Death in the Jungle (34 page)

He began to the tune of “Jingle Bells”:

As McCollum finished the chorus, the rest of us cracked up. McCollum grinned at me and kept singing. After two more verses, we were all joining in on the chorus, singing as loudly as we could. When the song was over, we had Muck take us through the whole thing again. I was amazed at how good we sounded as we put down Doc Brown one last time. But it was all in fun. Doc had had his with his needle; now we had fun with ours.

I sang some Christmas carols with the men for another hour, drinking only one beer because I was tired of the effect alcohol had had on me lately. Then I ate lunch before going back to my cubicle to read and to write my parents. The letter was quite melancholic, as I wished I could be at home for Christmas.

At 1500 hours, I gathered with all of the SEALs on the base for religious rites for Frank Antone and the VN who had been killed. As the priest said what he gets paid to say at a funeral, I thought about Antone’s parents back in the States. I knew how proud they must have been when their son had become a SEAL, just the way my parents had been proud. I knew how they’d prayed every day for their son’s safety, just as my parents had prayed. I knew they were in for a terrible shock when they were told about their son’s death. And I wondered how their Christmas Day was going.

By way of contrast, I realized that my Christmas was going pretty well. Even though Santa Claus hadn’t made a personal appearance to deliver a gift to me, God had. He had dropped a helicopter down from the heavens in the Saint Nick of time and had given me life.

“Merry Christmas, you lucky bum,” I said to myself. And the priest up front said, “Amen.”

Three days later, my squad inserted at dusk on a barren, exposed point on the Tac Ong Nghia. I didn’t like that at all, as spotting us under those conditions would be easy for the enemy if he was anywhere nearby. The VC could lob in an 82mm mortar HE round while we were setting up our ambush site and wipe us off the face of the earth. Surely, Mr. Meston and my teammates must have recognized the possibility, too. It made me angry that we were being so casual about insertion so close to the end of our tour. If anything, we should have been more clandestine than ever. I’d have thought Antone’s death would’ve strongly reinforced this.

There were only six of us on the mission: Mr. Meston, Funkhouser, McCollum, Brown, Ty, and me. I took the point and guided us a mere sixty meters to our predetermined position on the Tac Ong Nghia where the mouth of a stream entered the river. It was at this intersection of waterways that we would spend the night on ambush.

Mr. Meston had three men and himself spread out along the main riverbank, while Ty and I took places on the bank of the smaller stream. Altogether, we were stretched out over fifty meters with Ty and me on the right flank about fifty feet from Funkhouser. After giving Ty the end of my parachute suspension line for communication purposes, I moved fifteen feet to his right, stringing out the line as I went. Then I selected a little hump of dry ground for my seat and sat down.

Right away, I noticed how quiet it was. Not even the usual drone of mosquitos was evident, making for a beautiful end to the day. The sky added to my pleasure, projecting red and pink above the horizon where the sun had hidden its face.

After a minute, I abandoned my admiration for the heavens and turned my eyes upstream. I spotted three wild pigs crossing the water about seventy-five meters
away. The stream was only twenty-five meters wide, and the pigs swam across quickly, climbed the opposite bank and disappeared in the brush. They reminded me of the children’s story, “The Three Little Pigs,” and I thought about how far I’d come since I had first heard the tale. I guess I’d turned into the Big Bad Wolf, there in the jungles of Vietnam.

Farther upstream I saw hundreds of birds, gathered in flocks, in trees along the bank. I took out my binoculars and glassed the creatures. They were large parakeets, and that was the first time I’d seen these birds in Vietnam. I assumed they were in migration. I decided to keep a close eye on them until it was too dark to see them any longer; if a human being came anywhere near those birds, whether on land or in a sampan, they would show alarm and erupt from their perches in the trees.

I continued glassing for about forty minutes as the sky gradually darkened, enjoying my bird-watching. I even located four large cranes in an old, dead tree about three hundred meters beyond the parakeets. None of the birds showed anything but placidity until it was too black to see them anymore.

During the next few hours, the stillness remained. The moon didn’t show itself, but many stars did. Since I wasn’t sitting in water, I found myself enjoying the serenity of the evening, although the drop in temperature was enough to chill me.

At 2300 hours, I thought I heard the sound of gunfire far away to my right. I gazed in that direction, fully aware that Foxtrot 2nd Squad was set up at the other end of the same little stream on which I was positioned, about three klicks away. I watched the skyline, and sure enough, I saw tracers arcing into the sky. Obviously, some of the fire team’s bullets were ricocheting upward. As the bullets rose, the red phosphorous in the core of
each bullet burned. They looked like falling stars in reverse.

I admired the show for several minutes, reminding myself a few times that I was sitting on an ambush site myself and I couldn’t afford to fall into a hypnotic trance while observing the fireworks. I forced my eyes to survey my piece of the stream every few seconds, looking for any signs of movement on the water. Spotting nothing, I glanced back to where movement then reigned, which was in the night air. There I saw more tracers, and finally there was a bigger glow, which I knew was a para flare.

After a few more minutes, I heard .50s firing. This told me the PBR was arriving to extract the team. The guns continued blasting for a couple of minutes, then all was quiet. Very quiet.

I started looking around more intensely, especially upstream to my right in the direction of Second Squad’s clash. I could only guess from all the shooting that they had encountered more than just one sampan or a couple of VC. In the event that they had met with a few sampans and several enemy, one or two crews may have escaped the SEAL ambush. If so, and if they stayed on the water, they’d be approaching our ambush site soon. I slowly swung Bad Girl’s double barrels in half a circle to my right, as a gut feeling was speaking to me loud and clear. I just knew the enemy was coming. He will come, he will come, I repeated over and over.

