The Crossland ShootoutA Novel by JOHN MYERS
Chapter 2
The Auto AK Search Leads Down the Vietnam War Trail,
or, Nam War Stories of Nick Rowe and Ronnie Bruton
A Novel by JOHN MYERS
Chapter 2
The Auto AK Search Leads Down the Vietnam War Trail,
or, Nam War Stories of Nick Rowe and Ronnie Bruton
Saturday morning came early, as it always does, and as I always do, I was up early to see it start. And along with enjoying a brand new day while it's still bright and clean and all the lay-abeds haven't breathed on it yet, I always start my days with the fruits of the late-night efforts of poor souls like Frank at The Star. Morning papers are a joy to read — at least they are to me, and when they cease being so, I suppose that will be time to get out of the newspaper business. But I know how much work they are to create from my years of experience of working the A.M. shift from 3 p.m. to midnight. And that makes reading them even more enjoyable.
And the greatest joy of reading that morning paper is when I've got a good story in it. Writing stories is fun, and so is taking pictures. But seeing it all put together and packaged properly is what the newspaper business is all about. The day I don't get a charge out of seeing one of my stories in print, particularly plastered all over the front page, will be the day I quit.
While eating breakfast, I read my hostage/shootout story in Saturday morning's Star—spread all over page one just like Frank promised— and my thoughts returned to that full automatic AK-47 which was sneering menacingly in living color in newsprint.
Back in my Navy days, automatic weapons were a dime a dozen.
But Richland County ain't Vietnam, at least it's not supposed to be, even though many U.S. cities are swiftly becoming war zones.
This is still rural North Carolina we're talking about, not the big cities, and you don't just pick up an auto AK from your friendly dope and guns dealer down at every corner of any town.
And thank God it's still news here when an auto AK shows up.
But as I finished breakfast and settled back to read the rest of the papers with my second cup of coffee, I began to think a bit more realistically and reformulated this auto AK story idea.
The story I can do, I told myself, is not where this particular AK came from, which would be an impossible hunt I don't have the time, money or the inclination to dig deep enough to find.
That's something the cops will be working on, with help from the SBI and the feds, since full autos break a federal statute.
The odds of my beating all those guys to that story are small, and besides, when they get the story, I'll get it, too, from Eddie.
The story I can do right now is more general, like what one has to do to purchase a fully automatic weapon, a weapon of "mass destruction," to use the legal description in state law.
Maybe there's a story in just how hard, or maybe how easy it is for me, or a crook, to go buy an illegal full auto AK-47.
With that in mind, I hunted up the telephone number for the best source I could think of offhand on where and how to get an automatic weapon, legal or otherwise, a genuine military expert.
Retired U.S. Army Master Sergeant Robert Allenby lives in the next county, and I called him, figuring he'd be at home this early.
He was, so I set up a meeting with him after lunch that day.
Bob Allenby is a guy I met on a feature story several years ago in connection with the SERE Army school down at Camp Mackall.
SERE is an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape and Bob was the inhouse expert on survival for a lot of years down at Fort Bragg at the U.S. Army Special Forces Center, guys known for their jaunty little floppy green caps with no bill, those Green Berets.
And he helped one of the Army's true heroes, Special Forces Col. James "Nick" Rowe, set up the SERE school to teach those four skills to all four branches of servicemen who are likely to be captured in war. Col. Rowe set up the school to teach skills based on lessons he learned in the Vietnam War.
The SERE school takes guys out into the deep woods around Camp Mackall and teach them how to survive, evade, resist and escape as if they were in enemy territory with nothing but their bare wits, no equipment, no weapons, no nothing but the uniforms on their backs. And before it's over, they lose even that.
Primarily Bob's job was teaching them how to live off the natural plants and other things Mother Nature provided there, because the students get no food provided during the school. It's quite literally a "root hog or die" type of training. They also learn how to find shelter when you have no tent, how to keep from freezing to death in winter—in short, survival in the wild.
And surviving by eating whatever is available, from weeds and seeds to snakes and roadkill, is what Bob specializes in. He earned the title "Roadkill King" for picking up animals who had not survived close encounters with vehicles and taking them to his survival classes where his students learned to clean, cook and eat such delicacies as 'possum, 'coon, poisonous snakes and other critters that your mama never served at home for Sunday dinner.
The rest of the course, the evading, resisting and escaping part, is taught convincingly by "aggressors" like Nick Rowe and others who went through the real hell to learn how to survive that in Vietnam. They put the SERE students through a pretty convincing version of that experience to get them ready for the real thing in war zones.
I watched some of it when I did the feature story on Nick Rowe, and that was one time that I did not volunteer to participate in the action. Just watching was rough enough for me as they beat the bushes for the students, then after capturing them all, put them through the simulated hell of a mockup prisoner-of-war camp. It's not real war, but it's very close.
The guys who complete the SERE course—and a fairly high percentage flunk out by quitting along the way—look like they've been to hell and back by the end. Then they're at least somewhat ready to go to face the nearest thing to hell they'll see in this life, real wars that are always going on somewhere.
Nick Rowe learned how to survive, evade, resist and escape the hard way, by surviving five years of captivity in Vietnam, becoming the first American prisoner of war to successfully escape in that long war. He later wrote a book about it, "Five Years to Freedom."
I met the colonel when I did that SERE feature story, and in the interview I did with him he recalled the crucial moment when he was at the end of his rope, beaten and bloody from repeated torture and starvation, about to give in to whatever his captors demanded just to get a little relief, or maybe just to give up and die.
In that moment, the young Green Beret said he recalled just the first five words of the 23rd Psalm, which he had learned as a boy in Sunday School back in Texas. "The Lord is my shepherd."
That was all he could recall in his search for spiritual strength at that defining moment of his life, but he said he held onto that, repeating it over and over until one word stood out.
