“Jungle Gym, this is Sharkman One. We’re coming out— pursued by one humongous group of unfriendlies and low on ammo. I need fire support at extraction point Alfa.”
Jack’s voice came through loud and clear. “Roger-roger, Sbarkman One. I wilco. We’ll be waiting. Kick some ass on the way home, too.”
I had to laugh. God bless all Navy chiefs.
Okay — we’d called our taxis. But first we had to get to the bloody river. I could see the VC moving in the shadows, not fifty yards from us. There were lots more of them than there were of us, and they knew it. They came in hot pursuit— something that had never happened to me before.
I saw one distinctly and hosed him with my M16. He went down, only to be replaced by three more. I hosed them, too, ducked away from the returning fire, and kept moving.
Hoss dropped to one knee and loosed one of his LAWS.
That left two. Risher called out for another Stoner belt. There wasn’t another Stoner belt. Harry Humphries shouted that he was down to his last three AK magazines.
He wasn’t the only one. We were all running low on ammo.
If the PBR missed the pickup, we’d be hamburger.
Denny Drady led the way through the minefield — trotting.
We followed in his footsteps, praying. It must’ve worked because we didn’t set anything off. Maybe a few of the VC sons of bitches would blow themselves up coming after us.
We bolted through the drained paddies, staying low in the ditches. Branches we’d managed to evade earlier now became sharp-edged weapons that slashed at us as we passed. Vines became trip wires. Chuckholes waited to snap our ankles.
This was not going the way I’d planned at all. We were at a dead run by the time we hit the riverbank, scores of VC in hot pursuit,
The PBRs were there — bows beached — right where they should have been. Their twin .50s.and mortars gave us covering fire as we scrambled over the gunwales, pushed out into the current, reversed engines, did what amounted to wheeües, and spun into the middle of the river.
I counted heads, then collapsed in the cockpit, the wonderful lethal odor of cordite wafting over me as the crew raked the shoreline with fire. Jack turned up the speed and the boat raced into the night, moving south. I could see tracers walking toward us from the shoreline, but we moved quickly out of range.
I pulled myself to my feet and slammed the chief on the shoulder. “Thanks for saving our ass, Jack.”
“Forget it. But we ain’t finished yet, Mr. Dick.”
“What’s up?”
“Chau Doc — they’re being overrun. The VC launched a big attack against the city, figurin‘ everybody’d stood down because of the Tet truce.”
“No shit?”
“No shit, sir. And y’know what else? That dipshit pencildicked scumbag pus-nuts asshole colonel’s keeping all his guys inside the compound. Westy and Drew got some real bad problems. They need us.”
“So? Home, James — and don’t wait for the stoplights either.”
Chapter 12
We got to Chau Doc at oh dark hundred but didn't land until first light. I wasn’t real familiar with the town’s layout, and besides, we couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad ones without a scorecard. So,we hunkered down, chilled to the bone, and listened to the gunfire. Just before six. Jack put his bow into shore, nosed the boat onto a wide set of stone steps, and we went over the gunwales directly below the main town square, about a quarter mile north of the White House.
There was a lot of shooting going on. We dodged ricocheting bullets and mortar blasts and ran, tumbling ass over teakettle into the Special Forces compound, where I caromed into the TOC — the Tactical Operations Center — to find out what the hell was going on.
A frazzled Special Forces major in impeccable fatigues gave me a quick Intel dump. The situation was bad, he said- The VC — how many there were he didn’t know — had overrun much of the city. Civilians were trapped somewhere — he didn’t know how many or where.
The man was a fount of useful information. Then he actually gave me some good news: Colonel Shit and Polish, he whis-pered conspiratorially, was over the edge. He’d locked himself in the radio room, where he currently sat, listening to the chatter. But colonel sir was still technically in command, major told me. Moreover, he’d ordered that no U.S. troops could take any action outside the compound, a command the major was obeying with relish.
I got on the radio to Westy. “This is a goatfuck over here.”
“I know. How many you got with you?”
“Eleven.”
