(Two) The Hotel Caravelle (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, BOQ #2) Saigon, Republic of Vietnam 1705 Hours, 10 January 1962 Major Philip S. Parker IV felt tired, hot, and dirty when he finally got to his room. He quickly determined his priorities: (a) a bath; (b) a cold beer; and (c) several more of (b).

A little procession of vehicles had been on hand to meet the seven Mohawks from the Card when they landed at Tan Son Nhut Airfield. There was a colonel, the MAC-V aviation officer, who'd come more for personal curiosity and courtesy than anything else. The Mohawks of the Twenty4hmj Special Warfare Aviation Detachment didn't belong to him but to the Fifth Special Forces Group, whose colonel was also on hand. And there was a neat young man in a seersucker suit and with a Harvard nasal twang who said he was from "the Embassy."

He sounded, Phil Parker thought, the way Craig Lowell had sounded when he had first met Second Lieutenant Lowell at Student Officer Company, the armored school, years before. Lowell sounded that way sometimes even today, especially after he and Toni Parker (who also sometimes sounded that way) had had enough very dry martinis to lessen their resolve not to tail like that in front of the peasants.

Parker did not like the young man from "the Embassy" but was able to resist the urge to clench his jaws and give his well known and skilled imitation of his wife and his buddy in their cups. The young man from "the Embassy"was obviously from the CIA, and in his last briefing before going to California to board the Card, Parker had been told that the Twenty third Special Warfare Aviation Detachment would be under the "operational guidance" of the CIA.

The primary reason Parker did not like the young man from the Embassy was that in a failed attempt to conceal his surprise and disappointment that the commanding officer of the Twenty third Special Warfare Aviation Detachment was a big black buck nigger, he did everything short of saying some of his best friends were Negroes. It had been even more difficult to resist the temptation to do his famous impersonation of the southern darkie cotton picker boott licking moronic grin, the works than to resist the temptation to clench his jaws while speaking. But he had behaved himself. He had left the young man from the Embassy with the feeling that things were not quite as bad as he had thought they were when he had looked up at the Mohawk cockpit and saw that black face under the helmet.

The Special Forces colonel and the young man from the Embassy had somehow acquired the notion that the trip from the States on the Card and the twenty minute flight had pushed the Mohawk pilots to the brink of exhaustion. Whatever else he might be, Phil Parker was a soldier, and smart soldiers never protest when their superiors have come to the conclusion that their duties have exhausted them and that they require several days of rest and recuperation.

When the Special Forces colonel told Parker to "get your people settled in the hotel, get your feet on the ground, maybe take a little look around Saigon, and then come to see me sometime Monday morning," Major Parker replied, "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

Parker sent the pilots into the hotel. He then took the bus with his enlisted men to the Special Forces compound to make sure they would have what they needed (and to make the point to the Special Forces first sergeant that he was concerned with their welfare, and that he had not just given a draft of coolies). And then he went on to the Hotel Caravelle.

The hotel was French Colonial. It reminded Parker of a hotel he and Toni had stayed in on leave in Morocco. That was a mixed blessing, he thought. The food would probably be very good, and the plumbing would probably not work very well.

He stripped to his shorts and then unpacked his luggage while he ran the water in the tub (the shower was a French "douche," a shower head on a flexible pipe), hoping that it would cool below tepid. It did not. When he came out of the shower, he felt cleaner but no cooler.

Civilian clothing was not only permitted but encouraged, the Special Forces colonel had told him; but he had not said, nor had Parker asked, what the civilian dress code in the hotel was. Could he get by in a polo shirt? Or, as a field-grade officer and gentleman, was he expected to wear at least a shirt and tie if not a jacket?

He had just about decided on the polo shirt when there came a knock on the door. The question was answered. His caller was a commissioned officer of the United States Army. He was attired in yellow Bermuda shorts, an open-collared sport shirt of many colors, and a straw beachcomber's hat.

"Bienvenue d Saigon. mon major," Lieutenant Tom Ellis said, thrusting a bottle of beer at him. "Voici une or is it un? bier."

"Where the hell did you learn to speak French?" Parker asked. "What the hell are you doing in Saigon?"

He took the beer and drank from the neck.

"I am in Saigon as a message center runner," Ellis said. "I even have one for you."

He handed Parker an eight-by-ten inch envelope. It bore the printed return address "Station Hospital, Fort Bragg, N.C." and was addressed to him, somewhat vaguely: "Major P. S. Parker IV, Vietnam." It was obviously from Toni, and he tore it open eagerly.

It was a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine. The index was on the cover, and one of the articles had a stamped red arrow by it.

"Observed Resistance of Certain Strains of Oriental Gonococci and Spirochetes to Penicillium-Based Treatment" by Thomas P. Yancey, M.D." Chief of Venereal Disease Service, Massachusetts General Hospital, could be found starting on page thirty-two.

