Harvest Platoon

Water

Thirst was always with us; sometimes it was a debilitating and urgent need. A man can only carry so much water.

In my case I think I carried 11 qts. of water that I had to conserve.  I frequently ran out.  When we ran out of water, we had to wait for resupply or drink anything available. 

Running water was great, stagnant water less appealing and a filthy mud puddle the least desirable.  I carried a large abdominal dressing to use as a filter for debris.  Not very sophisticated by today's standards.  I've drunk all of it and am still alive, although dysentery is its own payback.

True thirst is something almost no American knows.  We take for granted clean available water. Thirst like I am talking about is all consuming.  It factors into every moment of the day until finally, you no longer have it in  you to pick up and move out.

That's when we reconsidered drinking from the mud puddle full of insects and god knows what invisible creatures - water so corrupted I used five purification tablets to sterilize a quart.

Generally speaking we would also run low on food every 7 days.  Again there were only two options: wait and hope for resupply or actively forage.  The resupply tended to slow us down because cutting an LZ can be a big effort and it gives your position away.

Of course foraging is also labor intensive, dangerous and can betray your presence but we tended to put off resupply if there was local food to take.  Plainly put, we ate or drank anything we could get our hands on.  Sometimes we just went hungry.  Hunger combined with high levels of activity can quickly become exhaustion.

When we were so inclined, or hungry as it might be, we would harvest edibles like corn and bananas.  We took what we wanted and then moved out while destroying everything left of value .

On one occasion we killed a large sow.  I rescued one of her piglets from the impromptu barbecue. The mother was roasted in a pit fire.  I took some and fed it to the piglet.  He ate it all right up and in fact seemed to really get into it.  I named him Oedipus Rex because he loved his mom.  I carried that little pig in a claymore bag for more than a week. I was determined to make a pet out of him.

Some complaints about him squealing were made, but the Lt. said anyone hearing it would assume we were pigs. I sent him back on a chopper with a man going back to base. Unfortunately he couldn't watch him all the time and the hooch maids ate him.  He was a good pig while he lasted.