Drady was a little guy whose long nose, small, dark eyes, big, ratlike front teeth, and squished face gave him the ferretlike look of a malevolent rodent. The similarity was reinforced by mousy-brown straight hair, and his quick, almost jumpy movements.
I kept repressing the urge to strangle him because he really was a nudge. On the other hand, without Dennis, we’d probably have forgotten our heads. He had a good brain for details. He was a gifted and talented point man. And as for being a yenta, when we found ourselves thirty or forty clicks from friendly forces and discovered that we’d forgotten extra firing pins for the AK-47s, or we’d lost our roll of trip wire, it was most often Drady who’d reach into his pocket with a selfsatisfied smirk, come up with the missing item, and tell me, “You mean you didn’t bring one of these, too, sir?” He may have pronounced it “sir,” but he was spelling it “cur.” I loved it when he did that.
There were fourteen of us in all—each man better than the next—and the platoon’s stats showed it. We arrived at Binh Thuy on December 17, 1967; we left on June 20,1968. In the six months between, we conducted 107 combat patrols. We killed 165 VC that we could confirm, plus another 60 or so probables. We captured just under 100 Viet Cong, destroyed five tons of their rice and eleven tons of their medicine, grabbed bunches of weapons, grenades, explosives, and other lethal goodies, sank scores of sampans, and blew up more hootches, bunkers, and canal blockades than I care to remember.
We didn’t do it by sitting on our butts in static ambushes either. That was the passive tactic Hank Mustin had devised on my first tour. And the surfer-cool West Coast SEALs from Team One sitting up in the Rung Sat Zone were still dutifully going out every night and hunkering down in the jungle, waiting for the VC to come along—and regularly getting themselves killed in large numbers as they did so.
That was the crux of the problem: the SEAL role in Vietnam had been formulated, designed, and was under the direction of non-SEALs. That was wrong. Vietnam was the first war in which SEALs fought. All the things we’d been trained to do, we were not being allowed to do. Why? The simple answer was because we were being commanded by officers who’d trained as ship drivers, aviators, or nuclear submariners, not as mean, lean, bad-ass jungle fighters. What we needed was brass-balled warriors. What we got was pus-nuts bureaucrats.
They thought of war in the conventional way, as a static affair in which the lines don’t shift very much. They thought of Vietnam as if it were Korea, or Europe in World War II—a war in which one side attacks the other, territory is taken, and the war is won. They had no concept of guerrilla operations; of wars being won or lost on the squad level. Worst of all, they wanted SEALs to be passive.
Not me. I wanted to go fucking hunting.
Part Two
UNODIR
Chapter 11
REACHING BINH THUY WAS LIKE COMING HOME AGAIN—except that during the six months I’d been gone, improvements had been made. The whole Navy complex had been moved a couple of clicks down the road, and enlarged to more than double its original size. By the time Eighth Platoon landed on December 17, the new compound had lost the goldrush, mud-in-the-streets, boomtown atmosphere. It was almost like coming back to Little Creek.
Gone were the ramshackle docks with their rickety pilings and floating oil-drums. There were new piers of concrete and wood. The barracks buildings, built of wood, had air conditioners in the windows and American-style toilets and showers along with American-style water pressure. The Quonset-hut offices had disappeared. A new complex of warehouses and repair facilities was built around steel A-frames that sat on massive poured-concrete slabs. Even a small airfield had been put in.
There was an O Club, enlisted-men’s clubs, a gym, equipment sheds for our gear, and scores of air-conditioned admin offices where the intel squirrels lived, typing reports that disappeared into a void and probably ended up in some admiral’s round file in Hawaii or back at the Pentagon.
I got my troops settled, reported in to Hank Mustin, who was still on scene as ops boss (although he would rotate back home within a few weeks). I’d brought Hank a couple of packages from home and he looked happy to see me. His friendly expression told me nothing had surfaced on my complaint about his Bronze Star.
Mustin reminded me I was in-country to be a part of a team, not to play Lone Ranger. He told me I’d be expected to file operational plans so HO would know what Eighth Platoon was up to, and to spend the majority of my time supporting riverine operations. “Things have changed here, Dick. Take a couple of weeks to familiarize yourself with the current procedures, then get to work.”
