Bunker

What am I doin' here?
Please Mr. Custer, I don't want to go.
—Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960)

Early February, 1970. 

For hours, we hacked our way through thick bamboo over our heads. The higher-ups had us investigating some funny business that The Duck had spotted in the stomping grounds of the 9th NVA (North Vietnamese Army) Division. 

All well and good, but the appalling 1968 Tet Offensive was on our mind. Back in the world, Jean Dixon, the gossip prophet, foresaw that our regiment (the 7th Calvary) would be wiped out again like at the Little Bighorn. This gal could knock 'em dead. She had predicted the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the launch of Sputnik and the sinking of the Thresher.

Late in the afternoon, I almost crashed into Bob after the point man had stopped chopping. Something piqued his interest—a fresh path. Normally, we didn't touch a path, follow it, or cross it. Better to break bush than mix with heavy traffic and ignorant crowds. 

Other leaders tossed lives around to make a name for themselves, but not Capt. Jackson, our CO. He felt the weight of each man on his shoulders, took no unnecessary chances and preached no sermons. It rubbed off. I never heard company members bitch at each other or their boss. We cared deeply for each other. No slackers or trolls—instead, results and boatloads of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

After a pow-wow with his platoon leaders, Jackson picked a squad to reconnoiter. We held our breath and slipped safeties. The news came in. The path led straight to the front entrance of Hernando’s Hideaway—a bunker complex hidden behind a dense bamboo screen, odd as a load of furniture left in the jungle, and no booby traps! 

The bunkers were not mere curiosities. Some were open trenches. Others were dug into the ground and domed like igloos, with slits for visibility and firing. Weaponized termite mounds, two feet high, hidden from eyes in the sky, scattered about and connected with tunnels. The ground around the bunkers had been freshly disturbed, but the ground atop the tunnels looked ordinary and harmless. 

Fucking clever.

Bob and others inspected one of the larger bunkers, 10 x 10 and 5 feet deep. He pulled out three discarded film cartridges, likely for training or propaganda. Ho! We didn't expect Hollywood. The next bunker was twenty feet deep, but most were smaller hidey-holes, 7 x 7 or 8 x 8. Bob thought an entire regiment, five hundred men, had used it recently. The tunnels of Củ Chi? Too remote. Training or food and weapons depot? Not likely. Favorite haunt or deserted fortification? No way to tell, nothing incriminating had been left.

Captain always gave us plenty of time to set up for the night in a safe area, but with daylight slipping away, we circled our wagons in a place certain to be hot. We cleared only the necessary, filling sandbags the best we could, marking our territory with less than Roman-like thoroughness. Some bunkers were incorporated into our defensive perimeter, others stretched too far away. Captain adopted one behind us for his CP (command post). Our squad deployed smack dab on the three-foot wide approach, directly ahead of the CP, to face any unwelcome guests head on. Killer's rifle squad was on our right. I don't recall who was on our left.

Well I don't know why I came here tonight.
I got the feeling that something ain't right.
Clowns to the left of me.
Jokers to the right.
Here I am—Stuck in the middle with you.

Capt. Jackson had never put us at greater risk, but we were armed, dangerous and prepared to inflict pain:

M60 machine guns
A hundred ammo belts for the M60s
Grenade launchers
A hundred M16s
Two hundred M16 ammo bandoliers
A Winchester Model 12 trench gun (shotgun)
A Thompson submachine gun, carried Chicago-style by a vet on temporary duty
Claymores
Frags
Smoke grenades

At four hundred rounds per man, we pulled twice as much ammo, mano a mano, than the NVA.

As the gorgeous blood-red sun disappeared behind the bamboo, Walt's twenty-three-pound M60 machine gun sat perched on its bipod, worth its weight in gold, parked at the front door, aimed squarely down the path—the same weapon Rambo used to blow down a town in First Blood. 

We rested our black rifles against sandbags, barrels pointed outwards, and settled into our guest house like rabbits in a pea patch. 

The guards better stay awake. 

