Death in the Jungle (14 page)

At dawn, the line on my left wrist jerked once. I looked toward McCollum in the aurora of first light, but it was still too dark to pick him out in the bushes. I jerked the line hard to let him know I was all right. The hard pull also relayed a bit of disgust. After all, it was one thing to see elephants that weren’t really there. It was another thing to hang strict noise discipline and jeopardize the entire mission with gibberish. I intended to ask Muck to avoid Dexamil in the future.

At 0630 hours, Mr. DeFloria’s squad relieved us on the ambush site. I sneaked back to the previous day’s resting spot.

Mr. Meston moved over to me and whispered, “Anything last night?”

“Heard a paddle two hundred meters downstream,” I whispered, “then voices across the river just after 0200 hours.”

Mr. Meston got real close. “Did you signal?”

“Dexamil sucks,” I grumbled. “Muck saw pink elephants. He and Buck slept like babies.”

With this information, Mr. Meston decided to recon the riverbank with Bucklew and me. He informed Lieutenant DeFloria, then we went northeast toward the area where I had heard the sampan.

I was on point, and after two hours and four hundred meters of nothing but thick jungle, we returned to the rest of the squad. I sat down in a dry spot, happy to have had the exercise.

Throughout the remainder of the day, little was different from the previous day. It was hot and I sweated like I was sitting in a sauna. I was thankful when thunder-heads rolled in at 1400 hours, and rain came shortly thereafter. For two and a half hours I enjoyed the shower.

At 1645 hours, Williams signaled from the riverbank that he saw one VC about four hundred meters upstream on our side of the river. This reawakened the wariness in every man, even though the VC disappeared in the bush after less than a minute. We knew that we were in the lion’s den. The good news was the lion didn’t know we were there. We hoped.

At 1730 hours, a half dozen bosun birds flushed from their roost in a tree about 150 meters downriver. I wondered what had alarmed them, knowing it may have been Victor Charlie. If so, he was getting close.

When it was time to relieve Mr. DeFloria’s squad on ambush at 1830 hours, I was keyed up. I had a strong premonition that night would be the night. Somebody was going to lose his future.

First Squad set up the same as the previous night. McCollum had left flank and Funkhouser right. Mr. Meston, Bucklew, and I were in between, in that order from right to left.

All was still until just after dark at 2100 hours. That was when I heard a banging like the sound of a paddle against a sampan. It was coming from the same area as before, about two hundred meters to the northeast around the bend of the river. I tugged twice on the suspension line both ways, and Muck and Buck tugged back twice each. They, too, had heard the noise.

Seconds passed. I stared into the darkness in front of me. The moon was hidden behind clouds and the jungle was blacker than the previous night. It was even possible for a sampan to float by without our knowing it. I strained my ears, listening for a muffled voice, the thump of a pole against a sampan, or a tiny splash of water.

Three hours crept by. The water level crept up. At midnight I was up to my waist in brackish water. That was the time for the VC to travel, I thought. They used the cover of darkness and peak high tides for the movement of supplies and personnel. Sometimes highly classified documents were handcarried by a commo-liaison for maximum security.

At 0100 hours, I wondered about McCollum and Bucklew. On the previous night at this time, they had been hibernating. I tugged once on both lines to check on them. McCollum pulled back, but not Bucklew. I tugged again and received no reaction. Buck must have ignored my advice to cease and desist the taking of Dexamil. With him out of it, there was no way to relay a message down the line to Mr. Meston and Funkhouser.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard talking and bumping noises two hundred meters downstream. The sounds were louder and more numerous, making me think there
were three or four sampans and at least a half dozen Viet Cong.

McCollum pulled three times on the line. I quickly jerked three times on Buck’s line and prepared to fire my shotgun over the stream. My eyes frisked the dark for the enemy. Nothing showed up.

Splashing sounds, then the sound of boats being dragged onto the shore filled my ears. The VC were going inland, ditto the previous night.

I climbed to my feet, rising slowly so the water running off me made little noise. I waded along the bank to McCollum’s side.

“Psst. Two hundred meters downstream around the bend,” I whispered to him. “They’re on the shore. Load up with HE and lob all you can right in on them.”

Muck got ready and I jerked the line to Bucklew three more times. Still no response.

