“That’s meritorious… but that’s what you learned with the paratroops? Were you raping girls in Belgium too? Or in Greece, in Italy?” Steiner protested vehemently. “Never! Herr Oberleutnant must surely know…”
“I know!” I cut him short. “Because you would have been punished very severely, if that’s what you wanted to say. What makes you think that it is different here in Indochina?”
“Those guerrilla bitches, Herr Oberleutnant,” he ran a nervous hand over his face, “They aren’t human.”
“They were human enough to satisfy your lust, weren’t they?” He did not answer, only stood, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue.
As a matter of fact we seldom executed woman guerrillas except for a few truly hardened Communist she-devils who had been guilty of hideous crimes. Sometime back in 1949 we had captured one Viet Minh amazon who had found immense pleasure in the torture-murder of captive Legionnaires. One of her victims we discovered in a horrible state of mutilation. The naked sergeant’s arms and legs had been drawn outward by stakes and burning splinters had been slivered under his skin; finally cutting away the dying man’s private parts she had forced them into his mouth. At first the sight was terrifying, then it made us sick. The wrath swelled in us so that we swore to hang every Viet Minh tigress we could lay our hands on.
“Stolz!” A lean, lanky Saxon stepped forward. With a quick jerk of his head he tossed his long blond hair from his face and froze at attention. During the war Karl Stolz; had been a panzer driver and a much-decorated one. He had to his credit vicious engagements from Poland to Paris, from Belgrade to Athens, and from Salerno to the Po valley in Italy. He had lost twenty-six panzers and survived five direct hits. He had been wounded eleven times and spent altogether seven months in various hospitals. During the offensive in northern France, Stolz had driven his panzer into a burning town which the French had barely evacuated. In front of the shell-torn town hall he had spotted a young woman. Lying in a pool of blood and crying for help, she was a pitiful spectacle; her left leg had been torn away by a shell and she was eight months pregnant.
“Save my baby… oh, God save my baby,” she implored in broken German. “I am dying… please save my baby.”
Stolz stopped his panzer. With his gunners firing furiously and with explosions still raking the street, he rushed to the woman and applied a tourniquet to her bleeding stump. Then with the help of another trooper he dragged her to the tank and lifted her onto the rear armor. With the trooper supporting the woman he had driven his panzer to the hospital half a mile away. Not wasting time at the entrance, Stolz drove his tank through the closed oak gate, stopping a yard short of the cellar entrance. He handed the woman to a frightened surgeon and two nurses, backed out of the garden, and raced off to tackle the French artillery outside the town.
He had been severely reprimanded and reduced in rank for having withdrawn from combat without permission, but the woman and her baby boy survived the war. Stolz saw her again in 1945 after he escaped from an American camp. The Frenchwoman gave him a civilian suit, food, papers, and money enough to reach Marseilles.
Now the same man was standing in front of me, after having participated in the rape and killing of five female Viet Minh.
“Why did you do it, Stolz?” I queried him looking straight into his eyes. He opened and closed his hands in a gesture of uncertainty.
“I don’t know,” he replied, “maybe the heat did it… the jungle… this whole Gottverdammte war… Maybe it was sheer madness… I am ready to take the consequences.”
In a way I could understand him and all the others. Ten years of constant war is not exactly what one can call the education of Samaritans. The men were tired and fed up. But raping and looting I never tolerated in our ranks. The men had to be punished. I stepped back to face the lot.
“You have committed a loathsome crime,” I spoke to them. “I presume that you were banking on the fact that we have neither a court-martial nor a prison here and that we cannot lose five good fighting men by simply shooting you. You should be shot but it would be a luxury our battalion cannot afford… Sergeant Krebitz!”
“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.
15. MOVE QUIETLY—KILL QUICKLY
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.