The team room was a cheap jungle bar and grill festooned with late sixties war zone artifacts and decorations. In a box above the bar lived two Rhesus monkeys, a crotchety old female and a young male totally at mercy of his adolescent hormones. They were named “C” and “P”. The moment I entered, both of them jumped on me from the ceiling and started subjecting me to every indignity in their extensive repertoire while my team-mates roared with laughter. After a while and with some sympathetic advice from the non-commissioned officers, I was able to win C and P by hiding bits of food in my pockets and engaging in a various forms of nutritional bribery. When C started preening my scalp and P forgot me and began to woo C instead, I knew I had passed their test and gained two new friends. In fact, the company trusted C and P’s judgment, as they could “read” human motivations extraordinarily well. They also provided an acceptable means of getting rid of dangerous fools who came to our camp. Any such individual who placed his own interests ahead of our safety was assaulted the moment he stepped into the team room. C and P would fly into a rage and attack such people with genuinely frightening ferocity. Naturally, we would “save” the poor guy by rushing him out to his chopper while explaining that the monkeys were special gifts from the local village chief, and that we had to honor the sacred trust between our peoples embodied in the ambassadorial primates sent to us humans by the Buddhist monkey god, Hanuman. “It’s a native thing, you understand,” we’d explain apologetically.
Swimming in the river with C & P. The Phu Tuc area was populated with Jare and Rade Montagnard tribes and as a new American in the area, it was necessary to win some support among their local village elders. To this end, a “numpi” festival was arranged. Numpi is a beverage generated when warm water is poured into a jug of carefully fermented rice seedling. For several days before the festival, the team medic made me drink huge amounts of water to stretch my stomach. An hour before the event, I ate two loaves of bread to neutralize the alcohol content of what I would be expected to imbibe, and hid some stimulants up my sleeve. As we walked over to the village long house, Loi, my interpreter, nervously told me I would have to drink at least three canteens full of numpi or he would lose the considerable amount of money he had bet on me with a local Viet Cong sympathizer. When we arrived, a small crowd had gathered, dressed in ceremonial garb and sporting lots of clean automatic weapons. The ceremony was long and complicated but enlivened when the village virgins danced at the end. I managed to survive the doses of the noxious liquid and made all the necessary gestures and noises which this pagan ritual required. Loi and his friends profited handsomely at the expense of their communist rivals, and I was comforted by the knowledge that I now had some supporters in the south central highlands as I lay groaning on my bunker. Soon I was ordered back and forth across central Vietnam in a series of assignments, some of which were challenging, and some astonishingly boring. Late in 1968, I was assigned as the “A” team commander of Camp Cung Song, which lay on the road to Tuy Hoa southeast of Phu Tuc. Our camp sat on a hill overlooking the town of Cung Song. I was able to think of our airstrip and the lush little river valley as my home. I had seven other Green Berets under me, a team of Vietnamese special forces, 632 Montagnard mercenaries, 14,000 local inhabitants, 840 square miles of “area of responsibility,”1.3 million dollars worth of equipment, and an attached artillery battalion manning two eight-inch and two 175-millimeter pieces. To fund this theatre, a little clerk