We seemed to just wander through the jungle. I treated injuries and sickness as best I could. Jungle rot was a problem for everyone. Even our clothes rotted on our bodies. Hell, everything rotted in the jungle. Fungus grew inside my watch, my camera and on my body. I had numerous medications for fungus but it was a continuous problem for us all. I checked feet whenever we halted. I also ran a continuous sick call for everything from malaria to parasites. I started to feel like a Mom to the guys, always fretting about their health.
I tried hard to fit in and look after the men in my care but the jungle is a fierce environment. There were thorny vines that grabbed us and held us back, scratching us to ribbons that quickly became infected. It is dark under the full canopy. Everything is either alive or rotted.
Every sort of biting blood-sucking creature sought us out. Leeches were the worst. We tied strips of colored cloth around our legs to help prevent them from climbing up and attaching to our crotches. Everyone had a preferred method for removing them. A cigarette placed next to a leech was slow but it worked.
Salt or bug juice applied to the leech killed them but sometimes they had to be carefully pried off. My skills in this were called on all the time. Leeches could be seen stretching their bodies off the leaves towards us as we hiked through their territory. They were unavoidable. At every stop we had to check for them.
There were worms the size of large snakes and all sorts of exotic insects. Snakes, apes, barking deer, and of course the Viet Cong.
We were followed everywhere we went. We climbed steep trails up and down the Central Highlands finding signs of the enemy all around. It was obvious we were being avoided but contact was inevitable. We could only hope that a few guys in the bush were not worth the effort to attack in force. For our part we were not really keen to meet up with an enemy that outnumbered us and knew the terrain better than we did.
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