“The rain might stop at any time.”
“We could move Xuey a few miles from here and guide the copter to a safer place.”
“That we might try,” Krebitz agreed.
“If they will send a copter at all,” I remarked.
“Colonel Houssong will send one,” said Riedl. “He would never let us down.”
I turned to Corporal Altreiter. “Will the radio work, Horst?” He shrugged. “One can always try.”
“Try it then—” And so we decided to do something for Xuey that we had seldom done for our own kind…
Twenty minutes later our signals were answered and my message went through. A copter was to take off within an hour and we could expect it to arrive in three hours. I chose to transport Xuey to a barren ridge four miles away. It was a devilish undertaking in the pouring rain. The stretcher bearers had to ford swollen streams and climb slippery elevations where every instant landslides or tumbling trees threatened to wipe out the group. Eight men of Gruppe Drei volunteered for the perilous trip, and they had to start immediately if they were to reach the ridge before dark.
We agreed to transmit a steady radio beam which the copter could “ride” to within a few miles of our camp, then Sergeant Krebitz was to take over with walkie-talkies.
I wrote a short but informative report to Colonel Houssong, in German. The colonel did not understand German, but neither did the Viet Minh. If my report, written in French, fell into enemy hands the consequences would be immediate. The German text would always provide us with time to do whatever there was to be done. The guerrilla commanders had no immediate means of learning the implications of a message in German.
In this respect, however, 1 underestimated the Viet Minh. A few months later we learned that for over six months three German nationals from the Soviet Zone had been attached to the Viet Minh High Command. Their principal task was to keep track of our communications and to evaluate our activities in general. The three German Communists had often been to the field, sometimes quite close to places which we had actually attacked and badly mauled. Knowing us well, the Viet Minh had been extremely careful not to allow them into any dangerous areas but since our movements were, in most cases, unknown to the enemy, their precautionary measures had been quite useless. It was only sheer luck that prevented our treacherous “compatriots” from falling into our hands on two occasions. From the interrogation of prisoners we learned that we had missed by only three miles the turncoat camp at Muong Bo. On another occasion, they had been among the thirty-four survivors who escaped Pfirstenhammer’s flamethrower attack on a small Viet Minh camp south of Cao Bang, an action in which over a hundred terrorists had perished. It would have given us immense pleasure to entertain those envoys of Walter Ulbricht. Erich nicknamed them “the ratpack of Pan-kow” and we loathed them even more than we hated the Viet Minh.
We had bad luck with our Communist counterparts but we did manage to capture a Soviet instructor in 1950; according to his papers he was Major Senganov. His interrogation led to the capture of one more Russian “adviser” and two high-ranking Chinese officers in a tunnel system two miles away. After questioning, the Chinese were shot out of hand. I was about to call for a copter to ferry our illustrious Russian guests back to Hanoi when Erich quietly remarked that we should not place Colonel Houssong and his superiors in an impossible position.
“Not even Paris,” he reasoned, “can hold the Ivans and at a word from Stalin they will be given a first-class air ticket back to Moscow.”
Indeed, with the Berlin blockade still fresh in the postwar history, the incident could easily trigger another crisis with unforeseen consequences. “The moment the French High Command knows about the Russians, their hands will be bound by Paris and in the end we are going to pay for it,” he explained. I accepted his reasoning.
We executed the Russians in a cave which Sergeant Krebitz then blasted shut. Seven months later, when we passed the place again, the fallen boulders and earth were already overgrown with vegetation, erasing all traces of the secret tomb. When told of the incident, Colonel Houssong’s only comment was a relieved “dieu merci.”
“You cannot imagine what would have happened if you had brought them in,” he said and requested us to erase the place from our maps—even the footpath that led to the one-time cave.
The men of Gruppe Drei improvised a stretcher and lay the dozing Xuey on it. Schulze covered him with a burlap, which he then fastened to the primitive contraption with a couple of belts. “The sedative will keep him asleep for a while,” Sergeant ZeisI told me. “Let’s hope he gets to Hanoi all right.”
We shook hands with Sergeant Krebitz. “The hills are going to be slippery. Take care!”
“Don’t worry,” he replied, wiping the rain from his face. “If we cannot climb, we are going to swim them. There is enough water in the hills to float a raft between the peaks.”
The party departed and we sank back under the burlap. Suoi and the girls prepared some biscuits with jam. Noy poured five cups of hot tea—a very tempting delicacy which we gently declined to accept.
“You drink it,” Schulze urged the girls, nodding toward a dozen of our comrades who were sitting miserably soaked beneath the dripping trees. We never accepted a privilege that was denied to our comrades. It was rule number one of our jungle code of companionship.
“So much for Xuey’s reconnaissance trip,” Riedl remarked quietly, as Sergeant Krebitz and his small group disappeared into the woods. I, too, was thinking of our fat prize so temptingly close yet now so far out of reach.
Then all of a sudden Noy stood before me. “I go there, Commander,” she announced resolutely. “I can do what Xuey wanted to do… See camp. Thi comes with me.”
“I come,” Thi nodded. The two must have discussed the matter already.
Riedl protested. “That’s ridiculous, Hans,” he began, but lie stopped short of saying anything else. He, too, realized the importance of Noy’s mission. We desperately needed information. Someone had to go and only a native Indochinese could penetrate the base.
“There are many, many women in the camp,” Noy insisted. “They come and go.”
“Nobody will know us not belong there,” Thi added in her broken French. “We see camp and come back.”
“What do you think of it, Erich?” I asked Schulze.
“I think it is quite feasible.”
I turned to Noy and reached for her hand. “Do you think you will be all right, Noy?”
“Jawohl, Commander,” she replied in German and smiled. “We go there, see all and come back. Then you can attack.”
“It is very important for us that you do come back, Noy. Not only because of the information you might bring back but because we all like you very much and we think you belong to the battalion.”
She blushed slightly, lowered her head, and said quietly, “I am doing it for Karl.”
She looked up and smiled. “Don’t worry.”
“If you overstay, I shall go and bring you back myself,” Riedl stated. “Be careful.”
Noy and Thi had been away for three days, and we could do nothing but hope for the best and wait for their return. The day after their departure the rain finally stopped but the sky remained overcast, and we had to keep our sodden clothes on until they dried from our own body heat. Sergeant Krebitz and his party returned muddy to the ears and dead tired—but also successful. Xuey was safely on his way to Hanoi. Schulze, who somehow always managed to keep his tobacco dry, lit a cigarette for Krebitz. “How was your trip?”
“Merde!” Krebitz grunted, puffing contentedly. “Twice we slipped into a river, performed a ski slalom with stretcher, provisions, and all down a hundred-foot slope, missed a falling boulder by inches, and almost guided the copter into a cliff. The pilot finally managed to land the thing with its left gear hanging over a precipice. The crew dumped some crates, we pushed the stretcher through the hatch; a guy grabbed your report and off they went. And just as well, because half a minute later the whole precipice began to crumble. I guess the vibration had done it. The whole works went to hell, and we barely managed to jump clear.”