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The "we" included Medieros and Thurlow; there was only one body. More from Brinkley's article:

A few minutes after all the Nung were ashore, the Swift crews heard a loud but muffled explosion inland. A voice came over the radio: "Can you come back in here and pick up a body? I've got one of my boys killed by a booby trap."

Mike Medeiros jumped ashore to join PCF-53's Thurlow, taking a couple of U.S. military-issue ponchos to carry back the mercenary's remains. Kerry secured his boat and followed the others ashore. "The Nung seemed to be wandering around almost aimlessly, unaware that one of them had bought the ticket," Kerry wrote in his journal. Their leader came up to him and told him where the dead body was. "I remembered easily who he was," Kerry wrote, "the loud, boisterous, fat, impish man who was something of a ringleader among the Nung and who had endeared himself to everyone by his funny face." The Americans started down to where Bac She De, the Nung mercenary, had died. Moments earlier Kerry had asked, "Is it bad?" The Nung leader had replied "that you could put him in 'a bucket,'" Kerry wrote. "I walked more carefully, looking where each step went so that I wouldn't trigger another trap."

And if the point of the quote is that Kerry thought the South Vietnamese troops were wimps, from later in the article:

Mike Miggins, the U.S. Army adviser to the local ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), told Kerry the problem was most likely that the Popular Forces didn't want to fight alongside the mercenaries. Then the Ruff-Puffs' leader got on the radio with the ARVN district chief and spent the next half-hour arguing in frenzied Vietnamese about something. An agitated Kerry and crew just stood by helplessly as the bureaucrats on hand engaged in a political debate over the present situation. Having had enough of this, the mercenaries' leader "called his perimeter men and told them to fake a firefight, hoping this might excite our Viet colleagues into battle," Kerry reported. "The next few minutes were filled with tremendous thunder, as though the whole war was being fought in front of them, but it was to no avail. Some of the South Vietnamese got up and looked around and some others cocked their single-fire rifles, but by and large they just milled around. Then they just walked back and got onto the boats and sat down."

While most of the "Cream Puffs" -- as Kerry liked to call the Popular Forces after that -- scampered back to the boats, a few of the bravest made little forays around the area in front of them, where they turned up a substantial cache of Chinese-made grenades, ammunition and one or two land mines. One group found some wire leading down into the water and pulled it up slowly and carefully. No mine was attached, but there was a string of batteries at the other end. "They were American-issue, and we realized that the VC had been planning a reception for us in this very spot should we have tried sometime in the future to make a landing," Kerry recorded. "I could just see us beaching and unloading troops into a volley of claymores and underwater mines."