Death in the Jungle Page 23

  But Victor Charlie didn’t let me down. He must’ve finished with his woman at 0500 hours, because at 0515 I heard his paddle smack the side of his sampan outside of our right flank position. I tugged the communication line between Dicey and me two times. He answered right back. Then I listened hard, anticipating the telltale splash of a paddle. Several seconds dragged by, then I heard a splash, followed by many more in a perfect rowing rhythm.

  I jerked the line three times: “the enemy is here!” Raising the M-16/XM-148, I saw the sampan passing through the middle of our kill zone, coming toward me on the left flank. With my finger on the M-16 trigger, I anxiously waited for Mr. Meston to initiate the ambush. Precious seconds went by, and nothing happened. The sampan was now in front of Dicey to my right, and I could clearly see the figures of three men in the boat. Three seconds later, they were in front of me and leaving the ambush site.

  “Shit!” I barked, then I squeezed the trigger. All I heard was a loud click. The hair stood up on the back of my neck at the hollow sound of the dud round.

  Dicey and Flynn, upon hearing my attempt at commencing the ambush, suddenly opened up with the Stoner machine gun and the M-60. I slipped my finger onto the XM-148 trigger and fired a 40mm canister round at the sampan. I then extracted and ejected the dud 5.56mm round, recharged the chamber with a fresh cartridge and shot an entire 30-round magazine at the three VC. My rapid fire was joined by all of my teammates to my right as we collectively sent close to a thousand bullets over the stream.

  In the moonlight, I could see the shape of the sampan. No human silhouettes were visible in the boat any longer. Still, we continued blasting the sampan and the water around it for several more seconds.

  As the shooting died down, Mr. Meston lifted a hand parachute flare above his head and pointed it at the sky over the sampan. Once he was sure he could fire it through the canopy of trees above us, he slammed the base of the flare with his right palm and set it off. The thrust was so powerful that the twelve-inch cylindrical casing slipped over Meston’s muddy hand and came back and hit him squarely in the mouth, splitting his lower lip completely in two and knocking out several teeth.

  The para flare rocketed to a height of about one hundred feet, then the parachute opened and the illuminating charge caught fire and lit up the stream below. It was suddenly “daylight in the swamp.”

  I easily spotted the sampan drifting toward the opposite side of the stream. The three VC were nowhere to be seen. Quickly, I fired two 40mm HE rounds over the sampan and into the trees on the bank, just in case one of the enemy had made it that far. The grenades blew branches and debris into the air.

  I looked at Mr. Meston, who had his hands cupped over his mouth. Blood was oozing between his fingers.

  In a muffled voice, I heard Meston say, “Pearson, take over! Take charge!”

  Pearson wasted no time in telling me to swim after the sampan. I handed my weapon to Dicey and began pulling my duck fins over my coral booties. As I finished, I heard Pearson calling for the Boston Whalers to “get us out of here!” I seconded the motion in my mind, remembering all too well that there were hundreds of VC in easy hailing distance, and we sure as hell had hailed them.

  I entered the cool water with my K-bar knife in hand as the para flare started to flicker and die out. Using underwater strokes in order to keep a low profile, I swam without making splashes or lots of ripples beneath the light of the flare and the moon. Unfortunately for me, the flare quickly extinguished, and I couldn’t see anything but the water directly under my nose. My night vision was lost.

  I continued swimming in the direction of the opposite bank, trusting that one of my teammates would send up another flare. My nose was barely out of the water as I went, and my nostrils burned with the smell of blood; someone had crawled out of bed too early for his own good in the Rung Sat Special Zone.

  I blinked my eyes hard a few times in an attempt to regain my vision, but things got even darker as I swam into the shadows of the trees lining the shoreline. I tightly grasped my knife in my right hand, aware of the fact that I could bump into a gook at any moment. And no matter if he was still alive or already dead, I planned to stick him twice before I inquired as to his well-being.

  Suddenly, a flare ignited high over my head, and in the bright light I saw the sampan hung up next to the riverbank. I swam to it, and as I reached for the bow I saw a gook lying on his back inside the boat. His knees were up and his arms grotesquely pointed skyward. Bullet holes were evident from his head to his feet. His heart protruded halfway out of his chest.

