Combat Swimmer (15 page)

There were hootches all along the river. Some were homes, but others were there only to camouflage an offensive bunker. We patrolled for about thirty minutes, passing two homes occupied only by women and children, before we found the first offensive bunker. It was deep and fronted right on the river. We could see the firing slits from the riverside as we circled the hootch. Offensive bunkers were well cared for, covered with live brush to make them virtually invisible from the river. And usually where there was one there were more.

Bump found two women and a baby in the hootch. We took them outside under protest. Because they made such a fuss, I figured there just might be men in the bunker. I positioned the troops in a security perimeter, and Bill lobbed a concussion grenade into the bunker. No result. We put in a Hagensen pack containing twenty pounds of C-4 explosives and blew it, then moved off, leaving the women and children there.

We found the next bunker fifty meters from the first. This one was not under a hootch and it was enormous. It went down about ten feet, well below the level of the water. The firing positions commanded an excellent view: through the slits I could see our LCPL just offshore as it followed us down the island. Outside, the bunker rose about six feet above the ground. The ceiling was supported and reinforced by large palm trunks, and the roof was three feet of baked mud, hard as concrete. We put two packs in this one and fired. The bunker collapsed.

The third bunker, smaller than the second but just as well built, was hidden in a hootch about twenty-five meters downriver. I put three packs on the bunker, fired, and watched the hootch fly about a hundred feet in the air. A large hole appeared where the bunker had been. I had used the SEAL formula for precise, surgical demolition work. If twenty pounds will do the job, use forty to be sure. In this case I used sixty.

Just before the boat came in with our resupply of demolitions, Charlie Bump came to me and said, “Hey, boss, look at this.”

He pulled up his fatigues. His legs were swollen to almost twice their normal size.

“Fred, come here,” I called.

Fred took one look at Charlie and said, “Must be an allergic reaction to some shit in the ditches we've been wading through.”

I sent Charlie out to the LCPL and took over the point.

We traveled about a hundred meters before we encountered another hootch. This one had only a defensive bunker. There were three women and two children inside. One of the babies had a terrible eye infection, so Fred broke out his medical bag and applied antibiotic cream. He gave the mother the rest of the tube and showed her how to use it.

I noticed that the women were “nervous as whores in church”—even more nervous than I would have expected. So as we moved off, I told the troops to be even more alert. We were setting a very clear pattern, moving down the river and blowing bunkers—and we weren't, obviously, being quiet about it. Still, I wasn't too worried. We had Satch out in the river watching in front of us, and he hadn't reported seeing anything.

Suddenly, something caught my eye, and I stopped the patrol. Crouching down to get a better look, I saw that to the left of the trail some grass, pressed down by someone's foot, was straightening into its normal upright position. It was the movement that had caught my attention. Looking in the direction the pressed-down stalks pointed, I saw an overgrown trail leading directly away from the river. Someone had just walked inland, probably after checking us out. I decided to follow the trail.

“Heads up,” I whispered to Fred just behind me. “Pass it back.” I waited until I could see everyone had the word.

We patrolled very slowly down the overgrown trail. The grass under the footprints started getting flatter and flatter. About fifty meters down the trail I stopped. Something didn't seem right. Our standard procedure when stopped was for everyone to get low and watch in alternate directions; the point concentrated ahead, while the last man watched the rear.

As soon as I squatted down, I saw movement about five meters in front of me. It was an AK-47 assault rifle, followed quickly by a helmeted head looking in our direction. The man wasn't walking, just standing and looking.

I remember thinking, “Oh, shit, we got problems,” as I rose quickly and shot him on full automatic. I had fired about four rounds when my left hand flew off the heat jacket and I felt an awful pain in my wrist. I thought my weapon had exploded.

In the next split second I realized that I'd been shot and that we were in a hell of a fight. We were taking heavy fire from our right flank and our front. I sensed we had just about been ambushed. Incredibly, it looked as if I was the only one who had been hit. The guys were returning fire, but we needed to get out of there.

I yelled, “Leap-frog back to the river! Move it!”

