Fort Bragg
The bulb that hung from the ceiling gave out a weak light.
Garner was reading some papers in silence and Trautman was writing.
“There's one guy, inside Baker team B, that has criminal records. They call him Danforth”
“Let me see” said Trautman.
Instead of passing him the papers, Garner read them aloud for Trautman.
“Use of force against a public official plus arrest resistance”
“Oh yes, the one with the beard. He is one of the two idiots of the C group that came down from the Valley of Sounds and nevertheless got today's task done. The next year this fucking canyon will be off limits for everyone, thanks to those two stupid idiots. If I find a single recruit trying to repeat their exploit, I'll immediately reject them and strangle them on the spot with my bare hands. Give me those papers. Let me take a look”
Garner passed them to him then said:
“I don't want rebels in my teams, Trautman”
“Neither do I, but I don't want altar boys either - Trautman pointed to the papers with a finger - Use of force against a public official? It means nothing”
Trautman thought for a while. Then he added:
“Why haven't we received these before?”
“Bureaucracy colonel. You know how these things go”
Trautman read those lines again, then he gave everything back to Garner.
“I don't see anything that could be a problem”
“You don't care about who those people you going to work with are?”
“Frankly? No. The less I know the better it is”
Garner smiled.
“Colonel, you are always a surprise”.
“I have to judge them, Garner. The last year during that selection we couldn't even put together an eight member team, so I really don't feel comfortable in rejecting someone just because he beat up a sheriff one year ago”
Then they both continued working on their papers, when the teletypewriter started to clatter.
Trautman went near the machine, waited patiently, then took the paper and read it.
The colonel was a man of integrity, but when he read to the point he felt his chest held in an iron grip anyway.
In Dak Son, a Montagnard (*) village, the Vietcong had just committed a massacre of civilians: men, women and kids, most of all unarmed, mostly using flame throwers.
The first guesstimate was about one hundred and fifty dead (**).
Trautman passed the paper to Garner without saying a word.
Garner said nothing about it either, because there was nothing to say.
Terror had been Vietcong's main weapon for around twenty years.
It had always been like that and it would be forever.
Terror was an easy weapon to use, a weapon that loaded US soldiers with paranoia and hate, and civilians with fear and obedience.
All of that paranoia, hate and fear pushed the Americans to do stupid things like friendly fire episodes, torturing prisoners for no reason at all or executing them just because of hate.
And every time an American soldier made any kind of mistake because of rage or fear, sooner or later the press discovered it and the US really paid for it.
This was far different from the North Vietnam war effort, because their regime had no public opinion to respond to, nor journalists that always poked their noses into everybody's business. And even when this happened and somebody discovered their massacres, after all they were just Vietcong, weren't they? So no one expected anything different from them and there was never any scandal at all.
But why?
Why did no one ever denounce their massacres with the same scandal as the ones made by the Americans?
In what kind of upside-down world were American-made massacres by mistake worse than cold-blooded, high-ranking-ordered Vietcong ones?
That new massacre was a big problem for the colonel.
Had the Vietnamese finally started to report every VC in the area to the Americans every time they found one, the war would have been different.
But every time there was a massacre like that, it pushed the civilians one step back and they tried to avoid any direct confrontation with the communists.
Because the Vietnamese – like everyone else in this world – were only really interested in surviving, and with that massacre, the Vietcong had just earned another brand new year of obedience, at least.
*The Montagnards are a an ethnic minority that live in the mountains.
**The guesstimate that Trautman received that night, was wrong. During the Dak Son village massacre, the Vietcong killed two hundred and fifty two civilians.