They arrived in minutes, Drew at the wheel. Harry jumped out and took Risher’s legs. Doc had him under the arms. I held his head.
“Shit.” Harry eased the kid’s body into the back of the jeep. He held one of Risher’s hands, his face grim. Doc Nixon had the other hand. “You dumb fuck,” Harry said to Risher. “There’s a couple of cases of cold beer at Westy’s. At least you could have waited—”
Doc covered Risher with a blanket. Somehow, we all clambered into the jeep and Drew took off.
He was going. I’d morphined him right away, and he wasn’t in any pain. But he was going. It was in his eyes. His eyes were already dead.
He knew it, too. He looked up at me like a fucking puppy. I was mad at the son of a bitch. He’d asked for it. “You stupid cockbreath pus-nuts asshole,” I kept saying, holding his head in my hands, trying to push his goddamn brains back inside his shattered skull with my thumb.
My black pajamas were sopping wet with his blood. My hands were sticky. I could feel skull fragments on my fingertips.
“You stupid dumb fuck,” is all I could say as he lay dying in my lap.
There was incredible rage in me right then. Some of it was directed at Risher himself. If he hadn’t been dying, I would probably have killed him myself. He was dying because he’d been stupid: he’d walked down the middle of the street. You don’t do that, and he knew it, and he did it anyway, and therefore he was a stupid asshole cuntbreath and he deserved what he’d gotten.
Except he didn’t deserve it, and as he lay there, his head in my lap and his brains in my hand, I knew he didn’t deserve it at all.
There was incredible rage in me right then because I felt Risher shouldn’t have been there in the first place. We were SEALs. We were jungle warriors, not dipshit urban policemen. The goddamn colonel and the Special Forces should have been out in the street taking the point instead of sitting behind six rolls of concertina razor wire and ten-foot-high concrete walls in his fucking neat-as-a-fucking-West-Pointparade-ground compound.
There was incredible rage in me right then because my man had been killed by some goddamn, stinking, seventy-poundssoaking-wet, VC Mr. Charlie pus-nuts sniper. Right then I hated all Vietnamese, a useless class of nuc mam-swilling subhumans who needed two sticks to pick up one grain of rice but used only one to carry two buckets of shit.
And there was incredible rage in me right then because, when Risher was sniped, my own immortality got nicked as well. First night out in Vietnam the AK round came skipping across the river and popped the guy next to me between the eyes. Why him and not me? I was running the trails on Dung Island barefoot one day, and the man behind me stepped right into my footprint, and—blam—a small land mine went off. It blew the beta boot right off his foot. Why him and not me? Guys on either side of me had been hit. Why them and not me?
Why? Because I was fucking immortal, that’s why.
That’s what I’d felt. That’s why I’d do anything, go anywhere—against any odds—and tell my men that with me, they were always gonna be okay. Dings, yeah. Scratches, yeah—even an occasional pop now and then. But nobody dies with Marcinko.
Unit fucking integrity. Nobody dies. You will be all right with Lieutenant ( j.g.) Rick Marcinko, Demo Dick, Sharkman of the Delta. Now hear this: nobody dies.
In the last twelve hours I’d ducked an AK round shot straight into my face at ten paces—and survived. I’d run my platoon through a minefield at night—and we’d made it without a scratch. We’d been chased by a company of VC—and no one had anything more serious than a sprained ankle. Eleven of us had taken on two hundred VC, and we’d driven them out of the north side of Chau Doc, block by goddamn block, and no one was any the worse for wear.
Until now.
I don’t know who I hated more: the VC scumbag who’d shot Risher, or Colonel Shit and Polish, who was too much of a pussy to do his own fighting, or the goddamn Vietnamese who had been doing this crap to each other for generations. Fact is, any of the above wouldn’t have wanted to be alone with me right then. It would have been dangerous.
I caressed Risher’s dying face with my hand. “You stupid dumb fuck.”
