Life turned out to be better than I expected. Instead of a barracks room or BOQ suite, I was given a two-story house with a quarter-acre garden filled with tropical flowers and hundreds of orchid plants. The house had big rooms with whitewashed walls—perfect for entertaining. There was a live-in houseboy—Sothan—and a driver—Pak Ban—and within a month after I got settled in, a crew of nieces and nephews and other assorted in-laws showed up, which brought my staff to more than half a dozen. What the hell—numbers didn’t matter. I gave Sothan a wad of money and had him outfit everybody. I put the girls in black sarongs, and the boys in black slacks and white shirts. As a coup de maÎtre, I added Navy white waistcoats on which I had the SEAL Budweiser (the eagle, pistol, anchor, and trident crest that had just been approved as the official SEAL emblem) embroidered in gold.
I was in business. Or so I thought.
I went to pay a courtesy call on Commodore Vong Sarendy, the Cambodian chief of naval operations, and got smacked by reality. First of all, my carefully studied French was virtually useless. The Cambodians spoke their own style of French, much the same way Haitians speak theirs. So I stuttered along as best I could, but basically I had to speak English. Second, the CNO was very distant, even cold, to me. At the embassy, later in the day, I found out why. The officer I’d replaced was a full commander—a capitaine de frégate. I was only a capitaine de corvette—a lieutenant commander. So far as the CNO was concerned, the U.S. hadn’t cared enough to send him the very best, and he took it as a diplomatic slight. Screw him—he’d never met any SEALs before.
The embassy was a large white building one block from the river. It was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped by barbed wire—an easy hit for the Khmer Rouge, I thought, as we drove through the gate.
There was no ambassador in residence, so I checked in with the deputy chief of mission, or DCM, Tom Enders. Enders, a protégé of Henry Kissinger’s, cut an imposing figure. He stood about six feet eight inches tall, with longish silver-gray hair combed back over his ears and Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses. The product of an upper-class Connecticut family and a Yale education, the man looked as if he’d been born to wear pin-striped suits.
He gave me a perfunctory glance and explained the situation in a rolling, aristocratic basso profundo. One: the communist Khmer Rouge forces basically controlled the countryside, so whatever supplies the government got, from bullets to rice to soap, they got by way of the river. Two: the guy I was replacing was okay but hadn’t done very much to improve the situation. Three: the situation was simple—the Khmer Navy was largely ineffective in stopping Khmer Rouge attacks on the supply convoys that came up the river from the South China Sea. Four: terror-bombing attacks inside Phnom Penh had increased twofold in the past six months, which didn’t do much to help morale or public confidence.
“Anything else?”
“Sure, Commander—fix it.”
Aye fucking aye, sir. That’s what I thought. I bit my tongue. “We’ll give it a shot, sir.”
Actually, I liked Enders. He wasn’t your everyday temporizing, memo-writing, weak-kneed State Department diplodink who caved in at the merest hint of a threat. Enders never backed away from a fight. He understood the necessity for covert operations and unconventional warfare. He was continually pushing the Cambodians, trying to get them geared up to strike decisively at the Khmer Rouge.
Fix it? Okay. I developed a pattern early. I’d get up before 0500, drive to Cambodian Navy headquarters, and get an intel dump on the previous day’s operations and the look-ahead for the current ops. Then, at 0730 I’d go over to the embassy, grab some coffee, and brief Enders. Then I’d go home, work out for an hour, clean up, and go back to Navy HQ. I’d stay there all day, watching and listening, or hit the river for a patrol. Early in the evening I’d go back to my villa for dinner, catch an hour’s nap, then return to HQ at about 2200 to watch how they dealt with night operations. If the Cambodians were running an operation—which was most nights—I’d tag along with the crews to see how they did. From 0300 to 0400 I’d catnap at home, then I’d get up, change, and be back at Khmer HQ at 0500 again. I spent a total of 396 days in Phnom Penh. During 291 of them, I was in combat.
Despite my rocky start with the CNO, I got along well with the ops boss, an energetic Khmer officer named Kim Simanh, who spoke good English and gave me free run of his HQ. Even CNO—that’s all anybody ever called Commodore Vong Sarendy—after watching me come and go for about three weeks, suddenly decided that, well, yes, he could speak English after all. He came up to me one day and put his arms around me, and from that time on, there was nothing I asked for that I didn’t get from the Cambodians.