Parker chuckled and handed it to Ellis.

"Do you think the doc' trying to tell you something, Major?" Ellis asked.

"This isn't the only reason you came to Vietnam, to give me this?"

"Not the only one," Ellis said. "Put some clothes on, and we'll go to le cocktail' and I'll tell you all about it."

"Le cocktail'?"

That's French for happy hour," Ellis said. "And they really do it right here."

"I'm not sure I want to be seen in public with you, Lieutenant, dressed that way."

"You don't like this? I bought it in Hawaii on the way over."

"In a place, no doubt, with a Tourists Welcome!" sign over the door?"

"At the airport," Ellis said. "I wasn't about to run around Hawaii with a briefcase chained to my wrist. Or take a chance on missing the plane."

"You're an officer courier? How did that happen?"

"I asked the general to send me to Vietnam," Ellis said. This wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but as he pointed out, it's close."

Parker chuckled as he pulled the polo shirt over his head. He put his legs in a pair of chino trousers and then started to tuck the polo shirt in.

"If you do that, where are you going to carry your gun?" Ellis asked. The question surprised Parker and his surprise showed on his face. Ellis turned around and raised his shirt of many colors. He had a Colt.45 automatic pistol in the small of his back.

"We're supposed to go around armed?" Parker asked.

"We're supposed not to," Ellis said. "And I suppose if you looked long enough you could find one or two dummies who aren't."

"Are you playing cops and robbers, Ellis?" Parker asked.

"No," Ellis said simply, "I'm not."

"The only thing I've got with me is an old Colt revolver," he said.

"Well, take that, then, until you can get something better," Ellis said. "I was shopping before. There's a place selling aluminum-framed Smith & Wesson.38 Specials they stole from the air force. They want a hundred bucks for one."

"Where'd you get the.45?"

"At Bragg," Ellis said. "Issued."

"I'm not sure if you're pulling my leg or not," Parker said.

"I'm not," Ellis said.

"Shit!" Parker said and went to his attache case, unlocked it, and took out a large revolver wrapped in an oiled rag.

"Where the hell did you get that thing?" Ellis asked.

"My grandfather carried it in the First World War," Parker said. "It's a 1917 Colt.45 ACP."

"And it still works?"

"It works fine, thank you, Lieutenant," Parker said. He sucked in his belly and slipped the old revolver under his waistband. This was not going to be a long-term solution to the problem. He was either going to have to get a shoulder holster or another pistol.

"Le Cocktail" was as nice as Ellis had suggested. There were white-jacketed waiters at your elbow offering hors d'ceuvres free and drinks at ridiculously low prices. There was a man playing a grand piano, and the room was full of attractive Vietnamese women. Some of them, Parker decided, were half white, which meant half French. Their skirts were slit on the side. He found them very attractive. He wondered how soon his resolve to be absolutely faithful to Toni would falter.

Over Japanese Asahi beer, Ellis told him that he had been bored with being the general's aide.

"Bullshit," Parker said. "You weren't the aide long enough to get bored." "Okay. For personal reasons..." "Eaglebury's sister?" "What makes you ask that?" Ellis asked. "You didn't knock her up?" Parker asked. "Jesus Christ!" Ellis flared.

"Sorry," Parker said, deducing correctly that Ellis's personal reasons were indeed Dianne Eaglebury and that he had in fact been in her pants. It was Parker's belief that never is a woman's virtue more strongly defended than by someone who has talked her out of it and is contemplating matrimony with the lady in question.

"She's not that kind of a girl," Ellis said, confirming Parker's analysis.

"Right," Parker said.

"Anyway, I asked to get transferred to Vietnam," Ellis said. "Most of my Cuba team is here."

"And the general said... ?" Parker asked.

"That luck was with me," Ellis chuckled. "He just happened to have a requirement for an officer courier."

"What did you bring with you?"

"Some stuff for First Group," Ellis said. "At least, that's where I delivered it."

"And when are you going back?" Parker asked.

"The general said I was to check with you before I went home, to see what you needed."

"Can't think of a thing," Parker said.

"Major, you just got here," Ellis said. "Why don't you think about it before you say that?"

"Think about it for how long?" Parker asked.

"Say, a week," Ellis said.

"What have you planned for the next seven days, Ellis?" Parker asked, smiling.

"I found out where three of my guys are," Ellis said. "Lopez, Dessler, and Talbott. They're with an A' Team in Kontum Province."

"Sure," Parker said. "Why not? I think we have to presume that whatever's going on here is more important than passing canapes at Bragg."

"Thanks," Ellis said.

