He greeted Gordy and me with the sort of arched-eyebrow distaste and repugnance Park Avenue matrons reserve for drooling street people who invade their space. He asked why I carried no sign of rank or wore no dog tags, and why my weapons were nonregulation. Most of all, he wanted to know who the hell had sent me onto his sacred turf without written permission.
I held my tongue and explained myself. I told his exaltedness what SEALs were, and how we could help him by providing skills his Special Forces guys didn’t have. He looked right through me as I spoke, but nodded in all the appropriate places.
Then I asked for a field brief. “Fieldwise, we’ve got the situation in hand, Lieutenant. I deploy regular patrols, and they keep track of all untoward enemy movements. The VC and North Vietnamese cadres are numerous, but they’re kept in check through consistent forward patrol activity. Further, I’m pleased to say we get good cooperation from our valiant RVN counterparts.”
It was boilerplate chickenshit, of course. But the colonel’s subtext was clear. He wanted no part of me or what I offered. He emphasized the fact that he had U.S. troops—12-man units—blanketed all over the region, working with Marvin the ARVN nice and close, and coordinating with RFPF—Regional Force/Provincial Force units, known as ruff-puffs—which were supposed to ferret out VC or NVA cadre activities on the village level.
“It’s all going smoothly so far as I’m concerned … Lieutenant. I’m not sure we need your unique capabilities up here. Seems like it’s an awful long supply route from Binh Thuy in any case.”
“Just a half-hour chopper jump, sir. Really—nothing more than a hop and pop.”
He nodded. “Good to know, son. If anything comes up, I’ll give you a call.” He saluted, then swiveled his welllubricated chair back toward his paperwork. We were dismissed.
Gordy and I walked outside. “To hell with him. He doesn’t want anybody upsetting his goddamn applecart. Too sweet and quiet up here.”
I formed the platoon up. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Being SEALs, we headed toward liquid. We wandered along the riverfront, stopping for a couple of beers and a few spring rolls as we traipsed through the old French colonial city. A quarter of a mile down the quay, we came upon a big white house that backed up right onto the Bassac. It was a no-shit residence: concertina wire was rolled outside; heavily armed guards in black pajamas similar to ours lounged, eyeing us suspiciously as we sauntered down the road.
I looked at the guards. These were no Vietnamese, but Chinese Nungs—mean, mercenary mothers. They ate the hottest food I’d ever tasted. They’d just as soon kill you as look at you—and they liked to kill you slow. My kind of people. They worked for my brothers-in-arms from the organization we fondly called Christians In Action—the CIA.
We walked up onto the porch and I rang the doorbell.
It was answered by a tanned, reedy, sandy-haired man in his mid-twenties wearing a wrinkled pair of tropical-weight trousers, sandals, a light blue barong—the Filipino shirt that looked like a guayabera and was favored by many Americans in Vietnam—and a .45-caliber automatic.
“Hi,” he said without so much as a flicker. “My name’s Drew Dix and I’m the regional CORDS adviser. Who the hell are you?”
“Hi, Drew,” I said. “My name is Dick Marcinko, I’m a SEAL, and I do dumb things. I’d like some wine for my men, some hay for my horses, and some mud for my turtle.”
He roared, “Well, fuck me,” and opened the door wide. “How about two out of three? Welcome to the White House. Come on in, have a few cold ones, and we’ll talk about the dumb things a man can do up here.”
I smiled through my camouflage. “Louie—this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
As PSA, or Province Senior Adviser, for CORDS—the acronym for the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support pacification program, which had been created in 1967—Drew Dix coordinated civilian pacification programs with both U.S. and Vietnamese military operations. It was a tough job. Drew was a Special Forces sergeant on loan to CORDS. He had done his best to develop an intel network in the area, and to work closely with the Vietnamese. But he was continually frustrated, he told us, because of both the structure of Vietnamese society, and the pigheaded stupidity down the street at the Army compound where Colonel Spit and Polish ruled the roost.
As with any civil war. Drew said, families had been split over both geographic and ideological grounds. So it was altogether possible to have an ARVN officer fighting against a VC cadre who happened to be his cousin or uncle or even his brother. It was often the case that opposing forces had grown up with each other, and word was passed across the lines when ops were run by both sides.
