Officers at the Da Nang or Chu Lai command posts who knew any details of the Quyet Thang mission deemed Captain Ruddy Cardenas a military eccentric. It seemed no wonder to Duquel why Cardenas kept his modus so secret. Only a few commanders lacking a traditional military mind would follow the freakish scheme.  

Cardenas was obsessed with capturing Thang alive. He wanted to thoroughly debrief the cunning Vietnamese chieftain and then gravely punish his war crimes. Ulises sensed too much reprisal in the hunt. An angry, recalcitrant revenge that configured Cardenas as the trapper, the juror, and guillotinist. It was a quest overloaded with payback more than military duty.  

In Pleiku, he tired of hunting teenage Viet Cong fighters in jungle streets. He wanted bigger prey. The National Liberation Front master minds and ideologues who infused inexperienced rural soldiers with a lethal patriotism.

For such an endgame, the captain created a unique style of foraging for guerrilla cadres in Central Vietnam. After adapting the original intimidation style of CIA operatives in Saigon. he devised a twist. Besides the hardcore scare tactics against Cong rebels in the Hobo Woods and Cu Chi plantations at the Iron Triangle –death symbols and fake ghost sounds in the jungle– Cardenas added ancestral spirit divination to the mix. A weird and uneasy deed that confounded even his least orthodox commanders.

He ordered his soldiers to insert a death card into the helmet band or mouth of a dead VC lying in the battlefield. Such practice was expected to dissuade the superstitious peasantry from collaborating with the insurgents. Duquel noticed how intimidation tactics did little to slow the insurrection. Cardenas and his platoon leaders insisted it worked, especially well in the remote villages. It appeared to him that the captain and his deputies reveled in scaring the impressionable, rural folk out of their millennial wits. 

Cardenas also ordered his Top Sergeant Enias Tabal, a demolitions specialist since the Korean War, who fought with Cardenas at the Yalu River, to blow up old tombs and cellars found in any abandoned religious shrine. He wanted to prevent the VC from using such places as a weapons cache. 

Duquel remembered that the ancient Buddhist temple deep in the Pineapple Forest, west of Chu Lai had cavities and small dungeons all over its ruins. Tabal, at 38 and the oldest soldier in Tango Troop, showed hesitance but, out of long-standing fealty to his captain, set up the charges in the two crypts behind the old main altar. Ulises presumed the chambers to be tombs of long-deceased servant monks.

The Cuban santero Fernando Castel and Papio recoiled in shock as the vaults went up in splinters. They saw it as a mutilation of an ancestral, holy site.  

 “We baptizing ourselves with devil luck,” warned Papio.

Later that day, as the platoon marched on to the distant Annamite range, far west of the temple ruins, Thibodeaux led a silent rosary prayer. The platoon made a new stop at an old bomb crater on the northwest edge of the forest. While Duquel and Papio took a piss by the edge of the stagnant water hole, Papio confided some more of his animist fears.    

“We messed with that graveyard folk, Duke,” he said, eyes bursting wide open. “Pissed off some ghosts, and now they’ll stick to our hide. There ain’t no bullets to kill annoyed spirits.”   

“Sure, Papio. But with all that praying Thibo did, we’ll be all right,” Ulises jested.  

 Later that day, Ulises helped Lieutenant Jeremiah Piper take stock of munitions, rations, and battle gear before the long trek to Bao Cat. The Lieutenant asked about the platoon’s morale. He knew the grunts were still shaky about blowing up the Buddhist tombs. 

“Any slackers because of the ghost charade back at the cemetery?” Piper asked. Duquel liked that the junior officer was mindful of his soldiers.

“Ancient folklore in Vietnam has a way of rubbing deep into everyone’s skin. I am an anthropologist with scientific criteria. I try to explain to them the outdated superstitions of this land,” said Duquel while they completed preparations to move farther away from the old cemetery.

“Do tell your captain that,” Piper shot back. “He believes his sysops’ magic will defeat the insurgency,” said Piper. “My take is that we should focus on Viet Cong deserters roaming in the town centers. Instead of running after phantom rebel chieftains in the boondocks, we would interrogate the runaways. They’re probably local spies for the Cong.”

Cardenas and the young lieutenant from Alabama were at irreparable odds about the Quyet Thang capture operation. He was a recent ROTC graduate officer from Rochester University. The captain used all his commanding officer tricks to transfer Piper out of his unit. However, the boyish Butter Bar with the shortest crew cut survived. Much later, Ulises found out why Piper had been assigned to Cardenas’s company, but did not immediately tell Cardenas the devious details. 

From where he lay wounded at Bao Cat, Ulises heard Piper and Thibodeaux chatting nervously behind the nearby boulders. The platoon commander ordered the radioman to change to a long whip antenna for more gain and long distance commo with the Da Nang base camp.

“Tango here. We’re under heavy fire! Request a mission reconfiguration at Bao Cat to include helicopter assault. Need reinforcements ASAP?”   With increasing tension, the lieutenant waited for an answer from headquarters. After a few minutes, Cardenas’s voice crackled in.  

“Negative Tenderfoot. This is Whiskey from Cayuse One. Reminding Tenderfoot, we burned our ships. Repeat –expect no backup!  Keep radio silence as much as possible. Radio waves infested. Will do flyover soon.” 