I became a Kooperating Khmer: I started riding the PBRs that protected the convoys, showing the junior Khmer officers—I called them MiNKs, for Marine Nationale Khmer—how to take the offensive against enemy ambushes.
I sent two PBRs downriver one night to clear out a Khmer Rouge ambush site twenty-five miles or so south of Phnom Penh and went along for the ride. They’d hit a small landing craft near the center of the narrow Mekong River channel. The LCM had been hit in the engine compartment at the stern. It had only partially sunk, though, as its interior compartments, which were called cofferdams, were still filled with air. So the bow protruded four or five feet above the surface of the river, and as marine traffic slowed to avoid it, the bad guys would open up from the riverbanks, less than one hundred yards away. Obviously, we had to blow the boat.
I explained how I’d do it to Kim Simanh. I’d run a line along the keel, to which I’d rig a pair of satchel charges. When I exploded both satchels at the same instant, they’d create what Frogmen called a bubble charge, which would lift the whole LCM a few feet off the river bottom. The craft’s own weight would cause the hull to crack as it dropped back onto the silt. The cracked hull would, in turn, release all the air trapped in the cofferdams, and the craft would settle nicely onto the bottom in two or three pieces. It was, I told him, a textbook example of a UDT operation—a perfect teaching opportunity for the young Mink officers and men.
I spent a couple of hours back at Villa Marcinko getting my gear in shape. I cut fuses to the proper length, tied detonating cords together, and rigged blasting caps. Then I prepared two fuse igniters, rolling condoms over them and tying off the ends to keep them waterproof. It was an old Frogman trick. I’d only need one igniter to set off both satchel charges, but Ev Barrett had taught me always to rig them in pairs. “You stupid blankety-blank blanker-blanker,” he’d growl lovingly. “And what the blank are you gonna blanking do when you’re blanking sitting fifty blanking feet underwater and the only blanking fuse igniter you blanking brought doesn’t blanking work? Answer that, you pencil-dicked shitfor-brains numb-nuts sphincter-lipped asshole geek, Marcinko.”
The only correct answer was, of course, “Aye-aye, Chief, I rig two fuse igniters, just like you so kindly suggest I do.”
Number one houseboy Sothan watched critically as I unrolled the rubbers over the igniters. “You go fuckee-fuckee tonight Mr. Dick?” he asked.
“Bien sûr—you bet. I’m gonna screw the Khmer Rouge,” I said, examining my handiwork. “Give ’em a good screw.”
Sothan wrinkled up his face. “Seem to me like a waste of good rubbers.”
It was just at the end of the monsoon season—November—and the nights were so humid that you became wet just walking outside. The river was high. We left the docks, and the PBRs’ Jacuzzi engines growled as the Khmer chiefs steered them carefully into the middle of the current.
I had one Khmer lieutenant commander with me, two lieutenants, and twelve enlisted men. It was important to me to teach Khmer officers how to lead from the front. That was a problem in Cambodia—officers tended to stay behind and let their men do the down-and-dirty fighting. It’s no way to win a war. I chose to coax them somewhat lightheartedly: “Why,” I kept asking, “are you letting your enlisted men have all the fun?”
We weren’t five miles south of th
e capital when we started taking fire. The officers’ first reaction was to order the boats swung around back toward the city. I countermanded the orders, launched a flare in the direction of the firing, grabbed the PBR’s .50-caliber machine gun, and raked the shoreline.
“See?” I motioned to the senior Mink. “Now—you do it.”
The lieutenant commander nodded at me, took the grips, and let go a long burst.
The hostile firing stopped. I slammed him on the back. “Voilà!”
We pulled up just north of the ambush site about an hour later. The jungle was quiet—no Khmer Rouge tonight. At least not yet. The PBR coxswain pointed at something in the water about one hundred yards to our south. I hit it with the spotlight—the blunt, gray bow of a landing craft poked out of the water.
“Let’s get closer.”
We pulled alongside. I slipped out of my green fatigues and pulled an inflatable vest, tank and regulator, mask, flippers, weights, and a waterproof flashlight on a long lanyard out of a nylon bag.