An hour slowly drifted by, and the only thing that came was the tide. The water rose and crested over the bank of the stream, but only a few inches. The peak hit at 0100 hours, and I sat in half a foot of water. It was enough to wet me down, and along with a sudden strong breeze, it was enough to make my teeth chatter. I sang a couple of old country-and-western songs under my breath to the syncopated rhythm.

An hour later, the water began receding rapidly the way it always did when there was a ten-to-twelve-foot difference between high tide and low. Water rushing and gurgling everywhere made it difficult to hear any other noises in the night. I did, however, pick up the sounds of amphibious lung fish flopping in the mud and splashing into the water. Every now and then I heard the clicking noises of nearby crabs. During one short stretch, several crabs joined together in what sounded like a group of percussionists testing their castanets for speed. Thereafter, however, things began to quiet down. Even the wind backed off until an eerie silence encompassed the area.

The silence lasted almost an hour, then like all silent times, it was overcome and broken. The culprit this time was a slightly errant paddle striking against the side of a sampan to my right. I turned my eyes toward the noise. About seventy-five feet away, I vaguely saw a sampan on the starlit water with a man seated forward and another aft. My heartbeat instantly did double-time and my hands took a firmer grip on the M-16/XM-148, which was resting on my lap with its barrels pointing downstream—in the wrong direction.

Damn it all, I swore inside myself, angry that I had moved my weapon to this position only ten minutes earlier. Now I had to swing it back around with two VC right on top of me. In the starlight, there was a chance they’d see me. Maybe they’d even shoot first before they moved into our kill zone. Hell, they were going to pass by me at a distance of fifteen bloody feet or less.

I slowly pivoted Bad Girl toward the oncoming enemy, but before I got her fully turned around, the sampan turned toward the bank of the stream and the bow ran up on the beach just ten yards from my bugged-out eyeballs. The occupants remained in the grounded boat and whispered frantically to one another. Believing that
they’d seen me and were plotting to shoot at me in a moment, I clicked my M-16 from semi- to full automatic. I seized the moment out from under the gooks and squeezed the M-16’s trigger. Spraying the sampan from end to end, I fired the entire 30-round magazine.

In the midst of my firing, the two men tumbled out of the sampan and into the water. I moved my finger forward to the XM-148 trigger and fired a 40mm HE round to the outboard side of the sampan. It blew, visibly rocking the sampan and setting it free from the shore.

I fell to my left side on the muddy bank, keeping a low profile as I inserted another 30-round magazine in the M-16 and loaded a second 40mm canister round in the grenade launcher. Before I finished, Ty opened up with his M-16 and shot up the sampan some more as it floated past him.

As I sat up from reloading, someone down the line sent up a para flare, which brought artificial daylight to the situation. I looked downstream about forty feet and saw a human head pop up in the water. I instantly fired a 40mm round to within a foot of the head; simultaneously, McCollum shot a 40mm round into the stream on the opposite side of the head. The two grenades exploded together, and when the water settled down, there was no trace of humanity left to be seen.

A few seconds later, a package of some sort surfaced about forty meters downstream. Muck and I again fired 40mm rounds beside it and blew it sky-high. This time when the water calmed, I could see a few pieces of the bundle drifting away in the current.

Twenty seconds later, as the para flare petered out, word was passed from Mr. Meston that Ty and I were to swim out and retrieve the sampan. I hustled to slip on my fins while Ty stood over me just watching. He had
no fins, which would be a big detriment in the swift stream if we had to swim some against the current.

“Let’s go,” I said as I climbed to my feet with my knife in my right hand. Just then, a second flare ignited high above the stream. Ty and I wasted no time in dropping down into the water and beginning our swim, Ty with his rifle in one hand.

At the start, I couldn’t see the sampan ahead of us. It had drifted beyond the range of the overhead floodlight. I glanced to my left; Ty was sidestroking easily beside me, as we were going with the flow of the current.

As we progressed, McCollum placed M-79 rounds on the banks around us to keep the enemy from sticking his nose in too close. I welcomed this assistance; it made me feel secure even though I was up to my neck in an insecure position. That was what teammates were for, I thought, to lend each other the courage to attain the unattainable.

Ty and I quickly left the small stream and entered the main river, where the current was stronger. Taking advantage of the flow, we swam hard and moved along rapidly. I kept my eyes peeled for the sampan, hoping it would show up on the glittering water.

After a hundred or more yards, just when I was considering turning back, I spied a dark object floating on the water about ten yards ahead of me. I swam closer, made sure it was the sampan, then went all-out to catch it. Ty was several yards behind me as I reached out of the water and grabbed the boat. Immediately I began stroking against the current, getting nowhere until Ty laid his weapon in the sampan and helped me. We towed the boat crosscurrent toward the black shoreline, and the going was extremely tough.

Surprisingly, Ty hung in there and lasted most of the distance, finally giving out with less than thirty meters to go. I told him to hang onto the sampan until I
beached it. Gathering up all my strength, I kicked furiously for the shore. I made it, but the last ten meters took a lot out of me. When the sampan struck land, I heaved it onto the muddy riverbank and uttered a sigh of relief. Then I crawled up the bank along one side of the sampan while Ty made his way along the other.

At this point I would have loved to have sat down and rested for a few minutes, but there was no way I was going to hang out a hundred yards away from my teammates with just a K-bar knife and an M-16 rifle in a totally compromised area. Instead, I jumped to my feet and grabbed the bow of the sampan. Ty took a grip beside me and we began dragging the sampan back to the ambush site through the mud.