Men at war do not talk much. Their minds are set to situation awareness. Captain Ruddy Cardenas’s filled his brain with schemes to hold at bay the Vietnamese insurgency. This fascinated Ulises Duquel tirelessly as he observed the officer plunging deeper into the logistical complexities of counterrevolution.

Cardenas’s plan targeted Viet Cong recruitment centers in the rural highlands and urban central Vietnam. A reputable intent. However, it defied all conventions his field commanders allowed. Duquel noted how tensely the captain’s rogue mission conflicted with the top brass mandates. Strict directives called for manifold infantry field operations in wooded areas. Aggressive ground contact and offensive combat. Not spook games or intel-gathering ruses, unless by sneak-and-peek patrols.

Cardenas faced the obstacles to his plan with inventiveness. To parry the imposed order of battle, he devised a shift to place his troops in unique urban settings. Initially, put together a musical band to pry into local Vietnamese cultural venues. Surreptitiously, the plan was also to lurk in suspected Viet Cong villages where peasant militia were continually recruited. Cadres constantly agitated the local population and recruited youth before the South Vietnamese draft got to them.

But the bosses became restrictive. When the orders were cut at Central Command, Duquel did not see provisions or resources for rumba music. They simply authorized the captain to lead a small, three-platoon company of riflemen and logistics personnel for search-and-destroy raids. A design to eliminate any assets for intel-gathering operations.  In all, it was a limiting scheme.  

After failing to plea his cause, Cardenas acquiesced but quietly repurposed his troops. He baptized Whiskey as the platoon for administrative affairs to be headed by the top sergeant Tabal. Papa platoon would take charge of logistics under his supervision. The twelve-man Tango platoon under Buck Sarge Espino became both the combat arm and the cultural ambassadors. Due to the scarcity of the allowed resources, all soldiers in the three platoons would be interchangeable as needed.

Cardenas devised other ways to override the imposed handicaps. Duquel watched enthralled as the captain tussled, turned about, and diverted from the stipulated marching orders. The officer was either teeming with smarts or was a madman. Interestingly, Duquel was the only one to be dismayed with the machinations. All the others merely felt piqued

It was to be expected. Most commanders at headquarters and headquarters were always busy discerning the next day’s field tactics. No one wanted to be lost in mind games. Trying to figure out a mid-level officer’s spook charades. Duquel discovered that men at war have little time to reckon with each other’s wits. Grunts were too frenetic with survival, the bosses frazzled with combat logistics and battlefield objectives. Strangely, men at war also deferred to folly. As doc Rawlings liked to say, in the madness of war, the crazier, the better. Temerity as a norm.

Ulises closely observed how Cardenas obsessed over decoding the historic Vietnamese language of resistance. The crux of the Viet Cong’s agitprop slogans and indoctrination spiels. The innermost minds of the insurrection’s political cadre. A cadre whose core mission was to mask the revolution in secrecy and mystic. As such Cardenas needed to decode their agitation ploys. That which he called the idiosyncratic poisoning of the Vietnamese mind. Extremist ideologues crafted stories. Narratives that transformed a rural peasant into a determined adversary. A transformation with little or no tactical training. And, how implausible defiance against imperialistic juggernauts as France, Japan, and the United States took shape.

He keened on the unleashing of almost suicidal verve in battle despite the odds. Fascinated by the adversary’s daring and brashness. With due respect. He had personally experienced the warrior spirit of the Viet Cong soldiers. Cardenas faced it, wounded thrice during his forays as an infantry platoon leader in the Iron Triangle. He met and fought a formidable and fierce opponent at most.

The Vietnamese resistance was unique and uneven. The captain toiled to grasp how nationalism became so sacrificial. Did the Communist social salvation arrogance have anything to do with it? Or was it fanatic rejection of capitalist materialism.

Not much spirituality in either system. Duquel saw the captain face dilemmas. Simplistic yet poignant. He contrasted Vietnamese high morality with crude, brutal war-faring pragmatism. Why did Hanoi and its military arm in the South choose a philosophy of objectivity? Vietnam was steeped in sublime spirituality. But to a Western mind… A spirituality steeped in superstitious disorder.

Why Marxism? There were many other practical ways of achieving Vietnam’s material aspirations. Was godless Communism more in tune with Nam’s ancestral rituality? Its Confucian ethics, patriarchal tradition, and animist abstractions?  Not really. If so, Cardenas felt the Vietnamese insurrection should have taken on a Buddhist bent.

