Headhunter Read online

  HEADHUNTER

  Tim Curran

  Copyright 2013 Tim Curran

  “I don’t think little big girls should

  Go walking in these spooky woods alone.”

  Ronald Blackwell

  1

  When I first heard that something was hunting heads in Vietnam—something not exactly human—I was standing in the ruins of a besieged village just north of Khe Ta Laou up near the DMZ with elements of the 101st Airborne. The air was pungent with the stench of burning flesh and a greasy pall of smoke hung above like a shroud. I was waiting there with that smell up my nose and mist in my face while paratroopers bustled about dragging bodies out of the jungle and out of the hootches. Bodies of the NVA and villagers who’d been unfortunate enough to have been caught in the crossfire. I’d been in-country for seven months by then. Not as a soldier but a correspondent, and I never could seem to stop staring at the dead. Whether it was theirs or ours, my eyes just didn’t have the good sense to avert themselves. It was something that kept me awake nights in Saigon with the cold sweats and no amount of booze or weed or pills could hope to wipe those images from my brain.

  Sometimes I thought I didn’t belong over there. And other times I was sure I didn’t belong anywhere else.

  A paratrooper—a lean black guy from Detroit they called Soul Man—was standing there by me, saying, “Know what, Mac? These dead slopes here, some of ‘em look like old ladies and young boys and kids and what the fuck. But it don’t mean shit, dig? See they ain’t no different from Charlie, they helping his scrawny ass. You lay down with dogs, baby, you get up with fleas. Boom, boom, boom.” He kissed the barrel of his M-16 and then scanned it over the three dozen odd heaped bodies, grinning like Death.

  “What’d you do before the war?” I asked him, your average journalist question.

  He ran a bony finger over his nose, his cheeks, pulled it away quick like he didn’t care for the feel of his own flesh. “Um…what the fuck did I do? Oh, yeah…shit…I ran with the boys, I hopped and bopped with the boys back in Dee-troit. I was a regular menace to motherfucking society, but now I’m cool, Nam has straightened me out.” He started laughing with a high, demented chuckle, having trouble stopping once he started. “You know what, Mac? We ain’t gonna win this here war on account it ain’t a war and we ain’t supposed to win it…but, shit, the Viets they gonna remember us a long time. We gonna leave a black, ugly stain on this country ain’t gonna wash out for a hundred years.”

  He walked over to the bodies, stared down at them. Tears of rainwater were streaking down stiff, sightless faces…those that had faces left. Soul Man sighted them in with his 16, silently machine-gunned them down like a kid playing war.

  Captain Morales, a second-tour hardcase the grunts called “The Undertaker” on account he was more than a little obsessed with body counts, was standing there viewing the carnage, grinning like a carved pumpkin. There was no emotion in that grin, just a grim satisfaction that came with killing the enemy and killing him in numbers.

  Command liked numbers. It was something they could crunch and handle and discuss. Morales liked to give them what they wanted. He was a lifer and damn proud of it, said he’d be general staff one day. And when he told you that you always agreed with him, even though you wanted to start laughing because Morales was nuts. Check this guy hanging out with Westmoreland and the boys, darting off to the nearest morgue to get his kicks every few hours, handling the cold cuts. Yeah, real command material here.

  But in that war…hell, maybe.

  Right then, Morales was standing there in his flak jacket and Yankees capcrazy sonofabitch wouldn’t wear a helmet or aboonie hat, just that dog-eared cap that I just bet smelled like a mortuarybarking out commands on how he didn’t want the NVA stiffs mixed-up with the dead villagers.

  “Let’s keep things organized here,” he snapped at his sergeants. “Let’s keep things tidy.”

  Tidy. He liked that word. He was fond of pointing out that Charlie didn’t do things as tidy as we did. That when his boys hit a ville or a base camp or just ambushed some VC guerrillas, he made sure they tidied up afterwards. “Those goddamn gooks,” he would say, “those bastards aren’t as tidy as we are.”

  The village we were in had been called Bai Loc and it had been taken down as part of a search-and-destroy sweep by the 101st to root out and crush the 7th NVA Front HQ. I’d been along since the day before, up one hill and down another, trudging through swamp and chopping through jungle, hunting, always hunting. It had been raining off and on and I was soaked to the skin. In the distance I could hear other units of the 101st hitting villages and engaging the NVA all along that ridgeline—the clatter of machine guns and the booming of artillery.

