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 be 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 lighting 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 Colone! 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 DocAfter a chat with the chiefs, I made sure they’d be loaded with good Navy sleaks, 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 LJNODIR 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 parallel 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 vul-nerable 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 sand-bars. The river got narrow and took a lot of ninety-degree turns north of Chau Doc. Many of thos
e 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-hayfal-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 strong out over about twenty-five yards. My rabbits, Denny the Yenta Drady, Jack Saunders, and John Engraft, 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, «Ae 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-change — 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 eighteen 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 safety, 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.
I was ten, perhaps fifteen yards ahead of Denny as we approached the tree line. I was moving one foot slowly in front of the other, inching along the dry drainage ditch.
My eyes swept the brush beyond the ditch’s berm, then fell, searching for any telltale signs of footprints, not to mention trip wires. My fingers probed the ground for pressure pads or land-mine detonators. My ears listened for any foreign sounds — easy-to-detect ones like the metal on metal raaatchet of an AK-47’s bolt sliding back, or the harder ones, like the sound of human breathing. My nose twitched like a bloodhound’s, searching for the VC’s distinctive body odor, accentuated by the nuc mam they poured on everything they ate.
I stopped. I held my breath. There was something out there.
I could sense it. I could almost taste it‘ The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.
Behind me the platoon waited.
To this day I don’t know why I did what I did next. Instinct?
Maybe. Luck? Probably.
I threw myself onto the ground.
As I dropped, the muzzle blast of an AK-47 came at me from no more than ten feet away.
I rolled, spraying at the flashes with my M16 as I did so, and screamed at the platoon to return ffk. They were already hosing the tree line above my head, shrieking at me to get back.
I careened on hands, knees, and elbows toward my platoon, firing blindly over my shoulder while a firefight raged six inches above my head.
“What the—” I shouted to Gordy Boyce.
He calmly dropped a mag, inserted a fresh one, and sprayed the tree line. “Lots of muzzle blast,” be bellowed at me.
“Maybe thirty, forty of the bastards.”
I peered at the incoming fire- “Shit — maybe more than that.
Let’s get the hell outta here.“ I rolled further down the ditch.
“Hoss—”
“Boss?”
I pointed toward the VC. “LAWS, Ski. Hit the muthas.”
The big Polack primed one of his antitank weapons, aimed it toward the tree line, and let it go at the biggest concentration of muzzle flashes. There was an explosion and a blast, followed by screams.
I waved my right hand in a circle. “Lets move it.”
Firing as we went, we scrambled back the way we’d come.
We hadn’t reached our ambush objective — third base — but we’d rounded first and second, so I grabbed Doc Nixon’s radio and called Colonel Shit and Polish for some of his muchvaunted artillery support.
The voice at the other end came back like a bad parody of a war movie. “No can do, Sharkman One, over.”
“Why not. Command?”
“Because there’s a tight situation here at command center — a VC attack and no assets can be spared in your direction. You’re on your own.”
Typical. Thank you very much for your care and your concern, Colonel, I thought. I will remind myself to come and visit you when all of this is over, and then I will break both of your fucking arms off, beat you senseless with them, then take what’s left of the stumps and stick them up your ass.
I punched up a new frequency into the radio keypad and called the PBR.
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