Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  I was about to advance on the bunker complex, but Jess pointed out that we were in a bad position. First of all, we didn’t know what was in front of us. Second, we were beyond the PBR’s fire-support fan. I always paid attention to Jess. He was as aggressive as any man I’d ever seen, but he also had great operational savvy, and when he got cautious I got cautious. I said, “Let’s make it.”

  Cautiously, we crawled backward to the edge of the tree line, then got to our feet and hurried toward the river, keeping as much foliage as possible between us and the hootch complex. Bill Garnett walked backward, providing rear security. Charlie Bump was in his usual position on the point. Unopposed, we moved back down the tree line to where I’d left Fred. He was hunched over the VC, who had a triangle bandage wrapped around his head. Only problem was, most of his brains were about two feet from his head. Fred looked up, and I could see he was really pissed. “Thanks a lot, boss,” he yelled, “for leaving me alone here in the open while you assholes chased VC!”

  “Pierre and Jake had you covered from the tree line,” I said.

  I could see Fred wasn’t buying this, but he didn’t argue. “I just about got the guy patched up,” he replied instead.

  “Yep, I can see that, Fred.”

  Fred got pissed again because I had so little confidence in his medical abilities. I told Fred he was the best I’d ever seen, but if that guy came back to life he probably wouldn’t be able to talk without his brain. As Fred and I enjoyed our rice paddy repartee, Jess made another astute observation:

  “Hey, boss, we’re hanging out here. We need to haul ass.”

  “Roger that, Jess. Let’s go find Pierre and Jake.”

  “Fred,” Jess said, “you done good. Now get your shit together—we’re leaving.”

  We moved back to the tree line along the river. All of this had taken no more than fifteen minutes.

  We picked up the weapon our brain-dead VC had dropped and moved to the hootch where the two women and the baby were hunkering down on the floor. The women started begging us not to kill them. Jess told them we had no intention of doing that and to calm down. He was able to determine that we had indeed broken up a meeting. Apparently the young woman’s husband was in the group we had jumped.

  I called the PBR commander, who’d been wondering what was going on, and told him to come pick us up. We extracted without incident.

  The National Police later told us that the older woman’s husband was the local guerrilla leader. He had been waiting in the tree line we charged. I figured he was in one of the bunkers, watching us as we waited for the firing to start.

  Though we didn’t get what we came for, all in all it was a good operation. It was the first time we’d used the National Police intelligence system. On balance, the information they gave us was accurate. Clearly, some sort of meeting had been scheduled, and we got there just in time to spoil the party.

  8

  SNEAK AND PEEK: LONG TUAN SECRET ZONE

  I could do ambush missions without fear of killing non-VC in any of the three “Secret Zones,” which lay along the coast of the South China Sea on each side of the Bassac River. The Long Tuan, Vinh Long, and Ba Xuyen Secret Zones were bad areas, designated free-fire zones. They were transit corridors for VC units moving north into the Saigon region and were also used to store food, weapons, and equipment. Because all three areas were mostly thick mangrove swamp, the only way to get around easily was by sampan. The enemy operated freely because no U.S. or Vietnamese forces ever went there.

  One day I paid a call to the subsector adviser responsible for the Long Tuan Secret Zone. I had requested and gotten one of the few U.S. Army “slick” helicopters at IV Corps headquarters. When I told the pilot where we were going, he looked at me like I was nuts. We took off from Can Tho Air Field and headed for the mouth of the Bassac.

  The subsector headquarters lay west of the Long Tuan Secret Zone, just outside the mangrove swamps. Once we were airborne, we raised the command post on the radio and got landing instructions: the pilot had not been there any more than I had. At IV Corps headquarters I’d been told that the command post came under artillery, mortar, and rocket fire every night. One of the advisers had been killed by a sniper a week ago when he poked his head out of the command bunker. Sounded just like the kind of place I wanted to operate.