  Morales had lost two men and a third was gut-shot, patched-up like a leaky tire and awaiting medvac. One of the village boys was running around alternately screaming at the paratroopers and laughing, shaking his head and nodding, his mind gone at the sight of his entire family piled on the ground with more holes in them than a window screen. Morales got sick of him and told the medics if they didn’t shoot that little prick full of something to shut him up, he was taking him for a walk. Nobody ever came back when they went “walking” with Morales.

  The fog in the valley was thick and torpid, clinging to everything and everyone in a sticky blanket. Rain was falling and we were getting wet. It ran off the brims of our helmets, down the backs of our fatigue shirts, trickled into our boots. Everything looked gray—people, huts, the jungle. Even though Morales had men on perimeter guard, listening, watching, and worrying, I found myself looking, keeping an eye out for signs of the enemy. The jungle was scraggly and low, dense, impenetrable, snared full of vines and creepers and tree roots. A snake could get knotted up in there.

  The troopers had all the bodies out and what remained of the village was set on fire. The flames burned low and sluggish in that damp, clotted atmosphere, but burn they did. And luckily, because Morales would not leave until Bai Loc was ashes and the enemy had been denied cover.

  The remaining villagers were pressed into a tight circle at the foot of a blasted mahogany that had been peppered by gunfire and shrapnel. Six or seven paratroopers were gathered around them, rifles trained on them. When I got over there, Soul Man was taunting them…him and a white cracker from Arkansas they called “Hard-on” because he had one all the time. Guy jerked off three or four times a day even when he was getting it regular. He had no shame about it. He could stand right in front of you and tell you about some op he’d been on or about his old man’s pig farm in the Ozarks, pulling his meat the whole time.

  Hard-on kicked some mud in the face of woman who was rocking back and forth on her heels. “Hey, mamasan…you fuckee-suckee me boom-boom real good?”

  Soul Man was laughing because the woman lacked teeth and had some weird growth on her face. “Man,” he said. “You ain’t got no respect for your dick you stick it in that shit.”

  There were eight of them dressed in muddy black pajamas, hard-luck Vietnamese villagers who’d been used and abused by us, by the NVA, the French, the Japanese. Everyone who came through here—and just about everyone had at one time or another—shit on these people and they took it. Abuse and hardship was a way of life for them and they knew no other.

  At first I’d felt a lot of pity for them, but seven months of atrocity, death, and evil had turned my mind hard as a grinding stone and you couldn’t even spin a spark off it by that point. So I just stared down at them, my eyes dead as driftwood.

  An old man looked over at me, his face a sun-dried, wind-split mask burnished brown and tough as a barber’s strop. He had no eyes, just blackened pits like maybe they’d been burned out of there with a hot stick. He saw me, grinned, flashed both of his ye
llow teeth at me and started to laugh. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha,” he carried on. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  A woman next to him with an old scar running from temple to jawline that pulled her left eye into a slit, pointed at me, began muttering some weird sub-dialect I’d never heard before.

  Soul Man just smiled. “She wants to fuck you, Mac. Fuck you so hard, baby, your spleen gonna hurt.”

  But she just kept babbling, those eyes filmed yellow, her fingers gesticulating madly. Next to her, the old man was still laughing. It was a high, insane sound echoing through that mist and dank jungle. Suddenly, we were all quiet because it was giving us the creeps. All of us. And guys like Soul-Man and Hard-On didn’t shake easily.

  Then, in English, she said: “Hey, you go home, Joe! Dead, dead, dead! Dead everywhere! Now you dead, too! We all dead!” Her and the old man were both shaking their heads and laughing. Then she stopped and looked right at me, gave me a look that turned my blood to frost. “Hey, Joe, he find you, eh? Nguoi san ddau! Nguoi ddi sang ddau! You know him now, eh? Yes, you always know him…”

  I just stood there, rooted to the spot, my boots slipping deeper into that foul black mud. The war seemed light years away. I turned to Soul Man and the others, but they all looked pale and helpless, wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Headhunter,” a voice behind me said. It was Lieutenant Gentry, the intelligence officer. “She’s saying ‘headhunter’, Mac.”

