Death in the Jungle (26 page)

I took a final look at the small boy. He was still standing in his sampan, peering my way, and I saw him stick a piece of gum in his mouth. He flashed another smile as the rain tore at his tattered clothing.

We pulled away, and I threw a sharp salute at the boy. I froze his image in my mind, then closed my eyes and turned around.

“Chao
, little fella,” I whispered into the wind.

At the Nha Be base, I escorted the woodcutter to Marine First Lieutenant Winsenson, an old mustang (an officer who came up through the ranks), who was to handle the interrogation. After telling Mr. Winsenson the details of the man’s capture, I ate at the chow hall, grabbed a shower, then stretched out in my bed until 1630 hours.

The rest felt good but it was not very long. We were to board an LCPL at 1700 hours and head for another ambush site on the Tac Ong Nghia River about eight hundred meters southwest of the previous site.

I put on fresh long johns and camouflage clothing, fed Bolivar some insects, then grabbed my gear and walked to the dock. The rain had stopped, thank goodness. If it didn’t start up again, I’d stay dry for another hour before we inserted. Then I’d be up to my neck in water, as we were inserting at high tide. That’s when I’d
wish I were a duck and not a schmuck weighted down with tons of gear.

We boarded the LCPL with the same personnel, along with the addition of PR1 Pearson and his M-79 grenade launcher, BT2 Moses, and ADJ2 Markel, both carrying M-16s. That gave us ten men this time. I welcomed the added firepower since we were going back fairly close to a compromised area.

The late afternoon was muggy, and I was glad when the boat got going. I took off my hat to let the air rush over my head as we sped along the Long Tau River. During the hour-and-a-half ride, I contemplated the usual preinsertion topics: life and death. The topic sentence for the first was “Gary Roger Smith is alive and well right now.” For the second, “Gary Roger Smith may be dead within the hour.”

Since I liked the first topic sentence much better than the second, I’d prepared well to keep the truth of it perpetual. Sweet Lips was my companion, and I was loaded down with ammunition, grenades, claymore mines, flares, food, and water. I was prepared for living. Other people would have to die from time to time for me to live; so dictated a thing called war. I had a strong feeling someone would die that night. My instincts told me this. But my will to live told me it wasn’t gonna be me. And I intended to help make sure it wouldn’t be any of my teammates.

Since a dry boat ride was a lot more enjoyable than a waterlogged recon, the scheduled hour-and-a-half trip seemed to end in half the time.

Mr. Meston called out for us to lock and load. That meant the fun was over and the ferocity would begin. As the LCPL slowed, I moved to the starboard side of the bow. When the coxswain cut the engine to just above an idle, I got ready to insert. Lieutenant Meston,
Brown, and Flynn collected behind me. The other men grouped on the port side.

As the bow touched into the branches of a nipa palm tree, Lieutenant Meston told me to go. I tossed the cargo net over the bow and climbed down it. I let go and dropped into almost five feet of cool water, and my first thought was, “Thank God I made the riverbank!” If I had fallen short, I would be blowing bubbles where the barracuda and stinging jellyfish played.

Without pause, I waded several paces ahead, making room for the other men to enter the deep water. I heard them splashing behind me as I moved around nipa palm branches, keeping my eyes on the swampland before me. Feeling my way with my legs and feet, every part of me was underwater except my head and neck. All of my gear, and even Sweet Lips, took the wet route. But I’d done this before: I’d gone where no ordinary soldier would go, and that was the key to our success as SEALs. No one was expecting us in the places where they ran into us, which gave us the greatest weapon of them all: the element of surprise.

Our objective was to set up an overnight ambush just a hundred and fifty meters northwest of our point of insertion. That was where a small stream branched off the Tac Ong Nghia. Mr. Meston, using his compass, pointed the way. I looked at my wrist compass for a rough azimuth and eyed the top of a tree standing higher than the rest. With this for my landmark, I headed out. The others fell in line behind me.

Walking in the water was tough. The palms were thick, making for slow going. I found no high spots at all, which kept the water lapping from our waists to our Adam’s apples without relief. Darkness was coming fast, bringing with it the eerie atmosphere I’d experienced in the early morning. A ghoulish, ominous ambience
surrounded me, and it was beautiful in a swampy sort of way.

