Men in Green Faces

by Gene Wentz; B. Abell Jurus

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Cruz said. “Purely luck.”

  Doc glanced at him. “Can say that again, You-O. Anything could have gone haywire.” Doc wiped milk off his upper lip. “The dau-dit bastards could have woke up, turned us to Swiss cheese. Lucky as hell they didn’t.”

  “Had our lucky element here”—Roland nodded toward Gene—“riding his 60. Nobody’s ever got killed operating with him. Right?”

  Gene looked up. He didn’t like that. “What you guys need to realize is, it wasn’t just luck. Somebody up there was watching over us.”

  Down the table, Alex took another bite of toast, listening but saying nothing. Sometimes, Gene thought, it was like Alex had them all stuck on little specimen pins, the way he sat back and observed.

  “Maybe so,” Doc said, “but did it have to be such a dick-dragger? Bad enough to have to operate in the first place, but it seems like every time I go out, when you’re there, it turns into a fuckin’ dick-dragger and I get the shit scared out of me. Takes three days just to stop shakin’.”

  Laughter drowned out his last words.

  Jim stood. “Good job. Good op. Every one of you, just hot. The best plan isn’t worth a damn unless it’s executed properly. You men can really execute.”

  They left the chow hall and walked in a loose group back to the hootch, where they picked up a case of beer and then their weapons from atop their bunks. Outside, they regrouped around the cleaning table. Methodically they began taking the guns apart to clean and repair, stopping frequently for long swallows of beer.

  “Op like that, you begin to understand why they put us through the training they did. Like the mud flats,” Gene said, unscrewing both ends of the 60’s gas port. “Remember the mud flats?”

  “Remember?” Roland’s eyebrows lifted. “Ain’t no forgetting SEAL training. Thought I’d died and gone to heaven once I made it through Hell Week and Land Warfare Phase on San Clemente Island. Even this forsaken place ain’t as bad as that was.” His voice went mournful. “Everything was all fucked up. The whole time.”

  Gene laughed. Couldn’t help it. He released the feed tray cover and took it off.

  “Time’s now. Still can’t believe we survived that extraction,” Brian said. “They were right on us, every second.”

  “Never so glad to hear claymores go off, buy us some minutes.” Jim reached for a cleaning rod. “Never so glad to see the boats and Sea Wolves coming in on step. Hoo-Ya!”

  “Hoo-Ya!” the rest chorused, thrown instantly back to the response learned in training by all SEALs.

  “Crewmen on the boat caught it, though.” Gene frowned, remembering. “Wonder how they’re doing.” He set down the nickel that he put behind the buffer assembly. The nickel was one of the modifications on the 60 he’d done. Gave a faster rate of fire, but there were some side effects. The firing pin could break, or the operating rod might not be able to withstand the force of the impact being put on it during firing, so there was always the possibility of fractures or cracks, or the rod breaking, leaving him with a useless weapon.

  “Poor bastards,” Doc said. “We sure were lucky.”

  “Hey,” Brian interjected. “What did you think of that old fort?”

  “Helluva shock to see that thing, whatever it was, way out there in the jungle.” Doc shook his head. “Just a helluva shock.”

  “Eerie,” Gene said, visualizing it again. “Really eerie.” Holding the operating rod up, he looked it over, shook his head, and deep-sixed it in the Son Ku Lon. SOP if they’d had heavy contact on an op. They had. He’d never had an operating rod break during an actual combat situation and never intended to. A new one went in before every op. “I could feel it,” he added.

  “Felt it. Yes.” Brian reached for the gun oil. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that place. Not the time to be on point. Scary. Just like I’d walked into…what do they call those places where…like cemetery houses…”

  “Mausoleums?” Roland looked at Brian, across the table from him. He was cleaning his Stoner. “Ain’t there some in the cemetery in Queens?”

  Gene listened while he worked with the 60, cleaning the baked-on carbon, first with a scribe, then with a steel brush and gun solvent. Brian and Roland were tight, both being from New York City. They constantly compared their neighborhoods back there. The minute they’d discovered they both liked to eat at Orloff’s Deli across from Lincoln Center, and that they both loved to play with the windup toys at the little shop down the street, they were friends.

