Death in the Jungle (29 page)

When McCollum was finished with his preparation, around 2030 hours, he stopped by my cubicle and asked
me to go to the Quonset hut to listen to a visiting band and drink a couple of beers. I declined the invitation, as reveille was scheduled for our platoon at 0315 hours and I wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Besides that, Funkhouser was in bed feeling sick with a recurring flu bug and I didn’t want to disturb him at a later hour; instead, I turned out our light and crawled into my bed.

For several minutes, I pondered the upcoming mission, then my thoughts turned to some of the principles by which Navy SEALs lived. We seemed to be unique, in that we understood our strength as a team was based on togetherness; nonconformity was not tolerated. When a teammate became morose or temperamental, we showed empathy and compassion, when needed, or we harassed until he snapped out of it. A standard maxim directly applied to us: “You’re only as strong as the weakest man and only as fast as the slowest man.” The bottom line was that introverts generally didn’t survive in the Teams. Everyone was an extrovert and we fed off each other’s bravado. For the career guys, “the Teams” represented not only a career, but also in many ways, satisfied family, social, and even religious requirements. “The Teams” was indeed a unique way of life.

I finally fell asleep around 2130 hours, and I slept well. After almost six hours of rest, I awakened to someone’s announcing “Reveille” outside the cubicle. Then I heard Funkhouser stirring in the darkness. I opened my eyes and saw his figure dashing into the aisle. I knew by his quick actions that he either had the runs or he was going to vomit.

I crawled out of the sack, turned on the light, and got dressed for breakfast. When I was ready, Funkhouser, wearing UDT trunks and a sweat-soaked T-shirt, stumbled back in.

“The runs or the heaves?” I questioned as he fell into bed.

“Both,” he groaned, burying his head underneath his pillow. In a muffled voice, he said, “Turn out the light ASAP.”

I flicked the light switch and walked to the chow hall where I drank coffee and ate oatmeal, eggs, sausage, and toast. Since I firmly believed the only way to begin a forty-eight-hour mission was with an exceedingly full stomach, I grabbed seconds of everything. By the time I left the chow hall, I was far from worried about the excess weight, as I was aware that a two-day diet of nothing but C rats and water would put the kaputs on my bulk.

After breakfast, nine members of Foxtrot Platoon, including me, gathered our gear and met at the dock. Minus Funkhouser, we boarded the LCPL MK-4 with the four-man crew. With all aboard, the coxswain started the 300-horsepower engine, then steered us into the black of the early morning. I watched the base perimeter lights gradually disappear behind us.

As we traveled down the Long Tau, I sat on the steel deck between Pearson and McCollum. Looking up, I saw no moon or stars, which indicated heavy cloud cover. The breeze over the boat was cold. The engine roar seemed louder than usual. But even though it was chilly and my ears hurt, my head drooped and rested on Bad Girl, which lay across my lap. In a few minutes, I dozed off.

I dreamed about hunting. The woods were alive with chirping birds, and chattering squirrels. The fall leaves were rattling their loosening chains. I was stalking a big buck, which looked nervously aware. He stepped into an opening in the post oaks and briars, then froze. I slowly raised my rifle to shoot. Then I woke up and the deer got away.

I lifted my head and felt Bad Girl with my fingers. She reminded me that I had become a manhunter. I’d
hunted man with the M-16/XM-148 three times since Sweet Lips’s demise, but I’d yet to kill with the weapon. It would have been nice if the North Vietnamese Communists would have given it up and gotten out of South Vietnam; the warring would have ceased and the dying would have ended. I would have retired Bad Girl without ever having shot a human being with her. Yes, that would have been nice. Right then, however, I realized I was thinking wishfully. In actuality, I was riding a boat so deep into enemy territory that there was a fair chance I’d have to cook some gooks, which is the way I had to think about it, so I wouldn’t think about it when the time came. If I were to dwell on the thought of an enemy having a wife and children waiting for him at home, I might hesitate in squeezing the trigger and give him an opportunity to kill me or a teammate.

The coxswain cut the throttle back on the engine to slow us down a bit. We were on the Dong Tranh and getting close to our insertion point. The coxswain employed the boat’s radar while Mr. Meston used his Starlight Scope to find our way and check the shoreline. Both men were looking for the small stream we were to bypass by five hundred meters, then we’d insert and work back to the stream at a point deeper in the jungle.