My. When I saw that word in my mind's eye, I grabbed on to it. I made the Lord my personal shepherd right then and there, and from that point on, I found the strength to keep on resisting."
And he resisted finally to the point of his successful escape.
His resistance had finally marked him for death, when the Viet Cong who had been holding him prisoner for five years finally decided they couldn't break Nick Rowe and were transporting him under guard to a North Vietnamese prison for his execution.
Then the Good Shepherd who gave Nick Rowe strength to survive intervened. The Viet Cong patrol stumbled into a helicopter sweep by U.S. forces and Nick Rowe evaded his captors and escaped.
And for that escape, Nick Rowe knew he was a marked man. The death sentence passed on him by the North Vietnamese kept him from going back to Vietnam, so he spent the rest of that war in the U.S.
I saw the colonel again just before he took an overseas assignment to the Philippines, back when we still had a big military base there. It was closed in recent cutback times.
He had advanced to one rank shy of a general's star and told me he knew he had to take another overseas assignment if he ever expected to make general.
In what I later realized was a prophetic moment, he told me one of his buddies asked him if he was going back over there where the communist guerrillas were still fighting to do some research for another book. He said he replied, "I hope not."
But that's the way it turned out, except Nick Rowe didn't get to write about this research. The communist guerrillas in the Philippines carried out the death contract the North Vietnamese put on Nick Rowe's head for escaping. He was assassinated with his driver one morning on his way to work in Manila in an ambush by the guerrillas.
Nick's friend and SERE cohort, M/Sgt. Bob Allenby, survived the Army and is in retirement now, out in the woods he knows and loves, a few miles away from Camp Mackall.
I dropped in on him after lunch Saturday. If I was smart I would have wangled a lunch invitation. Bob's cuisine is very tasty, if it is a little odd. In fact it's downright strange. He practices at home what he preached in survival classes, with most or all of his meat coming from roadkill animals such as 'possums, snakes, 'coons and other less familiar critters, and his vegetables are not found in supermarkets, but growing wild out in the woods around his home.
You could drop Bob down in the middle of the Sahara desert and he'd get fat on camel meat and sidewinder snake stew, with cactus milkshake for dessert. Drop him off in the Arctic and he'd dine on seals, fish and polar bears, and probably find some relatives among the Eskimos, as he's part Cherokee Indian.
He told me one time the only thing he'd ever tried that he couldn't figure out how to cook, eat and enjoy was a seagull. His Army unit was on maneuvers down at the coast when a seagull flew into a lighthouse and broke its fool neck. As the roadkill king, Bob never could let anything go to waste,. so he decided to try his hand at roasted seagull. But he said no matter how he cooked that seagull, he couldn't get rid of that oily, fishy taste that stayed in his mouth for about three days after.
But I suppose God made plenty of other critters to live on if we eliminate seagulls from the cuisine. Anyway, I missed whatever weeds, seeds, and whatnot Bob had fixed that day with his roadkill.
As he welcomed me into his home, I shot a quick glance around his kitchen. No roadkill stew leftovers in sight. Not even a lamb's quarter salad (that's one of Bob's favorite weed greens, not meat).
Oh well, I already had lunch anyway. Maybe next time. And I knew there would be a next time, because I've enjoyed Bob's cuisine as well as his hospitality several times before and would again.
His cooking may sound a bit odd, but it's always good eating.
Appearances can be deceiving, in cuisine and in people, and that is certainly true in Bob's case. His 6-foot frame carries about 230 lbs. easily, and his big hulking shoulders and arms, coupled with his dark hair and complexion, heavy eyebrows and mustache remind one somewhat of a grizzly bear.
But if he was a bear, his name should be Gentle Ben, because he's about as easy-going of a fellow as anybody I've ever known.
He's not the kind of guy anyone in their right mind would pick a fight with. But once you get to know him, you learn that Bob is a perfect Southern gentleman, proud of his Indian heritage and as quiet and noble as the savages of Western fame. I've never heard him raise his deep rumble of a voice, but then he doesn't have to.
His grandfather was a Cherokee medicine man, who taught Bob the many secrets of the forest in the western North Carolina mountains, where Bob was born.
Bob's Cherokee mother married a white trucker to provide the Allenby name. With his father on the road earning a living most of the time, Bob was raised by his Indian grandfather.
Like me, Bob began his military career in the Navy in Vietnam. But unlike me, who enjoyed the relative luxury of hot showers, hot food and a clean bed at night on a 400-foot destroyer during my Vietnam cruise, Bob served with the brown-water Navy in Vietnam.
Those guys rode those little gunboats up and down the narrow rivers where death was always within AK-47 range, lurking behind every bush, around every bend in those twisting, turning, sunburning brown-water rivers. If the AK-47s, .30 and .50 cal. machine guns, grenades, mortars and 40 mm rockets didn't get you, the snakes, leeches and diseases would.
Theirs was a very nasty war.
I had an old classmate who joined the Navy a year or two before I did and fought that part of the war, Ronnie Bruton from Crossland. He was a little banty rooster of a guy who wasn't afraid of the devil himself. The first time I saw Ronnie was the first day of school in the first grade. The teacher asked if any of us kids knew the alphabet. Ronnie's hand was the only one raised.
This was way back in the dark ages before kindergarten or Sesame Street, and none of us first-graders even knew what the alphabet was, much less could recite it.
The teacher took mercy on Ronnie and didn't call on him to show off his supposed knowledge. But that's the way he was, right from the start, the kid who didn't care if he stood out, who would step forward to try anything, and don't dare call him a chicken, unless you were ready to duck.
We were always pretty much opposites, Ronnie and I, but we became friends almost by default. Barton and Bruton were always lined up together or seated together in the alphabetic arrangements at school. He was short, brassy and bold, I was tall, skinny and painfully shy. But we became a Mutt and Jeff pair, often palling around together from the first grade through high school. Then I went off to military school to finish high school and then on to college and meanwhile Ronnie joined the Navy.