I learned some bitter lessons from Risher’s death. The most important one affected the way in which I waged war from then on. My primary mission, as I now saw it, was to bring my men back home alive. How I did that was of no consequence to me. If it meant that during interrogation sessions I became tougher, even brutal, to VC suspects, so be it. If it meant that we had to become more ruthless in battle, then that’s what we did. Indeed, if keeping us all alive was my first priority, killing VC was my second. And third was the development of SEAL tactics—using the war to find the most effective way to employ SEALs in a hostile environment. Those lessons stayed with me for the rest of my career. There are those who think I’m bloodthirsty—too “dirty”—when it comes to tactics. Fact is, I’ll do what has to be done to keep my men alive, and kill as many of the enemy as I can.
Further, I realized after Chau Doc that we Americans meant nothing to the Vietnamese. Not to our alleged allies in the South, and not to our adversaries from the North. It was their war. They’d been fighting it for centuries. We were simply another impediment to them, another ephemeral invasion of round-eyed, white-skinned ghosts. So they’d mess with us—both our allies and our adversaries. For example, ever since Male magazine had put me on its cover—“Lt. ‘Demo Dick’ Marcinko—The Navy’s Deadliest Viet Nam Shark-Man” was how it read—I’d become the target of dozens of jokes and pranks from my fellow SEALs. I didn’t mind them—I got even with each and every one of the pranksters. And I can take a joke as well as anyone.
I wasn’t too keen, however, about the VC Wanted Posters tacked to trees and hootches all over the Delta about three months after the Male article was published. The first of them read, “Award of 50,000 piasters to anyone who could kill First Lieutenant Demo Dick Marcinko, a gray-faced killer who had brought death and trouble to the Chau Doc Province during the Lunar New Year.”
That was me, all right. And I didn’t much care for the fact that they not only knew my name but knew that I’d been at Chau Doc for Tet. So much for operational security.
I took down another one during a raid we staged in Ke Sach in mid-May. “Award of 10,000 piasters to anyone who could kill the leader of the secret blue-eye killer’s party that massacred many families [here] during the United Nation Day of 2 January, 1968.” That was me, too. We’d been the only ones operating in Ke Sach January second. We’d killed six—maybe even seven—VC.
Such tactics from the VC were to be expected—although to be honest I found it ironic that they read Male. It took me longer to learn to how to “read” the friendlies. They had their own ways of playing head games with you.
When the platoon would go through a village, we’d often stop to have a meal. Gordy and I carried Vietnamese piasters, and we always paid for the rice and fish we ate. It served two purposes. One, we didn’t have to carry food, which allowed us to make up the weight in bullets. Second, it brought us, I’d always thought, closer to the people. I thought so because it made sense to me, round-eyes that I am, that by eating with them and spending time with them, they would come to trust us.
And in fact, the villagers we spent time with were friendly. They would often come up to us and touch us as we hunkered down with our rice bowls.
In the beginning, I thought it was because we were strangers and they wanted to feel our uniforms, made from unfamiliar material, and see the weapons up close and see if our hairy, white skin felt the same as their smooth, yellow skin. Then I learned what they were really doing when they touched us.
They were passing on their demons to us.
They were protecting themselves and their villages; passing on their evil spirits to the round-eyes by touching them. In Vietnam, evil spirits are passed that way.
So I began passing them back.
When kids touched me, holding me around the knees, I’d take them in
my arms and wipe some of my camouflage grease on their faces or their hair. When the elders rubbed my arms to feel the hair, I’d rub them right back. I’d smile and grab them and say, “Chao hom-nay-dep-troi,” which was the equivalent of “Have a nice day.”
Fuck me, Charlie? Du-ma-nhieu—Fuck you! Doom on you, Charlie.
Chapter 13
I FLEW BACK TO VIRGINIA BEACH EARLY IN JULY OF 1968 to take on an assignment that turned out to be tougher than fighting VC—becoming a full-time husband and father. My son, Richie, was five; my daughter, Kathy, was three. Neither had seen much of me before. (Little Kathy screamed and screamed when I picked her up during the first couple of weeks I was home.) Nor, for that matter, had I seen much of KathyAnn. Between training sessions and my two Vietnam tours, I’d been away from home more than twenty of the previous twenty-four months—and the visits home had been in oneor two-week spurts.
