The Village by Bing West Read Free Book Online Page B

to school, were soon swarming after the Americans, gawking at Sueter’s hefty size, trying to pinch the hair on Lummis’ forearms and challenging Brannon to recite more words in Vietnamese than they could in English.
    A few youngsters, mostly indentured orphans, did not attend school. These were the poor, illiterate buffalo boys in dirt-stained clothes who with tiny reed switches drove their enormous beasts to the hot paddies or the wide river. Whenever the buffalo plodded past, the Marines left the dung-spattered trail and stood well out on the paddy dikes, fearing the horned charge their strange American smell often provoked.
    The Marines also stepped aside whenever they heard the jingle of a bicycle bell and with a wave of his hand a PF would pedal past, hurrying home from the fort to breakfast with his family and begin a day’s work.
    Or at least that was the government’s plan for the Popular Forces: they would be primarily farmers or fishermen and only part-time soldiers. In Binh Nghia few PFs had the stamina to patrol and walk guard at night and then toil in the hot fields by day. Most needed to sleep sometime. Yet they were paid only part-time wages—$20 a month, half the wage earned by the police or the soldiers of the regular Vietnamese units. Most of Binh Nghia’s PFs were lucky: they were bachelors. They could eat and sleep at home and use their meager salaries to buy cigarettes and beer—when they didn’t gamble it all away. For those five or six PFs who were married, life was much harsher; not only did they have little money to spend on themselves, but their wives had to work doubly hard to support their families.
    At a leisurely pace, the three Marines followed the main trail to market. East of the fort for a quarter of a mile their path ran straight, bordered on both sides by dark green paddies, before taking a sharp left turn and veering north when it struck close to a wide river called the Tra Bong. At the bend the trail entered a treeline, and for over a kilometer the trail was lined with cool thatched houses, separated by bramble fences and smooth dirt paths worn into grooves by generations of use. Interlacing the main thoroughfares were hundreds of less distinct tracks, the backyard roads beaten by the foraging domestic pigs, the cows and water buffalo plodding to and from their stalls, and the children playing among the houses.
    The marketplace was a loose collection of a dozen wooden sheds without walls, jammed with women trading and selling rice and piglets and chickens and fish and fly-encrusted pork. Brannon and Lummis sat down at a food stall to practice their Vietnamese by ordering breakfast while Sueter was engulfed by a wave of potential patients. The three Americans stayed in the hamlet for several hours.
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    Such contacts between the villagers and the Marines were not unusual. During the daytime the Americans liked to get away from the confines of the fort and stroll in the Binh Yen Noi hamlets, which were considered relatively safe in full light. But at night no hamlet was safe and for the villagers there was the constant danger of being caught in the middle of a firefight in the dark. When they heard a night patrol passing, many mothers gathered up their families and went to sleep in their bomb shelters.
    On the tenth day and the fortieth night patrol after the Marines’ arrival, Corporal Leland Riley, a slender young man with pale, sharp eyes, was leading a four-man defensive patrol across the paddies in front of the fort. From the villagers, the PFs had heard that a large enemy force planned to attack that night. Beebe had sent Riley out to provide advance warning.
    Riley was walking point along a low paddy bank with his men strung out behind him when he saw a group of figures moving toward him from his right.
    â€œDown,” he hissed, sliding down into the shallow water amidst the rice stalks so that only his head, shoulders and rifle showed above