Shortly after midnight, our guard saw flashes of light darting to and fro in the darkness behind the clumps of heavy bamboo. The interlopers were taking our measure, searching for tripwires, deciphering our layout. We didn't know what they were but they didn't know what we were, either. Two or two thousand? The fog of war.

The tide turns quickly in Vietnam.

Fear can strip you to your naked self. To counter the butterflies in my gut, I popped in earplugs, listened to the Rolling Stones on the American Forces Vietnam Network, and held on for Judgment Day.

The Romans used “Hour of the Wolf” to refer to morning twilight—a half-lit world where magic held sway, dreams came true and most people were born and died. So it was in this peculiar light of the predawn sun that one of our visitors made a fatal mistake to reach out and touch someone; he tripped a flare in the perimeter belonging to our squad. A scream rang out across the jungle. Sam squeezed the M57 clacker, blowing our Claymores, killing the guy and any of his buddies nearby.

This was no time to brush my teeth. We were already in fighting position, hugging the ground in shallow bunkers behind our massive firepower. 

All hell broke loose from the heavy metal pouring in and our resounding roar. Enemy bullets busted above my head. When you hear the whistle, you know they’re close. 

Despite the chaos, I could tell the guns apart; ours were faster, louder, more violent; our bullets were smaller and lighter. They say you can hear a popping sound when a bullet hits a body; well, I never heard it then or ever.

Whole bamboo trees toppled like dominoes, pulverized by the incredible fire. By some strange miracle, the incoming flew above our heads and no friendly fire came from the squads at our back; they were hugging the ground in their bunkers, clueless. The only outgoing came from us and the two squads flanking us, especially the blazing fury from Killer's men, who lacked a machine gun.

We had the same thought as our enemies,

Kill the bastards.

Walt lay on the ground without protection, directly behind his M60, ripping fire down the path. Bobby Parris fed him 100-shot ammo belts hooked together into an endless lead salad. Belts were plentiful, since each man in the company carried one. Bobby blasted away with his 12-gauge when he could. They were alone together; who wants a shower of red-hot shell casings? 

Walt's hell-gun fired sustained barrages up to 600 rounds per minute, low ricocheting bullets all over the path, a huge morale booster and perhaps why the incoming fire was aimed over our heads.

In my bunker, a few steps to the right of Walt, I laid Thumper aside, my single-shot M79 grenade launcher. The smallish, 40 mm grenades could ricochet off overhanging trees and be back on top of us before we knew it. Behind thick bamboo, we had zero visibility; anything other than bullets was a bad idea (we rolled regular frags down the path). Hey—legend has it that a soldier fired his M79 point-blank at an enemy and the grenade got stuck in the guy's gut without exploding!

I snatched bandoliers, took magazines out of ammo pouches, and fed them as fast as I could to the guys with 16s. Nobody ever filled their magazines completely. The quirky, zigzag way the bullets fit into the twenty-round magazines made the last two bullets unusually tight fitting. Over time, dust, dirt, moisture and metal fatigue would make the spring fail, jamming the gun. Even then, a spent cartridge case could fail to eject from the firing chamber. The new round would bump into the old casing and cause a different kind of jam, a failure to extract: 

Can I get a whistle? My gun's broke!

Our 16s had been bored-out, eliminating the problem. 

Thirty minutes of fire had almost drained our ammo when Capt. Jackson changed the balance of power—he called for Shake, Rattle and Roll, a tactical air-strike from Bien Hoa's huge runways. Because the enemy could throw matching smoke, Killer only identified our camp with lefty lemon (yellow) when Jackson was still talking to the overhead forward air controller. 

F-4 Phantom 

In the blink of an eye, a pair of swept-wing F-4 Phantoms—the leading distributors of MiG parts—came screaming out of the sky like fiery Bellonas,¹ skimming trees, dropping high-drag 500-lb shakes and dashing out, trailing black smoke from their twin GE turbojets. 

I hate noise!

Concussions from the ill-natured bombs pounded our chests, kicked tons of dirt and dust into the sky and scared the living shit out of us—and we were expecting! It couldn't have been any better for the other side—imagine the looks on their faces.

