Men in Green Faces (6 page)

Gene, checking his 60 and its ammo, could hear Tommy Blade’s instructions during training. “Always save enough ammunition to get yourself home.” Gene always had, and he’d always needed it.

Beside him, Jim, his young boy’s face tense under green and black streaks of face paint, pushed at his headband and relayed instructions to Roland. “Tell the copters to break contact and cover our extraction through the B-40 team, approximately three hundred feet in front of the boat, on the east bank. We’ll direct fire as they come overhead for their rocket strikes.”

Less then a minute later, closing on the B-40 kill zone, both boats and the SEAL squad opened up.

Furious, raging, Gene stood—he always stood to fire—entirely gone into the purple haze of firefight.

The Wolves roared over his head, low level, and launched their rockets into the enemy ambush team’s location. The explosions were deafening. Still firing as they passed the kill zone, Gene heard a secondary explosion that told him the B-40 team was hit. Then a second blast was caused by their own B-40 rockets going off.

Doc was working at Gene’s feet, weapon slung on his back, trying to stop the bleeding gut wound of one of the boat crew on the deck beside him.

Somewhere behind him, Gene heard a moaning, crying, hurt-so-bad sound that wasn’t him, wasn’t any one of the SEALs. Now, with the other SEALs setting security, he knelt to take Doc’s place, render what aid he could to the bleeding crewman, releasing Doc to go to a second man who had arm and shoulder wounds. He worked quickly, efficiently, knowing from training what needed to be done to keep the crewman alive until they reached Seafloat. “It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay,” he repeated, trying to counter the fear in the man’s eyes, even as he worked to staunch the bleeding and ease the pain. He stayed with him until Doc returned. Then he stood again.

He was still standing when they reached, dear God, finally, Seafloat. Standing with his 60 off safe, locked and loaded. Standing until the wounded were lifted into the medical team’s care, then moving, blood-encrusted, mud-covered, unseeing, adrenaline still pumping, through and away from the doctors, from Willie, from everyone.

Alone, he put the 60 on safe at last and went to the edge of Seafloat’s deck. There he pulled the little Bible from his pocket, the eerie fort, the jungle, the B-40 rocket teams, the explosions, the machine gunner at the R&R Center, the screams, replaying in his mind. He bent his head, closed his eyes, and prayed, before going to eat and then break down his 60, clean it, and get it ready to sing again.

G
ENE TUCKED HIS
B
IBLE
back in his shirt pocket and headed for Lima’s hootch. Inside, he grabbed a PBR, a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, opened it, and took a long swallow. They’d had nothing to eat or drink since leaving Seafloat the day before, and he could feel his adrenaline still pumping. He was uptight, energized, jumpy. The beer would help.

Crisp and sharp, it slid cold down his throat like July lemonade with about as much effect. Two more long chugs finished the can. He tossed it, lay the big 60 on his upper bunk, stripped off his gear and what was left of his ammo, then went to join the rest of the squad.

Inside, the chow hall reverberated with the clatter of breakfast trays and utensils, mixed with the usual talking, yelling, and laughter. Gene went through the food line and to the table where the squad sat. They’d saved a place for him between Roland and Cruz, who were, he saw, stuffing their faces. So were the rest, and so would he, the second he had fork in hand. His stomach felt empty enough to echo.

“Man, we were lucky,” Roland was saying. “We should all be dead, as outnumbered as we were. Pure dumb luck.”

“And damned good planning,” Cruz put in. “Nobody in the squad even so much as scratched.”

“You men were great. Just outstanding,” Jim said. “I’m really proud of you.”

Gene washed down a forkful of hotcakes with milk. “You’re damned good operators,” he said. “A shit-hot op, thanks to everybody doing what was needed and doing it right.”

“Needed, by God. Ever see a place go up like that?” Brian shook his head. “High-order. I mean, it went up really high-order. Nothing left but splinters.”

“If they’d had forces between us and extraction at the river,” Roland said, poised to take another mouthful of scrambled eggs, “everything would have been all fucked up. We’d never have made it out alive. Really lucky.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Cruz said. “Purely luck.”

Doc glanced at him. “Can say that again, You-O. Anything could have gone haywire.” Doc wiped milk off his upper lip. “The
dau-dit
bastards could have woke up, turned us to Swiss cheese. Lucky as hell they didn’t.”