I shook his hand, pumped my biceps, saluted smartly, and said. “Whatever you say, sir.”
That’s what I said. Within six days of our arrival, however. Eighth Platoon was already slip-sliding away. Unencumbered by such niceties as chain of command, or “By your leave, sir,” Marcinko’s Muscle-bound Merry Murderous Marauders designed our own unique form of riverine support.
We left on our first patrol December 26, with lethal tidings of discomfort, and no joy whatsoever, for the VC. My elves did a nighttime insertion onto Tan Dinh Island on the Mekong River in Vin Long Province, went hunting, and killed five of Mr. Charlie. Melly fucking Clistmas.
When HQ discovered I wasn’t supporting anybody that night, they tried to get me on the radio to call us back. Somehow, as I earnestly explained later, the signals from Binh Thuy to the PBR were just too faint to read. And after we’d inserted, well, we were on radio silence so we had our receivers turned off. Besides, I’d told them what I was doing. I’d filed my ops plan, just like I’d been ordered to.
“UNODIR—Unless Otherwise Directed,” I wrote, “Eighth Platoon will insert covertly on Tan Dinh Island to recon the area and probe for enemy troop concentrations, courier networks, communications facilities, and general VC infrastructure.” It didn’t matter that Hank Mustin or the 116’s commander, a dipshit captain, hadn’t got a riverine operation going within fifteen miles of Tan Dinh. I wrote out the plan, left it at the communications center, and ordered the radioman to wait two hours before he delivered it to Mustin. No one directed me otherwise, so we did exactly what we wanted to do. By the time we got back, Hank was furious. But what could he do? We’d gotten five confirmed kills and three more probables—a good night’s work for a seasoned platoon, much less a green bunch of newcomers. He just shook his head, halfheartedly reamed me out, and then left us alone.
That set the pattern. The next night, UNODIR, we hunted south and east to Dung Island almost to the China Sea and killed a trio of VC.
Six days later we celebrated United Nations Day, January 2, 1968, by hunting VC in Ke Sach, in Ba Xuyen Province southeast of Binh Thuy. We bagged half a dozen that night. A happy Frank Scollise told me we’d probably gone over the legal limit. “We wuz poachin’ for sure by the end of the night, boss,” he said, laughing, after the boats had come to extract us and we sat scrunched on the PBR’s deck sipping a couple of cold ones.
Forty-eight hours later we disappeared UNODIR into Phong Dinh Province near Can Tho and snatched five VC out of their hootches in the middle of the night. There were probably a dozen of the enemy sleeping nearby, but no one heard us coming or going.
On January 9 we disappeared on a two-day patrol back into Phong Dinh Province. The VC had set out lots of pickets in the area because we’d made them lose a lot of face by kidnapping five soldiers. We got ’em again—wounded two and snatched six more right out of the hootches. This was getting to be fun.
By the end of our first twenty-five days we’d run just under a dozen patrols, killed about two dozen VC, captured a dozen more, destroyed forty-nine huts, sixty-four bunkers, three thousand pounds of rice, burned two fishing stations, and sunk a bunch of sampans. I heard some grumbling about our methods, but no one from Hank Mustin on down could complain because we were just too goddamn effective. Mr. Charlie definitely knew somebody baaad had just moved into the neighborhood. He just didn’t know precisely who we were—
and we weren’t about to let on.
One reason for the VC’s confusion was we’d already begun to go native. I’d stopped wearing U.S.-issue combat boots on my first Vietnam tour in favor of the sneakerlike beta boots worn by South Vietnamese troops. No sense leaving lug-soled, size 11, U.S.-government-inspected, gringo-sized footprints for Mr. Charlie to follow. Within our first month in-country we began trading our Marvin the ARVN beta boots for the tire-soled sandals favored by the VC. We didn’t wear them on every patrol, only the ones that took us way up the tiny canals and tributaries, where we’d walk the dikes for miles and recon a VC village before we snuck in and snatched bodies. As we moved farther and farther up the dikes and into the jungle, I even began to go barefoot on the trails. It was easier to sense booby traps without shoes on—and the prints I left really made the VC scratch their heads.