“Fire!” I whispered at Muck. “That’ll wake everybody up!” He wasted no time in firing the first 40mm round down the river. I opened up with Sweet Lips directly across the water. If any gooks were there, I planned to make them keep their heads down.

Instantly, Mr. Meston and Funkhouser fired their weapons. I saw the red tracer rounds from Funky’s M-60 machine gun zipping over the water. A couple seconds later, Bucklew was firing his M-16. McCollum was shooting round after round of high explosives downstream, where they were blowing up ashore.

Firing my shotgun, I kept the trigger pulled and pumped the gun as fast as I could, emptying it in a couple of seconds. As I reloaded, Mr. DeFloria’s squad moved quickly into position on the ambush site, interspersing themselves with 1st Squad. Each of them began firing his weapon into the jungle across the stream, and specifically where Muck’s 40mm HE rounds were
exploding. That made ten of us flinging everything we had into the night.

The eruption of sound almost defied description. Two machine guns, five M-16s, one M-2 carbine, one shotgun, and a grenade launcher firing like crazy. The blasting noises conglomerated into one continuous, deafening roar. To top it off, all three claymore mines were blown. Then Mr. Meston tossed a concussion grenade into the river to kill any swimmers.

I squeezed off six more rounds of 00 buckshot, then I heaved a fragmentation grenade toward the opposite shore. The grenade fell short and exploded in the water. Tearing another from my ammo pouch, I jerked the pin and threw the thing with all my might. This time there was an explosion in the brush across the river.

I watched as McCollum fired three more rounds from his M-79. When they blew up downriver, Bohannon turned his M-60 machine gun toward the explosions and let go with about seventy rounds of 7.62mm bullets. I pulled the pin on my third frag grenade and tossed it into the river. It blew, then Mr. Meston shouted, “Cease fire!” At least that’s what I thought he shouted. My battle-blown eardrums were vibrating so violently with all the racket that a screaming jet engine at ten feet wouldn’t have done any more damage.

In a few seconds, I saw no more tracer rounds or explosions. The terrific firepower had stopped, but the roar continued to bang off the walls of my brain.

Mingled with the ringing in my ears was a cry of pain. Then another. The sounds were from downstream. I thought I heard a moaning, too.

As I listened harder, Mr. Meston sounded like a bomb going off when he called on the radio for the two LCPL boats to extract us. Using predesignated code words, he said, “Stingray Eleven, this is X-ray Two. Be advised, enemy contact. Request extraction as soon as
possible. Over.” He next requested the Seawolves to fly in and strafe the opposite riverbank. Then he communicated with Caisson 69, which was the U.S. Army artillery battery on an island called “French Fort,” requesting an artillery H-and-I (Harassment and Interdiction) strike soon after our extraction.

Giving the radio handset back to Bucklew, Mr. Meston passed the word to mark our flanks with strobe lights, which McCollum and Funkhouser handled.

A couple minutes later, Mr. Meston told me to mark the Viet Cong’s position with a hand-held parachute flare. I took one off my web gear, aimed it skyward over the bullet-torn jungle and slammed the bottom against the palm of my left hand. The flare rocketed out of its case and soared into the sky over the VC’s position. Reaching its peak height, the parachute deployed and the illuminating charge ignited. The flare burned so brightly that it turned our dark little world into brilliant daylight. The light was mesmerizing as it hung a while, then gradually floated downward, reflecting off the water. It shone brightly for almost a minute, and, as it slowly died, I sent up another. McCollum waited forty-five seconds, then shot up a 40mm parachute flare.

Then I heard the helos. They flew single file over our heads and opened up, strafing the opposite shore with M-60 machine guns and 2.75-inch rockets. I watched as the rockets exploded and bullets sheared branches off trees.

The gunships circled in their usual racetrack pattern. As they swooped in for a second attack, I heard a partially-muted yelling across the river. I listened for more, but the Seawolves erupted in a wave of gun and rocket fire to drown out every other sound. More rockets blew the life out of the jungle; more trees and bushes were shredded.

As the helos flew away, I watched the flares peter
out. Eerie shadows were cast on the water and jungle in the fading light. Seconds later, it was lights out.

While my eyes worked to adjust themselves to the sudden darkness, I couldn’t see a thing. My night vision was totally shot. I held my hand in front of my face. Where I should see my hand there were red, white, and blue spots. I smiled at the thought: I was patriotic even in my blindness.