We took off, firing on the run. The river seemed to be a mile away instead of sixty meters. The leapfrog tactic works well, but it's designed for more than five people. With three moving and two shooting, we fought our way back to the river, rounds slapping the ground all around us. We broke free of the trap within seconds, but it seemed to take forever.

We set up behind the berm at the river's edge and kept returning fire to our right and front. Now my left wrist really started throbbing, and for the first time I took a look at it. Shouldn't have done that. All I saw at first was a bloody stump where my hand had once been. When I looked again I realized that the entire top of my left hand appeared to be missing. Fred was on me like a tramp on a muffin, jabbing two morphine syrettes into my leg. We had to get out of there. VC rounds were hitting the berm all around us.

Satch knew we were in trouble before I called him—the heavy fire going over our heads was also cracking over his. But he couldn't do anything until he knew exactly where we were. That problem was solved when we reached the river.

I told Satch to get some air support in (he'd already called the TOC), and tried to position the rest of us to get maximum firepower where it was needed. My troops told me later I gave Fred trouble because I wouldn't stay put. I kept moving around, shooting and giving orders. I don't remember that. I also don't remember how long we were on the riverbank. I do know my hand hurt like hell.

We were in trouble, but we did have the river at our backs, and our LCPL was putting out horrendous fire to our right flank. (Charlie Bump had taken over the .50-caliber machine gun.) So my original concern about being overrun was groundless.

The LCPL's firepower soon suppressed the enemy fire long enough for our Boston Whaler to come in and get us. Satch had already called for a medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) helo from the Air Force base at Binh Thuy; it would pick me up at the sector headquarters, just up the river. Fred and one of Satch's guys jumped into the Whaler with me, and we headed that way.

At the sector headquarters, we learned the MEDEVAC helo was in-bound. Fred had managed to get my wrist bandaged somehow, and since I hadn't gone into shock I opted to walk the 200 or so meters to the LZ rather than be carried on a stretcher. The morphine really must have taken effect.

We got to the LZ just as the bird landed. In thirty minutes, Fred and I were in the dispensary at the Binh Thuy Air Force Base. Larry Bailey met us there. As I sat on the examining table with my left wrist hanging loose, I told Larry I would probably have to become a fag if the doctors couldn't fix it. SEAL humor. By that time I'd had four morphine syrettes, two from Fred and two more from the medic on the helo. I think medics like to give morphine shots—they probably make the patient easier to handle. The doctor put me on a C-123 leaving for Saigon.

Two hours later, I was admitted to the Third Field Evacuation hospital, a grungy, filthy SEAL still in his cammies and war paint—an oddity, because they usually got only Army personnel who had been well scrubbed at field dispensaries. They took me to an operating room and started working.

The doctor gave me a radial block, which completely numbed my left arm. It was pretty impressive: he put a needle in my left armpit and said, “You should feel a tingle in your left thumb as I put in the needle.” Yes indeed, my left thumb started tingling. I remember thinking, “This guy's good.”

Once they'd completely numbed the arm, they went to work, scrubbing the hell out of the wound and talking all the time, as I lay there and watched. The bullet had entered the underside of my left wrist, shattering when it hit my bones; the exit wound opened up the entire top of my left hand. In passing, the bullet had destroyed my SEAL Team-issue Rolex watch, most of which ended up in my wrist along with the bullet fragments.

The doctor asked if I knew what kind of weapon had shot me. I didn't, but from the amount of damage done by the round he figured it was probably an AK-47. He also reconstructed the path of the bullet. From behind and to my right, its trajectory was from about four o'clock to nine o'clock. He told me I was lucky (I'd already figured that out for myself). They worked on me for about an hour, and then the doctor said he wasn't going to do any more because I would need a hand specialist—and, he said, I stunk so he couldn't stand me any longer. I like a doctor with a sense of humor. Later, on the ward, he brought me a plastic bag full of metal and glass—the remains of my Rolex, plus bullet shrapnel. He hadn't gotten all the shrapnel out; some of the fragments, he said, might work their way to the surface of my skin and I could just pull them out. The rest I'd probably carry in my wrist for the rest of my life. (I do, and it sets off airport metal detectors.)