“What happens,” he said, “is that Charlie stages an op, and Marvin goes out to hit him, and a lot of shots get fired, but no one is hit, and then they both withdraw and go home for the night. Frankly, Marcinko, that sucks.”
“What about Colonel Spit and Polish?”
“What about him?”
“Doesn’t he—”
“Shit, Marcinko, he hasn’t left his goddamn compound in weeks. We collect intelligence and we give it to him, and he sits on it until it’s too late to do anything, then he sends out a token force—he’s worse than the goddamn Vietnamese.”
Dix’s opinion was confirmed by his friend Westy. “That sorry muthafucker hasn’t lifted a finger to help out since we set up shop,” Westy said in his broad Louisiana drawl.
The CIA man mopped his red moon face with a blue bandanna that he kept in his back pocket. “No account assholes,” he growled, pointing his nose in the direction of the colonel’s compound. I liked Westy. He was a slow-moving, Jack Daniel’s-drinking Special Forces officer in his mid-forties—probably a major—on loan to Langley. He’d given up crawling around the jungle and now spent his time sitting in a rocking chair in the White House, perfectly content to let Drew have all the action.
Over a Nung dinner that made us sweat like pigs, Drew and Westy gave us the skinny about what it was like on the Cambodian border. “Just remember that once you’ve left the city,” he told us, “the VC own everything. They’ve got a big training center in Cambodia. There’s a supply route that moves through Seven Mountains, which is to the southwest of Chau Doc, and then due south to the Delta.”
“You keep pretty good tabs on Charlie,” Gordy said.
Drew nodded. “We got great intelligence. Problem is, we can’t do anything with it.” He drained his beer, opened another, and took a long pull from the can. “Nungs can’t go out every day—and the colonel’s a chickenshit.”
I raised my beer toward the CIA agent. “We sure’d like to get a piece of your action. Hell, Westy, you got your intel, I got my animals. Seems like we could do good business.”
Westy chopsticked a sliver of red Thai pepper, chewed at it, wiped his forehead with the big blue bandanna he used as a handkerchief, and pulled at his beer. “Shit, Marcinko, you wanna go shoot Japs, just go to it, boy. There’s nobody bothering them right now.”
Next morning I got on the radio, called in my Seawolves, and we rode back to Binh Thuy. As soon as I arrived, I arranged for two PBRs to be sent up the Bassac to Chau Doc. After a chat with the chiefs, I made sure they’d be loaded with good Navy steaks, good Navy ammo, and great civilian beer. Then I paid a social call at the neighborhood Seawolf chopper squadron and told them that we’d discovered it was open season on Charlie up at Chau Doc. That made the pilots very happy and assured us air support whenever we needed it.
We put a couple of more patrols under our belts out of Binh Thuy while the paperwork for detailing the PBRs was shuffled, cut, and dealt. Then, on the twenty-eighth of January, I filed an UNODIR with Hank Mustin, and off we went to go hunting.
We left Chau Doc on the evening of the thirty-first—Tet eve. The idea was to set up a listening post above the Vinh Te canal, about fifteen hundred yards north of the city. The canal was only two hundred yards south of the Cambodian border and ran paralle
l to it for miles. Sitting there, we’d present a tempting target for the VC—and if they made a move to overrun us, we’d kick the shit out of them.
Colonel Spit and Polish—I’d begun calling him Colonel Shit and Polish—had ordered me to file a fire plan, which I’d never done in my life, before we went out. Basically, a fire plan would give him the map coordinates of my position so he could call in artillery support should I need it. A fire plan may work if you have a division stumbling around in the jungle. But SEALs don’t want or need massive ground artillery support from a firebase twenty miles away. SEALs carry their own firepower—and if they need more, they can call in the mortars on Mike boats, or the recoilless rifles and machine guns on PBRs.
