I slapped Patches on the shoulder. “Bring her around.” I watched as the bullets followed us, plink-plink-plink. We couldn’t hear anything because of the noise generated by our Meres. But Charlie was sure as shit shooting at us, and the firing had to be coming from the free-fire island.
We watched, transfixed, as bullets hit the water. Next to me stood a SEAL named Harry Mattingly, who’d come along for the ride. All of a sudden he screamed, “Oh, shit — I’ve been hit.”
I knocked him to the deck and looked. A ricochet had spun off the water and got him right between the eyes. He was bleeding like hell. But he was also okay — the wound was only superficial. His face had been less than a foot from mine— this shit was for real.
“You’re one lucky son of a bitch,” I said. “Get up and shoot back at ‘em.” Patches spun the wheel, Gallagher followed, and both f STABs headed for the far side of the river. I grabbed the radio mike. “I’ll follow you in. When he starts firing at you, I’ll spot the muzzle flashes and hit him with the recoilless.
For two hours we raked the island with everything we had, alternating Eagle’s STAB and mine as we charged in, expended ammo, and veered away. From the pitiful amount of fire being returned, I guessed there were no more than one or two VC out there. But numbers didn’t matter. What was important was that they’d shot at us, and we were returning fire.
At about twenty hundred I decided to call in aerial support.
I got on the radio and requested Spooky, the call sign for a Puff the Magic Dragon — a C-47 equipped with four Vulcan Galling guns that can each fire 6,300 rounds a minute.
“No can do without PROCOM — Vietnamese Provincial Commander — authorization, Silver Bullet,” said the Air Force voice on the radio.
Silver Bullet was me — it was the most grandiose radio “handle” I could come up with on the spur of the moment. Authorization? No prob. I simply got the PROCOM out of bed and asked for fire support. “I got a hoi one here, sir.”
“Who are you?”
I told him.
He groaned audibly. “You American assholes are always making trouble.” But he authorized my Spooky.
We watched as the plane floated one hundred meters above the island at about ninety knots. Even in the darkness we could see trees, bushes, and earth flying as the Vulcans raked the ground. Spooky made five slow, lethal passes and then wagged his wings, banked, and flew northward. I got him on the radio. “Thanks, guys. Silver Bullet over and out.”
I called Gallagher. “Not bad, huh?”
“Right on — Ensign Silver Bullet.” I could hear Eagle guffaw over the speaker. “Why didn’t you jusl call yourself Hot Cock?”
“I wouid have if I’d thought of it.” I swung my STAB to port. “Let’s go home.”
We’d had four hours of fun, and it was 2230 by now, high time for a few cold ones. “It’s Miller time,” I radioed Gallagher. We wheelied the STABs and hauled ass downriver like a goddamn twentieth-century armada. I couldn’t stop smiling. We’d shot off every frigging bultet we’d carried with us. and we stunk of cordite and sweat. We smelted like the warriors we’d always wanted to be. War was great!
The natural high lasted until we reached dockside. I saw him from the river, some yahoo asshole jumping up and down like a monkey on a leash, his mouth working in four-quarter time.
As we got closer, I picked him out. It was the OPS boss, a lieutenant commander named Hank Mustin. Now, I didn’t really know Mustin except by reputation. He was an Academy grad whose daddy and granddaddy were both admirals, all of which just impressed the shit out of little old arrogant me, right?
By the time we were within twenty yards I could hear him shouting over the throaty rumble of our twin Meres. “Who the fuck are you calling in an air op without my authorization?
Who gave you the goddamn authority to get the goddamn PROCOM out of his frigging bed? Who gave you permission to use this friggin‘ unit’s call sign?“
To be honest, I’d never given any of those questions any consideration at all. You waged war, and that was that. You didn’t put your hat in your hand and say, “May I?”
So I answered him back in kind. “Hey, you asshole, I came here to kick some rucking VC ass and take some rucking VC names — and that’s what I rucking did tonight. And if you don’t rucking like it, then fuck you and all your fucking kind, you sorry shit-for-brains cockbreath pencil-dick numb-nuts asshole.”
