Combat Swimmer (12 page)

Suddenly, the man with the weapon turned toward the paddler and said something. The paddler fired up the engine, shattering the silence. To me, the engine sounded as loud as a C-130 on takeoff. I felt another adrenaline rush. I had to make a split-second decision. If I let the sampan get too far out in the river, we'd miss our chance for a kill. But I had to be sure they weren't going to turn around. I'd just about figured they weren't, but—

The bow of the sampan lifted as the engine accelerated.

I squeezed the trigger on my M-16. The noise of the sampan was drowned out by our horrendous fire; our muzzle flashes lit up the night in front of us. Tracers hit the water near the sampan and ricocheted into the air across the canal. Despite the magnificent light show, I was completely focused on the target. I fired single action, keeping my sights on the man running the engine. My first tracer slammed into him and I swung my rifle forward, just in time to see the man in the bow fly out of the sampan. Our tracers seemed to lift him straight up. I turned back to the rear man, but he had also disappeared.

“Cease fire!” I yelled.

At once it got quiet again. Maybe six seconds had passed. That was the nature of an ambush: hours of boredom followed by seconds of excitement.

Bump and Pierre blew some air into their life jackets (that was SOP; using the toggle to inflate it was an emergency maneuver) and started to slide into the water to go check out the kill zone—that is, the sampan.

“Wait,” I said, wanting to be sure there wasn't a large force back up the canal, coming our way to see about all the shooting.

I listened for about thirty seconds, but heard nothing.

“Boss, the sampan is sinking,” Jess whispered.

The sampan disappeared below the surface of the water. I reached over to Fred and turned on the radio he wore. “Call for extraction.”

I knew Satch had seen the action, but he wouldn't come our way until I called him. Sometimes we held our position in case the VC sent anyone to investigate. Then we got to kill again—sort of a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. Still, my instincts told me we weren't going to see a reaction force. And with the full moon I didn't want to wait around too long. If a large force did come down the canal firing, we were in a bad position. We had no cover and we were standing waist-deep in water. Leaving was the prudent thing to do.

I heard Fred whisper, “Extraction, extraction.” A few seconds later he turned to me. “They're on their way.”

Satch knew to pick us up at the canal mouth. I looked out into the river and saw the bow wake of the STAB. It was cruising toward us at half-speed. If I'd called for an emergency extraction, the boat would have been at full plane on top of the water.

When I figured the boat was about 200 meters out, I pointed my red-lens flashlight at it and gave three quick flashes. The boat turned directly toward us and slowed. As it idled into our site, I grabbed the gunwale and held it as Bump pulled himself aboard and the rest of the men followed. Once Jess had backed out of his covering position and climbed in, I passed my M-16 to him and pulled up. Hands grabbed my H-harness webbing and hauled me over the railing as the boat backed away from the riverbank.

Crouched in the boat, my weapon pointed toward shore, I looked out toward the river. The LCPL was loitering about a hundred meters out, guns trained on the canal to cover our withdrawal. The STAB turned and the coxswain pushed the two throttles completely forward. The boat hesitated for a split second, then took off. Without the added weight of the ceramic armor ringing the inside of the gunwales, it would have leaped nearly out of the water. Pierre and Bump manned the two pintle-mounted M-60 machine guns on the port and starboard railings as we hurtled forward. When the coxswain throttled back and came starboard of the LCPL, I saw that Satch had all his weapons manned and ready to fire. He looked disappointed at having nothing to shoot at.

I jumped aboard the LCPL. “Got two,” I told him.

“I'll kack up a message to the TOC and let them know the results,” he replied.

“Okay. Tell them we'll be back in about two hours.”

“I'm going to hang around to see if anything else comes out of the canal.”

“Don't think you're going to see anything,” I said. “Just make sure you clear the area before light.”

I didn't want to show the VC in the area what our LCPL looked like. So far we'd been trying to keep them from putting us together with that boat. Outwardly, it looked just like one of the old riverboats the French had used in the fifties and then turned over to the Vietnamese. I wanted the VC to think our LCPL was just another boat belonging to the South Vietnamese River Assault Groups.

