Men in Green Faces
Read Men in Green Faces Online
Authors: Gene Wentz,B. Abell Jurus
Tags: #Military, #History, #Vietnam War
MOVE SILENTLY…
KILL SUDDENLY…
DIE WITH COURAGE…
THEY WERE THE U.S. NAVY SEALS.
GENE: He believed in God. He believed in his wife and soon-to-be-born child. And he believed in the SEALs—because SEALs helped keep fellow SEALs alive.
WILLIE: He was a short-timer, yet he kept going on missions—and Gene kept getting a bad feeling…
THE EAGLE: He was two hundred and ten pounds of pure mean. The only man he feared was Gene. The only man Gene feared was The Eagle—but they loved to operate together.
DOC: He bitched and moaned and told the SEALs they were crazy. But if you needed a man for an impossible operation, he was your first choice.
TONG: He’d watched Nguyen wipe out his family. Now he’d come over to the SEALs to lead them to the NVA. To prove his loyalty, he would kill in cold blood.
MEN
IN
GREEN FACES
GENE WENTZand B. Abell Jurus
CONTENTS
With great respect and deepest gratitude, this novel is dedicated to the men and women of the Armed Forces of the United States, and written for those silent warriors about whom Gene Wentz says, “It was a privilege and an honor to have served alongside the members of SEAL Team.”
W
E OWE DEEPEST THANKS
to our families, especially Bessie and Skip, for their support, patience, trust, and love, while we trekked mountains and beaches, nights, and disappeared to write, days, for twenty months plus. Great appreciation goes to writers Jean Jenkins, Barbara Hartner, and Virginia Fidler, for their invaluable critiques and also to Bill Martinez, Michael Steven Gregory, Mark Clements, and Cheryl Carpenter for their valuable input. Special gratitude goes to early teachers Madeline Tabler, Joan Oppenheimer, and Charles Jerry Hannah, and to the writers of the Santa Barbara and Southern California & San Diego Writers’ Conferences for sharing their knowledge. Many, many thanks to an old and dear friend, our most valued, straight-arrow, Beverly Hills agent, Mike Hamilburg, and to senior editor Jared Kieling, for “sitting right up” and taking the risk, and his assistant, Ensley Eikenburg, for help and humor. To author Shane Stevens, a fellow practitioner of the White Art, thank you forever. And to those many others who, although not listed by name, know who they are, we are ever grateful.
Becoming a US. Navy SEAL Team member is strictly a personal and voluntary choice. At any time during training, deployment, or in the midst of battle, a SEAL can simply announce that he’s had it, doesn’t want to be a member of SEAL Team any longer, and he will immediately be returned to the original unit from which he volunteered. During training, especially during Hell Week, more leave than stay. Once Hell Week is completed, few—very damned few—stop being SEALs, active or not…for the rest of their lives.
T
HE DEADLIEST MEN IN
Vietnam’s Mekong Delta were operating…
Deep inside the triple-canopied jungle, Brian, at point, held up a clenched fist. The silent stop-look-listen signal passed from point, down the line to Gene, and back to Doc in the rear. The seven SEALs froze, ten feet apart, seeing what wasn’t supposed to be there. What wasn’t on any map.
Gene, his M-60 aimed wherever he looked, smelted death, looked at death. His chest and throat tightened, adrenaline pumping. One step forward out of the jungle, where he stood invisible in the green shadow, and he’d be in there. The 60 moved very slowly, poised like a cobra.
The SEAL squad had inserted into the jungle hours earlier, after being taken nine miles upriver by boat into enemy territory. From their insertion point into the NVA Secret Zone, they’d patrolled to within two and a half klicks of the mission objective, an NVA Rest and Recovery Center. Progress had been slow. Well trained, all with hard-target combat experience, they’d snaked through dense jungle, weapons off safe, locked and loaded, never disturbing the natural sounds of the environment. The SEALs secured everything metal with green duct tape and made sure they moved quietly.
Now they almost didn’t breathe. In there, the jungle was beyond quiet. Totally silent. No birds, snakes, monkeys. Not even the constant insect hum.
To Gene, standing motionless and sweat-soaked in the stifling heat, it looked like the ancient rotting thing had been lifted from a horror film and just inserted in the jungle. A square-shaped structure, like a fort in a western movie, gray with age, sat up on stilts in the center of the fifty-by-fifty clearing. Gunports, high up, looked outward like empty eyes.
No sign of gun barrels or of any kind of life. There were only the walls of thin, rotted tree trunks, tied together with aging rope and rusted wire. Unevenly cut, but sturdy. Dangerous. He breathed out slowly. Probably booby-trapped—both the clearing and that fearful building—from the jungle’s edge where they stood, clear through to the far side. The 60 moved again. God, but the place was eerie.
After seven hours in the jungle, he, like the rest of the squad, wore a virtual bodysuit of mud. Sweat dripped into his eyes in spite of the olive-green bandana tied around his head to keep his dark, curly hair off his face and the sweat from washing off the green and black face paint. White-knuckled, he stood his ground and shuddered…
Something really bad had gone down here. A lot of people had died. Died real bad. Massacred. He could sense death, feel it. The mud in that clearing—deep, endlessly deep. Year after year of leaves falling, vegetation decaying. Animals dying in there, sinking down into the sludge to join the bodies of men…French, Viet Cong, whoever killed, whoever died…the men and their weapons…all in there, rotting away. God, it stank.
