, thinking painfully about Bea and the children and the ordeal I must surely be putting her through.

Although the experience of the firing squad had been traumatic at the time, it had somewhat reassured me for the long run. I did represent something of value to my captors, but even that was a dubious comfort. Would I at some point in the near future wish that the scruffy kid with the M-1 had been on target and spared me the ordeal I was about to face?

During the trek, I thought back frequently to my survival training, more specifically SERE training (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). So far I had been able to survive, but evading capture had been impossible for me. By the time I had regained consciousness out there in the water, my captors were upon me. Resistance and escape were my immediate concern. If the tetherball routine back in My Xa was any indication of things to come, I would somehow have to do better. I would have to be stronger and smarter, or something. Hell, that was just an improvisational little routine back there. What could I expect in a formal POW camp, where if I did in fact represent something of value to them that something of value might be extracted from me? My anxiety about resistance grew as we rolled on closer to our destination.

Escape had been on my mind almost constantly. The Code of Conduct specified as well: “I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape.” It was axiomatic that the best escape opportunities presented themselves between capture and arrival at a formal prison compound. At every stop along the way, in hamlets, huts, truck parks, roadside stops to “make watah,” I had surveyed the circumstances quickly and calculated my chances.

Before my capture, in the anxious fantasies of my stateroom solitude or in Ready Room bull sessions, escape was a foregone conclusion: The bastards won’t hold me, man; I’ll be outa there! However, all those preconceived scenarios had you at full strength. Just having no boots, being handcuffed and blindfolded, confused and scared, let alone being seriously injured as well, had a devastating effect and seemed to diminish the number of circumstances in which escape might be feasible. Nevertheless, I had surveyed each new situation or holding place with escape in mind.

One night the southbound convoys seemed to be endless, and the Scoutmaster (the name I had assigned to the officer in charge of my delivery because the guard and driver were more like Boy Scouts than soldiers) led me into a two-room hut in some hamlet just off the teeming road. As with all the huts before, the floor was dirt and the walls were of plaited bamboo. Several soldiers and drivers were in the first room squatting around an open brazier, eating rice and something else with long chopsticks, drinking beer in bottles with no labels, and passing around a bubble pipe. The mood was festive—it was still Tet season— and I was offered a beer. Scoutmaster, in a magnanimous gesture for the benefit of the others as well as for me, unlocked one cuff from my wrist, apparently so I could enjoy the beer more. It tasted like soapy piss (I surmised, having never tasted soapy piss!), but I was thirsty so I drank it anyway. Then he sat me down against the back wall of the second room, removed a cuff from my good arm, and reattached it carelessly or kindly—it didn’t matter—around my right ankle. He then returned to the party in the other room. It was apparent that he could hardly wait to regale the group with the story of my shootdown and capture, the exaggeration of which had by now, I was sure, reached near-mythical proportions.

As my eyes accommodated to the dim light, I could see this room was littered with trash from all the transients—drivers and transport people—who came and went. The sweet smell from the bubble pipe mixed with the smell of feces and urine in the far corner. The opium and the beer would surely have their effect and it seemed the word was that the southbound traffic would have priority most of the night.

As the party became more raucous, I began to realize this might be my final chance to escape. The bottom of the plaited wall I was leaning against was about eight inches from the ground, and the dirt was fairly soft. With my free left hand I began scooping it away from directly under the wall. Several bottle caps lay within reach; using the sharp edge of one, I was able to nick a bamboo sliver from the butt of one of the diagonal cross-pieces of the plaited wall.

God, I was only seven or eight years old when I had listened religiously to my favorite afternoon radio serials: Jack Armstrong, Captain Midnight, Tom Mix, and Terry and the Pirates. It had been Terry held captive in some Oriental horror chamber who had ingeniously improvised a bamboo sliver to release himself from captivity and a fate worse than death at the bloody hands of the infamous Pirate Chieftain. Using the bottle cap I shaved the sliver thinner and smoother until it was about the size and thickness of a plastic collar stay. The cuffs were hardly precision equipment. It was easier than I had imagined to slip the thin, stiff sliver between the side housing and the ratchet of the cuff on my ankle. As I depressed the spring-loaded claw on the inside, the ratchet slipped out. Way to go, Terry! Glancing toward the opening to the outer room, I repositioned the cuff loosely around my ankle so it would appear as it had been.

