Annapolis, page 75
And there he was: Bob Hope, also known as Oliver Parrish.
He was wearing olive drab skivvies, shower shoes, dog tags, and shades. And, of course, he had a golf glove on his left hand, a six iron in his right. Three buckets of golf balls were lined up beside him, and a small army of Vietnamese kids paddled in the river and ran along the bank, waiting for him to swing.
“Hey!” shouted Jimmy. “Is that Bob Hope?”
At the sight of Jimmy, Ollie loped over to the edge of the barge, swinging the club like a walking stick, the way Bob Hope did it when he came out to tell jokes to the troops. “Hey, Jimmy! I keep tryin’ to get these motherfuckers to call me Jack Nicklaus, but Bob Hope’s the best they’ll do.”
Ollie still wore his hair in that crew cut, but he had been in the sun so long that he was almost brown. He threw an arm around Jimmy and welcomed him aboard, then he shouted to the rest of the crew, “The beer cooler’s in Hut Four. There’s a pool table in Hut Three. But stay the fuck out of Hut One. That’s the Spook Bin. Bunch of CIA guys in there. Get yourselves hurt.”
Then he looked at the little Vietnamese kids and waved them away. They all waved back and shouted and shook their fists and cried, “Bob Hope! Bob Hope!”
“Tomorrow,” he shouted, then he repeated it in Vietnamese.
One of the Vietnamese kids gave him the finger, and two or three of the SEALs sitting around laughed like hell.
It was clear to Jimmy that no matter who the CO was on this island of rust, Lieutenant Oliver Parrish was in charge.
“I give the little dinks a penny for every twenty-five golf balls they bring back,” said Ollie. “You should see ’em fight over it. Free enterprise in action.”
“That’s one way of lookin’ at it.”
Ollie’s office in the Quonset hut was air conditioned, which was a true luxury. He played the host like a river baron. He told Jimmy to sit in the big rocking desk chair, asked him if he wanted the Rolling Stones instead of Cream, then put “Satisfaction” on the PA. Then he pulled two beers out of a refrigerator in the corner.
“Beer?” Jimmy grinned. “On a navy vessel?”
“This is a SEAL vessel, babe. The spooks in Hut One run the show. But they drink more than we do.” Ollie popped the tab on his can and toasted.
Jimmy toasted back. “It’s good to see you.”
“Wait until I’m done before you say that.”
“What’s this job you need me for?”
Ollie leaned back and put his feet up on the desk. “We do a lot of bad shit in this unit. Assassinations, kidnappings, throat cuttings. There aren’t many rules.”
“And?”
“I wouldn’t have asked for you on any of that shit. But this is different.” Ollie picked up a little sawed-off nine-iron that he kept on his desk. It had a full-sized head and a perfect grip, but the shaft was only half the length of an ordinary club.
“You have to bend a long way to swing that,” said Jimmy.
“I swing it at skulls.” Ollie grinned.
Jimmy was chilled, because the words came out as though they were part of a golf score. “Uh, the job, Ollie. What’s the job?”
“POW rescue, up near the Cambodian border. Gook stronghold back in there. You’ve got VC pouring across day and night. They have three full divisions and eleven main force battalions in the area. But the CIA spooks are saying there’s two navy fliers, about three kilometers in from a little stream called the Tien Doc. If we can get to them quick, we can save them from a stay in the Hanoi Hilton.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“What’s your point?”
Jimmy shrugged.
Ollie got up. “Stoppin’ sampans loaded with dead fish and AK47s can be dangerous, man. Shootin’ up the riverbanks can be dangerous. Cuttin’ the throats of VC tax collectors in their hooches can be dangerous, too. And none of it’s worth doin’. But this—this is what your father would call servin’ with honor.”
Jimmy didn’t like the way Ollie’s voice rose and fell, like he was fighting demons inside every sentence, and he must have hesitated to answer a little longer than Ollie wanted, because suddenly that broken nose and crew-cut beer breath were right in his face.