  The other Viets were studying the ground, not daring to look up for some reason. But the eyeless man still laughed and the old woman still jabbed a finger in my direction. “You find him and he find you, yes?” She spit on the ground and rubbed a sandal in it. “Ac quy ddi san ddau! Nguoi san ddau! Ac quy ddi san ddau! Even now, he smells you and waits for you, Joe!”

  I lit a cigarette and gave her a hard look, even though something about her and the whole situation was making my guts roil. “What’s she saying?”

  Gentry’s lips were moving silently, sounding it all out the way they’d taught him in Army language school. “She’s saying…um…‘The Devil That Hunts Heads.’ Something like that. ‘Headhunter. The Devil That Hunts Heads.’ Crazy mamasan.”

  I looked back at her.

  She was nodding her head vehemently.

  I turned away, feeling green and runny inside, and studied the bodies of the NVA all gathered up like a collection of scarecrows—stick arms and legs and mouths frozen in mid-scream. The stink of death was ripe. I could hear choppers approaching in the distance. An Army photographer pushed past, started taking shots of the fallen enemy. I could just about see those photos spread out over some MACV general’s coffee table in Saigon. Conversation pieces.

  Morales came over and right away the crazy woman stopped laughing. “You Vee-Cee, eh, mamasan? You boom-boom Vee-Cee? Kill plenty Americans?”

  But she would not look at him or answer him.

  A few others were madly proclaiming: “No Vee-Cee! No Vee-Cee!”

  I didn’t want to watch Morales bully them, but I couldn’t help myself. All I was really seeing, though, was that old man without the eyes watching me, constantly watching me. I knew he couldn’t see me, but he seemed to be looking in my direction all the same. It was spooky.

  Gentry came up to me, pulling from a cigarette. “That headhunter-thing. It’s just a superstition with these people, Mac,” he said. “I heard of it once…some ogre or monster that hunts men. Bullshit. They believe in it, though. They believe in all sorts of demons and devils and ghosts. You listen to ‘em long enough, you’ll start believing every inch of this country is haunted.”

  But I already believed that.

  2

  There was a bar in Saigon that had no true name, just a few rusting slats upon which a signboard had once hung years before. It was in an alley and unless you knew where it was, you’d never find it. It was run by an Australian named Finch who everyone just called “Vet”, on account he was an ex-SAS commando and former mercenary who’d been through just about every major and minor conflict since World War II and had the scars to prove it.

  It was a dim, grim place for a dim, grim group of men. Your average soldier, sailor, or Marine wasn’t allowed in there. It was a hang-out for the elite troops in-between missions—Green Berets, Ranger-Recondos, SEALs, Lurps, SOG lifetakers, Recon Marine widow-makers and the like. There was a twenty-five gallon aquarium displayed prominently behind the bar and flanked by bottles of Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, and Beefeater’s. It was half-filled with curled-up little things that looked oddly like dried fruit or squashed prunes, but were actually human ears that the trophy-hunting soldier of fortune types—bushmasters, scalphunters, and nightstalkersdropped in there whenever they came in out of the boonies. I saw a Beret Delta-Detachment trooper drop three of them in there one time with an almost religious reverence like he was handling the bones of a saint. No one paid any attention to him, as if, like prayer, it was a private matter.

  That’s the sort of place it was.

  The spec ops types came in to drink, get stoned, tell stories, compare tattoos and battlefield disfigurements. The only reason I was allowed through the door by the hardcase, eye-patch wearing LLDB—Vietnamese Special Forces—sergeant was because I had been accepted into their community. I had spent weeks in Green Beret A-Camps stuck in highly contested Indian Country up north. I had accompanied four-man Lurp patrols in the Highlands. Diddy-bopped through the swamps of the Mekong Delta and the Rung Sat with SEAL hunter-killer teams. My last op with the SEALs…and they didn’t let you along on many…my photographer had taken a round from a VC sniper not four feet from me, spraying me with blood and brains and bone chips. One of the SEALs pulled the chips out of my face with a tweezers, said I’d finally popped my cherry. When I got back to Saigon, the pages of my notebook were smeared with exploding gray matter which had turned black like ink. I sat there for some time, touching the wounds on my face like stigmata, and staring at those smears.