Mr. Meston suddenly gave the signal to lock and load. The sounds of cocking weapons filled the air as the LCPL continued moving alongside the dark shore. When the boat slowed to just above idle, I moved forward to the portside bow. Four of my teammates grouped behind me while four others crouched down at the starboard bow.

As the coxswain turned the bow of the LCPL toward the shore, I prepared myself for the jolt of boat striking land. When it came, I jumped off the port bow and onto the shore. To my delight, the ground beneath my feet was soft but not wet and muddy.

The nine of us ended up a few meters inland, waiting and listening in the brush. The LCPL backed away from the riverbank, then moved farther down the river where the coxswain would perform a couple of fake insertions.

With my ears peeled, I observed the silhouettes of my teammates in the dark. The outlines of the weapons projecting out of each body were a sight to behold—the M-16s, the M-79 grenade launchers, the M-60, and the Stoner machine guns. My courage cranked up a couple notches as I was reminded of our firepower.

After fifteen minutes, the dark sky showed the first traces of the coming of dawn. Meston had us hold for another few minutes, then he signaled Pearson to take the point position and start through the thick brush. The rest of us strung out behind Pearson and began moving east, back toward the stream we had passed in the LCPL. I fell into the fifth slot behind Pearson, Meston, Markel, and Schrader. Behind me walked Flynn, Moses, Dicey, and McCollum.

The going was slow for several reasons. The nipa palm and undergrowth was heavy. Prickly stems and branches grasped at our legs like octopus arms. The brush was noisy, and noise was a major no-no for U.S. Navy SEALs in the T-10 area. Also, the possibility of booby traps was great, as we were assuming the VC and NVA had taken appropriate measures to protect themselves and their base camps and hospital.

We covered the first two hundred meters of our 750-meter patrol in an hour. The mosquitos had acted as a sour uninvited escort since just after daybreak, oblivious as always to the killing power of our weaponry.

Mr. Meston had us halt when Pearson signaled that he had found a well-worn trail. Several sets of VC tracks, no older than forty-eight hours, were imprinted in the ground. Pearson was sent to recon a portion of the trail alone, checking for more sign. After going
about forty meters, Pearson returned and informed the lieutenant that there were several diverging trails ahead. To give Pearson a break from the stress, Meston motioned for me to assume the point position. Pearson and I exchanged places, then I started down the trail with the others strung out behind me.

Walking on dry ground along a cleared pathway was a pleasant change from the normal watery muck and dense vegetation. I had to focus on my job, though, and not allow my concentration to lapse because of the luxury. After all, I couldn’t afford one careless step. I, for one, intended to meet death on a golf course at an old age, not death in the jungle at twenty-six.

After we traveled about two hundred meters, the human footprints became intermingled with lots of deer tracks. Having seen thousands of deer tracks in my life, I estimated that the biggest tracks on the trail had been made by a deer weighing around two hundred and fifty pounds. My heart hammered a little faster as I anticipated the sighting of a monster buck, and once again I had to apply myself to the task at hand, which was guiding the squad carefully to our ambush site.

My attention was undivided over the next three-quarters of an hour as my teammates and I covered another two hundred meters. The numerous human and deer tracks continued underfoot, and I avoided stepping in some scattered deer droppings, but no other signs of humans or deer were manifested. I was somewhat surprised by this, as we’d moved to within seven hundred meters of the enemy base camps.

When I finally came to the designated stream, I knew our position was 250 meters inland from the mouth of the stream where it intersected the Dong Tranh. I signaled Mr. Meston, who signaled back that I should recon the bank while the others waited.

I slunk up and down the riverbank for several minutes,
discovering the same old thing: voluminous tracks. I reported my findings to Mr. Meston, who decided to proceed with our game plan, which was to patrol 150 meters alongside the stream to our preplanned ambush site. That location would put us less than five hundred meters from scores of enemy troops.

It took thirty minutes to reach the ambush site, which I identified when I noted a second stream that branched off to the southwest from the main stream. At that fork we would lie in wait to capture or kill soldiers who would attempt to do the same to us. But this I knew: capturing a SEAL was out of the question; as long as breath remained, a knocked-down, wounded, and dying SEAL would continue shooting holes in enemy hides. And the rest of the team wouldn’t leave until he was carried away or dead. Such was the confidence we placed in each other.