Moreover, fire plans are restrictive. First, they give you fewer choices. We could operate only in three small areas because the artillery dip-dunks were either unwilling or unable to plot more than a trio of coordinates on their maps. So if we weren’t dead center on first base, second base, or third base, we didn’t get artillery support. That didn’t bother me. What really made me mad was that my men and I were vulnerable to friendly fire if we strayed off the areas we’d committed to. Another problem with fire plans was op-sec—operational security. The more people who knew where I’d be, the more chance there was that someone would let Mr. Charlie know. Colonel Shit and Polish maintained close contact with Marvin the ARVN. And there were a lot of Marvins who had relatives in VC cadres.
I considered telling Colonel Shithead to screw himself, but Drew and Westy warned me not to get playful. So I filed the paperwork, giving myself the discreet, dainty, self-effacing radio call-sign Sharkman One. Then we took our PBR and started upriver.
Eleven of us left at dusk, loaded down with as many lethal goodies as we could carry. Hoss Kucinski, the rear guard, brought half a dozen LAWS. I carried a 9mm pistol with a hush-puppy—silencer—and my M16, with lots of extra ammo. Risher had his Stoner; Dennis Drady and Frank Scollise carried extra mags. Doc Nixon carried the radio and stuffed his medical bags full of frag grenades. We might be out for two to three days—who knew how long the cease-fire would last—and we wanted to be prepared.
Drew Dix, Westy, and the Nungs watched as we cleared the pier behind the White House, moving slowly because our PBR crews didn’t know the river. We left Chau Doc behind and steamed north. I stood in the cockpit with the lead PBR captain, a seasoned chief named Jack.
He adjusted the power and scanned the river, carefully watching for sandbars. “Gonna have some fun, Mr. Dick?”
“Hope so, Chief.”
“How long you gonna stay out?”
“Two days if we’re lucky.”
He nodded. He reached into his pocket, took a cigarette, and lighted it. “Sounds good.” He took a deep drag on the butt and exhaled smoke through his nose. “We’ll stick around tonight,” he said. “Not much sense cruising during the day tomorrow, but we’ll be back on site tomorrow night.”
“Sounds good to me, Chief.” I paused. “This part of the river is new to you.”
He shook his head. “New to everybody. We gotta be real careful up here.”
I knew what he was talking about—and it wasn’t just sandbars. The river got narrow and took a lot of ninety-degree turns north of Chau Doc. Many of those turns took you across the Red Line—the invisible border separating Vietnam and Cambodia. Tonight’s mission, in fact, would start in Vietnam, although where it would end was anybody’s guess. The idea was to come in from north of the Vinh Te canal—the direction Americans would be least expected to come from—and set up an ambush that looked like a listening post. If I was right, we’d catch Mr. Charlie trying to break the Tet holiday truce, and we’d kick his ass. If I was wrong, we’d have two lovely, quiet days in the countryside and come home none the worse for wear.
About eight kilometers from the city, just below the Red Line, Jack began a series of sweeps that brought the PBRs close to the shoreline. After three or four of these feints, we inserted covertly, leaving Jack and his crews to continue the pattern. If Charlie was watching, he had no idea what was going on, as no PBR had ever come this far up the Bassac before.
The brown water was warm as we went over the side, and we swam quickly onto the bank, crawled into the underbrush, popped the plugs from our rifle barrels, and moved onto the shore. The landscape was more like Virginia than Vietnam, filled with tall reeds and thick, green bushes that scraped like holly plants as we slithered under them.
By the time we’d moved twenty yards from the river, the ground turned hard and flat and the vegetation got brambly. We could make out a mountain eight or ten kilometers ahead. I knew from my map it was in Cambodia. On the other hand, so were we. Big deal.
We took bearings and began to move southwest, along a pattern of dikes that ran through a series of drained rice fields separated by small ditches. Beyond the flat fields, a tree line beckoned. Somewhere to the south, just behind the tree line, lay the Vinh Te canal. I wanted to move across the plain, through the tree line, toward the canal, and set up an ambush. The VC would be coming from Cambodia, from their trails and supply caches. We’d be waiting for them, and gong-hayfat-choy—happy New Year!