Ulises heard the exchange. Cardenas had given the green platoon officer a scornful call sign. The captain never hid his aversion and mistrust for the young Louie.

It was proper for Tenderfoot to be desperate. Pinned down and ambushed on all flanks meant doom for the expedition. Ulises prepared to die as peacefully as he could, blood draining slowly from his body. Amid the increasingly desperate situation, a tune sprang into his mind. It was an echo hallucination emanating from an old jukebox stored in his innermost brain. To Duquel, it was like the Platters humming to “Twilight Time” coming from the voices of a Buddhist temple choir. A spectral melody accompanied by a soft percussion of bongs and finger cymbal and some ethereal lyrics. 

“When purple curtains mark the end of days… The dead live longer than the living.“

A cryptic message with the wisdom of popular song and cosmic insight. Was the dear monk Jampa Kochi speaking to him again about life and death? Ulises feared his mind was beginning to run wild like the sniper bullets ricocheting from the boulders. Or was it that at death’s throes, death takes a life of its own? Latching onto key experiences lived, emotions not forgotten, or lessons that should have been learned?

It vexed him that such vagaries occupied his mind, not the primitive survival instincts needed to stay alive a while longer at Bao Cat. Intuitions, epiphanies, memories, and misused sentiments flooded his soul. His thoughts shifted to his first days in Vietnam when he tried the hardest to figure out his predicament as a reluctant warrior, a draftee into the US Army’s gargantuan apparatus that swallowed a huge chunk of the 1960s young. Twisting the youthful fate of a generation to the whim of hawkish political strategists and militaristic adventurers.   

The memory of day one in Vietnam almost always made him sob. The sweltering room at Da Nang’s Tenth Deployment Station where he stood, duffel bag at his feet like a tame, submissive dog, seemed a hellfire gate to a new dimension. The bag contained a few belongings that once connected him to the tame, complacent academic world now so far behind him.  A week before, at Travis Air Force Base, north of San Francisco, waiting to board a military airlift Command flight to Vietnam, Ulises unpacked and threw away books, class notebooks, and pictures of faux girlfriends. Once at Tan Son Nhut airport, two days before a chopper flight to Da Nang, he gave away his acoustic guitar to a three-time wounded departing Marine Lance Corporal. Ulises wanted no ties to a previous existence as a musical scholar. He thought it would be best for his sanity. 

Staring hard at the bamboo gate that was Bao Cat’s front access, his head throbbing with fear of a slow, agonizing death or the quick mercy of a another direct bullet hit, Ulises remembered how, just last December, he placidly strolled about through the hallow halls of Syracuse University. He walked from Languages Hall to the Humanities Center or the Bowne Conservatory, indulging in scholarly polyphony or ink research for his degree in musical anthropology. He consiodered himself a mellow, sentimentally unburdened student, alive with dreams of traveling the entire arch of the Antillean archipelago to study the artistic and sugary mélange of Caribbean musicality. He also planned a year or two of study in the West African backcountry, tracing the roots of slave chants and tribal musical lore, which later engendered the delightful sounds and rhythms of the rumba, mambo, candomblé, samba, and bolero beats the world over.    

Another pang of pain and discomfort moved up and down his neck and his upper solar plexus as images of his campus meanderings escaped his mind. Ulises wondered why the sniper who put him down had not finished the kill. He methodically eyed the village for signs of movement. He saw none. It seemed as if the place was deserted. Defended only by the spirits of ancient dwellers against, annoyed by intruders to their domains. It suddenly dawned on him that in a bigger sense, it was what the story of Vietnam was all about. An age-old psychic war against foreign usurpers. Like the hassled ghosts Papio Pinay detected at the ancestral temple graveyard. 

Soon, Duquel heard grenades exploding by the north mesa of Bao Cat ridge, right over the jungle gorge. It was grunt Raymond Galan aggressively using his hand grenades. Ulises anxiously scanned the sky above his head. Only two mature vultures sat patiently on nearby branches and the rocks, passively observing the slow-motion skirmish below their perch. Ulises was really searching the sky for the Cayuse helicopter with Captain Cardenas on board. That, perhaps, it would be the angel he had prayed to come and whisk him away to safety. 

But the sniper fire kept the rescue machine away. 

As his situational awareness slowly faded, Ulises’ mind drifted back to memories of his last civilian days. Eluding the Selective Service, he left the campus and hit the lively streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hiding for a while at Uncle Pepe Duquel’s fifth-floor tenement.   To no avail.

During that frosty winter, military disruption inevitably swept into his student lifestyle. He was inducted in the levy of February 1967. Six weeks of boot camp followed at Fort Dix. He then received advanced training at Fort Hamilton. At the finish, classified as an administrative clerk, useful to a mobile infantry company. His hopes were on assignment to an Army garrison base in Italy, Germany, Hawaii, or, with a blast of fortune, his native Puerto Rico. At worst, the Demilitarized Zone in the icy Korean peninsula. As a fluke of luck, to Panama or Alaska.  

Orders to Vietnam came on his last training day at Ft. Hamilton.  At least his college curricula would save him from Infantry duty. Or so he hoped.

♠

NEXT CHAPTER: ESPY