Combat Swimmer by Robert A. Gormly Page B

turned to me. Into my ear he whispered, “This about right?”
    I nodded. We’d gone over the procedure in our mission brief, and everyone knew what I had planned.
    I motioned toward the nipa palm above us, watching as each man turned and made his way up the bank. Our patrol order was also our ambush order. I crawled up behind.
    At the top we turned and sat, our backs against the thick foliage. As I hunkered into position, I thought this might be fairly comfortable. The relatively soft mud provided a good cushion, and the nipa palm served as a backrest. Sort of like sitting down in front of your TV in your favorite recliner, waiting for your favorite program to come on. My favorite program that night would involve about six sampans loaded with troops moving slowly into our kill zone.
    We traveled light, but with a lot of firepower. Now that we’d settled into position, I took a mental inventory. Bump, to my left, had his M-16 rifle, which launched about 900 5.56mm rounds per minute on full automatic fire. I carried an M-16. Doc McCarty, to my right, had an M-16 and the radio. Pierre, just to his right, had a Stoner Model 63 light machine gun that fired more than a thousand rounds of 5.56mm ammo per minute. He had a thousand rounds of ammo with him. Firing in short bursts, he was a killing machine. Doyle had an M-16 with a 40mm grenade launcher attached. The grenade launcher had a canister round chambered, making it a heavy-duty shotgun. Jess Tolison, on the right flank of the ambush, carried the same load as Doyle. Each man with an M-16 carried 230 rounds of ammo. Our “bullet launchers” could put out a lot of rounds in a few seconds, and that’s all it would take. Each of us also carried concussion and fragmentation grenades. Satch, in the river with our mini-battleship, could move to the mouth of the canal and make anyone giving us a hard time wish he hadn’t been there that night. The .50-caliber machine guns on the boat could cut a man in half with two rounds and would easily penetrate the nipa palm. The M-60 machine guns could clean up the rest. The recoilless rifles and naval mortars could lay down a dense cover fire that only a deranged person would attempt to move through. And if all that wasn’t enough, Satch would call for PBRs on patrol in the river to add their .50-caliber and 7.62mm M-60 machine guns to the fray. Satch could also scramble the Seawolf light helo fire team on call back in Binh Thuy and they’d come running with their 7.62mm miniguns and 3.2 rockets blazing. You get the idea. I wasn’t afraid to take on a battalion of VC with all that firepower on hand. We’d start it, and my friends would finish it.
    We’d reached the ambush site at 2130. I planned to stay there until just before first light, unless we got a hit first. Ambushing was like rolling dice: you picked a spot and hoped your numbers came up. As ambush sites went, we were in a fairly good one. The area was under VC control, and they moved along the canal system at night with impunity. The primary purpose of our routine ambushes, apart from killing as many of the enemy as we could, was to remove some of that “impunity.” We wanted not only to take the night away from the VC, but to make them afraid to move their men and supplies. We were few in number—only two SEAL platoons operating in the lower Mekong Delta, a vast area that covered a large part of South Vietnam. (The three SEAL platoons at Nha Be weren’t considered part of our force because they had to stay close to the shipping channels going to Saigon.) But already we thought we were making our presence felt. The word seemed to be getting out among the VC; it seemed that some canals upriver near Binh Thuy, where we’d been honing our skills, were no longer used as much as they had been. To get hits, we had to travel farther and farther away from Binh Thuy. Tonight we were about forty miles downriver from our