By now it was about 2230. We were moving very slowly because we’d had reports about VC minefields from the Nungs, although we hadn’t come across any so far. The platoon was strung out over about twenty-five yards. My rabbits, Denny the Yenta Drady, Jack Saunders, and John Engraff, were up front, nosing a path through the rice fields for the rest of us to follow. Then came Risher, with the Stoner. I walked behind Risher, followed by Doc Nixon, who carried the radio. Dewayne Schwalenberg followed in Doc’s footprints. Frank Scollise, Gordy Boyce, Harry Humphries, and Hoss Kucinski brought up the rear. I wanted the old guys—they hated it when I used to say that—behind me. Their instincts were perfect—and they could drop and shoot without my having to say a word to ’em.
We turned east. I’d hoped for a dark night, and I got my wish. We’d brought starlight scopes, low-intensity-light devices that allowed us to see in the dark. I carried one. So did Gordy Boyce, and so did Denny Drady. If VC were hiding out there, we’d see them before they saw us—or so we hoped.
Ahead of us, the sky was black. However, back at Chau Doc, Colonel Shit and Polish had evidently decided he’d put out flares. So to our south, the sky was bright, almost like when, coming up the Jersey Turnpike at night, you first see the lights of New York just below exit 13. We’d be hooking south soon, and our starlight scopes wouldn’t be much help once we did. Maybe, I thought, the colonel would make enough noise so that nobody would pay any attention to eleven SEALs. Fat chance.
I could barely make out Denny Drady, a hundred feet or so ahead of us, inching forward. He held up his hand. We all froze. We hadn’t advanced twenty yards yet. Drady waved for me to come forward—slowly. I made my way to his shoulder.
The fidgety little guy was pointing like a hound on scent. I followed his shaking finger.
It was barely visible in the chaff of the field, but Denny’s keen eyes had picked it out—the button detonator of a VC antipersonnel mine.
“Shit.” Were we at the beginning, middle, or end of a minefield? I had no idea.
I signaled the platoon not to move. “Minefield,” I hissed. The warning was carried back down the line.
My senses were so sharp I could feel it as a single rivulet of sweat made its way down the inside of my shirt. The tension was electric. Together, Denny and I dug around the perimeter of the mine, lifted it slowly out of its hole, and placed it gingerly on the ground.
I cracked a smile and tapped Denny on the back. “Good work, Yenta. Now, make me a path,” I said.
He nodded, his beady, little round eyes bright with excitement. “Aye-aye, boss. Presto-chango—you’re a path.”
“Screw you, Yenta.”
He blew me a kiss. “Not unless you shave first.” Drady dropped to his knees, his knife out, probing the ground as he moved forward inch by inch, sweeping a path eightee
n inches wide for the rest of us to move along. We followed behind, creeping slowly as he scrutinized every lump and bump.
It took us almost an hour to move less than two hundred feet. We didn’t feel safe until we’d crossed a small drainage ditch and cut eastward, away from where Denny thought the pattern of the minefield lay.
He dropped into the ditch exhausted. “Shit, boss, I’ve had it.”
He had good reason. He was soaked through with sweat; his mousy hair had matted under the black kerchief tied around his brow. His eyes had gone red with fatigue and stress. But he’d brought us through. Halfway through the field he’d pulled another mine out of the ground and guided us safely, leaving discreet markers so we could find our way back if we had to.
I hit him on the arm. “Take a break. I’ll grab the point for a while,”
“Thanks, boss.”
We moved out toward the distant tree line. I took a slow pace, still moving carefully—more mines were a possibility. It was strange being on point, a role I usually did not take in the platoon. I wanted to be in the middle of the men, where I could control both front and rear. But tonight, with Denny exhausted, I somehow felt it was my turn.
On my first tour I’d watched Patches Watson lose five, six, even seven pounds of body weight every time Bravo Squad went out on a patrol, from the sheer physical and mental strain of taking the point. And Patches was a big, robust, strapping lad. Denny Drady was skinny to start with—now, the strain of getting us through the minefield had begun to take its toll and he looked like the proverbial drowned rat.
No question, point drains you. There has never been any war movie or book that has adequately described the overwhelming sensations that run through your mind, or the effects on your body, when you walk the point in a combat situation.
You can’t let up, even for a microsecond. Every molecule in your body becomes an antenna, absorbing the endless succession of outside stimuli that bombard your senses, evaluating every infinitesimal change that takes place around you. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—each of these senses is being used to its utmost. And if you screw up, you get dead.
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