Anyway, I’d heard enough about the River Rats to know that I didn’t want no part of it. The chief inferred that those that didn’t volunteer might end up with the Rats anyway. Then he gave us the pitch about the SEAL Teams. As usual, I didn’t pay too much attention. All I heard him say was “frogman.” Frogman? I thought. I got this dicked in a hard way. What could a frogman possibly do in a jungle war? I’d get out of it that way. Shows you what a naïve dipfuck I was. SEAL training lasted about a year, which was exactly what I wanted. You see, they were saying on TV and on the radio that the war would be over in a year. I had her made.
So, I volunteered.
And when I did, the chief looked at me like I had a hammer hanging out of my ass.
“You sure, Davis?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” I called out like some gung ho dumbass.
“You stupid prick, you deserve it,” was all he would say.
So, after a series of tests and what not, I made the cut. And for the next year they beat my ass bloody. Only ten percent of our class made it through. Frogman? Sure, that was part of it. The basis of everything we were, but only the basis—I was jumping out of airplanes, learning to live off the land, sniping, demolitions, counterinsurgency, reconnaissance, guerrilla warfare. Shit, I learned how to handle all kinds of weapons, how to kill people with knives and crossbows, with poisons, booby traps, even my bare hands. I learned how to speak some French and Vietnamese. They brainwashed the hell out of you, too. By the end of that year you were a gung ho, life-taking motherfucker who just wanted to kill for his country and got physically sick at the thought of communism. Kick ass and take names.
Beginning of ’70, they mobilized us and sent us to Southeast Asia. No point in going into my first tour. I did what you think guys like us do—I killed the enemy in number. I personally greased seventy that I knew about within the first four months. After that, I gave up counting. I re-upped for a second tour and this time I was attached to a team of second-and third tour vets who were handling special operations and intelligence missions for the spooks, part of the Phoenix program.
In July ’72, Naval Intelligence sent us on a search and destroy mission in the Mekong Delta. The Delta was our main area of operations, our AO. At least that’s what the buzz was. Truth being, we went everywhere and anywhere—North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, even China itself. This time, though, it was the Delta, just like our orders read. We were heading northeast, deep into the Rung Sat. The area had been heavily infiltrated by Uncle Ho’s pukes and was serious Indian Country. The Rung Sat, or “Forest of Assassins” as it was also known, was a traditional hideout for Asian bandits and smugglers and it was also home to communist insurgents. Some four-hundred square miles of mangrove swamp and thick rain forest.
Lieutenant-commander Barber was our C.O. He was an okay guy as long as you did what he told you, which you always did because after three tours, he knew exactly how to keep you alive in the boonies.
I liked Barber. He was professional and honest and had no problems tipping beers with us swabbies in Saigon or Da Nang. Our former C.O., an Annapolis squirt name of Wentz, got greased up north after we parachuted in one night to abduct an NVA colonel. We got our subject, but we left that uppity fuck behind. Wasn’t much left to him after he tripped that Russian mine, anyway.
We were to be inserted by riverboat. As we sped down river to the insertion point, everyone was quiet. Even the riverboat swabbies, the River Rats, were silent. And that was strange: they were always talking about being fucked—by each other, by the slopes, by their whores, the climate, the Navy, you name it. It made me feel uneasy. This whole thing did and I wasn’t sure why.
I was checking over my gear and the other SEALs were doing the same. I looked over at Roshland, the only guy I outranked. He was carrying his ruck, Starlight scope, and the usual shit like the rest of us. But he also had the M-60 machine gun, the kind we used with the barrels sawed-off real short. He was a big black mother, his body crisscrossed with bandoleers of ammo. Roshland was okay. He was a drummer back in the world. Claimed his band had opened for Jimi once. He was probably the only guy on the team I would have associated with outside the SEALs. The rest of ’em—maybe myself included—were all fucked-up and not in a good way. They were scary. Maybe it was just that I knew how good they were at killing people. Maybe I’d seen them peel the skin off one too many Viets with their diving knives and grin while they did it, keeping the screaming little pricks alive for hours.
So, there I was on the riverboat, the PBR, smoking and worrying, propped up against several stacked cases of C-rats, the mechanical cacophony of the twin diesels thrumming through my bones. Within an hour or so, the boat slowed to a stop before a small clearing. We slipped into the water, silent as hunting crocs, and made our way to the bank, running through waist-deep elephant grass towards the jungle.
The PBR didn’t hang around long: soon as we deployed, it swung around back up river.
And we were alone.
After we’d entered the fringe of the jungle and secured perimeter, Barber called us together.
“Okay, listen up,” he whispered. “About five clicks east there’s a suspected supply route for Charlie. We’ll just check it out, maintain surveillance and ambush any small groups we come across. Anything larger, forget it. Intel just wants numbers, weapons, organization, the usual.”
It wasn’t unusual for us to get our briefing in the jungle. Lot of the shit we did was so highly-classified we were rarely told in advance… unless it was a special op like an abduction or an assassination or something tricky like that. Then they told you beforehand and put you in quarantine until you deployed. Security.
“That’s just our first stop,” Barber said. “After that comes the vil. In the morning.”
The village.
As far as intel knew it wasn’t much more than a little hamlet. So tiny and remote it didn’t even have a name, just a couple map coordinates. It was our ultimate destination, the reason for this little trip. We were to hit it with extreme prejudice, meaning we were to kill every living thing we came across—men, women, and, yes, children, too.
Idea of that leaves you cold?
It shouldn’t. We exterminated plenty of villages in ’Nam. That’s what the Phoenix program was. Fucking government will never admit to it, of course, but then they still won’t tell the truth about Roswell and who greased JFK. Anyway, Phoenix was in full force and lots of villages were being erased because of communist ties.You probably heard of My Lai, but that was only one instance. You see all that shit on TV about the Nazis exterminating villages in Poland and Russia and that, but we did the same thing. See, Mao Tse Tung said that the guerrilla is the fish that swims in the sea of the population. Something like that. So how do you catch that fish? You net the whole lot, that’s how. If the population shields those cowardly bastards, then they go, too. Don’t get pissed off at me, it wasn’t my idea to do these things. It was your government’s, good old Uncle Sham. But having troops go in and waste some shit-nothing hamlet was messy. Too many guys traumatized, too many witnesses who might spill the beans. So the strategists in Washington got some better ideas. And you’re gonna hear all about that in a minute.