This month the Naval Institute Press will publish its fifth novel, The Old Man’s Trail. Written from the standpoint of our enemies in the Second Indochina War, it follows a Vietcong named Duan as he moves 60 15-year-old boys and more than a ton of cargo south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The following excerpt details but one of the trials the platoon faces on its hazardous journey.
Increment 1008 will board these trucks for transportation as far as Ban Mun Lan junction,” the guide announced. “There you will meet guides who will take you by foot to station 613DS. You will pass four way stations in one day,” he added proudly.
“This is ridiculous, trung si," Duan said, addressing the guide by his rank of sergeant. “These whoring trucks are easy prey for the Americans, and my men will not be fuel for the fire that will occur when they are spotted—and they will be spotted. The Americans are very clever, not stupid men.” He glanced around anxiously, receiving some consolation from the low black clouds and drizzling rain.
The guide looked puzzled. Most increments were eager to rest their tired feet and backs aboard trucks. Ba jerked the card from the guide’s hand and studied it. “Duan, I think we must accept this decision,” he said, handing him the card.
Duan scanned it quickly and said through clenched teeth, “A pile of bureaucratic shit. The last time I came down the trail there wasn’t all this magnificent efficiency. You either made it or you didn’t. ... A soldier had a say in his own death. With a little josh and good comrades, he could survive. Now we have damned paperwork assigning us to the Immortals in heaven—all in order, stamped, proper, official.” He spat toward the guide. . . .
Ba and Duan declined offers to ride in the drivers’ cabs and positioned themselves on top of the ammunition in the first and last of the three trucks in the convoy. While they waited for word to start, Duan ran four dismount drills to show the platoon how to get off quickly, with all their gear, in the event of an air strike. His mood was sour as they began bumping down the exposed road. For the rest of the day he sat on a box of 130-mm ammunition uttering the foulest curses many of the porters had ever heard, interspersed with fervent prayers that the Immortals would confound the Americans and their spying machines.
They followed a loose-surface graded road paralleling the rushing Kong River, which lay to the east of the roadbed. Road-repair crews were everywhere working on rain and bomb damage. At one detour they saw ten American prisoners working on a road gang that was repairing a culvert. They were guarded by a Pathet Lao squad and appeared not to notice the convoy as it drove by slowly. They towered over the Vietnamese and Laotian workers with them. The platoon gawked. These were the first Americans any of them had ever seen. Emaciated and shivering like everyone else in the cold and rain, they didn’t look like the devils the porters had been raised to expect. One American looked up at the passing trucks and smiled, raising his hand with the middle finger extended. He withdrew it quickly when one of the guards yelled at him. Several of the porters innocently waved back and smiled. Duan quietly told them to stop.
At 4:00 p.m. they arrived at Ban Mun Lan having covered 52 miles, which would have taken them more than four days to walk. The houses and huts of the village were abandoned. A large refueling depot had been constructed under three layers of overhead canopy in the jungle north of the road. The trucks carrying the antiaircraft company continued south on the road that now disappeared into a tunnel cut in the mass of vegetation.
Three armed guides emerged from the jungle and strolled down the hillside toward the stopped trucks. Duan shouted for everyone to get off and form up. He walked the several hundred yards to the guides and motioned the platoon to follow. The men were stiff from sitting all day in the rain and they hobbled over to Duan, struggling with their loads. Ba brought up the rear, kicking the stragglers. The guides stood casually smoking cigarettes, apparently in no hurry to begin moving, more intent on watching the activity around the fuel depot.
“Clumg ta ra di!” Duan ordered, in a tone that usually left no room for argument.
The senior guide laughed arrogantly and said, “We go when I am ready.” He was used to foot increments who were desperate and disoriented by this point in their journey, helpless without his assistance.
Duan glared at him, turned and motioned the platoon to follow as he strode off quickly up the steep trail. The guide yelled after him, “We don’t go that way, old man. Our trail is in another direction,” and the guides laughed, still smoking out on the open hillside. Duan ignored the insult and pushed ahead deliberately, seeking the protection of deep jungle.
It began as a faint whisper, unidentifiable to the untrained ear, and rose in a matter of seconds to a loud, oscillating, unearthly rushing noise. There was no sound like it. It hypnotized most people. The sensation was particularly mysterious in the rain. Five-hundred-pound bombs dropping from an A-6 aircraft at 10,000 feet made a splashing noise, like rocks dropping in a stream. The noise was not continuous; it was a series of increasingly loud splashes that finally became sharp cracks, like from a whip, as the bombs crashed through the thick canopy. Then came the sickening thud as the bombs hit the soft mud, which tripped their delayed-impact fuses and sent whistling shards °f steel, rock, and debris in all directions.