  “No, man,” Brian said. “Tomb. Tomb is what I mean. That place was worse than a tomb. No…catacomb, like in Rome. I mean, you just knew the bodies, the weapons, everything was still in there in the clearing under all that gray gunk.”

  They hadn’t been able to even think about the fort until now, Gene mused. A result of training. In enemy territory, they just blocked that kind of thing out. Had to keep the mind on the op and survival, and nothing else.

  Roland used his wrist to shove a lock of his black hair back off his forehead. “One peek through the brush and I knew everything was all fucked up in that place. Relieved to get away from it.”

  “Dead,” Gene said. “Never been near a place so dead.”

  Jim, standing next to Roland, echoed Gene. “Dead is the word, all right. Extraordinary, to encounter something like that. Undoubtedly French. Totally unexpected. No reason to go in. Not a sign of life anywhere.”

  Cruz ran a cleaning rod down the barrel of his Stoner before glancing at Jim, on his left. “Wonder what was in there.”

  Doc looked across the table at him. “Boom-boom, you’re dead, is what was in there. Booby-trapped from end to end. I’d bet on it. Didn’t want to put one toe in that clearing. There weren’t even creepy-crawlies, and if critters won’t go in, men sure as hell have no business hanging around.”

  “You noticed that too?” Gene asked, reassembling the 60. “Not a breath of air moved. Nothing.”

  Everybody nodded, remembering. Except Alex, working on his grenade launcher, Gene noticed. What the hell went on in his head? He often wondered, especially when Alex, so quiet, so serious all the time, would break his self-imposed reserve to volunteer to make a knife kill. Gene shook his head. Very strange guy. Candidate to be a Charles Manson once back in The World.

  “All I’ve got to say,” said Cruz, “is that we don’t deserve to be alive after an op like that one. But, God, it was hot. Ka-boom!”

  “Hoo-Ya!” they yelled.

  It took a little more time to get the bowie knife clean. Gene offered another silent prayer of thanks as he wiped rust-inhibiting lubricant on the eleven-inch blade. If the NVA machine gunner hadn’t been lost in thought, watching the campfire…if he’d heard, turned around…He wet his arm, ran the blade over it. It shaved. It was sharp enough.

  With the 60 and the bowie cleaned, he turned his attention to his personal gear. Unscrewing the CO-2 cylinder from his UDT life jacket, he washed out the activating device, then the jacket itself, before screwing the cylinder back in. He hung the jacket, dripping wet, on the little post at the corner of his top bunk, and the 60 from the sling on his bed frame, ready.

  Weapons and gear taken care of, he finally stripped off his wet, stinking clothes and dropped them on the floor. The Kit Carson Scouts’ women, the hootch maids, came daily to clean the place up and wash their clothes. Naked, he went back out to the fifty-five-gallon drum sitting next to the cleaning table between the hootches. The drum was always full of rainwater. They used it more often than the showers farther away on Seafloat.

  No hot water anyway, Gene thought, using a pith helmet to pour water over his head and body before soaping down. So what was the difference?

  Face and body clean of paint, mud, and dried blood, he returned to the hootch, dried off, pulled on a pair of shorts, and strapped the bowie back on. Between ops, it came in handy to cut wire, open crates, whatever he needed it for.

  In shorts and shower shoes, he leaned against his rack.
What he never wore—what no SEAL wore—was underwear. Another lesson from training. Wet sand in your shorts and you’d be rubbed bloody-raw. During training they were always wet and always sandy.

  He looked around. The rest of the squad were either dressed and waiting or finishing getting dressed. And they were still talking about how amazing it was that they had lived through it all.

  “Debriefing in five minutes,” Jim called as he went out the door.

  Gene settled in the same chair at the rear, by the door, that he’d used for the Warning Order and Patrol Leader’s Order the previous day. He preferred his back to the wall and the exit handy. Now he began to feel fatigue. None of them had had any sleep for about thirty hours, and the op had, as Doc put it, been a real dick-dragger. Fear didn’t set in until they were safely back. Couldn’t even think about being afraid out there. Too busy trying to stay alive.