He got absolutely white-faced, screamed, “You are in trouble, mister,” and stomped off. I never gave the incident another thought, until the next afternoon.
Every day just after noon. Captain B. B. Witham used to lie in a hammock he’d strung alongside his commodore’s hootch, to read, smoke, sip coffee, and work on his tan. The day after our escapade he called me over as I passed by on my way to chow.
He plucked off the blue baseball cap that covered his thick, closely cropped, gray-blond hair, thumbed his sunglasses onto his forehead, and squinted at me. “Dick, you’re starting.” He reached for a cigarette, tit it, and blew smoke in my direction.
“You’re in trouble already.”
“Moi?”
“Out, toi, mon petit phoc.”
What the hell was he babbling? “What did I do?” I really didn’t know.
Witham traded the cigarette for a mug of coffee, sipped, returned the cup to an ammo-crate table, and picked up his Marlboro again. “Do the words Hank and Mustin mean anything to you?”
“Ah, so—”
Witham nibbed his coarse blond mustache in irritation.
“Don’t ‘ah so’ me. He could bloody well get you courtmartialed. He’s a senior officer. He’s got juice in WashingtonHe’s an Academy grad. And he’s not a bad guy — in fact, Ensign Geek, if you got to know him without his wanting to cut your balls off and fly ‘em from the frigging flagpole, he could become a real help to you.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Don’t give me any of your ‘aye-aye’ horse-puckey either,
Dick. I’m serious when I say he can help you. Hank writes the ops plans.“
“So? Big deal.”
“You are the most arrogant’s.o.b. ensign I have ever met.”
Witham took a drag ofMarlboro. “Read my lips, Dick. He’s the one who’s designed the SEAL deployment out here.”
“But he ain’t a SEAL, sir. He’s some Academy twit who tells me, ”When you run into the enemy, you have to ask me,
“May I?” before you can fire one goddamn round.‘ “
“That’s not what he’s saying.”
“That’s how I read it.”
“You go and shoot up a free-fire zone without telling anyone- You get the PROCOM out of bed to give you fire support and authorize it using the 116 Task Force — of which I am the goddamn commodore — call sign. And you’re telling me that Hank Mustin is an asshole because he’s upset? Screw him, Dick — I’m upset.”
“We!! — maybe I got a little steamed last night.”
“Read my lips. Desist, desist, desist. You go around telling too many lieutenant commanders to go fuck themselves the way you did last night and they’re gonna fiy you out of here in shackles.”
“Okay, I got it. Wilco.”
Witham shook his head. “Good.” He paused and sipped his coffee. “Fact is, there has to be some sort of order to things around here, Dick.”
“I agree. But the way it looks to me, Skipper, everyone around here thinks very conventionally. You ride the boats, you listen to the chiefs. From what I hear, Charlie knows what we’re gonna do because we run everything by the book.”
“So?”
“So it’s time for a new book — something he hasn’t read yet.”
Witham shook his head. “We’ve got a new book. And Hank Mustin wrote it — SEALs will support riverine operations, and—”
“Skipper, we’re the ones who should have written our own plan. He sees SEALs as support units. Screw it. Skipper—
Hank Mustin may be a terrific guy, b
ut what he’s designed is conventional, Academy Navy pus-nuts thinking. For chrissakes, Skipper, SEALs’re supposed to be unconventional.
That means not by the book.“ I waited while he sipped his coffee. ”I didn’t come here to sit and wait for Charlie to find me, Skipper. I want to kick Charlie’s ass on his own turf.
That’s unconventional.“
“Like you did last night?”
“Hey — last night was just a rehearsal. I wanted to give my guys some practice before we went out for real.”
Witham sighed. “I’ll tell you something, Dick. There’s no practice out here — no rehearsal. Every bloody day is for real.
You want to expend four hours’ worth of my ammo, then bring me back a VC prisoner or some intel or something else I can use.“
He was right. Dammit — he was right-
His tone softened. “Did you at least gel anything out there?”
“If there was anything on that island. Skipper, it wasn’t moving after we got done. We came home bone-dry. Not a round left — even in the M16s.”
“Boy, you do like living dangerously.” He shook his head.
