Toll for the Brave

She said, ‘There’s a lovely old boy and mud up to the eyebrows.’

Fritz padded round to the front of the chair and shoved his nose at my hand.

There had always been a chance that this would happen ever since Tay Son. The psychiatrists had hinted as much, for the damage was too deep. I started to cry helplessly like a child as Fritz nuzzled my hand.

Sheila was very pale now. She pushed my hair back from my brow as if I were a small untidy boy and kissed me gently.

‘It’s going to be all right, Ellis. Just trust me.’

The telephone was in the kitchen. I sat there, clutching my empty whisky glass, staring into space, tears running down my face.

I heard her say, ‘American Embassy? I’d like to speak to General St Claire, please. My name is Mrs Sheila Ward. There was a pause and then she said, ‘Max, is that you?’ and closed the door.

She came out in two or three minutes and knelt in front of me. ‘Max is coming, Ellis. He’s leaving at once. He’ll be here in an hour and a half at the most.’

She left me then to go and get dressed and I hung on to that thought. That Max was coming. Black Max. Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, Congressional Medal of Honour, D.S.C., Silver Star, Medaille Militaire, from Anzio to Vietnam, every boy’s fantasy figure. Black Max was coming to save me as he had saved me, body and soul, once before in the place they called Tay Son.

FORCING HOUSE NUMBER ONE (#ulink_6d5c94de-0288-5c49-b3d8-ff99bdae8487)

2 (#ulink_a43b4f58-fae0-510f-a7d2-5783376024d2)

On a wet February evening in 1966 during my second year at Sandhurst, I jumped from a railway bridge to a freight train passing through darkness below. I landed on a pile of coke, but the cadet who followed me wasn’t so lucky. He dropped between two trucks and was killed instantly.

We were drunk, of course, which didn’t help matters. It was the final link in a chain of similar stupidities and the end of something as far as I was concerned. Harsh words were said at the inquest, even harsher by the commandant when dismissing me from the Academy.

Words didn’t exactly fail my grandfather either, who being a major-general, took it particularly hard. He had always considered me some kind of moral degenerate after the famous episode with the Finnish au pair at the tender age of fourteen and this final exploit gave him the pleasure of knowing that he had been right all along.

My father had died what is known as a hero’s death at Arnhem during the Second World War. My mother, two years later. So, the old man had had his hands on me for some considerable time. Why he had always disliked me so was past knowing and yet hatred is as strong a bond as loving so that when he forbade me his house, there was a kind of release.

The army had been his idea, not mine. The family tradition, or the family curse depending which way you looked at it, so now I was free after twenty-odd years of some kind of servitude or other and thanks to my mother’s money, wealthy by any standards.

Perhaps because of that – because it was my choice and mine alone – I flew to New York within a week of leaving the Academy and enlisted for a period of three years in the United States Army as a paratrooper.

It could be argued that the jump from that railway bridge was a jump into hell for in a sense it landed me in Tay Son, although eighteen months of a different kind of hell intervened.

I flew into the old French airport at Ton Son Nhut in July, 1966, one of two hundred replacements for the 801st Airborne Division. The pride of the army and every man a volunteer as paratroopers are the world over.

A year later, only forty-eight of that original two hundred were still on active duty. The rest were either dead, wounded or missing, thirty-three in one bad ambush alone in the Central Highlands which I only survived myself along with two others by playing dead.

So, I discovered what war was all about – or at least war in Vietnam. Not set-piece battles, not trumpets on the wind, no distant drum to stir the heart. It was savage street fighting in Saigon during the Tet offensive. It was the swamps of the Mekong Delta, the jungles of the Central Highlands, leg ulcers that ate their way through to the bone like acid and leeches that fastened on to your privates and could only be removed with the lighted end of a cigarette.

In a word, it was survival and I became rather an expert in that particular field, came through it all without a scratch until the day I was taking part in a routine search and destroy patrol out of Din To and was careless enough to step on a punji stake, a lethal little booby trap much favoured by the Viet Cong. Fashioned from bamboo, needle-sharp, stuck upright in the ground amongst the elephant grass and smeared with human excrement, it was guaranteed to produce a nasty, festering wound.

It put me in hospital for a fortnight and a week’s leave to follow, which brought me directly to that fateful day in Pleikic when I shambled around in the rain, trying to arrange some transportation to Din To where I had to rejoin my unit. I managed to thumb a lift in a Medevac helicopter that was flying in medical supplies – the worst day’s work in my life.

We were about fifty miles out of Din To when it happened, flying at a thousand feet over paddy fields and jungle, an area stiff with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular troops.