As soon as the music stopped, we evacuated our bunkers beat it to the nearest tree for an umbrella against the dirt balls raining down. Lt. Ashmore, our platoon leader, had gone poof! What the hell? He had remained in his bunker and been hit by a dirt ball a foot in diameter. It knocked him ten feet through the air, breaking his thigh bone.

The NVA rounded up their dead and went đi đi mau ("go quickly"). They had a prior appointment.

We had taken no casualties except for the lucky Lt. with the million-dollar wound. He would likely get to go home after the medevac flew him out. But there was no joy in Mudville. We were in shock. Shit happens, your survival instincts and training take over and you react to the chaos around you.

The molten sun was up now. A squad went down the path to take stock. I only saw one dead enemy, dumped into a bomb crater for later retrieval. Vietnamese believe that the souls of the dead will be in turmoil forevermore, if not buried on family soil—a custom that obfuscated our body counts.

Bob took off with the patrol and came back with a bag of meat, blood and bone meal to add to the pile of remains.

You fuckers figure it out!

He estimated 200 coonskins on the wall.

Oops. The NVA had miscalculated, but Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap threw cold water on Gen. Westmoreland's strategy to break Hanoi by attrition:

Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this Earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little. 

We would out-kill; they would outlast. If they didn't lose the war, they might win it; if we didn't win the war, we must lose it.

The platoon leaders added the number of enemy bodies on the ground to those hauled away by the enemy and gave the inflated count to the CO. The exploits of Charlie Co. accrued to the balance sheets of the officers, lifers and those above; they were punching their career tickets with our kill ratios and body counts, like Edward III after the battle of Crécy. Therein lay the rub—why we grunts were resentful and suspicious of the higher-ups.

Victory had been brought and we remained the victors, but to go in and get out was Capt. Jackson's motto. We skipped breakfast, pressed play and gave back the won territory; air-strikes would obliterate our shallow entrenchments and what they had built.
After a wild one-night-stand, we rode out essentially as we rode in until an intemperate endnote arose. We crossed an open field and halted in front of a wood to rest our asses in the elephant grasses. Sam looked over his shoulder and saw two figures following us a hundred yards distant. NVA tracking, coming up before we were into the tree line? Curiosity seekers? We were still in Tet.

Sam, our John Wayne, stood up and spoke in his slow Texas drawl,

Well, gentlemen, the party's over.

He opened up with his 16 and several more of us let fly. I lobbed a few grenades on target with my 79, but our after-action patrol found only one body.

Jean Dixon had misfired, but we hadn’t. We had dodged a bullet—several, in fact.

Ha! I never believed in horoscopes.

¹ Roman war goddess. As the twin sister of Mars, she loved to spill foreign blood and wield a spear, sword, shield and fiery torch while bellowing orders and war-cries over the roar of battle. She's said to bring good luck. The Roman Senate met in her temple when business was foreign war.

What's the point?

Formations come in all shapes and sizes. Geese fly in a V. Elephants walk trunk to tail in single file with their calves in the middle. Wildebeests rest at night in linear bedding phalanxes, ten to twenty animals deep with a clear aisle between their ranks.

Soldiers goose-step past the reviewing stand. The Greeks used the wedge and the phalanx in battle. Roman legions fought in three parallel lines consisting of widely separated maniples (blocks) of 120.

In the jungle, a single file, three feet apart, is appropriate. A nervous point man leads. If he screws up, he could get a hundred guys killed. Our CO travels in the middle of our column with the 1st Sergeant and an RTO (radio operator).

Our senses are tuned to the jungle. The point watches for tigers, snakes and alligators. He checks trees; looks forward, right, left, up, down, like in the cowboy and Indian movies you saw as a kid. A detective in motion, wary as a cat, he has no idea what's about to go down. He interprets ambiguity.

When he's forced to hack through thick bamboo with a machete, the column slows to a snail's pace. Unusual movement, smells, sounds, broken branches or footprints are tell-tale signs in virgin jungle. A cough, a sneeze, a click, a snap. He freezes.