“Great. I put my three dozen Nungs out on the south end of town. You and your guys take the north side. Flush the VC back the way they came.”
“Gotcha. You got ammo at your place?”
“All you need.”
“What about medevac?”
“I can get it if you need it.”
“What about Colonel Shitface?”
Westy snorted. “Screw him. I’ll kill the son of a bitch myself after this is all over.”
“I got first dibs.”
He laughed. It sounded tinny through the radio. “There’s another problem.”
“What?”
“Three American civilians — a nurse and two schoolteachers — pinned down a few blocks away from you.”
“I got no transportation, Westy, and I don’t know the city.
Hold on a second.“ I turned to the major. ”Westy says we got civilian women pinned down, Major. Can we go get ‘em?“
He shrugged. “Nothing I can do. Lieutenant.”
“Come on. — ”
“Hey, Lieutenant, the colonel’s orders say no one goes out.
That includes you and your men now that you’re here.“ He picked up a mug of coffee and started to sip.
I grabbed the asshole by the pressed lapels of his fatigues.
The cup went into the air and coffee splattered all over him.
I lifted his feet six inches off the ground. “Say what. Major?”
“Okay, okay. You can leave. But our guys stay.”
“You queer cockbreath pussies can bugger yourselves day and night for all I care.” I tossed him across the room and watched him crumple against the wall.
I picked up the radio again. “Can you send anybody to pick us up?”
“We got a jeep with a fifty-cal on it. I’ll send Drew — he knows where the civilians are.”
“We’ll be ready.”
I commandeered ten hand radios, made sure the batteries were fresh, and tuned them to Westy’s channel. Then we all went out into the sunshine. Drew showed up in the jeep about six minutes later, doing a nice wheelie as he careened into the compound, chased by automatic weapons fire. I waved Harry and Doc Nixon into the vehicle. “Go play cavalry.
Maybe you’ll get laid.“
Harry flashed a thumbs-up. “I hope so.” He straddled the backseat, took the machine gun’s grips in his hands, and fired a short burst. “Works nice.”
“See you.” Drew spun away. We laid down covering fire as they sped off.
Risher, Drady, Hoss Kucinski, Johnny Engraff, and I made up one blocking force. Frank Scollise, Dewayne Schwalenberg, Gordy Boyce, and Jack Saunders broke into another, and we all set off toward the White House.
It was like the TV series “Combat.” Chau Doc was a French-designed city, and we fought street to street, alley to alley, house to house, in an Asian version of WWII.
We’d see fire coming from a window; I’d whistle for Hoss.
“There—”
He’d set up with a LAWS, fire through the frame, then Drady and I would kick in the door and rush the place, firing, to finish the VC off. If any came out, Risher would kill them with the Stoner, and we’d go on to the next house.
“Fire from the rooftop,” Drady called out to me,
“I see it- Risher—”
Risher swung the machine gun up. The bullets cut through the edge of the roof line like a buzz saw. A VC tumbled two sto
ries into the street.
We moved another few yards and cleared two more houses.
We were still taking fire from above. The VC had a good idea- I pointed up. “Let’s take ‘em from the top.”
We kicked a door in and clambered up two flights of stairs, climbed through a trapdoor and onto the roof. The houses were side by side, close enough so that we could jump from roof to roof. Twenty yards away was a VC holding a hand grenade with no pin. I brought my M16 up and stitched him across the chest. He went down on top of the grenade. It blew him off the roof in three pieces.
We worked our way along one street, around the corner, and up the next, firing down into clusters of VC. It was grueling work. By midmoming we’d cleared only three streets.
Meanwhile, Harry and Doc were having their own kind of fun, as I found out later. They’d pulled up in front of one house, where a nurse named Maggie lived. VC fire came from the second story. Mindless of the bullets, Drew kicked the door in while Harry returned fire with the .50, and Doc Nixon washed the windows with his M16.
As Drew went in the front door, a trio of VC were coming in the back. He hit them with a burst from his M16 and they went down. Another pair shot down the stairwell at him. He killed them, too.