  As we approached the area, all I could see was mangrove swamp, stretching for miles to the South China Sea. At first we couldn’t even find the landing zone (LZ), so the subsector command post gave us a vector to follow. They said we’d soon see the small town of Long Tuan. Two minutes past that we’d see a wind sock—that would be the LZ. We finally located the wind sock and the LZ. We were flying at 1,500 feet—too high for my liking, but that altitude was SOP for Army helos in the delta then. Following our landing instructions, the pilot auto-rotated straight down to the LZ.

  The skids touched down, and Jess and I jumped out. We hadn’t touched the ground before the helo was airborne again, screaming toward the Bassac River. The instant he cleared the edge of the open area, he climbed as fast as he could and was gone. (I later learned from a contact on the IV Corps staff that he called back to the IV Corps command center and tried to get out of picking us up. The watch officer told him not to come back without us.)

  Meanwhile Jess and I were zigzagging across the LZ, following the sergeant who had met us to the command bunker. Sniper rounds cracked over our heads from the nearby tree line. I dove into the bunker and met the acting adviser, an Army captain in battle dress minus his helmet. We shook hands all around, and he offered coffee. Being good Navy men, Jess and I accepted.

  The captain, who’d been told only to expect two Americans who wanted to talk to him about operating in the Secret Zone, was looking at us the same way the helo pilot had. I explained that we were SEALs and asked that the captain and his sergeant keep that piece of news to themselves—the fact that SEALs were operating in the delta was classified Top Secret at that time. I explained that we’d been operating upriver and weren’t getting the results I wanted. I’d heard that his area was a target-rich environment, and we wanted to give it a shot.

  He laughed. “Great, I haven’t been able to get any force to operate in the Zone. You guys can have all you want. How many men you plan to go with?”

  I said, “You’re looking at a third of them.”

  The captain started laughing again. “No, really, how many men are you going to take in?”

  “Six.”

  He just looked at me strangely, and I said, “That’s right—six.” I wasn’t going to explain our modus operandi because he didn’t have a need to know.

  “Okay, let me give you what I know about the area.”

  His brief was quick because he didn’t know much about anything beyond the perimeter of his barbed-wire-enclosed command bunker complex. He explained that the Americans never left except to fly out for a break once a month. He also told me about the adviser who’d just been killed. The sniper who’d fired at us as we were leaving the helo had a reputation as a poor shot, so the advisers had gotten lazy about moving from bunker to bunker. The major had been shot because instead of running, he was walking.

  The captain finished his rundown by saying, “We get shot at every time we stick our heads out of the bunker. Since the major bought it, we don’t go out much.”

  This situation was familiar to Army and Marine troops operating in the North, but it was not the norm in the delta at that time. He said there just weren’t any friendlies around. I asked about his VN counterparts.

  The captain chuckled and said, “They’ve made their accommodations with the VC.”

  The VC could have attacked and captured the command post any time they wished. But because they could obtain hard-to-get American consumer items from the Vietnamese, they left the command post alone. “All the local VC are smoking Camels,” he explained. “They don’t want to screw up a good deal.”

  The captain showed me his “rumor board,” on
which he had plotted such things as munitions factories, supply points, and base-camp areas. He had no idea how accurate the information was, and he only kept the map for something to do.

  “My VN counterpart puts H & I [harassment and interdiction] fire into the Zone every night with his artillery, but he’s always careful not to hit anything. I figure my info is right if I can’t get him to shoot at it.”

  He was painting an interesting picture. It really was a target-rich environment—Jess was drooling.

  “I’m gonna take my guys in and have a look,” I said. “Don’t say anything to your counterpart about us.”

  “Have at it, but don’t send me any message traffic. In fact, don’t even use the radio to tell me where you’re going.”

  I understood. The VNs might learn about the operation. In those days there were no secure voice radios in the delta.

  “You guys are clear to operate at any time and any place in the Zone. Shoot anyone you see. They’re all bad guys in there.”

