Soldiers and Marines Saga, page 21
Jumping out of airplanes turned out to be fun, after the first three weeks of using muscles I never even knew I had. The most dangerous thing about the training was the ancient pre-war plane that took us up twice a day to jump during the last five days. Ten jumps in all. But the parachute school only lasted a few weeks, and after a couple of days of celebrating among the bars and ladies of Marrakech, I found myself soon back in Paris. Once again, I was terminally bored.
Two mornings later, a messenger, and an embassy car, were waiting for me when I returned from breakfast.
******
“Hi Dennis. What’s up?”
“Dunno Chris, but there’s a coded message for you in the communications center.”
The communications center was in the office of the embassy’s Public Relations Officer; the decoding clerk was a big jovial guy by the name of Jerry McClintock. He was almost certainly the CIA station chief, or a member of the station’s senior staff.
The message was from General Talley. It was both short and thought-provoking.
“Colonel Dunn arrives embassy noon tomorrow. Please be available to meet with him.”
What the hell is this all about?
General Talley was now a three-star at the Pentagon, and the next day the answer arrived in the form of Colonel Richard Dunn.
I showed up at the embassy, as I always do, in casual civilian clothes. Dunn was a West Pointer, I could tell from the ring he wore, with ribbons suggesting a very active and successful career, both in war and administratively. Talley must have filled him in about me because he didn’t seem at all surprised by my age or appearance.
“Sir, I am Colonel Dunn, General Talley’s aide.”
“Hello Colonel, I’m Chris Roberts,” I said as I offered him my hand and invited him to sit. “What’s up?”
“Sir, General Talley is aware you are fluent in French and recently completed the French Army’s parachute course at Sidi Bel Abbes.”
Uh oh. I see where this is going.
Dunn filled me in over a cup of coffee in Dennis’ conference room. It seems the French have established a defensive position in an isolated area of their Vietnamese colony in Southeast Asia. They thought it would cut off the supplies the communists were bringing into the south via Laos. They also hoped it might even bring the communists to battle so they could inflict casualties on them without having to chase them all over the countryside.
Unfortunately, according to Colonel Dunn, “to say the French strategy is not working is an understatement. The communists have placed artillery on the mountains surrounding the base and are pounding it. France’s casualties are growing, and they’ve asked us to help by providing air support, and atomic bombs.”
Atomic bombs! Jesus, are they crazy?
“The bottom line is that General Talley has been tasked to find out what’s actually going on at some place called Dien Bien Phu. It’s cut off with its runway too dangerous to use, and the few helicopters the French have available to send in are so often shot down that they rarely try to use them. So the only way supplies and replacements can get in now is via parachute.”
Now I can really see where this is going.
“General Talley needs an officer volunteer, someone acceptable to the French, who speaks French enough to pass for a Legionnaire, to jump in and radio back a report. You came to mind.”
******
Five days later I was in an ancient two engine Douglas C-47 that apparently had been turned over to the French during WWII. From the looks of it, the only maintenance it had ever gotten over the years was an oil change about ten years ago.
The plane itself was loaded to the gills with cargo pallets and about a dozen French officers and Legionnaires, including a couple of lieutenants I recognized from my parachute class.
All the men in the plane were volunteers, and the three of us, and probably everyone else in the plane, were still recovering from the bon voyage party we held for ourselves last night in various Hanoi bars. I was wearing the battledress uniform of a Legion officer without rank insignia.
We were bouncing along pretty good when the jumpmaster told us to stand up and hook on to the static line cable. Then the old plane began a diving descent with the door open, and a couple of nervous Vietnamese-looking crewmen standing by the bales of supplies and ammunition.
Suddenly there was a tack tack tack sound, like hail hitting a tin roof, and both pilots, and the jumpmaster, began screaming “Go” “Go” “Go.” I was the third one out.
They jumped us too soon. One look at the cleared area of the French perimeter in the distance and I could see we’re going to land short, way short. So we all began slipping our chutes to move towards it.
This isn’t going to work. We’re going into the trees well short of the jump zone.
Instinctively I began slipping my chute to try for an open area about two miles short of the French base. So was everyone else. It was either that, or risk being stuck in a tree in Indian Territory. I think most of us made it.
I bent my knees and rolled as I touched down. And then I stayed down and began fumbling with the MAT-49 submachine gun I’d been handed this morning by a Legion sergeant with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
This damn thing better work.
Then, with the “whip whip whip” of rounds going over me, I began crawling on my belly towards the edge of the clearing closest to where I think the French perimeter might be located. So was everyone else, except a Legion corporal I came across, after I crawled on my belly for what seems like hours.
He was face down in the grass at the edge of a mud puddle, and grimacing as he held tightly to his shattered left leg. Where the hell did he come from?
“Can you roll over on your back?” I asked as I crawled up to him.
“Oui,” he gasped. And with me pushing, and an obviously painful effort on his part, he rolled over, and looked up at the sky with one hand holding his mangled leg, and the other sprawled out to his side, compulsively opening and closing.
