Our boat had been dragged up on the beach next to a small Vietnamese village. The infantrymen that had not been killed or injured during the ambush left the boats and formed a perimeter. Our boat crew joined them with our personal weapons and the M-60 machine gun that I had been shooting. I found out later that that gun probably wouldn't have worked if needed anyway; too many rounds had been fired through it without a barrel change. Of course, the Army never told any of us that this particular weapon might need a barrel change or that the barrel could even be changed. So, thanks for that, Transportation Corps! A helicopter was sent to evacuate the body of the person that had been killed and the others that had been wounded, including one fellow whose foot had been blown off.
After a thankfully uneventful night, a boat was sent from Cat Lai to pick our crew up and drop off mechanics to refloat the boat so that it could be towed back to Saigon. I heard that damaged boats were shipped from Saigon to the Philippines for repair. A couple of days after returning to the base, we were told that we had to go to Saigon to inspect the boat for any weapons or explosives, something that the civilian workers would not do. Plus, the civilians were complaining about a bad smell on the boat. So, off we went to Saigon to look at our wrecked Mike boat.
The boat was on a large barge parked on the Saigon waterfront. It had two large holes in the starboard side of the hull that had been patched, and the engine room had been pumped out so that it could be refloated. We found a few items of interest, including M-16 and M-60 ammunition, a hand grenade, some human gore tangled up in the tarp that had been covering the cargo deck, and a human foot still laced into a jungle boot. We chucked the foot and the gore that we could stand to collect and tossed them into the river. We took everything else with us back to Cat Lai.
After we returned to Cat Lai, the crew dissolved. The coxswain went home and the seamen moved on to other boats. I was told that I had been assigned to a new boat that would arrive in a few days, so I spent that time avoiding any work and perfecting my pot-smoking skills.
Up next - Life During Wartime!