  I couldn’t ask for better rules of engagement. “I’ll take my chances on the H & I fire,” I replied.

  “You won’t have a problem.”

  “Can you give some artillery support if we get in some shit?”

  “Better not count on it.”

  When the helo checked in on the radio, we stood by the bunker entrance. As he started down we shook hands all around; they wished us good luck, and Jess and I headed for the LZ. The sergeant and the captain stayed in the bunker, and the sniper fired a good-bye as we jumped on the helo and took off.

  “Jess,” I said, “this is the place we’ve been looking for.”

  “You got it, boss,” he agreed. “But we’d better take it easy at first.”

  Back at Binh Thuy, Jess and I met with Satch Baumgart to start planning for the Long Tuan. Our biggest problem was not being able to expect fire support if we got in serious trouble. We could use Army helicopter gunships, but they wouldn’t have much staying time—their nearest refueling point was Ba Xuyen airfield, about thirty minutes away from the middle of the Long Tuan. Nor would our boats be of much help: if they came up any of the large canals they’d be sitting ducks. Since we would be the first force in anyone’s memory to operate in the Zone, we’d have surprise on our side, but we’d have to be careful, as Jess had said. We’d just write the book one page at a time.

  Our other problem was getting there. Helos were out of the question; I knew I couldn’t get any slicks to insert us at night, and daylight helo insertions would give us away to any bad guys in the area. We’d have to use our boats to insert, then patrol on foot to where we wanted to go.

  On the way back Jess and I had talked about what kind of operations to do. We settled on ambush patrols, which would allow us to reconnoiter an area before a hit. I figured we’d start with two-day operations—a limit set by how much water we could carry. (We couldn’t get more in the Zone.) We’d insert early in the morning, around 0400, patrol the mangroves during the day, and lay up in ambush at night on one of the interior canals. If we got a hit, we’d assess the situation and probably get out. If we didn’t get a hit, we’d sleep the next morning, patrol to another canal in the afternoon, and repeat the process.

  Satch looked at the map and charts of the area and said the LCPL couldn’t operate at the mouth of the Bassac because the seas were too high for the boat’s low freeboard. I always paid a lot of attention to what Satch said: it was his second tour, and he was one hell of an officer. Satch said the STAB, our twenty-two-foot trimaran, would be okay but it was fuel limited and because it burned gasoline, not diesel, getting fuel from the nearby Junk Force base was out of the question. Satch figured the best thing was to use two PBRs to get us into the area, leaving Binh Thuy late in the afternoon so as to arrive off the Secret Zone about 0200. The STAB could load extra fuel bladders and transit at night, on its own.

  For our first operation, a simple one, we’d go someplace accessible from the Bassac River. Jess threw a dart at the map and we started planning. Canals ran all over the Zone. We picked two that were about a kilometer in from the river and ran parallel to the South China Sea. To get there, we’d insert about a mile upriver and walk the rest of the way. We knew moving in the Secret Zone would not be easy, so we planned to go light, with no machine guns and minimal hand grenades. The grenades would be next to useless because in the thick mangroves we couldn’t throw them far enough to get us out of the kill radius. Besides, hand grenades don’t have much effect when they detonate in the water. Everyone was enthusiastic about going to the Zone. It would be the first time U.S. eyes would be on the ground there, and it would really bother the VC to have someone shooting at them in one of their safest areas.

  The IV Corps intelligence officer, an Army colonel, gave me what he had on the area. It was basically what I’d seen on the subsector rumor board, but he did think there was a weapons factory in the area through which we had to patrol to get to the canals. It gave us something to look for.

  About 1400, we left Binh Thuy on two PBRs headed downriver. Satch came along to run things on the water. The trip was uneventful and the STAB showed up about midnight. Because the thick mangroves would probably cut down the range of our radio transmissions, Satch wanted to keep the PBRs closer to shore than we had originally planned. I agreed; we were playing it safe until I had a feel for the area. We boarded the STAB and slowly headed for shore. I wanted to insert at low tide so we could walk up a small canal for a couple of hundred meters before striking out cross-country.

