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

The sampan was now in front of Dicey to my right, and I could clearly see the figures of three men in the boat. Three seconds later, they were in front of me and leaving the ambush site.

“Shit!” I barked, then I squeezed the trigger. All I heard was a loud click. The hair stood up on the back of my neck at the hollow sound of the dud round.

Dicey and Flynn, upon hearing my attempt at commencing the ambush, suddenly opened up with the Stoner machine gun and the M-60. I slipped my finger onto the XM-148 trigger and fired a 40mm canister round at the sampan. I then extracted and ejected the dud 5.56mm round, recharged the chamber with a fresh cartridge and shot an entire 30-round magazine at the three VC. My rapid fire was joined by all of my teammates to my right as we collectively sent close to a thousand bullets over the stream.

In the moonlight, I could see the shape of the sampan. No human silhouettes were visible in the boat any longer. Still, we continued blasting the sampan and the water around it for several more seconds.

As the shooting died down, Mr. Meston lifted a hand parachute flare above his head and pointed it at the sky over the sampan. Once he was sure he could fire it through the canopy of trees above us, he slammed the base of the flare with his right palm and set it off. The thrust was so powerful that the twelve-inch cylindrical casing slipped over Meston’s muddy hand and came back and hit him squarely in the mouth, splitting his lower lip completely in two and knocking out several teeth.

The para flare rocketed to a height of about one hundred feet, then the parachute opened and the illuminating charge caught fire and lit up the stream below. It was suddenly “daylight in the swamp.”

I easily spotted the sampan drifting toward the opposite side of the stream. The three VC were nowhere to be seen. Quickly, I fired two 40mm HE rounds over the sampan and into the trees on the bank, just in case one of the enemy had made it that far. The grenades blew branches and debris into the air.

I looked at Mr. Meston, who had his hands cupped over his mouth. Blood was oozing between his fingers.

In a muffled voice, I heard Meston say, “Pearson, take over! Take charge!”

Pearson wasted no time in telling me to swim after the sampan. I handed my weapon to Dicey and began pulling my duck fins over my coral booties. As I finished, I heard Pearson calling for the Boston Whalers to “get us out of here!” I seconded the motion in my mind, remembering all too well that there were hundreds of VC in easy hailing distance, and we sure as hell had hailed them.

I entered the cool water with my K-bar knife in hand as the para flare started to flicker and die out. Using underwater strokes in order to keep a low profile, I swam without making splashes or lots of ripples beneath the light of the flare and the moon. Unfortunately for me, the flare quickly extinguished, and I couldn’t see anything but the water directly under my nose. My night vision was lost.

I continued swimming in the direction of the opposite bank, trusting that one of my teammates would send up another flare. My nose was barely out of the water as I went, and my nostrils burned with the smell of blood; someone had crawled out of bed too early for his own good in the Rung Sat Special Zone.

I blinked my eyes hard a few times in an attempt to regain my vision, but things got even darker as I swam into the shadows of the trees lining the shoreline. I tightly grasped my knife in my right hand, aware of the fact that I could bump into a gook at any moment. And no matter if he was still alive or already dead, I planned to stick him twice before I inquired as to his well-being.

Suddenly, a flare ignited high over my head, and in the bright light I saw the sampan hung up next to the riverbank. I swam to it, and as I reached for the bow I saw a gook lying on his back inside the boat. His knees were up and his arms grotesquely pointed skyward. Bullet holes were evident from his head to his feet. His heart protruded halfway out of his chest.

I also noted that there was a large water jug sitting in the middle of the sampan, full of bullet holes but still standing upright. The sampan, too, was bullet-riddled. I grabbed the two and towed my catch back to my teammates as the para flare extinguished above me.

When I made it across the stream, Pearson extended a hand and helped me out of the water. I hung onto the bow and pulled the sampan partway out of the water with me. Pearson explored the sampan and discovered some papers and a Chicom SKS semiautomatic rifle underneath the dead man. He salvaged the loot, then together we turned over the sampan and dumped the lifeless body into the stream. Under the circumstances, it was the closest we could come to an honorable burial at sea for the misfortunate fellow.

As the body floated away and quickly disappeared below the surface of the water, Pearson told me that he had seen a second body rise up and then sink in the middle of the stream as I had been towing the sampan. That gave us two confirmed KIAs. The third VC’s whereabouts was officially unknown, but unofficially I’d have bet my Bad Girl that he’d smiled his last smile.

Speaking of smiles, Mr. Meston wouldn’t have much of one for quite a while, I thought to myself as I gathered my gear and waited uneasily for extraction. In the moonlight, I watched him dabbing his