Vietnam: It was dark, I assume.

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Walsh: Yes, I didn’t even see it coming. He was a big man, very lean and very strong. He had a boxer’s body. He was so fast I never saw the hand coming. He hit me right in the cheekbone. I saw stars. As a matter of fact, I think I saw Jupiter and Pluto, I was so stunned.

Vietnam: Why didn’t he kill you?

Walsh: I don’t know. Instead of finishing me off, he ran. I fired seven shots at him and hit him six times. I was carrying an AK-47. I was wearing a VC uniform–the conical hat and black pajamas. Because of my height, he thought I was one of his bodyguards. I looked the part.

Vietnam: You had an encounter with an animal on one of your patrols. Tell us about that.

Walsh: Oh, the pig. You would have to bring up that embarrassing moment. It was my very first night patrol. We were after this VC tax collector. We got some intelligence telling us that
he was to meet in this hooch. Unbeknown to me, there was this 100-pound pig sleeping by the front door. I came running in like John Wayne, and it was like hitting a brick wall. I went right over the top of the pig, ass-over-teakettle. This old man was just sitting there looking at me like, ‘Oh, the gringos are here.’ The wind was knocked right out of me. My patrol leader, Chief Warrant Officer Wayne Boles, and Warrant Officer Scott Lyon came in and laughed. They said: ‘Get up, maggot, get up. You’re trying too hard. Just relax, you doing fine, you’re just trying too hard.’ Scanning the room, we looked at this big bowl of rice and we figured the old Vietnamese guy was probably feeding a whole platoon. He wasn’t. It was all the leftover rice he was feeding to the pig.

Vietnam: What happened the day you were wounded?

Walsh: Ben Tre, February 28, 1971. I was with X-ray Platoon. It was, perhaps, the most hard-luck SEAL platoon to serve in during Vietnam [see the sidebar 'The Hard Luck X-Ray Platoon' in Steve Edwards' 'Operation Bright Light,' Vietnam, October 1991]. We had taken a Chieu Hoi (or Hoi Chanh, a VC defector under the Chieu Hoi amnesty program). I did not trust him at all. He was there to get us killed. And he almost did it. I didn’t like it; I had a bad feeling about it. But we went on patrol with this guy leading the way. You go, even though you’ve got a bad feeling about it. We found some bunkers and blew as many as we could. Our patrol was extracted by an LSSC (light SEAL support craft). We were carrying so much weight, everybody was soaking wet. You go in weighing 100 pounds, and you come out weighing 150 pounds because you’re wet and all the mud just sticks to you. The boat was really struggling to get up to speed. That was when they hit us. They put one B-40 rocket in the side of the boat. The other one missed, skipped off the water and hit the trees. We got some backlash from the shrapnel from there as well.

Vietnam: Unfortunately, one or two SEALs got killed, I understand.

Walsh: Yes, there were several legs gone, they were taken right off. One of the boat guys lost a leg. Also, a South Vietnamese interpreter we had with us lost both his legs. The force of that explosion was so powerful that it lifted me off the deck. Fortunately, most of the shrapnel went through the Chieu Hoi and then struck me. That’s what saved my life. One man lost the right cheek of his butt when all his grenades went off in low order–incomplete detonation. In this case, the B-40 rocket set off the grenades he was wearing. Thank God, Ed Jones manned the .50 caliber and began firing into the VC positions. They took off. They could have finished us off, but they ran.

Vietnam: What happened to the Chieu Hoi?

Walsh: I found him severely wounded. He looked at me and smiled. He knew he had led us into an ambush and he had succeeded. I finished him off with my gerber knife.

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