Death in the Jungle (16 page)

The occasional hootch on the side of the road of a couple miles back became many hootches. Old French two- and three-story buildings increased in appearance, as did plain one- and two-story buildings like those of Taiwan and China.

Doc Brown reached into his Levi’s jeans front pocket and pulled out a minigrenade. He saw me looking at him and said, “Saigon scares me more than the jungle.” Then he shoved the grenade back into his pocket.

I didn’t blame Doc for his nervousness. The Vietnamese were prejudiced against black people, and Doc was
black. To me, he was a friend, that was all. Not black or white, just Doc. He was a good teammate, always there and always ready to help. In combat, he was very cool, calm, and collected. It was too bad, I thought, that he had to face prejudice even in Vietnam. Facing death in the jungle was enough burden for any man without adding to it.

Entering Saigon, we saw people everywhere. Many were on foot, while others drove vehicles, motorbikes, pedicabs, or rode bicycles. The funny thing was, they all ignored us. Why they did this, I couldn’t figure out. After all, we were there fighting and dying for their freedoms, and they didn’t seem to care one iota. Besides, I wondered how people can not notice a pickup loaded with loaded U.S. servicemen. The mystery of it pissed me off.

Driving carefully now, due to the heavy traffic, Pearson took us to a main intersection, which we called “the
Y
.” There it was even more crowded, if that were possible. As always, I gazed at the big painted sign above us advertising toothpaste. It pictured a black man’s profile, and he was smiling and showing off his very white teeth. What a paradox! I thought. The Vietnamese didn’t like blacks, yet they exploited one to promote a toothpaste, certainly for the contrast of the white teeth against the black of the man’s skin. Anything for a buck. No wonder Brown disliked Saigon.

Pearson drove down Tran Hung Dao Boulevard. The street was lined with big trees and big French colonial buildings. The windows in the buildings were wooden louvered or totally open for air to circulate. Lots of hotels, restaurants, sidewalk cafes, shoe shops, bars, and laundries filled both sides of the street. Again, droves of people flooded the thoroughfare. Workmen and peasants were dressed in loose black trousers and short black or white jackets. Many nonlaboring men wore Western
clothing. The Vietnamese women wore their national dress of long trousers under a long-sleeved tunic slit from hem to waist. Some of the men walked the street hand-in-hand, an ordinary mark of friendship common to many Asian countries.

Eventually we ended up in the center of Saigon at NAV-FORV, which was headquarters for Naval Forces Vietnam. The three-story building contained SPECWAR staff officers, who coordinated with SEAL platoon officers in the field, and other U.S. military personnel. That was where lieutenants Salisbury, Meston, and DeFloria gathered classified information while the rest of us drank more beer across the street at an Indian-owned tailor shop. The shop catered to GIs, serving sandwiches and beer as well as making and fitting clothes. It was also a place for trading money on the black market, an illegal practice.

Thirteen of us entered the tailor shop and took seats at the four tables. The Indian proprietor, wearing a colorfully embroidered shirt, approached my table.

“American beer?” I asked.

“No, only Vietnamese Tiger or 33 beer,” he answered.

“Man, I’d rather drink piss than
Ba muoi ba,”
I replied, referring to 33 beer, which was a sorry beer at best.

“Smitty’s buyin’!” Funkhouser shouted. “It’s his birthday so he owes us a round.” Funkhouser was right. On a SEAL’s birthday, the birthday boy bought a round of beer. It was a tradition that I would not be the one to break. We quickly decided on Tiger beer. The bottle was nearly twice as big as 33 beer. Quantity, not quality, had become my motto since going to Vietnam.

“Serve ’em up!” I told the Indian. And he did. As a matter of fact, two rounds came out of my wallet.

“If you keep blowin’ your money like that,” Katsma
chided me, “you won’t be able to afford that house on the hill in Texas!”

I smiled at my friend. “You’re right,” I agreed. “Too bad I wasn’t born on February 29. Then I’d only have to put up with this once every four years.”