  Finch knew me, but gave me a ration of shit every time I showed my face in there.

  “So, yer some kind of reporter, eh? Some bloke what scribbles about in a pissing notebook so them in the world can read yer shit. That it, mate?”

  “Yeah,” I said, sucking down my beer, wondering why I ever came there. It couldn’t have been to suck up the atmosphere because it looked and smelled like the inside of a body bag minute you walked in that door. “Yeah, that’s what I do.”

  “Lovely, lovely. And what rag you with?”

  “Freelance. Esquire, Time, whoever pays me.”

  Finch went on to say—like he did every time—that a freelancer was pretty much the same as a mercenary, working for the highest bidder and there sure as fuck was nothing wrong with that. I was welcome there, he said.

  “Scavenger like you will fit right in, saavy?”

  I saw a Special Forces sergeant I knew named Quinn sitting alone at a table, so I joined him. He was a big boy with arms like pythons who heralded from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen area in West Side Manhattan. He was on R and R from his A Camp up near Khe Sanh where he and a dozen other Berets and a few hundred Montagnard mercenaries ran recon and ambushes against the NVA and VC. They were the perpetual fly in Charlie’s stew, waging guerrilla warfare against the guerrillas.

  He was sitting there, drinking whiskey from a water glass and filling an ashtray with dead cockroaches. He was wearing a bright yellow-and-orange Hawaiian shirt, a pair of worn tiger camouflaged fatigue pants, and rubber-soled Ho Chi Minh sandals that Vietnamese peddlers made out of truck tires. Guys like Quinn who’d been in the bush too long lacked any true fashion sense.

  “Hey, Mac,” he said. “Why don’t we just say fuck it and go native? Go live up in the hills with the Yards.”

  The “Yards” were the Montagnards, an indigenous people of Vietnam who were quick to point out they were not Vietnamese. They hated Viets and communists and anybody who attempted to fuck with them or their lands. They were the largest ethnic minority in the South, wild and woolly
sects of tribesmen organized along tribal lines like American Indians. They were darker and heavier built than the Viets, lived in huts and wore loin-cloths. Uncounted centuries before, they lived in the coastal regions until forced up into the inaccessible hill country by Annamese invaders from China. Self-reliant, proud, honest, they were considered inferior by the Viets and happily fought alongside American Special Forces, as long as it meant they would be armed and given the chance to kill Vietnamese and communists in general.

  Quinn said the last commander up at his A Camp, Colonel Hoghton, had gotten greased and command sent them this West Point dip-shit named Reese with only three months in-country who didn’t know his pecker from a pungi stick. Quinn was telling me that him and three Yards ambushed a ten-man VC patrol and killed the lot.

  “So we got back and Reese debriefed us and I told him the works. How we drilled eight of ‘em and two of ‘em slipped off, me and this Yard hunted ‘em and down slit their throats,” he was saying. “No big deal. Business as usual. But Reese don’t like the Yards. He’s a real tight-ass, Mac—guy could crack a walnut with his asshole—so he says, ‘Great work, Sergeant. You eliminated’—and that’s how he said it, eliminated, like I scrubbed fuck words off a nun’s door—‘you eliminated ten hostiles.’ So I said, no, me and the Yards brought ‘em to ground just like I said. Reese just shakes his head, ‘No, you single-handedly eliminated ten Victor Charlies.’ He wasn’t about to give the Yards credit for it. So he puts me up for the bronze star and gives me a week of R and R. How do you like that?”

  It was nothing I hadn’t heard before. “What you gonna do with that medal?”

  He thought about it a minute. “I’m gonna have it melted down, pressed into a bullet. Then I’m gonna shoot it straight up Reese’s asshole.”

  “How long you been in-country?” I asked him.

  “Third tour,” he said, butting his cigarette atop a squirming roach. “First was in an A Camp, second I ran recon with SOG up the Ho Chi Minh, and now I’m back in an A Camp. I love it, you know? If I was still back in the Kitchen, I’d be doing ten-to-twenty up in Sing Sing by now. I finally found something I was good at other than gang fights and stealing cars. But Reese, Christ, that motherfucker’s under my skin like a tick. We don’t lose that fuck, he’s gonna get fragged…”