To Kill the Pope by Tad Szulc Page A

the team to move at night, Tim feared that a nocturnal incursion might lead to a lethal confrontation with a vastly superior enemy, with heavily armed Viet Cong deployed around the cluster of houses forming a village. A daytime sweep would also present serious dangers inasmuch as the farmers would immediately shed their civilian identity and turn into a fierce fighting force, exchanging plows for Soviet-made Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers hidden in attics, cellars, and under rocks and boulders. Tim therefore decided to go for the only other alternative: a surreptitious attack just before dawn when, he hoped, most of the inhabitants would still be asleep and the armed sentinels relaxed and unsuspecting. They would be tired and sleepy after their nocturnal vigilance. It was the best approach Tim had learned from hearing about Viet Cong tactical habits.
    Romeo’s first target was True Thien village, about four miles east of the landing area. It had long been on the Phoenix hit list. Tim kept his detachment back in a gully obscured from view by trees, giving the men all day to check their equipment and concentrate their minds on the approaching action. They broke out K rations for the noon and evening meals. At nightfall, the team moved out, advancing silently in Indian file behind Tim. They were imitating the Viet Cong’s stealthy ways.
    Tim had spent the daylight hours trying to memorize the detailed map Kurtski had handed him before departure from Can Tho, but now he had to keep rechecking it with a tiny flashlight. He wore infrared goggles for night vision, as did all the team members, striving to match the terrain’s features with the map’sindications. Of course, Tim was uncertain how accurate was his South Vietnamese Army map, adding to his mounting tension. It was a typical, humid, oppressive Delta night, and the men were bathed in sticky sweat. True Thien village was immediately west of the old French Colonial Route 4, which helped Tim in orienting himself toward the objective: The map had to be right, if nothing else, about the location of Route 4.
    The trick was to advance atop the grassy tracks of the connecting network of dikes, avoiding the swampy trap of the rice paddies, though every once in a while one of the men would slip down, returning sheepishly to the column, covered with mud. It adds to the camouflage, Tim thought after falling himself into a paddy, as he spat mud out of his mouth. They covered three miles in eight hours of walking virtually on tiptoe in their heavy boots. The safety catches were off their weapons: The men were ready to fire if they suddenly ran into a Viet Cong unit returning to one of the villages from its nocturnal raids. Viet Cong attacks on “pacified” villages were almost invariably at night. But the silence now was broken only by the cries of night birds and the chatter of monkeys.
    A few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, Romeo reached the cover of a small forest. True Thien, according to the map, lay immediately behind the woods. He signaled the team to halt and crouch down to rest on its western edge. It was blackness ahead, but Tim could discern through the infrared goggles the village’s houses and huts. He saw no movement.
    At five o’clock, the roosters came awake, a dog barked here and there. Now it was dawn, not like thunder, but like the lazy end of a gentle spring night’s dream. Romeo had mastered the art of communicating by hand signals; when it was to dark, the men conveyed signals by touch, whispering only if urgently required. Slithering through the forest floor muck to the first line of trees, his M-16 in his left hand, Tim hid behind a clump of thick bushes, the rest of the team taking up positions on either side of him. It was already light enough for him to observe the village through his high-powered binoculars. He made out six or seven one-story houses, some with