His MAT-49 lay on the ground next to him. I ran the bolt to make sure it was ready to fire, and pushed it into his open hand. It took considerable time, and effort, on my part since I was lying face down on the ground, and as low and flat as I could get.
“Okay.”…. “Use this and watch our rear.”
Then I grabbed the corporal by the scruff of his uniform collar with my right hand, and began slowly towing him along the ground as I wiggled forward on my belly. It was slow going because I was holding my MAT-49 in front of me with my other hand, and pulling us along the ground using only my legs, and the sides of my elbows.
The Legionnaire helped, when he could, by pushing with his good leg despite the obvious pain it caused as his shattered leg dragged across the rough ground. We were for sure going to be the last ones to get clear of the open area. If we clear it at all.
It was exhausting but, after what seemed like ages, we reached the tree line and entered. I was beat and had to stop for a moment to catch my breath.
“Your name?” I gasped in French.
“Orsini” he gasped back. “Gaspar Orsini.”
“Will you buy me a glass of wine when we get to the next bar?” I gasped back while I tried to take a deep breath.
“Oui.”
“Okay, then I better get you to a bar. Hang on.”
Two more hours of pulling Gaspar on his back through the trees, and one brief encounter with a surprised, and, fortunately for us, totally unprepared Viet Minh soldier along the way, and an Arab face in French battledress popped into view in front of me.
I let go of Gaspar’s collar, waved my arm in the air to attract attention, and collapsed. A few seconds later I felt searching hands running over my body and everything faded away.
Chapter Three
My knees, elbows, left leg, and left ankle were so lacerated, and stitched up, that I could barely hobble, even though it had been almost twenty-four hours since I was treated. The Legion sergeant sent to retrieve me chatted with Orsini while one of the nurses checked my stitches, and changed the dressings. Nurses here?
Then the sergeant led me to the bunker that served as the French command post, and gave me a professional’s view of the situation on the way. From the sergeant’s German accent, it was likely he was a Wehrmacht veteran serving in the Legion.
The French position resembled the trenches of World War One, and Korea. It was in a valley surrounded by mountains that supposedly could not be climbed.
Unfortunately for the French, the Vietnamese had not only managed to climb the mountains surrounding the French base, but also to haul up artillery that could fire down on the French positions and airfield in the valley below. And that’s what they were doing.
Slowly but surely, with artillery barrages, and repeated Russian-style mass charges, the Viet Minh were overwhelming the French outposts, and pushing the French troops into a smaller and smaller perimeter. More than half of the French outposts had already fallen.
The French troops were primarily colonial infantry and Legionnaires. They all had French officers. No poorly trained young draftees here.
It was slow going for the Vietnamese because the French troops, and particularly the Legionnaires of the two parachute regiments, were superb, absolutely superb. And so were their officers. But this place was a poorly chosen death trap, picked out, if I got the sergeant’s take on it, by some distant general, who got to the top because his superiors never turned quickly enough to break his brown nose.
“My God,” I heard one of the Legionnaires tell another, “We’re going to be part of another Camerone. What a way to go.”
From the way he said it, I couldn’t tell if he was unhappy or pleased with the prospect; Camerone was where a force of Legionnaires went down to the last man in 1863 rather than surrender.
However it got selected, it was crystal clear that no amount of American aid, atomic or otherwise, could save this place, or the men in it. And that is what was in the message I sent to Talley. I didn’t, of course, say that in so many words. Rather I sent some previously agreed words, and phrases, that would convey the message without disheartening the French.
Similar messages went out in the days that followed as I became more and more familiar with the situation, and the troops who were trapped here.
So many officers fell that the ranking French officer, Brigadier Cristian de Castries, who knew me only as an unknown foreign officer observer who had graduated from the Legion’s parachute course at Sidi Bel Abbes, asked me to accept the rank of major in the Legion and command one of his outposts, Isabelle. I agreed, and served until the night of May Fourth.
On the morning of the Third of May, a Legion runner from headquarters brought me a confidential message from de Castries to the effect that surrender is imminent, and he has received an order to try to evacuate me by helicopter that night. The situation on the ground was beyond desperate, and I’d been expecting something like this for the past week.
I gathered Isabelle’s NCOs in my bunker, showed them the message, and told them I had to go. The Legion has a long tradition of never surrendering, so I spread out a map, and suggested escape routes into Laos for those of the men who wanted to try to slip out and run for it.
Even though Orsini’s leg was shattered, he, and many of the wounded, had been carried to fighting positions; he’d spent the past several weeks actively shooting at the Viet Minh during their periodic mass charges. The idea that I would have a chance to escape, and he would not, truly bothered me. So I decided, for good luck, as I explained to my NCOs, to have Orsini see me off tonight when a helicopter was supposed to try to land in the dark and fly me out.
After it got dark, the senior NCO at Isabelle, a German Wehrmacht veteran by the name of Karl Heinz Streeter, the sergeant who had fetched me from the hospital, and two other Legionnaires, helped me carry Orsini from his position down to where a small observation helicopter had just landed in the dark to carry me out.
