by Orr Kelly
It was like being at a shooting gallery. We were all on line behind this mound and these guys come tearing off across the front of it and we just nailed them. That was very clean.
I have no explanation as to whatever possessed Keith to take off and run like that.
That was our tenth or twelfth op in country. That, coupled with what happened on our third patrol, morale wasn’t as high as it could have been.
What happened to your platoon during Tet?
We got sucked into perimeter defense of the base there at Binh Thuy. Tet came and went and nothing happened around us. But we were ready. Then we went back to Nha Be and for the rest of the six months ran our ops and did it correctly and nobody got hurt.
Was the rest of your tour pretty quiet?
Well, there were no engagements that we didn’t win. It’s been my experience, and I think you’ll find most people at the time aren’t particularly concerned about being afraid because you’re too busy doing your job. You can get scared later, at that point in life when you realize your own mortality. I didn’t see anybody who showed any outside signs of fear in combat. I think fear is part of it but I guess that’s the difference between being a professional and being a coward. If you’re a professional, you do your job and you do it well.
How good were the enemy soldiers?
The Viet Cong didn’t grow up with a good diet. One of the consequences is a lot of them tended to be nearsighted. They didn’t get proper corrective lenses. Consequently, they are lousy shots. A lot of their people were conscripts and not quite as dedicated as they might have been.
But their leadership, considering the very difficult conditions they ran their operations from, did an excellent job.
CHAPTER
21
“Everything Is Written Down”
Most SEALs have great confidence in their own abilities and the abilities of their comrades, working together, to make things come out all right. But many of them have a feeling that blind fate often has a powerful role to play as well. Jack Macione is convinced that a couple of his experiences are proof of the role fate plays on the battlefield:
Let me tell you a profound story. This is awesome. I really believe everything is written down and all we do is play the script.
I was relieving Jake Rhinebolt as OINC [Lt. Henry J. Rhinebolt, officer in charge of the SEAL contingent in Vietnam]. This must have been July 1967. We had flown over in a DC-6, a four-engine, lumbering monstrous airplane. We had been in the air for something like eighteen hours. I think we had made a couple of hours’ stop in Hawaii.
We got to Tan Son Nhut, the door opens, there was Jake at the bottom of the ramp, stairs, whatever they had.
They all call me Blackjack.
He says, “Hey, come on, Blackjack. Jump in the jeep. I’m going to go down to brief General Westmoreland.”
So I said, “Great.” I turned to the chief and said, “Take over.”
I jumped in Jake’s jeep and down we went to MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. We come into this darkened war room. All the charts and the lights. God, there he was, General Westmoreland. I really admired him. So I sat in back and Jake briefed him up.
It was this: that we had some intel that a Viet Cong, a North Vietnam courier, a high-ranking infrastructure courier, had been walking south for the last three months or whatever it was. It was a long time. And somewhere in this vast thousands and thousands of square miles of jungle we were going in to get him.
After the brief, Jake says, “You want to go?”
I said, “Yeah, I want to go. But come on, Jake, you gotta be shitting me. This guy is walking south. He could be anywhere in a couple thousand square miles of jungle. And we’re going to find him?”
He says, “Well, we got some good intel. He’s supposed to be here tomorrow night,”
“Jake, we could pass in the jungle ten feet apart.”
“Well, we’re going to go in. You want to go?”
“Shit yes, I want to go.”
I didn’t have anything. So I borrowed some guy’s weapon and some grenades and ammunition and black face and bam, off we went down the river.
The plan was to make an insertion, rubber boat, into this area called the—I think it was some secret zone. No friendlies had been in there in twenty years. So we go in like two or three in the morning, two rubber boats, get on the beach.
The plan is that one squad is going to cross over the inner waterway. We’re on the South China Sea. You get on land and walk a few yards and there’ll be an inner waterway they put the boats on. We’re going to move up to this hootch, three-four hundred yards.
