Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,78

And then they would run around doing whatever the hell they felt like, launching surprise attacks on the Marine Corps advance base, demolishing the McNamara line even as it was being constructed.

Clearly something was going very wrong.

The reason for this lay underground in that highly developed network of tunnels. Vietnam had begun preparing for an all-out war of resistance in March 1965, and in the major cities all the crucial facilities had already been moved underground. Underground passages and shelters had been dug early on, and the digging had continued ever since. Naturally the DMZ was no exception. Over the course of the two years previous, an extremely intricate system of tunnels had come into being below the seventeenth parallel.

To make matters worse, the North Vietnamese Army had the help of a corps of supporting combatants with superhuman powers who could lead them across the DMZ to South Vietnam, and do so even through the pitch-black of night.

Dogs.

Chinese dogs whose presence in Vietnam was a closely guarded secret. Their collars, which bore the emblem of the PLA, had been removed.

The dogs had been doing their thing for quite a while already. When the US Army’s anti-guerrilla special forces, the Green Berets, secretly entered Laos, organized a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, CIDG, and started threatening the DMZ’s western border, it was the dogs who, by summer 1967, forced this strategy to a halt. “Resist America!” the red dogs (that’s just a metaphor) barked as their showdown with the CIDG in the mountains began.

Over the course of the summer, the red dogs’ numbers dwindled to twenty, of which only eleven were assigned to the area around the seventeenth parallel, but they remained North Vietnam’s most powerful ally on the ground.

They remained a symbol of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh’s friendship.

This was the situation in the DMZ and in Quang Tri. This was how matters stood in the northernmost reaches of the I Corps Tactical Zone. Offensive and defensive maneuvers were conducted aboveground; all kinds of other things went on belowground. The US military was determined to build the McNamara line, and the North Vietnamese Army just kept smashing it to pieces. It was almost as if the wall were being built expressly to be destroyed. Naturally the Vietcong were everywhere in the south, west, and east of the province, and they kept plugging along with their war of attrition. In essence, the US military had erected, here in this Buddhist land, to no good purpose, a hell whose flames the military itself was burning in.

And you were sent into those flames. You, DED, were given the command. Your ultimate goal was the complete and utter annihilation of the communists; the first step was to track them down. That was your mission. Yours, and the other nine dogs’. A specialized elite. You were told to keep track of the Vietcong as they slipped quietly into invisibility in the jungle, to search out the North Vietnamese special forces, and to follow them at a distance without attacking. As long as they could figure out where the bastards kept bubbling up from, they could get this chaos under control. And that was the whole purpose of your special training on Okinawa, right?

YES.

Well, then, show us what you can do.

Woof!

You were already accustomed to the environment. To the tropical terrain, the climate. And so, DED, they set you loose—you and your fellows. But…it was different. These thunderous explosions, the horrific smells, the artificial blasts of fire…Was this some kind of show?

You had been set loose. Ten of you. Into the faint miasma of tear gas sprayed somewhere in the distance, eddying through the air. A droning close by that assaulted your ears. Rockets and grenades whizzing overhead, the stuttering of machine guns, bullets sweeping over the ground, shrapnel, flying gunships. Ghastly odors. And there, infiltrators, commies—you’d found them. You pulled back fifty yards. One hundred yards. But you never, not for a moment, let them leave your sight. You pursued them. You kept going. Ten dogs heading, now, in ten different directions, each discovering a camouflaged entrance to the subterranean network of tunnels.

But were they real?

Each of you, one after another, poked your head in to see.

And here everything happened at once. You, DED, and each of three of your fellows, were suddenly approached from behind by another dog. These four new dogs weren’t wearing collars. They didn’t have tags. But they weren’t wild. They simply weren’t revealing their affiliations. They were red dogs with