Next a nurse came in to ask if I'd urinated yet. I told her I hadn't had the urge—and besides, I whined, my wrist was hurting so bad I couldn't get out of bed. This crusty old major, who looked as if she could go bear hunting with a switch, told me if I hadn't pissed in twenty minutes she'd put a catheter in me and drain my bladder. I came off the bed like a Polaris missile. She was laughing as I staggered to the head. (But she turned out to be a kind person. Later that night, when the pain in my wrist got worse, she gave me a morphine shot stronger than the pills the doctor had prescribed.)

The next day my old commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Dave Schaible, visited me. In his new position on an amphibious ready group staff off the coast of Vietnam, Dave had seen the after-action report that said I'd been shot. So he'd hitched a ride on a helo to Saigon to harass me about trying to catch bullets.

While he was there, Fred McCarty came in. The platoon had been told to stand down for a few days, and as my corpsman, he figured he ought to come to Saigon to see how I was doing. He told me that our LCPL, every PBR in the western Bassac, and most of the local air assets spent the rest of the day battling the VC on the island. Though they never completely suppressed the VC fire, they probably screwed up or delayed the big crossing.

Intelligence figured the advance party of a regiment-sized force had reached the island the night we arrived. When we started blowing bunkers, they sent out a group to set up an L-shaped ambush, with the long side along the river just past where I turned us inland. The tracks I led us down were on the short side, so we'd surprised them. If we hadn't turned off the main trail when we did, chances are none of us would have survived.

Fred also reconstructed our fight. Apparently the VC force never saw us until I opened fire. I had been shot over my left shoulder, from about ten feet away (that VC was a terrible marksman); our Vietnamese SEAL, Quan, immediately greased the guy. If I'd been standing upright, I would have been shot in the back. No one else had even been scratched: our initial volume of fire had made them lie low long enough for us to leapfrog back to the river. In retrospect, our fire discipline and tactics had gotten us out.

I
left Saigon on a C-141 MEDEVAC flight on June 10, 1967. When I got on, I realized how lucky I was. There were men going back to the States with no arms, no legs, no arms
or
legs. One of the saddest was a young sergeant who had been a tank commander in III Corps. He had seen a lot of combat and now had suffered his third wound, which, under the Army policy in effect in those days, meant an automatic return to the States and no more war. He looked fine, so I asked where he had been wounded. Seems his tank hit a mine. He was blown out of the top hatch unharmed, but he landed feet first in a punji pit. One of the upright, razor-sharp stakes had gone into his groin, severing the muscles and nerves at the base of his penis. The kid had been married two days before coming to Vietnam, and he'd had no R & R since. He'd spent two nights with his new wife. Doctors in Saigon told him he would probably never be able to use his penis except to piss. Yeah, I felt very lucky.

When my second-leg flight pulled up to the terminal in Norfolk, a couple of guys from the Team were standing on the tarmac near another plane. They turned out to be members of the platoon replacing mine at Binh Thuy, so we talked for a while. I gave them a quick-and-dirty about how I got wounded, and some words to live by when they started operating. As they stared at my bandaged left hand, I could tell they were wondering if they'd get dinged too—or worse. I was the second member of SEAL Team Two to get wounded, and the first man had also been shot in the hand. We were just the first of many. In the first two years the command had platoons in Vietnam, we had a 95 percent casualty rate—but only seven guys killed.

Naval Hospital Portsmouth was a good hospital, but I hated hospitals (still do), and all I wanted to do was get out and get back to work. The doctors had other ideas. (Coincidentally, one of the doctors treating my wrist was the same fellow who'd delivered my daughter in February. I never did figure out whether Becky had been attended by an “orthopod” or I had been treated by an obstetrician.) At any rate, they told me the damage to my wrist and hand was worse than they had first thought. All the bones in my wrist had been broken, the tendons leading from my fingers had been severed, and all the skin had been torn off the top of the hand. There was also extensive nerve damage, which they said might not heal (it hasn't). I needed at least two operations to patch things up, and they said I might be in the hospital six months.