Death in the Jungle by Gary Smith (most inspirational books .txt) 📕

inch or two that I couldn’t see, but I felt it. At the finish, I could feel it still. So did Kats. He flew through the gate with his right fist in the air. He had won, barely.

As I slowed to a walk, I looked at my watch, which I had stopped when I had passed through the gate; it read 31:42 for the six-mile run. I bent over at the waist and almost heaved my guts, but I didn’t. I stared at my feet for a few seconds, watching a multitude of sweat drops fall from my face onto my shoes.

Standing up again, I was dizzy, but I began jogging to help my body to cool down gradually. Kats and Bucklew were doing the same twenty meters ahead of me. As I followed them, I made a quick calculation and realized we’d run the last mile in an incredible 4:57. Flynn was right, I told myself, we were idiots. It was too hot to run that fast.

“Hey, idiot!” Kats shouted at me. “I gotcha!”

With perspiration still streaming into my eyes, I looked at Kats and shook my head. “If I hadn’t bumped into Nga, I would’ve won by ten yards!” I fibbed.

Kats spun around and started to backpedal. “Bumped?” he said with a laugh. “Is that all you did to her? I thought you had a full-blown affair!”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. “Even if you discard the bump,” I argued, “there’s still the cockroach issue.”

“What do you mean?” Kats asked as I caught up to him, and he turned around to jog with me. His breathing was still fast and heavy, like mine.

I grinned at my friend. “If it hadn’t been for that cockroach,” I said, “the winner here today would’ve been a horse of a different color.”

Kats gave me a playful shove, then laid back his head and whinnied. “Excuses, excuses,” he muttered, “but I won the race. Bucklew is my witness.”

I looked at Bucklew, who was jogging to our right.

“What about it, Buck?”

Bucklew smiled at me. “Kats and I already struck up a deal while you were back there tossing your cookies.”

“And?” I wondered.

“He promised me a couple beers if I tell the others who won.”

“And?” I persisted.

Bucklew chuckled. “You lost.”

I moved over and slapped at his head, but he blocked my assault.

“You lousy Communist!” I said.

As the other runners began showing up, Kats, Bucklew, and I jogged to the gate and waited to cheer for my roommate and Schrader, who I knew would be the last two. “What kinda pace do they run?” Kats asked me.

“Eight minutes a mile at best,” I reported.

Kats looked at his watch. “Well, it’s been forty-nine minutes already, so where are they?”

Bucklew grunted. “Probably at the pagoda prayin’ for a gook to shoot ’em so they won’t have to run back!”

Lieutenant Meston, who ran the course in forty-one minutes, walked toward us.

“Who’s left?” he asked.

“Funky and Schrader,” I answered. “Any minute now.”

Bucklew pointed down the road. “There they are entering the village.”

I watched the two men jogging side by side. Even at a distance, they still looked like sick cows.

When they were two hundred meters from the gate, we all started hollering.

“Come on, Funky!” I yelled. “Shake the lead out!”

“Run, girls!” shouted Pearson, the point man for 2nd Squad. He began clapping and howling like a coyote.

We were quickly joined by the other SEALs, all of whom wanted to get in on the action.

“I’ll bet five bucks on Schrader,” I heard Flynn offer from behind me.

I turned and looked at him. “You’re on, Flynn.”

As Funkhouser and Schrader picked up their pace, I joined in the cheering. Then the two men really started running. It was obvious that neither wanted to be last.

“The loser buys a round of beer!” McCollum cried out.

“Hoo-yah!” someone shouted.

Funkhouser and Schrader drew much closer. Their faces were beet-red from their effort. They were wet with sweat, neck-and-neck, and I thought of how Kats and I must’ve looked driving for the gate.

Then, fifteen meters from the gate, Funkhouser stumbled and started to fall. With arms flailing and body contorting and twisting, he somehow regained his balance. No, I thought, that was not how Kats or I had looked.

Funkhouser lost most of his speed in the near collision with the road, and he lost all of the race. I lost five bucks.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mission Six

“The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.”

Joseph Wood Krutch, The Best of Two Worlds

DATE: 12, 13, 14 September 1967

TIME: 120600H to 140130H

COORDINATES: YS073779

UNITS INVOLVED: Foxtrot 1, Alpha 1, MST-3, Navy Seawolves

TASK: Recon patrol and 4-hr. river ambush

METHOD OF INSERTION: Navy Seawolves

METHOD OF EXTRACTION: LCPL

TERRAIN: Mangrove, nipa palm, thick undergrowth

MOON: ¾

WEATHER: Clear with occasional clouds

SEAL TEAM PERSONNEL:

Lt. Meston, Patrol Leader/Rifleman, M-16

Lt. DeFloria, Ass’t PL/Rifleman, M-16

QM2 Bohannon, Automatic Weapons, M-60

RM2 Smith, Point/Rifleman, Shotgun

MM2 Funkhouser, AW, M-60

BT2 McCollum, Grenadier, M-79

HM2 Mahner, Corpsman/Rifleman, M-16

BM2 Williams, Radioman/Rifleman, M-16

ADJ3 Bucklew, Radioman/Rifleman, M-16

Ty, Ass’t Point/Rifleman, M-2 carbine

AZIMUTHS: 260 degrees-550m, 180 degrees-100m, 260 degrees-300m

ESCAPE: 225 degrees

CODE WORDS: Challenge and Reply-Two numbers total 10

The T-10 area of the Rung Sat Zone, located a few kilometers south of Saigon, was a dangerous place for good guys. It was an area where one hundred percent contact with the enemy occurred. There were big NVA units in the T-10, and we were going in. Ten men from Foxtrot and Alpha Platoons. It was like sending a mouse after a lion, but the lion was drowsy and unsuspecting while the mouse was sneaky and packing a bazooka.

At first light on September 12, 1967, five of us from first squad boarded a Seawolf slick. Five others from Alpha Platoon climbed aboard another Seawolf slick, and together the helos flew us toward our insertion point for my sixth mission as a SEAL in Vietnam.

It was a twenty-minute flight, just above the treetops at a hundred miles per hour to our drop-off, and as we