by Orr Kelly
We went on to the pickup point. We met up with the lieutenant and they had hit a boat. And they had captured a female the night before and she was hit in the arm and she died during the night sometime. They had hit the boat an hour before we had got there.
The guy was still in the boat. You couldn’t tell it was human, there were so many flies. I never thought it was human anyway. We talked about who we captured and all that stuff. And then we went out to the boats.
What I was going to say earlier was, when we captured those kids and that woman, I was wearing a buttpack. And this woman had two kids, one in each arm, and neither one of them could walk. And they were crying and they were crying and all I did was go, shhh, and [snaps fingers] they stopped. She stopped ’em from crying. She was struggling, carrying both of these kids.
So I put one kid on my buttpack and tied a string around him so he wouldn’t fall off in case he went to sleep and I carried him for about five klicks on my back, him sitting on my buttpack in my H-harness.
How old was he?
I couldn’t tell you. Maybe a year. He was a heavy load. To tell you the truth, I’ve carried sixty- and seventy- and eighty-pound rucksacks. But that kid was the heaviest load I’ve ever carried. Because that was his grandfather I had killed.
PART FOUR
THE SEALs’ WAR
CHAPTER
13
A Greek Tragedy
The story of John C. “Bubba” Brewton is an almost classic Greek tragedy. It is the story of a handsome, talented young officer destined for success in whatever field he chose. And yet, as some of his friends perceived, he suffered from a fatal flaw that eventually led to his tragic death.
Brewton served two tours in Vietnam in 1968–69 and 1969–70. In his first tour, he was assistant to Lt. Richard P. Woolard, commander of SEAL Team TWO, 3d Platoon. Also serving with him at that time was Lowell E. “Bo” Burwell, a medical corpsman. In his second tour, Brewton was assistant commander of the 10th Platoon. Serving with him at that time was another medical corpsman, Robert P. “Doc” Clark. All three vividly recall Brewton’s life as a SEAL in Vietnam, and his death.
When Bo Burwell became a SEAL in 1968, he had already served two tours as a corpsman with marine force recon units in the northern area of South Vietnam. He went on to serve two tours with SEAL Team TWO in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. When he went to Vietnam as a SEAL in 1968, he was assigned to the 3d Platoon, operating out of Nha Be. This is his story of his experiences with Woolard and Brewton:
I had already had extensive service so I joined a platoon already in country. We were at Nha Be. We worked in the Rung Sat and in Long An Province, primarily.
The Viet Cong had a significant force in the T-10 area [a particularly dangerous area in the northeastern section of the Rung Sat Special Zone]. It had all the rear service for the regiment that did attacks on Saigon and the surrounding towns. They’d do their attacks and then come back into this safe area and hide.
They were also doing like a hundred shipping attacks a month on the rivers from the South China Sea to Saigon. They were just shooting these guys up left and right. They were using mines, handheld rockets. They were using command detonated mines. And of course small arms off the banks.
We started targeting these people. We would go in there quite often. That’s what we were there for. When we left they were making only three or four attacks a month. So we made quite an impact there.
That was the 3d Platoon. The officers were Lieutenant (jg) Woolard and Lieutenant (jg) Brewton. John was my squad leader.
He and Woolard were probably two of the best matched platoon commanders, because they got along so well. And they had such extraordinary leadership, I thought, under fire.
I have been in a lot of firefights, a lot of gun battles. But those two people, for leadership under fire, I haven’t seen it matched. Both of them were just so cool.
Several instances come to mind. It bothered all of us that Brewton was so cool, because he would do things probably some of the rest of us wouldn’t have done. I remember in firefights, while the shooting was still going on, you would look out there and see him wandering around collecting intelligence, something the enemy may have dropped. And we’re taking fire at that time. It was almost like he had a certain confidence about him that nothing would ever happen to him. And therefore he—it wasn’t as if he could walk on water. But if he did, he wouldn’t get his feet all the way wet. He did have a great confidence. And that’s one of the things you’ll find with great military leaders. And we had many of them in the SEAL teams.
