Death in the Jungle (7 page)

Just before the sun glinted over the horizon, the mosquitos mounted a final offensive, attacking me from all quarters. There was no way to swat a thousand ace flyers, so I didn’t swat any. I just allowed the repellent and clothing to do the job.

After a while, I looked through the hordes of mosquitos at the foliage around me, and I discovered the red ants. They, too, appeared to have heard the dinner bell. It amazed me that such little creatures showed no fear of such a large beast as myself. I looked forward to killing some of them.

A couple hours went by, and things had changed. The mosquitos had retired to who-knows-where, somewhere to escape the heat of the day. Eleven enemy dead—red ants—lay at my feet. Eight had died without warning; the other three, well, suffice it to say that their deaths had been drawn out and painful because each one had put a round of teeth in me before his capture. I went down in their books as a WIA; they went down dead.

I looked over at ADJ3 Bucklew, who was visible to my left about ten meters away. He was hard to see through all the vegetation and cammo paint, but I knew exactly where to look. Besides that, I could smell him. I stared at him for a full minute, fully aware that I was gazing at the nephew of the famous Captain Bucklew of World War II.

Eventually, Bucklew’s head slowly turned toward me. He looked for a few seconds, then his white teeth flashed behind a big, silly grin. I smiled back, then stuck out my tongue at him.

The temperature rose toward a hundred degrees. Inside
my long johns, I felt like a baked potato wrapped in tinfoil. Still, I was grateful, for without the long johns, the mosquitos would’ve drained me dry. As it stood, I believed I’d lost only a pint of high octane.

Bucklew abruptly waved at me and signaled that it was time to move. I crawled out of the mud and waited for the lieutenant. Two minutes later, I was back on point and guiding the platoon north. Our planned mission was to follow the creek to the Rach Long Vuong and a checkpoint we’d designated Tijuana, then circle east with the river to checkpoint San Diego. From there, we were to recon six hundred meters southeast before setting up an all-night ambush site on the riverbank at Los Angeles.

Suddenly the rains came. Hard. I didn’t mind, though, because the mosquitos were awash. My body and my clothing needed a good rinse, anyway. I couldn’t stand myself an hour earlier, but I had put it out of my mind then. I wished I had some shampoo and soap.

In the downpour, my vision was limited. I glanced behind me at Meston, who was right on my tail. I turned away and continued guiding the procession.

As point, I was supposed to look for the enemy himself, his footprints, and the little gifts he leaves for nice guys like me, namely, booby traps—all shapes and sizes.

One of the friendliest booby traps was the “toe-popper,” a small pressure-activated mine that usually only blew off the foot of the unfortunate who stepped on it. Punji stakes, barbed sticks planted in a camouflaged hole, also were partial to American feet. The ones with a nastier streak were those dipped in dung, designed to infect through intimate contact.

The booby traps that were totally antagonistic and anti-American were those made to destroy whole bodies:
antipersonnel mines similar to our M18A1 claymore mine, specially adapted grenades, and many other types of mechanically and electrically initiated booby traps. These were set off by stepping on them or just barely moving one of them, tripping a wire, or by the concealed enemy himself. Oh, the joys of the point man.

Upon reaching Tijuana, Mr. Meston motioned for me to leave the water’s edge and to take a shortcut over some higher ground toward San Diego. I checked the compass on my watchband, took a reading, then steered the platoon due east through the jungle. There was less muck throughout the shortcut, but I knew the vacation would be brief. High tide was coming soon.

Before reaching San Diego, we stopped to eat our C rats and drink water from our canteens. The two lieutenants and I set up a security watch while the others ate, then we got our turn at some nourishment. The C rats tasted pretty good to me after all the hours of reconnaissance, and the water tasted like life itself, even though it was tepid.

After a half-hour rest, I guided the platoon down to the Rach Long Vuong. At San Diego the mud was soft and we were in water that was knee-deep. The time was 1300 hours and high tide was in. That meant conditions wouldn’t get any worse, unless a crocodile erupted out of the mire. If so, strict noise discipline was off. Sweet Lips would see to that.