“Look — stay out of Hank Mustin’s way for a couple of weeks.
I’ll smooth things over, and you’ll end up friends. But Jesus — what a way to start.“
He slid his sunglasses down, replaced the long-visored cap, and picked up his paperback. “Dismissed, Ensign Geek.”
Chapter 8
Bravo Squad didn’t see any action for about a week after my little escapade. I was the Junior man, and it was decided by the lieutenants that combat patrols would be assigned in order of seniority. Bravo had to wait until last, Finally, after what we considered an interminable lull, we got to go.
I’d obtained some intel about VC activity at Juliet Crossing, close to the free-fire island where we’d tested our firepower.
Now, Bravo would try its luck there again, this time in what I hoped would be a face-to-face confrontation with Mr. Charlie.
We planned a textbook riverine operation- “Consider this a KISS mission — Keep It Simple, Stupid,” I told my guys.
And indeed, the plan was so elementary it eould have been designed by Hank Mustin. We’d insert onto the westernmost tip of the free-fire island, which overlooked Juliet Crossing, a major north-south VC transverse point on the Bassac River.
There, we’d wait for a VC courier to show himself. We would ambush and kill him, recover whatever intelligence we could, bring it back to Skipper Witham, receive a pat on the head and an “attaboy,” then go find some cold beer and party.
The kitting was an important element for a couple of reasons. First, that’s what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never know whether you can kill someone until you do it. I wanted to make sure that each member of Bravo was up to ihe task. It could prove deadly to the squad if even one man was reticent- We left Tre Noc just after sundown, all of us in a single STAB. We’d blacked out our faces and hands and wore camouflage greens, jungle boots, soft caps, and web gear, and we carried one canteen, our assault knives, and lots and lots of bullets and grenades-
We were part of a miniflotilla. One of the SEAL Two lieutenants, Larry Bailey, took command of one Mike boat — an armored Landing Craft, Medium, or LCM — which held an 81-mike-mike (81mm mortar), plus pairs of M60 and .50caliber machine guns. A second Mike boat was commanded by a SEAL One officer on TAD from Rung Sat Zone. He was a pretty-boy bleach-blond California surfer I’ll call Lt.
Adam Henry. I didn’t like him. We were also Joined by one of 116’s PBRs, with its machine guns and 40mm Galling. If we got into trouble, Adam would play John Wayne — he’d shoot the hell out of Charlie, while the STAB would hit the shoreline and extract us in a hurry. Larry’s mission was to sniff and snuff out any VC crossing the river upstream.
As I think about it now, Larry would have been a better choice for the John Wayne role. A dark, lanky Texas boy with eyes like a cobra’s, he’d been the most aggressive of the lieutenants during our predeployment training. It was a foregone conclusion that Larry would be SEAL Team Two’s tiger in Vietnam.
The boats drew abreast of our target area. The STAB moved toward the island at six knots while the PBR and both Mike boats continued on a course upriver. Adam should not have gone along. The growls from their heavy engines and the STAB’S Meres would cover any noise made by our insertion, while the larger boats would also prevent any VC at Juliet Crossing, or serving as lookouts on the riverbank, from seeing us drop off the STAB. We were sixty yards south of the island, and Just east of the tip. I tapped Patches Watson.
He rolled over the far gunwale and dropped into the warm water. Now Ron Rodger went. Then me, Joe Camp, Jim Finley, and last. Eagle Gallagher.
The STAB continued upriver, disappearing into the darkness. Faces half out of the water, we dog-paddled slowly toward the island, moving as quietly as we could. Eight yards off the southern bank I dropped my feet down and was immediately sucked into ooze that covered my boots. I kicked free and dog-paddled again until my knees touched the muddy bottom.
I moved cautiously onto the bank, which was overgrown with vegetation, slid my M16 over my head, and flipped off the safety.
I waited. The lap of the water was interrupted by the sound of the other SEALs as they arrived one by one. I peered. We were all present and accounted for. I gave hand signals: move up the bank; spread into preassigned positions; set up the perimeter,
The drone of the boats was now quite distant. I shivered in the cool evening air. I would never have thought I’d shiver in Vietnam, but I was cold.