I jumped back into the STAB. “Home, James,” I said to the coxswain.

As we cruised up the river, the men slept on the deck, all except Jess and me.

“What d'you think?”

“Not bad,” he said. “I figured we'd get more, but two ain't bad.”

“When I saw the bow lift on that sampan, I knew they were headed across. I figured two were better than none.”

He nodded. “Yeah, the VC'll probably think twice before they use that canal again.”

We'd taken the night away from two VC, but the psychological gain of our mission far outweighed any material gain. Two dead VC wouldn't be missed by anyone but their families and friends. But the fact they'd been killed doing something that had probably been routine for years would affect the morale of all their VC buddies.

N
ear the end of April 1967 we learned that the National Police in Can Tho, just down the river from Binh Thuy, had picked up a farmer who told them there would be a high-level VC meeting in a village down the Bassac that afternoon.

Normally I would have been very suspicious of anything coming out of the National Police, but the CTF-116 TOC watch commander told me one of the river patrols had searched a sampan on the Bassac last night and interrogated the owner, who'd told them that “something big” was going to happen the next day in about the same place the National Police informer had fingered. To sweeten the pot, the IV Corps naval intelligence liaison officer who worked routinely with the National Police told me eight to ten guerrillas, including the VC district chief, would be at the meeting. The fact that they were holding the meeting right on the river during the day didn't surprise me: they were used to operating with impunity. Going after a district-level VC cadre was a good chance to do something worthwhile for the war effort. I decided to go with the information.

The suspect village, it turned out, was in two different places! Really the “villages” were small clusters of the Vietnamese mud-and-thatch houses we affectionately called hootches. We decided that Larry Bailey's squad would go to one area, mine to the other. Lieutenant Jake Rhinebolt, our detachment officer-in-charge, elected to go with us, as he often did. I considered Jake a member of my squad, and I liked having him along. He was a hunter and one hell of an operator. Even though he was senior to me, he had made it clear from the start that I ran the missions.

This had to be a daylight operation, which wasn't completely to my liking; so I decided we'd insert by PBR instead of using our smaller boats. I figured that would give us a little edge; by now, I was sure, our STABs were familiar to the VC, and the PBRs could provide us good fire support.

The plan was simple. We'd take one of the two boats in a routine PBR river patrol and beach it in front of the target. After doing our thing, we'd get back on the PBR and get the hell out of there before any large force of VC in the area had time to react. We didn't know exactly in which hootch the meeting was to be held, so I planned to hit fast in hopes of spooking the VC. Quick in, quick out.

I made last-minute arrangements with the CTF-116 TOC, briefed the two PBR crews assigned for the mission, and briefed my men. By this point in our tour, our squad briefings were
really
brief. We'd worked together long enough for everyone to know what he and everyone else should do in any given situation. Everyone was hot to go—daylight operations didn't bother them—and I fed off their enthusiasm.

We got our gear together and headed downriver to the villages, about five miles south of Can Tho. I remember thinking that the weather was too perfect, with no clouds and almost no wind. The usually choppy Bassac looked like a lake. I'd rather it had been raining, but this was the dry season. We arrived off the village about three, and I started looking through binoculars for the hootches described by the informant. Things looked pretty quiet on shore, though I did find what appeared to be the target area. I hadn't expected a sign saying “Meeting This Way,” but I
had
hoped to spot sentries. There was nothing. I figured we were either early or late.

I was wondering, as I had earlier, whether this was a setup, so I told the PBR patrol commander to position the other boat on our right flank, because that would be the best firing position for supporting us. I also told him to close the distance to the shore at high speed, and as soon as the boat touched land we'd be off. He was then to back out, giving us fire cover to our left flank. I gave the guys a final quick check, and Jess offered me the thumbs-up. Off we went.

The PBR was a highly maneuverable boat because of its water-jet propulsion system; at top speed it could do a 180-degree turn in its own length. We closed to the shore rapidly, my men and I riding in the bow, left and right of the forward dual .50-caliber machine gun. About ten yards from the beach, the coxswain went from full ahead to full astern by reversing the water jets. We jumped forward just as the PBR's bow hit the riverbank. It was like being shot out of the end of a banana peel, but we were off the boat in seconds.

