I’d been hearing about Ilo-Ilo for months. There was nothing on it from the NILO — Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer — at My Tho, but then Naval Intelligence, which some people believe is an oxymoron, was usually about ninety days old when they finally got around to disseminating it at the squad level. It was always my sense that the Navy never felt intel could be as useful to field units as it was to admirals.
So, while the intel squirrels were great at collecting their factoid nuts, and analyzing what they had, and wrote briefing papers and memos by the ream, they hardly ever sent anything back our way. Which says something about the way the Navy fought wars, even then.
The problem with intelligence-gathering in those days (and to a great extent today as well) is that virtually ail military intelligence collection is geared toward supporting — and therefore reporting about — large units. And yet for a SEAL, even a 100-man company is a major overload if you run into one on a narrow jungle trail.
Despite the fad that the Navy didn’t know about Ilo-Ilo, its name kept cropping up elsewhere. Village chiefs from up and down the river mentioned it. VC prisoners talked about it. Chu-hoi gossiped about it. Marvin the ARVN’s intelligence gophers would chatter about it. Marvin believed it to be a >big VC R&R center, where Charlie would send his guys after they’d been harassing us. The chu-hoi thought it was a staging area for VC strikes north into the Rung Sat Zone, or the northeastern portion of the Mekong Delta. Whatever it was, I felt it was worth a trip to find out.
Ilo-Ilo sat in the mouth of the Delta, where the My Tho River ran into the South China Sea. A nutmeg-shaped island, it lay three-eighths of a mile from either shore. It wasn’t all that large — perhaps half a mile long and a thousand feet wide.
At its western tip was a big canal that ran eastward in a series of S-curves, cutting through some incredibly thick underbrush, until it finally seemed to peter out. On the opposite — easternmost — side, another series of smaller canals ran into the ocean. From the air, they looked like spiderwebs as they snaked north and south in random geometric patterns.
It seemed to me Ilo-Ilo was ideal real estate for a major VC encampment. It had the same trio of prerequisites as a good investment property anywhere in the world: location, location, and location. And best, it was virgin territory: there had never been an American operation there. I took my idea to Commander Toole. He approved a daytime operation. I told Fred Kochey about it, too.
“Sounds like fun. Rick. Mind if I come along for the ride?”
That was fine with me. I liked Kochey. Like me, he was a Pennsylvania boy. Unlike me, he was one of those perpetually calm, unflappable types- If the two of us ran three miles, I’d be sweating buckets when we finished; Kochey, a slightly built guy about six feet tall, would look as cool as when he’d stayted.
He was a methodical, thorough planner. Best of all, he was dependable in combat — in fact, combat was the only time Fred would actually get excited. “Sure — it’ll be fun to have you come play with us if you want. But you gotta bring your own toys.”
Ilo-Ilo was forty miles downriver from My Tho, too long a run for STABs. So early on the morning of May 18, we tied a STAB alongside our Mike boat, piled on as much ammo as we could carry without drowning, and chugged down the river at a steady eight knots.
The day was typical Vietnamese.Mekong Delta spring weather: ninety degrees, 100 percent humidity. In our tigerstripe camouflage and blackened faces we sweltered. The trip down the river took four, seemingly endless, hours. We arrived just before noon to a nasty surprise — huge quantities of Delta mud. As we neared Ilo-Ilo, the Mike boat almost ran aground on a series of sandbars clogging the channel- The problem was silt that had probably traveled all the way from Cambodia. But wherever it had come from, it was a definite bummer. It was impossible to make the head-on approach that had, from the map, appeared to be the most effective way of inserting onto the island.
When in doubt, improvise. So Bravo, Kochey, and I dropped into the STAB, and with the Mike boat chunkachunking offshore, we went round the back to see if there was another way in from the ocean side.
We rounded the southwest tip of the island, feinted a couple of times to confuse anybody who might have been watching, then rolled off the STAB on the offshore side and swam into the biggest of the canals. Even swimming, mud was a factor because the water was loaded with silt. It got worse as we moved forward, chest deep in the canal. The bottom was sticky as hot tar, making our progress slow — and worse, noisy.