“Maggie, Maggie, it’s Drew — where the hell are you?”
“Here,” a quivering voice from a cupboard in the living room answered. Drew ran and pulled the frightened nurse out from where she’d been hiding. He threw his arm around her. “Come on.”
As they ran, more VC came through the back door. Drew spun, pushed Maggie out the door, and shot them. He slammed the front door shut, tossed the nurse into the jeep where she landed on Doc Nixon, and they sped back toward the White House. In all, Harry, Doc, and Drew made six round-trips — and they got all the civilians out without a scratch. But Doc Nixon insisted the best was when Maggie’d landed on top of him.
“What a great pair of knockers,” he told me. “My kind of woman.”
Shortly after noon, the VC started putting back. There weren’t a lot of them — not more than a couple of hundred, But there were fewer than fifty of us, including the Nungs, to confront them. Still, we’d overrun many of their positions by midmoming, and they disappeared, melting into Chau Doc’s warren of streets and alleys, or changing clothes and once again becoming the loyal, docile, friendly local population.
The good news was that Westy’s Nungs had been successful in ejecting the enemy from the south side of town, pushing them east into the countryside. The bad news was that, during the fighting, the fuel farm had blown, and a lot of civilians had been cooked. The pungent smell of burning flesh was evident from half a mile away. (The next day, we scheduled medevac choppers for as many of the burned Vietnamese as we could. Jack took a bunch more on the PBR, sailing downriver to the hospital at Sa Dec, over on the Mekong River.
Maggie went with him. When she got back, her clothes smelled as if she’d Just spent eight hours working at a barbecue.)
In the early hours of the attack, the VC set up firing positions in Chau Doc’s church and hospital. It’s a guerrilla tactic still used today that forces anyone attacking them to destroy the civilian target, which gives the guerrillas a propaganda victory even if they lose the actual battle.
That’s what happened at Chau Doc — we pushed the VC out, but both the church and the hospital were left in ruins.
And within days, VC cadres started circulating word through the countryside that the round-eyed bandits (that was us) had destroyed civilian targets without cause.
It also wasn’t until after twelve o’clock that we first saw any Marvin the ARVNs poke their noses out of their defensive perimeter, which was near the army compound. That was par for the course- The Marvins generally liked to keep their heads down during times of hostile activity — they’d been trained by Colonel Shit and Polish, after all, and he was still locked inside his radio room. But afterward, they always came around for mopping up — I always thought it was because that’s when they could find lots of VC souvenirs to sell on the black market. But the Marvins weren’t alone in their cowardice. Once we cleared out all the VC, Colonel Shitface would probably throw on a flak jacket, perform an inspection — and put himself in for a medal. (I don’t know what happened to the colonel, but Drew Dix did win the Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle of Chau Doc. The one thing I don’t understand about that was that Harry and Doc Nixon were with Drew the whoie time — and all they ever got was Bronze Stars. That made me wonder whether the criteria were higher for SEALs than they were for Green Berets.)
With the VC in retreat, we decided to clear as much of the city as we could, working block by block. We split up into pairs and much like cops on the beat, strolled the sidewalks.
Hoss Kucinski and I took one side of a street; Scollise and Risher were opposite us. The enemy fire was intermittent— almost none one minute, thick the next. We worked in a choreographed plan. I’d slide up to a doorway, kick it in, roll a grenade, and wait to see if anything happened. If it was all clear, Hoss would leapfrog me and do the next door. If I heard anything, I’d wait until after the grenade exploded, then go through the door and spray the room with my M16.
The SEALs on the opposite side of the street did the same.
It was the perfect way to spend a lovely, sunny Tet holiday afternoon in greater metropolitan Chau Doc.
Then we started taking fire from down the street. Hoss and I dove into a doorway. So did Scollise. Risher didn’t. The kid took his Stoner and walked out into the middle of the street, screaming and firing. It was Dodge City, Vietnam. The machine gun was cradled in his arms; this crazy smile was on his face.
He was screaming, “Come on, you assholes — come on, you assholes.” They’d shoot at him — you could see the puffs at the ground around his feet as the shots hit. He paid them no mind.