The dirt was scooping away easily and I soon had a trough deep enough for me to be able to slide beneath the wall to the outside. I hadn’t the slightest idea what was on the other side except that it was the side away from the highway, the east side, so I would want to go straight away from the hut toward the Gulf. The options were limited at best. To go north meant to parallel Highway 1 and go deeper into North Vietnam. To go south meant again to parallel the highway for at least fifty miles before reaching the DMZ; then I’d need to somehow cross the Ben Hai River. After that I would have Viet Cong and possibly North Vietnamese patrols to avoid before reaching our own forces. East was the only possibility.

I figured the Gulf couldn’t be more than twenty miles away through mostly farmland and paddies like I’d traveled along that first night. My plan was simple if somewhat naive: I would anticipate the dawns and conceal myself through the day, sleeping as much as possible. I could eat bananas and greens and young rice shoots. Night after night I would travel until reaching the ocean, where I would steal a fishing boat and row or sail or drift out into the path of radar coverage of one of our destroyers or carriers operating in the Gulf. Rescue would be an overwhelmingly joyful occasion, and my shipmates would be incredulous that I had escaped from deep inside North Vietnam. The message traffic would go out, and Bea would be phoned immediately that I had escaped and was safely back aboard the Kitty Hawk and would soon be back home for recovery from my injuries. She would hug the kids and cry with relief, and all my buddies back in the home wing would raise a toast at the bar during happy hour and say “Coffee, that slippery sonovabitch, we knew if anybody could do it, he could!”

I contemplated that thought: Could anybody do it? I knew no one had so far, but a year and a half later, Air Force Major Bud Day would be shot down and captured just north of the DMZ. Almost immediately—with the crudest of methods—a Vietnamese medic had set his broken arm and applied a cast from shoulder to fingertips. Then, in spite of a badly wrenched knee and a torn-up face, he escaped from an underground bunker and headed south. For over a week he moved through a barren and devastated landscape of bomb craters and charred trees. He survived close encounters with Vietnamese patrols, and a near-fatal B-52 bombing attack that left him vomiting and bleeding from the ears. He barely appeased his hunger by swallowing raw frogs and a few berries. After nearly two weeks of evasion, he crossed the Ben Hai River into South Vietnam and worked his way within a mile of a U.S. fire base. He could see and hear the helicopters ferrying supplies in and out. Reluctant to approach in the fading light and be mistaken for the enemy, he holed up in the bush for one more night. As he emerged from his concealment the next morning for the final run, he was spotted by a couple of North Vietnamese soldiers, shot in the leg, and recaptured. With one leg shot through and the other swollen to huge proportions, body emaciated and dehydrated, the cast on his broken arm crumbling, he was taken back into North Vietnam to be incarcerated for many years. His heroic attempt had fallen short by less than a mile.

The smile on my face was hidden in the shadows as one of the Boy Scouts looked in on me. It had been about fifteen minutes since he’d checked. Satisfied that I was hunched over asleep, he returned to the group. That was it. I’d have fifteen minutes to split this roach coach and get farther away than they would imagine I could get after they discovered I was gone. I thought, This is it, man, go! I took a deep breath, removed the loose cuff from my ankle, and snapped it closed so it couldn’t snag something, leaned back into the trench I’d scooped out, and wriggled my head and shoulders through. The lower part of my body followed easily.

It was pitch-dark. Had I mistakenly thought there was a moon? I arose and stepped away from the wall—and smacked right into another wall. Shit! The impact was so loud I was glad for the noise of the party inside. I looked left and saw moonlight on the ground a few feet away. I’d exited right into the wall of a closely adjoining building whose eaves had obscured the moon. I crabbed to my left toward the moonlight, turned east at the corner, and stopped dead. Damn! It looked like I was on the west side of the hamlet and was about to go right down Main Street. Again I heard laughter coming from the shed. I figured that since the lane ahead was deserted, maybe everyone else in the village was celebrating too. I could see just well enough to jog cautiously down the middle of the path; there were houses and sheds on either side and lamplight glowing from cracks and doorways. Miraculously, I encountered no one. Way to go, Babe! You’re gonna be outa here!

