Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  By now the moon was up, and I could see across the canal almost as clearly as if it had been high noon. In the shadows we were nearly invisible. Anyone moving on the canal would be in the spotlight. But the incoming tide created another problem.

  I squeezed Bump and Doc McCarty and motioned upward, then started slowly to get up. Pressing against the nipa palm, I got my feet under me and pushed. We’d been in position for nearly two hours, so I was stiff and my legs had gone to sleep. They tingled in protest. All of us had taped the metal buckles on our gear to keep them from rattling, and as we rose to full standing positions, we made no more noise than ghosts.

  Still the water rose. By midnight it had reached my chest, and I was struggling to keep my M-16 dry. A plastic muzzle cap kept mud and dirt out of the barrel, but it wouldn’t keep out the rising water. Even though the weapons worked fine after immersion, we kept them dry as much as possible.

  Our position was becoming untenable: with the water at our chests, we’d be shooting up at any sampan we saw, and even for us SEALs “the high ground” was the byword.

  I turned to Bump. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “I was wondering when you were going to say that.”

  I moved down the line of men to Jess. “Wasn’t it higher back by the river?”

  “I think so,” he replied.

  “We’re going to move back there.”

  I turned and motioned. The rest of the men started walking, Jess taking the point as we made our way back to the mouth of the canal. In the chest-high water, moving around was easier.

  When the patrol had passed me, I fell in behind Doc McCarty. We all used the nipa palm stalks for stability. The bank was steep and the mud beneath the water very slippery. We’d almost reached the river when Fred lost his footing and started down. Grabbing the PRC-25 on his back as he slipped beneath the water, I jerked him up and turned him around, to see a grin on his face. I almost laughed. Behind me, Bump chuckled. We all learned long ago that when things got tough, you can lose just about anything except your sense of humor and get by.

  Fred took hold of a nipa palm and started forward again. I released my stalk to follow him—and promptly disappeared underwater. I had on my life jacket, as we all did, but I tried to kick my way back to the surface. No dice. Sinking, I thought fast. If I pulled the toggle to inflate the life jacket everyone would laugh at me when I popped back up. Not an option. Finally, I figured if I held my M-16 straight up, the tip of the barrel would be above the surface. Someone would grab it and pull me up. When my feet hit the bottom of the canal, I poked up my rifle. Nothing happened.

  I waited for what seemed like several minutes. I was just about to swallow my pride and pull the toggle when there was a tug on my M-16 and I started up. Good thing—I was nearly out of oxygen.

  I broke the surface, looking right into Jess’s eyes. He’d come back to ask me something just as I went under. I grinned at him. “Took you long enough.”

  “Next time, pull your life jacket,” he replied with a big smile on his face.

  Looking around, I saw the moon reflecting off five sets of teeth. They all loved it when they got one up on their officer.

  “Looks like we have some high ground at the river,” Jess said more seriously.

  “Good. You and Doyle set up facing the river. The rest of us’ll face the canal.”

  As we settled in again, I looked around. A light wind blew on the river, and I was getting a little chilled in my wet clothes. The rest of the troops were probably cold, too. We needed some action to warm us up. I could see a long way under the full moon. If anything came along, we once again had the high ground and would wreak havoc.

  Around 0200 I heard the chugging of an outboard engine—the “onelunger” the Vietnamese used—somewhere up the canal. All of us came to full alert, like hounds who’d caught the scent. The engine RPM went up, and so did my adrenaline. I listened as the sound got closer. Seemed to me it was about a hundred meters back up the canal when the engine idled briefly and then shut off.

  I heard muffled snicks as each man eased his weapon selector switch off “safe.” I didn’t have to give any orders. They all knew what to do. None of them would open fire until I gave the signal. Normally, I would fire a handheld illumination flare in the air over the target, and then the troops would cut down. Tonight we didn’t need a flare.

  I stared back up the canal. Bump squeezed my arm and pointed.

