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Vietnam Convoy

By Daniel Ford

South Vietnam has only two seasons--wet and dry--and this was the time of transformation. The sky each morning boiled with clouds; the afternoons were soft and blue, and the sun was like an open furnace door. Between times the rain came down, briefly and fiercely.

Ours was a six-truck convoy, each vehicle crammed with 20 or 30 Montagnards in battle dress. Small, fat goats ran bleating from the noise of our passage. The men grinned at us with gold-capped teeth; the women, barebreasted and grave, squatted by the roadside to ease the burden of their wicker packs, and watched us without any expression at all. Some of the children saluted; others fled with the goats.

There was a barbed-wire fence around each village. A black-uniformed militiaman guarded a barbed-wire gate which could be swung across the roadway at night, completing the perimeter. The huts of the village were fashioned from poles and thatch, and stood high off the ground on stilts, as if, a millennium ago, they had served lake-dwellers instead of mountain men.

As we drove, the villages were spaced at greater intervals. Finally we left the river valley behind us and climbed a mountain, on switchbacks supported only by a few boulders or a wall of rotting timbers. The trucks groaned in their lowest gear. Our Montagnard troopers seemed equally pained, but we crossed the mountain without causing a landslide or meeting an ambush, and we grinned at each other across the language barrier.

We came down upon a plain of scattered, umbrella-like trees. A small white obelisk stood beside the road, marking the spot where a French regimental combat team had been ambushed and destroyed 10 years before. Nearby were the rusting, weed-grown carcasses of two French armored cars. Our convoy passed the graveyard without sparing it a glance or a prayer: such sights are nothing unusual anywhere in South Vietnam.

The Highlands do not attract many travelers these days, even to such secure and pleasant oases as Pleiku and Dalat. Even the white hunters have ceased to tramp the mountains in search of tiger pelts. Virtually the only foreigners in the Highlands today are the US military advisers--which is the world's loss, because this is a place of extraordinary beauty. The Highlands cover two-thirds of South Vietnam and are covered mostly by rain-forest. Flying from Saigon to Pleiku (there are roads, but the only safe highway is the sky) is like skimming a frozen green sea.

Pleiku is the military and therefore civil center of the Highlands--a few paved streets and a few dozen small, open-front shops with corrugated roofs. It is the nearest thing to Shangri-la that I have seen on this earth. Blue-green mountains encircle it like a giant horseshoe, open to the south. The air is always cool, the sun is always hot, so that a man can regulate his climate simply by moving in and out of the shade. The colors are brilliant: the soft blue of the sky, the new rice kelly-green in the hollows, the earth red and black, flowering trees whose blossoms are a shade between gold and crimson, and vines that flower purple against the gates and arches of the town.

The Highland population averages out to five inhabitants per square mile. The people are not Vietnamese but tribal mountaineers who speak their own language, worship their own gods and live much as their ancestors did 500 years ago. The French called them Montagnards. The Vietnamese word for them is moi, which means "baboon." They are a sturdy, dark-skinned race, with none of the feline delicacy and cunning of the lowland Vietnamese. They are natural warriors, happily exchanging their crossbows for automatic rifles; the government recruits them to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, and the Viet Cong recruits them to keep it open.

After the trucks put us down, we split into four sections, with two Americans and about 75 Montagnards in each. The Americans in my section were Russell Brooks and Michael Holland, both sergeants, both in their mid-twenties, neither speaking a word of Jarai, the local tribal language. They gave orders in sign language. The orders were usually translated by the Montagnard noncom, a grizzled, bandy-legged warrior called "Old Man," whose ears had been pierced in childhood and then weighted, so that loops of flesh hung down almost to his shoulders.

We spent five days in the mountains, marching 10 or 12 hours a day. Sometimes we were walking through open valleys, sometimes crawling through the bramble-bush. Sometimes, rarely, we were chasing guerrillas at a run. The Montagnards protected us with silent, smiling gestures. Do not walk on this trail: it is bristling with bamboo spikes. Do not touch this tree: its spines are sharp and its sap is poisonous.

Old Man could smell water, it seemed, and each time our canteens went dry he found the one clear pool of water in an otherwise dry creek bed. He did not approve of the iodine tablets we used to purify the water, or the army rations we carried in our packs. The Montagnards carried only rice, with a can or two of sardines for emergencies. The rest they foraged--a certain pulpy leaf, a round green fruit like an artichoke, apples no larger than cherries. Once I saw a Montagnard strip a white, fluffy mass from a tree, like a bundle of milkweed floss, which he wrapped in leaves and put into his pack. I picked up one bit; it was a woolly worm.

At night we bivouacked wherever the day's march had brought us. The Montagnards scattered in twos and threes to build thrifty little fires from twigs and dry leaves, with a few small stones to control the draft. One man in the group produced a fire-blackened pot and in this they cooked their rice, flavoring it with leaves they had plucked during the day. It took 20 minutes to cook the first batch of rice, 20 minutes to eat it, and 20 minutes to cook the rice that they would eat cold for their breakfast the next morning.

Then they smoked. The Montagnards were issued four tobacco leaves per man per day; some chew their ration, some crumbled it into massive, hard-carved pipes, and others rolled it into cigars the size and shape of ice-cream cones. The acrid blue smoke curled about their heads.

By seven o'clock the sun was down; by seven-thirty our olive-green uniforms were melting into the dusk, and by eight it was altogether dark. The Montagnards simply stretched out and slept. Holland, Brooks, and I had brought plastic ponchos, which we spread under us to discourage ants. As an extra comfort, I stuff my hat with grass for a pillow. Lastly, we anointed ourselves with mosquito repellent. The trick was to fall asleep, and to stay asleep. This was not always easy in the Highlands, because the nights were chilly and the thirst of the day was so compelling that we continued to drink water throughout the night.

We were gathering refugees as we marched. Usually they were hiding in the thickest parts of the rain-forest--pathetic little bands of women, children, and old men. Some were migrating in search of new valleys to farm. Others had fled their huts on the second day of this operation, when government had assaulted a Viet Cong village with rockets, machinegun fire, and Vietnamese Rangers dropped in by helicopter. The refugees were usually hungry and often sick. Mike Holland is a medic, and he treated their sores and gave them vitamin pills. Then we marched them along with us. The children carried smaller children, and the adults carried towering packs and great clay water jugs. By the fifth day we had 30 refugees, two shaggy ponies, and a dozen cows in our column. Even the cows were mountaineers: they scrambled up cliffs that I could not climb without using my hands. The Viet Cong had drafted their young men; now we were taking the others back to government-controlled settlements.

Our last day's objective was a town recorded on the map as Tan Hoa. We could not find it. There was nothing where Tan Hoa should have been, except a road, a river, and a grass field where we spent the night. Next morning, as we were waiting for the helicopters which would take us out, we found some ancient fighting holes and a graveyard with fine granite tombstones, Gallic in design. That was all that remained of Tan Hoa--foxholes dating back to the Indochina War, a few French graves, and a name on a French-made map. All the rest had moldered in the 10 rainy season, and turned to dust in the 10 dry seasons, which separated their war from ours.