I majored in partying in college, then dropped out after a couple of years, one step ahead of flunking out, and joined the Navy, too.
Just before I went over to Vietnam on that destroyer I served on in the winter of 1968-69, I saw Ronnie's older brother, Hale, back home. He told me Ronnie was already over in Vietnam, serving in the U.S. Riverine Force on the brown water of Vietnam's rivers.
Hale said Ronnie had just over a year left in his four-year enlistment and was serving as an engine maintenance technician on a supply ship in San Diego, Cal., when he volunteered for Vietnam.
"I asked him why he volunteered when he could have sat out the war in San Diego," Hale said, "and he told me, 'Hell, I can't do nothing for my country over here. The war's going on over there.'"
So Ronnie volunteered for the brown-water Navy because that's the only way you got in it, and he was assigned to one of those little death boats—death to the Viet Cong but also death to the sailors on board them. The brown-water Navy suffered about 70 percent casualties, the highest percentage among U.S. troops in that war.
Quite frankly, I joined the Navy because I figured with a war on, if I had to go, I'd rather do it in a ship offshore than wear a green uniform and fight in the jungle with the "grunts," the soldiers who did all the real fighting of that war, at least on the semi-dry land part. I never even considered volunteering for the brown-water Navy. At the military academy where I finished high school, and I learned one of the most important rules for military service: Never volunteer for anything.
That wisdom was reinforced in Navy boot camp when our drill instructor asked for volunteer "truck drivers." The fools who put up their hands got the privilege of driving wheel barrows full of rocks and dirt in that hot sun, while everybody else in our company got the rest of the day off. Don't volunteer for nothing.
The only time I ever saw the brown-water Navy in Vietnam was when their small boats would occasionally ferry a few Marines out to our destroyer, the USS Mullinix, DD-944, for a few days of rest and recuperation.
It was hard to feel sorry for yourself as a sailor fighting our kind of clean war in Vietnam when you saw these Marines come on board with a month or two's worth of grunge saturated into their filthy fatigues, sure they were in heaven for a while just to get a hot shower, hot food, clean fatigues and a clean bed to sleep in on an air-conditioned ship.
I sweated a bit in the hot sun during my tour on the gunline in Vietnam, but that -- and boredom, waiting for the next gunfire mission or the next liberty call -- was my chief discomfort.
Of the 300-some sailors on board my ship, our only casualty was a young boiler technician who was badly burned when a boiler exploded during a rearming run.
I nearly died of fright that day.
We were out in the South China Sea several miles off the coast of Vietnam, reloading our magazines with 5-inch and 3-inch shells and powder while steaming alongside an ammunition supply ship.
That's a pretty tricky maneuver, two ships sailing along at the same speed on the same course, while ammunition is transferred from one to the other over steel cables strung between the two.
Get too far apart and the cables snap, probably killing several sailors as the broken ends lash about. Get too close and the vortex of ocean suction created by the two ships' hulls slicing through the water at 20 knots will suck them together with a horrendous crash, killing more sailors and in the case of an ammunition run, probably setting off an explosion that would scatter parts of both ships and sailors all the way to China.
Right in the middle of that ticklish exercise, I was standing on the deck cutting the metal bands that held a pallet of 5-inch high-explosive shells together that had just arrived on the cable strung between the two ships. After we broke open the pallets, we then handed the shells down one by one, 70 lbs. each, through a deck hatch to sailors below, who passed them along down a line of sailors stretching to the ammunition magazines below decks.
And suddenly, the hatch we were passing shells down through filled up with what appeared to be white smoke gushing out.
Before we started sending those 5-inch shells down, we had already unloaded several thousand powder canisters, each of which contained about 35 lbs. of gun powder. Powder canisters are paired with the projectiles when loaded into the gunmounts for firing.
And when we saw that white stuff gushing from the hatch, somebody hollered, "Powder smoke!" and my thoughts were, "Oh God, some fool busted a powder canister and set it on fire. The next sound I hear will be those 70-pound high explosive shells we're loading as they begin exploding below decks." Some cool-headed sailor broke us out of our trance with an order and we sprang into action.
Somebody grabbed a saltwater hose, which is always kept charged and ready at hand during all rearming exercises, and began pouring water into the hatch, with no apparent affect on the white smoke still gushing forth freely.
The rest of us sailors began grabbing 5-inch projectiles which were still stacked on the deck waiting to go below, running them one by one to the side railings and throwing them overboard.
We cleared that deck of projectiles faster than I thought was possible, in a matter of seconds, and as I threw the last shell overboard and watched it disappear into the ocean, I thought seriously about jumping overboard and following it into the water.
At the first sign of trouble, the ammunition ship had broken contact, and was now about half a mile away, streaking black smoke from its stacks as they poured on the power to get as far away from us as possible, in the event our ammo magazines should explode.
Which seemed like a very likely event, if that indeed was a fire below with both magazines open and high-explosive shells lying about everywhere among lines of sailors passing them below decks.
"Can I swim that far?" I asked myself as I eyed that ammunition ship which was now running alongside us at a distance.
But before panic took over completely and I jumped over the side, the captain sounded the general quarters/battle stations alarm, and I no longer had to think, just to respond to the call.
I ran up two decks to my battle station, the aft gun director mount, and climbed inside. When I put on the headset, I learned the good news that it was not a fire below, but a boiler explosion.
That stuff we thought was white smoke was steam instead.
Good news at least to the extent that the ship was not about to be split apart with exploding magazines. Bad news indeed for the boiler crews, and in particular for one young boiler technician.
As I said, the only casualty that day was the young boiler technician, who panicked and ran the wrong way when that boiler exploded. While the rest of his shipmates ran to another hatch free of steam, that young sailor climbed up through the hatch where all the superheated steam was escaping. It cooked him like a lobster.
