Death in the Jungle (8 page)

The night passed. Nothing happened. No sampans, no VC. Not even a croc, thank God.

The sun was sneaking up to peek at us, so we had to get on the move. Our extraction point was eight hundred meters and a couple hours south. At Lieutenant Meston’s signal, I climbed to my feet. Water rushed out of my clothing as I pulled Sweet Lips from the branches. She felt funny in my hands and I wasn’t sure why. Slipping her under my right arm, I rubbed my hands together. My skin felt like the exterior of a shriveled prune.

Bucklew motioned for me to roll up the suspension line. I did and shoved it in a pants pocket. A minute later, the platoon was ready to go.

Back on point, I was wet and cold in the cool morning air as I guided the platoon south toward the Quan Quang Xuyen. The sun was still struggling to climb over the horizon, but its quest had lit up the land. Ahead of me, some nipa palm trees looked black against the brightening sky.

Looking back down, I watched the water and protruding brush before and to the sides of me. Many nasty things could await me—booby traps, crocs, and snakes to name three. And then there were the NVA, gooks.

Fortunately, we made it all the way to the extraction point with nothing more to show than a souvenir skull and five million mosquito-inflicted puncture wounds for
the seven of us. Four and a half million of them belonged to BT2 McCollum, our grenadier, who hadn’t worn his long johns. His facial expressions as we awaited the LCPL were a sight to behold, and his incessant scratching of his thighs told the whole story. He’d been had, royally.

Twenty minutes later, though, we were all on board the Navy boat and were headed back to the barracks at Nha Be Naval Base. I glanced from one SEAL to another, all seated and chattering; strict noise discipline was off. Each guy was wet and dirty, caked with mud. Filthy as they were, they were downright ugly, but it was a good-looking ugly to me. They were the bravest and toughest men in the world. They were my teammates, my buddies, my brothers. I would fight to the death for any one of them.

Personally, I was feeling really good, almost euphoric. I couldn’t wait to grab a shower, clean my gear, oil Sweet Lips, eat some vittles, and hit the rack. The thought of it all made me smile.

Mission One was a complete success. Seven men out, seven came back, all alive and well. Only McCollum would argue the point. Scratch, scratch.

There I was, back on point with Sweet Lips. I was moving through the mud of a mangrove swamp on my fifth mission. In the previous two weeks I’d been point man on three other missions; all had been uneventful. I wasn’t complaining. I was glad we’d had the good fortune to get a few placid missions under our belts; we had needed to get our feet wet, which we’d done in every sense of the phrase.

Mr. Meston liked me on point. He’d noticed my country-boy instincts and knew my Texas upbringing, so he’d put his faith in me. I’d reciprocated that trust. Since the first couple of missions, Mr. Meston had settled down and impressed me with his decision making. He was a well-balanced man, cautious yet creative, and not afraid to hear new ideas. My kind of leader.

I glanced back at Meston. He was five meters behind me, just visible in the first light of day. Behind him, invisible to me, was Bucklew with the radio, then followed Funkhouser, Khan, who was a Vietnamese SEAL, and McCollum. All of them were likeable guys, especially McCollum.

McCollum was a jovial fellow and had turned out to be the life of the party whenever there was a party, which was every available night. At Nha Be Naval Base, the Seabees had erected a prefabricated twenty-by-forty-foot shelter with a semicircular arching roof of corrugated metal. It was a Quonset hut over a concrete floor. Inside was a plywood bar, a large refrigerator for storing beer, a few tables with chairs, and a beat-up piano stolen from Saigon. It was there where many SEALs hung out, and where McCollum sat at the piano and sang endless off-color English and Australian ballads. Our platoon had nicknamed him “Muck,” which
was simpler to say than McCollum, and is British for “engaging in aimless activity,” which was what hanging around the Quonset hut entailed.

Also part of Muck’s repertoire were the love songs from the
Navy Song Book
, which he saved for the nights when he’d especially miss his wife back home in the States. His last song two nights earlier, sung with great feeling, had been “Sweethearts and Wives.” The words were well known to me:

Suddenly my brain screamed, “Stop!” and my right leg froze in midair. My heart slammed in my throat as I realized there was a trip wire across my shin. The next
few seconds took forever; part of me wanted to draw back, the rest of me refused to move. I stayed put, and nothing happened. It became apparent that I’d stopped my forward momentum in the nick of time.

As Mr. Meston approached, I waved at him to back off. He did, and I looked hard to see where the trip wire lead. I spotted a tin can, camouflaged and tied to the trunk of a small tree in front of me and to my left. The can was tied parallel to the ground with the open end facing me. Inside the can was an object which I couldn’t make out, but I knew what it was. It was a VC grenade. The trip wire was attached to the grenade, which had had the safety pin removed. Fortunately for me, the grenade was still inside the can where the spoon was held in place. Had I finished my step, the grenade would’ve been pulled out of the can, releasing the spoon and detonating the grenade. It’s fair to say I would’ve earned a Purple Heart, but I’d have been a bit too stiff to shake hands at the award ceremony.

Sure of myself, I stepped back and allowed the trip wire to slacken. I got free of it, then took a few seconds to choke my heart back down my esophagus.

I carefully approached the booby trap and took my K-bar knife and cut the monofilament trip wire. I didn’t slide out the grenade. I simply left the grenade in its nest and rejoined the platoon.

