FIRST KILL

The Rung Sat Special Zone did not seem particularly special to the Lieutenant, but he was brand new to war. He had arrived at Ton Son Nhut a week previously with well-wrinkled TWs, wide eyes, and an inquiring mind. Assigned as an advisor, after some haggling among MACV people managers, he was transferred from the Airborne Brigade to the 52d Ranger battalion due to a recent wipeout of the unit.  

Within a week after his arrival, the Ranger battalion had trucked to a small village on the Saigon River. There they had embarked on a rag tag fleet of small boats and had begun to wind their way through the mangroves, bamboo, and floating islands of roots and earth that obstructed every narrow channel and canal. This was his first combat operation.

The Rung Sat is a huge swamp area adjacent to the river throughout its course from the sea to the port of Saigon. It is akin to Okefenokee or the bayou swamps of Louisiana. On the small dots of reasonably stable earth, small villages exist subsisting on a sparse economy of fish and trade. The vast area is interlaced with small canals, rivulets, and streams. The land, such as it is, is composed of hundreds of small islands of dense vegetation and trees. It is these islands that were of military interest.

The extreme convolutions of the area, the virtually unmappable water courses, and the ambivalent, vulnerable nature of the population made it ideal guerilla country. Since ancient times, this area had been a refuge and sanctuary for whatever elements were out of favor with the power structure.

The VC, as did the long line of predecessors, had found the area ideal for their purposes. Using the knowledge of the locals, they recruited small craft operators to infiltrate weapons and people into the greater Saigon area, as well as, evacuate wounded or special personalities for consultations.  

They would occupy uninhabited small land masses for a limited time and then move on. The odds of being intercepted were very low. The Vietnamese Navy and some US brown water craft did routine patrols along the greater water courses, but these were studiously avoided by the VC. They chose to move primarily at night in the smaller sampans that could navigate inconspicuously along the more tortured and unknowable connective tissue of crooked streams and small canals. This was where the Rangers were to go.  

On rare occasions, the military decided that the usually unreachable areas had to be reached. A small flotilla of shallow draft barges, sampans, and fishing craft would be assembled. Either Marines or Rangers would then load into them and spread across the Rung Sat for several days hoping to catch the VC in their own neighborhoods.  This was the first time the 52d had worked this area and the first combat mission the Lieutenant would experience.

He loaded on a small fishing craft with his counterpart and moved to the prow, sitting on a pile of fishing nets. The Lieutenant noted that the bow had an evil eye on each side of it which had been freshly painted, indicating the crew knew it might need additional spiritual protection.

Offloading the truck, he had immediately experienced a variety of overwhelming sensory assaults. The air itself was like a velvet cape of heat and humidity. It draped itself over one like a most palpable glue-settling over every nook and cranny of the body and the mind. There was an overwhelming mix of odors that challenged the most discriminating nose. There was rot, vegetation, sulphur, water, and earth all heated in the gigantic Petri dish that defined the Rung Sat.

Interspersed were zephyrs of cooler sea salt tendrils that like sherbet to the nose, momentarily cleansed the senses. These would quickly pass, and the Lieutenant would be immediately buried in a miasma of the smells of the Rung Sat once again. There were very few sounds other than the slow chugging of the craft and the rhythmic lapping of the chocolate waters against the hull.  

The troops were uniformly quiet, absorbing the experience. They were mostly animists and preternaturally concerned about the spirits of the place. Though more open in mind and agnostic, the Lieutenant, too, was overwhelmed into silence.

There was very little visual stimulation—certainly not enough to dominate the smell and heat. The canal was enclosed on both sides by mangroves, bamboo, and other course vegetation. Passersby had chopped and hacked to keep the watercourse open, but it was clearly a Sisyphean task. In some areas, the boat simply ploughed through the entangling undergrowth until clear.

There were occasional glimpses of sky and distant places, usually marked by small tendrils of blue white smoke stroking to the pale sky. The torpid air was insufficiently active to move them from their near vertical columns. The location of the sun was largely indicated by a brighter degree of misty air at some point on the horizon. Discernment was an impossibility. The Lieutenant held a compass in his hand as a weak anchor for his cognition.  

Thousands of years ago, the Lieutenant’s antecedents learned to survive and passed their genetic factors forward to this place in time. They had dealt with animals large and small, trapped, free, vicious, and relatively tame. They were superb hunters and had a primordial sensitivity that underwrote the success of the hunt. These instincts while passed on over hundreds of generations, remained subordinated to others as their presence became less and less critical. Until this day.

The encounter was very sudden as are most combat initiations. It was mid-day in the course of the operation, and an anesthetic-like quality hung on everyone to that point. The craft went slowly forward, but the passengers retreated into a near zombie state in the ubiquitous blanket of heavy, torpid, fetid, and unmoving air. 