I turned with the river toward the southeast, heading toward Los Angeles, our ambush site. We were only six hundred meters away, which was not very far unless one was walking in mud, water, rain, and a “free-fire” zone where people shot everything they have at anything that moved. Not that I was complaining. It beat being on the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper in an earthquake registering nine on the Richter scale.

I wondered about Los Angeles, the primary ambush site of this mission. I wondered whether we’d cause the earth to shake there with all of the firepower we were lugging, our platoon of angels. Not that any of us were very angelic, though right then I wished I had wings. Come to think of it, I did. I’d already earned my Navy/Marine Corps parachute wings. Maybe there was some angel in me, after all.

Just then, I stumbled over something and halfway fell into the water. Quickly regaining my balance, I felt with my feet for the submerged object. I touched something solid, and, holding Sweet Lips in my right hand, I reached carefully underwater with my left. My fingers found a hold on the thing, and I slowly raised it out of the mud and water. As water rushed out of the nose and eye sockets, I saw I was holding a human skull.

Lieutenants Meston and Gill joined me for a few seconds in admiring the prize. They offered thirty more seconds of patience while I ran a short line through the eye sockets and fastened the souvenir to my web belt. Then I was back in the saddle.

After another thirty minutes, the rain lightened up, and an hour later it stopped. Lieutenant Meston pointed a finger down the river and then held up one finger at me, indicating we were inside the city limits of L.A., and downtown was just a hundred meters away.

The water I was walking in became a couple inches lower. I wished it were suitable for drinking, as I was thirsty again. It was brackish, however, so I’d drink from my canteen after I pulled up a chair in the ambush site, that is, if I wanted to hang Sweet Lips in a bush and sit in water up to my armpits. Twenty minutes later, I thought I’d found the living room.

Soon Lieutenants Meston and Gill confirmed that it was time to set up our ambush. First, I had to scout up and down through the bush growing along the channel.
As I did so, the remainder of the platoon waited back in the brush.

After a thorough check of the area, I rejoined the others. Meston signaled me to select a spot for the right flank. I slipped in between two bushes.

Within a few minutes, our perimeter was set up along the flooded bank of the Rach Long Vuong. I carefully rested Sweet Lips in a small tree just above the water, which was almost two feet deep, then I sat down in the warm stuff. My buttocks sank a few inches in the mud, which put the water just beneath my chin. No problem. I’d endured much worse in UDT training at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California. There I had been introduced to Hell Week and the infamous mud flats in the Silver Strand. The mud flats was an old sewage area, where the watery muck was two to four feet deep. On two consecutive days, my instructors had harassed Class 36 at the flats while timing boat crew competitions in the mud. For the better part of each day, I had stood in mud, swum in mud, crawled in mud, got stuck in mud, and almost had become mud. In fact, the instructors had tossed my paper-bagged lunch out to me when I had stood in mud at chest level; hence, half of what I had eaten had been mud.

Then there was the time at Stead Air Force Base Survival School when I had spent forty-eight hours in a simulated POW camp. After many hours of mental torture, I literally had been pushed, squeezed, and compacted into a wooden box barely big enough for a rabbit. So tight was the fit that it had taken two men to pressure the door of the box shut. When I had heard the
click
of the lock, I had almost lost it. There I was, in a compressed fetal position, so crushed that my lungs couldn’t expand—I couldn’t breathe. I had mentally scolded and ordered myself to calm down, then started inhaling and exhaling tiny, rapid breaths of air. This had
kept me alive until four hours later when the door was opened and I was pried back into civilization. With incidents like these in my past, sitting in two feet of water for a few hours was as easy as ogling the curves of Raquel Welch.

Two hours later, I felt something nibbling on my left wrist. I hastily brushed the creature away, but another swam through my arms. Then another. I was surrounded by several tiny fish. I chased them away with my hands, then they were back in a matter of seconds. I decided not to resist, and they continued to play and nibble.

The fish stuck around for a long while, and suddenly they were gone. Maybe the smell of Bucklew down the line had done the trick. Or perhaps it was the fact that I had just urinated through my clothing. At any rate, my little friends departed. I was left to my mission, which was to ambush the enemy.