Kats and I laughed, then ordered another beer.

As we drank together and traded money with the proprietor, an erratic stream of Vietnamese people flowed in and out of the shop. Some bought sandwiches, others picked up clothing. Each time someone entered, we were on alert. At least we were on guard as much as it was possible for a group of inebriated men, which truthfully wasn’t much. Still, we made an attempt to keep track of who-came-in-with-what, and more importantly, who-left-what. A box left behind on the counter may have contained more than just papa-san’s pajamas in need of a needle.

That particular day, only one suspicious Vietnamese man entered the shop. He was carrying a shoe box and a seemingly frightened look on his middle-aged face.

As the man passed Brown’s table next to mine, Brown told him, in Vietnamese, to halt. The man stopped and faced Brown with the shoe box held tightly by his left arm.

“What’s in the box?” Brown asked. His eyes were riveted on the man’s face.

The man hesitated, appearing confused. I heard the click of the hammer of Brown’s revolver as it was cocked.

Brown barked at the man, asking if he understood him.
“Ong hieu toi duoc khong?”

The man jerkily nodded his head up and down as he slipped the box from under his arm and into his shaky hands. “Shoe!” his voice squeaked. He took the lid off and lowered the box to show a new pair of sandals to Brown. “Shoe! Just shoe.” The Vietnamese man
grabbed a sandal and took it out of the box, offering it to Brown. “You want?”

Brown’s intense glare faded and I heard the hammer being slowly uncocked.

“No,” Brown mumbled.

The man persisted. “You want shoe, GI?”

“Toi noi khong duoc,”
Brown said, waving the man away.
“Di di.”

As the man backed away and jammed the sandal back into the box, Brown shoved the revolver down inside his shirt and belt.

“Saigon scares the shit outta me,” he muttered in my direction.

A moment later, Mr. Meston entered the shop through the open door. “Let’s go, men,” he said. “The PX awaits us.”

Everyone guzzled the last beer and headed for the truck parked just outside the door. All aboard, Pearson drove us a couple of miles to our favorite spot in Saigon, the Post Exchange in the Chinese city of Cholon.

The Post Exchange, or PX, was a big French building where we could use our ration cards to obtain a month’s supply of hard liquor and wine, two bottles each per man. We could also buy Japanese stereo and camera gear on the spot, or we could order it through the PX catalogue and have items sent directly to the States. Good deals were found on jade objects, oriental furniture, and other things made in the Orient, such as stereo gear, camera gear, and lens accessories.

Mr. Meston gave us an hour at the PX, telling us to rendezvous at the main entrance at 1300 hours. Funkhouser, Katsma, and I were the first in line for our liquor ration.

As I waited my turn behind Funkhouser, I chuckled to myself. Funky never outran me in anything, except
the liquor run. While I was always content to walk, albeit rather briskly, to the service counter, he sprinted.

I chuckled again when Funkhouser placed his order. “Two quarts of Early Times.” Then he ordered two bottles of Portuguese wine.

“I’ll take the same,” I sang out. Funkhouser grinned at me.

Katsma giggled from behind me. “You remind me of the Texan who was sittin’ at a bar when this guy walks in and orders a stiff drink. He drinks it and immediately blacks out and falls to the floor. The Texan says to the bartender, ‘I’ll have what he had, only make mine a double.’ ”

I laughed, collected my booze, and went shopping.

At 1300 hours, all of us gathered at the entrance to the PX to fill up the truck. Everyone had his liquor, and some, like me, had other purchased items. I carried an AM/FM radio, which I’d been wanting.

We traveled another couple of miles to the Continental Hotel, where we sat at sidewalk tables beneath beautiful mango trees and enjoyed sharkfin soup with noodles, fried rice, beer, and French coffee for lunch. Our eyes feasted on the hordes of women walking by.

Two times, Bohannon asked a particularly pretty woman to sit down with him.
“Moi co vao ngoi choi,”
he said.

Two times, he was ignored.