  I also noted that there was a large water jug sitting in the middle of the sampan, full of bullet holes but still standing upright. The sampan, too, was bullet-riddled. I grabbed the two and towed my catch back to my teammates as the para flare extinguished above me.

  When I made it across the stream, Pearson extended a hand and helped me out of the water. I hung onto the bow and pulled the sampan partway out of the water with me. Pearson explored the sampan and discovered some papers and a Chicom SKS semiautomatic rifle underneath the dead man. He salvaged the loot, then together we turned over the sampan and dumped the lifeless body into the stream. Under the circumstances, it was the closest we could come to an honorable burial at sea for the misfortunate fellow.

  As the body floated away and quickly disappeared below the surface of the water, Pearson told me that he had seen a second body rise up and then sink in the middle of the stream as I had been towing the sampan. That gave us two confirmed KIAs. The third VC’s whereabouts was officially unknown, but unofficially I’d have bet my Bad Girl that he’d smiled his last smile.

  Speaking of smiles, Mr. Meston wouldn’t have much of one for quite a while, I thought to myself as I gathered my gear and waited uneasily for extraction. In the moonlight, I watched him dabbing his mouth with a handkerchief. He had to be disgusted, as a self-inflicted punch in the mouth was no SEAL’s But what was done was done, and at least Mr. Meston still had a heart, unlike a couple of gooks I’d run into shortly before.

  A minute later, I thanked God when I heard the power props of the Boston Whalers whirring downstream. Some of the bravest men in the world were brazenly entering this hellhole to save our butts from an inevitable counterattack.

  When the coxswains of the two Whalers located us, they rammed their bows into the riverbank so the nine of us could jump aboard. Nothing had ever felt better to me than the fiberglass deck of the boat where I plopped my rear end, even though it was as cold as, well, steel. Cold, but safe, and being safe was at the top of my priority list right then.

  The Whalers roared away from the ambush site, dramatically rescuing the good guys as they were paid to do and prayed to. We left behind two or three dead enemies, depending upon who was counting. Oh, yeah, and Mr. Meston’s teeth.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mission Twenty-seven

  “Life without the courage for death is slavery.”

  Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

  DATE: 23 December 1967

  TIME: 1445H to 1745H

  UNITS INVOLVED: Foxtrot 1, 2, Army UH1B

  TASK: Recon patrol, destroy VC bunkers with demolitions

  METHOD OF INSERTION: Army slick UH1B helo

  METHOD OF EXTRACTION: Army slick UH1B helo

  TERRAIN: Nipa palm, partly defoliated

  TIDE: 1340H-3.3 feet, 2130H-12.1 feet

  WEATHER: Clear

  SEAL TEAM PERSONNEL:

  Lt. Meston, Patrol Leader/Rifleman, M-16

  Lt. (jg) Schrader, Ass’t Patrol Leader/Rifleman, M-16

  PR1 Pearson, Point/Rifleman, M-16

  RM2 Smith, Ass’t Point/Cameraman/Rifleman, CAR-15

  MM2 Funkhouser, Automatic Weapons, Stoner

  BT2 McCollum, Ordnance/Grenadier, M-79

  BT2 Moses, Grenadier, M-79

  ADJ2 Markel, Radioman/Rifleman, M-16

  ADJ2 Flynn, Automatic Weapons, Stoner

  HM2 Brown, Corpsman/Rifleman, M-16

 
SN Dicey, Rifleman, M-16

  Gieng (LDNN SEAL), Rifleman, M-16

  AZIMUTHS: None

  ESCAPE: 270 degrees

  CODE WORDS: Insert-Ford, Bunker Site-Chevy, Loading Charge-Blast Off, Extract-Buick

  Over the next three and a half weeks, we went out on five missions. On the first, I spotted a large deer that ran from beneath the helo when we inserted. Then on ambush at dusk, a large buck appeared just twenty-five yards away from me. He was fat and sleek and had a rack similar to an elk’s with five points on each antler. He foraged around for about ten minutes, barked a few times, then disappeared into the jungle. The week before my sightings, Mr. Meston had seen an enormous deer walk to the edge of the river where we had been positioned on an ambush site. I believed that to be the first sighting ever by a SEAL of a deer in the Rung Sat.

