Sweeping Action Skirmishes in Vietnam 1968
3. Sweeping Action Skirmishes at the Hidden Enemy Base
(Note: As with the previous extract from the book, all the names remain fictitious, drawn mainly from diverse mythological usage but they do – the author would like to think – characterise them in their roles. T.W.)
The routine or schedule of duty was for four squads to leave the base at Long Bean once a month to pull an ambush. There were two big rivers near the hills. Across the river where Ulixes’s squad camped were the Thais, also setting up their ambush traps.
The army had dropped in these positions “connexes”, that is, the huge metallic containers used in trans-oceanic shipping. The connex was cut off at the back so that the open side could be sand-bagged, and the squad could set up their guns and await the enemy. They also set up booby traps with wires around which would set off flares just in case any one stole up to the connexes while the men were asleep.
On one occasion, Percival, from the Bronx, decided to step out to ease himself in the dark. He tripped on a wire and set off the flares. Ulixes – a light sleeper – grabbed his M16 and was just about to drill the guy when “Percy” yelled out: “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and got everybody up.
Normally, the squads stayed up there in the connexes for about a week at a time. To keep themselves in shape in order to face up to the unexpected, they smoked marijuana, but this was done in some other squad’s connex each time, if they could help it. The idea was not to get caught doing it in your own connex.
One night while Ulixes’s squad was sucking the reefer dry in a connex, they heard a deafening explosion. It was a rocket-propelled grenade that went off. They stuck their heads out to find their own connex blown to smithereens! (Well, almost, I should think.)
According to Ulixes, the only other incident (among others) worth recounting happened some time in the following May of 1968, though he could not be certain about the date. The rest of the skirmishes involved only momentary fire from the enemy: they would suddenly fire out of the thrush for a few minutes and when the squad returned fire, they would pull up their positions and disappear into the jungle. Apart from two other devastating incidents, no fearful confrontation took place, except for the following encounter.
Sweeping Action
This was a sweeping operation in the jungle. Four squads were put together and with a captain at the head of a company-strong contingent, the boys marched into the jungle where rice-paddy fields were littered along a river in the vicinity of a small mountain. The base received an intelligence report that an NVA complex with hospital and armaments was hidden in the area.
It was the kind of operation that Ulixes described was an “ass-hole puckerer”, by which he meant the tension it generated “tightens up” the individual and gets the adrenaline to flow. Probably because one couldn’t see the enemy nor could one guess at his strength, and one knew he was probably watching one’s every move and waiting for a better opportunity to wipe out the greatest number amongst them when they least expected it.
The actual sweeping movement referred to the position of the guys moving forward fanned out - with about ten yards in between them. They were in the rice fields. They could only see the tree line where the dense jungle began, and they had to worry about snipers and land mines under foot. The captain sent out “two or three guys” to check behind the tree line. They came back saying there was nothing they could find.
And yet, when the squads penetrated the jungle, they soon walked into a base camp some half a mile (as) big. They found a hospital with wooden beds and scalpels; some hundred bicycles arranged in an enclosure; AK 47s, etc., so they called base to say it was too big to blow up. Instead, since the enemy had either taken cover or deserted the place in a hurry, they decided to do the mopping up themselves.
They found deep “rat holes” and “spider holes”. With rat holes they’d get the smallest guy amongst them, tie a rope to his leg and get him to scour the underground nest. The spider holes were nothing but narrow dug-out holes where only one individual could stand. On the top, they were covered with weeds and rags. The NVA would let you pass them and then take a pot shot at you.
It was the dry season. River beds were generally dry, too. Some had some water still flowing, but the rest were covered with oozing clay. In places, under overhanging branches, water would collect in pools. The boys had to cross the river. And that was no easy task as the snipers got into action. Some hundred NVA were battering their rear. Ulixes’s squad under Big Jumala and another squad under Summanus, a black, and two more squads made up platoon strength. They were now ordered to withdraw across the river. Another squad was ordered to cover their retreat.
The point of the river they had to traverse was wide and sludgy, and in places where others had passed extremely treacherous for the bed had become a thick glue-like mud which made every step with their packs on a veritable Calvary. With the water level down, the banks remained high – sometimes as much as twenty feet high – and difficult to scale with their back packs and weapons. Most of the men kept throwing up what with the extraordinary effort they had to make to wade through the mud and the heat that kept eating into their brains.
One white soldier had a Prick-25 radio box, run on batteries, on his back, and he was struggling through a pool of water under some overhanging trees a little ahead of others. Suddenly, the others saw a huge python drop on to him and drag him under water. By the time the others got to him to free him from the stranglehold of the mass of twisted up python flesh, he was already drowned.
“What a way to die! To come out so far and be strangled by a python! Would his relatives be told of the way he came to an end?”
“No”, said Ulixes. “They would be told that…”
“…he died in action.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“After all, he was out on action against the enemy.”
“Right.”
Some seventy guys managed to get across the river
with their equipment. The last two left in the now churned-up river bed were Summanus and Ulixes.
“When we were near the further bank, I saw fire but no people.”
Summanus had managed to get to the foot of the bank. Others who had climbed the marshy slope up to the other side of the river just lay sprawled on the ground oblivious of all the rest of the world. Practically all of them were sick and lay there too weak to move.
“As for me, I sank in the mud up to my knees. I felt faint. I was throwing up, too. The heat made me sick. I could see I was sinking. I hadn’t the strength even to reach for my KA-Bar knife to slash my back pack and the bandoliers. I told myself: I’m a dead man!”
Just then, Summanus spotted him and shouted out to him to grab his extended rifle. He couldn’t reach out to the rifle. Summanus went round past another dry patch and came up closer to Ulixes. With his KA-Bar he cut off Ulixes’s bandoliers and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him to the safety of the bank.
By then, Big Jumala came to the bank edge, and together with the others pulled the two to safety. They could see the rest of the boys wallowing in their vomit.
“When you sweat more than you can keep drinking, then you get dehydrated, and by then you’d need to be put on intravenous fluids. That’s when you’ve got sun stroke. It’s too late.”
“So, Summanus actually saved your life?”
“Oh, yes, he did. No doubt about it!”
© T. Wignesan. …the smell of piss an’ shit in his pants. The Vicarious Memoir of a Vietnam War Veteran. Allahabad/ Cyberwit, 2009, pp. 90-93.
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