  Looking across the canal, I saw a sampan come into view, hugging the other canal bank. The canal was about twenty meters wide at the river mouth. The sampan was still more than fifty meters away, and I strained my eyes to see the occupants. Finally, I saw one man in the rear, paddling quietly. The other man stood in the bow holding a rifle. Definitely not fishermen getting an early start.

  The sampan neared the river mouth. When the bow edged out past the other bank, the critical moment had come. If they turned back, I’d let them go, figuring they were scouts for a larger force about to cross the river. I wanted them to give the all-clear so we could get the main group.

  The paddler held the sampan in position as the other man looked up and down the river. I held my breath, my M-16 aimed toward the boat. My heart slowed and the world seemed to grow quiet. All the night sounds were blocked from my brain as I concentrated on the scene before me. I didn’t have to look around to know the men were equally focused. I felt no fear, just anticipation, as I waited for them to make their decision—a matter of life or death for them.

  Suddenly, the man with the weapon turned toward the paddler and said something. The paddler fired up the engine, shattering the silence. To me, the engine sounded as loud as a C-130 on takeoff. I felt another adrenaline rush. I had to make a split-second decision. If I let the sampan get too far out in the river, we’d miss our chance for a kill. But I had to be sure they weren’t going to turn around. I’d just about figured they weren’t, but—

  The bow of the sampan lifted as the engine accelerated.

  I squeezed the trigger on my M-16. The noise of the sampan was drowned out by our horrendous fire; our muzzle flashes lit up the night in front of us. Tracers hit the water near the sampan and ricocheted into the air across the canal. Despite the magnificent light show, I was completely focused on the target. I fired single action, keeping my sights on the man running the engine. My first tracer slammed into him and I swung my rifle forward, just in time to see the man in the bow fly out of the sampan. Our tracers seemed to lift him straight up. I turned back to the rear man, but he had also disappeared.

  “Cease fire!” I yelled.

  At once it got quiet again. Maybe six seconds had passed. That was the nature of an ambush: hours of boredom followed by seconds of excitement.

  Bump and Pierre blew some air into their life jackets (that was SOP; using the toggle to inflate it was an emergency maneuver) and started to slide into the water to go check out the kill zone—that is, the sampan.

  “Wait,” I said, wanting to be sure there wasn’t a large force back up the canal, coming our way to see about all the shooting.

  I listened for about thirty seconds, but heard nothing.

  “Boss, the sampan is sinking,” Jess whispered.

  The sampan disappeared below the surface of the water. I reached over to Fred and turned on the radio he wore. “Call for extraction.”

  I knew Satch had seen the action, but he wouldn’t come our way until I called him. Sometimes we held our position in case the VC sent anyone to investigate. Then we got to kill again—sort of a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. Still, my instincts told me we weren’t going to see a reaction force. And with the full moon I didn’t want to wait around too long. If a large force did come down the canal firing, we were in a bad position. We had no cover and we were standing waist-deep in water. Leaving was the prudent thing to do.

  I heard Fred whisper, “Extraction, extraction.” A few seconds later he turned to me. “They’re on their way.”

  Satch kne
w to pick us up at the canal mouth. I looked out into the river and saw the bow wake of the STAB. It was cruising toward us at half-speed. If I’d called for an emergency extraction, the boat would have been at full plane on top of the water.

  When I figured the boat was about 200 meters out, I pointed my red-lens flashlight at it and gave three quick flashes. The boat turned directly toward us and slowed. As it idled into our site, I grabbed the gunwale and held it as Bump pulled himself aboard and the rest of the men followed. Once Jess had backed out of his covering position and climbed in, I passed my M-16 to him and pulled up. Hands grabbed my H-harness webbing and hauled me over the railing as the boat backed away from the riverbank.

  Crouched in the boat, my weapon pointed toward shore, I looked out toward the river. The LCPL was loitering about a hundred meters out, guns trained on the canal to cover our withdrawal. The STAB turned and the coxswain pushed the two throttles completely forward. The boat hesitated for a split second, then took off. Without the added weight of the ceramic armor ringing the inside of the gunwales, it would have leaped nearly out of the water. Pierre and Bump manned the two pintle-mounted M-60 machine guns on the port and starboard railings as we hurtled forward. When the coxswain throttled back and came starboard of the LCPL, I saw that Satch had all his weapons manned and ready to fire. He looked disappointed at having nothing to shoot at.

