The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997

“The counter-terror program will have three areas of focus. First, we will identify and track every party secretary, finance and supply unit, information service, social welfare provider and unit, and proselytizing section. Second, we will launch a psychological warfare program and a hearts-and-hands-to-the-people on a national level with rewards such as were used so successfully in the running dogs war in Malaysia and with informational leaflets on a grand scale.  Third, we will imply small counter-terror teams on a scale never before imagined until we bring real fear, danger, insecurity, and death to the communists and their functionaries even in the areas of the cities and the countryside where they no feel secure. As never before we will fight fire with fire; we will employ their own Viet Cong methods against them. The methods will include everything from psy-ops, to intimidation, to physical persuasion, to literal counter-terror.”

“Phoenix is going to be the union of all the police, military, and paramilitary intelligence gathering programs and insurgency interdiction in the whole region; and it is going to be under direct and continuous United States control. We are going to eliminate duplication and conflict among the contributing agencies. The Company and the President have had enough with all the career creating bureaucrats. We are going to get down to the business of coring out the heart of the Viet Cong organization.”

Phoenix did things to people that were unspeakable and had contrived them to appear to be the work of the Viet Cong with the argument that the ends justifies the means. Phoenix shifted its focus progressively toward the Cambodian and Laotian borders, determined to interdict the assistance being given the PAVN forces that streamed down the Ho Chi Minh trail and into the south.

NVA Visits a Village

In the NVA, as in all communist armies, the political officer has the ultimate authority.

The young NVA privates and corporals were dispatched to round up the children on the list. When it became evident that it was the intention of the NVA company to march away with the thirteen children, the eldest of whom was sixteen, the women began a keening wail of protest, of grief. Only the headman and Dung’s mother dared lift their heads and to protest.

“Stop!!!” screamed the irate and flustered cadre. Dung’s mother either did not hear or was insubordinate. Whatever the case, she did not stop. The cadre pointed at her and at the headman, barked a series of harsh commands to his men, and brought himself to stiff attention, his face contorted with anger. The men looked at each other with brief unhappy glances, then moved sharply to bring the disobedient woman and insolent old man before the political officer on their knees. The children who were to accompany the military unit were summarily marched out of the village while ten of the most hardened combat veterans remained behind to follow the next set of orders.

While her two youngest children looked on in fascinated horror, the cadre ordered two of the men to strip the foolish woman to the waist and to pin her supine on the ground. The officer walked deliberately up to the woman who was now lying passively on the ground, bent over her form, then in a lightening quick movement roughly seized her right breast by the nipple and pulled it as taut as he could elevating it from her thin chest. She cried out in involuntary pain. The brutal cadre then whipped a French flic knife through the air and amputated the soft appendage neatly at the level of the pectoral muscles. She fainted. The battle-hardened soldiers blanched and stepped back. The cadre nonchalantly threw the severed breast fragment to some dogs hiding under a nearby stack of bamboo poles. He calmly took out his service pistol and dispatched the meddlesome woman with a single bullet in the middle of her forehead. The two children, ages four and seven, stood mute. The four year old, the youngest daughter, never spoke again.

The political officer, using a conversational level of amplitude, then ordered two of the other NVA soldiers to bend the back of the horrified old man. The cadre withdrew his regimental saber, jabbed it roughly into the middle of the old man’s upper back, and when the headman involuntarily arched backward from pain, swept the razor-like edge sword down across the nape of the man’s neck with the force of a thunderclap. The dignified head, with a grimace of agony permanently etched on its wrinkled face, dropped into the red dust. The body made two convulsive twitches before toppling on its side with twin fountains of blood geysering from the severed carotid arteries.