So there was a fair amount of settling in to be done, not to mention a two-page, single-spaced list of “honeydews”—house and yard maintenance chores-that had gone awaiting because I was overseas. I was proud of our home, a tiny brick ranch house around the corner from the Princess Anne Shopping Mall. The place was small, and it was modestly furnished. But it was ours—we’d bought it between my first and second Vietnam tours. That act alone made me different from my parents, who’d never owned any of the houses in which we’d lived.
Over the summer of ’68, I spent my days with the Teams, working as a training officer for the kids who were about to ship over to Vietnam. Most of the time was spent at a place we called Dismal Swamp, which was located near the North Carolina border. I took Richie with me on one trip. He had a blast. He shared my sleeping bag and got to plink beer cans with the BB gun I bought for him. He met some of the SEALs from Eighth Platoon and watched, amazed, as Freddie Toothman caught water moccasins with his bare hands and wrung their necks.
He also tasted his first venison. One night, a deer made the mistake of swimming across the river just below our campsite. The guys saw it, and I jumped off the pier with a short machete, cut its throat, and dragged it underwater to drown it. Then I pulled it out onto the shore and Richie watched as I gutted it—I even showed him how we’d learned to crawl inside the carcass to stay warm during survival training—and he ate grilled Bambi chops for the first time. He loved ’em.
I played SEAL trainer until November. Then I volunteered to go back to Vietnam.
My argument was that I couldn’t really be an effective trainer unless I knew what was happening in-country. The games that had worked for me during the first six months of 1968 might not work for SEALs during the first six months of 1969.
The Navy, however, had other plans. In its infinite wisdom, the Bureau of Naval Personnel-BUPERS-assigned me to a vacant slot as the special operations adviser at COMPHIBTRALANT. For the uninitiated, that’s Navyspeak for COMmander, AmPHIBious TRAining Command AtLANTic. I’d still be working at the Little Creek Naval Base—in fact, COMPHIBTRALANT was only two blocks from SEAL Team Two’s HQ. But those two blocks of sidewalk were separated by a vast gulf of tradition and behavior. As the SpecWar/COMPHlBTRALANT, I’d hold a staff position.
At the Teams, everything revolved around the physical. You trained endlessly. You drank with the boys nightly. The world was rough-and-tumble macho, full of fuck-you-verymuch tough talk and I Am the Baddest Motherfucker on the Block attitude. T-shirts and shorts were the uniform of the day, and if your hair wasn’t quite perfectly combed, well, tough titty, dickhead.
Now, all of a sudden I was going to become the kind of officer I’d always ridiculed—a staff puke. The prospect of turning into a bureaucratic, dip-dunk, whining, drag-ass paper pusher did not excite me in the least. And I wasn’t shy about expressing my sentiments to anyone who’d listen.
“What the hell do I need this staff crap for?” I asked KathyAnn one night. We were sitting in our living room. The kids had been put down for the night and we had a couple of beers in our hands.
“I don’t know. What do you need it for?”
It was a valid question. I thought about it. “Career track I guess.”
“So … ?”
“There’s so much bullshit involved,” I said evasively. I sipped at my beer, peering over the can at my wife. In fact, I wasn’t worried about bureaucratic bullshit at all. I knew I could handle that. What made me apprehensive was much more fundamental and deep-rooted. At COMPHIBTRALANT I knew I would have to prove myself on a battlefield that was not, so far as I was concerned, tilted in my favor.
In Vietnam, I’d gone nose to nose with Naval Academy grads or ROTC reserve officers and won. I was a tougher, more resourceful warrior than any of them, and they knew it. Because I’d been an enlisted man, I could talk trash with the boat crews or curse out sailors with a two-minute stream of profanity as articulate as any master chief’s. Because I’d spent my time pushing the limits of SpecWar, there was nothing I wouldn’t do on the battlefield—with or without the permission of my superiors. That was fine so long as I remained overseas. But the rowdy renegade’s reputation I’d won in Vietnam was not, I knew, something that would ultimately boost my Navy career.
Regular Navy officers—ship drivers, aviators, or nuclear submariners—mistrust SpecWarriors. That is a fact of life. Even when I was a full commander, wet-behind-the-ears ensigns straight out of the Academy would look at the Budweiser crest—the eagle, anchor, and trident emblem all SEALs wear—on my uniform blouse and sneer. They knew that in the Navy caste system I was an untouchable; that my kind were seen as unpredictable knuckle-draggers. They knew they’d make admiral, while we SEALs would not.
