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.

Humor is where you find it.

Out on patrol, we would spend up to a month at a time in the bush. The Cav would resupply us about once a week or so. Getting resupplied was a lot of work. Sometimes we would find a satisfactory LZ other times we had to cut an LZ with explosives.

On one such resupply the Cav dropped off more food and ammo than we could carry. Fires were built to destroy the extra supplies and one man was detailed to throw extra frags off of the mountaintop.

We sorted through the cans of C rations to take what we wanted then we poked holes in the rest and tossed it in the fire.Finally we were ready to move out again.

I shouldered my rucksack and got in line. there was the sound of a distant pop and I was struck in the side of the head. Burning pain suddenly hit me and I reached up my hand to feel the side of my head. Hot sticky wetness flowed down my face. A moment of panic hit me and I yelled "I'm hit"
as I pulled my quick release, dropping my rucksack. I dove to the ground, certain I had been shot in the head.

Some fire was returned as the platoon reacted to my cry. That's about the time when I realized that the hot sticky mess on my head was not blood but was hot molten peanut butter.

A can had exploded and spun out of the fire with enough force to hurt me. I still take some ribbing for my error and everyone got a good laugh at my expense. I resumed my position in the line and we all moved out again.

Some time later, still with 2nd. Plt. we were moving in the jungle when a sniper stopped us. Everyone hit the dirt and we were returning fire. A man suddenly yelled out "I am hit." and I moved forward to check him out.

He lay there holding his leg which was drenched in blood. I exposed the wound, which looked like a gunshot wound with no exit. Chunks of flesh mixed with blood flowed down his leg. I used gauze to wipe the wound.

That's when it became obvious that he was not shot; but that when he hit the dirt the largest leech I had ever seen had burst open. Blood poured freely from the area, but it was only a minor problem.

There was a lot of relief as well as a generous measure of humor over the mix up. When the grunt saw the blood he had automatically assumed the worst. Now he had to deal with the rest of us laughing. The sniper ran away and we moved out again.

These were the occasional breaks from the daily and ongoing tedium of pushing through dense jungle in the Central Highlands. Life was hard but humor is where you find it.

Camp Buffalo Deepest Regrets

I was with a platoon pulling duty at Camp Buffalo, an oversize firebase near Ahn Khe, sometime around July-Sept 1971. There was nothing special going down; they just needed some grunts attached for patrols, ambush and straightforward perimeter security work. I'm not sure what Company or platoon I was with.

Ahn Khe was an okay place by our standards: showers that sometimes worked, barracks with honest to god bunks, a short airstrip, and a Battalion Aid Station with a MD all courtesy of the 1st. Cav.

One day the Bn. Aid put out a call for all medics to report. This wouldn't be good. I went with another medic to find out.

I can't remember what I was feeling as we reported in but I'm sure it included a mixture of fear and dread at what I was about to see. I'm sure because I do remember the relief that came over me when I realized that the casualties lying all over the floor were Vietnamese.

At this point in my tour I had changed.  I often felt numb.  We were under constant pressure to dehumanize the Vietnamese.  I no longer cared about things I once felt firmly about.  I was prone to react without thinking things through.

A clerk logged us and our equipment in. He told us that there were no U.S. casualties and the MD wanted any arriving medics to just pick a casualty. He suggested we pick something we were interested in or needed practice on. This was not protocol for handling mass casualties; it was far too casual. Life was cheap in Nam, especially for the Vietnamese.

The clerk volunteered that these dinks were riding on the back of a big truck loaded with logs and trees when they hit a particularly effective N.V.A. ambush. Their truck rolled in the explosion so there were all sorts of wounded.

With that, the clerk wandered off, clipboard in hand. The MD had his hands full and the Bn. Aid medics were all engaged with their casualties. We never spoke to anyone aside from the clerk. I doubt we were even noticed. It was pure chaos.

I turned to the other medic and we decided to work as a team. I expressed an interest in head wounds. We picked our way through the men, some dying and others crying out, looking for an interesting casualty.

This memory always plays silently; I think that it must be that I'm not ready for the truth of what it sounded like. We passed over all those broken bodies, shopping for a good head wound.

I made a selection and we knelt down by a young guy, practically a kid. I could see the fear and panic in his eyes, the helpless look of someone too badly hurt to help themselves. We applied dressings and did a few things to improve his situation.