The mud went everywhere: pockets, boots, guns, magazines. After an eighth of a mile in the canal we dragged ourselves up onto the bank, set up a defensive perimeter, and spent half an hour cleaning weapons. The silt was so bad we had to disassemble our Ml 6 30-round magazines and rinse the springs and followers clean. There was almost an inch of silt at the bottom of each mag — more than enough to make them totally unusable.
The temperature had risen to about one hundred. The men were already hitching. I could hear Eagle Gallagher muttering to Fred Kochey about crazy Mr. Rick, his screwed-up notions about patrols, and the quality of the mud in the canal. Patches Watson looked skyward and asked the Lord what he’d done to deserve this unhappy fate.
Ron Rodger played the God role: “Because you piss me off, my son,” he said in a booming basso profundo.
I’ve always believed a hitching sailor is a happy sailor, so I decided to make the men ecstatic by leaving the smaller canals. Instead, we’d blaze a trail through the thick, thombush underbrush toward the center of the island. There, I hoped to find the major canal and follow its meandering Scurves westward. If there were any VC on Ilo-Ilo — and I was convinced there were — they’d be adjacent to that main canal.
We moved out to the sounds of rumbling clouds and grumbling SBALs. Patches Watson took the point. After him, Ron Rodger and the Stoner machine gun. Then me, followed by Camp, Finley, Kochey, and Eagle Gallagher. We found a few trails, although they obviously hadn’t been used in some time. Still, we stayed away — no sense running into hostile strangers — and hacked a new path, spacing ourselves at fiveyard intervals, watching carefully for any sign of Mr. Charlie.
It was tough work, and we measured out progress in feet, not yards. The brunt was born by Patches Watson, who had the point. It was he who did the most cutting, chopping with his machete while simultaneously staying alert for trip wires, booby traps, and pungi pits.
Ilo-Ilo was different from any place I’d seen in Vietnam.
The vegetation was more like one of the Virginia or North Carolina coastal islands than Southeast Asian jungle. At the shoreline there were no palm trees; instead we found dense, tough saplings, thorn bushes, and heavy vines that had to be cut with machetes. As we progressed inland, it grew more tropical, with palms, big-leafed jungle plants, and the tall marsh grasses we were accustomed to in the Delta. Just before two P.M., it rained. The coolness was welcome — there was steam coming off us as the water cascaded down for about fifteen minutes, then eased to a drizzle. Finally, it stopped.
We didn’t.
Patches Watson held up his hand. I signaled for a break.
He slid his machete back into its sheath, made his way back up the line to where I hunkered, and sat down heavily, leaning on his CAR-15. His uniform had tripled in weight from the Delta water, rain, and perspiration.
“Mr. Rick?”
“Yo.”
“Screw this shit. I’ve had it.”
“You tired?”
“Tired? I’m bleeping ragged. There’s nothing here.”
“Says you?”
“Says the damn jungle, Mr. Rick — ioud and clear. This op is an Adam Henry goatfuck — we’re gonna come up dry. I can’t see six feet in front of me. Let’s go back to the boat.”
I shook my head. “I love you Patches, but you’re outta here. If you don’t think we’re gonna find anything, you ain’t gonna keep a sharp eye. We need a fresh man on point because there’s VC — somewhere. I can smell it.”
&n
bsp; I waved at Camp. “Joe — take another minute, then relieve Patches.”
Camp nodded. We’d just gotten to our feet, and Camp hadn’t gone three meters, when his hand went up, signaling me forward.
I halted the column, then moved ahead to Camp’s position.
Camp pointed. I looked. It was a canal, perhaps ten feet wide.
On the far side was a good-sized bamboo hootch, built on stilts five or six feet off the ground to protect it from the tidal surges. Eureka. We’d hit pay dirt. I waved Patches Watson forward and pointed.
“Holy shit. Well, mud-suck me, Mr. Rick.”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
I gave hand signals. Two men flanked right, three of us took the center, and two flanked left. Moving silently, we slid through the low vegetation, over the bank, and down into the canal, submerged ourselves up to our necks, and dogpaddled across. We lay on our backs on the far side, protected by the natural roll of the four-foot benn. Our weapons were balanced on our chests.
