At sunrise on the day of the Bao Cat attack, Captain Ruddy Cardenas took to the air. By noon, he made precarious flyovers across the hamlet mesa. He was on board a swift Cayuse helicopter piloted by Warrant Officer Armand Amador. Both saw Ulises lying wounded near the Monkey Bridge and Papio Pinay limping about and yelling for ammo amid the shrub border. Cardenas checked with Sargent Espino if the troop’s three-person Sniper Killing Team had vantage points on high rocks between boulders. The platoon needed to quickly pinpoint and take out the Viet Cong sharp shooters superbly concealed in the surrounding jungle tops. Espino answered in the negative through VHF portable radio.  

Amador wanted to go down and pick up the wounded soldiers. Cardenas denied the landing. They spoke in Spanish to deter the hamlet guerrillas from understanding their intentions via captured radio chatter. Ulises heard the exchange from Thibodeaux’s backpack radio as the radioman cringed nearby to avoid a sniper’s hit.  His marching orders were to stay a reasonable distance behind Lieutenant Piper to avoid giving VC snipers an easy double target.

Buck sarge Espino, grenadier Jaramillo, and medic Rawlings moved about the craggy outcrops, still held back from the village entrance by the constant sniping. The remainder of the platoon fumbled below the hamlet plateau a hundred meters down, desperately trying to regroup and join the fight at the top. So many tactical rehearsals months before Bao Cat, only to execute at the end with brainless confusion. As he bled, it all irked Ulises terribly.

He elucidated and searched for rationality. Was it the captain’s fault for not briefing his fighting force thoroughly before the incursion? So much fucking, goddamn secrecy to it all. He knew how Bao Cat Bao could be a tribal-size booby trap. Yet, Cardenas held back crucial details until the end. Never told about the possible size of the encounter, the exact location of action, nor the difficult climb. Once up at the ridge and targeting by coherent marksmanship, as metaphysical as the Tango Troop purported to be, too many operational shortcomings blurred even the keenest insight.

Ulises remembered it well. The grunts from Rumba Hill began to intuit the lethality of the mission only as they got closer to the village atop the misty ridge. He recalled a conversation with Jaramillo at the temple ruins, a few days before Bao Cat. 

“I already hear blood of humans and animals gushing out of whatever place we’re taking our asses to this time,” said the Colombian ex-soccer player. After morning rations, they took a cigarette break. The abandoned Buddhist temple deep in the Pineapple Forest lay some thirty-seven klicks from the Bao Cat. Shrouded in the first light fog, both spotted the ridge line from far through an opening in a bamboo-lined rest spot. Jairo pressed Ulises for more inside about the expedition. 

Jaramillo puffed nervously. As he spoke, words came out shrouded in tobacco smoke.  “As is usual in Vietnam tactics, small platoons confront company-size North Vietnamese regulars who weren’t supposed to be in our path. And, if not saved by the gunships, everyone will is wiped out. What are we up to, Duke?

“It’s a guerrilla cell up there. But it’s a tough one. All I know.”  

Jairo pressed for more. “Lay it on me, buddy. This place we’re going to, stinks of a cruel death. It can save our lives if we know what we’re up to. What are we looking for.”  

“It’s to be a long-range patrol with the possibility of a brief incursion into Laotian territory. All I know. Honestly.”     

“I get bad senses, man. I hear agony and laments,” insisted Jairo. He had clairaudience, a sysops technical term used by Cardenas to describe sound impressions of metaphysical origin.  Ulises and Jairo shared the ability to capture vibrations from thin air. Ulises in musical terms, Jairo were in woo-woo perceptions.

“You have puma ears inside your brain,” said Ulises, trying to fend Jaramillo off.

“Squawk up, man. Let the message pigeon loose,” Jairo pressed on. He might have been the oldest inductee in the Tango Troop, at 27. Ulises did not remember all their ages well despite keeping the records on each. As Saigon Son’s frequent wood pipe player, Jaramillo sported a light mustache and a tiny goatee. He had large bald entrances on his thin crop of hair. His features were light Iberian and Moorish. However, they had the strong Amerindian stock of the Quimbaya tribes from the Colombian central mountains. Almost Asiatic. On a dreary day on a Vietnamese village road, he would be easily confused for a local. 

