Death in the Jungle (22 page)

After half an hour, I finished the letter. I felt sleep touching my eyes with his invisible hand, so I decided to catch him this time around.

The next thing I knew, Flynn was waking me. “Hawk, it’s 0330. We board the LCM in thirty minutes.”

“My watch quit,” I sputtered, thrashing at my mosquito net with my arms. I stumbled out of bed and got dressed in my cammo clothing. Then I made a head call and washed my face and brushed my teeth.

As I swished a mouthful of water, I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. I was wide awake now, ready to resume my profession as a swamp warrior. I had no smile for the mirror, only a glare. Guerilla warfare brought out the ferocity in a man. Confronting the enemy deep in his own territory demanded a bastard, not a good ol’ boy. Believe me, my face that morning did nothing to bolster the image of a young and handsome gentleman.

My gear was ready, so I gathered everything in my arms and carried it to the dock. I boarded
Mighty Moe
with my teammates.

At 0400 hours, we moved down the Long Tau. The sky was black. No moon or stars were visible. With nothing to see, I lay down against the starboard bulkhead and closed my eyes. If I could manage to fall asleep, I would get two and a half hours of shut-eye before we arrived at our insertion point.

The hum of
Mighty Moe’
s engines seemed loud at first, but the more I relaxed, the less distracting was the sound. After a few minutes, I even relished the steadiness of it. Steady, even, solid, consistent. Just like I someday wanted my life to be. Like I
hoped
it would be. For that kind of life, though, I would need to change, and I wasn’t sure I could. I’d need to give up the risks and life-threatening dangers that I’d always gone for. The only cure, I supposed, was to grow up. I was finding that the Rung Sat Special Zone had a way of expediting the process.

I gradually slipped into semiconsciousness. While I
was visiting there, worrisome things took a back seat to delightful visions of Scotland, Texas. I saw myself riding a black horse in front of my little house on the hill. It was a splendid sight.

When I awoke from my dreaming, I found I was riding black waves in a black world. Hello, Vietnam. Yes, it’s you again.

With nothing for me to do, my choice was either to go back to sleep or to stay awake. I chose sleep, but I stayed awake. That’s how it went sometimes.

After what seemed a long while, the sky started to glow ever so slowly. Dawn had never missed an engagement yet. She’d been late a few times, like the early morning I had heard a whitetail buck horning a small tree right in front of my blind, and I couldn’t see squat until he was gone, but she always showed up eventually. Eventually became then as our squad prepared to insert.

We made a fake insertion first, then a second. The third time was the charm. As usual, I jumped off the boat ramp first, plopping into the mud of the Song Dinh Ba riverbank. The mud felt cool on my left hand, which I’d stuck out to avoid a nose dive, but I didn’t pause to savor the experience. Instead, I scrambled ahead into the thick brush. My six teammates followed.

I went ten meters into thick nipa palm and waited in an expanse of skunkweed. Lieutenant (jg) Schrader came up beside me, and we waited a while. My ears were tuned to the jungle, listening for sounds of human activity.

Ten minutes later, after hearing nothing but distant birds greeting the rising sun, Mr. Schrader motioned me to lead out. The going got tough immediately. Thick, tangled brush clawed at my every move. The ground was a mire, sucking at my boots. Mobs of mosquitos sucked at my blood.

After only a hundred meters, Mr. Schrader wanted
me to stop. He whispered to me that Flynn, who was lugging the heavy M-60 machine gun, was having a hard time. He needed a rest.

I knew from the previous day’s briefing that we had another 450 meters of that dense vegetation before we reached our ambush site on a small tributary branching off the Song Dan Xay. At the slow rate we were advancing, that meant another two hours on patrol. Two hours that would feel like twenty.

As we waited, I looked at the hog tracks that were everywhere around me. A stick cracked ahead of me and I automatically pointed Sweet Lips in the direction of the sound. The safety was already off and my index finger lightly caressed the smooth trigger.

Another twig broke. My heart stepped up its drumming. I glanced at Mr. Schrader, who had his M-16 aimed toward the oncoming mystery.