Mr. Meston signaled for half the squad—consisting of Schrader, Pearson, Moses, Markel, and Dicey—to position themselves overlooking the stream. Meston, McCollum, Flynn, and I set up as rear security several meters back in the bushes. While the other three men catnapped, I took the first two-hour watch for rear security.

As the time went by, I heard nothing except the mosquitos. I observed the still jungle and enjoyed the peaceful morning. The skies were overcast, but it didn’t rain. It was a nice feeling to be high and dry on an ambush site, which was a rare experience. Even my rump was comfortable, settled down in a soft, dry pad of moss.

At 1130 hours, McCollum relieved me on watch. I stood my M-16/XM-148 against a sturdy branch of a bush, then lay my head against the trunk of the nipa palm behind me and closed my eyes. A light breeze
licked at my face for half a minute, refreshing me, then it was gone to wherever it was that breezes went.

I left the war to the others for a while as my mind ran through many thoughts of a different place and time. I dreamed about the field-rat plague in the summer of 1959, when North Central Texas had been infested with millions of rats at the end of a seven-year drought. The rats had been eating up all the grasses and even the bark off mesquite trees. Day after day, Chuck Toliver, Jimmy Harbis, and I had traveled a couple of miles out of Wichita Falls on the Archer City road with our .22 rifles to shoot at the rats. We’d killed them on the ground and knocked them off mesquite branches where the rats had perched like vultures. When our ammunition had run dry, we’d picked up sticks and clubbed or stabbed the varmints to death, howling and laughing all the while.

I remembered my 1960 Harley Sportster, a souped-up motorcycle that could do 110 miles per hour in third gear. When I had wanted to show off, I would lift the front wheel off the ground when I shifted to fourth. The speedometer had stopped at 120, but I often had taken the bike to 150 in fourth gear. At top speed, the wind blast had been so strong I could barely hang onto the grips. I had even felt my fingers slipping on many occasions. As a twenty-year-old, I’d drag race at night on the boulevard in town, beating the hottest Corvettes and everybody else, then I’d escape from the converging cops in the nick of time.

In the same time period, I had owned a red convertible MG-A which could hit 120. I’d cruise town with a black-cloth top or a fiberglass red top or no top at all. The Pioneer 3 drive-through restaurant had been a primary hangout for college kids, and it was there I’d hustle the girls in my flashy sports car. One night in 1962, I had floorboarded the MG all the way between
Jacksboro and Mineral Wells on Highway 281, a trip of approximately thirty-five miles.

Suddenly my mental drifting was ended by a sound similar to the uncorking of a wine bottle. I opened my eyes and sat up, reaching for Bad Girl in the same motion. Mr. Meston, sitting on the ground a few meters to my left, slipped the safety off on his M-16. McCollum, sitting off to my right, raised the M-79 grenade launcher from his lap. Flynn, propped against a tree trunk next to McCollum, was asleep. We left him be while we listened for another clue.

A minute went by. Then two, and three. Nothing happened. I looked to the front line on the stream, but no signal was given.

A rustling of brush occurred behind Mr. Meston and my heart bolted inside my chest. I turned my head to look as the noise came again, only to spot a squirrel dart through the ground vegetation and climb into a nipa palm. I watched it for a few seconds, noting that it looked like our gray squirrels back home, then I looked at Mr. Meston. He rolled his eyes, letting me know that he, too, had been freaked by the squirrel’s racket.

After another few minutes, Dicey slipped off the front line and quietly approached us. I could see by the look on his camouflaged face that something had happened.

As Dicey reached Mr. Meston, the lieutenant motioned me over. I half walked and half crawled a few yards to the two men. Dicey whispered to us that he had seen a gook come to the edge of the trees on the opposite side of the stream, carrying two water jugs. The man had peered up and down and across the stream while motioning and whispering to a comrade or comrades hidden behind him in the bushes. I asked Dicey why he hadn’t shot the man, and Dicey said that if he had reached for his Stoner machine gun the VC certainly
would have seen him, that’s how close he had been. The stream was only twenty-five meters wide and the VC had been directly across from Dicey and had been all eyes.