“Had our lucky element here”—Roland nodded toward Gene—“riding his 60. Nobody’s ever got killed operating with him. Right?”

Gene looked up. He didn’t like that. “What you guys need to realize is, it wasn’t just luck. Somebody up there was watching over us.”

Down the table, Alex took another bite of toast, listening but saying nothing. Sometimes, Gene thought, it was like Alex had them all stuck on little specimen pins, the way he sat back and observed.

“Maybe so,” Doc said, “but did it have to be such a dick-dragger? Bad enough to have to operate in the first place, but it seems like every time I go out, when you’re there, it turns into a fuckin’ dick-dragger and I get the shit scared out of me. Takes three days just to stop shakin’.”

Laughter drowned out his last words.

Jim stood. “Good job. Good op. Every one of you, just hot. The best plan isn’t worth a damn unless it’s executed properly. You men can really execute.”

They left the chow hall and walked in a loose group back to the hootch, where they picked up a case of beer and then their weapons from atop their bunks. Outside, they regrouped around the cleaning table. Methodically they began taking the guns apart to clean and repair, stopping frequently for long swallows of beer.

“Op like that, you begin to understand why they put us through the training they did. Like the mud flats,” Gene said, unscrewing both ends of the 60’s gas port. “Remember the mud flats?”

“Remember?” Roland’s eyebrows lifted. “Ain’t no forgetting SEAL training. Thought I’d died and gone to heaven once I made it through Hell Week and Land Warfare Phase on San Clemente Island. Even this forsaken place ain’t as bad as that was.” His voice went mournful. “Everything was all fucked up. The whole time.”

Gene laughed. Couldn’t help it. He released the feed tray cover and took it off.

“Time’s now. Still can’t believe we survived that extraction,” Brian said. “They were right on us, every second.”

“Never so glad to hear claymores go off, buy us some minutes.” Jim reached for a cleaning rod. “Never so glad to see the boats and Sea Wolves coming in on step. Hoo-Ya!”

“Hoo-Ya!” the rest chorused, thrown instantly back to the response learned in training by all SEALs.

“Crewmen on the boat caught it, though.” Gene frowned, remembering. “Wonder how they’re doing.” He set down the nickel that he put behind the buffer assembly. The nickel was one of the modifications on the 60 he’d done. Gave a faster rate of fire, but there were some side effects. The firing pin could break, or the operating rod might not be able to withstand the force of the impact being put on it during firing, so there was always the possibility of fractures or cracks, or the rod breaking, leaving him with a useless weapon.

“Poor bastards,” Doc said. “We sure were lucky.”

“Hey,” Brian interjected. “What did you think of that old fort?”

“Helluva shock to see that thing, whatever it was, way out there in the jungle.” Doc shook his head. “Just a helluva shock.”

“Eerie,” Gene said, visualizing it again. “Really eerie.” Holding the operating rod up, he looked it over, shook his head, and deep-sixed it in the Son Ku Lon. SOP if they’d had heavy contact on an op. They had. He’d never had an operating rod break during an actual combat situation and never intended to. A new one went in before every op. “I could feel it,” he added.

“Felt it. Yes.” Brian reached for the gun oil. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that place. Not the time to be on point. Scary. Just like I’d walked into…what do they call those places where…like cemetery houses…”

“Mausoleums?” Roland looked at Brian, across the table from him. He was cleaning his Stoner. “Ain’t there some in the cemetery in Queens?”

Gene listened while he worked with the 60, cleaning the baked-on carbon, first with a scribe, then with a steel brush and gun solvent. Brian and Roland were tight, both being from New York City. They constantly compared their neighborhoods back there. The minute they’d discovered they both liked to eat at Orloff’s Deli across from Lincoln Center, and that they both loved to play with the windup toys at the little shop down the street, they were friends.

“No, man,” Brian said. “Tomb. Tomb is what I mean. That place was worse than a tomb. No…catacomb, like in Rome. I mean, you just knew the bodies, the weapons, everything was still in there in the clearing under all that gray gunk.”

They hadn’t been able to even think about the fort until now, Gene mused. A result of training. In enemy territory, they just blocked that kind of thing out. Had to keep the mind on the op and survival, and nothing else.

Roland used his wrist to shove a lock of his black hair back off his forehead. “One peek through the brush and I knew everything was all fucked up in that place. Relieved to get away from it.”