A flare went up suddenly about a quarter of a mile to the east of us. There was the burnt-out wreck of a small Huey helicopter in the corner of a paddy field and the man who waved frantically from the dyke beside it was in American uniform.

When we were about thirty feet up, a couple of heavy machine guns opened up from the jungle no more than fifty yards away and at that range they couldn’t miss. The two pilots were wearing chest protectors, but it didn’t do them any good. I think they must have both died instantly. Certainly the crew chief did, for standing in the open doorway in his safety belt, he didn’t have a chance.

The only surviving crew member, the medic, was huddled in the corner, clutching a bloody arm. There was an MI6 in a clip beside him. I grabbed for it, but at the same moment the aircraft lifted violently and I was thrown out through the open door to fall into the mud and water of the paddy field below.

The helicopter bucked twenty or thirty feet up into the air, veered sharply to the left and exploded in a great ball of fire, burning fuel and debris scattering like shrapnel.

I managed to stand, plastered with mud and found myself looking up at the gentleman on the dyke who was pointing an AK47 straight at me. It was no time for heroics, especially as forty or fifty North Vietnamese regular troops swarmed out of the jungle a moment later.

The Viet Cong would have killed me out of hand, but not these boys. Prisoners were a valuable commodity to them, for propaganda as well as intelligence purposes. They marched me into the jungle surrounded by the whole group, everyone trying to get in on the act.

There was a small camp and a young officer who spoke excellent English with a French accent and gave me a cigarette. Then he went through my pockets and examined my documents.

Which was where things took a more sinister turn. In action, it was the practice to leave all personal papers at base, but because I had only been in transit after medical treatment, I was carrying everything, including my British passport.

He said slowly, ‘You are English?’

There didn’t seem to be much point in denying it. ‘That’s right. Where’s the nearest consul?’

Which got me a fist in the mouth for my pains. I thought they might kill me then, but I suppose he knew immediately how valuable a piece of propaganda I would make.

They kept me alive – just – for another fortnight until they found it possible to pass me on to a group moving north for rest and recuperation.

And so, at last, I came to Tay Son. The final landing place of my jump from that railway bridge into darkness, a year and a half before.

My first sight of it was through rain at late evening as we came out of a valley – a great, ochre-painted wall on the crest above us.

I’d seen enough Buddhist monasteries to recognise it for what it was, only this one was different. A watch tower on stilts at either side of the main gate, a guard in each with a heavy machine gun. Beyond, in the compound, there were several prefabricated huts.

Having spent three days stumbling along on the end of a rope at the tail of a column of pack mules, I had only one aim in life which was to find a corner to die in. I tried to sit and someone kicked me back on my feet. They took the mules away, leaving only one guard for me. I stood there, already half-asleep, the rain drifting down through the weird, half-light that you get in the highlands just before dark.

And then an extraordinary thing happened. A man reported dead by the world’s press came round the corner of one of the huts with three armed guards trailing behind him, a black giant in green fatigues and jump boots, Chaka, King of the Zulu nation, alive and shaking the earth again.

Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, the pride of the Airborne, one of the most spectacular figures thrown up by the army since the Second World War. A legend in his own time – Black Max.

His disappearance three months earlier had provoked a scandal that had touched the White House itself for, as a Medal of Honour man, he had been kept strictly out of the line of fire since Korea, had only found himself in Vietnam at all as a member of a fact-finding commission reporting directly to the president himself.

The story was that St Claire was visiting a forward area helicopter outfit when a red alert went up. One of the gun ships was short of a man to operate one of its door-mounted M60’s. St Claire, seizing his chance of a little action, had insisted on going along. The chopper had gone down in flames during the ensuing action.

He changed direction and crossed the compound so briskly that his guards were left trailing. Mine presented his AK and St Claire shoved it to one side with the back of his hand.

I came to attention. He said, ‘At ease, soldier. You know me?’

‘You inspected my outfit at Din To just over three months ago, sir.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I remember and I remember you, too. Colonel Dooley pointed you out to me specially. You’re English. Didn’t I speak to you on parade?’

‘That’s right, General.’

He smiled suddenly, my first sight of that famous St Claire charm and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You look bushed, son. I’ll see what I can do, but it won’t be much. This is no ordinary prison camp. The Chinese run this one personally. Forcing house number one. The commander is a Colonel Chen-Kuen, one of the nicest guys you ever met in your life. Amongst other things, he’s got a Ph.D. in psychology from London University. He’s here for one reason only. To take you apart.’