The snapping hurried closer, and I saw movement in the brush only thirty feet away. A low-standing, dark-colored shape materialized, and another appeared beside it. As the objects came closer, I recognized them to be wild boars. Five or six more followed the first two. Appearing to weigh fifty to sixty pounds, they looked a lot like the javelinas back home.

When the hogs closed to within ten feet, the lead boar stopped and stared at me. His nose lifted slightly and I watched the nostrils flare as he sniffed the air.

Suddenly, the hogs panicked and started running in frenzied circles and chaotic zigzags. One almost brushed my pant leg as it streaked by at a hundred miles an hour. Had it crashed into me, the animal easily could’ve broken my leg.

After twenty seconds of disorder, the herd disappeared, leaving behind some screeching birds and some hammering hearts. I looked at Mr. Schrader, who was wiping his brow and grinning at me.

“That one almost took off your nuts,” he whispered, then motioned for me to take the point and resume the patrol.

We reconed about a hundred meters when Mr. Schrader stopped me. He had us rest again for ten minutes, which irritated me. The area we were in was supposedly not hot for enemy activity; therefore, we should have moved a little faster. Thank goodness we didn’t have three or four thousand meters to recon that day because we’d have never gotten it done at that slow rate.

Three pit stops and almost two hours later, we finally reached the Song Dan Xay, a river that was five to six hundred meters across. I moved another forty meters south along the bank and found a small stream branching off to the west. This was where we were hoping the VC would float a sampan or two sometime in the next twenty hours. If they would cooperate, we planned to detonate twenty pounds of C-4 explosives beneath them and flip all boatmen into the water. Moses and I, the designated swimmers, then would enter the stream, with our K-bar knives at the ready, to capture one or two prisoners.

While the others held back, I slowly reconed the bank of the stream. I found lots of deer tracks, but no signs of humanity. When I made my way back far enough so Mr. Schrader could see me, I waved him on.

It took but a few minutes to set up our ambush overlooking the stream. Flynn, with the M-60 machine gun, took the right flank, and McCollum, toting the M-79 grenade launcher, positioned himself five meters from Flynn. Mr. Schrader settled in next, with Markel dropping a few meters behind him into a thicket with the radio. Both of them had M-16 rifles. Brown found a hiding place just off the bank with his M-16, followed by Moses, also carrying an M-16. I secured the left flank position with my steady girlfriend in my arms.

Once we were well situated, Mr. Schrader signaled to
Moses and me to plant the haversack of explosives in the water. As we’d rehearsed, Moses and I walked down the bank opposite the flow of the stream. I hoisted the haversack, which was much heavier with weights than during our practice, while Moses strung out the electrical firing line that extended to Mr. Schrader’s location.

When the firing line reached its full length, Moses and I put on our fins and slipped into the water. We swam until we ended up smack-dab in front of Mr. Schrader, in the middle of the stream, where we dropped the weighted haversack and watched it disappear as it sank toward the bottom. Then we swam back to shore and retook our places on the bank of the stream.

For a short while, I felt refreshed and invigorated, as I was soaked with cool water. But as the temperature rose, my wet cammo clothing and long johns warmed and bonded tightly to my skin. I became itchy and uncomfortable, but there was nothing I could do but sit through a long drying-out period.

As the daylight hours slowly passed, I got pretty bored. Dark clouds had moved in and the day was dismal. Nothing interesting happened to speed things along. Due to habit, I found myself looking at my watch about every hour, but each time, I was reminded that the watch had stopped working the previous afternoon. I was forced to guess at the time of day.

Sometime around 1600 hours, a greenish-blue duck flew by just above the water. I followed it with my eyes until it disappeared. A minute later, the duck came back and landed in the stream just twenty meters out from my position. It quacked six times, sounding comparable to a dinner bell to me. I took a can of C rats and a canteen from my backpack, and I ate while watching the duck bob for fish.

During the next couple of hours, Mamma-san Nature did her thing. She slowly hung a curtain of darkness
while gently easing the tide in on us. At 1930 hours, according to Moses’s watch, we were sitting in two feet of water. Then it started raining hard. For two hours, the tiny missiles buffeted our bodies.

Just as the rain finally began slacking off, I heard voices fifty to seventy meters upstream. I alerted the others, but when the rain stopped a couple minutes later, so did the voices. Dead silence dropped on us like the closing of a coffin.

