beds, all taken. I followed Doctor Lowe, Co Yung, and two Vietnamese interns from bed to bed as they read fever charts and checked dressings. Seeing that many patients had leg wounds—some legs were gone altogether—I asked the doctor why. “Land mines,” he told me. “The whole goshdarn province is seeded with land mines and booby traps. Mines and booby traps are our biggest medical problems around here, except maybe malaria.”
Not long after my visit to the hospital I had a seemingly unrelated experience, this one involving the VC Long An Battalion, the 506th, the same one that Sergeant McCrae had said was near T, O and E. It took place while I was waiting for lunch on the rowhouse’s back porch. One of Travis King’s sidekicks—Mr. Graessle, an ex–Los Angeles cop who advised the South Vietnamese police—burst upstairs shouting: “They just caught the VC in the Right Testicle.” He explained excitedly that the Right Testicle was the nickname of the easternmost of two big loops in the river ten miles south of Tan An, in Tan Tru District, andthat the South Vietnamese army had trapped the VC Long An Battalion by blocking the neck of the loop. “Now we can clobber the bastards by air!” Graessle exclaimed. As if to underline his statement, six U.S. Army helicopters roared over the porch traveling south. Higher up I could see some Air Force jets going the same direction.
Just then King arrived, and we went inside for a lunch of crabmeat salad. “The 506th is in deep trouble,” he said, to a series of distant bangs. “Those sound like five-hundred-pound bombs.” I spent the rest of the afternoon working on notes and listening to explosions. The next morning a U.S. Army advisor from the small MACV compound down the street told me that 156 VC soldiers had died in the fight. “A damn good count,” he said. “I eyeballed most of the bodies myself, and if you throw in the wounded, the 506th ought to be sidelined for quite a while.” I found out afterward that the South Vietnamese had dubbed the battle “Operation An Dan 14/66.” 10
A day or so later my notes were more or less in order, the Chieu Hoi sample being 146, Long An’s entire defection take for the last four months. I decided that rather than do more of Lieutenant Chat’s boxes, I’d try to make sense with what I had. This meant putting together a profile of the average VC defector—describing such things as how long he’d been with the Vietcong and where he stood in the organization. The defectors’ standing seemed to me particularly important (were we getting honest-to-goodness VC, or just the hangers-on?), so I’d picked up from Saigon several intelligence studies on the VC in order to bone up on their organization. These included MACV’s “Glossary of Viet Cong Terminology,” and its “Enemy Order of Battle,” or OB for short. The OB listed the number of enemy troops by province and by type, but most interesting for my purposes, it said who they were and what they did. By reading the OB and other studies, I began to get a fair idea of what the communist army looked like.
They showed that the VC army was organized like a pyramid with three layers. The top layer consisted of the so-called main forces, heavily armed soldiers formed into big units such as divisions and regiments.The middle layer consisted of the so-called local forces, well-armed battalions and companies run by the provinces and districts. (The Long An 506th was a typical local force outfit.) The bottom layer consisted of the so-called guerrilla-militia, which acted as a home guard for VC villages and hamlets. I had a lot of notes on the bottom layer types from the Chieu Hoi files.
My notes showed the guerrillas—most of them armed with rifles—were of two types; village guerrillas (du kich xa), who defended entire villages, a village being made up of several hamlets; and hamlet guerrillas (du kich ap), who defended the hamlets themselves. * The hamlet guerrillas
Not long after my visit to the hospital I had a seemingly unrelated experience, this one involving the VC Long An Battalion, the 506th, the same one that Sergeant McCrae had said was near T, O and E. It took place while I was waiting for lunch on the rowhouse’s back porch. One of Travis King’s sidekicks—Mr. Graessle, an ex–Los Angeles cop who advised the South Vietnamese police—burst upstairs shouting: “They just caught the VC in the Right Testicle.” He explained excitedly that the Right Testicle was the nickname of the easternmost of two big loops in the river ten miles south of Tan An, in Tan Tru District, andthat the South Vietnamese army had trapped the VC Long An Battalion by blocking the neck of the loop. “Now we can clobber the bastards by air!” Graessle exclaimed. As if to underline his statement, six U.S. Army helicopters roared over the porch traveling south. Higher up I could see some Air Force jets going the same direction.
Just then King arrived, and we went inside for a lunch of crabmeat salad. “The 506th is in deep trouble,” he said, to a series of distant bangs. “Those sound like five-hundred-pound bombs.” I spent the rest of the afternoon working on notes and listening to explosions. The next morning a U.S. Army advisor from the small MACV compound down the street told me that 156 VC soldiers had died in the fight. “A damn good count,” he said. “I eyeballed most of the bodies myself, and if you throw in the wounded, the 506th ought to be sidelined for quite a while.” I found out afterward that the South Vietnamese had dubbed the battle “Operation An Dan 14/66.” 10
A day or so later my notes were more or less in order, the Chieu Hoi sample being 146, Long An’s entire defection take for the last four months. I decided that rather than do more of Lieutenant Chat’s boxes, I’d try to make sense with what I had. This meant putting together a profile of the average VC defector—describing such things as how long he’d been with the Vietcong and where he stood in the organization. The defectors’ standing seemed to me particularly important (were we getting honest-to-goodness VC, or just the hangers-on?), so I’d picked up from Saigon several intelligence studies on the VC in order to bone up on their organization. These included MACV’s “Glossary of Viet Cong Terminology,” and its “Enemy Order of Battle,” or OB for short. The OB listed the number of enemy troops by province and by type, but most interesting for my purposes, it said who they were and what they did. By reading the OB and other studies, I began to get a fair idea of what the communist army looked like.
They showed that the VC army was organized like a pyramid with three layers. The top layer consisted of the so-called main forces, heavily armed soldiers formed into big units such as divisions and regiments.The middle layer consisted of the so-called local forces, well-armed battalions and companies run by the provinces and districts. (The Long An 506th was a typical local force outfit.) The bottom layer consisted of the so-called guerrilla-militia, which acted as a home guard for VC villages and hamlets. I had a lot of notes on the bottom layer types from the Chieu Hoi files.
My notes showed the guerrillas—most of them armed with rifles—were of two types; village guerrillas (du kich xa), who defended entire villages, a village being made up of several hamlets; and hamlet guerrillas (du kich ap), who defended the hamlets themselves. * The hamlet guerrillas
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