They sent a helicopter out to our ship to evacuate him to a hospital ship, and he lived long enough to make it back to the states to a burn hospital. He died a few weeks later in the hospital, but the rest of us all made it home safely.
The only time I was even shot at during my Vietnam tour was one occasion when our destroyer was up north of the Demilitarized Zone which divided North and South Vietnam and some fool North Vietnamese gun crew on a 40 mm anti-aircraft gun cut loose at us.
We wouldn't have even known they were shooting at us, some two or three miles offshore, if they hadn't used tracers, incendiary rounds that left pretty red streaks in the sky as they arced up in the air and then fell harmlessly well short of us in the ocean.
All those foolish NVA gunners managed to do was give us a little target practice that day as we sat offshore and blasted away with our 13-mile-range 5-inchers until we silenced that 40 mm gun.
I did get a brief glimpse of the real Vietnam War, or at least the edge of it, one day when we were playing big brother with our destroyer to some of the brown-water Navy boats operating in the South China Sea in the area south of the Navy base at Cam Rahn Bay.
Anytime we were operating close to shore and were sighted by the small boats of the brown-water Navy, we were subject to get a request by blinking signal light, such as "Got any ice cream?"
I told you us destroyer sailors had it made. The ultimate luxury in that hot, humid war zone—after cold beer, which Uncle Sam doesn't allow on any of his ships—was ice cream, and we always had a 5-gallon bucket or two to spare for the little boats. We had an ice-cream machine on board we kept working full-time.
One of those PBRs, the Navy acronym for Patrol Boat, River; had pulled alongside for some ice cream and since I happened to be down on the main deck, I ran over to the rail and did the same thing I had been doing whenever any small boat came out to visit.
I leaned over the rail and hollered to the PBR sailors, "Hey, any of you guys know a river-boat sailor named Ronnie Bruton?"
The young sailor reaching up for the bucket of ice cream dropped his hands for a second and gave me a startled look, and before he could answer, a familiar curly black-haired head popped out of the coxswain's station, looked up at me and called out, "Yo!" over the rumbling exhaust of the PBR's engines.
Sure enough, it was Ronnie Bruton, in the flesh.
Ronnie, it that you?" I hollered. "It's me, J.J."
When I was growing up, since I was John Jay Barton Jr., and my daddy was known as John, it was natural I came to be called J.J.
And that's what everybody in Crossland, Ronnie included, called me, and many still do since I moved back to my hometown.
But when I joined the Navy, my name became simply Barton, plus several other unprintable titles bestowed upon me in boot camp by the drill instructors. To my new friends, I introduced myself as Jay Barton. If anybody calls me John, I always look around to see if they're talking to my daddy, even though he's gone now. And since my daddy was never in the newspaper business, my byline became just plain Jay Barton, no junior needed to tell me from him. And besides, John Jay Barton Jr. just sounds too pretentious for a newspaper writer.
My son has followed in my footsteps in that regard. He was raised as "J.J." but now that he's away from home he prefers to be just plain John Barton. Only a few friends and family call him J.J., and the same applies to me. So I was glad to hear that familiar name called by Ronnie thousands of miles from home.
It sure was good to see a friend from home, halfway around the world in Vietnam, and Ronnie seemed even happier than me.
He whooped with delight, "J.J.!" and climbed nimbly as a monkey up a rope ladder we had draped over the side of the destroyer, leaping to the deck without so much as a "Permission to come aboard?" or any of the usual naval formalities of boarding a ship.
I guess things were a little more informal in the brown-water Navy, but since there were no officers standing around, no one said anything about the unauthorized passenger we had taken on board.
After a few minutes' talk standing beside the rail, Ronnie's boat had gotten their ice cream and a few other goodies our ship's cooks had rustled up for them and it was time for him to go.
Hey," Ronnie said, "why don't you come over for a RON?"
What's that?" I asked.
RON. Means remain over night."
Ronnie explained he had just gotten his boat out of repairs at the big Navy base at Cam Rahn Bay and had 24 hours to give it a test-run shakedown cruise before reporting back upriver for duty. He was headed back to his main supply base to spend the night and could bring me back out the next morning, if I wanted to go with him for a short run. We could even drink a few beers, he promised.
I hotfooted it up to officer's country and found the gun boss, that's the officer in charge of my division, and explained my request. He okayed it, since it was usual practice for sailors on our ship to get over-night visits to shore bases, and I was off.
This was my first trip off the ship, since gun-control crew members were not allowed to go ashore while we were on call for fire missions. But our schedule for the next three days called for us to loiter around offshore and provide rest and recreation for a two or three squads of marines being ferried out by smaller boats. No gunfire missions were expected.
So Ronnie's arrival was timed just right for me to get off the ship. I made a stop at the ship's armory on the way off to get a .45 Colt semi-automatic pistol issued to me for personal protection—with a generous supply of ammunition, one clip with five rounds.
I started to tell the gunner's mate to keep the pistol if that was all the ammo he was authorized to give me, but I figured five rounds was better than nothing, so I kept my mouth shut and took it. Surely where we were going, to a big patrol-boat base, I wouldn't need even five rounds.
And a few minutes later, I was standing alongside Ronnie in the coxswain's flat of his PBR as we cast off from my destroyer and went speeding away, skimming atop the South China Sea headed for the mainland of South Vietnam and its dangerous dark jungle.
As soon as we got clear of my destroyer, Ronnie jammed both throttles all the way open and I couldn't believe how fast that little boat leaped up on top of the water and started flying.
Wow," I said, as we slapped along from wave top to wave top, just hitting the ocean's high spots. "How fast are we going?"