Hoss and I were screaming at him.
“You asshole — get the fuck off the street.”
“You dipshit, get down.‘
He was laughing. The crazy motherfucker was actually laughing.
Then — there was this incredible instant of silence in the middle of all the noise and confusion.
I knew what was gonna happen. I yelled at Risher,
“Noooooo—”
It was too late. I heard it. One shot. One sniper’s shot.
It caught him in the center of the forehead.
He dropped the Stoner and sagged to the ground. I was there quick enough to catch him. Hoss let a LAWS go in the direction the shot had come from. I don’t know if it hit anything. I was otherwise occupied.
I dragged Risher out of the street. My hand, which was holding the back of his head, was wet. The shot had gone through. His brains were spilling into my hand. I tried to push them back inside the skull, but it was impossible.
I shot the kid full of painkillers, but he didn’t feel anything anyway. Hoss called for medevac. We got on the radio to Drew, Doc Nixon, and Harry, who drove over under fire in the jeep to pick us up and take us to the chopper pad at Westy’s, which was about six blocks away.
They arrived in minutes, Drew at the wheel. Harry jumped out and took Risher’s legs. Doc had him under the arms. I held his head.
“Shit.” Harry eased the kid’s body into the back of the jeep. He held one of Risher’s hands, his face grim. Doc Nixon had the other hand. “You dumb fuck,” Harry said to Risher.
“There’s a couple of cases of cold beer at Westy’s. At least you could have waited—”
Doc covered Risher with a blanket. Somehow, we all clambered into the jeep and Drew took off.
He was going. I’d morphined him right away, and he wasn’t in any pain. But he was going. It was in his eyes. His eyes were already dead.
He knew it, too. He looked up at me like a rucking puppy.
I was mad at the son of a bitch. He’d asked for it. “You stupid cockbreath pus-nuts asshole,” I kept saying, holding his head in my hands, trying to push his goddamn br
ains back inside his shattered skull with my thumb.
My black pajamas were sopping wet with his blood. My hands were sticky. I could feel skull fragments on my fingertips.
“You stupid dumb fuck,” is all I could say as he lay dying in my lap.
There was incredible rage in me right then. Some of it was directed at Risher himself. If he hadn’t been dying, I would probably have killed him myself. He was dying because he’d been stupid: he’d walked down the middle of the street. You don’t do that, and he knew it, and he did it anyway, and therefore he was a stupid asshole cuntbreath and he deserved what he’d gotten.
Except he didn’t deserve it, and as he lay there, his head in my lap and his brains in my hand, I knew he didn’t deserve it at all.
There was incredible rage in roe right then because I felt Risher shouldn’t have been there in the first place. We were SEALs. We were jungle warriors, not dipshit urban policemen. The goddamn colonel and the Special Forces should have been out in the street taking the point instead of sitting behind six rolls of concertina razor wire and ten-foot-high concrete walls in his fucking neat-as-a-fucking-West-Pointparade-ground compound.
There was incredible rage in me right then because my man had been killed by some goddamn, stinking, seventy-poundssoaking-wet, VC Mr. Charlie pus-nuts sniper. Right then I hated all Vietnamese, a useless class of nuc mom-swilling subhumans who needed two sticks to pick up one grain of rice but used only one to carry two buckets of shit.
And there was incredible rage in me right then because, when Risher was sniped, my own immortality got nicked as well. First night out in Vietnam the AK round came skipping across the river and popped the guy next to me between the eyes. Why him and not me? I was running the trails on Dung Island barefoot one day, and the man behind me stepped right into my footprint, and — blam — a small land mine went off. It blew the beta boot right off his foot. Why him and not me? Guys on either side of me had been hit. Why them and not me?
Why? Because I was fucking immortal, that’s why.
That’s what I’d felt. That’s why I’d do anything, go anywhere — against any odds — and tell my men that with me, they were always gonna be okay. Dings, yeah. Scratches, yeah — even an occasional pop now and then. But nobody dies with Marcinko.
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