Mr. Meston slapped me on the back, then motioned for me to take point and lead the way. Gee, thanks for the compassion, Lieutenant. Couldn’t I have had another five seconds, first, to recover from my nervous breakdown? Nevertheless, I guided the platoon eastward to the place where our intelligence indicated a VC hootch was located. Our job was to check the hootch, looking for enemy activity.

We located the hootch two hours later. From our position, forty meters from the hootch, it looked vacant.
Mr. Meston decided to play it by the book, spreading us out into a skirmish line facing the hootch. He then signaled me to skirt the area around the hootch, maintaining visual contact with the platoon.

I carefully walked the minor trail leading to the hootch, looking for more booby traps. Staying close to the brush, I circled the hootch from west to east, finding only old human tracks in the mud. I signaled Mr. Meston, and he slowly advanced toward the front of the hootch.

As Meston reached the open door, I joined him. He motioned for me to go inside. Sweet Lips was the first to stick her nose in, with me coaxing her from behind. I saw immediately that there was no one in the hootch, and in the few seconds it took for my vision to adjust, my eyes told my brain the place had been cleaned out. The only things left were a broken clay stove in one corner of the dirt floor and a makeshift bed constructed of lashed limbs in another.

Meston entered the hootch and participated in the perusal, then we exited and rejoined the platoon.

As we continued our reconnaissance, I couldn’t help but analyze each member of the platoon strung out behind me. Khan, the Vietnamese SEAL, was impressive. He was a short, slender man with penetrating, predator-type eyes. He was steady and exhibited no fear at all. He had a deep scar on his left cheek as a reminder of a knife fight with a gook, who had a deeper scar across his decaying chest.

Funkhouser was just as impressive as Khan. He was a husky six-footer who was so familiar with the M-60 machine gun that I believed the barrel had been his pacifier in his cradle days. He was as cool as a cobra in the field, warming up only when we partied.

Mr. Meston was a clean-cut man of medium build, standing five feet, ten inches tall. He had been making
good decisions, including his choices of beautiful, exotic women.

McCollum was better behind the piano than he was in the field; to tell the truth, we were all better at the bar than at recon. “Muck,” though, was a bit uncomfortable with his assignment to rear security. Bringing up the rear on a pitch-black night in an enemy-infested jungle was enough to make most men jittery. Still, I’d rather have “Muck” with his M-79 grenade launcher protecting our posteriors than most.

Bucklew was the most handsome one of the platoon, with the possible exception of myself. He was a muscular, six-foot, hundred and eighty pounder. He was a great runner and swimmer, but his athleticism wasn’t helping him in the swamplands. That was because his mind was giving him problems, negating his physical advantages. Mr. Meston had given him a try on point a couple missions back, but the stress had eaten him up. Bucklew by then seemed too nervous to me. I was hoping he would hold up when we engaged the enemy, which was an eventual surety.

I pondered my analysis of my buddies for a minute. It seemed to me as though I’d been a little hard on some of them, until I remembered I was judging their performance under extremely dangerous conditions and not simply how they’d fare on a frog hunt back in Texas. In a jungle with gooks and snakes and crocs all around, nobody was perfect, believe me. But these imperfect SEALs, of which I was one, were not quitters. Regardless of their individual quirks and shortcomings, collectively they composed a group of fighting men that no sane enemy would want to face. Of that I was sure. I knew these men. They’d been trained to the max. Someone would have to pay for all that training, and his name would be gook.

I continued on point, moving in ankle-deep mud,
until 1200 hours when Mr. Meston decided to take a break. In fairly thick cover, the six of us set up a perimeter in a circle, with each man facing outboard. I sat down in the mud and leaned my head back against a nipa palm and closed my eyes for half a minute. It felt good to rest my eyes and daydream of the little house in the country I planned to buy near my parents’ home in Scotland, Texas. Right then I really wanted the house because it was built on a hill where I’d seldom ever have to walk in mud.

Knowing I must stay alert, I opened my eyes and looked for trouble. He was only present in his mosquito disguise. Feeling safe, I stood Sweet Lips against the palm tree and took a can of C rations from my backpack, along with a P-38 can opener and a spoon. I opened the can of ham and lima beans and stared at the stuff, smothered in solifidied grease. I set the can down to my right in the mud, hoping the ninety-degree heat would liquefy the grease so I could pour some of it out.

In the meantime, I drank from my canteen. The water was warm, as usual, but refreshing. It was wet; that’s all that mattered.

While my meal slowly corroded, I decided to relieve myself at the nearest bush. I pulled down my pants and long johns, realizing that shining a full moon at hungry mosquitos needed to be a short-lived experience. Two minutes was as short as I could make it, and I think I incurred only one slight wound. The responsible mosquito, though, was dead.

After covering up my exposed parts, I sat down next to my food and my shotgun. I reflected for a couple of minutes on our mission, which involved reconnaissance and then sitting overnight on an ambush site on the Rach Nuoc Hoi waterway. This particular river was only forty meters wide and was still six hundred meters north of our position. We had to cross two minor tributaries
before we got there. Also, one hundred meters before the stream, there was a hootch to inspect.

I looked at Mr. Meston, who was a few meters to my right, and he flashed the thumbs-up at me. I nodded, then he went back to digging into his C rats can. He looked like he was enjoying the stuff.

I looked at my can and saw the grease was still hard. Disgusted, I picked it up and thrust in my spoon, scooping out a blob. This brought back the pleasant childhood memory of a picnic when I had sat beneath a tree and shoveled pork and beans out of a can and into my mouth. Right then, I wished I had the pork and beans; the grease in my C rats was sticking to the roof of my mouth, guaranteeing me an unpleasant memory.