We crawled up the bank, moving mere inches at a time along the fifty-yard-wide tip of the island, until we’d set ourselves up in ambush position behind the stump of a downed tree. Four of us — Patches Watson, Camp the radioman, Ron Rodger with his Stoner machine gun, and I — separated into two pairs eight yards apart and scrutinized the southern shore of the river, a spit of sand and mud a hundred and fifty yards away, for any hint of movement. Jim Finley and Eagle Gallagher took rear guard, fifteen yards inland, and covered our butts.
By now I couldn’t hear the support boats at all, and I was suddenly overcome by an incredible sensation of aloneness.
Simultaneously, I was struck by a degree of paranoia I’d never known before. Shit — we were actually out in the jungle with live weapons and people who wanted to kill us. If this was a trap, if Charlie was laying for us — Jesus. I shook myself out of it. I blinked, squeezing my-eyes tight and then releasing, to control the hyper stage into which I was rocketing. I tried breathing-control exercises. They worked. 1 relaxed.
The dial on my watch read 2140. It’d taken us about twenty minutes to crawl through twenty-five yards of jungle scrub and river grass into our ambush position. So far, we’d been on station half an hour. The island had accepted our arrival and was alive again with the sounds of unknown critters that chirped and whistled and buzzed all around us. I found the ambient noise to be loud and decided it was accentuated by my alert condition.
We hadn’t spoken a word since we’d left the STAB. We didn’t have to.
I looked up. The sky was as clear as I’d ever seen it. The stars — millions of them — shone as brightly as if it were a crisp fall night in New England. The air had turned quite cool, and my teeth started to chatter. I forced my jaws together to stop.
How goddamn incongruous. To be cold in the tropical jungle.
I thought about Ev Barrett, and Mud, and pulling low on my last Med cruise. I thought about St. Thomas — rum and Coke and humping that wonderful, big-titted schoolteacher from New Jersey. I thought that maybe tomorrow I’d write a postcard to each of my kids. Souvenirs for them when they learned to read. I remembered how terrified I was the first time the freight train pinned me against the wall in the tunnel to Hauto when I was seven.
Then I heard it. Creak-creak.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I got goose bumps.
Creak-creak. Wood on wood. An oar
in an oariock. Creakcreak. ‘’
From the sandspit opposite where we lay, the nose of a small sampan poked into the slow-moving river.
I raised my finger slowly. Wait. He’s 150 yards away. He’ll come closer. Don’t spoil it by going too soon. I held my breath. Not a hair on any of my guys moved, even though four weapons were following the sampan.
He came across slowly, slowly, agonizingly slowly. One Vietnamese in black pajamas, no hat, no visible gun; an Asian gondolier, his single oar stirring a creaky, steady “J” stroke against the Bassac’s sluggish current. He came right at us.
I let the first shot go when he was less than twenty feet away. The others fired so quickly after my round that the poor guy must have thought he was looking down one big 16inch barrel. Whatever he was thinking, it was the last thought he ever had. All of us hit him simultaneously with full 30round mags. But it was Ron Rodger’s Stoner that really did the damage — a hundred and fifty rounds of .223, every twentieth round a tracer.
“Let’s go.” I was up on my feet, scrambling for the bank.
I charged down to grab the VC’s body and empty what I could from the shredded sampan before it sank.
Patches was hot on my tail. Ron Rodger wasn’t far behind.
I sloshed through the water, my feet slicking in the mud.
The sampan began to slip into the water. It became a footrace.
I was swimming now.
“Come on.”
Patches and I reached the sampan first. I pulled myself over the gunwales. The inside of the boat was covered with blood, bone fragments, and shreds of black pajama. But it was empty except for a small cloth pouch, which I grabbed.
“Find him,” I shouted.
Patches dove. I followed. We came up empty. He’d probably been blown backward into the water by the Stoner. Shit.
We were dragging at the sampan when the water around my head started kicking up. From the bank, Joe Camp pointed. “Automatic fire — eleven o’clock.” He dropped to the ground and let a full mag of covering fire go over our heads. “Get your asses back to shore.”
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