We split the squad. I’m tail end Charlie. As we’re weaving along this path, all of a sudden the whole squad stops in midstream. Like a caterpillar stopping. All stopped at once.
I happened to be right on the edge of the embankment on the South China Sea. Coming by in a sampan are four guys with AK-47s. I could have reached out and touched any one of them. We didn’t make a sound. They were talking Vietnamese. We knew it was probably a bodyguard or it could have been the guy, but probably not.
No sooner had they just cleared me and I hear a noise behind us. So I look back—it’s three o’clock in the morning. I grab [HM1 Paul T.] Schwartz, the corpsman. He had the shotgun. I pushed him down on one knee right where I was. I look back and I see these shapes coming. The reason I can see them is there is a water inlet. I can see the silhouettes against that bright water.
We’re supposed to make contact with our other squad by radio, but they never contacted. So we figure the radio’s out. But now they’re walking in behind us. And I’m pissed because it’s dangerous. So the first thoughts I’m having is chewing somebody’s ass out.
Anyway, here come the shapes. Right in front of me is a branch. As he ducks under the branch, I see this conical hat. I know I’ve got Viet Cong.
The guy comes up, bumps right into me. So I push him over and tell him in Vietnamese to get his hands up. He brings his rifle around, but he’s close to me. He shoots but the rifle is up against the side of my head. I push him off. I hear Schwartz pumping off the shotgun. Cachung! Cachung! Cachung!
I’m deadly from the hip. As a kid I’d gone night after night after night shooting rats at the dump. I’m deadly from the hip. When I went through a pop-up target course, I never aimed. I just shot from the hip and I was always four-oh. [Perfect. The highest numerical grade on navy evaluations is 4.0.] Always. So I let off a round. Well, I know I hit the guy because it flips him over a bush into the South China Sea.
There’s a lot of shit going on. Shooting going on. Dark. We had full tracers on our guns at night. So I run over to the bank and I see this black head going downstream. The water is going pretty fast. The tide. And I say, “Is there anybody in the water? Any of my men in the water?” In English.
No answer.
Peewee Nealy [ENC Richard C. Nealy], the little bantamweight, says, “Shoot the son of a bitch!”
So I shoot, hit the guy, and the head disappears.
The shit has hit the fan. I jump in the water. I’m going to cover the waterside flank to make sure we don’t get our own flank from someone coming around.
I lay my grenades up on the bank. I’m in the water. I’m kind of watching the waterside. There was a lot of shooting and all of a sudden it gets quiet.
I stayed there for about two hours. Not a sound, nobody moving. Suddenly, underwater, it feels like somebody grabs me. I turn around and see a knapsack floating.
I pull up on it and on the end of the knapsack is this guy I had shot two hours earlier. The tide had taken him out to sea, turned him around, and brought him right back to me. The bullet had hit him, almost micrometer measurement, right between the eyes. Had blown his head off from behind his ears back. His brain was hanging out by the spinal nerve and the fish were eating it.
I pull him up on the bank and look in that knapsack. It was the guy we were looking for.
He had
the locations of six major arms caches. It took trucks to load.
He had the names of over one hundred Viet Cong agents working for the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. He had a lot of stuff. He was the guy we were looking for.
Can you imagine? Was that written down, or what? I had just come twelve thousand miles, didn’t have anything to wear or put on. I go down the river, and it’s the guy we’re looking for. And if he’d been one foot either way in the jungle we never would have seen him. If we’d been fifteen seconds one way or the other we wouldn’t have run into each other.
It was one of the greatest intel finds of the war, up to that time, and probably of the whole war. I was so naive, let me tell you. He had forty thousand dollars in American in that knapsack. I kept four hundred of it for a beer party. Some naval intel guy is still laughing about that, ’cause I’m sure he took it home with him.
CHAPTER
22
Blowing Bunkers
Jack Macione recalls another event that convinced him not to ignore the role of fate:
This is another profound one.
