Erich Schulze, Sergeant Krebitz, and I removed our boots and waded into the stagnant water, taking only Gruppe Drei. We may have caused the peasants a few sinister thoughts but we certainly delighted the local leeches which could suck a man dry as well as strangle him to death, according^ to Erich. The people now stopped working; they rose and observed our approach for a while, then began to press closer together.
“Chieu hoi.”
Some of them returned our greeting. Others stood in sullen silence, the women a good ten yards behind the men. A good-looking lean fellow in his early thirties stepped forward, ran his tongue over his betel-stained lips, then spoke. “My name is Van Ho Tien and I can speak French,” he announced casually. “My companions know no French.”
He paused for a moment, then added with a tinge of mockery in his voice, “What do you wish to know, officer?”
“I haven’t asked you any question, have I?” I answered jokingly and offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with a slight bow.
“Oh, the army always wants to know something,” he said. “Maybe you want to know if we’ve seen the Viet Minh lately, but we have not seen them for many weeks.”
“And that’s the standard answer number one around here, isn’t it?” Erich cut in with a broad grin on his face. “We saw nothing we heard nothing, we know nothing. You must be quite happy, they say God provides for the ignorant ones. Now come, come, Monsieur Van Ho Tien, when was the last time the Viet Minh visited your village?”
“We are very few people and our village is unimportant to the Viet Minh.”
“Lucky for you,” commented Erich. “Where is your village anyway?” Van Ho waved a casual hand toward the low hills a few miles distant. “There beyond, two hours” walk from here, officer.”
Then he quickly added, “But we have no road.”
This sudden addition of his sounded so funny that we all broke into laughter.
“How are you coining and going then,” Schulze chuckled, “Thumbing rides on army copters?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said Van Ho, “we have a few narrow trails.”
“Very precipitous and slippery at places, I presume,” Riedl interposed. “Maybe even mined here and there?”
“No!” Van Ho protested, taking Riedl’s teasing remark in earnest. “We have no mines, no weapons—nothing we have.”
He appeared to dislike the direction our conversation had taken. “Our village is very tiny, very filthy, and very poor with many sick people in it. There is nothing to see.”
We laughed again and Van Ho’s face reddened as he realized the childish quality of his remark.
“Don’t worry, Monsieur Van Ho Tien.”
Erich tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “We don’t want to visit your village. It seems to be out of our way.”
I checked the location of Van Ho’s village on Schulze’s map, a very special one, which due to his meticulous recording of various significant landmarks revealed a great deal more information than the regular army maps. The village was marked on it all right, with the numbers 12/15 indicating the number of dwellings. But placed alongside the numbers a tiny red star caught my attention and I asked Erich about it.
“I recorded the village from air reconnaissance of the area,” he explained. “Here the star means that peculiar movements were observed in and about the hamlet which could be associated with guerrilla activities but not proven.”
“I see____” I wheeled back toward Van Ho and now asked him bluntly, “Are there any Viet Minh cadres in your village?”
“Our village is very small,” he repeated after what I thought was a slight hesitation. “Only fourteen dwellings with forty- men. The Viet Minh knows that we could be of little help to them and they leave us alone. We hope the French, too, will leave us alone.”
“And we hope we can oblige,” Schulze retorted. “Believe me, the last thing on earth we care to see is a local village.”
Van Ho smiled. “We know that our villages are much too backward for you to enjoy. You live in big cities like Paris, Marseilles, or Lyons.”
“Or Berlin,” commented Riedl.
Van Ho seemed surprised. “Berlin is in Germany, so I have learned,” he blurted out.
“You learned it where?” Erich asked.
I thought it was a most extraordinary encounter—a local ricepicker in the middle of nowhere knowing about Berlin. So after all the natives were not so savage as the French insisted they were.
“When I was a child I attended the missionary school at Yen Bay,” Van Ho explained. “The missionaries taught us many wisdoms, including geography.”
He paused for a second, then asked with some restraint, “Are you the Germans of the Foreign Legion?” His barely perceptible hesitation before saying “Germans” brought another grin to Erich’s face.
“I bet he wanted to say ‘Nazis’,” he remarked in German and I saw that Van Ho looked up sharply when he heard that word. It must have been familiar to him. “Bien ser,” Schulze answered. “We are the Germans, the Nazi wolves, the man-eaters, the angels of death, the unceasing fighters.”
“I haven’t said that you are wolves and man-eaters,” the man protested, showing fright for the first time.
“Why not? That’s what we are,” Schulze teased him. “Have they not told you so?”
“Who should have told us?”
“The commissars.”
“We are not guerrillas,” Van Ho protested vehemently.
“I have not said you were.”
There was a pause and a sense of restlessness in the group. “May I ask you something?” Van Ho spoke finally.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Why are you fighting?” he asked.
“Your people won’t let us retire,” Krebitz told him with a chuckle.
“It is your own choosing, for this is not your war,” Van Ho insisted.
“Correct,” Schulze agreed. “This is not our war. It is everyone’s war—France’s, England’s, America’s, and maybe even Sweden’s or Japan’s, but they have yet to realize it.”
Van Ho shook his head. “I do not understand your mentality. Truly I do not.”
“We are complicated people.”
said Krebitz. “No one seems to understand our problems.”
“Maybe you are very warlike,” nodded Van Ho. “The SS—” He cut off as soon as that word slipped out.
“That’s right!” Erich roared. “SS tradition, mon ami, sheer SS tradition. By the way where did you learn about the SS, Monsieur Van Ho Tien, also in the missionary school?”
“I read some books about the war.”
“What did you read about the SS?”
“They were much feared during the war.”
“You are being very polite,” Schulze chuckled. “You ought to have read a lot more about the SS than that.”
Then shouldering his submachine gun he added, “You are a clever man, Monsieur Van Ho Tien. I think you deserve a better job than picking rice—or,” he concluded, stressing his words, “maybe you do have a better job and work in the paddies only part-time.”
He strolled over to the pile-supported shelter, lifted some bags casually, examined a few nearby baskets, then turned. “What do you think of the Viet Minh, Monsieur Van Ho?”
“I feel neither love nor hatred for them. We live far away from the war and we are happy that it is so.”
“It cannot be as idyllic as that. Your village is in the center of a very important Viet Minh-dominated province, isn’t that so?” I realized that Erich was playing hide-and-seek with the man and began to wonder what might have awakened his suspicion.