Nationalism was no religious crusade in the style of Christian Medieval Europe. Nor biblically fueled Jewish compulsion for the creation of a state. Much less, Islamic holy wars against infidels. The Vietnam rebels simply latched on to Maoist praxis.  A struggle without cosmic creeds, deities, monks, or saints. Lacking any form of religious sanctity. Yet steeped in ancestral worship mysticism.

Cardenas found these paradoxes hard to solve. National fervor had deep historical roots in the peasant mind, but uprisings offered no practical returns for the rice fields. He knew that in most villager’s mind, revolution was a calling for political elites. Revolt did not solve the calamities of a drought or a bad rice harvest. Nor did it cause seedlings to produce more yield. How, then, to extricate the South Vietnamese masses out of the revolutionary fervor? Die hard militants like Quyet Thang were the clue. If such ideologues were dissected, their dialects could be effectively neutralized.

Such thinking pushed Cardenas to place focus on the principal propagandists of the insurrection. To his consternation, the US military had not thoroughly accomplished this after five years in the fray. A good field intel lineup of principal actors was needed. Pinpoint the insurrection’s main brains in South Vietnam. Gather the key political clues, the relevant patriotic stratagems and extrapolate them with ongoing rebel military strategy. Killing peasant soldiers should not be the main strategy. Slaying the ideas that propelled them into battle was. Otherwise, since there was no real estate to be won in asymmetric warfare, only pointless bloodletting would ensue.

Cardenas knew every young Vietnamese boy and girl craved an ancestral hero. As an Infantry first lieutenant, he carefully gathered legend and lore about Vietnam’s mythical figures. Learned the lore from interrogated prisoners at Pleiku, My Tho, Saigon, and Dak To. Talked at length with captured cadre from the deep inside Cu Chi rebel underground.

Found out how Liberation Front political cadre mixed military training with legend and nostalgic song. Instilled on the village young tales of exemplary war heroes who sacrificed their lives for an independent and glorious Vietnam. A girl activist from the Saigon University Student Union first told Cardenas about Quyet Thang. She said that one Quyet Thang cadre excelled in political indoctrination that capture youthful minds. Did so by impersonating mythical characters of Vietnam past and staging small dramas about ancient battles against invaders from China, Portugal and Japan.

The captain heard gossip about how –on key occasions– Thang cleverly disguised himself as a woman to escape detection when working risky indoctrination venues. Informants said Thang sometimes took on the name of Nemesis, referring to the Greek goddess of revenge. Retaliation against France, the Saigon government and American collaborators for political crimes against the Fatherland.

This story revealed to Cardenas that the master indoctrinator had acquired some Hellenic studies. He adeptly used Greek mythology for his spiels.  Studying Cardenas’s notes, logs, and interrogation reports, Duquel found mention of a surrealistic inventory of ancestral heroes. The ancient Trung Sisters riding into battle on elephants against Chinese invaders. The Grand Prince Tran Hung Dao defeating hordes of encroaching Mongols. The extraordinary deeds of the unificationist Tay Son brothers fighting drawn-out battles against divisive warlords. Such past heroism gave spiritual energy to Thang’s discourse. A call to violent struggle against a new set of intruders. These were the US Americans and their British, Australian, South Korean, New Zealand, Thailand, and Philippines allies. A peoples war against their Saigon lackeys.  

Thang’s inventory did not disregard the more contemporary champions. Cardenas took note of mentions to the modern traditionalist thinkers Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh. Both kept the patriotic fervor aflame during the dark, repressive French colonial years. And fan the new reverence for Ho Chi Minh. Ulises remembered how, with Boi’s translations, the captain outlined lists of the venerated martyrs of Vietnamese nationalism. He detailed those that resonated the most with the current insurrection. The research soon made the captain a military scholar of Pan-Asian revolutionary thought.  But, US Americans were losing too much blood as a result of all the patriotic agitation. An ideological counteroffensive was in order.

His scheme required qualitative research which Ulises Duquel was trained to provide. Historic, folklore, and cultural interpretation would be the venue of Boi Pham Nguyen. First of all, decipher the historical trajectory of the rebellion. Understand the impact on the population of revolutionary narratives. Neutralize, or effectively counter the effect of the indoctrination. Finally, wipe out what is left of the armed struggle.

Captain Ruddy Cardenas saw the fields of battle in Vietnam as a mindscape in conflict, not territory to be gained. The war would be lost or won deep in the psyche of the South Vietnamese people. Not in provincial villages or urban political centers.

Then. and only then would the US intervention succeed. Upturn Quyet Thang’s proverbial nom-de-guerre –Victory Sword– against him.  

♠

NEXT CHAPTER: INSIGHTS