Death in the Jungle (21 page)

“Did you find him?” he inquired, his voice hoarse from the flulike illness, which had kept him from the mission rehearsal.

“No,” I replied, “but we will.” I sat down on my footlocker to untie my boots. I started jerking impatiently at the laces, which didn’t seem to want to cooperate.

Funkhouser, observing my touchy behavior, was considerate and asked no questions, such as the natural “What happened?” He undoubtedly had been told the main details several times already.

After several more frustrating seconds, I pulled off my left boot and shoved it beneath the corner of my bed.

“You got any whiskey?” I asked impulsively, glancing at my roommate.

“Yeah. You want a shot?”

I nodded my head and bent down to untie my right boot.

“Open my locker and it’s right on top,” Funkhouser offered. “Pour yourself whatever you want, and give me a glass. I need something strong to kill this crud I’ve got.”

I got my boot off, slipped it under my bed and moved to Funky’s footlocker. I lifted the trunk lid, gathered the essentials, and in less than a minute, Funky and I were gulping Early Times whiskey. He was trying to cure the crud, and I was trying to sink the sharks. After several shots apiece, our conscious vexations ceased as we passed out in our beds.

The next thing I knew, someone was yelling, “Reveille!” just outside our cubicle. I rubbed my face awake
and opened my eyes, groggily aware that I’d been dreaming that Katsma was dead. A few seconds later, I realized it was not a dream at all; rather, it was a dreadful truth that had slimed over my brain’s control room. The cleanup process would take a while.

Looking at my Rolex watch, I saw that it was 0635 hours. I climbed out of the sack and got dressed for breakfast. Thinking about eating, I remembered Bolivar and fed him a half dozen beetles I’d imprisoned in a small glass jar. For a moment, I was tempted to reach under Funkhouser’s mosquito net and interrupt the sound sleeper’s snoring by shoving a beetle into his mouth. The thought was fleeting, however, and I left my sick roommate alone with his feverish visions.

At the mess hall, I ended up sitting at a table already occupied by Flynn, Brown, and Moses. All three greeted me, then returned to their conversation.

“Bucklew went back to CONUS,” Flynn said, referring to the continental United States, as he chewed some food.

“What for?” Moses asked.

Flynn smacked his lips. “A death in the family, I guess.”

“That’s goin’ ’round,” Brown commented.

I stabbed my fork into a link sausage and poked the whole thing into my mouth. Having eaten little the day before, I was famished.

Moses set his fork on his cleaned plate and picked up his coffee cup. Before drinking, he said, “It’s supposed to rain like hell today.”

“Great,” Flynn grumbled. “Another one of those days where you gotta jump in the river to dry off.”

Moses chuckled. “And we’ll prob’ly be out there gettin’ soaked to the bone.” He sipped from his coffee cup.

“What makes you think so?” asked Brown.

Moses swallowed, set down his cup, and replied, “It’s called ‘gettin’ right back in the saddle after you’ve been thrown.’ The officers aren’t gonna let us sit around and stew. They’re gonna put us back out there.”

Flynn nodded in agreement. “First Lieutenant Salisbury is gonna grill us.”

“He’ll go easy,” I interjected softly. “It was an accident, and nobody needs a browbeating over it.”

No one said anything for a few seconds. Flynn finally retorted. “We shall see.”

Two hours later I found myself in the briefing room with Flynn, Moses, Brown, McCollum, Markel, and Dicey from second squad. Lieutenants Meston and Schrader were also present as we listened to Lieutenant Salisbury’s pep talk. His words were encouraging and inspiring, giving all of us a sense of relief.

“However,” Mr. Salisbury said, and the tonal change in his voice alone was enough to cause instant apprehension, “there’s one more step you will all have to endure.”

I glanced at Mr. Meston, whose face looked pale.

“All Foxtrot, PBR, and MST personnel involved in yesterday’s exercise will speak individually with the XO at the officers’ club, beginning at 0900 hours. The XO will be handling the internal investigation.”