Man-by-man the column halts, coiling behind him like a snake about to strike. The CO has no clue why the column stopped until someone at the front radios back. We stay on our feet because it's an ordeal to get back up again with a ninety-pound pack on your back. When the point starts again, the snake uncoils.

If the column stops for a ten-minute break, then we drop to relax. A few of us stay alert.

If the point spots debris, a trail, a village, an old campsite or any other man made sign, our CO sends out a patrol before moving on. If the point finds a booby trap, we mark it with a stake and pass the word back. Usually they were old, out of commission.

Our Kit Carson scouts usually fell in with the point squad, near the front, not quite on point. They kept to the background, searching for bad situations, booby traps, anything out of place, volunteering information only when necessary. One actually claimed he could smell the enemy.

Less Traveled

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 

—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (1920)

Our main opponents were the NVA (North Vietnamese Army). They were legit—didn't want to get zapped by their own traps, much wiser than the nut-case VC (Viet Cong).

We never followed old trails, new trails or middle-aged trails, always breaking new ground to avoid booby traps and ambushes. If we came upon a trail, we passed the word back. We didn’t cross rivers unless we had no choice, only followed them. We never visited the same area twice, never operated at night, always skirted villages. So, we avoided snipers.

Sometimes it seemed like we were roaming the countryside looking for a lost civilization or buried treasure.

We advanced in a straight line, blazing a trail through rain forest, grassy plains, bamboo and elephant grass, rivers, swamps and mountains. We didn't listen to transistors (radios), talk or joke; our time was spent concentrating on who we were, where we were and what we had to do, maintaining silence despite our heavy loads. This was a WAR zone for God's sake! Those who forgot could become casualties. No screw-balling either, surprising in a company with an average age of nineteen.

In the bush, I had to figure it out for myself because I came with no point training. Unless I was using a machete, I talked to the guys back of me, especially if they were experienced. I wasn’t alone in the world, but I wasn’t used to looking for signs either. The slackman training me a few steps behind was old boots—a vet experienced in country.

The more point I took, the more prepared I became, like a Boy Scout.

The Boogie Man

The first time Bob took point, he missed an NVA coming out of a bomb crater. The man got clean away. Pissed off the vet behind him.

Another time, Bob spied a land mine. He dropped to one knee to present a smaller target. The column came screeching to a halt. The vet behind chastised him for reacting as if it was the enemy, came up to look for himself and dropped to one knee for the same reason. Panic at the disco.

After they informed the CO, a small squad, with its own point man, sallied forth to investigate. The mine was ancient, so they marked it, passed the word back, and on we went.

Prof. Dennis H. Mahan, who taught most of the top officers in the Civil War, introduced the idea of the point to West Point (no pun intended):

The apex, or most advanced point, may be formed of a staff, or other intelligent officer, under the escort of a few horsemen . . . —Elementary Treatise on Advanced-Guard, Out-Post and Detachment Service of Troops (1861)

The first time I walked point, I got yelled at for my excess caution in open grass. Fine! I kicked it into high gear. The column behind me could barely keep up but at least I stopped their bitching.

I never came face-to-face with the enemy, but point was too stressful, layered on top of my other constant worries; life, family, and comrades.

The M-79 grenade launcher was a specialized weapon, ineffective for the point and exempted those who carried it. After I had been on point a couple of times, a guy with the M-79 grenade launcher went back to the world. I jumped at the chance to trade my M-16 and point for the clumsy M-79, despite the weight of the fifty grenades that came with it. In no time, I became an expert with it. Yesactly!

Who's Point?

Point is an unpopular position filled by rotation during the CO’s morning meeting.

Who had point last?

In turn, the leader of the lucky squad christened one of his guys point—often a disposable FNG (fucking new guy).

The officers used compasses and read maps and map coordinates, but the point followed a stream of simple orders from the CO which made its way up the line by radio or word of mouth.

See that big tree 1000 mikes (meters) down there? Head for it.

Roger that.

Point also sent his notable observations back down the line, but he didn't communicate with the CO every time he stopped.