This here is the fastest PBR in the whole d--- Navy," Ronnie said proudly. "When I first got her, she wouldn't hardly do 25 knots, but I did some work on those diesels and now she'll do 35."
Even before Ronnie joined the Navy, he was known as a good hand as a shade-tree mechanic. He had a '57 Chevrolet with a 283 cubic inch V-8 engine than ran like a 327 engine after Ronnie got through rebuilding it. Nobody outran Ronnie in his '57 Chevy, including several highway patrolmen who tried to catch him.
And guess who made the twin 220-horsepower diesel engines in Ronnie's Mark II PBR? None other than the same manufacturer of his beloved '57 Chevy and its V-8, General Motors, he informed me.
I figure I got 'em cranking out at least 275 horses each, prob'ly more," Ronnie said of his twin diesel engines.
And as we got closer inshore where the water wasn't as choppy, I discovered another amazing thing about that 31-foot boat. As the ride smoothed out a bit, I stepped out of the coxswain's flat and looked over the side and discovered that the entire front end of the boat was out of the water, with no more than a few inches of the aft part of the boat maintaining contact with the ocean.
Ronnie explained that his PBR has no propellers, but is driven by Jacuzzi water jets, just like in those California hot tubs.
At full throttle, the PBR draws an amazing nine inches of water as we skim along with those water jets pushing us, he said.
Then he showed me another amazing feature of his PBR.
Watch this," Ronnie said, and jammed a lever in reverse.
In less than a hundred feet, that PBR came to an abrupt halt from 35 knots down to a dead stop. Unfortunately, the water around us was still going at 35 knots, so we got a free bath courtesy of the South China Sea as the boat ground to a screeching halt.
Ronnie just laughed like a banshee, shook the water off like an old hound dog and jammed the throttles wide open again. He explained he had reversed the water jets to bring us to that halt.
Watch this," he said again, and this time he spun the wheel over while slapping the water jet lever again, halfway around.
This time we reversed course abruptly in the length of the boat, of course with another free shower from the disturbed ocean.
Laughing like a banshee one more time, Ronnie shook off the water again, then made a bit wider loop as he swung us back around.
Then he turned the wheel over to one of his crew and we both went back to sit down in the fantail rear area of his cramped boat to dry off a bit in the warm wind.
As we sat down, I remembered my camera case, an aluminum Haliburton I had just bought in Hawaii at the Navy base on the way over to Vietnam, and was glad I had the forethought to buy that water-tight briefcase.
I opened it up to see if it was indeed as water-tight as the Haliburton folks claim, and it was dry as a bone inside. Fishing out my Nikon 35 mm camera, I set the light meter and then passed it up to one of Ronnie's crew with a request to take a picture of Ronnie and me.
We sat there, grinning like a couple of idiots, both bareheaded in the breeze, wearing flak jackets and t-shirts, me in bell-bottom jeans, Ronnie in fatigues, his steel-pot helmet lying on the engine hatch nearby.
Between us on a tripod mount was a .50 caliber machine gun, and with both hatches open to the twin diesels, it was too noisy to talk as the engines hummed loudly, pushing us along at 35 knots.
But as soon was got close to shore, the sailor at the helm swung the boat south to follow the shoreline and Ronnie stood up and dropped his smile.
Holding onto the .50 cal., he began scanning the shore, as I snapped pictures of him and his crew. The happy, carefree look that had been on Ronnie's face since we left my destroyer was gone. Suddenly he and his crew were all business, warriors once again, headed back into harm's way.
We headed down the coast a few miles from the Cam Rahn Bay area and then turned to go up the Vam Co River, Ronnie explained.
As we turned into the mouth of the river, Ronnie spotted something and held his hand up, and the helmsman stopped quickly.
What's that?" I asked, looking where Ronnie was peering and seeing three or four long, slim reeds poking out of the water.
Fish trap," Ronnie answered.
But after a second or two, he added, "Watch this," and swung the .50 cal. machine gun around, pulled back on the bolt handle once to chamber a round, then cut loose firing a short burst.
About the second or third round he fired triggered a huge explosion, drenching us with yet another free shower, but thankfully with nothing any harder than water. No shrapnel anyway.
I thought so," Ronnie explained. "Contact mine. Something about that fish trap didn't look right. Too far out. The fishermen know that most boats will just run over a fish trap if it's out in or near the main channel. If you see one out of place like that one, odds are it's got a mine in it some VC put there, just waiting for some boat to come along that's not paying attention. Mr. Charlie's smart and he's got a lot of tricks like that. You have to learn 'em fast if you want to stay alive out here on the river."
With no further explanation, we headed upriver slowly, Ronnie and his crew keeping watchful eyes on the dark jungle on the banks. Thick as that jungle was, a thousand VC could have been hiding anywhere and we would have never known it, unless they decided to let their presence be felt by taking a shot at us.
I stayed hunkered down in the rear of the boat, trying to shrink up inside my flak jacket, my smiles gone, too. Aside from the time I almost jumped overboard during that rearming exercise, it was the first time I'd really been afraid while in Vietnam.
I kept my head down and my mouth shut, not wanting to show how afraid I was, until we pulled into the PBR main base camp at Tan An, which Ronnie informed me is at the forks of the Vam Co River.
Just north of the base, the Vam Co splits into two branches, the Vam Co Tay, west branch, and the Vam Co Dong, east branch.
The forward base camp for Ronnie's PBR division is up the Vam Co Dong several more miles, near a little village called Tra Cu.
But we were going to spend the night at the Tan An base, where the Army's 9th Infantry Division also has their headquarters. Tan An, Ronnie informed me, is "safe as babies. They hardly ever hit this place, except maybe a rocket or a mortar or two now and then. Just enough to let us know they're still out there. We own the river, but the jungle is Charlie's."