  But once back and safe, fear took hold. Shook him to his very soul. Everything he couldn’t allow himself to feel during an op, he felt when he got back. Then he tried to drown the fear and blot out the memories with booze. They all did. Sometimes it worked for a while.

  Jim walked to the front of the room.

  Gene closed the door and settled back. The debriefing, as always, would be very orderly. Basically they’d be going over what had happened from insertion to extraction.

  “Everything went to tactic,” Jim began. “The first thing is that the wounded MSSC crewmen are doing okay. They will recover, according to the medical people. The second thing is that the captured NVA officer has been released to V Corps for interrogation. Good job bringing him out, Cruz. Now, let’s get on with it.”

  It wouldn’t last too long, Gene knew, because they’d had a hard target. They’d gone out to destroy, not to gather intelligence, though taking one NVA officer hostage should provide some.

  He listened as each individual discussed what he’d seen during his portion of the op, and then the usual questions were asked: Had they picked up another man? Had anyone been able to catch the identifying marks on enemy uniforms, so they might identify exactly which NVA force or forces were in the area? Had anyone found any defecation? If so, a sample brought back could be analyzed to learn what the enemy’s main food staple was. Had anyone seen any of the NVA coming in on them?

  Gene knew beforehand the answers would all be no, except for the last, when they’d seen the enemy across the river. Once the R&R Center blew, they’d outright booked, and the enemy never caught up with them. Thank God.

  Jim continued with the debriefing, and Gene listened intently in spite of increasing weariness, as did the rest.

  “Did anything go wrong?” Jim took his time looking around the room.

  No, again. It was a successful op. If there’d been a breakdown, Gene knew Jim would ask if the op hadn’t been covered well enough in the PLO, why there’d been confusion out there, and what they could have done to prevent an adverse situation. So the debriefing was relatively simple because they achieved all they’d set out to do, plus taking out a B-40 team on the way into the objective.

  They’d actually had two ops, is what it boiled down to, he thought, yawning and shifting in the metal chair. The R8cR Center and, coming out, the B-40 rocket team.

  “We’ll be sending a Vietnamese SEAL out to one of the local villages around the R&R Center, to listen and bring intelligence reports back,” Jim said. “In three or four days, we’ll have the total numbers of enemy killed in action and wounded in action.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s it. Good job.”

  Amid the screeching of chairs being shoved back as the men stood, Gene rose and opened the door. Time to get some sleep.

  Back in the hootch, he unstrapped the bowie, hung it on the bedpost, kicked off his shower shoes, and vaulted into the top bunk above Brian’s. Lying on his back, mosquito netting pulled down around him, he ached to be standing at the edge of the pines in the Laguna Mountains, east of San Diego, looking out over the endless, golden sweep of desert below. The space of it…hawks freewheeling above…

  He fell asleep to the sound of the droning fans and the voices of Brian and Roland talking about Manhattan.

  He woke, with no recollection of dreaming, at 1750 hours, in time for evening chow. The hootch was comparatively quiet. Four SEALs from Delta Platoon were playing poker on a bunk at the other end. Alex and Roland were still asleep. Nobody would bother them. Nobody ever disturbed anyone sleeping without damned good reason. First, it was a courtesy. Second, you could get hurt waking somebody.

  Standing at the side of the bunks, he put on insect repellent, swim trunks, his blue and gold SEAL T-shirt, the bowie, and the dry pair of his two sets of canvas jungle boots. He went then to take care of another one of his jobs…that of Lima’s intelligence petty officer.

  He opened the door of the Naval Intelligence logistics officer’s hootch, and found NILO Lt. Jonathon Blake still at his desk. A good man, Johnny Blake, but very serious. He respected the SEALs, loved to associate with them. Johnny’s responsibility lay in receiving and disseminating intelligence reports from all investigations or intel sources.

  Gene liked the fact that Johnny worked well with all the U.S. military as well as the South Vietnamese military. Not an easy job. Too, Johnny would often clear the SEALs’ AOs with both the foreign and domestic military commands, and with local and province-level political personnel. When the SEALs inserted, their area of operation became a free kill zone. Damned important that no friendly forces be in there. Whoever they contacted out there died. Johnny made sure no friendlies were around.