Karl and I had become good comrades during my stay at Isabelle. He and the other Legionnaires were used to the foibles, and quirky behavior, of the men who become Legion officers, and hadn’t even blinked I when explained to them that, for good luck on my trip out, I needed to have Orsini present when my helicopter lifted off.
In the light of the periodic shell flashes, and flares, I could see that my escape was to be attempted via a little gasoline powered two seater, a French observation helicopter.
“Brigadier Roberts. You are the American General Roberts?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
Karl and the men were stunned at hearing the rank. Surprised you didn’t I, Karl? It surprises me too.
“Please hurry, General. Dawn is coming.”
“Load Orsini,” I ordered the Legionnaires. I was quite emphatic. Legionnaires know how to respond when a Legion officer gives a definitive command; they quickly got to work lifting him through the tiny door.
“But I can only carry one man in this little thing.”
“I know,” I said, “and he’s the one.”
“But”…
“No buts. He’s going.”
The pilot nodded when I waved my MAT-49 at him for emphasis. Then he saluted, and started to turn away. Then he turned back, stood rigidly to attention, and saluted again.
******
Back at Isabelle, I packed my bug-out gear, and wait anxiously all day for night to fall. I had decided to go out through the wire with this evening’s ambush patrol. They will set an ambush and come back, as usual, just before dawn. I, on the other hand, would keep going.
Talley is really going to be pissed; tough shit.
Word about Orsini’s departure must have spread. When I finished getting my gear together, and came out of the dugout, I was quite taken to find Karl, and all the Isabelle Legionnaires who were not at their fighting positions, standing in the trench at attention. I shook the hand of every one of them as we stood in the flickering light of the flares periodically popping overhead.
“Bon chance” we whispered to each other. “Vive Le Legion.”
I’m glad it’s dark so they can’t see the tears in my eyes.
Our six-man patrol snaked out through the wire and moved quietly through the dark night. I was dressed in the black pajamas of the Viet Minh and wearing a Viet Minh pith helmet, and sneakers. I was carrying one of the AK-47s favored by the Viet Minh, and a bamboo Viet Minh artillery shell carrier.
Instead of shells, the bamboo carrier was packed with whatever I could find that I thought might be useful on the long walk ahead. I was also wearing a web belt with a big fanny pack and three canteens.
Hopefully my silhouette, when I wear my Viet Minh pith helmet, and carry an AK-47, would make me look as though I was just another Viet Minh trooper walking at night to avoid the French planes.
I sure as hell hope so.
I was not carrying much ammunition, just a single grenade in my pants pocket and the rounds in the long clip of my AK-47. But I was loaded down. My most important items were my Viet Minh pith helmet, and two inflatable rubber mattresses. I had one of the mattresses in the fanny pack, and one in the bamboo basket.
Also split between my fanny pack and the basket were a couple of extra canteens, some rope to tie things to the mattresses when I have to swim, small ammunition pouches containing bottles of water, purification tablets, and malaria pills. I was also carrying an extra pair of Vietnamese sneakers and socks, and all the sticky rice balls, and combat ration food packs, I could stuff in anywhere they would fit, including inside my shirt, and the various pockets of my battledress pants.
It’s a long way to Laos. I figured I might get away with losing either the fanny pack or the bamboo basket, but probably not both.
******
Not a word was spoken when we reached the ambush position selected by the Legion corporal leading the patrol, just firm handshakes. Over and over I reminded myself that I needed to clear the area, and find a place to hole up, before dawn breaks. In the dark moonlit night I was headed, I hoped, to what looked to me to be the least likely place on the map for the Viet Minh to be on the lookout for escapees.
In other words, I was going to start my long walk back to Hanoi by heading north away from South Vietnam, and taking the long way around to get to Laos.
Several times I heard voices, and men moving about, after I parted with the Legionnaires. But I saw no one. About 4am, I began moving higher up the side of the mountain until I found what I thought might be a suitable hiding place. It was, so far as I could tell in the darkness, a heavy thicket of trees, and brush, into which I could crawl, and spend the day.
The flashes and booms of mortars and artillery rounds seemed loud and close by, and there were constant flares and explosion flashes to the south. I thought, make that devoutly prayed, I was beyond the Viet Minh lines and staging areas. My best guess was that I was about six miles north of the French perimeter. It was the morning of May fifth, and time for some sleep. I was completely bushed.
I dropped my pants and took a crap. Then I slept and napped all day, and tried to do it without moving. As every soldier knows, it is movement, more than anything else, that draws attention.
Just before twilight, I slowly raised my head until I spotted the Laotian mountains. I think. Then I looked at my compass to see the direction I’d have to take to reach the mountain range that I would have to cross in order to get into Laos. In the distance, I could hear the thunder of the Viet Minh shells arriving in the perimeter, and the answering explosions from what was left of the French artillery beyond it.
Almost time to go.
When it got fully dark, I moved out as rapidly as possible in the slight moonlight, over the ridge, and into the next valley. Then, after carefully looking and listening for what seemed like hours, while I waited for a cloud to cover the moon, I took a deep breath to settle my nerves, and moved out into the open to wade across a small stream running down the valley. Every second I expected to hear shooting, or a shout, and the sound of running feet.