  On the second mission, Foxtrot Second Squad killed two VC and expropriated two weapons and a sampan. Before the hit, I had discovered a booby trap, a pineapple-type hand grenade secured in a tree, with a trip wire running across the trail from the grenade to another tree. Fortunately, I had found the booby trap with my eyes and not my feet.

  In between these missions, the fourteen members of Echo Platoon had invited the rest of us to their going-away party at the chief’s club, where the SEALs, helo crews, and boat support personnel consumed steaks, baked beans, French fries, and salad along with twenty cases of beer and two cases of hard liquor. The next day, Echo Platoon flew to Subic Bay on the first leg of its journey home, and four days later, 10 December, the twelve men of Bravo Platoon replaced Echo at Nha Be. The Bravo Platoon members were Lt. (jg) Van Heertum, WO1 Casey, EM2 Lou DiCroce, RMSN McHugh, GMG3 Jewett, HMC Blackburn, SA Keith, AN Klann, ETNSN Luksik, TM1 Payne (because of wounds Payne was later replaced by EM2 Puckett), SN Antone, and FN Hyatt.

  On our last mission, which was my twenty-sixth of the tour, we patrolled to a VC base camp, which the occupants had left in a hurry before our arrival, leaving behind hot ashes in their kitchen. We blew and burned several huts and four sampans with incendiary grenades, keeping some papers and M-79 ammunition we found at the scene.

  The next day was Friday, December 22, 1967. Some VC swimmers struck back at us in the early morning hours by floating a contact-detonated mine into one of the civilian tankers anchored at the naval base. The tanker suffered some damage but did not sink.

  In the spirit of tit for tat, Lieutenant Meston passed a warning order early in the day, then led our briefing at 1800 hours. We were to insert by helo into an area close to the Vam Sat River where no enemy was then supposed to be. With information provided through an intelligence system run by Marine First Lieutenant Winsenson, we knew that a huge bunker complex made out of logs and mud existed in the area, and our job was to destroy the bunkers before the VC came back.

  After the briefing, all of us got very busy preparing our gear. Since the area of operation was not hot, I left Bad Girl behind and carried a lighter Car-15 instead. Like the other men, I would tote ten pounds of C-3 explosives. In addition, as the designated photographer, I was to carry a Nikonos camera and take slide pictures of the op.

  The next morning, reveille came at 0515 hours. After a hearty breakfast, Foxtrot 1st and 2nd Squads assembled at the helo pad at 0630 hours. The army helos, however, didn’t show up from inserting Alpha and Bravo platoons in the T-10 area, so our mission was canceled until 1400 hours.

  At 1300 hours, we had a rebriefing, then we boarded the slicks and headed for the Vam Sat. The flight took just forty minutes, and with no reason for concern over close proximity of the enemy, we were dropped in a partly defoliated mangrove swamp just outside the bunker complex boundary.

  We moved into the complex area and were amazed at the sight. I counted eight bunkers and they were the biggest I’d ever seen, with each one measuring at least ten feet by twenty feet. The bunkers were made with mud and logs and were built on muddy ground, designed to absorb the shock of aerial bombings and ground vibrations. Craters from U.S. bombs lay within twenty-five yards of some bunkers but appeared to have done little or no damage to them.

  Foxtrot 1st and 2nd Squads were divided into four teams of three men apiece. Funkhouser, McCollum, and I were assigned two bunkers on the eastern edge of the complex. We were to enter the bunkers with flashlights, looking carefully for booby traps. After placing C-3 explosives at strategic reinforcement points within each bunker, we were to detonate the charges to destroy them.

  As the three of us approached our first bunker, Funkhouser halted in his tracks and pointed at a crater just ten meters from the bunker entrance.

  “Oh, my gosh,” he said, his mouth agape, “look at that ten-foot hole!”

  I looked. “That’s what a thousand-pound bomb will do for you.”

  McCollum stopped beside us, gazing at the crater. He snorted, then said, “Maybe we got lucky and a dink was standin’ there takin’ a leak.”

  I chuckled. “That’s what I’d like to think. Another slopehead became a dead head.” Ignoring noise discipline, we all laughed. With the enemy far away, we were not being real tactical about security.

  “You go in first, Mr. Point Man,” McCollum said to me at the entrance to the bunker.