He came from Termales, a small town on the Colombian Pacific Coast. His ancestors were good metalsmiths, Ulises knew from his anthropological studies. Jairo carried his wood pipe everywhere in his duffel bag to throw good vibes into the air. He smoked pot frequently when visiting the Dog Patch slum village outside Da Nang base. Jairo carried ancestral legends with him. He claimed the ingredients of cannabis were extraterrestrial. Alleged cannabis originated from the inner dimensions of planet Jupiter. Old tribal jive. Had he been in San Francisco, California, and not as an émigré in San Diego, Jairo could have morphed into a sixties flower child at Ashbury Heights. Stoned to the grill and ferociously protesting the carnage in Vietnam.  

As a teenager, he participated in a soccer championship in Tijuana with local Mexican students. During that time, he entered San Diego as a spiny teen. t. It would be a few days of revelry, but he never turned back. He took residence with a local family as a handyman and went to school as a field athlete. The Migra caught up with him upon graduation in San Diego and allowed him to choose. Volunteer for the US Army or be deported.

He trained to be a grenadier in Fort Ord, California, and in October 1967, trapped in Bao Cat, he was three months away from ending his tour. Ulises liked to think that if he ever made a documentary about Aboriginals of the Americas, Jaramillo would play the part of an indigenous tribal shaman from the pre-Columbian ages.  

“Dale, cabron. Háblame” Jairo demanded at the temple ruins as he puffed away hard from his Chesterfield. He was breaking the Order of Battle rules. Cardenas did not allow the Tango troop to talk in Spanish unless for coded messages in the field.  

Duquel kept mum, insisting on total ignorance. However, he was aware that captured documents at the Cu Chi tunnels a year ago gave Cardenas key information for his mission. They revealed that Quyet Thang officiated over a secret animist sect from a hideout in the central mountains. A captured diary also noted the insurgent spiritist cabal met regularly at an old French mansion at an unidentified address in Da Nang. 

To Duquel’s amazement, the documents detailed rituals of spirit contact with Viet Minh nationalists. These were resistance fighters publicly executed by the French during the early century. The colonial police previously tortured most. Some were hanged at Hue’s old imperial courtyards. Others guillotined in Hanoi prisons. Six faced a firing squad wall behind the Da Nang market square sometime in the 1930s. Other hardened nationalists were left to languish and die inside the decrepit walls at the infamous Con Lon island prison. During his youth, Quyet Thang was one of the penal island inmates.

 Duquel later examined documents at the Deuxième Bureau archives. This was the old French intelligence agency in Saigon’s colonial days. The documents detailed executions at a downtown Saigon sidewalk by henchmen of the Ngô Đình Diệm regime. Cardenas’s intel files also discovered a nationalist sect, the Tam Tam Hoi —Transcendental Militia Intelligence– in which Quyet Thang was still active.  

Tam Tam. Ulises relished the sonority of the name. And piqued by the intrigue of secret societies. It reeked of extraordinary sorcery. Cardenas relieved him from menial tasks at Rumba Hill. He then focused on studying Vietnamese resistance movements from folios pulled from discarded colonial police archives. Liaison officer Boi Pham Nguyen pilfered them from a shuttered French prison at the Maison Centrale du Saigon.  

Contemporary intel gathered by Cardenas’s Vietnamese informants in the remote villages further evidenced certain beliefs. Partisans blindly imagined that Quyet Thang’s resistance strategies were dictated from the afterworld.  Astutely, Thang’s political cadre tuned into ancient spirit lore to feed the villagers with esoteric patriotic sentiment. It all fell on open ears. Urban Vietnamese high society and its scholar gentry usually veiled modern science and technology from the rural folk. Duquel took note on how the academic intelligentsia and the French collaborators held similar views towards the rural classes. This social split gave the National Liberation Front a loyal-to-death following for the resistance cause.  

“It’s a genial ploy. Thang is an insurrectional virtuoso,” Cardenas conceded to Boi Pham Nguyen. “The nationalists win the villager’s hearts by befriending their ancestral spirits.”

The captain ordered Boi and Duquel to keep all this research hidden from the platoon or other curious officers. Much less make any reference to it over the interloop airwaves.”