Flynn looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He had been right about the grilling; he just had had the wrong guy heating up the coals. Still, I thought an investigation would only show that Kats’s death was nobody’s fault. That was the truth of the matter, and the truth is the truth. No doubt, all of our stories would correlate, and this tragedy would be put to rest.

I was called in to the Lieutenant Commander’s office at 0950 hours, after Lieutenant Meston and the Boston Whaler crew. The XO, sitting at his desk, had me sit in a chair across from him. He said he wanted to know, in exact detail, how I had tied Kats in our rehearsal. I told
him, then took a couple of minutes to write the account on a piece of paper.

“Is tying personnel during exercises, while being transported over water, a frequent occurrence for UDT and SEAL teams?” the XO deliberately and pointedly asked me.

I sensed this question was possibly the biggest one of all, so I ran the answer through my mind for a few seconds before engaging my tongue.

“Yes, sir,” I replied steadily. “On the Colorado River, during the escape-and-evasion course, the UDT instructors tied me the same way I tied Katsma. This is routine, sir.”

The XO studied my face for a moment, then said, “Add that information to your written report.”

As I wrote, he told his yeoman via his intercom to send in five crewmen of the PBR. In less than a minute the office door opened and the five men entered. The lieutenant commander told them to stand behind my chair.

“Are you finished, Smith?” he asked me, sounding impatient.

“Yes, sir,” I answered as I wrote my last two words and punched a period at the end.

“All right,” the XO said, opening his top desk drawer and lifting out a roll of electrical tape. The tape was identical to that which I had used in the mission rehearsal.

“I want you to tie all five of these men’s hands in the precise manner you tied Katsma’s hands,” the XO instructed me as he reached the tape out to me across his desk.

I took the tape and stood up. Turning around, I glanced at the faces of the crew of the PBR, with whom I had searched for Kats’s body. Their faces were as red and sunburned as mine.

“I’ll be tying your hands behind your backs,” I informed them, then I walked around the first man, who happened to be the coxswain. He cooperated by moving his hands behind his back for me. Just as I had done Kats, I wrapped the tape three times around the coxswain’s wrists.

After taking a couple of minutes to tie the other four men’s hands, I looked at the executive officer and nodded my head.

“All right,” he said, sitting forward in his chair, “I want all of you to attempt to break loose, right now.” Simultaneously, the men strained and pulled, and in a matter of a few seconds, all five snapped the tape and displayed their freed hands. The XO stared for a moment, then sat back in his chair. I could almost see his mind going a hundred miles an hour.

“Thank you,” he finally said. “You’re all dismissed.”

I walked back to my barracks, glad that the quizzing was done.

At 1400 hours, Lieutenant (jg) Schrader gave Foxtrot Platoon a warning order. The warning order was a “heads up” that a mission was imminent. At 1900 hours, Mr. Schrader would brief us on a twenty-four-hour recon and river ambush.

I gathered my gear for the op, then checked out Sweet Lips from the armory. I hadn’t cleaned and oiled her as well as usual after the mission rehearsal, so I took her to the cleaning table outside my barracks. Using diesel fuel and a couple of firm bristle brushes, I gave the shotgun a real good scrub. When I finished, Sweet Lips looked pretty enough to kiss, which I did in front of two of my teammates.

“You must be awful horny,” McCollum said with a chuckle.

“I just wanna keep my lady happy,” I replied, wiping the stock once more with a cloth. “After all, she never
complains, does everything I want, and smells and looks better than you do.”

“I agree!” Moses 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 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:

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 footlocker, I kicked off my coral booties and crawled into my bed. I wrote an upbeat letter to my parents, choosing to mention Katsma’s death only in passing. I didn’t want to upset my parents and cause them to worry, so I wrote mostly of pleasant and humorous things, like Muck’s mooning me. McCollum, I was sure, would be happy to hear me say his moon-job was something I considered pleasant, but there in the Rung Sat Special Zone, it was, comparatively speaking. Compared to the sight of someone’s blown-out brains, a healthy, bare ass looked damn good.