It could be heavy going. We had a famous case in elephant grass. PFC Puget had been breaking bush with his machete in the one-hundred plus degree heat for a couple of hours when he collapsed. We waited while Doc Howe re-hydrated him. Just add water. Captain Rice called the meat wagon (helicopter ambulance) and we continued.

Everything seemed hunky-dory until we found out that CBS had rushed the tape to New York. His mother freaked when she saw her son on the nightly news with his tongue hanging out. The army had been taking the browns to the Superbowl and hadn’t got around to her. That’s how you start a congressional investigation.

Meanwhile, the meat factory (hospital) gave Puget a clean bill of health, informed his mother and he was back in field after his two-day vacation.

Point was not a fan favorite, but neither is suicide.

No one wants to be the kink in the band of brothers.

The B52s

Keep off the path, 
beware of the gate, 
watch out for signs that say 'hidden driveways' 
—Private Idaho, The B-52's (1980)

In hundred-plus heat, a company of sweat-soaked grunts, a few officers and a couple of scouts, are humping—walking through the jungle single file, muscles tensed under ninety-pound packs, stopping occasionally for a ten-minute break. A nervous point man leads them. The CO (commanding officer) travels in the middle.

Charlie Company was a diverse bunch, with ten blacks and a dozen Hispanics. A lotta guys hailed from the rural U.S. and many were good trackers. There were no lifers in my squad, but my company had two—the 1st Sgt. and the CO.

Soldiers stick to their squad of eight and squads stick to their platoon of twenty-five, commanded by a lieutenant. The battalion commander flies around in his helicopter, maintaining radio contact with his COs so their units don't bump into each other. Think of a corporation following an objective.

We rarely pissed in the jungle heat because the human body conserves water, except what it discharges as sweat. The march doesn't stop to shit, either. Smoking on the move was the exception, not the rule. Lunch was over a ten-minute break. Many skipped breakfast.

The heat and the stench of the air
A sick feeling in your stomach, day after day
The smell of body odor 
and the chocking dust in your throat
Eyes that burn from sweat 
and are tired and painful from squinting
The ache in your back and neck 
while you stand waiting to move
A pause for a minute and a quick cigarette
That deserted second from reality
when your whole body reeks with tension
at an unknown sound or a shadow in the Bam-Boo 
—SP4 Bob Jackson (1970)

Our main opponents were NVA (North Vietnamese Army) conventional units of patient, patriotic men in for the duration, who liked to fight and endured ridiculous hardship.

My thoughts kept returning to where I had been and where I was going. Over and over I played the "what if we make contact?" game in the back of my mind. Do I drop to one knee or move out and seek cover or wait for directions? Think of a center fielder in a baseball game with the bases loaded and one out. He can’t wait for the coach. He's got to know what to do in case of a fly ball, a ball hit in front of him, over his head, in the gap. Anything.

Kit Carson

Thousands of Vietnamese in their late teens to early fifties joined the Kit Carson Scout Program. They wore the same uniform, back pack, and boots as the soldiers. They carried Colt M16s, traveled in the same milieu, mixed with the soldiers, and made the unit more effective. Our company always took the same two scouts; we never fired them. No effort was made to extract them after the war.

Lup, a fifty-two-year-old Papa San and former Yard (Montagnard mountain man), had built Punji pits for the VC before he defected.

A diabolical Bengal invention, Punji pits are lined with sharpened bamboo sticks and smeared with toxins or feces to infect the wound. The sticks are fixed to the sides of the pit and pointed downward so that a victim caught in the pit cannot be extricated without severe damage to his leg or the rest of his body.

The column had to stop for the painful extraction, lost valuable time and became highly vulnerable to attack until the victim was evacuated by helicopter. We never hit a Punji pit, thanks to the grunts and scouts.

We used to rib Lup about his habits of puffing on his pipe and eating anything he came across. He would smile and move on, eating alone, friendly enough. If he came across a turtle or a lizard, he would cut it up and cook it. "Chop, chop." One time, he acquired a baby monkey and asked Bob to build a fire, but Bob answered. "To hell with you, you're not gonna burn that monkey. No way!" His gourmet meal foiled, Lup let the monkey go.