“You guys wait here.” I shrugged into my gear, slung the flashlight and a pair of Mk-135 satchel charges around my neck, went over the side backward, and dropped into the water. The current was stronger than I’d expected, and the forty or so pounds of explosives I was schlepping didn’t help much, either. I swam to the sunken boat, attached a rope to the bow, submerged, and felt my way down the craft’s port side. It occurred to me as I held on with one hand and reached for the light with the other that the Khmer Rouge might have set booby traps inside the wreck. Doom on you, Demo.
The water was opaque—full of monsoon silt—and I had real trouble seeing anything. I pulled myself along the gunwale until I reached the muddy river bottom, then worked myself around the landing craft. Where the broad stern had buried itself in the mud, I attached the rope, then tied off the satchel charges ten feet apart. Then I surfaced, waving at the PBRs fifty feet away. I pulled out my mouthpiece. “Toss me a line.”
I pulled myself back aboard the patrol boat and explained what I’d done. “Now we blow the sucker.”
It was simple: I’d swim back down, attach a waterproof timer, set it, swim back to the boat, and watch as the LCM disintegrated. Basic Frogman stuff.
Except: on my second trip down, Mr. Murphy was waiting for me. First, I cut my arm as I pulled myself down the LCM’s keel. Nothing terminal, but it would take stitches to fix. Then, I discovered that one of the satchel charges had come loose, and it took me five minutes of groping to find it. Then, I cut myself again on the hull reattaching it. This was becoming mere complicated than I wanted. Finally, everything was in place. I double-checked the explosives. I double-checked the detonators. I double-checked everything. Then I pulled the initiator on my fuse igniter. Nothing happened. I reached for the second igniter and yanked it. It worked perfectly. Thank you, Ev Barrett.
Finally, I resurfaced, my mask poking cautiously out of the water by the LCM’s bow, the flashlight a beacon so the PBRs could see me. I’d preset the timer fuses for ten minutes.
A bullet caromed off the metal six inches from my head. The goddamn Khmer Rouge had shown up. I swam around the other side of the wreck and looked for my boats. They were nowhere in sight—they’d pulled an Adam Henry on me and I swore I’d kill the Mink lieutenant commander if I ever got my hands on him. Then there was a flurry of pings and dings, and rounds slapped at the water, and I dove again into the blackness.
This was jolly. Twenty-five feet below me were forty pounds of C-3 explosive, rigged to explode in, oh, seven minutes. Khmer Rouge gunners were shooting at me from both shores. And my goddamn PBRs had gone bye-bye.
After what seemed like an eternity, I heard the Jacuzzis growling on the surface. I popped up like a cork, waved the light at them, and heedless of the firing surface-swam like a bat out of hell.
I grabbed a trailing rope, pulled myself alongside, up, and rolled across the gunwale. “Get outta here—she’s gonna blow!”
I don’t think we were two hundred yards away when the charges exploded—the water geyser drenched the PBRs and the shock wave lifted my boat into the air.
Kim Simanh was at Khmer HQ when I got back. He looked at my bloody, bedraggled fatigues and dour countenance.
He gave me a wry look. “Bad day at the office, Lieutenant Commander?”
I stayed off the boats for two days. Enough was enough.
My biggest contribution to CNO was the creation of a force of Cambodian Marines—although the Cambodians called them Naval Infantry—a 2,000-man unit that used 105mm howitzers based along the Mekong River to protect the convoys and hit the Khmer Rouge offensively. I told Kim Simanh and CNO about my two tours in the Mekong Delta; explained how I’d hit the VC up the dikes before they were prepared, and how the tactic could work for them as well.
Kim Simanh ran with the idea. And the Naval Infantry did, just as I hoped it would, cut down on the frequency and intensity of Khmer Rouge ambushes. Tom Enders was happy. And I felt that I was earning my pay.
Life, I should add, wasn’t all drudgery. I had fun as well. I led some ambushes, which got the juices flowing again. And I took up bodysurfing. The Mekong River is wide, warm, and calm just south of Phnom Penh, and I used to jump into the water with a towline and bodysurf behind the patrol boats. If I’d thought of it, I would have had someone at SEAL Team Two ship me a pair of water skis. But I made do with what I had: my two feet. During one of my outings about fifteen miles south of the city, my PBR took some fire, and it slowed down to pick me up.
