I gave hand signals. “Enemy coming. Get ready.” The squad went down in their holes.
Now the jeep started to move. “Ready.”
I waited. “Now—”
The ridgeline erupted as six 30-round magazines were expended in unison. I was blinded by the muzzle flashes and lost my target picture but kept shooting anyway. I ejected, thrust another 30-round mag in my M16, and blasted away. So did everybody else.
“Shit—goddamn it, son of a bitch!” Gallagher’s voice came down the line, followed by Gallagher, who exploded out of his hole six feet straight into the air. He landed on top of his partner, Watson, and started throwing punches. “You asshole scumbag—”
I ran up the line and pulled them apart. “What the—”
“It’s his fault, Mr. Rick.” Gallagher ripped his fatigue shirt off. His back was covered with ugly red blisters. “It’s Patches’ friggin’ shell casings. The son of a bitch ejected them down my neck.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“You dipshit—”
I shook them by the scruffs of their necks. “Oh, this is just peachy. We are supposedly in the middle of a fucking ambush, and you shit-for-brains assholes are arguing about where your hot brass is going, while the fucking enemy is cutting your throats.”
I stomped off toward the jeep path to check the targets. “This is no way to run a fucking war.”
What I discovered made me even more unhappy. There were six of us. We had each emptied two 30-round magazines at the six-by-eight target, which had been moving at a speed of five miles per hour, at a distance of 120 feet. We had fired 360 shots. There were precisely two bullet holes in the target.
The squad was summoned. I poked a ballpoint through each hole.
“So, this is what a highly trained, well-fucking-motivated squad of killers can do when it tries, right?” I growled in a passable Ev Barrett parody.
I let their perfidy sink in. I looked at the crestfallen faces.
“Didn’t you go to marksman’s school?” I put an index finger over Patches Watson’s heart. “Don’t you hang a fucking Expert Marksman’s Badge on that walking billboard you call a jumpsuit?”
He hung his head in shame. “Yes, sir, Ensign Rick.”
The Barrett in me took over. “Well, it is not fucking good e-fucking-nuff for you to wear a motherfucking cocksucking dingle-fucking-dangle medal and shoot only two fucking holes in this motherfucking piece of plywood. Or do I have it all wrong, gentlemen?”
No answers.
“Boys,” I said softly, “those probs and stats don’t fuckin’ excite me at all.”
Silence.
“Now, I’ll tell you something—we’re all at fault here. I mean, how many times did I hit the target? Okay, so we’ve got a prob to solve. Let’s solve it. Are we leading the target too much? Are we not leading it enough? I mean, what gives?”
We did what was necessary: we drilled again and again and again until we could shred the plywood target whether it was towed at five miles an hour or fifteen. We practiced shooting in teams of two—remember swim buddies, and how I said you would see that material again?—from a confined space, like a camouflaged hole, or from behind trees. Each of us learned how to fire from close quarters without showering his neighbor with hot brass.
Our training continued from fall into early winter. For Halloween we visited the Vietcong village at Camp Lejeune, where Marines in black pajamas and cartoonish Asian accents carried AK-47s and tried to play trick or treat with us. Marines should never attempt war games with SEALs. We gave the bogus VC our own brand of So-Solly U.S. Maleen, boobytrapping their booby traps, playing hide-and-seek during their ambush exercises, and staging our own sneak attacks on their “secured” VC hamlet. It was all fun and games and playacting. We hiked. We camped. We shot the hell out of targets. When we had time, we’d waltz into Virginia Beach for some full-contact bar-brawling.
A word or two here about that. I have always believed that being a SEAL, like being an NFL linebacker, requires a certain amount of aggressive, close physical contact with your fellow human beings. Some may disagree with me. But I find that there is something truly rewarding about putting your back up against the back of someone you trust with your life, and taking on all comers. Sure, you take a certain number of dings in the pursuit of these unruly activities. But in the long run, I believe the rewards outweigh the liabilities. And when, as an officer, my most important job is to build unit integrity, there are few better ways in which to build it than late at night, in a bar, when it’s you and your five guys against the rest of the world.