There was a night in particular when John Brewton was the patrol leader. We had patrolled into this place and set up on a pretty good sized road, like a logging road, up away from the swamp area. They had little hootches and hiding places back in the woods.
We had looked pretty much all night and hadn’t made any contact. So we decided we’ll set up an ambush. It was starting to get dawn. So we’ll just set up on this road junction—a dirt trail and this path, foot path, that came into it. There was a huge tree there. We couldn’t see the tree real well in the dark but the guys put up a claymore on the side of the tree, aimed right down at the road junction.
We set an L-shaped ambush with the main force out on the road and myself and [Engineman Chief Solomon D.] Atkinson on this short leg. I was right up next to the V in the road. As soon as daylight come, you could hear the coughing and hacking, these guys getting up and having their first cigarette. They’re coming out of their hiding places. There must have been two dozen of them that congregated right at this spot, where these two trails came together.
Well, it was daylight and under the rules of engagement, we had to challenge. So Lieutenant Brewton stood up and in his best Alabama accent, he lai day-ed—stop, come here or whatever. These guys looked around and started running in all different directions. We had the machine guns and we opened fire. My land, we were shooting, the tracers were hitting these guys, and they were going down.
And all of a sudden they fired off this claymore mine, up on the side of this tree. Well, we didn’t know, and the people who put it up there didn’t know, but that tree was rotted. That thing exploded! It knocked some of the warrant officer’s teeth out. It knocked us down. It blew up the tree. It killed some [Viet Cong] people, too. We had two or three bodies out there.
The shooting was still going on and all of a sudden we see something bob up out there and it was Lieutenant Brewton. And he was out there checking these people, seeing what they dropped, if they dropped any weapons. The kinds of things we would collect and try to get away with. To see who had had a gunfight with us. He was a bit overconfident. But he was a wonderful person. He and Woolard were so well matched. The organization, everything just flowed so perfectly. We thought we would all be together forever. These are the type people who make you feel: I’ve served with the best.
One time we had gone in on an operation and, it was such a beautiful night, we had just kept on going. And by this time we were getting toward the end of our tour. I guess the animalistic senses, or the sense of well-being in combat, had overcome common sense. And fear. This particular night was such a beautiful night we had started in an operation and we just kept patrolling, patrolling.
The platoons made a brief record of each operation on what they called a “Barndance card.” The Barndance card kept by SEAL Team TWO, 3d Platoon, dates this operation as the night of 10–11 October 1968. The patrol was led by Woolard, accompanied by Brewton.
It was in the same area where John Brewton got killed. This was before. This was on the ’68 trip. This night, there were probably eight, nine, or ten of us. Toward the end of the tour, those who liked to go would be all these people wanting to go. And then of course you had the ones who didn’t like to go and they would look for all these little excuses. They were coughing or they had an ingrown toenail.
This particular night, we had patrolled on in and we got totally out of the range of the supporting weapo
ns from the heavy SEAL support craft. We came into this area, a great huge field, I would say probably five hundred acres. And there was a road which connected these two hamlets. You could see the lights, probably a mile distance apart.
Here went this Viet Cong riding a bicycle. He’s got a woman on the bicycle and he’s talking all sorts of sweet nothing. We had some Vietnamese with us and they could figure out what he was talking about.
At this point the lieutenant told us, three of us, to go up and scout this little hamlet. We could see these lights over there. So there was three of us who got up fairly close to this thing. All of a sudden we started to get a blinking light—a signal. Of course we didn’t know how to answer this signal.
Two of the folks were going to stay there and observe this thing and I was going to go back. While I was on my way back, there was a confrontation with the guy coming back on the bicycle. He got shot for stopping and taking his weapon out. By that time, we had gotten together and gotten back to the group, the three of us.