I lit a couple of cigarettes and gave one to the casualty. I had to hold the kid's smoke while we held a brief discussion on his limited chances of surviving. It's unlikely that he could follow our conversation but there could be no mistaking our casual "don't give a shit" attitudes.

I'm sure he thought we were cold. I'm certain the other casualties were all hoping someone would come to them next.

Instead we stood up and said words to the effect of "fuck this" and walked out of that horrible room. I told the clerk that the kid needed an urgent medivac if he was going to make it.

We just walked out, knowing that no one would get that kid a medivac. We didn't really care either; we just wanted to get away from it. No leader stepped up to stop us. No one cared.

Now I wish I could go back to that day and try to regain some of my humanity. Regrets of this type are difficult to reconcile.

I think about this moment frequently, sometimes I can't get it out of my mind. I feel like my behavior was inexcusable, but I was simply to numb to care and I had become overwhelmed.

Deadly Mistakes

My plt. would sometimes stand down in Tuy Hoa - formerly an AF Base but now the Army ran it.

There was a numbered hospital on the Post.  I would sometimes go there to hang out with medics in the ER when we were on base.  I was also there for a couple of weeks as a patient when I was down with scrub typhus.

This was on or about July 28, 1971.  I was at the hospital for some reason.  I don't remember exactly why - tests, hanging out, I'm not sure.

They brought a GI in from the perimeter. He had tried to take an M-79's HE round apart.  He was in a tower or bunker position on the line. I heard a a few versions of what happened.  In one he was a FNG, a new guy, possibly a clerk who was assigned to augment the grunts. If that's the case he probably didn't know that the round goes live after separating from the brass and rotating about 20 or 30 times

Whatever the case was, he armed and detonated the round while holding it close to his torso.  This was instantly fatal.  Sitting in a corner with sandbags to the front and sides his body absorbed the full blast.

The damage was sickening, as if a flaming chainsaw had bisected his body head to crotch.  Blast damage is horrific.

Somebody put a white sheet over the body and rolled him into the main hall.

I have a vivid memory of the misshapen body under that drape with a perfect red line going down the middle. It looked like a painted stripe but it was blood.

The other man with him survived the explosion.  Sometimes I wonder how he feels about it now.

We usually avoided the new guys and especially rear echelon people.  Mostly I think it was because of stupid things like this mistake.  You just never knew what someone who didn't know what they were doing might do, and as a result get somebody killed. 

Life is Cheap

Early in my tour, I'd say May to July 1971, I was at the hospital when troops brought in a wounded woman from the perimeter. Sometimes the Vietnamese strayed to close to the kill zone, especially by the river where the women liked to wash clothes on a large rock. This was a dangerous place to do laundry; one of the guard posts killed a Viet woman for doing that very thing. In that incident the woman was struck in the head by a M79 gas grenade fired by a guard tower.

This old woman had stepped on a mine, one of the small ones. I think it was a model -14. We just called them poppers. They were designed to blow off feet if you stepped on them. If you crawled over one well that would be a different story. They were a small but nasty high explosive and very hard to see. They were scattered all over the sandy perimeter.

She had stepped on it with no protective foot gear so her foot was completely destroyed. A large gobbet of bloody meat with some toes still showing hung from a long shredded tendon coming out of her calf. She was screaming completely freaked out begging and bleeding out from the stump.

A group of medics was assembling and starting care. Just as I got there a MD took over. He was pissed at the noise and the mess. He ordered everyone back to their work and told someone to get the Red Cross to get her the fuck out his hospital. He bitched out everyone for even allowing her to be brought in.

One of the medics, a male nurse or a 91-C, stood up to him saying "this is an old woman in pain we need to help her". Everyone was looking at him now so he relented and allowed dressings and morphine. He was still angry and insisted they do it in the hall and turn her over to the Red Cross STAT. He left and the medics took care of her.

I'm proud of the medic who stood up for the old woman. Standing up against a doctor took a lot of courage and it goes to show what a crazy place Nam was. Life was cheap and a Vietnamese life was cheaper.

REMF's Gone Wild

Tuy Hoa was a big base with lots of brass, hordes of lifers, and assorted REMFs. It was not uncommon to be harassed by the MP's when we stood down there.

