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

The letter was quite melancholic, as I wished I could be at home for Christmas.

At 1500 hours, I gathered with all of the SEALs on the base for religious rites for Frank Antone and the VN who had been killed. As the priest said what he gets paid to say at a funeral, I thought about Antone’s parents back in the States. I knew how proud they must have been when their son had become a SEAL, just the way my parents had been proud. I knew how they’d prayed every day for their son’s safety, just as my parents had prayed. I knew they were in for a terrible shock when they were told about their son’s death. And I wondered how their Christmas Day was going.

By way of contrast, I realized that my Christmas was going pretty well. Even though Santa Claus hadn’t made a personal appearance to deliver a gift to me, God had. He had dropped a helicopter down from the heavens in the Saint Nick of time and had given me life.

“Merry Christmas, you lucky bum,” I said to myself. And the priest up front said, “Amen.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Mission Twenty-eight

“Human blood is heavy; the man that has shed it cannot run away.”

African Proverb

DATE: 28, 29 December 1967

TIME: 281900H to 290500H

UNITS INVOLVED: PBR, Foxtrot 1

TASK: Overnight river ambush

METHOD OF INSERTION: PBR

METHOD OF EXTRACTION: PBR

TERRAIN: Nipa palm, partly defoliated

TIDE: 1900-8.5 feet, 0045-12.8 feet, 0800-2.6 feet

WEATHER: Clear

SEAL TEAM PERSONNEL:

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

RM2 Smith, Point/Rifleman, M-16/XM-148

MM2 Funkhouser, Automatic Weapons/Stoner

BT2 McCollum, Ordnance/Grenadier, M-79

HM2 Brown, Corpsman/Radioman/Rifleman, M-16

LDNN Ty, Rifleman, M-16

AZIMUTHS: 270 degrees-20m

ESCAPE: 090 degrees

CODE WORDS: Insert-Canada, Ambush Site-America, Extract-Mexico, Challenge and Reply—Two numbers total 10

Three days later, my squad inserted at dusk on a barren, exposed point on the Tac Ong Nghia. I didn’t like that at all, as spotting us under those conditions would be easy for the enemy if he was anywhere nearby. The VC could lob in an 82mm mortar HE round while we were setting up our ambush site and wipe us off the face of the earth. Surely, Mr. Meston and my teammates must have recognized the possibility, too. It made me angry that we were being so casual about insertion so close to the end of our tour. If anything, we should have been more clandestine than ever. I’d have thought Antone’s death would’ve strongly reinforced this.

There were only six of us on the mission: Mr. Meston, Funkhouser, McCollum, Brown, Ty, and me. I took the point and guided us a mere sixty meters to our predetermined position on the Tac Ong Nghia where the mouth of a stream entered the river. It was at this intersection of waterways that we would spend the night on ambush.

Mr. Meston had three men and himself spread out along the main riverbank, while Ty and I took places on the bank of the smaller stream. Altogether, we were stretched out over fifty meters with Ty and me on the right flank about fifty feet from Funkhouser. After giving Ty the end of my parachute suspension line for communication purposes, I moved fifteen feet to his right, stringing out the line as I went. Then I selected a little hump of dry ground for my seat and sat down.

Right away, I noticed how quiet it was. Not even the usual drone of mosquitos was evident, making for a beautiful end to the day. The sky added to my pleasure, projecting red and pink above the horizon where the sun had hidden its face.

After a minute, I abandoned my admiration for the heavens and turned my eyes upstream. I spotted three wild pigs crossing the water about seventy-five meters away. The stream was only twenty-five meters wide, and the pigs swam across quickly, climbed the opposite bank and disappeared in the brush. They reminded me of the children’s story, “The Three Little Pigs,” and I thought about how far I’d come since I had first heard the tale. I guess I’d turned into the Big Bad Wolf, there in the jungles of Vietnam.

Farther upstream I saw hundreds of birds, gathered in flocks, in trees along the bank. I took out my binoculars and glassed the creatures. They were large parakeets, and that was the first time I’d seen these birds in Vietnam. I assumed they were in migration. I decided to keep a close eye on them until it was too dark to see them any longer; if a human being came anywhere near those birds, whether on land or in a sampan, they would show alarm and erupt from their perches in the trees.

I continued glassing for about forty minutes as the sky gradually darkened, enjoying my bird-watching. I even located four large cranes in an old, dead tree about three hundred meters beyond the parakeets. None of the birds showed anything but placidity until it was too black to see them anymore.

During the next few hours, the stillness remained. The moon didn’t show itself, but many stars did. Since I wasn’t sitting in water, I found myself enjoying the serenity of the evening, although the drop in temperature was enough to chill me.

At 2300 hours, I thought I heard the sound of gunfire far away to my right. I gazed in that direction, fully aware that Foxtrot 2nd Squad was set up at the other end of the same little stream on which I was positioned, about three klicks away. I watched the skyline, and sure enough, I saw tracers arcing into the sky. Obviously, some of the fire team’s bullets were ricocheting upward. As the bullets rose, the red phosphorous in the core of each bullet burned. They looked like falling stars in reverse.

I admired the show for several minutes, reminding myself a few times that I was sitting on an ambush site myself and I couldn’t afford to fall into a hypnotic trance while observing the fireworks. I forced my eyes to survey my piece of the stream every few seconds, looking for any signs