  I jumped aboard the LCPL. “Got two,” I told him.

  “I’ll kack up a message to the TOC and let them know the results,” he replied.

  “Okay. Tell them we’ll be back in about two hours.”

  “I’m going to hang around to see if anything else comes out of the canal.”

  “Don’t think you’re going to see anything,” I said. “Just make sure you clear the area before light.”

  I didn’t want to show the VC in the area what our LCPL looked like. So far we’d been trying to keep them from putting us together with that boat. Outwardly, it looked just like one of the old riverboats the French had used in the fifties and then turned over to the Vietnamese. I wanted the VC to think our LCPL was just another boat belonging to the South Vietnamese River Assault Groups.

  I jumped back into the STAB. “Home, James,” I said to the coxswain.

  As we cruised up the river, the men slept on the deck, all except Jess and me.

  “What d’you think?”

  “Not bad,” he said. “I figured we’d get more, but two ain’t bad.”

  “When I saw the bow lift on that sampan, I knew they were headed across. I figured two were better than none.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, the VC’ll probably think twice before they use that canal again.”

  We’d taken the night away from two VC, but the psychological gain of our mission far outweighed any material gain. Two dead VC wouldn’t be missed by anyone but their families and friends. But the fact they’d been killed doing something that had probably been routine for years would affect the morale of all their VC buddies.

  7

  ATTACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT: BASSAC MISSION

  Near the end of April 1967 we learned that the National Police in Can Tho, just down the river from Binh Thuy, had picked up a farmer who told them there would be a high-level VC meeting in a village down the Bassac that afternoon.

  Normally I would have been very suspicious of anything coming out of the National Police, but the CTF-116 TOC watch commander told me one of the river patrols had searched a sampan on the Bassac last night and interrogated the owner, who’d told them that “something big” was going to happen the next day in about the same place the National Police informer had fingered. To sweeten the pot, the IV Corps naval intelligence liaison officer who worked routinely with the National Police told me eight to ten guerrillas, including the VC district chief, would be at the meeting. The fact that they were holding the meeting right on the river during the day didn’t surprise me: they were used to operating with impunity. Going after a district-level VC cadre was a good chance to do something worthwhile for the war effort. I decided to go with the information.

  The suspect village, it turned out, was in two different places! Really the “villages” were small clusters of the Vietnamese mud-and-thatch houses we affectionately called hootches. We decided that Larry Bailey’s squad would go to one area, mine to the other. Lieutenant Jake Rhinebolt, our detachment officer-in-charge, elected to go with us, as he often did. I considered Jake a member of my squad, and I liked having him along. He was a hunter and one hell of an operator. Even though he was senior to me, he had made it clear from the start that I ran the missions.

  This had to be a daylight operation, which wasn’t completely to my liking; so I decided we’d insert by PBR instead of using our smaller boats. I figured that would give us a little edge; by now, I was sure, our STABs were familiar to the VC, and the PBRs could provide us good fire support.

  The plan was simple. We’d take one of the two boats in a routine PBR river patrol and beach it in front of the target. After doing our thing, we’d get back on the PBR and get the hell out of there before any large force of VC in the area had time to react. We didn’t know exactly in which hootch the meeting was to be held, so I planned to hit fast in hopes of spooking the VC. Quick in, quick out.

  I made last-minute arrangements with the CTF-116 TOC, briefed the two PBR crews assigned for the mission, and briefed my men. By this point in our tour, our squad briefings were really brief. We’d worked together long enough for everyone to know what he and everyone else should do in any given situation. Everyone was hot to go—daylight operations didn’t bother them—and I fed off their enthusiasm.

  We got our gear together and headed downriver to the villages, about five miles south of Can Tho. I remember thinking that the weather was too perfect, with no clouds and almost no wind. The usually choppy Bassac looked like a lake. I’d rather it had been raining, but this was the dry season. We arrived off the village about three, and I started looking through binoculars for the hootches described by the informant. Things looked pretty quiet on shore, though I did find what appeared to be the target area. I hadn’t expected a sign saying “Meeting This Way,” but I had hoped to spot sentries. There was nothing. I figured we were either early or late.