I tuned my ears toward the opposite shore and listened intently for a few minutes, but I heard only a humming in my ears.

Minutes later, I heard the boats coming for us. Mr. Meston used the radio to guide them right to us.

First squad swiftly boarded one boat, Mr. DeFloria’s squad the other.

Moving upstream, the coxswain of our LCPL flashed a spotlight along the shoreline, looking for sampans hidden in the vegetation. He spotted pieces of a sampan floating on the water.

Filled with blood lust, the gunners on the boats began destroying the jungle with their .50-caliber machine guns. I saw branches and leaves dropping in the light of the spotlight. An entire tree was cut in half and fell into the stream.

I fired Sweet Lips twice at the shore. Funkhouser joined in with his M-60. McCollum sent two rounds of HE into the foray. Mr. Meston and Bucklew added semiautomatic rifle fire. My eardrums took another licking, but so did the VC.

As we stopped firing and the boats accelerated up the river, a great feeling of relief washed over me. We had survived the T-10 area, leaving a vivid reminder of our visit carved in tree trunks and, we hoped, human bodies.

We heard incoming artillery rounds as we disappeared into the night. The “men with green faces” had scored again.

I awoke at 0630 hours on September 29, my birthday. Twenty-six years old, nine missions under my belt, and still in one piece. I did, however, have a couple long gashes on my legs, incurred while prowling through a nightmarish mangrove swamp.

Sitting up on my bed, I checked the cuts. One was four inches long, right of my left knee, just above the Wiley Coyote tattoo on my calf. Another two-inch incision sliced through the neck of the Road Runner tattoo on my right calf. Both tattoos had been artfully done by old Doc Webb in May of 1964, while I had enjoyed my first liberty in San Diego after boot camp. Doc, known all over the world, had had a parlor not far off Broadway. Right then, I was not too happy that the Road Runner had been decapitated. I’d always hated the thought that any part of me that has a head would someday lose it. Someday for the Road Runner had been three days earlier.

I slipped on my UDT swim trunks, then raised the mosquito netting, and stepped out of bed onto the concrete floor. Dropping the net, I slid into my coral booties.

Funkhouser was lying on his back on the other bed, snoring softly. I decided to take Bolivar, my twenty-inch boa constrictor, out of his cage and set him on the
topside of Funky’s mosquito net, three feet above Funky’s face.

As the snake slithered around, I dropped down on my haunches and blew through the netting into Funk-houser’s ear. He squirmed a little, but after thirty seconds, he was still asleep.

A better idea popped into my mind. “Viper,” I whispered. Funky stirred. His eyes began moving beneath his eyelids.

“Viper!” I tried again. This time, Funky’s eyes popped open and focused straight up at the snake. For a seemingly endless few seconds, nothing happened. Just as I was ready to laugh and call off the prank, Funkhouser rolled his body toward me with tremendous speed and force. He crashed into the netting and flopped out of the bed and into my lap, pulling the net and Bolivar down with him. I, too, ended up sprawled out on the floor.

“Don’t hurt the snake!” I shouted as Funkhouser scrambled to his feet, stark naked. “It’s Bolivar!”

I looked up at Funky’s face; it was wearing a wild-eyed, helter-skelter expression. Bolivar was at my feet, and while Funky was still trying to get a grasp on things, I grabbed the snake and put it back into its cage.

“I oughta kill you!” Funkhouser hissed at me.

I laughed. “Come on, Funky, be nice to me. It’s my birthday.”

“Birthday, hell,” Funkhouser mumbled, picking up his mosquito net. “It’s your funeral if you ever do that again. I guarantee it. And the snake’s, too.”

I chuckled as I walked away and out of the barracks. That had been so much fun, I thought I’d do it again. But not soon. First I’d let Funky get over it. And next time I’d use a real viper. After all, if Funky was going to kill a snake, I didn’t want it to be Bolivar.

I walked into the chow hall and spotted Katsma and
Bucklew sitting together. After heaping scrambled eggs and bacon on a plate and stacking four pieces of toast on top at the food counter, I poured coffee into a cup and walked the hungry man’s meal to my buddies’ table.

“Chow, Hawkeye,” greeted Katsma, looking up at me.