I was glad I had at least five rounds of .45 to defend myself, but before we left the boat, Ronnie handed me an M-16 rifle to carry, picking up one for himself, too. He was also wearing a pistol, but it was not one of Uncle Sam's regulation sidearms.
He proudly showed me his Colt Python .357 magnum revolver with a six-inch barrel, powerful enough to knock down a water buffalo.
And Ronnie also gave me a quick tour of the boat and its armament before we went ashore. The .50 cal. machine gun on the rear of boat was a single mount, while up front a twin .50 cal. mount was standing on a tripod inside a circular armored turret.
Both .50 cal. mounts also had Mk. 18 grenade launchers which could be attached to them "piggy back" and amidships opposite the coxswain's flat were mounting posts for .30 cal. M-60 machine guns, and/or grenade launchers. On board was also a generous cache of "small arms," M-16 rifles that fire semi- or full-automatic, M-70 handheld 40 mm grenade launchers and 12 gauge pump shotguns loaded with slugs and double-ought buckshot, plus plenty of ammunition.
That was the offense. For defense, Ronnie's Mk. II PBR didn't offer much. The hull, he informed me, is fiberglass, which has its good side and bad side. Good because it's light and strong for speed. Bad because even a .30 cal. AK-47 round will penetrate it. But good, too, in some instances of being shot at and hit.
We just got a big hole patched up in the bow," Ronnie told me. "The last firefight we were in upriver, they hit us with a 75 mm recoil-less rifle round. Went right in one side and out the other without exploding. Went off when it hit the far bank."
The only armor on board Ronnie's PBR was the ceramic tub about waist high around the forward twin .50 cal. machine guns and similar ceramic armor plates around the coxswain's station. The after single .50 cal. machine gun had a single plate to protect from rounds in front, but no protection from the sides and rear.
And Ronnie said the armor plating "ain't worth s--- anyway. Won't stop nothing but .30 caliber. We'll take most of it back off soon as we go upriver. Just slows us down. Speed and maneuverability's our best defense."
And even having "the fastest PBR in Vietnam" wasn't enough to keep from getting shot up on patrol, Ronnie added. "Ever try to outrun a cannon shell at 35 knots?" he asked me.
But Ronnie said he and most other PBR skippers figure the extra knot of two of speed is worth the loss of minimal protection from the ceramic armor, so it comes off before going on patrol.
With M-16s slung on our shoulders and pistols dangling from our hips, we went ashore to taste the pleasures of the Tan An Base.
We walked over to the enlisted officer's club, which we were entitled to use. Ronnie was an EN 2, Engineman second class petty officer, and I was an FTG 3, Fire Control Technician-Guns third class petty officer. It wasn't much of a club, plywood walls, roof and floor, a long bar with plywood tables and straight-back chairs.
But it had that one qualification which made it better than the finest battleship afloat, cold beer, plus whiskey and liquor. Uncle Sam doesn't allow alcohol of any kind on any ship in the Navy, but every Navy shore facility is swimming in booze.
Now I quit drinking after I got saved in 1977, but back on that day, Feb. 8, 1969, I was a typical sailor. Show me a bar, hand me a cold beer and I was in hog heaven, as long as the beer held out or I got too drunk to pour anymore down, whichever came first.
After we poured a few cold ones down our necks standing up at the bar, we grabbed a pair of new ones each and moved to a table.
I asked Ronnie about his six and a half months spent with the brown water Navy and he had quite a few hairy stories to tell.
When he first arrived in August 1968, Ronnie's river boat section had been assigned to the Mekong Delta in what was called Operation Game Warden. It didn't have a thing to do with catching deer poachers, as the name indicated, but concentrated on stopping the flow of war supplies to the VC, the Viet Cong communist guerrillas, from Cambodia into South Vietnam on the Delta's rivers.
Ronnie's unit spent his first five months in Vietnam patrolling the My Tho River, the northernmost Delta river closest to Saigon, stopping and searching sampans and junks—the boats used by Vietnamese for fishing and living—for war supplies.
When we came ashore, Ronnie had donned the black beret worn by the Riverine Force, and as we sat down, he took it off and tossed it onto the plywood table.
I picked it up and looked at it and asked him about the black loop of ribbon on the back which was cut in two with each end notched in a "V" shape.
Ronnie explained, "After your first firefight, your crew members cut the ribbon and then you notch the two ends after your next two firefights. I notched both of mine a long time ago."
PBR patrols, Ronnie said, were usually 12 hours each, half at night and half in the day, and he said it was a rare patrol that saw no action. Ronnie said he and his PBR crew had already been in more than 60 firefights during the first half of his Vietnam tour.
As a second class petty officer, Ronnie started out as boat engineer on the four-man crew of his PBR, responsible for the running and upkeep of the twin diesels. But when the first class petty officer who was his coxswain was killed, Ronnie took over, in effect becoming the captain of his boat, lord and master of all 31 feet of his craft and responsible for it and its other three crew.
In addition to him, the rest of his crew was a third class gunner's mate who manned the forward twin .50s, a third class boatswain's mate who manned the rear .50 and alternated with Ronnie as coxswain, and a seaman who manned one of the midships M-60s or grenade launchers.
Ronnie said his boatswain's mate was a pretty good coxswain, so he usually put him at the helm on patrols and manned the rear .50 himself, "because that's where all the action is. I love firing that big .50. I ain't seen nothing yet that .50 won't knock down."
In Game Warden patrols, Ronnie said the PBRs usually initiated action. "We're gung-ho as hell. We go looking for trouble."
But he said the tactics had changed in the past six weeks as Ronnie's PBR division was transferred to the Vam Co Dong River to take part in a new offensive called Operation Giant Slingshot.
He said the operation name comes from the two forks of the Vam Co River, which run on both sides of an area known as the Parrot's Beak, a projection of Cambodia jutting far into South Vietnam.
