Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

Did the wall work? Was it impermeable?

It was not.

At all.

True, they were still building it, but this was kind of ridiculous. Not infrequently the enemy would actually slip past the McNamara line and turn up behind the US forces. And then they would run around doing whatever the hell they felt like, launching surprise attacks on the Marine Corps advance base, demolishing the McNamara line even as it was being constructed.

Clearly something was going very wrong.

The reason for this lay underground in that highly developed network of tunnels. Vietnam had begun preparing for an all-out war of resistance in March 1965, and in the major cities all the crucial facilities had already been moved underground. Underground passages and shelters had been dug early on, and the digging had continued ever since. Naturally the DMZ was no exception. Over the course of the two years previous, an extremely intricate system of tunnels had come into being below the seventeenth parallel.

To make matters worse, the North Vietnamese Army had the help of a corps of supporting combatants with superhuman powers who could lead them across the DMZ to South Vietnam, and do so even through the pitch-black of night.

Dogs.

Chinese dogs whose presence in Vietnam was a closely guarded secret. Their collars, which bore the emblem of the PLA, had been removed.

The dogs had been doing their thing for quite a while already. When the US Army’s anti-guerrilla special forces, the Green Berets, secretly entered Laos, organized a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, CIDG, and started threatening the DMZ’s western border, it was the dogs who, by summer 1967, forced this strategy to a halt. “Resist America!” the red dogs (that’s just a metaphor) barked as their showdown with the CIDG in the mountains began.

Over the course of the summer, the red dogs’ numbers dwindled to twenty, of which only eleven were assigned to the area around the seventeenth parallel, but they remained North Vietnam’s most powerful ally on the ground.

They remained a symbol of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh’s friendship.

This was the situation in the DMZ and in Quang Tri. This was how matters stood in the northernmost reaches of the I Corps Tactical Zone. Offensive and defensive maneuvers were conducted aboveground; all kinds of other things went on belowground. The US military was determined to build the McNamara line, and the North Vietnamese Army just kept smashing it to pieces. It was almost as if the wall were being built expressly to be destroyed. Naturally the Vietcong were everywhere in the south, west, and east of the province, and they kept plugging along with their war of attrition. In essence, the US military had erected, here in this Buddhist land, to no good purpose, a hell whose flames the military itself was burning in.

And you were sent into those flames. You, DED, were given the command. Your ultimate goal was the complete and utter annihilation of the communists; the first step was to track them down. That was your mission. Yours, and the other nine dogs’. A specialized elite. You were told to keep track of the Vietcong as they slipped quietly into invisibility in the jungle, to search out the North Vietnamese special forces, and to follow them at a distance without attacking . As long as they could figure out where the bastards kept bubbling up from, they could get this chaos under control. And that was the whole purpose of your special training on Okinawa, right?

YES.

Well, then, show us what you can do.

Woof !

You were already accustomed to the environment. To the tropical terrain, the climate. And so, DED, they set you loose—you and your fellows. But… it was different. These thunderous explosions, the horrific smells, the artificial blasts of fire… Was this some kind of show?

You had been set loose. Ten of you. Into the faint miasma of tear gas sprayed somewhere in the distance, eddying through the air. A droning close by that assaulted your ears. Rockets and grenades whizzing overhead, the stuttering of machine guns, bullets sweeping over the ground, shrapnel, flying gunships. Ghastly odors. And there, infiltrators, commies—you’d found them. You pulled back fifty yards. One hundred yards. But you never, not for a moment, let them leave your sight. You pursued them. You kept going. Ten dogs heading, now, in ten different directions, each discovering a camouflaged entrance to the subterranean network of tunnels.

But were they real?

Each of you, one after another, poked your head in to see.

And here everything happened at once. You, DED, and each of three of your fellows, were suddenly approached from behind by another dog. These four new dogs weren’t wearing collars. They didn’t have tags. But they weren’t wild. They simply weren’t revealing their affiliations. They were red dogs with a terrible wealth of experience fighting real battles in the jungles of the Indochina peninsula. Yes, there behind each of you was another dog. Those other dogs attacked.

You were all driven into the holes.

You were anti-Vietcong specialists, yes, but you weren’t fighting dogs. You knew how to deal with people and minefields, but no one had taught you what to do if you were set upon by another animal like this. And these weren’t ordinary animals; these were creatures of the twentieth century, these were weapons. Modern weapons. And they were like you. Members of the Carnivora order and the Canidae family. Dogs.

You were driven down, underground.

As were your three fellows.

An officer in the North Vietnamese Army stood and watched through a pair of binoculars. Two dogs sat at his feet. Waiting, ready to go. Glancing down from the eyepiece, the officer gave the dogs a sign. “Lure them into the fourth layer! Or under the tiger trap!” he commanded. The two dogs, set loose, immediately dove into the well-hidden holes underground.

What of the other six dogs? Three were skewered with bamboo spears by commie sentries waiting inside the entrances to the tunnels and died instantly. Their bodies tumbled belowground, as if they had simply rolled into a deep, straight hole, disappearing as suddenly as the Vietcong themselves. One of the remaining three fell victim to an identical bamboo-spear attack but didn’t die—was, rather, unable to die—and simply lay there yelping. Three minutes later its lungs filled with blood. It lay there wheezing. Each of the American dogs had been accompanied by an American soldier. Two of these soldiers were panicking. A second before, the dogs had been walking along a few dozen meters ahead—the soldiers usually watched their dogs through binoculars—and now all of a sudden they had disappeared, just like that, or in the case of the fourth dog, been transformed into a wheezer who lay writhing on the ground. Shit, they thought, they’re here! Vietcong nests!

They put in a request for an air sweep to neutralize Vietcong forces.

Two dogs to go.

THESE LOOK LIKE VIETCONG HOLES, the dogs decided, and waited nearby. They stretched out on the ground as a sign to the soldiers following them that they had found something. And they listened to the earth. They heard a sound. Their fellows were being pursued. Their friends, down beneath the ground—BELOWGROUND? BUT HOW? HOW?—were being attacked.

And then the explosions came. One after the other, four grenades landed nearby. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the mission the ten dogs were engaged in—with their pursuit of the commies. But the shock inspired a split-second reaction. The two dogs instinctively leapt down into the holes they had discovered, into the network of tunnels.

A fighter aircraft appeared on the horizon. It was flying extremely low, dropping bombs with minute precision from under its wings. Air-to-surface missiles, ordinary bombs. This jet’s bombing really was marvelously precise—excellent support. Only the areas in the sights, visible in the plane as the coordinates on a map, erupted into a spectacular display. Showtime! The earth crumbled, erupted, heaved, crashed. Fragments of bombs flew, scattered, mixed with ruthlessly torn-up clods of dirt that somersaulted through the air. And the burial began. The underground passageways caved in. The “Vietcong holes,” targeted in a manner intended to cause minimal damage to the surroundings, were sealed off with almost unerring precision.