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

At the start, I couldn’t see the sampan ahead of us. It had drifted beyond the range of the overhead floodlight. I glanced to my left; Ty was sidestroking easily beside me, as we were going with the flow of the current.

As we progressed, McCollum placed M-79 rounds on the banks around us to keep the enemy from sticking his nose in too close. I welcomed this assistance; it made me feel secure even though I was up to my neck in an insecure position. That was what teammates were for, I thought, to lend each other the courage to attain the unattainable.

Ty and I quickly left the small stream and entered the main river, where the current was stronger. Taking advantage of the flow, we swam hard and moved along rapidly. I kept my eyes peeled for the sampan, hoping it would show up on the glittering water.

After a hundred or more yards, just when I was considering turning back, I spied a dark object floating on the water about ten yards ahead of me. I swam closer, made sure it was the sampan, then went all-out to catch it. Ty was several yards behind me as I reached out of the water and grabbed the boat. Immediately I began stroking against the current, getting nowhere until Ty laid his weapon in the sampan and helped me. We towed the boat crosscurrent toward the black shoreline, and the going was extremely tough.

Surprisingly, Ty hung in there and lasted most of the distance, finally giving out with less than thirty meters to go. I told him to hang onto the sampan until I beached it. Gathering up all my strength, I kicked furiously for the shore. I made it, but the last ten meters took a lot out of me. When the sampan struck land, I heaved it onto the muddy riverbank and uttered a sigh of relief. Then I crawled up the bank along one side of the sampan while Ty made his way along the other.

At this point I would have loved to have sat down and rested for a few minutes, but there was no way I was going to hang out a hundred yards away from my teammates with just a K-bar knife and an M-16 rifle in a totally compromised area. Instead, I jumped to my feet and grabbed the bow of the sampan. Ty took a grip beside me and we began dragging the sampan back to the ambush site through the mud.

Just before we made it back, a couple of Seawolves arrived and strafed the opposite bank for security measures. As planned, Mr. Meston and the Seawolves knew exactly where Ty and I were since I had turned on my strobe light with a blue lens cover when Ty and I had started our swim. Also, I knew Mr. Meston had been watching us through his starlight scope. As always, I was happy to see the air support, and I was now fully confident that my platoon, once again, would get back to the naval base alive and well after one more successful mission.

As Ty and I approached the others, I yelled to alert them so we wouldn’t get shot accidentally. A few seconds later, I heard the PBRs coming to extract us, so Ty and I hurried our task. We pulled the sampan the last several meters and dropped it down on the riverbank where the minor stream entered the main river. Mr. Meston instructed us to gather our gear quickly so as to waste no time in departure. We retrieved our belongings as our teammates loaded the sampan onto one of the PBRs, then we joined them in boarding the boats.

Moments later, we were cruising down the Tac Ong Nghia, and I was feeling fine. Mr. Meston didn’t seem so fine as he sat down beside me in the boat.

“Smitty, you initiated the ambush prematurely,” he said. “Why didn’t you wait until the sampan entered the kill zone?”

I explained to the lieutenant that the VC had beached the sampan next to me and I had no choice. With that information, Meston grinned at me.

“I understand,” he said, nodding his head. “When you let loose on the right flank like that, it scared the pants off the rest of us.”

McCollum, sitting on my opposite side and hearing us, added, “It scared my pants off and my shit right out of me.”

I chuckled. “Better your shit than my life.”

Muck was grinning in the darkness. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

Once we got back to the base, we found out from Second Squad that they had seen four sampans at 2300 hours, which was when I’d heard and seen their gunfire. They had allowed the lead sampan, a scout boat, to move through and out of the kill zone before opening up on the trailing sampans. All of the VC had either fallen or jumped overboard during the outburst, and only one body had been found and confirmed dead. The others had sunk or gotten away. The two men I had shot must have been the occupants of the scout boat that Second Squad had let pass.

As it happened, that was the first time in which both fire teams in a platoon had gotten hits in the same area on the same night. That was good for our morale and bad for Charlie’s. We’d done our job, which was to harass and destroy. Charlie had done his job, too, which from our point of view was to die. And Foxtrot Platoon lived to see another day and another mission.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mission Thirty-four

“War is an unmitigated evil. But it certainly does one good thing. It drives away fear and brings bravery to the surface.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi,

Non-Violence in Peace and War

DATE: 26 January 1968

TIME: 1330H TO 1630H

COORDINATES: XR698247, XR700242

UNITS INVOLVED: PBRs, MST-2, SEAL 1, SEAL 2

TASK: Recon patrol for VC hospital and prisoner-of-war camp

METHOD OF INSERTION: PBR

METHOD OF