  “Well, hello, Gene,” he said, half standing and extending his hand. “Congratulations. I was glad to hear everyone returned safely, and with a POW. Any intelligence from an NVA officer is useful. What can I do for you?”

  “Anything further come in on the NVA advisor, Colonel Nguyen, since the flash report?”

  Johnny smoothed his brown, carefully brushed hair. The gold of the Annapolis class ring on his left hand glinted. “Nothing since then. Sorry. You have a special interest?”

  “No,” Gene replied. “Just doing my job. But this damned colonel, the flash said, wipes out entire villages—people, hootches, everything—in his forced recruitment campaigns. Personally, no special interest. Professionally, yes. Terrorist tactics work. He has to be stopped. We want the bastard bad.”

  With a sigh, Johnny straightened an already orderly stack of papers at the left front of his desk before looking up, his brown eyes tired. “It’s true. His tactics do work. Too well. But no, we don’t have further intelligence on the colonel.”

  “If any comes in, let me know right away, if you would.” Gene started out the door, then turned back. “By the way, you have any intel on tonight’s movie?”

  Johnny smiled his broad smile. “Word is that it’s Bullitt with Steve McQueen.”

  “Hoo-Ya! It finally came in?”

  “Rumor has it.”

  “Rumor had it before.”

  “True. Hope and such springs eternal.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks, Johnny.”

  A few minutes later, standing in line at the chow hall, Gene noticed two things: Willie’s waved invitation to join him at the table, and Freddy Fanther, third man in line in front of him. He nodded an okay to Willie, then glared at the back of Fanther’s head. Goddamned slipknot. What an asshole. Alligator mouth and parakeet ass. Delta Platoon’s pretty boy. Talked all the time about how his looks were going to make him millions. He’d be the new Marlboro man. The asshole was a skate as well. Any work to be done, he found a way to skate out of it. Never volunteered for possible heavy-contact ops. Had to protect his face.

  On the way to join Willie, he saw Fanther settle down at a table near the door. No Marlboro man had that many freckles. More than a kid with chicken pox. Not only that, Fanther might be a decent operator when he did decide to go, but he didn’t like the way Fanther used his weapon. Something about the way he handled that 40 Mike-Mike…

&n
bsp; “Rumor has it, my friend,” Willie said as Gene sat down, “that Bullitt has come in at last.”

  Gene grinned. “So I heard.”

  “Who told y’all?”

  “Johnny Blake, over at NILO.”

  “I told Johnny.”

  “Well, hell, Willie, who told you?”

  “Half a dozen gentlemen.”

  Gene laughed. “So what else have you heard?” He waited while Willie forked up a bite of steak, chewed, and swallowed. A southern gentleman never talked with food in his mouth.

  “Heard y’all had a real testicle-cruncher of an op. Not like going after the B-40s on the Mighty Mo.”

  Willie loved to talk about the Mo. Particularly about that trip.

  “Well,” Willie was saying, “with the B-40 rocket teams, up in the Secret Zone on the Dam Doi…there surely was no way to go up the river safely. And, as y’all knew, we had to go up to recon, so—

  “So we went up. Inserted. Made contact and killed those three armed VC. God, I never will forget the one.” Gene shook his head in disbelief. “Kept getting up after being shot. Must have been so loaded with whatever he was on. I don’t know how many times he got shot, and still he ran off. Finally followed his blood trail and used the 60 to take him out. God.”

  “And then, Lordy, in comes the Mighty Mo to extract you.” Willie laughed. “What a sight that lady is.”

  “One look at her”—Gene laughed—”and any enemy with the brain of a gnat knows to stay low.”

  “Only mike boat I’ve seen that carries that kind of firepower. Armored like a battleship. A fortress. Painted black. Never saw one painted black before. Have you?”

  Gene shook his head. “Only the Mo.”

  “Only the Mighty Mo’s crew would do what they did either.” Willie grinned. “I sure do wish I could have seen that.”

  “Heard it, you mean.” Gene rubbed his left shoulder, which was still sore from the weight of ammo and the 60, then swallowed the last of his milk. “I’ll never forget heading back down the Dam Doi, with those loudspeakers just blaring, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by the Beatles. I yelled, ‘What the hell you trying to do? Draw fire?’ “