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

guffawed, pointing a teasing finger at McCollum. I laughed with Moses, and Muck finally broke a smile. He slowly unzipped his pants and dropped them to his knees. In true SEAL tradition, he was wearing no skivvies.

“Smell and look at this,” he smirked as he turned around and bent over, sticking his bare rear end at us. We just laughed harder.

I took Sweet Lips with me to my cubicle, where I intended to crash for a couple of hours before supper. As I crawled into bed beneath my mosquito net, I looked at my Rolex watch to check the time. The watch registered 1405 hours, which had passed at least an hour earlier. I tapped on the glass face with my right index finger, but the watch was dead. I shook it on my wrist to no avail.

Looking at Funkhouser, who was still sick in bed and lying on his back, I found him staring at me.

“What time is it, Funky?” I asked him. He raised his left arm in front of his face and gazed at his Rolex.

“Fifteen-fifteen hours,” he reported, then dropped his arm on his chest. “What’s up?”

“Got a briefing at nineteen hundred hours,” I told him, giving my watch another shake. The face stared back at me, showing no life. “Wake me up at seventeen hundred hours if you’re awake.”

I closed my eyes and relaxed my body. After only a minute, I got my mind slipped into neutral. I began drifting into another world.

“… funny your watch quit today,” printed out in my brain. For a few seconds, I didn’t know where this had come from. It was maybe part of a dream. “Of all days, it quits just after Kats dies. You think that’s an omen of some kind?”

Suddenly, I was awake and focused on Funkhouser’s voice. I opened one eye and rolled my head toward my roommate.

“No,” I flatly stated. Funkhouser just stared back at me.

I closed my eyes and turned away. I breathed deeply, let my muscles relax and looked for slumber. But it was too late. Sleep had run away without me. Funkhouser’s interruption had shifted my brain into reverse and I flashbacked to the day before. It was there I drowned until Funkhouser told me it was 1700 hours.

“How’d you sleep?” Funkhouser asked as I climbed out from under the mosquito net.

“Like a baby,” I lied, not wishing to discuss the things that had kept me awake. I slipped into my coral booties and asked Funky if he wanted me to bring something back for him from the mess hall.

“Yeah,” he muttered, “a nice breast.”

I ignored him and headed for the latrine. After doing my duty, I went to the mess hall and loaded up on steak and potatoes.

At 1900 hours, I gathered with McCollum, Moses, Markel, Flynn, and Brown in the briefing room above our barracks. Mr. Schrader came in and told us about a twenty-four-hour patrol and ambush scheduled for early in the morning. We were to board Mighty Moe at 0400 hours. Echo Platoon was going to insert about two thousand meters east of our insertion point on the Song Dinh Ba. Since the three VNs who were supposed to go with us had left for Saigon the previous day without checking out, there would be only the seven of us going on this mission. That was no big deal to me.

When the briefing ended, McCollum and I walked to the Quonset hut for a beer. I had only one, as I didn’t like to drink a lot on the night before an operation. There was a good chance of dehydration out there in the hot sun when a person’s veins were floating in alcohol.

McCollum swigged a couple of beers before sitting down at the piano. As he started clunking the keys, my attention centered on the human skull resting on top of the piano. It was the skull I had found in the jungle several weeks before and had “loaned” to the bar to spruce up the decor. Someone had secured a candle inside it, and now the flaming wick glowed eerily behind the eye sockets.

McCollum suddenly erupted into song:

“The ship goes sailing down the bay,

Good-bye, my lover, good-bye!

We may not meet for many a day,

Good-bye, my lover, good-bye!

My heart will evermore be true,

Tho’ now we sadly say adieu;

Oh, kisses sweet I leave with you,

Good-bye, my lover, good-bye!

The ship goes sailing down the bay,

Good-bye, my lover, good-bye!

’Tis sad to tear my heart away!

Good-bye, my lover, good-bye!”

The twenty men in the bar applauded politely as McCollum did his usual big ending. The moment the clapping quieted down, Muck sang the song again, this time substituting vulgar words in strategic locations. And this time when Muck finished singing, the applause was thunderous.

“Thank you!” McCollum shouted, waving a hand in the air. “Now here’s a song for the other woman in your life!”

After a fancy introduction across the ivories, McCollum started singing more soberly:

“ ‘M’ is for the million things she gave me,

‘O’ means only that she’s growing old,

‘T’ is for the tears were shed to save me,

‘H’ is for her heart of purest gold,

‘E’ is for her eyes, with lovelight shining,

‘R’ means right, and right she’ll always be,

Put them all together, they spell ‘Mother,’

A word that means the world to me.”

As McCollum sang the last word, the ovation was greater than ever. Everyone clapped and cheered for his dear old mom, including me. My mother’s weekly letter, usually with a few lines from Dad, was always an uplift, as was her occasional package of candy, magazines, and books.

McCollum’s song reminded me that I owed Mom and Dad a letter, so I left the Quonset hut for my cubicle. When I arrived there, I saw that Funkhouser was gone. I suspected he was at the mess hall, trying to eat his way back to health.

Taking a pad of paper and a pen from my