Phoenix Raid on Village Designed to Blame VC/NVA

The three commandos moved into the tiny targeted community in the night and kidnapped the elderly first wife of the headman and a pregnant teenaged girl. The two women were mercifully knocked on the head and rendered unconscious; then, they were decapitated. The unborn infant was cut from his mother’s womb. The fetus was far enough advanced to be able to determine its sex. The heads of the two women were impaled on the two gate posts of the entrance to the village. The women’s bodies were suspended upside down by their ankles and notes in Vietnamese were pinned to their naked breasts. The notes read in Vietnamese INFORMER on the older woman and TRAITOR on the younger woman, the victim of the rude Caesarean section. The fetus was hung form a branch. His sign read ROTTEN FRUIT. The murders, mutilations, and ‘progressive information’ signs, as the NLF euphemistically called their propaganda, were typical of Viet Cong retaliations; and the villagers would readily blame the VC for the atrocities. The anguish would be all the worse since the women were innocent – willing providers for the NLF.

Civilians Caught in the Middle

Posing as DRVN [Civilian Secret Police], the three Vietnamese imposters rousted the entire hamlet from their beds and lined them up in front of the headman’s house. Cham, the best actor of the group, harangued the sleepy and frightened people for nearly an hour, accusing them of collaboration with the corrupt GVN oppressors and of betrayal of the righteous cause of the people. From a long rice-paper list of crimes Cham read in terrifying slow magisterial tones.

When Cham finished his communistic condemnation of the hamlet, he announced that the headman must suffer the crimes of the rest of the villagers and would serve as an example for other would-be betrayers of the people. Cham stepped aside, and Ngoc and Hai dragged the petrified old man to the center of the line. There was muffled weeping from the other family members, even the men. The headman was made to kneel, then he was decapitated with a scimitar.

The indictment document was laid on the blood covered thorax of the headless corpse, and scimitar was stabbed through it so the blade remained standing in the dead man as a deep lesson and as evidence of VC culpability should proof be required by disbelieving villagers from neighboring hamlets. The terrorized villagers were convinced by the lesson they had witnessed; they indeed feared the Viet Cong cadres all the more, almost as much as they feared and mistrusted the representatives of the RVN who pillaged their homes and raped their women by day.

Helicopter Ride

In forty-five minutes they were in a helicopter over the South China Sea traveling at about three thousand feet. The moonlight shimmered and sparkled on the calm surface of the water casting beautiful but eerie shadows from the silhouettes of the archipelago of islands. There was a single US Navy destroyer making its way toward Danang and a few sampans sitting at anchor, the lamplights and cooking fires on their afterdecks creating dots of light on the surface of the black water.

The softly whimpering girl lay in the fetal position on the greasy steel deck of the chopper. The Nungs were each armed with a .45 and a cruel looking curved two-edged dagger. There were no signs of resistance, and none of the occupants talked until they were well out to sea. There was only the steady loud rattle of the craft’s engine and rotors to interrupt the silence of that starless night.

“You have one chance to repent and to make yourself clean. Do it now. If you don’t, you alone are responsible for your daughter’s fate.” Mr. Phan begged, cajoled, pleaded, and cried in a stream of nearly unintelligible Vietnamese. DuParrier shouted in the ear of the Nung guard seated next to him. The Chinese man roughly grabbed the diminutive girl by her blouse front and the belt of her blue pleated school uniform skirt. He easily lifted her off the vibrating floor and duck walked to the open door with the terrified girl.

“Tell me!” menaced DeParrier. “Five seconds!” was all he added. He looked straight into the stricken father’s eyes and began to lift the fingers of his right hand methodically.

Phan watched the number of fingers increase in horrified fascination. It was as if he were struck dumb. He dropped his face into the palms of his hands, and his body shuddered with his sobs. DeParrier jerked the captive man’s head up when the five seconds had elapsed. He nodded to the Nung.

The Chinese mercenary sneered at the girl then made a sign crossing two fingers in front of her as a mortal insult. Then he made a sudden violent jerking motion and pitched the hapless little girl into the black void. Her decrescendo screaming trailed off into the night.

Anders had heard and ignored rumors that the CIA backed system had condoned the torture and killing of old people, women, and even children, sometimes for mere sadism, sometimes for petty revenge. This reality he had just witnessed made even the worst of what he had heard about have a deep ring of truth.

