Mankind is a predator by nature and a hunter by instinct. I loved to hunt. It was in my blood. And I was now ready to head back to the bush, to hunt the biggest game in the world--man.
With five tours of Vietnam and 257 combat missions under his belt, Navy SEAL Gary R. Smith has witnessed hell itself. DEATH IN THE DELTA covers his third and fourth tours in Nam. From Cam Ranh Bay to Nam Canh to night insertions into Cambodia, he served as SEAL adviser to volatile Vietnamese special forces, including the fierce PRUs (Provincial Reconnaissance Units), Biet Hai, and Regional Forces. Often accompanying their missions, Smith vividly captures the nightmare of a jungle war, whether staging sudden deadly ambushes or sitting silently for hours soaking in mosquito-infested swamps. It wasn't pretty, but Smith makes no apologies for himself or his fellow warriors in this no-holds-barred account. For him, its a privilege and honor to pass on a small part of the history of the U.S. Navy SEALs experience as he saw it in Vietnam.Alan Maki grew up in Belleville, Michigan, and was inducted in 2001 into Belleville High School's Distinguished Graduate Hall of Fame. He was awarded the Jefferson Award, sponsored by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, for outstanding community service in Montana in 1988. Besides serving as the pastor of three Baptist churches, he broke a Guinness World Record for "balancing on one foot" for more than eight hours to raise funds for disabled children and children with cancer. He has written two Christian novels and three nonfiction books about Navy SEALs. Alan's first movie, Sidewalk Singer, which he wrote, produced, and starred in, was released on DVD in January 2014 by Vision Video. His second movie, which he wrote, produced, and starred in, was titled Mr. What and was distributed on DVD in January 2015 by Bridgestone Multimedia Group. Both movies received five Doves from the Dove Foundation.
Gary Smith served with UDT/SEAL teams for more than 15 years, engaging in 257 combat missions. He was awarded the Purple Heart, three Bronze Stars, and other honors.Introduction
The room was very formal and carefully arranged to be as intimidating as possible. There was a series of windows which overlooked the railroad yard that led into the old Studebaker plant, but the blinds were closed and the only light was of the sterile overhead fluorescent variety. I had been waiting for some time, so I got up, parted the blinds, and looked out at a typical cold, gray day common in northern Indiana in late November. I remember thinking about how my mother would take me with her when she visited her sister and I would look down on the same tracks from my aunt’s apartment window. The difference was that back then the yard seemed almost alive, the activity reminding me of ants swarming over a decaying animal carcass. Jeeps and amphibious vehicles were produced in the plant, and they were rushed from here to there for loading and transportation to some far-off battlefield. Now it looked like the ants had finished their task and gone on to whatever else ants do, leaving only the skeleton of a factory that had produced one of the finest cars ever made in this country.
My nostalgic journey ended abruptly when I was jerked back to reality by the less than friendly voice of the South Bend, Indiana, Superintendent of Schools.
“If you persist in this foolishness, you will never work in this school district again,” he said pointedly. I was somewhat, but not completely, taken aback by the frontal assault because I had long suspected that the superintendent was not the avuncular gentleman he would have everyone believe he was.
“Look,” I replied, “my country is at war and I feel strongly that it is my duty to do my share. I find it very difficult to hide behind a schoolteacher’s deferment when there’s a war going on.” My position was somewhat preposterous by today’s standards, but it was 1964 and my early childhood had been spent exploring Rumvillage Woods, Bullfrog Pond, and Pinhook Lagoon. On Saturdays, for fourteen cents, my cousins and I had watched John Wayne win World War II at the Indiana Theater. Actually, we started out with twenty-five cents earned by collecting and selling old newspapers and scrap to the junkyard. The movie consisted of a double feature, a cartoon, and a serial, usually Lash Larue or Flash Gordon. We would spend ten cents on gedunk, which left us with a penny. The sporting goods store was next to the theater, and they sold BBs in penny packs—guess what we spent our last cent on? In any case, the superintendent was not impressed with my explanation of why I wanted to break my teaching contract, but he was true to his word—I never worked in that school district again.
What I didn’t tell the superintendent was that I had already been accepted into the U.S. Naval Officers’ Candidate School at Newport, Rhode Island. My plan was to breeze through the required four-month course and follow Richard Widmark’s webbed footprints (I had been very impressed by the movie Naked Warriors) into UDT/SEAL training. After all, how long could it take to get my commission, complete the required training, and win the war in Vietnam? There is very little I care to remember about OCS at Newport, but UDT/SEAL training is where I, and everyone else in the class, grew up!
Our class was number thirty-six, and it was unique in many ways. We were about the last class to graduate before the powers that be realized what SEALs were capable of and decided that they wanted more. Well, the making of a SEAL is a long, difficult, delicate, complex art which requires the correct chemistry to get the desired results. SEALs cannot be mass-produced simply because there is a need for them, but that’s another long and controversial story. In our case, a total of one hundred sixteen officers and men began the program—thirty graduated, and of the thirty, the general consensus among us was that six did not fully measure up to what we felt a SEAL should be.
In SEAL training there is no differentiation between enlisted men and commissioned officers. Stripped naked, everyone shares the same hell. You get to know the real person, who is cleansed of all the protective insulation we wrap around ourselves to get by in society. It doesn’t matter who your father is; if you are a doctor, an Olympic champion, a Ph.D., or graduated at the bottom of your high school class—what matters is that you actually do that which is required of you. Talk is of no value; performance is everything!
Our class was a microcosm of society. We had the great-grandson of a president of the United States, a U.S. senator’s son, a lieutenant who went on to become the admiral in charge of all unconventional warfare for the navy, two guys from Hell’s Kitchen, and just about everything in between. They were twenty-nine of the best men I have ever known, and if I were forced to choose the most outstanding of the bunch, I would have to go with the man in the middle of the front row of our class picture—Gary Smith!
Of course, you can’t really single out one individual and say he was the best, because each man was gifted in his own way. However, there was something about Smitty that set him apart from the rest of us, and it wasn’t his tattoos. The best tattoo, hands down, belonged to Barney House.
Smitty’s rate was radioman, but he was no more a radioman than I am a star of the Bolshoi Ballet. He was, and is, a born gunners’ mate. He breezed through Explosive Ordnance Disposal School and ended up in charge of the ordnance locker for the teams. He has an almost sixth sense for weapons and weapon systems, proven by his recent return from Kuwait, where he helped clean up unexploded ordnance left over from the Gulf War. The key word here is return—not everyone did! I could go on about how he was one of the best runners in the teams, how he set the record for penetrating the simulated border-crossing obstacle course at Stead’s Air Force Global Survival School, what a great operator and leader he was in the field in Vietnam, but what really set Smitty apart, in my opinion, is the fact that, at the cost of considerable ridicule, he kept a diary. Not only did he keep a diary, but he kept it with almost religious fervor. I have seen him write notes on toilet paper so as not to lose certain facts he wanted to remember, but all of his scribbling was done after the operation was completed and the gear stowed.
If there was a discrepancy between an official navy report of an operation and Smitty’s version of the same encounter, I would float my stick with Smitty every time!
Probably the most entertaining and prolific western author of our time was Louis L’Amour. He once said that if he wrote about a stream, that stream was where he said it was, and furthermore the water was good to drink. If Smitty tells you about a stream somewhere in Vietnam, you can go to the bank with the fact that that stream is where he says it is. However, I doubt that the water would be good to drink!
John M. Odusch, Lt. USNR Houston, Texas October 1993
