The Village by Bing West

the bank.
    The shadowy figures also stopped moving and started murmuring to each other in soft Vietnamese.
    â€œVC,” Riley said, and loosed a long burst from his M-14 automatic rifle. The Viet Cong sought the cover of another paddy dike and swiftly returned fire.
    From the flashes of the weapons and the colors of the tracers—those of the Marines showed as red and the Viet Cong’s white—the watchers from the fort could judge exactly where the lines were.
    â€œRiley, hold your position,” Beebe radioed. “I’ll get artie. You just hold where you are.”
    Beebe called an artillery battery four miles away. He was specific.
    â€œI have about thirty VC in the rice paddies at coordinates 589973. My patrol is one hundred meters east, so be careful.”
    A few minutes later, Beebe received the message, “Round on the way.”
    This was followed by the familiar banging sound of a shell impacting, but none of the Americans or Vietnamese in the fort saw any explosive flash in the paddies.
    Beebe looked at Lam, who shook his head worriedly.
    â€œCease fire, cease fire. We lost your round,” Beebe yelled into the radio.
    â€œWatch it,” came the reply. “There’s a second one already on the way.”
    Crr-ump. A white flash followed by a shower of sparks burst from the dark treeline behind the fort.
    â€œYou stupid bastards,” Beebe yelled. “You’re three hundred yards short.”
    The firefight in the paddies sputtered out, as the Viet Cong, knowing their position was exposed, pulled off. But from the treeline behind the fort came the glow of a fire, and Lam took six PFs and ran to the spot.
    Hit by one of the artillery rounds, a thatched hut was blazing. Of the family of five, three had survived, although wounded. The mother and her daughter had been killed. Beebe called in a helicopter to evacuate the father and his two boys. Lam told the villagers that he had been standing next to the Americans when they had called for artillery, and that he would have done the same. The error had not been made at the fort. But two women were dead because of firepower gone awry, and the black ashes of the house could be seen by patrols coming and going from the fort, a constant reminder which for seventeen months affected, if it did not actually determine, the American style of fighting in the village of Binh Nghia. The Marines saw too much of the villagers, and lived too closely with them, not to be affected by their personal grief. Besides, the Americans had to patrol with the PFs, whose own families were scattered throughout the hamlets and who were naturally concerned about the use of any weapon which might injure their relatives. The rifle—not the cannon or the jet—was to be the primary weapon of the Americans in Binh Nghia.
    The morning after the artillery accident, Beebe was ordered to Marine headquarters at Chulai airfield to testify before an investigating board about the tragedy. When he returned to the fort, he saw a large crowd of PFs and Marines gathered outside the main room. He asked what was going on.
    It was a simple story. Lam had gone out that morning to take his usual stroll through the hamlet in order to pick up pieces of information about enemy movement during the night. Upon being told that there were some Marines having breakfast at the marketplace, he had decided to walk that way and join them. He wasn’t paying particular attention to his immediate surroundings. Suddenly a woman yelled to him to look out. Instinctively, he ducked just as a carbine cracked behind him. The bullet passed by his head, missing by inches. The sniper was crouched in a doorway only a few feet away, and as he tried to get off a second shot, his carbine jammed. Lam was on him in the same instant, pistol-whipping him to the ground and knocking him out. Lam had then carried the man to the fort and was now questioning him.
    Inside, the hall which had been