This little village is starting to come to life. Of course we had nowhere to go. We just sat there. Here they were coming and you’re cut off. Where are you going to go? You don’t really know where to go. It happened so quickly the only thing we could do was put out some claymores and hope to catch them as they came in.
We were cut off. The village had us cut off from the trees we had come out of. You hear dogs here and you can hear people coughing here so you pretty well knew where they were. We were surrounded. Here the folks came.
Somewhere in the firefight, Lieutenant Woolard got shot in the leg and the arm. He was not far from me. I had a Stoner machine gun and I was putting out a lot of tracers. As a matter of fact, that was the last tracer I ever fired, last one I ever will shoot.
Why?
They come right back at me. Someone can see them and they can direct the fire right into you. There was a lot of those white-green things, the AK, come right back in there.
There was an initial gunfight, then they pulled back. We tried to get a Sea Wolf out to us. Well, the Sea Wolf was broke. One of them was up but they weren’t supposed to fly unless both were up.
Going back to these two officers we had—the personal relationships they had made around the BOQ [bachelor officers’ quarters]—this one pilot heard this on the loudspeaker in the officers’ barracks, that SEALs were in trouble. He gets his crew together and says he’s going out there to do something about it and here he comes.
While he was flying out, there was one of these AC-47 gunships, either Spooky or Puff. The helicopter pilot got them to come in there.
At one point he said, “If you don’t hurry up and get here on station, I’m going to be on the ground with those SEALs.”
They kept telling him to go on back. No, he wasn’t going to go on back. As it turned out, there were something in the vicinity of three dozen Viet Cong bodies that night. Three to four dozen. Thirty-eight comes to mind.
It was quite a successful night even though having a lieutenant [Woolard] shot. He got medevaced to the army 3d Field Hospital. Some of us went up there to see him. They’d already sewed up his legs and sewed his arm up. But during this whole fight, getting back to the fight itself, nobody even knew he was wounded until he had everything secure. And at that time he got over to me to put a bandage on him.
Whenever we went to the 3d Field Hospital to see about him, he said he was ready to go back to the unit. We dressed him up and brought him back. It wasn’t against his will. We just put his clothes on him and took him back. We had a jeep. That night, he was aching to go again. This is only a couple or three days since when he was hit.
He said to organize some kind of operation where he didn’t have to get out and wade in the mud. So we did this. [The platoon’s Barndance card dates this operation as occurring on the night of 21 October 1968—ten days after Woolard had been wounded.] We had our light SEAL support boat that rode real low in the water—real low profile. The motor was pump driven. You could idle that thing down to where you couldn’t hear anything. The only thing you heard was the sweep of the Bendix radar.
This night, we were trying to catch these people moving supplies. We had four boats [destroyed] and thirteen kills that night. We had our boat completely loaded down with weapons and stuff we had taken out of these sampans. We had a terrible lot of equipment.
As we came back through the area where we had had our last Shootout, we noticed a little blip on the radar screen. The lieutenant [Woolard] and myself, we were sitting up on the bow. I had a Stoner machine gun. He had a Starlight Scope. He would spot things. We would pop a flare and shoot them.
Up on the bow there it was even quieter than down in the boat. We heard a noise. The lieutenant turned around and gave the boat captain [indicates a hand signal to speed up]. Let’s get out of here.
He turned sideways.
Someone turned on a spotlight. It was just miscommunication. At that time we took a couple of B-40 rockets.
We had six out of nine in the boat that was wounded. One guy, it blew him out of the boat into the water. He swam and got back on. He had a machine gun around his neck. I guess you can do a lot of things when that adrenaline gets going. He got back on the boat. It was just lucky it stunned the boat driver enough so he didn’t just gun it.
Of course I had a couple of little chunks of stuff in my head—about the only place they could hit me without hurting. It stunned everybody, this huge explosion right on top of you. I jumped up. I got my machine gun. The concussion had blowed the belt out of it. I jumped and I grabbed the M60. The guy who was manning that got gut shot. And it wouldn’t shoot. We had the Mark 20 Honeywell [grenade launcher] amidships. This thing, the belt of ammunition had blown right through it and tore off some of the grenades. They were lying right there.
