My FIL was 173rd, part of the only combat jump in VietnamStop me if I’ve told this before. My team and a team of Recondos were on top of Bach Ma, We were supposed to run patrols down of the top, to prepare for an insertion of both Battalions (506 and 1/327). Turned to shit right away. Huge cloud sat on us all day and all night for two weeks. When we were set down there, a Chinook left us a pallet of C Rations and a water buffalo as in the picture. After two weeks water was getting low, maybe half a tank, so we started rationing it, in case we had another two weeks of fog. It stretched on. One night our LT was taking a short walk to the water point, and heard some splashing. He climbed up on the tank, and looked down into the hatch, with his penlight. There was a Recondo private swimming around in there, taking a bath! All hell broke loose.
“Sergeant of the Guard!”, he shouted. Several of us including the E7 from both teams came running. The poor kid was standing in the hatch dripping wet, nekid, and scared shitless. The Recondo LT cam up, and ordered his E7 to take the idiot to their CP. We were in a fix.
One of our issues was that previous residents of the hill top, mostly ARVN’s had ringed the hill top with booby traps and never taken them out. There were literally hundreds! We only ran one patrol, due to both that and the heavy fog, which persisted down about 3,000 ft for the hill top. On that patrol we had found a small creek, so we took every canteen and both teams made a patrol in force, to refill all of them. We did that once every three days, until the clouds broke, and they swapped out the water tanker. And left us there for two more weeks. This was like late December of 68.
Had some crazy stories like this, including guys “playing” with a cobra on a patrol.
You never know if the old guy you see was at one time a certified badass.
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