Moreover, success at COMPHIBTRALANT would be based on the way I expressed and conducted myself, and—to be frank—I had no idea whether or not I could carry it off. Despite the fact that I’d just been promoted to full lieutenant, I was still a high-school dropout. My GED certificate had been won during a Med cruise at the behest of Ev Barrett, whose spelling skills stopped somewhere short of words with three syllables. Sure, I’d handled Barren’s paperwork during my time at UDT-21 and UDT-22 and written “barn-dance cards” (after-action reports), fitreps, and commendation citations for my squads and platoon in Vietnam. But I had no experience in report writing; no training in the Machiavellian craft of memo-drafting. As a COMPHIBTRALANT staff officer, I’d be as vulnerable and exposed to bureaucratic flak as any NILO roach would have been to the real thing at Chau Doc during Tet.
There was a secondary element to my unease, too: KathyAnn. She’d never taken on any of the ticket-punching volunteer work that officers’ wives are expected to do. How could she? She was stuck with two young kids and a house to maintain, and a husband who hadn’t been around for the better part of two years. Still, if I planned to make the Navy my life—and I did—we’d both have a bunch of rough edges to smooth off in a big hurry. I’d need a college education, and Kathy would need to begin acting like a junior officer’s wife, if we wanted to whirl ourselves up the old career cone. I had more butterflies in my gut over my new assignment than I’d ever had in Vietnam.
Things took a definite turn for the better the day I met the admiral for the first time. I was summoned to a “meet and greet” command performance in his office one morning. The admiral was a two-star named Ray Peet, a bushy-eyebrowed, impeccably turned out officer who looked as if he’d been sent over to play the part by Central Casting. I’d seen him climbing in or out of his car on the base. To little old snake-eater me, he was impressive. He never had a hair out of place. His shoes were mirror polished, his nails smartly buffed, his tie perfectly tied, and the creases in his trousers razor-sharp. It was downright disheartening. I must have spent two hours getting myself ready to meet him. I don’t think I’d ever worked so hard at spit and polish—not even in my Geeky days, when I polished both the tops and soles of my boots.
A beribboned aide ushered me into a huge, plush office. Admiral Peet swiveled his high-backed judge’s chair to face me across a desk the siz
e of a small aircraft carrier. I saluted. He returned it, glowering. Then a smile as warm as a Vietnam sunrise spread across his face. He rose, came out from behind the desk, and shook my hand.
“Glad to have you aboard, son.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Sit.” He indicated a wing chair at one end of a long cherry coffee table. I sat at attention. He took the end seat on the Queen Anne sofa, next to an inlaid corner table on which sat an ornate brass lamp made out of an antique fire extinguisher, a big, multiline phone console, and a foot-high stack of reports, the color on each cover sheet denoting the level of security classification contained within. The pile looked like a rainbow.
“So, Lieutenant, what brings you to COMPHIBTRALANT?”
I’d thought about what I’d say if I was asked that question. The Geek in me would have answered, “Because it was time for a dip-dunk puke staff assignment and the asshole cockbreath shit-eating goatfuckers at BUPERS won’t let me go back to Vietnam.”
However, I looked Admiral Peet right in the eye and said, “Well, sir, I’ve just spent the last year and a half in Vietnam, and I thought it was time to give the younger guys a chance to do some fighting, while I took the opportunity to develop some staff expertise.” I said it with a straight face, too.
“You did pretty well over there—Silver Star, four Bronze Stars, two Navy Commendation Medals.”
“Yes, sir. But—”
“But?”
“Admiral, I’m a damn good SEAL, and I love to fight. But to make the Navy a real career, I have to understand how the Navy works—and that you can learn only as a staff officer. Besides, sir, working here would also allow me the time to attend night school. You’ve seen my jacket, sir. I don’t have a college degree. I think it’s important to go to night school so I can compete for a slot in the Navy’s BA/BS program at Monterey.”
Peet nodded. “I think you’re looking at things realistically, son,” he said.
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