We got asked to clear out this area. The Viet Cong had built big mud igloos. They looked like igloos. The rivers of course were the highways. So in this real bad area they would shoot at the boats and then jump in the igloo. They had killed several people. So the area commander asked us to go in and clean it out.
It wasn’t our job. It was the 9th Division’s job. The army. But, you know, we do anything. Whores. This is the day I get three Purple Hearts. No it wasn’t. That happened later.
We each took forty pounds of high explosives in haversacks. In socks, with a short fuse, a thirty-second fuse. Each of us was carrying twenty socks. So we were blowing these bunkers.
What we would do is, we would holler “allee allee outs in free” and throw it into the bunker. Up to that time I had been a demolitionist seven or eight years. And I had never had a misfire. A misfire is when the cap goes off but the main charge doesn’t. It’s not uncommon to have a misfire. There are very few people who can get by their time in the team without having a misfire. But I’d never had a misfire. It was kind of a little pride thing.
So we were going along, throwing two-pound socks. Let me tell you the power of a two-pound sock. It is maybe two and a half pounds, about as big as a carton of cigarettes—a carton of regulars. If you cut off a piece of C-4 [the explosive] about half the size of a pack of cigarettes, you could split a railroad rail. With a two-pound sock you could take out the walls of a building.
You have a fuse puller. You pull the fuse and it spits fire into it and lights it. About thirty seconds. So we go along pulling the fuses, hollering “allee allee outs in free.” If nobody comes out, we throw it in. [The fuse puller is attached to a length of timed safety fuse, which is cut into thirty-second lengths, the number of lengths depending on how long the operator wants to delay the explosion. The safety fuse burns down until it reaches a cap, which it ignites, causing the C-4 explosive to go off.]
I had blown maybe eight or ten bunkers. We walk by this one bunker, holler allee etc. Nothing. Nobody comes out. I throw it in. We start walking away. I hear—“clap”—a misfire. The cap goes off but the charge doesn’t. It’s the only misfire I’d had up to that point. Incidentally, its the only misfire I ever had.
I say to Peewee [Richard Nealy]: “I’m going to go in that bunker and get the explosive. Because the Viet Cong would get it and make booby traps.”
So I start crawling in this tunnel. Pitch-black. I’m sure from the inside I’m silhouetted against the light. I get about halfway in that tunnel and grab ahold of somebody’s hand.
Man! I did the four-minute mile on my knees backward. I didn’t have a weapon or anything.
So I yell in there. A woman comes out with a six-month-old baby, both of them completely unharmed.
My only misfire!
We asked what the hell she was doing, why she didn’t come out. The Viet Cong told her—they called us the Sea Tiger—the Viet Cong told her we would eat her baby. So she found it quite unusual that we gave her some food and sent her on her way.
CHAPTER
23
“Something’s Happened to Mike”
Mike Bennett, who participated in three Apollo astronaut recoveries, later served in Vietnam. He, too, became convinced that fate explains some of the strange things that happen in combat:
Speaking of funny things. I can’t remember when it was, but we were still on Seafloat. We were going to try to open the channels between two main rivers so the boats could get up and down there to get to both rivers.
And as we would go upriver, we would find these stakes stuck in the river. The Vietnamese would take these bamboo poles in their little tub boats. They would stick these bamboo poles in the mud and shake ’em. And we couldn’t pull them out with a Mike boat. We’d wrap lines around and try to pull ’em out with a Mike-8 and we could not pull ’em out. So we’d blow ’em.
What were they there for?
To stop our boats from going up the river.
So we’d put Mark 8 hose in there and blow ’em. So we got up to one of these stops. We got out, alongside the river. We did a sweep around the river, looking. Didn’t find anything, so they told me to go back down to the boat, bring the boat up so we could blow this thing.
I said okay. So I’m looking for booby traps and stuff. And I hit something with my leg and I looked down and there’s a piece of monofilament line wrapped around a stick about that big. And the stick looked like it had just been whittled. Like somebody had just whittled it. And my heart started pounding. And I thought, holy shit.