  I clicked on my flashlight and aimed the beam inside. “No sweat,” I told him, happy to lead the way.

  “Just watch out for a cobra,” warned Funkhouser, half seriously.

  “Or a man-eating man-a-cheetah,” added McCollum quickly.

  I looked back at my teammates before stepping inside the bunker.

  “Anything else, fellas?”

  Funkhouser glanced at McCollum, who shrugged his shoulder and said, “Don’t forget the booby traps.”

  I nodded my head, pointed the flashlight and my rifle into the bunker and stepped inside. My flashlight beam probed every nook and cranny of the large chamber. After a minute of exploration, I was sure that no gooks or goblins awaited me.

  McCollum and Funkhouser entered the bunker and all of us looked for the best place to position our breaching charges. McCollum checked out the roof and quickly made a suggestion.

  “Right here is the main log in the overhead,” he said, pointing at the beam. “What do you think?”

  Funky and I agreed with Muck’s assessment. “Let’s do it,” Funky affirmed.

  I took the ten pounds of C-3 that I’d been carrying and fastened it to the log with a piece of parachute suspension line. At the same time, McCollum attached five pounds of C-3 to a corner support post. I then ran sensitized detonation cord from my charge to McCollum’s. Funky handed me two six-foot lengths of safety fuse. On one end was a nonelectric blasting cap and on the other was an M-60 fuse lighter. We double-primed our charges, as always, in case one of the nonelectric caps was a dud. McCollum helped me tape the two nonelectric caps to the center of the det cord.

  Just before we lit up our handiwork, Funkhouser went outside to make sure no other SEALs were nearby and yelled, “Fire in the hole,” three times. A few seconds later, he stuck his head back into the bunker and called to us, “The coast is clear!” Then McCollum and Funky left and walked seventy meters to where a convenient crater, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, welcomed us.

  I pulled the two M-60 fuse lighters, and as the safety fuse started smoking, I hustled out of the bunker and followed Muck and Funky.

  “The charges should go off in five minutes and ten seconds,” stated Funky. We hid down in the hole, peeking over the top so as not to miss the fireworks.

  After five minutes had passed, McCollum gave a verbal five-second countdown. “Five, four, three, two …” Before he could say, “One,” the C-3 blew.

  “You’re one second off, Funky!” Muck commented.

  “Eat your heart out!” barked Funky from deep within the crater.

  I saw little of the blast as my natural reflex action was to duck my head, especially when the charge was but seventy meters from our cover. The detonation, however, was muffled, and when I raised my head, I saw that the b
unker was still standing. There was a sizable hole in the roof and a smaller one through a side wall, but that was all. Top-notch design and construction of the bunker had enabled it to shrug off most of the effects of our modified breach charges.

  “Hoo-yah!” shouted Funkhouser, waving an arm over his head in a celebratory gesture.

  “Whoa-yeah!” McCollum yelled in my ear, then he slapped me on the back. “I love playin’ demo man!”

  “Me, too,” I told him, “but we didn’t play too well. The damn bunker’s a long way from being destroyed.”

  McCollum climbed out of the crater, chuckling. “Hell,” he said, “that don’t matter. We’ll just blow the son of a bitch again!” He waved five pounds of C-3 under my nose. “This should be good for bustin’ another air vent through the roof.” He grinned at me, and I grinned back.

  As we set the next charge, several blasts were heard from other areas of the bunker complex where our teammates were taking care of business. We wasted little time in adding to the ruckus. Back in the crater again, we kept our heads up this time and watched as sticks and mud blew into the air. The roof of the bunker was now half gone and the remaining portion was ruptured and loose enough for us to tear apart by hand.

  After pulling apart the ceiling and knocking down the bunker walls, we used Funkhouser’s ten pounds of C-3 on the second bunker to rip a huge hole in the roof. Another charge or two was needed to wreck the sturdy bunker, but the three of us were then devoid of explosives.

  I located Mr. Meston and told him of our predicament. He cussed the strength of the VC bunkers and said all four of our groups were experiencing the same problems. He immediately radioed Nha Be TOC requesting more C-3 to be delivered by helos. While we waited, I snapped several pictures of the bunkers. Then I took a picture of one of the helos as four haversacks containing twenty pounds each of explosives, safety fuse, and M-60 fuse lighters were dropped down to us.