As the woman walked away, Bo shouted after her,
“Co o dau?”
Again, the woman was silent, not wishing to tell him where she lived.

I watched the beauty disappear into the masses. I felt a sense of loss when she was gone, as I, too, had hoped she would join us. I knew I would’ve enjoyed gazing into her dark, almond-shaped eyes for a little while. Instead, I was stuck with Bohannon’s bloodshot blues.

Finally, Funkhouser bellowed, “Let’s go back to the Quonset hut and have some fun!”

“Let me at the piano,” agreed McCollum.

“Hoo-yah!” echoed down the street as the sixteen of us went for the pickup truck.

Mr. Meston told us we were making one more stop at the Saigon Central Market.

Mojica exclaimed, “Great! I wanna buy a monkey.”

Bohannon hit him with the obvious comeback. “You are a monkey.”

“And you’re monkey puke,” Mojica bettered him. The two men stared hard at one another. I stepped in between them and looked into Bohannon’s red eyes.

“We’re all gonna be puking before this day is done,” I said with a smile.

Bo studied my grin, then said, “And it’s all your fault, birthday boy!” He slapped my back, and all was well.

After a ten minute ride, we arrived at the market and started wandering through the place. There, under roofs of clean-lined buildings, a wide variety of things were for sale. All kinds of fish, squid, eels, and snails in baskets were available. Brassware, jade, cloth, and hundreds of other items were on display. The odors of fish, seashells, spices, and peppers combined to make up an oriental smell unlike any other I’d experienced.

I ambled over to the site where wild animals and reptiles were shown. Mojica was already there purchasing a young monkey. I watched as he paid fourteen hundred piaster, or about twelve dollars, for the cute little animal.

As the monkey, which was on a leash, climbed onto Mojica’s shoulder, Mojica grinned at me. “I’ve already got a name for him,” he told me.

“What is it?”

“Bo,” he said with a devious laugh. I couldn’t help but laugh with him.

I stuck with Mojica as he bought some bananas and
mango for the monkey, then we met the others at the truck. All of the men took an immediate liking to the monkey, and all loved his new name, except Bohannon. Bohannon swore he’d get even with Mojica, and by the look on his face, I was sure he’d try. But for then, Mojica had the upper hand and he was enjoying it plenty.

On the trip back to Nha Be, no one did any drinking. Instead, we had to hang on for dear life as Pearson gunned the truck down the narrow gravel road.

When we reached the place where the sniper had fired at us, the truck was speeding along like a roller coaster on a downhill slide. We were bouncing up and down and moving fast. The wind was beating loudly against my ears. Even so, I heard the sound of gunfire. The sniper was at it again. But again, he missed everything.

After the fifth or sixth report, Flynn waved and shouted, “Bye-bye, shithead!”

Later that afternoon, I felt like the shithead. Having consumed several too many beers, my head was splitting as I lay in my bed. My last beer at the Quonset hut I had chugalugged without pause after my teammates had sung “Happy Birthday” and the old “Chugalug” song. As the beer had gone down, my eyes had watered and I had gagged at the finish.

As I stared through the mosquito net at the ceiling, a sudden white fog overwhelmed me. Through the cobwebs in my mind, I realized that the base DDT truck was outside spraying around the barracks.

For a few seconds, I lay frozen, knowing that the insecticide, at the very least, was at any moment going to choke me up and cause more gagging. While I waited, I heard some of the other SEALs coughing and running through the barracks. One of them was cursing the DDT truck driver.

“I wish he’d stick that hose up his ass!” he screamed.

I silently agreed. Then I gagged. Happy birthday.

The juice of a partially visible sun spilled over me as I climbed out of the mud after jumping out of a Huey slick. Nine other men had landed besides me, deep in the dangerous T-10 area of the Rung Sat Special Zone.

I quickly adjusted my web gear and the four claymore mines I was loaded down with, which had shifted after the plunge, and I assumed the point position. Mr. Meston moved in behind me and motioned for me to start for the ambush site.