Duan’s keen ears caught the first deadly whisper. His mind took only a second to translate it into extreme danger. “Down!” he shouted. Their training paid off. No one paused to question the command. They instantly dropped their loads and hugged the muddy trail, squirming for the safest positions. Duan . . . flung himself down between two porters and yelled for Ba to do the same. This was for real. Ba hesitated and then, with a startled look of understanding, dove flat to the welcome protection of the cold, wet mud.
Even though the aircraft crews could not see their target, the bombs fell with pinpoint accuracy made possible by an intricate system of radar beacons and navigation and target acquisition equipment that gave the precise location of the planes in relation to the target. A ballistic computer released the bombs. Each of the three A-6s dropped 28 500-pound bombs from a tight triangular flight formation, creating a similar but larger pattern on the ground.
The A-6s were Marine Corps aircraft that had been targeted on this mission by Task Force Alpha, a U.S. Air Force staff that controlled a large and expensive high-tech system specifically designed to interdict Communist logistic traffic on the Old Man’s Trail. In keeping with the American penchant for innocuous names, the program had evolved over a number of years and was eventually dubbed Igloo White.
The Igloo White network comprised thousands of people, facilities, and aircraft, all targeted against the 650 miles of the Old Man’s Trail tracing through Laos and Cambodia. Task Force Alpha integrated countless ground and airborne sensor readouts from its air-conditioned Surveillance Center, housed in what was proudly heralded as the largest free-standing structure in Indochina, at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. Incoming target information was processed by colossal IBM 360-65 computers, which continuously printed out data on reams of paper that were then analyzed and stored in the cavernous facility.
The doomed fuel depot’s location had been pinpointed just before the monsoon hit by high-resolution aerial photographs taken by one of the reconnaissance aircraft that continuously crisscrossed the Laotian panhandle. A small mistake by the depot crew caused their destruction this day. The cameras had caught two men rolling a 55-gallon drum of fuel in the open. Until then the aerial photography interpreters had been fooled by the camouflage.
The bombs hit a hundred yards north of the target and walked directly through the center of the closely stored fuel drums and ended two hundred yards to the south.
The sound of impact was paralyzing. Bombs exploded in rapid succession followed by a roaring fireball as hundreds of gallons of fuel ignited. The depot and the hundred or so people who manned it were consumed in less than ten seconds. Two of the big bombs hit ten yards from the ammunition trucks that had delivered the platoon to the road junction. The drivers and their young guide for the day were killed instantly. There was a pause, and fuel tanks and ammunition began to explode.
With heads buried under their arms, the platoon was bounced and shaken off the ground, engulfed in the high- pitched, roaring noise. The jungle was alive with the whispering whistle and sharp thuds of shrapnel and debris hitting trees. Duan felt a violent tug that pulled him up off the ground as a six-inch piece of jagged steel ripped into his pack.
The deafening noise gradually subsided, replaced by a rapid series of smaller explosions. Duan shouted to stay down, waiting for the debris that had been blown into the air to return to earth. A minute passed, then a ripping sound came from high above in the jungle canopy. It continued for 30 seconds, then the larger objects began to crash to the jungle floor. After that there was quiet, interspersed with spasmodic explosions of ammunition and the roar of the fuel fire.
Duan raised his head cautiously and looked around. Several men were crying and the rest whimpered and grunted, as all people do unconsciously when caught in bombing or artillery fire. He listened hard for another whisper of bombs, but heard none. He rose to his knees, peering warily around. ... He searched the line for casualties. If anyone tried to get up he pushed them back down. ... At the end of the column nearest the road he found one of his porters dead, with a small hole in the back of his head. He helped a dazed Ba to his feet and told him to get the platoon up and ready to go.
Moving cautiously, he crept out of the protection of the jungle back where he had left the three guides. The heat from the inferno at the fuel depot pushed against him, even though he was two hundred yards away. He found two of the guides lying on their backs, dead from concussion and multiple shrapnel wounds. The leader held a cigarette between his fingers; it was still burning. He called out for the third guide and found him whimpering, face down in a small depression, ten feet from his comrades.
Duan said roughly, “We go.”