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

clothing in the brush, but they were too well camouflaged for me to know whether they were awake.

Funkhouser was sitting in the mud a few yards to my right, staring off into the jungle.

I decided it was time to eat. I took a can of C rats out of my backpack and opened it with the P-38 can opener. I looked at the spaghetti and meatballs and it looked ready to pounce at me. As was often the case, there was a lot of hardened grease forming an undesirable topping.

I stood the can in the mud where the sun could melt the grease, and I could dump it on an ant or two. Just another field-tested method of insect torture.

While I waited for the grease to liquefy, my thoughts turned to my favorite author, Robert Ruark. In his book, Horn of the Hunter, which I had read five times, Mr. Ruark told of lion hunts, leopard hunts, elephant hunts, rhino hunts, cape buffalo hunts, and every bloody kind of hunt one could conduct in bloody Africa. I’d hunted dangerous African big game animals only vicariously through Mr. Ruark’s books, so I wasn’t sure of the validity of what I thought. But what I thought was this: the most dangerous big game animal is man.

An animal had only one way to kill, which was its body ripping up yours. A man, however, had reason and technology, which lent him several options: he could kill you with his hands or blow you in half with guns or grenades when he was near, or he could kill you with booby traps or mortar rounds when he was miles away. Also, while an animal instinctively tore out your life and finished you as swiftly as possible, a man could elect to stretch your death out over hours or days.

Yes, I thought, man was the animal to fear the most. I wished Mr. Ruark had been alive to discuss hunting and life and death and jungle survival tips, but he was not. Mr. Ruark, and I did mean the Mister, had died two years earlier in London at the age of forty-nine. I wished he were there with me in Vietnam and we were hunting deer, tigers, elephants, and crocs. Everything except man.

Then back to reality. I was hunting man. Damn.

Thirty minutes later, I poured the grease out of the C rats can over a red ant as planned, then ate every bite of the spaghetti and meatballs as I watched the ant wade through the fat. I finished as the ant finally struggled out of the mess.

I also stepped on the C rats can and pushed it into the mud until it was gone. That was when I felt it. The wind had suddenly picked up. I looked above the brush and saw the sky was dark to the west. A foreboding stripe of lightning telegraphed the severity of the advancing storm. But it only made me smile. Come on, Vietnam! Rain like mad and wash away the one-hundred-degree heat!

I watched for several minutes as the thunderclouds marched my way, and I was reminded of the west Texas storms of my youth. I remembered the many times when everything had become totally quiet, the vacuum before the storm. I’d stand in my yard and stare apprehensively at the sky, waiting for the sixty- or seventy-mile-an-hour winds. Soon a great, ominous red cloud would appear in the distance, as the advancing element of Texas dirt had blown toward me. The first time I had seen this, I couldn’t have been more frightened if it had been an ax murderer bearing down on me. The second time, though, I had stood my ground, my heart pounding.

When the winds had finally lashed into my little body, the transient dirt had bit my eyes and reddened my teeth. Minutes later, with black clouds climbing all over me, rain had made its assault, then hail, bouncing off the ground all around me like ricocheting bullets.

One time when the hail seemingly had stopped, I had actually heard a hailstone falling out of the sky. I had looked up, and not seeing anything or knowing which way to run, I had stayed put and covered my head with my arms. A moment later, a chunk of hail the size of a hardball had slammed into the ground just five yards from me.

The thunderclouds were now directly above and unloading on me. I looked up and relished the wet on my face. For two hours, I was drenched with heavy rain, then the rain and the clouds were gone. Left behind was a wonderful, fresh, clean smell. The Rung Sat had been put through the rinse cycle and felt like a new place. I was refreshed. I was happy. I fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was hot again. I checked the time and saw it was 1755 hours. In thirty-five minutes it would be our turn on the riverbank. I had just enough time to eat something and cammo up again. I was sure the paint had streaked from all the rain I had permitted to wash over my face.

As planned, at 1830 hours Mr. Meston, Bucklew, Funkhouser, McCollum, and I relieved Mr. DeFloria’s squad on ambush. McCollum took the left flank and I positioned myself five meters to his right. As usual, we strung a line between us for communication purposes. In a couple hours it would be too dark to see each other; actually, I could barely see Muck then because of his camouflaged clothing and the brush between us.

Even though the air temperature was in the mid-nineties, I felt pretty good. I was sitting in the shade of a big bush, and looking at the smooth-flowing stream just a yard from my feet brought cool impressions to my mind.

After an hour, a large gray heron flew up and landed in a few inches of water about five feet to my left. I could have poked it with the barrel