I waved them off and screamed for the pilot to put the pedal to the metal: “Imbéciles—foutez le camp d’ici!—Get the hell outta here!” Then I dropped onto my belly and let them drag me upriver. Shit, it was safer to bodysurf through an ambush than give the enemy a slow-moving target to plink at.
My social life was as busy as my professional schedule. Women were plentiful. There were the local LBFMs—Little Brown Fucking Machines—brought in an endless supply by my houseboy Sothan. There was a British nurse who hung out at my place for days on end, and a young secretary at the French embassy who thought that I was a pretty good phoque for an Américain.
I lunched two or three times a week with CNO and his deputy, whose name—I swear—was Sous Chef. Our conversation moved easily now, from French to English to pidgin Khmer, as we ate lemon-grass chicken and drank Hennessy VSOP cognac. I threw cocktail parties at least once a week, dinner parties twice a month, mixing and mingling in the best spy-school tradition with attachés from the other embassies. My favorite adversary was the Soviet naval attaché, Vassily. We’d drink shot for shot—me with my gin, him with his vodka—and tell each other lies.
“How many children you have, Marcinko?”
“Seven. All boys. And you?”
“None. I am bachelor!”
Fat chance. He had a wife at home in Moscow and three kids, so the gossip went, and he probably knew my whole story, too. But we sat and we drank and we lied and everyone had a good time, and the taxpayers were footing the bill.
The biggest downside to my posting was that I went to a lot of Khmer funerals. Fact was, the Cambodians were losing a lot of people. The casualties caused an ethical dilemma for me, as a duly constituted representative of the American government. The reason was, I knew CNO was skimming goods from the U.S. military aid packages, as well as taking a cut from all the civilian convoys he protected. If I’d been a strictly by-the-book attaché, I would have reported his actions. But the truth of the matter was that he did it to take care of his people. Unlike the U.S. military, the Cambodians provided no death benefits, so if a sailor got waxed, his family got axed from the payroll. CNO and Sous Chef provided for the families of KIAs from their graft. I thought what they were doing was terrific for morale, so I kept my mouth shut.
About six months after I arrived, Sous Chef and Kim Simanh decided they’d really mess with me. I’d already been through a bunch of subtle Khmer tricks with them and had paid them back in spades. I was a veteran of mind-fu
cking the Vietnamese, after all. But they still played their games. Like eating turtle, for example. Cambodian tradition says that if it’s passed to you headfirst, it means you have a limp dick. Well, after I learned that, I’d serve myself, then turn the dish around, smile demurely, and pass it back the way it came—headfirst, right to Kim Simanh. Phoc me? Nah, fellas—Domah-nhieu. Phoc you.
CNO would roar with laughter when I did that. “See,” he’d tell his aides, “tu as complètement oublié que nos ami le capitaine de corvette petit Richard, le grand phoque américain, a barbouille le camouflage sur les visages des enfants vietnamiens—you’re forgetting our old pal little Richard the SEAL used to smear Vietnamese kids’ faces with camouflage.”
Now it was about to get serious. We piled into the old black Ford Falcon staff car Sous Chef used and drove to Kim Simanh’s apartment. Gathered there were three dozen or so senior-level navy officers. “Bienvenu, Richard,” Kim Simanh said. He pointed to the table and indicated where I should sit. “Welcome to the cobra feast.”
I smiled at him. “You are a devious little brown-skinned son of a bitch.”
“Thank you so much, you crotch-sucking monkey-furred heathen.” I roared—the man was actually learning to talk like a SEAL.
The pleasantries over with, we began lunch with green salad. The salad was somewhat chewy because it contained small morsels of cobra skin. I finished and put down my chopsticks. “Good.”
“I’m glad you liked it,” Kim Simanh said, ringing for the servants.
Next came a kabob of cobra meat, which wasn’t so different from rattlesnake. I ate two helpings.
“You must like cobra,” Kim Simanh said.
“That’s why they call SEALs snake-eaters,” I said.
He smiled inscrutably and called for the next course.
The cobra eggs arrived. They were somewhat gamy, but no worse than Chinese thousand-year-old eggs, or Korean pickled eggs.
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