We moved through the mountains, the rice paddies, the jungles and the beach in search of Charlie. When we weren't chopping trail in the jungle, there were lots of cow trails, hedge rows and flat land we had to walk on. The rest of the terrain amounted to villages and whatever came in between. Through it all we were shot at by their mortars, their guns, our own fifty caliber machine guns and our own mortars along with shrapnel from bombs of our own jets. We also encountered pungy pits, and explosive booby traps as well as other things I've forgotten...
I thought it was amazing, how after throwing everything we had as far as jets, artillery and mortars at the enemy on a hill, that it still couldn't take out the enemy. If our leaders ever tell us we can win a war in a land full of hills and valleys with air power alone, they are badly mistaken. You need ground troops and a lot of them to take out the enemy. Bombs leave a relatively small creator, clearing only a small portion of the jungle on the surface. There's no way you can remove all of the thick vegetation in the mountains and valleys that the enemy has to hide in with explosives. All Charlie has to do is crawl under a rock somewhere and wait for the bombing to stop....
On one memorable occasion after a small mountain had been heavily bombed with artillery and jets for at least two days, leaving it rather parched and baron, something almost unthinkable happened. We'd been told that the hill had been cleared and that we were to receive hot chow which was to be brought to us by choppers. Well, here we were standing in line with our paper plates that came with the chow, ready to be served out in the boonies at the bottom of this mountain which had supposedly been cleared. We'd only been at this location for a matter of minutes. Prior to this a sniper had been shooting from up in the rocks at other men from our unit. This hill was charred black from bombs. We couldn't see how anyone could have survived the bombing of this hill and therefore acted as though everything was ok....
Well, I wished that I had given it a little more thought before getting into the chow line that I was standing on solid rock and the relevance of that to our situation. I'd dug a lot of fox holes up until then, but not down through solid rock. An entrenching tool folds out into a shovel which is extended, or at a ninety degree angle. It also has a fold out pick that can be used instead of a shovel.
The sniper must have been happily confident that he could inflict heavy damage on a bunch of foreign soldiers standing still in a line waiting to eat. After all, if he could withstand all of the other bombings, what did he have to worry about? Well, bullets began landing too close to this soldier. From a very prone position, I fished out my entrenching tool from my ruck sack.. There was no dirt to dig, only a flat bed of stone. Needless to say, I used my pick. I had never dug so hard and so fast in all my life. I was busting hunks of rock two to three inches thick. It seemed like eternity to get just enough depth to force myself into. This was not full protection either. In other words, I had to say to myself, way into the depths of my soul, as I had done on many other occasions, "Please don't hit me." I think it's kind of like begging. You need something so bad that you are willing to do almost anything, or say what ever it takes to get it....
While your getting shot at and the bullets are landing all around you, when you have no protective cover, seconds seem like eternity. Minutes and hours seem like forever. There's no way anyone else will ever understand what this is like, the fear and the adrenalin rush, unless they go through it themselves. Later on, it made hitch hiking and other undesirable things back home extremely easy to do! As I now think about it, if only some others I know, relatives, friends, whoever, had gone through this for a prolonged period of time, my relationship with them would have been so much better, I'm sure...
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