First, Mr. Pham’s right arm and leg became flaccid and dangled like wet spaghetti at his side. The left side of his face became slack. He burbled unintelligently, emitting a nearly inaudible syllable salad. Then he slumped to his right. Phan Pho Ngo, the Coca Cola bottler and distributor for South Viet Nam, was dead. When his daughter flew out of the helicopter door, his blood pressure had shot off the manometer; a blood vessel deep in his brain burst from the strain and blew the left side of his cerebrum to pieces.

Duparrier gestured angrily at the two Nungs. They took hold of Phan’s limp body and pitched it unceremoniously out over the South China Sea. There would be no evidence of their night’s work.

Phoenix Terrorizes a Village

They coordinated their entrance; and one by one the men slithered into the house, quieter than the breathing of the sleeper inside. All three of them were now wearing their night vision glasses and had adjusted to the green light and head heaviness that accompanies the use of the night vision devises. By habit, each of them moved his head to and fro frequently to compensate for the limitations of peripheral vision. There were three persons sleeping, two teenagers and a middle-aged man. None of the sleepers stirred as the night stalkers entered their sleeping chamber.

Each PRUC took one of the victims as his responsibility; Anders stood in the center towering over the older man. He held up three fingers, then counted silently, one…two…three. As one, each of the PRUCs slapped a lead filled sap hard against the side of his victim’s sleeping head. Then each pasted a strip of wide duct tape over the mouth of the man beneath him. Only Anders’ man stirred requiring another blow from the sap. It had been very quietly done; the noise had not carried outside the walls of the well ventilated hooch. Less than three seconds had elapsed fro the time Anders had reached his count of three. A circlet of tape was wrapped around the unconscious VCIs’ ankles and wrists, trussing them adequately for the short time Anders had in mind.

The PRU cadres loaded their unconscious bundles over their shoulders, squatted low, and duck-walked out of the low door, Anders in front, and led their cautious way up the gentle grassy incline out of the village and onto the well-trodden secondary trail out of the community.

As the first step, Anders stepped behind the small VCI men, one at a time, lifted the man up to a semi-sitting position and cupped the man’s chin in one hand and the base of his skull in the other. He lifted the man’s head up as hard as he could, then sharply twisted counterclockwise pushing the chin down and the opposite occiput up. The resounding snapping noise was followed by an instant painless death as the first and second vertebrae separated, fractured, then sheared apart narrowing the intraspinal space drastically and physiologically transecting the cervico-medullary junction of the nervous system.

Next, the two Vietnamese PRUCs stripped the bodies naked and strung the three from tree limbs, head down. Then, using the sharpest pointed knife they had, two punctures were made into the engorged jugular veins, and the still fluid blood flowed freely and darkly into a rich pool at the base of the tree. Anders had his men strip the legs and abdomen down to mild as much of the blood out as possible. Finally, they hung the bodies by their wrists so that they were high enough, outstretched enough, and near enough to the main trail to command immediate and complete attention.

Dawn eased into the village gently with the light coming in overhead from the mountain tops beore the sun made its first appearance. Sunlight dappled through the trees gradually bringing the light and heat of the morning to the just arousing people.

Children began to herd their families’ potbellied pigs into the nearby forest to graze. Women began to cajole their lazy husbands to get up and to go out to the green carpets of the rice fields that were now undulation in the slight breeze. Half-asleep men cursed the perfidy of their buffaloes and jerked the nose loops unnecessarily, causing the powerful beasts to wince and stamp their feet. Ducks quacked; roosters crowed; and boys and girls began to yell friendly insults at each other across the dust now rising between the close order rows of nipa nuts.

Suddenly all of that stopped. From the edge of the forest, along the secondary trail, came the high keening wail of a woman in terror. All else, even the animals, became silent; and the village was momentarily transfixed in soundless animation. The sentries reacted first. Three of them raced across the village in the direction of the screaming woman. The population of the village departed en masses to where the source of such dismay was located.

The villagers stood looking at the three pale bodies suspended from the trees not daring to speak. No one noticed the three intruders as they quietly departed in the opposite direction.