“Dead,” Gene said. “Never been near a place so dead.”

Jim, standing next to Roland, echoed Gene. “Dead is the word, all right. Extraordinary, to encounter something like that. Undoubtedly French. Totally unexpected. No reason to go in. Not a sign of life anywhere.”

Cruz ran a cleaning rod down the barrel of his Stoner before glancing at Jim, on his left. “Wonder what was in there.”

Doc looked across the table at him. “Boom-boom, you’re dead, is what was in there. Booby-trapped from end to end. I’d bet on it. Didn’t want to put one toe in that clearing. There weren’t even creepy-crawlies, and if critters won’t go in, men sure as hell have no business hanging around.”

“You noticed that too?” Gene asked, reassembling the 60. “Not a breath of air moved. Nothing.”

Everybody nodded, remembering. Except Alex, working on his grenade launcher, Gene noticed. What the hell went on in his head? He often wondered, especially when Alex, so quiet, so serious all the time, would break his self-imposed reserve to volunteer to make a knife kill. Gene shook his head. Very strange guy. Candidate to be a Charles Manson once back in The World.

“All I’ve got to say,” said Cruz, “is that we don’t deserve to be alive after an op like that one. But, God, it was hot. Ka-boom!”

“Hoo-Ya!” they yelled.

It took a little more time to get the bowie knife clean. Gene offered another silent prayer of thanks as he wiped rust-inhibiting lubricant on the eleven-inch blade. If the NVA machine gunner hadn’t been lost in thought, watching the campfire…if he’d heard, turned around…He wet his arm, ran the blade over it. It shaved. It was sharp enough.

With the 60 and the bowie cleaned, he turned his attention to his personal gear. Unscrewing the CO-2 cylinder from his UDT life jacket, he washed out the activating device, then the jacket itself, before screwing the cylinder back in. He hung the jacket, dripping wet, on the little post at the corner of his top bunk, and the 60 from the sling on his bed frame, ready.

Weapons and gear taken care of, he finally stripped off his wet, stinking clothes and dropped them on the floor. The Kit Carson Scouts’ women, the hootch maids, came daily to clean the place up and wash their clothes. Naked, he went back out to the fifty-five-gallon drum sitting next to the cleaning table between the hootches. The drum was always full of rainwater. They used it more often than the showers farther away on Seafloat.

No hot water anyway, Gene thought, using a pith helmet to pour water over his head and body before soaping down. So what was the difference?

Face and body clean of paint, mud, and dried blood, he returned to the hootch, dried off, pulled on a pair of shorts, and strapped the bowie back on. Between ops, it came in handy to cut wire, open crates, whatever he needed it for.

In shorts and shower shoes, he leaned against his rack. What he never wore—what no SEAL wore—was underwear. Another lesson from training. Wet sand in your shorts and you’d be rubbed bloody-raw. During training they were always wet and always sandy.

He looked around. The rest of the squad were either dressed and waiting or finishing getting dressed. And they were still talking about how amazing it was that they had lived through it all.

“Debriefing in five minutes,” Jim called as he went out the door.

Gene settled in the same chair at the rear, by the door, that he’d used for the Warning Order and Patrol Leader’s Order the previous day. He preferred his back to the wall and the exit handy. Now he began to feel fatigue. None of them had had any sleep for about thirty hours, and the op had, as Doc put it, been a real dick-dragger. Fear didn’t set in until they were safely back. Couldn’t even think about being afraid out there. Too busy trying to stay alive.

But once back and safe, fear took hold. Shook him to his very soul. Everything he couldn’t allow himself to feel during an op, he felt when he got back. Then he tried to drown the fear and blot out the memories with booze. They all did. Sometimes it worked for a while.

Jim walked to the front of the room.

Gene closed the door and settled back. The debriefing, as always, would be very orderly. Basically they’d be going over what had happened from insertion to extraction.

“Everything went to tactic,” Jim began. “The first thing is that the wounded MSSC crewmen are doing okay. They will recover, according to the medical people. The second thing is that the captured NVA officer has been released to V Corps for interrogation. Good job bringing him out, Cruz. Now, let’s get on with it.”

It wouldn’t last too long, Gene knew, because they’d had a hard target. They’d gone out to destroy, not to gather intelligence, though taking one NVA officer hostage should provide some.