With no visible moon providing light, I couldn’t see very well. I did my best to look over the dark water, seeking the black shape of a sampan.

Suddenly my heart leapt into my mouth as an elongated object floated in front of me. Sampan! I thought. I was just about to jerk three times on the communication line between me and Moses when I realized I was seeing only a big log. I slumped back a little from my stiff, upright posture and took a deep breath.

Just as I was feeling relief over the fact that I hadn’t sent out a false alarm, the line tied to my right wrist was pulled three times. Moses had mistaken the log for a sampan. Before I could do anything about it, Mr. Schrader set off the charge in the water, which erupted right where we had dropped it. I couldn’t see how the explosion affected the log, as it was too dark.

In the few seconds of silence following the blast, I shouted, “It’s only a log!” Regardless, someone down the line opened up with his M-16. A moment later, the M-60 spewed dozens of rounds across the small stream. I watched the tracers streak through the night.

As everyone else started shooting, I cursed as loud as I could, yet I couldn’t hear my cry. The ruckus was too much. Disgusted, I pointed Sweet Lips upstream and let her scream for me. Once, twice, thrice—she belted out my frustration.

A grenade went off on the opposite shore, then another
blew in the water. I felt like swearing, but I started laughing instead. The fact that seven grown men were shooting the hell out of nothing struck my funny bone.

“Hoo-yah!” I yelled, then Sweet Lips echoed me three more times.

As I reloaded, someone down the line sent up a pop flare over the stream. In the sudden light, I saw a massacred log drifting away. Behind it floated a multitude of splinters from its wooden anatomy.

“It’s only a log!” I shouted again. A couple of seconds later, the noise ended. My eardrums, though, didn’t stop reverberating. The resounding ring of another assault snaked around inside my head like a dentist’s drill gone wild.

“It was only a damn log!” Mr. Schrader’s voice stabbed my ears.

“Yeah,” said Moses next to me, “but it’s just a stick now.”

I chuckled at the remark.

The pop flare died in the black of night as Mr. Schrader took the radio handset from Markel and reached the LCM-6.

“Barracuda Seven, this is Dogfish One. Be advised, mission is compromised. No enemy contact. Request extraction as soon as possible.”

After the transmission, I heard the others moving toward my position. I rolled up the parachute suspension line between Moses and me and slipped it into a pant pocket, then I stowed my gear and put on my backpack. When everyone was ready, Mr. Schrader told me to head for the Song Dan Xay just thirty meters to the east.

With the tide having edged out, we didn’t have to walk in water; instead, we walked in mud. The stuff sucked at my every step, but the struggle lasted only a couple minutes. When I reached the Dan Xay riverbank,
I felt like I was home free. I could hear the sweet sound of
Mighty Moe
, coming to steal us away.

Mr. Schrader directed the boat to us by using brief radio communication and a red-lens flashlight.
Mighty Moe
drew closer and closer while we waited in the heavy vegetation on the riverbank for the boat ramp to drop down. Seconds later, as the ramp lowered, it hit the branches of a tree and broke apart a large red ant nest. Thousands of ants were scattered all over the ramp and all over us. Nevertheless, we hurried across the ramp and onto the boat, stepping on the ants as we went. I doubted if many of them died, as they were as tough as pit bulls. I was reminded that they have jaws like mad dogs, too, when one of them chomped into my neck. I took immediate revenge by grabbing the little gook and biting him in half with my teeth. I spit his ass into the night, then found a seat at the other end of the boat, as far away from his comrades as possible.

Mr. Schrader sat down next to me a couple minutes later as we headed back to Nha Be. I made out his eyes looking at me in the dark.

“I just found out they found Katsma’s body,” he said. His words slugged into me like a heavyweight’s fist.

“Where?” I blurted.

“Washed ashore near where he went down,” Mr. Schrader said, his voice shaking a little. He paused a moment, then added, “His hands were free, but his feet were still tied. Part of his face was eaten.”

I crumbled inside. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I fought to hold them.

Mr. Schrader kept going. “Some of the flesh on his hands was gone, too. The Vietnamese found him first and took his Rolex watch.”

I couldn’t hear anymore.

I rose up and walked into a darkness like I’d never known before.