I signaled to Gallagher and Patches. They went up the bank and scrambled toward the hootch. Seconds later they rolled back over the top and dropped into the canal, all excited.
Gallagher was absolutely ebullient: “It’s empty, Mr. Rick — but Charlie was there. He was there. Only a couple hours ago, too. There’s a cooking fire and it’s still warm.”
“Great.” I drew a circle in the air with my index finger.
We pulled ourselves up the bank, put out perimeter guards, and searched the hootch. There were big tins of medical equipment, some paperwork, and a few odds and ends. We took what we could carry and set fire to the rest. I got on the radio to the Mike boat.
“Bravo to Docksider.”
“This is Docksider.”
“We’re hitting pay dirt, so don’t you guys be sunbathing out there.”
“Roger Bravo. What’s your location?”
“We’re moving up the big canal toward the main exit.”
“Roger-roger, Bravo. We’ll be waiting.”
We divvied up the VC booty, stuffing it into the pockets of our fatigues. Then we started moving westward in the canai,.‘ taking it slow and easy. Moving in water was certainly easier than hacking our way through vegetation, but nowhere was it written that Charlie wouldn’t booby-trap canals the way he did Jungle paths, so we kept our eyes open. We moved in a crouch, protecting ourselves from being seen by using the water and the berm, which rose three to four feet, to mask our movements.
We hadn’t gone three hundred yards when we came around a sharp, leftward curve and the strong smell of smoke hit us.
It’s amazing how often in the Delta that would happen: we wouldn’t hear, see, or smell anything until we were right on top of it. It was as if the jungle were divided into rooms separated by invisible walls.
Patches signaled. “Enemy ahead.”
We moved inch by inch until we heard voices, then we crept even slower, keeping the canal bank between us and the sound of Vietnamese.
I slid my nose above the berm line. Not twenty yards away was a large clearing — maybe twenty by twenty-five meters— with three hootches on stilts and a good-sized cooking shed.
In front of the hootches, five VC in shorts and loose, black pajama tops were squatting in front of a fire, chattering tike Boy Scouts, while they watched a pot of something boiling away. Their AK-47s were leaning against the hootches, their sandals were off. Three of them were smoking.
In the distance, I could hear the growl of the Mike boat’s diesels. Charlie could hear it, too- But the sound did not concern him.
There had probably been hundreds of boats chugging past Ilo-Ilo, and never any unwelcome visitors. So Charlie was not worried. He hadn’t set out any recon. It wasn’t necessary:
Charlie knew he could read the Americans tike a book.
I dropped back down, hardly able to keep myself from smiling. We were about to write them a new chapter — with a surprise ending, so far as I was concerned.
Using hand signals I sent the squad on its way, and we spread out into firing positions. The canal took a horseshoe curve around the hootches, which meant two wonderful things for us tactically. First, it kept us out of sight while we took our time flanking the unsuspecting VC. Second, it gave us a natural killing zone because our expanded field of fire would catch the hootch area from three sides instead of straight on.
On my signal, we rolled our M16s and Stoner over the top of the berm and hit them with full automatic fire. It was going nicely when somebody — no one ever owned up to it later— decided to help things along by tossing a frag grenade.
The grenade bounced against a tree trunk and — almost in slow motion — caromed back toward us, bouncing and rolling inexorably closer and closer to our firing positions.
“Oh, shüüit—” Fred Kochey’s voice was loud and clear over the gunfire. “Grenaaaade — down!”
Seven men rolled back and dove underwater as one, chased by the concussion and deadly metal fragments.
I surfaced, coughing, spouting the brackish canal water like a statue. “Everybody okay?”
Nobody had been dinged. We held our fire. Jim Finiey peeked over the top of the canal. “They’re history.”
Patches and Eagle charged up the bank, followed by Kochey, me, and the rest. Patches rolled the bodies, both to see how we’d done and to make sure no one was playing possum.
We’d hit them well, with lots of head shots and upper-torso wounds. We grabbed the weapons. I gave them a quick onceover. They were Chicom AK-47s. I grabbed one and slung it over my shoulder and passed one each to Patches, Gallagher, and Kochey. AKs were rare. Then we searched the area thoroughly, grabbing everything we could find. I was euphoric.