One afternoon, I was with a Sgt. coming back from the PX or the theater when it started raining. We began to jog hoping to get back to the Company Area quicker. A MP Sgt. in a jeep pulled up and ordered us to halt.

He informed me that I had a uniform violation; my trouser legs had come unbloused and were hanging down. No big deal but this was a chance for this REMF to hassle me.

I remember he kept pushing at me calling me stud. This was pissing me off. I told him to call me Specialist, my last name, or just Doc - but not stud. My attitude infuriated him. He went for his stick.

The situation escalated but before he could beat me down I submitted and covered my head. He cuffed me behind my back and shoved me hard into his jeep.

It was a short ride to the PMO, military police station. There I was hustled inside and placed in an interrogation chair in the center of the room. There was no reason for any of this to be happening.

After leaving me to sweat awhile, the MP came back in the room. He held his 45 and just walked up to me and placed the barrel against my forehead. Words were spoken but in my mind it was a blur. He was telling me to pray as he wanted to see me beg and cower. He cocked the 45. My last thoughts were that someone in 2nd. plt. would avenge me. I closed my eyes and he pulled the trigger.

Click. Nothing happened; I was still alive. He had dry fired the weapon. The sensation of almost dying left me speechless, wondering about life, feeling my hands still cuffed tightly and wanting to kill so bad I could taste it in my mouth.

That's when my Plt. Leader showed up with the Plt. Sgt. He asked for my release and pointed out that there were grunts outside with weapons. He told the LT at the PMO it would be best for all concerned if I were released into his custody. That's what they decided to do and once I was back with the Plt. all was well. Sometime later I found a unique way to deal with the MP Sgt.

Episode 7. Ambush

Typically we would spend one month on patrol and ambush and then rotate back to Tuy Hoa for perimeter guard and ambush around the base. A convoy home was a cause for celebration. We would load up in the back of sandbag-lined open trucks for a long ride to Tuy Hoa. Roads were dangerous but we knew that soon we would be in Tuy Hoa with cold beer and a real bed to sleep in.

The following enemy ambush occurred on one such convoy home.

Just as we exited the mountainous trail and the coastline swung into view we came across a small village. Local people with children gathered by the road waving hoping for us to throw c-rations, candy, or cigarettes. It was a great photo op - everyone with a camera tried to get a few shots.

It happened very fast. There were at least 2 incoming explosions. The gun truck in front of ours was hit and I remember seeing a man hanging over his mounted machine gun. These were big explosions. I had always assumed that the rounds were buried HE artillery rounds since that was what I heard first. Other guys in the platoon maintain they were B-40 rockets. I don't know for sure but whatever they were, they messed up the gun truck in front of me.

We were taking small arms fire from up a hill. Part of my platoon dismounted to assault the hill while others, myself included, returned fire from the truck.

There had been a small boy with a bicycle by the side of the road as we approached the village. The next time I saw him the bike and his body were mangled together and, as one guy said, "he was cut in half". I sorta blank out on the rest.

I was firing my weapon up-slope when our truck suddenly lurched into motion, swerving around the disabled gun truck. One of my buddies was running back to the truck as we pulled away. I leaned out and extended the barrel of my rifle to him. He grabbed it and I dragged him out of the ambush.

When we stopped I had only one minor casualty from my plt. That turned out to be a 2nd degree burn from a weapons barrel. He was ok. Then they brought a guy with a bloody head wound. A chopper was already landing for casualties so I left his makeshift bandage in place and deferred to the medivac. I don’t think this man was from my unit; he was probably off the gun truck but I don't know for sure. At this point we had our casualties sorted out, and all were taken care of.

An officer, it might have been my platoon leader, asked if I wanted to go back into the village to help. I said that I wanted to be with my platoon. They were ok with that and we loaded up and moved on. Now I am bothered by knowing we left Vietnamese wounded in that village that I could have treated.

An officer and Iraq war vet I met in a PTSD ward in a VA Hospital, told me it was bullshit for the officer to lay it on me to decide what to do. Of course I wanted to be with my platoon - that was my job, they were my family, my safety net.

If the officer wanted to go back to the village he should have told me to go back. It all depended on the tactical situation. We would have had to go back in force. It wasn't my call. This all made sense when explained to me, and I am grateful to him, for spelling it out. Veterans helping veterans is what it is all about.