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

K-bar knife, which I’d had in my hand, stuck the blade between my teeth and struck out after the sampan. I took a last look at the runaway boat before the flare extinguished and I was left in total darkness. Actually, I was in the worst of conditions, as my night vision had been wiped out and I saw only white spots before my eyes. In other words, I was swimming blind.

Continuing my strokes regardless, my nose picked up the strong odor of blood on the surface of the water. Obviously, that told me that somebody was bleeding. Because I was sucking on a very large and very sharp knife, I hoped it was not my own blood.

Taking the knife out of my mouth with my right hand, I immediately felt better. Too many movies had depicted some gallant hero paddling away with a dagger between his lips, but now I knew what a sham I’d been handed. Knives and lips and teeth were not made for one another, I could assure the world.

A few seconds later, I assured myself that the blood in the water was not mine. It was definitely someone else’s. At the moment of my relief, a second flare burst in the sky over my head, and there was light in my tiny world again.

I saw the sampan hung up by overhanging branches alongside the opposite riverbank. After swimming forty meters to the craft, I grabbed the bow and looked inside. There I saw the bullet-riddled body of a man dressed in the green uniform of the NVA.

I didn’t look twice. I freed the sampan from the low tree limbs and started back toward my teammates with the boat. The going was not impossible as the current was laggard. Still, I was swimming against the flow of the water, and that made it tough enough.

By the time I reached the riverbank, McCollum and Funkhouser pulled me and the sampan with the dead body ashore. I took off my fins and climbed to my feet as the light from a third flare died out.

“One confirmed kill and one probable,” Lieutenant Meston told me. “Get your gear and get ready for extraction.”

I couldn’t see spit again, but somehow I managed to find my backpack and web belt. Pearson walked with me back to the others and gave me some news that broke my heart.

“When we fired when you were in the water, I fired your shotgun. Only thing is, I accidently got mud jammed in the barrel somehow before I fired. The barrel’s blown apart.” Pearson handed me the shotgun. I slid my hand down the barrel and found the end expanded and split apart. The gun was ruined.

“Sorry,” Pearson muttered an apology.

Sweet Lips was only a gun, I told myself. There were other guns. Don’t get melancholy over a gun.

I heard the hum of the LCPL in the distance. It was a sound I’d been in love with ever since my first extraction. When I heard one of our boats coming, I was reminded of my mother’s humming me to sleep when I had been a little boy. It was a sound that said, “Have no fear. All is well.”

As I waited with the others for the boat, I touched Sweet Lips’s barrel again. For some reason, I reflected back a half dozen years to when Barbara, the love of my youth, had left me for a truck driver. I had told myself then that it hadn’t mattered, and that there were many girls. But Barbara had been one of a kind. When I lost her, I lost a piece of my heart. I’d never before had a gun like Sweet Lips. Yes, I’d need to choose another companion now, but nothing would replace my faithful, tried-and-true shotgun. Somehow, she had not been just a shotgun to me. She had been my nerve and my spirit, my link to the living. “I got his weapon, papers, and documents,” I heard Ty tell Mr. Meston, referring to the dead enemy lying in the sampan.

“Good,” Lieutenant Meston replied. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

The LCPL cruised up the stream toward us, and it was a sight for tired eyes. When the boat bumped against the riverbank, I climbed aboard with Sweet Lips for our last trip home together.

Two dead bodies were left behind for whoever or whatever found them first.

CHAPTER TEN

I left the mess hall after a hearty breakfast and walked to the base armory. I walked past a couple of armory personnel and went to our platoon’s cubbyhole where the weapons were stored in cabinets. Only the members of Foxtrot Platoon had access to this particular area. I’d stored Sweet Lips there after cleaning her every part, unusable though she was. The shotgun would be shipped back to the States eventually, and the receiver with the serial number would go to the Naval Weapons Center in Crane, Indiana.

Next to Sweet Lips rested my new weapon, an M-16/XM-148 combo that I’d used on the past three missions. This weapon consisted of a basic M-16 rifle with a grenade launcher installed below the barrel. The trigger for the XM-148 was easily adjusted to sit an inch forward of the M-16 trigger on the right hand side. Having been trained on the use of this versatile combination, which I liked, it was my first choice as a replacement for Sweet Lips. I favored the shotgun in the thick jungle for close range encounters, but the shotgun, I kept having to remind myself, was dead.

I’d fired about seventy 40mm HE rounds through the XM-148 into the Dong Tranh River for practice, and I shot very accurately with it up to two hundred meters. I intended to increase the distance of precision shooting to 350 meters.

“Whatcha doin’?”

I looked up from making a minor adjustment on the grenade launcher’s trigger and saw Funkhouser entering the room.

“I’m all done,” I answered, turning away from my teammate and propping my new weapon back up in