If they went in—no sign of an entrance on the side that he could see—a man on each corner, one at the entrance, two inside, would their squad be the next layer of bones and weapons? In the wet heat, he shivered.
Hand signals, a half-circle followed by the direction to take, came back from Jim: Retreat into the jungle, skirt around the clearing. Avoid. Gene lifted the 60 away, safety off, locked and loaded, as it had been since leaving Seafloat, as it would be until re-boarding, whether that was hours or days from now.
The seven SEALs moved as one, disappeared into the returning bird and monkey cries from the trees, and faded into the jungle.
Gene never looked back, but the image of the fort was locked in memory forever. No Patrol Leader’s Order could have anticipated a head-on encounter with ancient death. Not when they’d had no intelligence, never dreamed such a monstrosity existed.
Earlier. 1600 hours…
Between ops, Gene Michaels, in swim trunks and canvas jungle boots, squatted in the shade beside Lima Platoon’s hootch on Seafloat, smoking a cigarette and studying the jungle, as was his habit. The barges that made up Seafloat were anchored mid-river on the Son Ku Lon, near Old Nam Cam in the Tran Hung Dao III region, and they were always a target. An added attraction for the NVA and VC was Solid Anchor, the airstrip the Seabees were constructing on the bank next to them.
He kept an eye on the muddy brown river as well, though previous sapper attacks had always come at night. He drew hard on his cigarette as Lt. (jg.) Jim Henshaw came around the corner of their hootch and settled down beside him.
“Gene,” he said, “I’m going to run an operation. It’s cleared through the platoon’s officer in charge. We’re going in and eliminate an NVA Rest and Recovery Center. If possible, bring out a hostage for intelligence. You want to be my assistant patrol leader?”
Muscular, tanned, his eyes now as hard as the grin that, tracer-like, flashed and died, Gene looked at the boyish face of his lieutenant. “Sounds like a good op, Jim,” he said, his voice low against the cadence of distant thunder over the jungle. “What do you need me to do?” He stood, took a last drag, and flipped the cigarette butt in a high arc off Seafloat into the river.
Jim, too, got to his feet. “Talk to the men, tell them the Warning Order time, set up early chow with the mess hall. And Gene, meet me at the helicopter pad at 1300 hours for a visual recon.”
The wall of the hootch was as unyielding as the shoulder Gene leaned against it. “Which men do you want?”
Henshaw named them and left. Gene Michaels went hunting. If the others were drinking, and they usually were, they needed to quit now. And maybe he could avoid running into Willie, who’d want to go, knowing damned well he couldn’t, because he wasn’t a SEAL. Willie, his best friend, was a photo intelligence specialist and took too many risks as it was, going out with the Kit Carson Scouts. Gene just wanted the southern aristocrat from Tennessee to live long enough to go home and get married as planned.
No such luck. Willie stepped away from the far side of the SEALs’ plywood hootch just as Gene rounded the corner.
“Whoa, Gene, I know that look. Y’all are jungle bound. Need a double on the op? Here I stand. At your service, sir.”
Gene shook his head. The guy was a redheaded rooster, always ready for combat, but he wouldn’t live through a SEAL op, and with him along, neither would the SEALs. “What’s the matter, Willie? The Kit Carson Scouts toss your rebel ass out?”
Willie took hold of the chain around his neck and dangled a gold cross at Gene. “Not while I’ve got this. This is their good-luck charm, and it doesn’t go without me attached.” He laughed. “Now, if you’re smart…”
He’d never met a more happy-go-lucky guy than Willie. Though he went out with the Kit Carson Scouts, the KCSs, as a fill-in, he mainly worked with their two combat military advisors, sat in on interrogations. Willie could read aerial photos like most people read road signs. Gene shook his head. “Sorry, friend. We’re covered.”
Willie’s green eyes narrowed. “Doc hates—I say, he hates—to operate. I’ll have a word with him.”
Gene shook his head. “Not a prayer. Doc’s going. He’s got no choice. But you, you’re going back to The World and get married. That’s an op worth experiencing.”
“Since you’re the only one married in the squad, I bow to your assessment.”
“Count your blessings.”
“I’ll save them for y’all,” Willie said.
They clasped each other’s shoulders, as close as they ever came to a hug.
“Catch y’all later.”
“Right.” Gene turned away and didn’t look back. Didn’t need to. He could feel Willie seeing him off, as always. He operated so often, with his own squad or another, that it was almost a daily ritual.
At 1300, he met Jim at the helo pad down at the far end of Seafloat. The chopper was already warming up. They climbed aboard and took off to inspect the terrain they’d be patrolling into.
Half an hour later, they landed and went directly to the briefing room where Sea Wolf and Mobile SEAL Support Teams, along with the five other members of the SEAL Team squad, were already waiting. Jim walked to the front of the room. Gene secured the door, then dropped into the nearest chair. Double security.
There was a knock on the door. Now, what the hell…He opened it to see Willie.
“Flash report,” Willie said.