“What are you waitin’ for, Jim-babe? Isn’t this why you left destroyers? To look Charlie in the eye? To smell a little blood? Or did you just do it to get a promotion? Your dad might be worried about that. Your dad is always worried about how things look. He proved that back in ’64. An August night. I don’t know if you were awake, but I was. Mr. Captain Honor, makin’ sneak phone calls because he didn’t have the balls to say the truth out loud.”
That felt to Jimmy like a slap in the face. There were times he had convinced himself he had dreamed that whole thing. There were times when he believed it was his own little secret, his father’s one aberration in a life of loyal service. But now he remembered something Ollie had said at the wedding: “I thought we just wanted to get this war over with, no matter how any of us thought when it began.”
After a moment Jimmy’s calm quiet had an effect on Ollie, who stepped back and said softly, “Come with me and you’ll look the enemy in the eye tonight. Stay here and I’ll take your fuckin’ boats and go myself.”
Jimmy swallowed his shock and tried to sound professional. “Why PBRs?”
“PBFs are too big. You can hear them five miles away. Zippos are too slow. And STABs are too small.”
“Will we have air support?”
“The Sea Wolves are going up to a little clearing near Chau Doc. If we call ’em, they’ll be over us quick. But the main thing is, we need quiet. If Charlie can’t hear us, he won’t see us. We’ll be in and out before he knows it.”
And Jimmy offered his hand. “Here’s my deal: never tell anyone what you heard comin’ up through the closet that night on the Patuxent, and you’re on.”
Ollie grinned, like a crew-cut skull. “Let’s go kick some ass… honorably, of course.”
BY 1700, THEY were on their way.
There were four SEALs in each boat, including two Vietnamese who had been trained by the SEALs. The November afternoon sun, not much different from the July sun in these latitudes, was dipping toward the horizon. And Chief Petty Officer Horace Church was looking very unhappy, although Ollie said that meeting Simpson Church’s brother was one goddamn good omen.
Ollie rode with Jimmy in the lead boat, and for the first hour or so, the river was wide and brown and safe on both sides.
“I’m glad you came along,” said Ollie. He was now wearing camouflage pants with a black VC pajama top, a green bandanna, and sandals made from old rubber tires, like the ones the VC wore. In his ammo belt, which was filled with number four shotgun shells, he carried a navy K-bar knife and that lethal sawed-off golf club.
“You know why else I wanted you, Jimmy?”
“Why?”
“If a PBF takes a rocket, the shot explodes against the aluminum and sends shrapnel everywhere. But these PBRs, they’re fiberglass. It gives up easy, and a lot of times, a rocket just comes in one side and goes out the other.”
“I’ve seen it happen.”
“Sometimes the rocket doesn’t explode until it hits a gook on the other bank. Charlie kills Charlie. It’s almost Oriental.”
“What is?”
“Turning your weakness into a strength. Turning fiberglass into armor.”
IT WAS NEAR sunset when they approached a bend in the river and Lester Thurlow saw something in the water up ahead.
“What does it look like?” Jimmy asked.
“Shit, it looks like sea monsters.”
Half a dozen gray-and-brown masses were floating on the current, each with four legs sticking out and jaws open.
“Don’t slow down,” said Ollie. “It could be a trap.”
“What are they?”
“Dog carcasses.” Ollie picked up an M16 and fired at one, then at two more.
“What are you doin’?” demanded Jimmy.
“They could conceal mines. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
But none of the dogs’ bodies blew up, and Ollie said it was all right to proceed.
As they came around the bend, they saw the source of the dead dogs.
Two PBRs were stopped beside a fifty-foot junk which had been shot to pieces. One entire crew had boarded it while the other boat covered.
Jimmy stopped, and the CPO in command of the second boat told them what had happened.
The PBRs had tried to stop the junk, but it kept running upstream, refusing to stop even when they fired across the bow. Then the captain had come out with an ancient rifle, and that was when both PBRs opened up. They killed all three crewmen and riddled the hulk with fifty-cal fire, and all the while that the bullets were going through the hull, they could hear—strangest damn thing—they could hear dogs howling. When they approached, they found that the whole junk was loaded with mutts stolen from downstream.