The distant lands were occasionally visible through the tendrils of convection currents that coursed from the canal and the passing jungle floor in whatever small patch of light shown through the canopy. The slightest movement brought dots of sweat to exposed skin. Breathing was an effort. With some period of exposure to the environment, the senses became blanketed and the brain dulled. The water, ground, and vegetation ahead blended into a broad and undistinguished green and yellowish canvas. 

The boat, without warning, nosed onto a piece of land, the prow cutting several feet into the low grey-brown mud bank until it abruptly stopped. Immediately, the Rangers, suddenly awakened, dropped over the side and began to aggressively move into the vegetation that surrounded the bow. Following his counterpart, the Lieutenant dropped off into a foot of slick yielding mud and followed the main body into the obscurity of the land.

He walked slowly—eyes fixed on the Ranger to his front. Some of the primordial skill sets began to emerge though still sublimated to the conscious. At this point, he had no idea what to expect or how to react. 

Ahead, a Ranger stopped and held his hand up, ivory colored in the dappled light. The Lieutenant quietly moved his rifle from his hip to his shoulder and looked intently over the front sight—seeing nothing but having the growing primordial sensing that emerges with this existence, instinctively knowing that a danger was just ahead, but still out of comprehension. To his rear, the rest of the column stopped, focused forward, and waited with a practiced level of detachment for resolution.

The lead Ranger took half a step forward and halted. Immediately several shots rang out—shots that clipped leaves, thudded into tree trunks, and softly but clearly impacted into flesh dropping a Ranger to the Lieutenant’s immediate front. Birds screamed and flew in all directions. Leaves fell and the harsh sudden cracks echoed from the tree trunks in all directions as to come from no discernible direction.

Suddenly, all the Lieutenant’s core survival instincts were awakened. Man had replaced the Mammoth. Without seeing a target, the Lieutenant brought his rifle up and began shooting toward the lower throaty sound of the AKs. This was an instinctive reaction and his first mortal engagement. His more experienced companions simultaneously did the same, and the jungle erupted into screaming birds, yelling people, falling leaves, and limbs combined with the dull thuds and musty grey black smoke of exchanged grenades. 

The noise was so intense that there was no single noise but a coalesced mass that shrouded the senses and created a supreme isolation for each participant who continued to reactively contribute to the effect. This went on for what was probably less than 10 seconds when the Lieutenant bounded forward to the point to get some sense of the enemy presence.  He passed the wounded Ranger at a low quick trot and quickly gained the point stopping at the lead and cuing on his direction of fire.

As quickly as the incoming fire started, it stopped. The jungle ahead resonated with the echoing sound of retreating movement in the leaves, the screeching of birds, and the distancing echo of the last shots. There had probably been less than 20 yards between the adversaries. Out of the corner of his eye, the Lieutenant saw movement to his right front where the ground gave rise to a small sunlit bare knoll—more a rise in the ground than a real feature. 

 He saw the momentary flash of glinting black hair melding into a light green shirt collar. Reacting with a deer hunter or skeet shooter’s skills, the Lieutenant, almost as an uncontrollable impulse, raised the rifle butt to his armpit and fired an unconsciously aimed single shot with animal-like hand and eye coordination.  

His only momentarily registered image was that of a spread of wind blown coal black hair as the VC disappeared on the other side of the terrain. Quickly, other Rangers began to move forward, firing as they went. Overtaking the Lieutenant’s position, they all gained the slight high ground to his front, spread out, dropped to the ground and began to search forward with their eyes. Less than 20 feet from the Lieutenant appeared an anomaly at the base of the knoll. Nothing could be discerned from his position except some light green of irregular shape against the brown jungle floor in the discrete shaft of light the jungle permitted entrance.  

The Lieutenant pointed toward the area. Several Rangers fired on its flanks. With no return fire, the Lieutenant and two of his companions crouched and slid down the hill on the soft wet red laterite clay. A Ranger reached in and grabbed the green. It was a shirt collar worn by the Lieutenant’s snap shot victim. He pulled the shirt and its contents up the hill to where it lay, bathed in the soft dappled light that escaped through the canopy.  

The features of the face were spread in an exaggerated moon shape with no real definition between the cheeks and the nose. The bullet had penetrated the base of the skull, tumbled on the top vertebrae and exited sideways just under the nose in a wide tearing moustache gash. The dirt-rimmed eyes were wide open with a mixture of yellow fluid and dust exuding from the corners of the eyes and ear holes. Already, ants were crawling across the eyes beginning the process of decay and consumption. A small fly sat on the right iris and began to probe the cornea.

The Lieutenant stopped and stared intently at the face and the eyes. He had a mixture of curiosity and morbid detachment. He had never seen a dead enemy let alone one he had killed. He felt nothing emotionally other than a detached professional interest. This was his first kill. The genes had been helpful.