Saigon

6/10/08

In Saigon, at Cong Quynh Street, we go north, pass a market, on the right, and cross the road junction, toward an unusual bridge over the road, still in Cong St.
This is a vaunted point at which the South Vietnamese forces are said to have held out to the last against the North and the Viet Cong.
It brings back a lot of memories for me, but they were realised before I actually encountered the bridge here. To one side, there is a small road, one of the Nguyen Trai streets, and at a point where it narrows, a green steel gate, of two panels. That was, to current analysis, where I applied the fight, with our A team, a few soldiers selected from our earlier group before the Americans pulled out from the military conflict here in the mid seventy.
I was delighted to see allusions to the fight in a science fiction film, Aliens, directed by James Cameron, 1986.

Now, let’s try to assess the situation.
The boys were holding the bridge, which was obviously a ruin.
From the north, goons shooting straight down. West and east, goon territory.
To the south, little scope for support, under hail of fire.
I saw us being pushed toward the building waiting at the top of the road, through where the bridge was. But I wanted to check out the Nguyen Trai.
I knew something that the American military went to pains not to, that the goons used powerful radio transmitters to detect metal objects, this was why so few soldiers came back from recon into enemy territory, and why our teams often succeeded.
So I, and later we, simply carried wooden weapons, bokken, nightsticks and strung double bogchain (nunchaku)!

I got in first, alone.
The following events were bloody horrible, I don’t want to recall them at the moment, except to say I managed to take out one or two concierges and a foreign VIP.

So I got back to the boys, and the A team, with some information, and we set out a plan. But we needed a couple of things.
A cutting torch for the gate. Our shrapnel suits, made of dense, wire lined rubber or plastic, with lightweight tank tracks bolted on. We would need to call down artillery upon ourselves, so a radio was necessary.
Now, to carry all that shit in, would only have got us klerrd, I mean, keeled!
So the suits, our machine guns, ammo, M16s and the cutting gear, we needed dropped from the air.
That wasn’t considered possible. There was very little available air support, just some hueys and phantoms. So we had a think. We couldn’t risk damaging the cutting flasks, or they wouldn’t work. We were going to require shooters very quickly too. But the suits would have given us away, so we decided to drop the stuff from a huey, which the pilot was to abandon, on a rooftop if he wished!
The suits, for which we would request by radio transmission when we summoned the artillery strike, would be dropped by a phantom jet!

Well, we got in again without heavy losses to our side. Not directly, and there was plenty of resistance. However, first, we weren’t heavily armed, so calls for help were not well heeded, secondly, the goons had become very accustomed to their metal detecting, and without a metal signal, didn’t see the urgency! Third, we could swiftly crush opposition anyway.

Now, there weren’t a lot of detectors, and the information needed collating.
So I found the kit link, and shut it down. Suddenly the enemy went quiet all around. Then the South caught on to what was happening, but of course, so did Charley! The South couldn’t move much, so we called in our huey, which the NVA simply watched, to see where it was going!
“Too easy!” The actual words of the pilot! He could even drop lower, almost for someone to pass the kit out, then climb the huey over the wall, into a holocaust of machine fire, and drop the bitch onto a cafe and do a runner! He carried a metal plate to his side, and as soon as he got to an alley, dropped it and took off!

Then the goons turned from the bridge, the building to the north, and the surrounding areas, taking the heat totally away from the boys at the bridge!
Of course, the goons swarmed toward us, as we commented they had often done before, the South Vietnamese Army saw the opportunity to shell! They radioed me, but I asked them to wait.

Then came sudden quiet, as we touched on nerves, capturing NVA ranks, foreign politicos, Charley leaders. Unfortunately for the Charley officers, the maxim, “I’ve had it up to here with the Viet Cong!” held, and we usually cut their throats. If the A team weren’t keen to do it, I very much was.

No-one would let me kill the foreigners, it was they who stopping the fighting, for one. This was, of course, good for me, as it revealed their complicity in the war, very finally.
Well, soon the VIPs cut a deal, and were about to drive away with us, in the bliss of Christ peace and joy. I was having none of that, but...what then?
Sorry, you’ll have to wait while I think! To simply open up on a few of them wouldn’t have been enough.

Well, they produced a girl, Abigail. They knew I’d recognise her, and one said, “Here she is, she’s yours.”
“Thanks.” Says I.
Then they grab her back, put a knife to her throat and tell me their conditions.
Then follows a very subtle dance, in reasoning, negotiating and even movement terms, not long in duration, and very very complex! During the dance, selecting prisoners, taking hostages, cutting, and shooting in what was intended to have been, if represented on an oscilloscope, periods of very high frequency, low wavelength, activity, like seizures, interspersed with low frequency, longer wavelength stretches, of balletic pour de bras and develope.

At the Zenith, we open up, and then all hell breaks loose! I’m straight onto the radio, summoning artillery fire on our exact position!
Happily, the phantom, fully alerted by the recent change in the battle, is closely and quickly approaching.
We shoot and cut our way to a temporary redoubt, and the phantom roars over, releasing the net, which slams into a wall above us, so the suits drop into our hands.
We kit up in a hurry, two or three start cutting a way out through some metal doors, while a few head back into the shit! Had we all been with them, they would have made a big target. But because we headed back into Dante’s Inferno, redirecting the focus of attention took most of the heat from the escape team.

Abandon all hope, ye who do here enter. Sorry, the next events were as awful as the solo incursion, so we’ll go to the escape.

Under shelling, and even heavy machine gun fire, we catch up with the cutting team.
We get out, back onto Nguyen Trai, and a tank comes hurtling toward us!
We wait a second, it stops, and it’s one of ours! So we get on, and it backs out of the street, and continues backing up until it crunches through a wall!
We stop, thank the driver, and sit it out at some building. We have a hostage, a North Vietnamese officer, who is grateful to have been removed from danger.
A South Vietnamese soldier tells us to let him go, and within an hour or so, South Vietnam has packed it in!

Last Update: 9/5/09
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