Like Game Warden, the objective of Giant Slingshot was to cut off war supplies coming in from Cambodia. But with the convoys coming through such a narrow area, instead of across the widespread Mekong Delta area in Game Warden, Giant Slingshot action was hot and heavy, with twice as many firefights as before, Ronnie said.
We had so many we had to come up with a new name for all the firefights, when we file all that d--- paperwork. ENIFF. Stands for Enemy Initiated Fire Fight. We never had enough of those in Game Warden to need a name for them, but we don't have to look for trouble on the Vam Co Dong. It finds us everytime we go on patrol."
All the action—which included contacts with North Vietnamese Army regular troops in addition to Viet Cong guerrillas—prompted new tactics for the PBRs on the Vam Co Dong, known as waterborne ambushes on the patrol reports, he said. But even hiding the PBRs in an ambush and waiting for trouble to come to you required new tactics for the river boats in Giant Slingshot.
There's so many d--- VC and NVA out there on the Vam Co Dong that we can't just pull over and hide. They'll hear you stop and then we're the ones who get ambushed. First we tried patrolling with two boats real close together, so one could cut engines and drift to the bank and the other one went on. But if you get hit with two boats close together, you're both in the s--- and the bad guys bag two birds with one rock. And even after you split up, they caught on to the sound of just one boat going on and one stopping.
We tried towing one boat with another, but that's too slow and clumsy and you've got big problems if you get into a firefight tied together. So we came up with a trick that we call sync.
As two boats head upriver, one boat slows down while the other puts its engines out of sync, speeding one engine up just a tad while slowing the other one down. When the engines on the first boat get out of sync, the second boat cuts its engines off and drifts into shore, while the first boat goes on. With the engines out of sync, the first boat sounds like two boats going upriver.
The first time we tried that, it worked real good. The lead boat went on ahead and we dropped off and eased up to the bank and got under the overhanging bushes and sat there real quiet like.
It was raining like a big dog that night and you couldn't see s---. At least the mosquitoes couldn't bite. We sat there for three or four hours, cold, wet and miserable. I was just about to say the hell with it, let's move on, when I saw something move maybe 50 feet away on the bank, but I couldn't see what it was in the fog.
I keep watching and then out of the fog I see this flat NVA helmet and a gook wearing it and right behind him there was a line of more of them. I sat and watched and they just kept on coming.
I kept counting and when I got to 40, I said, s---, that's enough and let loose with the .50. We all started firing then and the whole f------- world lit up all along that bank as they started shooting back. They were shooting AKs and light machine guns and B-40 rockets and when mortars started coming, too, we cranked up and got the hell out of there. I don't know how many was in that NVA patrol, but it was sure as hell more than we could handle alone.
We called in the Black Ponies and the Seawolves and the artillery and they pounded hell out of that patrol. They sent us back in after daylight and we found about 40 bodies in the bushes on the river banks, but we didn't go in the jungle and look for any more. We found another half a dozen or so bodies was floating in the river, too. We really gave that NVA convoy hell that night."
Ronnie explained that the Black Ponies are AV-10 propeller driven aircraft on call for fire support with cannons and rockets, while the Seawolves are Navy helicopters with similar armaments.
Army artillery and Naval gunfire support offshore, like our destroyer, are also on call when the PBRs get into trouble.
Another tactic tried in Giant Slingshot, Ronnie said, was using the PBRs to ferry teams of Navy SEALs and Army LRPs, special commando units. SEALs get their name from Sea, Air and Land, as they are trained to operate in all three areas, and LRPs is an acronym for Long Range Patrols, which is what those units do.
The idea, Ronnie explained, was to take teams of SEALs and LRPs up the Vam Co Dong, drop them off quietly at night and let them go out and set ambushes for the VC and NVA, or at least find the enemy and call in air strikes and artillery to blast them.
Ronnie said the one and only time he ever left his boat during a patrol was when they dropped a SEAL team off on the Vam Co Dong.
We pulled that sync drill and dropped off behind the lead boat to drift to the bank real quiet and let the SEAL team off.
We were supposed to sit there for a couple of hours or so and let the SEALs go out there and look around, then pick 'em up again.
But the SEALs weren't gone but maybe 15 minutes when all hell broke loose. We could hear the heavy firing maybe half a mile away and the SEALs got on the radio and told us they were pinned down.
We called for artillery and air strikes, but the SEALs came back on the radio after the strikes started and said they wasn't doing any good. The jungle was so thick the rockets and artillery were exploding up on the top layer of the triple canopy. Those SEALs were still catching hell from the enemy heavy weapons fire down on the ground and they couldn't move. It looked like they were goners.
Well, there wasn't nothing to do but to go and get 'em. So we called off the artillery and air strikes and went in after 'em.
Maybe those NVA or VC or whatever they were thought there was more of us than just four sailors with M-16s, shotguns and M-70 grenade launchers. Anyway, when we started shooting, they lightened up enough to let those SEALs get out of there. We all boogied back to the boat double-time. I never was so glad to see that ol' PBR.
We cranked that sucker up and flew on back downriver. We were lucky. We didn't lose anybody that night, SEALs or sailors either."
But most Giant Slingshot patrols aren't that lucky, he added.
The Vam Co Dong patrols so far, a little over a month into Operation Giant Slingshot for Ronnie's section of PBRs, had resulted in a casualty rate double Game Warden patrols.
I lost my best friend on the third patrol after we came up here from My Tho. He was killed that night and two more were seriously wounded. The first patrol I went on up here, they hit our boat with B-40 rockets and heavy machine-gun fire. They've hit us just about everytime we've gone out. The last patrol was when they hit us with that 75 recoil-less rifle round that went all the way through the hull. The other boat with us was hit, too, one killed and three wounded. It sunk in less than two minutes.