Thus endeth the sermon.
Early in December, we trooped over to the infirmary and upgraded our inoculations. We were still nursing sore arms and butts when the base legal officer sat us down and drew up last wills and testaments for those of us going overseas. Then the yeomen from BUPERS—the Bureau of Personnel—came and told us about supplemental insurance and death benefits we could sign up for, and we arranged to have our paychecks direct-deposited in our checking accounts.
This was a no-shitter. This was the real thing. My kids, Richie, who was three, and little Kathy—I called her Kat—who’d been born July 5, less than six months before, were too young to realize what was happening. But my wife, KathyAnn, knew, and she—like the other SEAL wives—was apprehensive. She got nervous whenever I jumped out of a plane or went out on a dive. She hadn’t cared for the fact that, as a SEAL, I’d been away for five of the preceding six months on training exercises. Now, the thought of my spending six months in Vietnam with angry, small, yellow people shooting at me did not make her happy at all. While I could comprehend her concerns, I couldn’t understand them. War was what I’d trained for since I’d joined the teams, and nothing would keep me away from combat.
There were tears and sniffles and lots of kissing and hugging, and then just before Christmas, we SEALs climbed onto a C-130 Hercules loaded to the gills with equipment. Instead of seats there were long, greasy web canvas slings strung along the sides of the fuselage. In the wide center aisle were pallets swathed in cargo netting, piled high with all the deadly goodies SEALs need for six months of fun and games. This was a true no-frills flight. No seats. No seat belts. No tray-tables. No food. No stewardesses to plump pillows behind our heads. In fact, there were no heads, only a tube by the tail ramp where we could take a leak.
Over the next seven days, we meandered west so we could reach the East, while we tried to find somewhere to stretch out and grab some sleep. That is harder than it sounds. The C-130 is a loud aircraft—it helps if you wear earplugs—and it is an uncomfortable aircraft because there is nothing soft on which to lie down. We also, I remember thinking at the time, landed on every bloody rock in the Pacific to refuel. Midway, Wake. Saipan, Guam, Philippines—we did ’em all. Then over the South China Sea, south of Saigon, and a long, lazy approach that finally took us over Vietnam itself.
I climbed up the ladder to the cockpit and looked through the windshield. I’d expected an endless panoply of lush, tropical jungle. Instead, it was dull green and mottled brown, with square-mile sections of moonlike craters pitting earth the color of dried blood.
“Where the hell’s the jungle?”
“Gone.” the pilot explained. “B-52 strikes. Defoliants. Napalm.”
I pondered that. “Where are we landing?”
“Binh Thuy.”
“Big airfield?”
“Not so big. We always take rounds, too, so we’re gonna make a fast approach. Once we’re on the ground we like to move quick—so if you could get you and your stuff clear in a hurry, it’d be appreciated.”
“That’s a roger.” I scurried down the ladder and found Kochey. “Pilot says we’re dropping into a hot zone. What about locking and loading now?”
Kochey screwed his chin up and pondered. “The regs say we can’t do that. It bothers the Air Force.”
“I wonder if Charlie’s read the regs.”
Kochey ponde
red that for about half a second. Then he slammed me on the arm. “You’re right. Tell ’em that anybody who wants to can lock and load.”
I gathered my squad and we pulled M16s and magazines out of our canvas hang-up bags. We slammed home 30-round mags. Then, when the Air Force crew wasn’t looking, we pulled the charging handles back—raaatchet-click!—and chambered rounds. Then we thumbed the M16 safeties to their horizontal ON position.
The Hercules was circling now, dipping its port wing as it dropped lower and lower. We could hear the hydraulic whine of flaps extending, then the rumble of landing gear, and then, ba-bump-ba-bump, we were on the tarmac and taxiing, and the rear ramp was whining as it slowly lowered toward the ground. All thoughts of home vanished. My heart was pounding a steady kaboom-kaboom at a rate of about 120. Oh, this was going to be fun.