Some of the guys began leaving their M16s behind and bringing captured AK-47s instead. AK ammo was always plentiful because we’d take it from VC corpses—there were more VC than round-eyes in the neighborhood—and the rifles had their own distinctive sound, quite different from the craaaack of the M16’s high-velocity .223 ammo.
It was more than just switching shoes and weapons. We began to think like guerrillas, getting spookier and spookier and dirtier and dirtier. Hoss Kucinski would always carry two or three LAWS, the disposable, single-shot light antitank weapons, with us. They were useful in blowing up hootches or collapsing tunnels. We’d leave the LAWS cases behind—booby-trapped. We’d also doctor the VC’s ammo. If we found a big cache of it, we’d bring a couple of cases back with us, then have it fixed so it would explode when it was fired. The next time we’d go out, we’d take the cases with us, then leave ’em behind. Doom on you, Charlie.
I discovered new and wonderful ways in which to screw with Mr. Charlie’s head. Sometimes we’d wear our gringo boots long enough to leave a noticeable trail—footprints so wide and deep they radiated like neon. But then we’d switch to beta boots or sandals or go barefoot, backtrack carefully, and—just where the gringo footprints became most obvious—we’d conceal pressure mats on the trail. The mats were detonators, which we’d attach to Claymore mines—deadly, shaped explosive charges. It was Eighth Platoon’s personable way of telling the VC, “Hi, guys, we’re heeeere.”
The first week in January, I ran into a SEAL buddy of mine named Jose Taylor, who was attached to Mike Force, the CIA’s elite special reaction units. Mike Force teams worked with groups of Montagnard tribesmen staging quick, effective raids on large VC and NVA positions, or coming to the rescue of Special Forces teams that were in danger of being overrun. Some of the Mike Force people had begun wearing VC-like black pajamas on their raids, and the idea seemed like a good one to me. I asked if he could grab me a couple of dozen blacks, sized large. They arrived the next day. From another source I dug up some old French camouflage fatigues and we stockpiled them, too.
What I wanted was to cause the VC to wonder just who these masked men really are. Are they black-pajama ghosts or are they leftovers from the French Foreign Legion or what? Were we 14 men—or were we 114? The more unsettled the VC became, the better off my SEALs would be.
We should also, I believed strongly, expand our area of operations. Despite the fact that some of the senior officers thought my UNODIR sorties were outrageous, because they weren’t staged in direct support of a bigger operation, I was convinced that what I was doing fell under the rubric of conventional SEAL ops: infiltrations, ambushes, and snatches. And they all revolved around water, whether it was rivers, canals, or rice paddies.
On my first tour, I’d begun hitting the VC while they were off guard. I’d done it by moving out of the river and up the smaller canals and tributaries, traveling along the dikes so we could hit the enemy before he got into an alert, defensive mode.
Now, I wanted to get closer to the main supply routes, to cut off Mr. Charlie’s head before he even began the staging process. So far as I could tell, the best place to do that would be up on the Cambodian border, where hundreds—even thousands—of North Vietnamese were regularly infiltrating, with their supply convoys, along the series of Ho Chi Minh trails that led from the north.
The provincial capital closest to Cambodia was a city called Chau Doc, which sat not five clicks from the border. Problem was, even though Chau Doc sat right on the Bassac River, which ran all the way northwest to Phnom Penh, it was about seventy-five miles from Binh Thuy, and the Navy had no riverine operations anywhere close. Nor, when I checked, were there plans for any. Worse, the Army’s Special Forces considered Chau Doc their personal domain, and the Navy brass wasn’t about to ruffle the Army’s feathers.
It was time for another UNODIR. Gordy and I were sitting in the O Club having a few cold ones when I broached the subject of Cambodia with him. He was ready for anything, as he’d just finished a command performance of his piéce de rèsistance, the Dance of the Flaming Asshole, which always brought the house down.
D.O.T.F.A.? It was an interpretative maneuver in which Gordy would first get himself smashed on bottled water, or perhaps even something as strong as ginger ale. Then he’d jump up on a table, drop his trousers and skivvies, stick toilet paper up into the crack of his ass, unroll about six feet, then have someone light it. The object was to see how close he could let the flame come to his asshole, before pinching the fire out. It was a great, classic SEAL-type act.
