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Vietnamese ‘Scarecrows’ Noisy(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war will continue in The Enquirer daily.)
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He was really sitting on a
gun jeep’s seat back, leaning on an M-60 machine gun, but the bushes
hid his
vehicle. He had his shirt off and was
sweating. The nights in the highlands
are cool enough, but 10 a.m. sun in the “Pleiku area dry season” whips
the
mercury right up to 120 degrees.
Sp4 Venaircles was flanked
by PFC Danny W. Denton, whose head stuck up above the top of the tea
bushes
. PFC Denton was dozing comfortably
behind the wheel of the jeep. It was
hard to see how he managed it because a slight breeze had raised the
oddest
conglomeration of sounds I have ever heard.
I walked over and climbed up
on the jeep and looked toward where the noises seemed to be loudest.
A steep bank ran down to the
Tae River here and a rice crop had been planted by the local Montagnard
villagers in the bottomland. These
Jarai tribesmen raised rice in dry fields instead of practicing the
paddy culture
of the lowland farmers.
They girdle big trees and
cut off the smaller ones about waist high in a fine demonstration of
getting
the job of clearing a field done with the least effort.
Up in the branches of the
dead trees in the rice field, which flanked the tea plantation, there
was a
collection of bamboo objects dangling and spinning and bobbing around
which
would have put a mobile figure sculptor into envious brooding.
Some of the bamboo gizmos
were six feet long. One had a windmill,
with the paddles made of palm fronds, set at each end and a collection
of
moving parts, also made of bamboo and lashed together with fiber, which
rang
wooden gongs and turned a ratchet-wheel noisemaker.
A couple of palm frond fins
kept the whole thing turning around in the wind while all of the
propellers and
noisemakers kept operating. It was hung
on a bark cord and dangled about 10 feet above the ripe rice crop.
“What do you suppose all of
that is for?” I asked Sp4 Venaircles.
“The interpreter says it
keeps the birds away. Look at that one
across the creek,” he said.
The one he indicated was a
scarecrow affair made out of old bits of rags, some on staves like
pennants and
some arranged into a man-form (the staff made him have five arms, if
that is
imaginable) and it was all topped with four different whirligigs
spinning in
the breeze.
The river bottom was lined
with this kind of thing for hundreds of yards and the noise was a lot
like
every milkman in town simultaneously clinking bottles, scraping their
feet and
throwing rocks on a tin roof.
“Are you out here on the
perimeter at night?” I asked.
“We were last night. I
hope I never spend another one like it,”
he said. “Look at Denton here he is a
nervous wreck.”
Denton had wriggled so his
head was pillowed on a box of M-60 ammunition and looked more like a
limp
sandbag than a nervous wreck. He opened
one eye and grinned sleepily.
“It sounds like the whole
North Vietnamese Army is coming across that field when the wind blows. I don’t know how we can tell if they ever
decide to do it, either,” he said.
I watched some of the
mountain villagers file down one of their paths toward the field. They walk from Point A to Point B in a
straight line, ignoring easier routes, and their paths are beaten deep
into the
red clay. I marveled again at the way
these primitive tribesmen keep their primitive culture intact in the
midst of
helicopter and aircraft fleets and all the rest of the technology used
by
armies.
The men are short, muscular,
darker than Vietnamese men, and wear a skimpy loincloth and a long
shawl-like
blanket.
The women wear a kind of
sarong wrapped around their waist. They
both carry loads in beautifully woven baskets with shoulder straps
which are
slung rucksack style instead of using the ubiquitous shoulder pole of
the
lowland people.
They load these to a point
which seems impossible, sometimes hanging smaller baskets on the big
ones, and
walk in single file at a pace I couldn’t follow very far without a
burden.
Sp4 Paul Leonard, Sp4 Eldred
Pritchett Sr., S-Sgt. Ronald G. Scott and Sp4 Thomas Coleman, all of
Capt. John
Drake’s Company B, First Battalion (Airborne) 12 Cavalry, had dug in
along a
road which skirted the plantation and were looking at the Montagnard
column of
three men and three women.
“Those people are real
friendly. They fixed us up a shower
point out of bamboo over at a little water fall up stream.” Sp4 Leonard
told
me.
“They made a trough to catch
the water and put bamboo sections up with holes in the bottom. Six people can stand under it.
First bunch of guys that used it got
embarrassed, though,” he continued.
What happened was that four
GIs had gone over for first trial on the village-provided shower. While they were soaping and whooping under
the cold mountain stream spray, two elderly Montagnard ladies came
along and
unconcernedly took over the remaining two showers.
“The guys were all grabbing
for clothes. Since then we see
everybody in the village coming down together so we just go ahead and
shower
and don’t pay any attention to it. Or at
least we act like we don’t! I don’t
think I’ll every get used to the idea, myself,” one PFC told me.
The villagers practically
adopted the 1st Cavalry Division in the weeks ahead.
Scores of the brass and silver bracelets they give as sign of
brotherhood and friendship after a vigorous initiation ceremony are
being
sported on American wrists now, in fact.
(The ceremony involves
drinking rice wine, dabs of chicken or buffalo blood, incantations,
etc., and
is finished by the bracelet being clamped on the initiate’s right
wrist.)
I went back over to the
airstrip about 10 a.m. and found that the First of the 12th, commanded
by Lt.
Col. Robert Shoemaker, was leaving for a mission south of Duc Co near
the
Cambodian border.
Lt. Col. Dale Cranford
offered to drop me off over there from his chopper and since it seemed
like
time to start the war again, I got aboard.
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