Chapter 7
IT SMELLED WARM AND HUMID AND NICE AND FRESH AND rustically pastoral, like pig dung. You know how when you climb off a plane there’s that first whiff of strange, new air that tells you everything at once about where you are? The first whiff that came through the lowered ramp made me think of Puerto Rico, and I knew instantly that I was going to like Vietnam a whole lot.
I looked around. There were sandbags, and there were revetments for aircraft. There were Hueys whomp-whompwhomping just above the tarmac. But there were also palm trees and rice paddies, and beyond the barbed wire and the minefields I could see farm hootches with chickens running in the yards and pigs rolling in the mud behind crude wood fences.
I stretched, raising my M16 over my head like a barbell, and sucked my lungs full of the beautifully humid, tropical, petroleum-laced air. Yeah. Puerto Rico. Panama. The aroma was definitely Third World. Strangely, for someone—me—who had never spent much time in the Third World, it was eerily like coming home.
Within a couple of hours we had settled in at Tre Noc, about a mile away from the Binh Thuy air base. Tre Noc sits on the Bassac River, one of five major waterways that run through the Mekong Delta region. (From south to north they are the Mekong, Bassac, Co Chien, Ham Luong, and My Tho rivers. Each one follows a generally west-to-east course running from Cambodia into the South China Sea.) The Navy had a PBR—Patrol Boat/River—headquarters on the river at Tre Noc: Task Force 116.
We’d been assigned to 116 to support riverine operations in the region, which had been given the appropriate-sounding code name Game Warden. Our assignment was to help the PBRs interdict VC supplies that were shuttled on sampans or portaged through the shallows by bearers. We would also intercept VC couriers, kill or capture them, and pass whatever information they were carrying to Navy Intelligence.
We drove the couple of kilometers from Binh Thuy to Tre Noc half expecting to see tents and slit latrines when we arrived. From the scuttlebutt we’d heard before we left, living conditions at riverine HQ were primitive.
No way. As we drove up, I could see concrete buildings, air conditioners sticking out of a few windows, a good-sized mess hall, a large dock and mechanical emplacement, and an HQ complex that, while it wasn’t Little Creek, was far better than anyone expected.
As soon as we pulled up, the four lieutenants—Jake Rhinebolt, Larry Bailey, Bob Gormly, and Fred Kochey—and I left the two platoons outside and wandered into the steamy HQ of Task Force 116, which was commanded by a senior officer who bore the title of commodore. We checked our paperwork in, then walked down the hall and rapped on the door of the commodore’s office.
“Come.”
We walked into a room hazy from cigarette smoke. The commodore, a captain in a grimy tan shirt, sleeves rolled to the biceps, waved us in without looking.
We snapped offhanded salutes in his direction.
The commodore looked up. His eyes wandered in our direction, then they focused on me. “Holy shit. You still pulling low, Marcinko, you geek?”
B. B. Witham, the former captain of LSD-114, the USSRushmore, where I’d done my final cruise as an enlisted Frog man, mashed his omnipresent cigarette into the sawed-off shell casing he used as an ashtray, jumped up, slammed me on the shoulder, and pumped my right arm vigorously. “Son of a bitch.”
Witham scrutinized the single-bar tabs on my collar. He reached out and touched them to make sure they were real. The crow’s-feet around his eyes wrinkled into what I remembered as the New Englanders weather-beaten smile. “I never would’ve believed you made it through OCS.”
Finally he took notice of the other four guys in the room, told them to stand at ease, and then slammed me on the chest good-naturedly. “This son of a bitch almost gave me a heart attack when he was an enlisted man and I commanded an LSD,” he explained, joyfully punching me in the arm.
“Shit, sir,” Rhinebolt, who was the senior SEAL, said earnestly, “he still does that. In training, he’d—”
“Good for Marcinko,” the commodore interrupted. “Read my lips. If there’s anything I like in an officer, it’s consistency.” He looked at me like a prodigal son. “Right, you geek asshole?”
What could I say. The man was a prince.