A hard-core smoker, Lup would pick up the brand-new packs of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes that nobody wanted and fieldstrip them for his pipe. No big deal, because discarded items were destroyed or buried to keep them from the enemy. And each time he rotated back home, he would come back on with an old, worn out pair of boots so he could get a free new pair. Nobody blamed him for that, either.

Ty, a seventeen-year-old scout from ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), held a grudge against the VC for shooting his father in the stomach after Ty refused to join them. He was always highly pissed and wore a magic talisman on a necklace, an evil eye against the VC. He even claimed that he could smell 'em and wanted to slaughter as many as he could. Bob and Ty were good friends.

Food and Fashion

Virtually everyone wore plain OD (olive drab) jungle fatigues without unit ID, patches, or rank. Why wear anything else? On log (resupply) day, a heap of large sizes would remain until the end or until the scouts claimed them. Baggy clothes were hazardous. Besides, the small ones fit everyone, even the big boys. Underwear caused chafing in the sticky heat, so we did without.

Some wore their OD green t-shirts all the time. Our steel helmets had a reversible camouflaged brown or green cover, wearer’s choice. No one sported camouflage makeup (or any type); it quickly bled down your face in the heat and humidity.

Stop the column! I gotta freshen up my makeup.

Everyone wore combat jungle boots, black and green bottoms with a fabric top to absorb moisture and dry quickly, with or without socks. Most looked like crap. Instead of laces, mine had heavy-duty zippers I picked up from a Vietnamese flea market. They went on and off easier and I never had to worry about tripping over the laces. While setting up for the evening, many soldiers changed into something more comfortable: sandals, boonie hats and t-shirts.

CBS

John Laurence won an Emmy for his coverage of us in the field, The World of Charlie Company (1970). He led a small CBS news crew attached to Sgt. Dunnuck's squad. The sound guy liked to set out alone and record the jungle; one day he didn't come back. We moved on.

Our foes wore Ho Chi Minh slicks (clever, well-constructed sandals made from tires and inner tubes), faded green fatigues, and carried AK-47 rifles.

We could travel light because every three days we dialed room service: a Huey chopper with combat-ready C rations (canned, pre-cooked rations) and LRPs (dehydrated Long Range Patrol meals), warm beer and soda, mail and sundries like shaving gear, candy, cigs, etc. New clothes every other time, new boots only if you had ordered them. Smokers grabbed cigarettes. To keep them from the enemy, leftovers were chopped up with a machete or buried.

Water came in various containers, most notably in elephant rubbers (rubber tubes 8-10 inches in diameter and 5 ft. long). When pitched out of the helicopter, they would bounce crazy across the ground. Water sometimes came in artillery canisters tainted with gun powder. Yuck! It also came in anything and everything and believe it or not, even in regular containers.

Time permitting, cooks came along, set up a field kitchen and tables for the food canisters, and we all got a good hot meal. Mucho grassy ass—we roared! (inside) The Hueys didn't hang around. They got the hell out before attracting too much enemy attention.

A lot of our stuff had multiple functions. For example, we didn't take showers but kept ourselves reasonably clean by drying our sweat off with a towel. Afterward, the towel could cushion the frame that stabilized your heavy backpack. Mine had the older lightweight aluminum frame.

NDP

On the march in enemy territory, the Roman army sent out advance scouts to select an advantageous resting site. The legion would arrive at the designated location in mid-afternoon. For the passage of one night, they dug a ditch around a square, circle or triangle as required. The turves that they cut out of the ground would be raised into a rampart and topped with stakes or wooden spars, enabling the soldiers to rest securely in their tents without fear of ambush.¹

Like the Romans, each night we constructed a fortified NDP (night defensive position) in the bush. That way we could hide in the jungle and not expose ourselves to rocket and heavy weapon attack. Setting up camp took about two hours.

The battalion commander, the CO and his platoon leaders put their heads together and selected a spot on the go. Inadequate cover, security, proximity to trails, odds of a better area or anything else, would send the troop onward.

Charlie Company had been humping the jungle all day when the column halted mid-afternoon. The word came down the line—we would setup here for the night.

