We usually stopped humpin' the boonies to make a perimeter and dig our fox holes every day around four o'clock. On a good night we'd get a little more than four hours sleep. We alternated our sleep time with someone else one to two hours at a time, according to how many men there were per fox hole. If you didn't get all the way out of your poncho when awakened to pull guard duty, you were taking the chance of falling back to sleep. This is where we had to discipline ourselves in order to stay alive at night. Sleeping close to our fox hole was the usual routine unless we were on ambush patrol when we had no fox holes and got no sleep. There was always that one percent who figured their sleep was more important than staying alive...
Water was precious. Sometimes during the dry season we had to go on water patrols searching for water. With just our M16's and a few bandoleers of ammo, about four or five of us would gather every one's canteens and take out across the country, sometimes for miles. One time everything was dry and we had no idea where to go for water. A few miles away, we noticed two mountains coming together at the bottom of them. Thinking that there might be some water run off from them, we moved out over flat dry land to check it out. It turned out that there was a nice cool puddle of water about five yards in diameter. It was all covered over with a nice layer of bright green moss. By the time we'd filled the first twenty canteens or so, after carefully pushing aside the moss, mud had become mixed with the water. We put two iodine, or water purification tablets in each canteen. To take away the taste of the iodine tablets we added whatever else we had, instant cool aid, or lemon aid from back home, shake it up and down the hatch, mud and all.
There were a few times when I didn't have much water, and drank out of rivers while swimming across them. These were not cold , clear, fresh looking rivers. They were usually soapy, and not very cold rivers that must have contained all kinds of bacteria, possibly including bodies floatin' somewhere up the line. In Vietnam, rivers were the laundry mat. Momma sons used a little bar of soap to rub on their dirty black pajamas, and while standing in rivers, folded them, pushing them against rocks repeatedly for hours at a time. I'm not saying that the soapy look of the rivers was necessarily caused by them doing their laundry, but it would suggest that it was one reason not to drink it without iodine tablets....
We were told in a company formation back at LZ Bronco by our company commander that for the the past six months or so, we had been walking at least seventy five miles per week. This was with a full ruck sack, heavy ammo, and most of the time while chopping trail with a machete through thick jungle terrain. Sometimes it was just plain humpin' on a trail, like as fast and as far as you could stretch your legs until you had no strength left. Many times, the strong would have to bare the loads of the weak. We were always exhausted and tired from getting little sleep at night. One night I was so tired that I fell asleep while standing up waiting for our point man to chop a trail for us. I fell into a thorn bush which, of course, immediately woke me up. These discomforts were little compared to getting shot at half of the time.
When squads of VC weren't ambushing us, snipers would shoot at us from a distance, and then run. At first they weren't that good of a shot, due to their lack of training and bad weapons. But, as time went on, they got better, and things got much worse for us. They liked to sneak up on us when we least expected them, at about forty yards or so away from us, and take one of us out, usually one of us who appeared to be a leader.
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