George Elford - Devil's Guard

“Herr Oberleutnant.”

“From now on these five men are going to serve as an advance guard for Gruppe Drei!” I said.

Krebitz looked at me, puzzled. “Gruppe Drei has no advance guard. We look for traps ourselves.”

“From now on you will have an advance guard,” I said, stressing my words. “For these men here are going to walk a hundred yards in front of Gruppe Drei—on every march, Krebitz!”

“But… they don’t know much about traps and mines…”

“They had better start learning!”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant.”

“And something else… Should you have a particularly dangerous job in the corning weeks, you will not call for volunteers. You already have your volunteers. We have to spare the lives of the more valuable men.”

“Jawohl!”

“Dismiss!” We marched back to the main column.

“Assemble!”

“Companies—single file! Attention!”

“En avant… marchez!” Eisner commanded Daylight filtered away imperceptibly; the blue sky changed into gray and the breeze stilled. We stopped at a small cascade to grab a quick shower, then rested until daybreak.

I could not sleep that night. I was thinking of my family, of Lin, of the raped girls—and of what tomorrow might bring.

Three days later and forty miles away Xuey and Krebitz detected another guerrilla base. It was not a permanent one but even so our raid was a success. Moving in the dead of night, we literally caught the Viet Minh napping. Posing as guerrillas, Xuey, Krebitz, and twelve men from Gruppe Drei infiltrated the camp and killed the sentries.

I moved in with fifty troops. The enemy was sound asleep in improvised hammocks stretched between the trees. Except for the low whisper of the wind-driven foliage the only sound we heard was the peaceful snoring of the terrorists. They must have come a long way. They were sleeping soundly. Dispersing into teams of three men each, we bayoneted the sleepers. With loathsome teamwork one trooper switched on his shaded flashlight, the second man thrust home into the heart. The moment the blade plunged in a third member of the team muffled cries and moans under a folded blanket which was pressed tightly against the victim’s face. Sometimes a man had to be turned over or uncovered, and the executioners had to work very fast to prevent noise.

My headhunters moved with a precision born of experience, and liquidated some seventy guerrillas without causing as much as a whimper. Only seven girl Viet Minh were spared; their heads were later shaved and then we released them unhurt. The wind, the snoring and the quiet hiss of the blades; a few muffled moans and sighs—it was quite a spectacle. The groups worked like a hospital team around a surgery table, though not saving but extinguishing lives. We had no choice. In hostile territory one must move and kill like a leopard. It was a rule that had existed eons before the great Mao had come to write it all up and claim ownership.

War, whether in the desert or the jungle, is not a new invention; one may bring innovations but one may not alter the rules. A machine gunner who mows down a hundred men in a minute will seldom think of his victims. It never occurs to an artillery man that he kills. He may be working his howitzer in a peaceful meadow, or on the shore of a lake, to trigger death in a burning village many miles away. To shell or to shoot people is an impersonal affair. The executioner has no personal contact with the executed. To kill with the bayonet is not so easy. To kill with the bayonet in cold blood, one has to summon every ounce of hatred from deep within. Bitter recollections from the past, the haunting images of tormented and mutilated comrades, recalled in short flashes, give one the resolution to plunge the blade into the living body of another human being.

In all my years in uniform I have seen thousands of people die. I cannot recall the number of those I killed in combat or executed with my own hands—or killed indirectly by issuing an order to kill. Still, when the occasion arose, I had to repeat mentally, forcing myself into a state of self-hypnosis: You are trying to beat wild tigers into submission… They are not human… You are killing sharks, rats, bacteria… Yet I doubt if I could ever have stabbed a captive tiger. I would lack the all-essential driving force—hatred. The tiger only follows the call of its nature, its instincts. The tiger never kills for pleasure. The Viet Minh kills only to spread terror and to intimidate its victims. For them I could feel no pity. I regarded the Viet Minh as the real prototypes of the Hitlerian subhumans. The most primitive Russian peasant harbored some noble features in his bearded face. At least I thought so. But the faces of those rat-like little Red gnomes in Indochina showed nothing but bestiality. Our hatred towards them knew no bounds. If we had had the means, we would have gassed them by the thousands without the slightest remorse.

Once again it was Xuey who spotted the guerrilla company as it forded the river. We split into three columns and deployed on the neighboring hills. Three hundred yards below the- hill which my group occupied, a wide trail ran between the river bank and the woods farther to the east. Obviously the trail was a major enemy route. Between the river and the woods stretched a wide patch of open bushland. We observed a number of peasants filling what appeared to be large baskets with earth. Another group was planting live shrubs in the baskets.

“They are the Dan Cong,” Noy explained after observing them briefly. The Dan Cong were the labor detachment of the Viet Minh, composed of ordinary peasants compelled to work as slaves a certain cumber of days every month for the cause of “liberation.”

” The shrubs in the basket were a clever camouflage against air observation. Simply by moving the baskets onto the trail, the enemy could blot out the road and consequently the evidence of Viet Minh presence in the area.

Schulze, who had been watching the enemy for some time, suddenly turned toward me. “Look at that, Hans!” He handed me his field glasses excitedly. “Do you see what I see?”

“Dammit!” I swore in genuine astonishment. The scene which we observed was a most extraordinary and rather terrifying one. Down at the river, in plain sight, moved a small convoy of field howitzers. For the first time in Indochina we encountered Viet Minh artillery. I edged toward the precipice to have a better look.

Shouting and gesturing, a group of guerrillas entered the river and pulled ropes toward the opposite bank. “Look at it!” Erich exulted. “They even have a bridge there, a whole goddamned underwater bridge. We have got them dead center. This is not the shuttle service but a Viet Minh highway.”

Indeed, the enemy appeared to be moving, or rather wading, across the river as if the water were only ten inches deep. They certainly had a bridge there, built to remain underwater. Otherwise the reconnaissance planes would have spotted it long ago. Hitched to teams of water buffalo, six small howitzers rolled down the grassy slope of the far bank and onto the bridge. The foremost terrorists had reached our bank and tightened the ropes on either side of the bridge to mark the way. Milling around the guns, pushing and pulling at the wheels, another Viet Minh group was assisting the animals. The enemy artillery caused considerable excitement among my troops.

“It seems that Giap is up to some big business somewhere in the not too distant future,” Schulze remarked, lowering his field glasses. “I wonder where the howitzers are going?”

“I am kind of curious myself,” Karl remarked.

I turned to Riedl. “Where is Xuey?”

“He went farther west with Krebitz and Gruppe Drei.”