(Three) Villa dans le Bois Thu Sac, Kontum Province Republic of South Vietnam 1630 Hours, 15 January 1962 The Villa in the Woods was no longer in the woods. Even before the building had been turned over to "A" Team Number 6, Company "A," First Special Forces Group, it had been in military hands. It had been put to use as Headquarters, Third Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment (Separate), Army of the Republic of Vietnam; and ARVN riflemen had spent long and hot days chopping down the towering pines for a distance of one hundred yards from the big old house.

The better logs had been trucked into Kontum and sold, and the less valuable logs used to build frameworks for various sandbag structures on the perimeter of the compound, inside the compound, or attached to the villa itself. To the surprise of the men of the Third Battalion, 119th Infantry, ARVN, some of the money received from the sale of the logs had actually been spent for their welfare. Other commanders would have put all of the money in their own pockets, but their commander had actually bought rice with some of it, and used some of it to buy pigs and chickens.

When the Americans came, they made other necessary military improvements to the compound. They removed the forest to a distance of two hundred yards from the villa itself. The Vietnamese were impressed with how the Americans did this. For one thing, they did not ax or saw the trees to the ground. They wrapped the trunks, as close to the ground as possible, with primer cord, covered the primer cord with sandbags, and with cheerful shouts of "Fire in the Hole!" detonated the primer cord. There followed a sharp crack. The trees seemed to shudder, and then they started to fall. The explosive force of the primer cord cut the tree trunks almost surgically.

The timber thus obtained had been turned into lumber on a barter basis. For every two tree trunks turned into construction lumber by an ARVN corps of engineers platoon equipped with a portable U.S. Army sawmill, the ARVN engineers got to keep one trunk for themselves. And since Master Sergeant Charles B. Dessler was supervising the lumbering operation, all the money from the sale of the tree trunks went to the engineers and not into the pocket of the ARVN engineer officer.

The primary purpose of the American timbering operation was the creation of a beaten fire zone, thus depriving the Vietcong of a place to hide closer than two hundred yards from the villa. But they also needed some of the lumber (the rest they sold) to reinforce the compound further. Six towers were erected, five on the perimeter of the compound, and the sixth in the center. All were protected by sandbags and equipped with machine guns and other weapons. The one inside the perimeter also served as a water tower, and the various antennae with which the "A" Team communicated with its headquarters and various ARVN units were mounted to it.

Water again flowed through the ornate faucets of Villa dans le Bois's faucets, and there was a sufficient quantity of it to permit a steady flow through otherwise unneeded bidets to cool wine.

There were three lines of coils of barbed wire surrounding the villa. This was called concertina, because it expanded from its shipping coil like the bellows of an accordion. Each coil was hung with beer cans and other light scrap metal so that noise would be created if the wire was disturbed.

Outside the exterior line of concertina, and between rows one and two and two and three, there had been em placed both homemade (number ten cans filled with metal scrap and rocks and small charges of Composition C-3) mines and Claymore mines. These were a new and effective device that when detonated blew away everything in a cone-shaped pattern for about thirty yards.

The "A" Team was being "protected" by a company from the Third Battalion, 119th Infantry. They were housed in bunkers inside the inner ring of concertina, but, except for the company commander and half a dozen others, they were denied access to the villa itself. In the minds of the "A" Team, there existed some question of the resolve of the ARVN infantry company commander to give it the old school try in the event of an attack. He was therefore kept close at hand, where he could be watched and his resolve strengthened. The half-dozen other ARVN five noncoms and an officer both spoke English and had in various ways managed to convince the "A" Team whose side they were on. As a general rule of thumb, it had been concluded that the allegiance of at least half of the ARVN riflemen was dependent on who they thought was going to win the engagement then in progress.

Nine men, two officers, and seven noncommissioned officers made up the "A" Team. Three of the noncoms, Master Sergeant Charles B. Dessler, the operations sergeant; Master Sergeant Juan Vincenzo Lopez, the armorer; and SFC Richard L. Talbott, commo, had jumped into Cuba with First Lieutenant Tom Ellis. They were pleased and surprised when the twicea-week supply convoy from Company rolled into the Villa dans le Bois compound and Ellis climbed down from the cab of the second truck.

The commanding officer (Captain Howard G. Fenn) and the executive officer (First Lieutenant Donald G. Crossman) had known Ellis while they were in training at Camp McCall. Their initial impression of him at McCall was that he was a nice kid, but they wondered what he was doing in Special Forces, which was supposed to recruit its officers from mature and experienced officers.

It had subsequently been brought unforgettably to their attention by Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan, Deputy Commander for Special Projects of the Special Warfare Center (who had overheard them referring to him as the "Boy Wonder") that Lieutenant Ellis was in fact the guy who had fought his "A" Team through twenty miles of angry Cubans to a last minute escape from the beach at the Bahia de Cochinos.

