Death in the Jungle Gary Smith (mobi reader txt) 📖

sour uninvited escort since just after daybreak, oblivious as always to the killing power of our weaponry.

Mr. Meston had us halt when Pearson signaled that he had found a well-worn trail. Several sets of VC tracks, no older than forty-eight hours, were imprinted in the ground. Pearson was sent to recon a portion of the trail alone, checking for more sign. After going about forty meters, Pearson returned and informed the lieutenant that there were several diverging trails ahead. To give Pearson a break from the stress, Meston motioned for me to assume the point position. Pearson and I exchanged places, then I started down the trail with the others strung out behind me.

Walking on dry ground along a cleared pathway was a pleasant change from the normal watery muck and dense vegetation. I had to focus on my job, though, and not allow my concentration to lapse because of the luxury. After all, I couldn’t afford one careless step. I, for one, intended to meet death on a golf course at an old age, not death in the jungle at twenty-six.

After we traveled about two hundred meters, the human footprints became intermingled with lots of deer tracks. Having seen thousands of deer tracks in my life, I estimated that the biggest tracks on the trail had been made by a deer weighing around two hundred and fifty pounds. My heart hammered a little faster as I anticipated the sighting of a monster buck, and once again I had to apply myself to the task at hand, which was guiding the squad carefully to our ambush site.

My attention was undivided over the next three-quarters of an hour as my teammates and I covered another two hundred meters. The numerous human and deer tracks continued underfoot, and I avoided stepping in some scattered deer droppings, but no other signs of humans or deer were manifested. I was somewhat surprised by this, as we’d moved to within seven hundred meters of the enemy base camps.

When I finally came to the designated stream, I knew our position was 250 meters inland from the mouth of the stream where it intersected the Dong Tranh. I signaled Mr. Meston, who signaled back that I should recon the bank while the others waited.

I slunk up and down the riverbank for several minutes, discovering the same old thing: voluminous tracks. I reported my findings to Mr. Meston, who decided to proceed with our game plan, which was to patrol 150 meters alongside the stream to our preplanned ambush site. That location would put us less than five hundred meters from scores of enemy troops.

It took thirty minutes to reach the ambush site, which I identified when I noted a second stream that branched off to the southwest from the main stream. At that fork we would lie in wait to capture or kill soldiers who would attempt to do the same to us. But this I knew: capturing a SEAL was out of the question; as long as breath remained, a knocked-down, wounded, and dying SEAL would continue shooting holes in enemy hides. And the rest of the team wouldn’t leave until he was carried away or dead. Such was the confidence we placed in each other.

Mr. Meston signaled for half the squad—consisting of Schrader, Pearson, Moses, Markel, and Dicey—to position themselves overlooking the stream. Meston, McCollum, Flynn, and I set up as rear security several meters back in the bushes. While the other three men catnapped, I took the first two-hour watch for rear security.

As the time went by, I heard nothing except the mosquitos. I observed the still jungle and enjoyed the peaceful morning. The skies were overcast, but it didn’t rain. It was a nice feeling to be high and dry on an ambush site, which was a rare experience. Even my rump was comfortable, settled down in a soft, dry pad of moss.

At 1130 hours, McCollum relieved me on watch. I stood my M-16/XM-148 against a sturdy branch of a bush, then lay my head against the trunk of the nipa palm behind me and closed my eyes. A light breeze licked at my face for half a minute, refreshing me, then it was gone to wherever it was that breezes went.

I left the war to the others for a while as my mind ran through many thoughts of a different place and time. I dreamed about the field-rat plague in the summer of 1959, when North Central Texas had been infested with millions of rats at the end of a seven-year drought. The rats had been eating up all the grasses and even the bark off mesquite trees. Day after day, Chuck Toliver, Jimmy Harbis, and I had traveled a couple of miles out of Wichita Falls on the Archer City road with our .22 rifles to shoot at the rats. We’d killed them on the ground and knocked them off mesquite branches where the rats had perched like vultures. When our ammunition had run dry, we’d picked up sticks and clubbed or stabbed the varmints to death, howling and laughing all the while.

I remembered my 1960 Harley Sportster, a souped-up motorcycle that could do 110 miles per hour in third gear. When I had wanted to show off, I would lift the front wheel off the ground when I shifted to fourth. The speedometer had stopped at 120, but I often had taken the bike to 150 in fourth gear. At top speed, the wind blast had been so strong I could barely hang onto the grips. I had even felt my fingers slipping on many occasions. As a twenty-year-old, I’d drag race at night on the boulevard in town, beating the hottest Corvettes and everybody else, then I’d escape from the converging cops in the nick of time.

In the same time period, I had owned a red convertible MG-A which could hit 120. I’d cruise town with a black-cloth top or a fiberglass red top or no top at all.