  I was wondering, as I had earlier, whether this was a setup, so I told the PBR patrol commander to position the other boat on our right flank, because that would be the best firing position for supporting us. I also told him to close the distance to the shore at high speed, and as soon as the boat touched land we’d be off. He was then to back out, giving us fire cover to our left flank. I gave the guys a final quick check, and Jess offered me the thumbs-up. Off we went.

  The PBR was a highly maneuverable boat because of its water-jet propulsion system; at top speed it could do a 180-degree turn in its own length. We closed to the shore rapidly, my men and I riding in the bow, left and right of the forward dual .50-caliber machine gun. About ten yards from the beach, the coxswain went from full ahead to full astern by reversing the water jets. We jumped forward just as the PBR’s bow hit the riverbank. It was like being shot out of the end of a banana peel, but we were off the boat in seconds.

  The boat continued backing out into the river, keeping its machine guns trained on our left flank. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the other PBR in position about a hundred meters to our right. We moved about ten meters in and set up a quick perimeter. This was the critical time. I expected the worst, but after about a minute ashore I felt we were secure and we’d better start moving.

  We were just to the right of the hootch that was our prime target. Jess Tolison and I ran through the door. It was a good-sized hootch, with a main room and a bamboo partition at the rear. As we went through the open door, Jess on the left, me on the right, I caught movement just in front of me. It was an old mama-san holding a baby. I saw Jess grab a young woman. Both were in shock. I guess they never expected two wild-eyed guys in full camouflage war paint to be joining them for tea. Ap
parently, the noise we made on insertion hadn’t alarmed them: they were laying out about five places on a floor mat. Bingo! Maybe we were going to get lucky.

  Jess had served a tour in Da Nang in 1962 training Vietnamese SEALs, so he spoke a little Vietnamese. He asked the young woman when the VC would be there and she was so astonished she blurted, “In a few minutes.” But she was talking at a good clip, so it took Jess a while to realize what she’d said. The old woman was jabbering also and between the two of them anyone in sight would have known something was wrong. They were really scared.

  At that moment I heard Pierre Birtz’s Stoner machine gun open up. Jess and I bolted out of the hootch and saw three VC with weapons running away through the tree line toward rice paddies a hundred meters off the river. Pierre yelled that he had seen five VC, and he thought he’d hit one.

  Jess, Bill Garnett, Charlie Bump, Fred McCarty, and I went after them. I told Pierre and Jake to move to the edge of the rice paddy to cover us. We neared the edge of the tree line, and one of the guys shot a VC in the head. We charged forward. As we went past the fallen VC, I yelled at Fred, “Patch the guy up—I want to talk to him when I get back!”

  As we broke out into the rice paddy, I quickly scanned the area. To our right about fifty meters away, another line of trees ran inland, perpendicular to the one from which we’d emerged. Three VC ran down along the tree line to our right and disappeared into the trees fifty meters in front of us. We fired at them and started moving forward across the open rice paddy. As we raced across the open space, my pucker factor started going up. Only our aggressiveness and speed would keep the VC from stopping just inside the tree line and firing on us. Finally, we reached the trees. There was another hootch complex ten meters away. No sign of the VC. Suddenly Jess yelled and we hit the ground. Just in front of us was the firing slit of a bunker. I expected to come under fire, but there was only silence. More bunkers were set among the hootches. It was a defensive perimeter, and we were right in the kill zone. We peered through the dense foliage, expecting to come under attack at any second; a few pigs wandered among the hootches but there was no sign of human life. The villagers, VC or not—but probably VC—were no doubt lying low in the bunkers, waiting for us to make a move. Bill and Charlie, weapons at the ready, were at my right; Jess was at my left elbow, his M-16 glued into his right shoulder, ready to fire. I figured if there was a fight, we’d give better than we got. Still, all was quiet—too quiet.