Since each soldier carried his own food, water, and supplies, we needed only provide cover. Platoons and squads were assigned sectors within a circular perimeter. The twelve squads were spaced 20-25 feet apart around and within the perimeter.

The CO, 1st Sgt., and the RTO (radio telephone operator) would set up smack dab in the middle of all this, in the secure CP (command post) hole.

We went to work like Romans. We dropped our packs, helmets, ammo belts, and five to seven quarts of water. Weapons were propped up against our packs. Shirts came off. Boonie hats went on. Everyone took part setting camp or guarding the forward and rear areas, regardless of rank.

Some guys shoveled dirt into sandbags, piling them three or four high to make a rectangular rampart for their squad. Once the makeshift bunker was built, weapons and ammo were stacked inside and together.

Others strung trip wires, hooked up flares, and set antipersonnel Claymore mines around the perimeter, about 30 yards out from our defensive rectangle.

Claymore mine.

We placed Claymores on the ground atop their tripods, into interlocking fields of fire, facing outward toward any potential enemy. Each mine or group of mines could be blown individually with a "clacker" (detonator). Each squad controlled their own sector of flares and mines within the 360-degree company perimeter. Every angle and square inch was covered. A bug couldn't get by unnoticed.

If a flare was tripped in his sector, the guard blew the mines in his sector, sending a lethal barrage of steel balls, .00 buckshot, screaming bloody murder through the bush. We scored a fair number of kills this way.

Next, each man used a machete to clear an area next to the rampart where he could sleep. The sleeping areas were close together, defended with squirts of bug juice; we avoided red ants at all costs. Air mattresses were inflated with a heroic effort, the camouflage poncho liner set on top for a blanket. If needed, an OD poncho was tied to the surrounding trees to provide shelter from the rain or mist.

Finally, we could rest and recuperate. The guys got casual with sandals and t-shirts. If you had to take a shit you put on your helmet, grabbed a shovel, and went outside the perimeter. No Pentagon toilet seats here. Some guys borrowed my .45.

Everyone was his own chef for the big meal; the secret ingredient in his kitchen was a bottle of Tabasco sent from home. C rations were opened with the awesome all-purpose P-38 John Wayne can opener, the greatest invention since the fork. It doubled as a screwdriver or a knife; we kept it on our key chains.

Spaghetti, crackers and cheese, and candy bars were OK. Tuna, eggs, and ham, not so much. In a highly unauthorized, but universal practice, C-4 plastic explosives dug out from a Claymore mine instantly heated a can of C rations or a canteen cup full of water for coffee, hot chocolate, or LRPs (Long Range Patrol rations).

LRPs weighed much less than C rations and were a welcome change, except for one small detail—they required water, a precious commodity in the field! So, I only ate them occasionally. Most of us stored our C-4 supply in an empty LRP bag to keep it dry.

The canteen cup could be washed with relatively clean ditch or bomb crater water. Some even used it for their LRPs. I never did. It was famous for parasites and bacteria.

Fed and watered, we could now kick back and reflect. We commenced smoking with cupped hands over the tip, listening to transistor radios with earplugs, reading and writing letters.

War Is Beautiful

The sun setting turning the sky a blood-red
The stars at night hold you like a satin blanket.
While a fuck-you lizard does his thing
Each night laying there staring at the stars
Gazing at all God's beauty and goodness.
Knowing that these same stars umbrella over everyone
and everything you love
Nights that seem eternal and ominous
—SP4 Bob Jackson (1970)

All was quiet as the stars took their places. Lying on my air mattress, arms folded behind my head, I awaited guard duty. Gazing up at the incredible night sky, a brilliant star moving across the heavens caught my attention.

I whispered to Bob, my closest squad member,

What is that?

A B-52. Operation Arc Light.

B-52 Heavy Bomber

Suddenly, the heavens blazed orange and the ground shook—a multitude of thousand-pound bombs had dropped from the sky.

My beautiful Star of Bethlehem was a Death Star. 

1 compiled from Vegetius' de re militari, Book III