We only had five boats left in our section when we got up here, the other five boats was left in My Tho for repairs. After a month my boat was the last one left floating and they had to send us down to Cam Rahn Bay to fix that great big d--- 75 shell hole.
It's hell up there on the Vam Co Dong, J.J. The section we patrol is about 35 miles long from Tra Cu to Go Dau Ha, maybe 125 feet wide at the widest point. The PBR sailors have named it Blood Alley. Every patrol we go out, somebody always get hit."
I never could hold beer very well, and with about two or three six packs in me, I was now several sheets in the wind, not far from knee-walking drunk. But Ronnie had been drinking at least two to my one, and showed no affect at all. He looked as sober as a judge.
I told him he better show me a rack while I could still walk, so he escorted me to a barracks and I died when I hit the bunk.
If the VC or NVA shot any rockets or mortars at the Tan An Base that night, you couldn't prove it by me. I slept like a rock. That was the first time I'd been drunk in about two months, since our last liberty call in between duty tours on the Vietnam gunline.
And the next morning, bright and early, Ronnie still looked like he hadn't had a drop, much less consumed a case or more of beer the night before. He was up and ready to go while I was still fumbling around, unable to find my butt with both hands, hungover like a big dog. So I took the only hangover cure I've ever found that worked, some more hair off the same dog that bit me. Two more beers and I was almost alive again, but I didn't risk breakfast.
I fell asleep again almost as soon as we headed back downriver in Ronnie's PBR and slept all the way back out to my destroyer.
Ronnie woke me up when we got there, and I didn't know how to say goodbye. Break a leg didn't seem right, nor did good luck.
So I mumbled, "So long, Ronnie. Take care. See you at home. Come back out if you can, we'll be out here on station for two or three more days before we have to go back out on the gunline."
Ronnie said as soon as he got back upriver, his PBR section was starting another joint effort with Army troops, this time the First Air Cavalry Division in something called Operation Keelhaul.
I'll come back out if I can," Ronnie said. "If I don't make it back before you go, tell mom and Aunt Judy and Hale 'Hi' for me. Tell 'em I'll see 'em in five and half months when I'm outa here."
I started to remind him that his tour would be up before mine was, and he'd be back in Crossland before me. But I didn't say it.
With a wave, he slapped his PBR into high gear and roared off.
Three days later we were getting ready to go back on the gunline and PBRs and other boats were ferrying the last of the Marines back ashore after their R&R vacation on our destroyer.
I was standing down on the fantail when a PBR came alongside and I heard my name called out by one of the sailors on the boat.
I ran over expecting to see Ronnie, but instead it was the third class boatswain's mate on Ronnie's boat. I never knew his name. I forgot to ask when he gave me the news. Ronnie was dead.
Ronnie and his crew had been almost back to the Tra Cu base at the end of a 12-hour daylight patrol when they were ambushed by a heavy weapons concentration of machine guns and rocket fire.
Ronnie was firing the aft .50 cal. mount when a B-40 rocket came arcing in and landed at his feet, knocking out one engine, damaging the other and almost sinking the boat.
By the time the boat limped back downriver to where they could get Ronnie to a helicopter, he had lost a lot of blood. He died on the way to the hospital in the helicopter.
Ronald Elwood Bruton, 21, was mortally wounded at 6:40 p.m., Feb. 11, 1969, near Tra Cu on the Vam Co Dong River, in the place PBR sailors named "Blood Alley."
I've done a lot of reading about the Vietnam War in the years since. I learned that Blood Alley was accurately named. It was the bloodiest battleground of Operation Giant Slingshot, which produced the highest casualty rates of the war for PBR sailors, more than double the next worst river-boat operation, Game Warden patrols.
Giant Slingshot continued for 515 days with more than 1,000 firefights, nearly two per day. More than 450 tons of war material was captured coming in from Cambodia into South Vietnam in 266 supply caches. And the kill ratios, those grisly figures the Pentagon loved to quote in that war, ranged from 40-to-1 to 100-to-1 for NVA and VC dead vs. U.S. Navy sailors killed on PBR patrols.
Giant Slingshot was judged by the war historians as a great success, but it was the last big operation for the PBRs. Starting in late 1969 and continuing through early 1970, the Navy began turning its PBRs over to the South Vietnamese and the days of the brown-water U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War were effectively over.
And regardless of whether it took 40 or 100 VC or NVA to kill Ronnie, he was the only brother Hale Bruton had. His mother and his aunt are both gone now. Hale is all that's left of the family.
About every time I see Hale we wind up talking about Ronnie.
Hale told me just the other day, "It's been 25 years now, and I'm still bitter about the whole thing, about the whole d--- war."
And I still can't answer the same questions Hale always asks me about Ronnie. Why? Why did he volunteer for the Vietnam War?
Why did he die in Vietnam, and what for? I don't know.
But I do know one thing. Ronnie Bruton did not die in vain.
He died fighting for his country, and Ronnie Bruton did not lose that war. He won the battles he fought, he and all the other brown-water sailors, and all the marines, soldiers and airmen who fought and died in Vietnam. We never lost a battle in that dirty war, in the jungles, on the rivers or in the airways.
But we lost that only war America ever lost because our politicians surrendered, because they didn't have the political will to back up our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. That's who lost the war in Vietnam. Not Ronnie or any of the 58,183 U.S. dead over there.
Ronnie Bruton was just what he said he was, an old-fashioned patriot who couldn't stay on the sidelines, safe in San Diego, when his buddies were in Vietnam fighting and dying for their country.
But 25 years later, there's still a lot I don't understand about that war, and I don't suppose there will ever be any answers.
And there's another question I've never been able to answer.
Would I have had the guts to fight the kind of war Ronnie fought? I didn't, because I didn't have to. But I'll always wonder.
Chapter 3
Off To Meet Jim Whoeverhewas, Green Beret Assassin,
How to Interview a Man Who Hates Photojournalists
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