Since I was on the right flank of our point ambush, my responsibility was to watch for any sampans approaching from the right, which in this case was south. In the event of a sighting, I was to tug three times on the parachute suspension line that I’d strung between me and Bucklew, who was several meters to my left with the line tied to his right wrist. Bucklew was to then pull on another line linking him to Lieutenant Meston, who would likewise pass the message. We were to hold our fire until the enemy skiff reached the middle of the kill zone, which was right in front of our middle man. Once the center of the kill zone was penetrated, the platoon commander would initiate the ambush. That was when all seven of us would open fire, and when some gooks would wish they were dreaming. It was my job to put them to sleep.

More hours slid by and the sun went down. The fish hadn’t returned. Just a few mosquitos annoyed me. No
VC had yet made an appearance, but we were not really expecting them until late in the night.

I gazed at Bucklew one last time before it was too dark to see him.

I tugged once on the suspension line, which asked, “Are you okay?” I thought he was looking at me, then he smiled, and I knew he was. I smiled back.

Darkness settled on us shortly thereafter and Bucklew disappeared. I stared at the moonlit water in front of me and reflected a while about why I was there. I blamed it on
Life
magazine (or was it
The Saturday Evening Post?
), which had printed a cover picture of a soldier looking up to the heavens and a hand reaching down to him. I had been in grade school in Abilene, Texas, at the time, and I had tacked that picture up in my bedroom. It had made me think: Am I predestined to be a career military man? From that time forward, I had been obsessed with playing war.

The man who had lived next door to my family had served in World War II, and he had fueled my obsession by giving me some German and Jap gear, including a gas mask, web gear, and dummy grenades. When I was fifteen, my family had moved to Wichita Falls, where I became a frequent visitor of a country club. I had dressed in military utility greens and boots, wielding my pellet rifle, and I had carried out secret operations all over the club’s golf course, which had been “enemy controlled territory.” Occasionally I had shot a grey squirrel for my taxidermy projects; however, the country club’s security personnel had thought dimly of my actions. Whenever they had spotted me with my rifle, they had assaulted my position in their golf carts.

Escape had not always been easy, especially when I had had my goofy Brittany Spaniel with me. Sometimes I had done what Hawkeye in
The Last of the Mohicans
did—I had crawled (dragging my dog) to the creek, slid
into its dirty water, and maintained a low profile in the weeds that grew in and around it. Never mind the water moccasins—the water had become my friend. Fortunately, I had never been caught. After three years of numerous close calls, I had retired to the campus of Midwestern University, where I had figured out ways of hiding from my professors without being missed.

Now, here I was, twenty-five years old and still playing hide-and-seek. Up until that day, it always had been just a game; never again would it be just a game. Never again.

It became difficult to see in the dark, especially when the moon vanished behind the clouds. I had to rely on my ears. I listened hard. To hear things at any distance, I had to block out the hum of mosquitos circling my head. It was their supper time, but my tenderloins and hindquarters were underwater.

The buzzing became hypnotic when I allowed myself to relax too much. It reminded me of the purring of a rotating fan that I had liked to sleep to when I was a kid. I had to watch it to avoid dozing off. The mission had begun almost twenty hours before, and my head and eyes felt it.

I decided to close my eyes and trust my ears. My hearing was acute, and besides, I was a light sleeper. I was sure I’d be alert with any unusual noise.

Some time later, I woke up. At least I thought I had been asleep. Really, it was hard to say. I sensed that I had slipped over the edge between waking and sleeping, but I was not sure. Nothing seemed to have changed. It was still dark and the mosquitos were with me. I saw very little, and there were no distant sounds. The only difference I noted was the smell.

I smelled the jungle then, really for the first time. It was the odor of decomposing nipa palm. The smell of wet and rot. An Oriental smell like I’d not smelled before.
It had probably been there all along, but I’d missed it. I hadn’t concentrated on it. But then it filled my nostrils and registered in my brain. The smell of Vietnam.

I looked in Bucklew’s direction, but I saw only black. Tugging once on the suspension line, I received no response. That meant he was asleep, or dead. I pulled again. The second time, he pulled back, once. I’m okay—you’re okay. Then we were alone with ourselves, again.