Finally I found a shotgun and began shooting it into the bank. And the other guy started shooting. By that time we had people recovering and started getting out of there. And that’s when we started doing the first aid.
One fellow we nearly lost that night. He had a certain amount of intestine hanging out. You just get in and do the best bandaging job you can do in those conditions, with a small penlight in your mouth. He kept getting fainter and fainter. His blood pressure was going down. Finally we got a serum albumin in him. His spleen was hit and he had internal bleeding.
Another fellow I assume is an admiral today, Jay Prout. [He is RAdm. James Gregory Prout.] He was the boat officer, in charge of the boat support unit. He was hit in the throat. Just barely missed his trachea and the big arteries there.
Of course the boat had a couple of dozen holes blowed into it. We limped to a South Vietnamese outpost. We had a medevac coming in and the rest of us would bring the boat back. And when we had all these people off, Mr. Woolard came over to me. And good lord, half of his shoulder was laying down on his back. It took close to 135—140 stitches to sew it up. You never knew it. He went right on directing operations. He’s making sure everything is taken care of before you knew anything was wrong. Here he is, these bandages are not even dirty from a couple of nights before, and we’ve got him shot up and tore up again. He was a pretty extraordinary person.
Woolard, now a captain assigned to the Pentagon, looked over the Barndance card for the night of 21 October 1968. His memory of the night differs somewhat from that of Burwell. While Burwell says he doesn’t recall Brewton being on that operation, the Barndance card lists him among those present This is Woolard’s recollection:
I remember this night. I got a Purple Heart this night. I was already wounded at this stage. I had been shot in the arm and leg a week or so before this, so I was not patrolling [on foot]. This was not a hard op. If you wanted an easy op, you just jump in the boat. You could man the organic weapons of the boat. We were in a light SEAL support craft, an LSSC. There were four pintels you could put grenade launchers or an M60 or whatever.
We were in the T-10 area. Nobody would go there but the VC. It was an area th
at nobody had really operated in. It was a bad area. The ships were taking a lot of fire.
There was a bunch of us in the boat. We spotted a sampan. They couldn’t see us. We could see them on the Starlight Scope. We could hear them but they couldn’t hear us. The LSSC at slow speed was a very quiet boat, with underwater exhaust. A good boat. If it was coming toward you at slow speed you wouldn’t hear it until it was very close, ten to twenty meters away. At high speed, of course, you could hear it and if it was going away from you, you could hear it.
So we saw these guys one hundred or so meters away. This time of night, where they were, they had to be bad guys. So we started intercepting their course with our course. They made it to the bank before we did. We fired them up and killed a bunch of them.
We got their weapons and everything and we felt pretty good. This happened early in the night so we figured, let’s stay in for a while. We went to another place further in the T-10 we thought might produce some action from our intelligence reports. We set an ambush there in the boat. This is just a boat sitting in the water where it cannot be seen from anywhere except right near where it was. You don’t silhouette yourself out in the middle of the river. You pull off on the side someplace.
Actually Brewton was in charge of this op. I was the guest patroller that night. Due to the wound in my leg, I couldn’t patrol. I would occasionally go out with the other squad to see how Lieutenant (jg) Brewton was doing—Lieutenant (jg) Woolard supervising Lieutenant (jg) Brewton. We waited there for a few hours and then we decided to go on down very quietly past the area of the first hit to see if any of the bad guys had turned up to investigate what had happened to the comrades in our first ambush.
We went past that spot and we didn’t see anything. We were heading downriver and this is pretty vivid in my mind. Myself and Brewton were sitting in the front of the LSSC with our back against the windscreen. Right down behind us in the cockpit was the driver and my boat detachment commander, a lieutenant by the name of Jay Prout, now RAdm. James Gregory Prout.