When they saw Tom Ellis climbing down from the supply convoy six-by-six, both Captain Fenn and Lieutenant Crossman, privately and independently, wondered if he had come to Villa dans le Bois to relieve and replace them. The team had been given a simple mission to perform: win the hearts and the minds of the people by providing, among other things, medical services. And they had been unable to do it. On Christmas Eve the villagers of An Lac Shi had gone to the Blessed Heart of Jesus Church for midnight mass and found Father La Patrick Sho, Mayor Song Lee Do, and four altar boys dead. The altar boys had been sho behind the ear, and the priest and the mayor had their throats cut open and their reproductive organs cut off. It was the Vietcong means of expressing their displeasure with lackeys of the traitorous anti liberation forces who had encouraged the peasants to avail themselves of medical services offered by the Americans in the green berets.

The tactic had been very effective. When Staff Sergeant Robert Franz, the "A" Team's medic, had made his round that week, not only had no villagers of An Lac Shi appeared with sick children, or old people suffering from parasitic infestation, or any other illnesses, but no villagers in any of the other four villages in the team's area had shown up to take advantage of Staff Sergeant Franz's free and competent professional services.

Intestinal parasites causing rectal bleeding are bad, but not nearly as bad as a cut throat.

Captain Fenn truly believed he had done his best. He had even come up with the name of the Vietcong officer responsible, a Captain Van Lee Dee of the Ninth Company, Fiftythird Regiment. It was just that he couldn't find the sonofabitch, and God knows he had tried.

He had received simple orders from Captain Fenn: "You have to find that bastard, Don, that's all there is to it." Lieutenant Crossman also believed that he had done his best, and that his best simply hadn't been good enough. Yet, after spending ten days and nights in the jungle and forest, he had no better idea now where Captain Van Lee Dee was than he ever had.

He hadn't had so much as a sniff. AU ten days and ten nights (in two five-day excursions) had done was to prove that somebody out there didn't like them. Two of his men had run feces-smeared punji sticks through their feet, and one of them had suffered a smashed upper right arm (he was lucky he wasn't squashed like a bug) when he tripped a wire and released an eight-foot section of tree trunk imbedded with more feces smeared pointed sticks.

Lieutenant Don Crossman was very much aware that he had sent three men to the hospital in Saigon, and all he'd gotten for it was a sense that Captain Van Lee Due was sitting out there behind a tree, laughing his balls off at them.

There were, of course, extenuating circumstances. The natives were understandably more afraid of people who had poved their willingness to risk God's wrath by emasculating a priest in his own church than they were of Americans who were some strange combination of soldier and Good Samaritan. They were consequently not about to tell the Americans, much less the ARVN, anything at all about what they knew of the location of Captain Van Lee Dee and the Ninth Company of the Fiftythird Regiment of the People's Liberation Army.

On top of that, Captain Van Lee Due and his small headquarters staff (estimates of his nucleus ranged from five to eleven; the truth was probably somewhere about eight) had an area of forest, jungle, and rice fields about ten miles by seventeen 17O square miles to hide in.

But none of the extenuating circumstances mattered. They had been not able to find the sonofabitch, which meant that they could send Staff Sergeant Franz out every day for the next six months and he would have no patients.

Since Lieutenant Ellis had proven his own ability to command an "A" Team, it was entirely likely that he had been sent in to replace officers who were unable to comply with their orders.

But it was almost immediately apparent that Ellis was making a social call, nothing else. A not entirely happy social call to be sure: Over dinner Ellis told the story of getting Eaglebury's body back from the Cubans.

Obviously this was a gross breach of security on Ellis's part for doubtless the file on the whole business was still stamped TOP SECRET. But as obviously that top-secret business was so much bullshit. The Cubans had had Eaglebury for sometime before they finally shot him. No man can resist torture beyond a given point. The Cubans almost certainly knew they had captured, interrogated, and finally shot a lieutenant commander of the U.S. Navy. And the Cubans damned well knew they had been paid fifty thousand dollars for his body, so who was that a secret from?

Toward the end of the first case of liter bottles of Asahi beer, the conversation turned to Captain Van Lee Due and the altar boys with their brains blown all over the sanctuary. Captain Fenn and Lieutenant Crossman were a little uneasy having their failure dragged out in front of Ellis, but there was no way they could stop the conversation once it had started. Fenn thought that it was possible that Ellis would be able to think of something he hadn't.

He took considerable consolation from the fact that Ellis didn't have any more idea what to do than he did.

In the morning, however, Ellis did something Captain Fenn thought was a little strange. He asked SFC Talbott, the commo man, if he could get through to Saigon on his radio, and if he could, would the Saigon operator patch him through to the Hotel Caravelle.

Talbott told him he didn't know about the telephone patch and that Saigon was chickenshit, but he would find out.

"Tell him I want to talk to Major Parker."

The officers knew who Major Parker was. There weren't that many majors in Special Forces, and only one of these was an aviator, well over six feet tall, and as black as midnight.