He was smarting because he’d waited too long until pinching this particular evening. “Listen, shit-for-brains, I’ve got the perfect cure for your sore sphincter,” I told him.
“What’s that, boss?”
“A couple of days of sight-seeing over the holidays.” It was coming up on the Vietnamese Lunar New Year—Tet—when things generally slowed down.
“Anyplace special?”
“I was thinking about Chau Doc.”
“Chau Doc for the Tet holiday.” Gordy thought about that for a few seconds.
“We see the sights up there, then just before the cease-fire we go out in the woods and set up a listening post.”
A beatific look spread across his face. Gordy knew what was coming. The technique was one I’d devised on my first tour. When I was instructed to not make contact with the enemy, I’d simply set up a listening post so far behind VC lines that they’d stumble across me and start shooting. I was allowed to shoot back. “That should really piss everybody off,” he said.
“I thought so.”
“How do we do it?”
“We just go.”
“UNODIR?”
“Whatever. Screw ’em. If anybody asks, we’re taking the platoon on R and R.”
So the second week in January, I commandeered a couple of Navy Seawolf helicopters, took the whole platoon along for the ride, and choppered upriver singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” as we went. The pilots got into the mood of things, too, buzzing villages and swooping down to wet their skids on the river surface as we careened up the Bassac, northwest to Chau Doc. We dropped into a dusty Special Forces compound at the edge of the city, an old French hotel that had been buttressed with sandbags, Quonset commo shacks, reinforced ammo bunkers, concertina wire, and guard towers.
We’d dressed ourselves like good tourists should: the full camouflage number on our faces, our heads wrapped in bandannas, sporting our new black pajamas and beta boots. There were bandoliers of ammo draped Pancho Villa style around our necks, and we carried a good assortment of special weapons to assist us in any show-and-tell we might be asked to perform. I affected a silenced 9mm pistol in a shoulder holster and slung a Swedish K submachine gun over my arm. Gordy Boyce brought his stainless-steel, short-barreled, 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun with its duckbill attachment. It sprayed a deadly horizontal pattern of buckshot and was effective in the paddies. Hoss Kucinski humped four LAWS on his back. Ron Rodger and Clarence Risher carried their Stoners and wrapped their upper bodies with ammo belts. Doc Nixon and a few of the others had AK-47s. No one wore dog tags, or an
y sign of rank or unit.
Six of us dropped out of the first chopper, waved it off, and then brought the second one in. It disgorged the rest of the platoon, heaved itself skyward, rotated, and flew south.
A wide-eyed Special Forces sergeant major came prancing out of the HQ, looking like the Queen of the Morning. He eyeballed us through the dust, and his expression told me he didn’t like what he saw. “Who the hell are you?”
“Marcinko,” I said with a grin. “Lieutenant JG Marcinko, SEAL Team Two, Sergeant.”
I saluted. So did he—eventually. “We’re from the riverine force at Binh Thuy.”
He looked at me dumbly. I spoke slowly. “SEALs—you’ve heard about us? Navy SpecWar units attached to Task Force 116?” I was drawing a blank. “We’re interested in looking at the vulnerabilities here in Chau Phu district, and expanding our maritime activities into your theater of operations.”
“We don’t have any vulnerabilities, sir.”
I winked through my camouflage. “Glad to hear it, Sergeant.” And fuck you very much, too.
Upon request, Gordy and I were ushered in to visit a commander, a colonel, whose spotless office boasted a huge American flag on a six-foot staff that sat behind his gunmetalgray metal desk. He looked like a recruiting poster: starched uniform, web pistol belt and fancy stainless-steel Colt .45 pistol, sitting at attention, his painstakingly rolled shirtsleeves exposing tanned biceps, his steel-gray hair precisely and severely crew-cut. His creases were ironed to perfection. His salute was drill-team flawless.
But it was all a facade. Sitting behind his handcrafted SECTOR CHIEF ADVISER desk sign, Colonel Spit and Polish reeked of stale whiskey. Behind his radiant, gold-rimmed aviator glasses, his eyes were betrayed by a red-veined alcoholic tinge. Behind them lay the frightened soul of a gunshy mannequin who’d lost all hunger for combat. I could read him like a book—and I didn’t particularly like a single sentence.
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