“Why stolen?” asked Jimmy.
“Pets downstream. Lunch upstream. The dink thought we was comin’ to take the dogs back. Now the lieutenant’s so torn up about killin’ them all that he won’t believe there’s no VC contraband aboard. He’s takin’ her apart board by board.”
Jimmy glanced at the junk, which towered over the American vessels, an ancient and strangely graceful thing. “Does he need any—”
“He needs shit,” said Ollie. “Keep goin’.”
“I’m still in command here, Lieutenant.” Jimmy glared at Ollie.
Ollie brought his hands together in an Oriental gesture of appeasement. “So sorry. But we have a fuckin’ mission.”
And on they went.
A SHORT TIME later, over the thrumming of the engine, Ollie apologized. “I get a little jumpy when the mission approaches. I’ve been through some bad shit out here, Jim.”
Jimmy wrapped his hands around the wheel so that the comforting power of the boat vibrated into his hands. “Yeah,” said Jimmy. “Me too.”
The sky to the west was blood-red now. Night would drop like a curtain in ten or fifteen minutes.
“It was those damn floating dogs,” said Ollie. “Do you know what I saw in those floating dogs?”
“What?”
“Defeat… The people we’re supposed to help think we’re the bad guys. They run when we come after them. They float mines in animal carcasses, drop grenades in our boats. And we keep takin’ land, hearin’ the locals swear loyalty, and as soon as we leave, the land goes back to the VC.”
“It makes you want to go home.”
“It does.” Ollie looked hard at Jimmy. “But you won’t. And neither will I.”
And on they went, toward that blood-red sky.
AROUND 1900 HOURS, they turned off the main river and ran in under a deep canopy of mangroves.
It smelled like places in Florida where Jimmy and his father and brother had gone to fish for snook over the years. There was a kind of mulch-pile funk in the air, a smell of water and earth, of decay and rebirth, all happening around the giant roots of those ancient trees.
At midnight Ollie took out his map and studied it with a little penlight. He looked out at the way the river turned and said, “Here.”
Jimmy ran the boat over to the south bank, cut his engines, and zipped his flak jacket up to his chin.
Following the procedure, Horace Church pulled his boat in on the north bank, about forty meters behind Jimmy’s.
In the sudden and total silence that followed, the sounds of a mangrove swamp came to life—the cry of the night birds, the million different chirps and squeals and clicks of the insects, the rustling of the SEALs opening their packs and hunkering down in the cockpit to prepare themselves.
When Ollie stood, his face was entirely green. He wore a hypodermic syringe loaded with morphine on a chain around his neck and a sawed-off shotgun in a homemade holster on his left leg.
“It’s show time.” Then he popped two tablets into his mouth.
“What are those?” asked Jimmy.
“Dexedrine. Make you hear like a dog and see like a hawk. And the fuckin’ mosquitoes won’t bother you at all. You want a couple?”
“I just want to get the fuck out of here as fast as I can.”
Ollie snapped his fingers, and his Vietnamese SEAL squawked just like one of those night birds.
“If it’s all clear,” Ollie whispered to Jimmy, “you’ll hear that, three times, fast. Then we’ll be coming out in that clearing about forty meters ahead. You stay right here. We’ll come to you, and we’ll slip away like we were never here.”
“Right.” Jimmy swallowed hard and tried to sound confident.
“If you hear any kind of explosion, or more than three or four shots, call in the Sea Wolves and get your ass up there to that clearing with the lead boat. But don’t fire until you’re certain you’re not going to hit any friendlies.”
“How the fuck do I know who’s friendly?”
“We’re the ones with the green faces.” Ollie glanced at the phosphorescent numbers on his watch. “Let’s synchronize at 0000 right now. If you don’t hear any squawking birds by 0200, listen for gunfire. There’s a bottle of Skin-So-Soft in my bag. It keeps mosquitoes away like Raid.”
And without another word, the SEALs were gone.
THE NOISE OF the jungle grew louder.
And the smells of funk were mixed now with the smell of an American hand lotion that someone had found was the best mosquito repellent known to man.