“When we have it all figured out, then we take action,” stated Cardenas. Just as secretly, Duquel guessed that the captain was trying to avoid ridicule from peer officers.

Cardenas also had mundane reasons for the decree. The captain knew Viet Cong listeners monitored all US and South Vietnamese military radio chatter. They did this expertly from hideouts in the high peaks. All codified helicopter frequencies and infantry field radios were expertly intercepted by guerrilla technicians trained in China. Using hand-cranked generators and espy lookout towers.

During their withdrawal from Indochina in the late 1950s, the French lost track of Thang. South Vietnamese security also lost track of his death squads during the political turmoil of the early sixties. These squads included propaganda, indoctrination, kidnapping, and political assassination. At the start of the big-scale US intervention, secret orders went out to all units instructing them to innovate strategies for rapid neutralization of partisan bands involved in executions. They reaped political havoc of the new Saigon regime.  Enraged with Thang’s action in the Iron Triangle and Saigon, Cardenas took on a self-assigned task of eliminating the nefarious Quyet Thang and his thugs. After learning of the sinister manipulations of the simple-minded peasantry, the naive patriotic youth of the lycées and of the universities, the captain decided to act on a mirror strategy. He would weaponize legend, tradition, and spiritist cultism. But he lacked the intel to do so. He then stopped leading infantry into battle and went into psychological warfare, into a psychic subterfuge of his own design. 

The eccentric sysop operation comprised two unconventional schemes. A small team of soldiers armed with extrasensory perception. A field communications code system in Spanish that was incomprehensible to Viet Cong spies. He expected his clairvoyant warriors to view or acquire clues leading to the roaming insurgents’ hideouts. 

To his surprise, the approach quickly won instant reproach and critical side views from peers and top bosses at regimental levels of command. Cardenas decided not to budge. The Vietnam conflict was so asymmetrical that no applicable protocol, standard field concept, or martial handbook provided the military chiefs with options for an easy victory and exit plan. This constantly put them at odds with each other regarding tactical procedures.  

Major Enzo Santangelo, the brigade chaplain at Da Nang headquarters, was the first commander at the base to inquire about the captain’s modus. While the bosses saw the plan as military unorthodox, the pastor saw it as a religious travesty. Being a practicing Catholic, Cardenas approached all his missions with sacramental piety. He told the chaplain through confession about the bizarre game of capture and revenge of a specific enemy chieftain.  

“Are you fighting in Vietnam’s upper or underworld?”  Santangelo questioned Cardenas during his monthly private review of sins. The captain made it a routine because he sincerely believed that if killed in action, he wanted to go with a clean soul slate as possible.

“Only God knows,” predicated Cardenas. “Our Creator also knows the enemy operates evilly in both worlds. They use criminal action against us and employ devilish psychological warfare against their own people.”

“I pray for guidance. But we must talk about this beyond the confessional,” Santangelo advised.

Ulises Duquel learned about such small, hidden dramas behind the Quyet Thang affair through the captain’s own handwritten war log. He had to typewrite, carefully bind the captain’s entries, and store them in a bolted footlocker under his cot. He instructed Ulises that if he were to fall in combat, he should discreetly dispose of the log at the morgue crematorium. 

Cardenas’s inner religiosity surprised Duquel. Outwardly, the disciplined officer seemed unaffected by the deeper moral matters of warfare. Ulises discovered that the captain wore a holy rosary. It was personally blessed by a bishop at Saigon’s Notre Dame Basilica. The reliquary hung from the captain’s neck with reverence and devotion. Castel, the troop’s resident babalwo, advised everyone to follow the captain’s lead. He suggested carrying beads to ward off mortified Vietnamese souls. Those stuck in jungle nooks since colonial days. The agnostic Duquel often felt engulfed by all the spirituality unfolding from the Tango Platoon’s assignment. Certain days it was awe, others terrible skepticism. 

At his dying moments at Bao Cat, Ulises Duquel shook in angst. He revised his short life as a foot soldier in Vietnam. A venture filled with too many surprises. A sudden love, lethal supernatural mysticism, ritualistic religiosity, military restriction, battlefield violence. All to end in a miserable, violent mutilation of body and soul. 

All to end in a miserable, violent mutilation of body and soul.

♠ 

NEXT CHAPTER: CROSSBOWS