  I hadn’t considered one factor carefully enough: the mud. The charts showed a sandy bottom well inside the Bassac. When Jess and I flew to Long Tuan the tide had been in, and although I had noticed mud, I thought it would be confined to areas near the riverbank. The squad was well acquainted with delta mud, but nothing prepared us for what we found here.

  With the PBR radar, Satch vectored us to a point just inside the canal I wanted. We were about a kilometer from the shore when the boat grounded out. Mud.

  “No problem. We’ll walk from here,” I told the coxswain. I climbed over the gunwale and promptly sank to my waist in the mud. Light though we were, we all sank in.

  The next three hours were like nothing I’d ever experienced. All the trips I’d made through the mudflats at Little Creek during UDT Basic Training—they couldn’t compare. This was like that nightmare in which you’re trying to escape some unseen threat but you find yourself unable to move your feet. To make matters worse, we had to be quiet because there were small, inhabited sampans sprinkled around us like little islands in a sea. We had to assume they had come from inside the Zone and wouldn’t be friendly.

  Charlie Bump, being the lightest of us, was having the easiest time. I told him to move at his own speed and cover us as we neared the mangroves. The rest of us slogged on, until we finally made it to the canal at first light. Once we got into the mangroves, Bump found a spot of dry land and we stopped. Each of us had consumed one of the three canteens he was carrying. Jess and I talked, and I decided we’d come out that night whether we made a hit or not.

  I called Satch on the radio and gave him the change. He checked the tide tables and said we had to be at the mudflats by 2300 if the STAB was to float. At that hour it could get a lot closer, so we wouldn’t have to walk as far.

  Since it was now daylight, I decided not to walk down the canal. Instead, we struck off through the mangroves, following a compass course that would take us near the purported weapons factory. I figured if there was one, we’d hear mechanical noise from some distance.

  We found the mangrove swamps weren’t all water—we crossed many dry areas—but I had underestimated the thickness of the foliage. It was worse than the Rung Sat. We had to contend not only with the thick brush but also with fire ants, which dropped on us out of the trees when they sensed our warm bodies. The heat and humidity were incredible. There was no breeze, and we were soon sweating like racehorses. We were also making a lot of noise, but I wasn’t w
orried about that—I figured the VC were too smart to do what we were doing. They’d be in sampans on the canals.

  About 1400 we got near where the factory was supposed to be, and I called break. We established our usual perimeter, then sat down and listened. Both Jess and I heard voices, and all of us heard metal clanking. The noises seemed to be coming from about ten o’clock on our line of march. I couldn’t believe we were going to get lucky.

  We formed up and started moving in that direction, very slowly to stay as quiet as possible. It was impossible to move silently; a Seminole Indian couldn’t have moved silently through that terrain. After half an hour of walking the noises didn’t seem to be any closer, and they seemed to now be coming from our 1300. I stopped the patrol in an “open area” of eight-inch elephant grass. Jess and I looked at the map and saw we should soon be at the first canal. The maps were so inaccurate that I didn’t put much faith in them, but they were all we had.

  We pushed on. About 1500, we reached a canal, but it didn’t look large enough to be the one I wanted. We stopped, and again we heard the same noises, this time down the canal to our right. I decided that someone was in a sampan doing something, but probably nothing to do with weapons.

  We were all beat, and this canal would do as well as the next, so we got in ambush formation along it, pulled our mosquito nets down over our faces, and waited. If something came by, I wasn’t going to wait until nightfall to shoot; I figured no one was going to chase us through this terrain. I gave the word for one member of each buddy pair to get some sleep. My buddy, Pierre, told me to go first because he wasn’t sleepy. No problem.