By 0100 the hum of the insects was like a giant electric current, plugged in and running all around them. On the boat, nobody said much, and downstream, the covering boat had disappeared into the darkness.
Jimmy Stafford said the Lord’s Prayer to himself and thanked God for night.
At 0115, something splashed in the water nearby. Frankie Donatello whirled with his M16, and Jimmy screamed “No!” Then he whispered it, and Frankie settled back.
At 0132, Lester Thurlow, sitting in the open fifty-cal turret in the bow of the boat, farted.
From the stern, Jimmy said, “Maintain silence, sailor.”
The others chuckled just a little bit.
At 0149, Jimmy checked his watch and checked the other boat. He wondered what Horace Church was thinking of all this just about now.
At 0156, a rocket screamed out of the jungle on the south side, barely missed the T-top of Horace Church’s PBR, and exploded in the trees on the opposite bank.
“Oh, shit!” cried Lester Thurlow.
Jimmy grabbed the radio and called in the helicopters.
And the firefight erupted. Two more rockets streaked past Horace’s PBR, leaving their trails of light and smoke and exploding in the woods beyond. Horace pulled the boat out, and his men answered with a tremendous barrage of gunfire into the south bank, followed by the crump-crump-crump of a whole belt of grenades going off among the trees.
And that was the moment when Jimmy heard automatic weapons fire coming from the insertion point—that clearing some forty meters upstream.
Everything was blowing up at once, including the plan. Jimmy didn’t know what to do, but he knew he had to act. So he gunned his engine, sending the PBR out into the middle of the stream. But instead of going forward, he swung back downstream and ordered his men to pour fire into the trees on the south bank, in support of Horace.
At the same moment, the north bank erupted—another VC patrol, maybe connected with the ones on the south bank, maybe not—and they were firing at Jimmy’s boat.
Bullets were slamming off the T-top and sparking everywhere. A rocket went clean through the bow of Jimmy’s boat, right past Lester Thurlow’s ass.
And Frankie Donatello of the North End of Boston lost the back of his head when an AK47 round hit him in the face.
“Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus!” cried the farm boy named Johnson.
“Don’t panic!” screamed Jimmy, and he clamped his hands around the wheel, trying to keep his cool in the midst of the sudden chaos.
Blam! Blam! That was Ollie’s shotgun. The sound was unmistakable over all the other racket. The SEALs were coming out.
And Jimmy knew he had to get to them. That was the plan. Follow the plan. Always follow the plan. So he swung his boat again, back upstream, and gunned it right up to the clearing where he should have gone in the first place.
In an instant he counted two SEALs and one guy running in leg irons.
“Hold your fire!” cried the first SEAL to reach the boat. “You’ve got three more back in the woods.”
“I can’t hold for long.”
Now machine-gun fire was stitching holes in the side of the boat.
“Request permission to return fire,” cried Thurlow from the forward guns.
“Hold your fire.”
The POW got to the boat and they pulled him in. He didn’t say anything, just collapsed on the deck and began vomiting blood. Then the two SEALs clambered aboard.
Blam! That shotgun again. And Ollie was shouting from the trees, “Open fire! Open fire!”
At the same moment, a star shell burst over the river, bathing the scene in an eerie flickering glow as it rode a little parachute back toward earth.…
AND JACK STAFFORD stopped writing. He had been working all night. Now the sun was coming up, pure and simple, as if to illuminate that dark scene so long ago. He flipped on his little tape recorder and replayed Oliver Parrish’s description of the fight, which had been investigated, but never fully understood from that day to this.
“I was calling for covering fire because I knew that no one else was coming out of that jungle that I cared about. It was time to blanket the place with grenades and fifty-cals. But for some reason, Jimmy’s boat pulled away from the clearing with two SEALs and one POW, and he left the rest of us in there on some very hot ground.
“It could have been the flare that frightened him, or sitting there holding his fire while rockets were flying all around his head.…I know I should never have told him to hold his fire like that. But in all my ops, I never lost a man to friendly fire. It was a thing I had.