Since we discovered no high ground on which to stop and rest, Mr. Meston kept us going until we reached the spot where the small stream should have been. We could see a thirty-meter-wide finger extending through the swamp where no vegetation showed above the deep water. In the trees overlooking this open space, we positioned ourselves for the night watch. I settled in on the left flank, while McCollum took the right. In between, Lieutenant Meston, Brown, Funkhouser, and Pearson set up. Flynn, Moses, Markel, and Ty dropped several meters back for the sake of rear security.

With the water still up to my neck, I was forced to stand as the night descended. Sweet Lips, however, got a break as I lifted her over my head, dumped the water out of her barrel, and propped her up in the branches of a small tree. Then I gave Pearson one end of my parachute suspension line when he waded a few meters to get it. He waded back to his position, stretching the communication link between us. The last thing I saw before the swamp was totally black was Pearson tying the line around his left wrist.

The area was quiet except for the droning of a couple dozen mosquitos that had discovered my head. None of them was brave enough to stake a claim, though, thanks to the working power of a large gob of repellent I had applied while back on the LCPL. The stuff was so effective that the bloodsuckers went away in ten or fifteen minutes, just before the water started receding and my back became a juicy target.

A bit later, I felt some tiny fish biting at the hair on my wrists. It was irritating at first, and I attempted to swish the fish away. They were persistent, however, and I eventually gave up, hoping they’d tire of their game
soon. About the time I started enjoying their playful antics, they departed, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

I relished the peace only for a couple of hours. At 2230, the tide was at its lowest level. I was sitting on the bank of the stream in slimy mud and a tiny puddle of water. The mosquitos were back. I believed the two dozen had spent two hours recruiting ten dozen enlistees. I couldn’t see them in the dark, but their relentless noise told me the story: parts of me were getting stuck like a pin cushion.

After an hour of torment, rain started falling. This was good in that the mosquitos dissipated; it was bad in that I quickly felt chilled to the bone. Having trouble stifling a sudden cough, I dug the remedy out of my backpack: a small plastic bottle I’d filled with Early Times whiskey. I unscrewed the cap and took a snort. The stuff went down smoothly, and a couple seconds later I felt fire from my throat to my gut. I took another swig, and while enjoying the warmth inside my chest, I put the bottle away.

The rain softened in a few minutes. As it became quiet again, I heard voices upstream to my left. I tugged the suspension line connected to Pearson twice as I brought Sweet Lips up off my lap. I rolled onto my knees in the mud and looked hard over the dark expanse of water in front of me.

The sound of a paddle hitting the side of a boat reached my ears. It was close. I jerked the line three times.

Suddenly I made out a sampan in the glimmer of moonlight. I saw the silhouettes of two people; one was seated and one was standing aft. They were right in front of me for a few seconds, then they were slightly past me and sitting ducks in our kill zone.

Before I could say, “Make your peace with Buddha, boys,” Funkhouser’s Stoner machine gun shattered the
stillness. I reacted instantly by firing my shotgun at the dark figure in the rear of the sampan. In less than a second I fired again. Then I heard M-16s blasting away.

I fired three more times before a grenade exploded in the water. As I reloaded Sweet Lips in the dark, somebody sent up a flare. The sky lit up with a brilliancy comparable to the sudden turning on of all the house lights in a dark theater at the end of a play. The only difference of significance that time was that the lights were coming on at the end of two lives.

Now that I could see clearly, I shoved a sixth shotgun shell into Sweet Lips and looked out at the sampan. The boat had drifted to the other end of our kill zone, but I saw no people in it. Funkhouser took advantage of the light and sprayed the water on both sides of the boat with the Stoner, then Lieutenant Meston tossed a concussion grenade into the stream. It blew a few seconds later, sending an eruption of water into the air.

“Smitty!” hollered Mr. Meston. “Go get the sampan!”

His words were not music to my ears. The last thing I wanted to do was swim away from my teammates in the middle of the night now that we had been compromised. If an NVA detachment found our location before I got back out of the water, I’d be in a hell of a mess. But that was beside the point right then. I’d been given an order, so I quickly pulled my duck fins over my coral booties. I grabbed Sweet Lips and carried her a few meters along the riverbank to Pearson.