What we’d come upon was exactly what I’d hoped we’d find: a major VC waystation; a pit stop for couriers as they made their way north and south, moving to and from Saigon, or west toward the Cambodian border. It was as big a VC camp as I’d ever seen.
Behind the hootches were a pair of camouflaged bunkers.
We blew them up with grenades. We took the cloth pouches the VC carried instead of wallets, and all the papers we could grab. We found a can of kerosene, splashed it over all the medical supplies and food, then set everything on fire.
We laid the VC in a neat row, so their pals would find them easily. Then we booby-trapped the corpses. April tool, Mr.
Charlie.
We also made a discovery. Outside the hootches were three pairs of what looked like rubber snowshoes, made of old tires and canvas. Ron Rodger found them and brought one of them over to me.
“What the hell’s this?”
I scratched my head. “You got me.”
Kochey fingered the goods. “Looks like a snowshoe.”
Eagle Gallagher nodded. “Mud shoes,” he said. He pointed at the VC corpses. “They don’t generally weigh but seventyfive pounds soaking wet. They wear these and walk on water — keep themselves out of the mud. Us big gringos in our goddamn boots sink like stones. Charlie glides”—he imitated someone ice-skating—“and leaves no tracks.”
Kochey nodded. “Sounds good to me.” He looked around.
“Dick?”
“Sneaky little bastards, aren’t they?” I looked at my watch:
1655. Almost five hours on the ground. “I think we should check out.”
“I don’t think we can carry any more souvenirs.”
“So let’s haul ass.” We formed up and went back into the canal, loaded with booty. We staggered the men — two shooters, then a souvenir carrier. It was time to be extra careful, too, because there was no way Charlie didn’t know he had visitors now.
I looked back at the five corpses. The sorry mothers never knew what the hell had hit them. Good — that’s the way it should be.
A point should be made here about the way Americans tend to regard the act of killing. Like most of my generation, I grew up on Western movies where the hero — Hopalong or Roy or Gene — chivalrously tosses his gun aside
after the black-hatted villain runs out of bullets and subdues the bad guy with his bare fists.
That may work on celluloid, but not in real life. In real life you shoot the motherfucker and you kill him dead — whether or not he is armed; whether or not he is going for his gun; whether he looks dangerous or appears benign. That way, you stay alive and your men stay alive. Many of our senior officers do not believe this. They would rather that we got killed than our enemies did. That attitude is stupid and it is wrong.
In Vietnam, I witnessed targe numbers of senior officers who spent most of their time sitting behind desks, putting each other in for medals — and we’re talking Bronze Stars and Silver Stars here — because they rode a PBR or Mike boat once or twice. These were the same men who jumped all over me because my interrogation techniques could get a little rough — I wasn’t above manhandling VC or slapping them around to get information. Or got upset with me because I’d allow my merry marauders to make sausage out of two or three young, innocent-looking, unsuspecting VC. Well, I wasn’t about to worry about whether or not I was killing the VC properly (I wonder what improper killing is) because at least my guys and I were out in the boondocks killing ‘em, not sitting behind some desk back in a cozy bunker stroking our mules.
During the U.S. invasion of Panama, a U.S. Army sergeant waxed some Panamanian civilians—“civilians” who attacked U.S. soldiers at a roadblock with hand grenades. His officers rewarded him for probably saving his comrades’ lives by courtmartialing him. Not only did they destroy morale, but they did the sergeant a huge injustice. Fortunately, he was found innocent. But the chilling effect such actions have on combat troops cannot be underestimated.
Conversely, during the summer of 1990, an Israeli Navy lieutenant in charge of a patrol craft killed four Palestinian terrorists by machine-gunning them in the water after he’d sunk the rubber boat in which they were trying to infiltrate the Israeli coast. He justified his act by explaining that he didn’t know whether or not the Palestinians were concealing hand grenades that might have been used against his craft and his men. The lieutenant was promoted to captain on the spot by the commander of the Israeli Navy. The message sent loud and clear to young Israeli officers was the right one: you will be rewarded for putting the lives of your men above the lives of your enemies.
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