Right after Black Spot, Trautman and the Baker team started working on the Phoenix program again.
As he’d promised Patrick Nelson before his death, Trautman’s persecution of those Vietcong living 'out in the open' before everyone was incessant. His efforts to curtail enemy progress didn’t stop there however.
He also hit spies, double agents, informants and almost anyone else who was actively helping the Vietcong.
Naturally there happened to be some ARVN officials as well on that list, yet Trautman hit them all exactly the same way and occasionally without even informing his own higher ranks about it.
In Trautman's opinion, the only real hope for Vietnam was to end the guerrilla warfare.
The Guerrilla ranks had already been hit hard in the '68 Tet offensive, but in any case, what they needed now was a coup de grace.
When it came to trying however, there was no question about how implacable Trautman was.
Trautman always calculated each of his targets very carefully by collecting indisputable evidence and always endlessly reasoning over it. The other bigwigs involved in the program didn’t always use his same methods unfortunately.
So it was strictly a matter of time before things would have to get worse and the colonel knew it.
In fact as time went by, things really did get worse.
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The CIA agents started going into the villages and randomly choosing a civilian, to then put a hood over his head and take him around the entire area. The hood had a couple of holes so that the civilian could see and breathe. Every time he passed in front of a house belonging to a Vietcong the man had to gesture somehow, either by scratching his nose or straightening the hood on his head.
Then, the same day but during the night, some ARVN men would have knocked on the incriminated doors and shot at anyone who opened it, be it a man, woman or child.
Usually they basically said something like “April's fool” and then shot whoever in the face.
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Trautman, of course had no idea exactly how bad things had become already.
As a matter of fact, on one occasion while taking part in a discussion regarding one of the Phoenix Program targets Trautman had accidentally found out that Danforth and Ortega had access to some information which they weren’t necessarily both supposed to have.