As the buildings became more and more sparse, it got darker and darker. The moon had become mostly obscured by a passing cloud and I barely noticed when the lane became a narrow path on a dike separating two paddies. My experience thus far had taught me that most of the dikes were laid out on cardinal headings, and I was reasonably sure I was still heading east. I was spurred on by the prospect of a straight path all the way to the Tonkin Gulf. I quickened my pace, so much so that I almost made it through midair across the three-foot ditch connecting the adjoining paddies. I’d completely missed the plank that crossed it and found myself flailing forward through black space. I crashed into the opposite bank with an incredible racket. There were several five-gallon water cans stacked right where my head and shoulders landed. The rest of me went into the ditch. The tin cans scattered noisily along the path and into the water. The sound of my splash and the cans hitting against one another was exceeded only by my subsequent thrashing and cursing as I tried to scramble back up the muddy slope to the level path. Christ! I couldn’t have made more noise if I’d been in a bowling alley. Somewhere nearby a dog started barking as if it already had me cornered. Others joined in immediately. Soon it sounded like there were a dozen dogs for every house I’d passed, all of them deciding to celebrate Tet at the same time.

Watch where you’re going, you dumb shit! You’ve really got to make tracks now!

Had it not been for the distracting crash of the cans, the din of the dogs behind me, and the desperation of the situation, I would have hurt more from the fall. I’d wrenched my good shoulder, knocked the breath from myself, and cut my lip on the rusty edge of one of the cans. It occurred to me, as I stumbled on down the path, that they might have been used to carry human fertilizer, so commonly applied in this part of the world.

A sliver of moon appeared through the clouds, allowing me to see about four to five feet ahead. Damn! I’d have seen that ditch if there had been just this much light! The increased visibility ahead and the barking dogs behind caused me to lengthen my stride. Still my eyes were fastened to the path in front of me as I watched for another cross-connecting ditch or for rocks or holes that could turn an ankle. Only last summer I had shown my sons Steve and Dave the fun of running along the rocks of the breakwater at Daytona, stepping and jumping from rock to rock, hardly knowing which rock we’d use next till we were there and our momentum forced us to choose, reacting with a long leap or perhaps two or three little mincing steps sideways and forward because that was all we could do. It was a sweet memory, their little five-and three-year-old legs carrying them along, and they loved it. And here I was now, ripping along, picking and choosing spontaneously, as if my life depended on it. And, indeed, it might.

I could still hear the dog chorus in the distance behind me when the first gong made the hair on my neck stand on end. It sounded more urgent and savage than any I’d heard before. It had to be about midnight, and there was no reason for a gong except for some emergency. My early departure from the party had surely been discovered now and they were sounding the alarm. God, I hope I’ve gotten far enough away! If only I hadn’t fallen into that stupid ditch! Did the dogs alert them? Make time, Baby, make time!

Other gongs chimed in, their collective dissonance like a howling banshee gaining on my heels. I fought back panic, the urge to run blindly into the darkness, anywhere away from the clutching sound. I glanced up at the moon, still weak but there. I riveted my eyes to the path ahead again and quickened my pace even more. I was flat-out running now, but I could see where the next couple of strides would take me. The whipping sound of my wet pants legs sounded their own cadence. I was really moving out now, putting precious distance between me and the dogs and the gongs and the Boy Scouts. Again I smiled as my mind raced forward to the ship, the debriefing, the medical care, a new front tooth, embracing Bea and the kids. Damn! I might even make it home before Number Four is born. The path was moving swiftly behind me. “That slippery sonovabitch Coffee, I knew if any . . . !” THUNK! A white-hot sun flashed through my mind, the lingering image vibrating with less and less intensity. In the black void that remained, tiny red and green balls wandered aimlessly through intertwined orbits and I was among them. I was one of them, floating just as aimlessly, no pain, no focus, no sensation of connectedness to anything. It seemed to go on and on, maybe for hours. I was just enjoying the silent, weightless life of a little red or green ball. I couldn’t tell—nor did I care—which color I was.

Gradually the darkness began to grow gray, the reds and greens began to pale. I was becoming aware of sound and the weight of the earth pressing against my back and the throbbing in my head. The sounds became sharper: a dog barking and snarling, several dogs. Shouts! Commands! Excitement! Confusion! The graying consciousness was jammed with the noise, the dogs, the Vietnamese, the gongs in the background. Someone or something was pulling me up by the collar. I opened my eyes, or at least one eye. My left eye was stuck closed under some liquid. I tried to blink it away, but it was warm and sticky. With one eye I recognized the Scoutmaster. He was screaming something in my face, his angry epithets louder and more intense than the rest of the voices. The movement of several flashlights and lanterns made the whole scene appear illuminated by the flames of a giant bonfire.

Holy shit! What happened? What hit me? I tried to wipe my sticky eye clear. The congealed blood told me I’d been unconscious for several minutes, maybe a half hour.

As I was jerked up to my feet my knees wobbled, and I tried to reconstruct my last few moments of consciousness. Things had been going so well, I was really moving out . . . .