“Hang onto my baby,” I told him, then I slipped down into the water. I swam for the sampan, but I went only fifteen or twenty meters when shooting spewed forth. The sudden burst of gunfire scared the you-know-what out of me.

In the fading light of the descending flare, I treaded water for several seconds while my teammates shot toward
the drifting sampan. I could see bullets tearing up the water near the boat, but I couldn’t see who was there that needed killing. One thing was certain: I hoped the guy was dead before I got there.

“Okay, Smitty! Get the sampan!” Lieutenant Meston yelled when the firing stopped. I took my K-bar knife, which I’d had in my hand, stuck the blade between my teeth and struck out after the sampan. I took a last look at the runaway boat before the flare extinguished and I was left in total darkness. Actually, I was in the worst of conditions, as my night vision had been wiped out and I saw only white spots before my eyes. In other words, I was swimming blind.

Continuing my strokes regardless, my nose picked up the strong odor of blood on the surface of the water. Obviously, that told me that somebody was bleeding. Because I was sucking on a very large and very sharp knife, I hoped it was not my own blood.

Taking the knife out of my mouth with my right hand, I immediately felt better. Too many movies had depicted some gallant hero paddling away with a dagger between his lips, but now I knew what a sham I’d been handed. Knives and lips and teeth were not made for one another, I could assure the world.

A few seconds later, I assured myself that the blood in the water was not mine. It was definitely someone else’s. At the moment of my relief, a second flare burst in the sky over my head, and there was light in my tiny world again.

I saw the sampan hung up by overhanging branches alongside the opposite riverbank. After swimming forty meters to the craft, I grabbed the bow and looked inside. There I saw the bullet-riddled body of a man dressed in the green uniform of the NVA.

I didn’t look twice. I freed the sampan from the low tree limbs and started back toward my teammates with
the boat. The going was not impossible as the current was laggard. Still, I was swimming against the flow of the water, and that made it tough enough.

By the time I reached the riverbank, McCollum and Funkhouser pulled me and the sampan with the dead body ashore. I took off my fins and climbed to my feet as the light from a third flare died out.

“One confirmed kill and one probable,” Lieutenant Meston told me. “Get your gear and get ready for extraction.”

I couldn’t see spit again, but somehow I managed to find my backpack and web belt. Pearson walked with me back to the others and gave me some news that broke my heart.

“When we fired when you were in the water, I fired your shotgun. Only thing is, I accidently got mud jammed in the barrel somehow before I fired. The barrel’s blown apart.” Pearson handed me the shotgun. I slid my hand down the barrel and found the end expanded and split apart. The gun was ruined.

“Sorry,” Pearson muttered an apology.

Sweet Lips was only a gun, I told myself. There were other guns. Don’t get melancholy over a gun.

I heard the hum of the LCPL in the distance. It was a sound I’d been in love with ever since my first extraction. When I heard one of our boats coming, I was reminded of my mother’s humming me to sleep when I had been a little boy. It was a sound that said, “Have no fear. All is well.”

As I waited with the others for the boat, I touched Sweet Lips’s barrel again. For some reason, I reflected back a half dozen years to when Barbara, the love of my youth, had left me for a truck driver. I had told myself then that it hadn’t mattered, and that there were many girls. But Barbara had been one of a kind. When I lost her, I lost a piece of my heart. I’d never before
had a gun like Sweet Lips. Yes, I’d need to choose another companion now, but nothing would replace my faithful, tried-and-true shotgun. Somehow, she had not been just a shotgun to me. She had been my nerve and my spirit, my link to the living. “I got his weapon, papers, and documents,” I heard Ty tell Mr. Meston, referring to the dead enemy lying in the sampan.

“Good,” Lieutenant Meston replied. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

The LCPL cruised up the stream toward us, and it was a sight for tired eyes. When the boat bumped against the riverbank, I climbed aboard with Sweet Lips for our last trip home together.

Two dead bodies were left behind for whoever or whatever found them first.

I left the mess hall after a hearty breakfast and walked to the base armory. I walked past a couple of armory personnel and went to our platoon’s cubbyhole where the weapons were stored in cabinets. Only the members of Foxtrot Platoon had access to this particular area. I’d stored Sweet Lips there after cleaning her every part, unusable though she was. The shotgun would be shipped back to the States eventually, and the receiver with the serial number would go to the Naval Weapons Center in Crane, Indiana.