Then Witham sat us down and gave us the skinny about the quality of our lives in the foreseeable future. We’d live in one of the half dozen flat-roofed, one-story concrete buildings that were divvied up into four-man bunkrooms. We’d have a mess hall, showers—all the conveniences, even a hootch maid to keep our clothes clean. And she’d have her hands full, because Witham wanted to keep us busy. “You’re gonna be spending a lot of time in the mud, so I hope you don’t mind getting dirty.” Finally, he kicked us out, told us to get squared away in a couple of hours, and then he’d see us for a beer later.
B. B. Witham was given to understatement. It took almost a week to square everything away. The ammo had to be stored, the equipment sorted and laid out, and our weapons cleaned. I quickly became a fanatic on clean weapons because I realized the climate would start ruining ’em within a few hours. Moisture, rust, mud, dust—we were constantly battling against them.
By the end of the third day I was getting restless. The quartet of lieutenants—Rhinebolt, Kochey, Bailey, and Gormly—had choppered north to the Rung Sat Special Zone, a killer, 600-square-mile mangrove swamp that ran from just southeast of Saigon to the South China Sea, to visit SEAL Team One and eyeball the way the war was being fought. Their thought was to copy SEAL One’s technique—set up a static ambush and wait for the enemy to show up.
Meanwhile, Boy Ensign and his merry band of junior idiots were left behind. We were too young to tag along, said the grown-ups.
“Get some rest,” Jake Rhinebolt told me. “Go play with your toys.”
So I sat and pouted and got some sun for about half a day. That was a loser. I hadn’t come to sunbathe. I visited the intel shop, where I asked the pigeon-entrails readers how the VC in the area operated, and where they were most likely to be found. That evening, the six SEAL pups of Bravo shared a case of beer and plotted. When adults go off and leave the children unattended, all sorts of unforeseen adventures can occur.
The next morning, Eagle and I sauntered down to the dock and sweet-talked ourselves aboard a PBR for the morning patrol. The PBR is a wonderful craft. It’s thirty-one feet long and runs on a Jacuzzi propulsion system, which means it has a shallow draft and it’s fast—like about twenty-eight or twenty-nine knots—and very maneuverable. They were armed with twin .50-caliber machine guns in the bow, riflefired 81mm mortars astern, and Honeywell 40mm Gatling guns over the engine covers. The four- or five-man crews carried an assortment of M16s, M60 machine guns, as well as .45 automatics and an occasional .38. So—in addition to fast—the PBRs were deadly.
The crew cast off and we edged out into the opaque greenbrown water. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and it was already more than ninety degrees. The humidity was fierce—you could almost see the air move if you chopped it with the edge of your hand. Over the engine growl I asked one of the deck crew if it was okay to stand by the conn, and receiving an affirmative nod, I clambered into the cockpit and sidled
up next to the chief who had the wheel.
He was archetypal. He looked somewhere in his late thirties, with thinning, light-brown hair trimmed flattop above and white-wall on the sides. His ears stuck out like jug handles. A series of tattoos ran up his muscular forearms and disappeared under the smartly rolled sleeves of a weathered chambray work shirt. Most of the sailors who ran PBRs wore green or tan. Not this guy. He was an old-fashioned mother, and he wanted you to know it.
“Morning, Chief.”
He spun the wheel out and the boat moved into the current. He applied a little more throttle now, moving us against the river. He kept his silence until we were well off the twin fingers of the dock. Then he ordered the gunners to clear their weapons. Finally he turned to me. “Morning … sir.” There was a thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three pause between the first and second words.
I looked at the green underbrush that overlapped the riverbank, now fifty yards away. “Nice day for a cruise. Chief.”
“If you say so … sir.” He turned away and shouted a blankety-blank command to one of his aft-deck blanketyblanking crewmen.
I knew what he was thinking. Here was yet another gung ho, dipshit, puke ensign looking to punch his ticket, play a war game or two, and go home.
I waited until he turned back to the conn and ignored me for another ninety seconds. “Hey, fuck you, Chief.”
That got his attention. “Say what?”
“I said, ‘Hey, fuck you, Chief.’ I’m here to learn—so break me in. Gimme a dump. Gimme a real no-fucking-shitter. What the motherfucking hell’s goin’ on out here?”
ROGUE WARRIOR® Page 10