Red Flags Read Online Free PDF Page B

another. Glass jars on a plank held potent-looking elixirs with bees and less identifiable things floating in them. Checkman pointed out the bat's-blood-and-rice-wine cocktail for tuberculosis beside jars of land leeches beckoning like miniature fingers.
    A few stalls offered modest black-market booty, mostly stacks of green c-ration cans and field gear. Nothing like Saigon's extravagant contraband. Along one end of the hard-packed square stood shops filled with cheap wares, a café, a photographer displaying large framed samples of hand-tinted portraits, the town barbershop, and an open-sided billiard hall. Pigpens and slop troughs immediately behind it gave off an acrid stench.
    "Shit," Miser croaked. "Who could play pool next to that?"
    Checkman grinned. He shooed the kids out of the jeep and we got back in. We drove by some thatch huts roofed with metal sheets imprinted with beer-can logos and halted at the empty back side of town, a plain of dry, baked earth and scrub. We hadn't passed a pagoda, a church, not so much as a gas station or streetlamp.
    Checkman nodded toward the landscape. "End of city."
    Miser frowned. "Ass end of nowhere."
    Turning back, we passed some two-story stucco houses with second-floor balconies edged with Chinese filigrees. Checkman showed us a shop front screened in at ground level, sparsely furnished with a few low stools and tables on a concrete floor. It was a bar in front and a brothel in back.
    "Homey as a garage," Miser said. "What a place to get laid."
    Checkman pointed out a stucco building that looked Mediterranean. "The Korean medical team's quarters and clinic. They treat Vietnamese. Two docs, three nurses. Dr. Towns's dispensary is on the other side, down that alley." He indicated a wide passage lined with shops.
    "He European?" I said.
    "She's American."
    Miser's head swiveled around. "An American woman, here?"
    "Yep. She does the health-care thing for the Yards. There's also a Christian Alliance missionary who runs a Yard leper colony a few klicks upriver. The Jarai never used to isolate their lepers but he talked them into it to reduce contagion. And there are two missionary couples: one here, the other in a Yard village way south."
    I said, "What's the American headcount in the province?"
    "Thirty Green Berets at the two Special Forces camps. Big one's north of here, the other's southeast. Also half a Special Forces team—that's seven Berets—and two MACV officers at a district headquarters. An A-team may soon go in on a mountaintop at Buon Blech too."
    I said, "Thirty-nine. Is that it for our side?"
    "Yeah, and the personnel here, and a dozen Army engineers bunking with us while they build the new airstrip."
    "What've we got locally?"
    Checkman downshifted to first as we bounced along a water-eroded stretch of road. "You gentlemen just brought the compound's total strength back to forty, sir."
    "What?" Miser exclaimed. "Did you say
forty?
"
    "Fifty-two, counting the engineers on temporary duty."
    "How close is the nearest support?" I said. "You know. Firebases? Reinforcements?"
    "Pleiku." Checkman braked for a goat. "Like, fifty miles."
    Miser sighed. "Eighty klicks. So a plane with Gatling guns is the best we can expect if it hits the fucking fan."
    Checkman said, "The First Cav is straight north at An Khe, about forty miles. I don't think we're a top priority for them either."
    "South?"
    "Empty for a couple of hundred miles until you get down around Saigon."
    "Crap," Miser mumbled. "So eighty-nine Americans in a province the size of ...?"
    "Like, Delaware," Checkman said, grinning. "We do have an ARVN battalion right across the road, and lots of strikers at the camps. Village militias too; most are Montagnard, a few are Vietnamese."
    "And that's it for round-eyes?"
    "Oh, the pinko French priest nobody ever sees. Likes to badmouth Americans and is supposed to be chummy with the VC. The Special Forces guys are always threatening to off him."
    "You think they're