Two weeks flew by in a blur of activities, exercises, and lectures. Tâm worked with her AK-47. She carefully field-stripped it for the first time. Cleaned the parts with an oiled rag. Then, with Nam timing her, she reassembled, loaded, and assumed a shooting position. It took more than a minute.
“Not fast enough,” he yelled. “You will be dead if the enemy knows you are there. Get it down to fifteen seconds.”
Tâm nodded and did it again. Thirty seconds this time.
“Still too slow.”
“This is the first time I’ve done this, sir.”
“No excuses!” he shouted. “Unless you want to die.”
She got it down to twenty seconds. Nam nodded grudgingly and showed her how to load a magazine with the correct ammunition. The AK fired a Soviet 7.62 round and used a standard thirty-round curved box magazine.
Once she learned how to shoot, Tâm was surprised at the thrill she felt when her shots rang true. To realize she held the power of life and death in her hands was intoxicating. Because she was a daughter and young girl, her family had emphasized an image of herself as weak and subservient. But with her AK she could end a life with a flick of her finger. What greater power was there? She almost laughed out loud. She didn’t need to be told to get to know her weapon. She’d fallen in love with it.
They woke early, before sunrise. After tea and fruit, they practiced shooting, mostly tin-can targets if they had them; coconuts or jackfruit if they didn’t. After a few days, as she grew more proficient, they fitted her with a shoulder strap so it was more comfortable to carry.
The next activity was a commando crawl under cover for fifty meters with her rifle, after which she was to stop, aim, and shoot. The first time she tried, she sliced her ankle on barbed wire, but Nam gestured for her to keep going. As blood seeped from the gash onto the jungle floor, she pulled herself forward using her elbows and knees. She ignored the bugs and mosquitoes that buzzed around her head and tried to remember what he’d said about pain. It was to be expected, he said. “You must learn to accept it and keep fighting. The only time you stop is when you are dead.”
They worked with bayonets as well, in endless drills where they camouflaged themselves with leaves and branches and scooted forward on their bellies holding the bayonet in an attack position. When a bell clanged, they ran to trenches, slid into them, then aimed and thrust their bayonets at burlap bags stuffed with garbage, rotten fruit, or straw.
They took turns arming and firing the two large grenade and mortar launchers in the camp, leftovers from World War II. They also practiced arming an older Chinese 75mm recoilless rifle, which required at least two soldiers, one to prepare the shot, the other to hold the shell. The camp did not have large artillery or infantry support weapons, but Nam passed around photos, which he described in detail. They needed to know about cannons, rocket launchers, and antitank weapons; they might be delivering arms or ammo to NVA troops in the field.
At the end of the first week, they moved on to explosives. Dividing into two-man teams, they carefully disassembled, then rebuilt grenades. They needed to work in teams, Nam said, because supplies were limited. He went over the parts of the grenade: the blasting cap or detonator. The fuse. The gunpowder. The safety lever or spring. The exterior shell. Ordinary matches. “By the way, dead GIs always have matches on them. Get them. We need them.”
While they worked, Nam told them how one recruit blew himself up when he didn’t place his thumb over the safety lever as the pin was pulled. Tâm shivered and hid her shaking hands. Nam saw her fear. “Push doubt out of your mind,” he said. “There is no room for fear. We do this now so you will know how to control the explosion.”
Tâm sucked in a breath. She could do this. She worked slowly and methodically to reassemble the grenade. Nam watched her, and when she finished, he grabbed it and trotted to other side of the stream behind the tents. Releasing the pin, he lobbed it into a barren area she hadn’t noticed before. Five seconds later, the sudden burst of noise, smoke, and fire made the recruits cheer. Tâm let out her breath, unaware she’d been holding it in.
Nam encouraged them to invent new booby traps using sharp bamboo sticks or crossbows triggered by trip wires. Each recruit was given a utility knife. Next to her AK, it became Tâm’s favorite weapon.
The recruits usually ate, then went to bed, exhausted, once darkness fell. Occasionally, though, Nam woke them up during the night to practice how to hide and melt back into the jungle. How to communicate. Communication between fighters during a mission would be a challenge; they didn’t have two-way radios like the Americans. They couldn’t afford them, and they didn’t want them. It would be too easy to be overheard by the wrong people at the wrong time. Instead recruits practiced birdcalls or animal noises as a way of contacting or warning team members.
Better still, Nam said, “Make sure your attack plans are self-contained within your own team. We have limited access to NVA troops and their artillery. That’s why we concentrate on booby traps.”
Nam also talked about interrogation techniques. “Some of you will capture soldiers or citizens who support the South or other enemies of us freedom-loving comrades. There are important principles you need to learn when questioning your prisoners. If a prisoner refuses to answer, there are many tools you can use to ‘encourage’ cooperation, from starving prisoners to depriving them of sleep. If they still do not cooperate, you can move up to beatings, stripping off their clothing, and other activities that will sound unpleasant but are critical if we are to win this struggle.” Nam was talking about torture, Tâm realized, after he described some of those activities. She squeezed her eyes shut.
They had no uniforms, but they were equipped with rubber sandals made from old tires. Tâm liked hers; they were much more practical and flexible for the jungle than the thick boots worn by the Americans and the South. Whether they were crossing rice paddies, bogs, or streams, rubber dried quickly, so foot rot wasn’t an issue. The sandals were also easy to replace. Each recruit also was given a rucksack, a canteen, and a black-and-white-checked scarf, the khăn rằn. Tâm already had one.
Every afternoon when the heat of the day was overpowering, the recruits gathered in the clearing for political education. Some recruits had never been to school or had only a rudimentary education. An NLF officer took them through Vietnam’s history: its dynasties and emperors, its close but uneasy relationship with China, its rejection of colonialism, its embrace of Communism. He told them about Karl Marx and Lenin, and how Hồ Chí Minh rose to power. He talked about French oppression, the Japanese occupation during World War II, the return of the French and their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, after which Vietnam was separated into North and South.
Tâm already knew most of what he was saying through her studies. What she did not know, because she was too young, was the history of Ngô Đình Diệm, who became president of South Vietnam in 1955 after it separated from the North. She learned how Diệm and his brother were staunch anti-Communists. How they encouraged business development and education. Diệm’s success impressed the U.S., which, hoping his regime would be the bulwark against Communism, poured money into South Vietnam. But Diệm was assassinated in 1963 by the CIA during a military coup, because, the instructor said, he wanted to open discussions with Hồ Chí Minh about reunification.
His eventual successor, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, a former general, supported the coup. Although he, too, was anti-Communist, Thiệu turned a blind eye to corruption, lining his pockets with American aid. Furthermore, he was known to appoint loyalists rather than competent officers to lead the military, which was one of the reasons why the South was caught flat-footed during Tết.
The most critical point the political education officer made was the necessity of unswerving loyalty to Hồ Chí Minh and the Communist Party. Any disloyalty would be dealt with quickly; justice would be meted out with a knife or a bullet. That applied to civilians, not only soldiers. He described an incident in which villagers in Communist-controlled territory informed on a schoolteacher who did not precisely follow the North Vietnamese curriculum. The teacher was executed. If that could happen to a civilian, the NLF officer said, not without a simper or two, imagine what disloyal fighters would face. Tâm cringed. Dr. Hằng had never mentioned the brutality of the fighters. Indeed, the contrast between Dr. Hằng’s polished sophistication and the soldiers’ cruelty was startling. Was her omission by design? Disturbed, Tâm walked back to her tent, mulling it over.