The boat continued backing out into the river, keeping its machine guns trained on our left flank. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the other PBR in position about a hundred meters to our right. We moved about ten meters in and set up a quick perimeter. This was the critical time. I expected the worst, but after about a minute ashore I felt we were secure and we'd better start moving.

We were just to the right of the hootch that was our prime target. Jess Tolison and I ran through the door. It was a good-sized hootch, with a main room and a bamboo partition at the rear. As we went through the open door, Jess on the left, me on the right, I caught movement just in front of me. It was an old mama-san holding a baby. I saw Jess grab a young woman. Both were in shock. I guess they never expected two wild-eyed guys in full camouflage war paint to be joining them for tea. Apparently, the noise we made on insertion hadn't alarmed them: they were laying out about five places on a floor mat. Bingo! Maybe we were going to get lucky.

Jess had served a tour in Da Nang in 1962 training Vietnamese SEALs, so he spoke a little Vietnamese. He asked the young woman when the VC would be there and she was so astonished she blurted, “In a few minutes.” But she was talking at a good clip, so it took Jess a while to realize what she'd said. The old woman was jabbering also and between the two of them anyone in sight would have known something was wrong. They were really scared.

At that moment I heard Pierre Birtz's Stoner machine gun open up. Jess and I bolted out of the hootch and saw three VC with weapons running away through the tree line toward rice paddies a hundred meters off the river. Pierre yelled that he had seen five VC, and he thought he'd hit one.

Jess, Bill Garnett, Charlie Bump, Fred McCarty, and I went after them. I told Pierre and Jake to move to the edge of the rice paddy to cover us. We neared the edge of the tree line, and one of the guys shot a VC in the head. We charged forward. As we went past the fallen VC, I yelled at Fred, “Patch the guy up—I want to talk to him when I get back!”

As we broke out into the rice paddy, I quickly scanned the area. To our right about fifty meters away, another line of trees ran inland, perpendicular to the one from which we'd emerged. Three VC ran down along the tree line to our right and disappeared into the trees fifty meters in front of us. We fired at them and started moving forward across the open rice paddy. As we raced across the open space, my pucker factor started going up. Only our aggressiveness and speed would keep the VC from stopping just inside the tree line and firing on us. Finally, we reached the trees. There was another hootch complex ten meters away. No sign of the VC. Suddenly Jess yelled and we hit the ground. Just in front of us was the firing slit of a bunker. I expected to come under fire, but there was only silence. More bunkers were set among the hootches. It was a defensive perimeter, and we were right in the kill zone. We peered through the dense foliage, expecting to come under attack at any second; a few pigs wandered among the hootches but there was no sign of human life. The villagers, VC or not—but probably VC—were no doubt lying low in the bunkers, waiting for us to make a move. Bill and Charlie, weapons at the ready, were at my right; Jess was at my left elbow, his M-16 glued into his right shoulder, ready to fire. I figured if there was a fight, we'd give better than we got. Still, all was quiet—too quiet.

I was about to advance on the bunker complex, but Jess pointed out that we were in a bad position. First of all, we didn't know what was in front of us. Second, we were beyond the PBR's fire-support fan. I always paid attention to Jess. He was as aggressive as any man I'd ever seen, but he also had great operational savvy, and when he got cautious I got cautious. I said, “Let's make it.”

Cautiously, we crawled backward to the edge of the tree line, then got to our feet and hurried toward the river, keeping as much foliage as possible between us and the hootch complex. Bill Garnett walked backward, providing rear security. Charlie Bump was in his usual position on the point. Unopposed, we moved back down the tree line to where I'd left Fred. He was hunched over the VC, who had a triangle bandage wrapped around his head. Only problem was, most of his brains were about two feet from his head. Fred looked up, and I could see he was really pissed. “Thanks a lot, boss,” he yelled, “for leaving me alone here in the open while you assholes chased VC!”