I turned around and looked, right back there. There was a grenade sticking out of a Schlitz beer can. This baby right there. [Pats can sitting on his desk.] And I said, “Grenade!”
And of course everyone went down. But me. My mind’s telling my body to get down and my body’s telling my mind, I’m not moving. I’m not moving. And I couldn’t get it to move for anything.
And Roger Sick says, “Where? Where?”
And I’m pointing at it. And he came around and he took a safety pin out of a tri-bandage and he stuck it in that hole and just as he stuck it in the hole, the pin fell out. I’ve got it right there. It was an instantaneous fuse.
Yeah, I tripped that booby trap and it did not go. It wasn’t my time. I found out later, talking to my mother … All of us kids, for her birthday, my dad bought the ring and each one of us kids bought their own birthstone for her ring.
She was working at the hospital back home the same day I tripped that grenade. And she looked down at the ring and my stone was missing. And through our correspondence we found it was the same day.
My mother said she felt in her heart, in her soul, that something was wrong and that made her look at that ring. The stone was missing. My aquamarine stone was gone. She says, “Something’s happened to Mike.”
And about twenty minutes later one of the guys tripped a grenade just like that and it blew the back of his head off. He survived but of course he had to learn how to walk and talk all over again. We medevaced him out.
We went on upriver and we were blowing… We were loading these little creeks trying to open up another river. And it seemed like the more explosive we put in the little river, the bigger dam would appear. Because when the explosion occurred, it would boil the mud up and completely dam off the river instead of blowing it deeper.
We used forty-pound cratering charges. We loaded the river with fifteen links of Mark 8 hose, interlaced with forty-pound cratering charges. We had it all set up where the cratering charges would go off. Since we were making these new dams, we figured out that we’d set the cratering charges with forty pounds in the middle, twenty pounds at the ends. Those charges would go first and then the links of Mark 8 hose would go and blow the mud out of the way.
So I guess we had about a thousand pounds of explosive loaded. And we went off downstream and we were getting ready to blow
it. And this beautiful white stork came flipping in. I guess his wingspan must have been six feet. He come swooping in, real slowly. And he landed in this tree. Just about the time it was “fire in the hole.”
He landed and he fluffed himself. And Whooofff! That thing went up and it just covered him.
And I thought, “Oh, man, we just disintegrated that dude.”
When all the wash came back down and the smoke cleared, he was still up in that tree. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! I thought, holy cow, and he shook himself off and he jumped and he fell out of the tree and he walked around the bank and finally he just took off. We screwed up his whole day.
We never did get anything opened up. That was the biggest dam we blew, that day. And as we were going back, we had forty links of Mark 8 hose. We had twenty forty-pound cratering charges in that boat. And we were on that boat. Usually it’s the one in the middle. We had a monitor in front but we didn’t have anyone behind us. And we were tracking downriver again, going home.
I was up by the coxswain and—no, as we were coming down the river a sampan was coming up. And the boat slid and it just mashed that sampan. People stepped out on the bank with all their goodies and stuff. It just tore that sampan up, sunk it right there.
I told him [the coxswain], “Charlie’s going to get you big-time for this. You just ruined one of his sampans.”
And the coxswain says, “I’m not scared of anybody. Who gives a shit?”
I says, “Man, Charlie’s going to get you. I don’t want to ride this boat. You just jinxed the boat. Charlie’s gonna get you.”
We made it down the river, down around the next corner and kaboom, we got hit. Charlie hit us twice. He hit us with a B-40 in the bar armor and the Styrofoam. [Boats were protected by metal armor, backed up by Styrofoam to absorb the energy of a shell.] The second one put a four-by six-foot hole in the engine room. And the coxswain turned the boat hard astarboard, both engines full ahead and put her up on the bank. And of course we jumped off, set a perimeter, shot up the banks.