1st Battalion 22nd Infantry Belis Stories Page 3

1st Battalion 22nd Infantry

The Jungle

The rain

While we were out in the jungle covered mountains on search and destroy in September/October 1970 there was a stretch where it rained seemingly without stopping for 14 days, as I recall. Some of the time the rain was a light drizzle and probably did stop for short periods, but it never stopped long enough for us to fully dry out. I remember the only place on me that wasn’t soaking wet for those two weeks was the very top of my head. That’s because I wore my steel helmet all the time and only took it off after I got inside a “hooch” made of ponchos. Inside the hooch we could dry out our socks overnight so that we could at least start each day with dry socks. It didn’t take long for them to get wet again though.

We moved through the jungle in single file with distance between each man. Going up and down those mountains in that rain was slow and tedious. Much of the ground was mud and even where it was not mud the ground was wet and slippery and guys fell down. I had my share of slipping down onto my butt like everyone else. Each one of us who fell picked himself back up and continued on. On more than one occasion some poor guy slipped, fell, and went sliding down the mountain a ways before one of his buddies could stop him or before he could grab onto something to stop his slide.

One guy fell, and in the act of going down discharged his rifle into the rucksack of the guy in front of him. The bullet was deflected when it hit the c-rations or something else inside the guy’s rucksack and he was not hurt since the bullet did not penetrate into his body. The shot caused considerable consternation in our platoon’s leadership. That could have been a nasty accident with someone getting killed needlessly and our Platoon Sergeant, Staff Sergeant Dotson came down the line angrily telling everyone to clear their weapons, and watched and made sure each man did so. Many of us waited until Dotson was out of hearing range and loaded a round back into the chamber of our rifle. I was one of those who reloaded his M-16. I wasn’t going to go tromping around in the Central Highlands of Vietnam with an unloaded rifle because one guy had neglected to engage the safety on his weapon.

Jungle animals

The wildlife in the jungle was a real education. Much of the time birds made noise during the day. Crickets or cicadas made intermittent noise during the night. Some of that noise was loud, or at least seemed so, in an environment in which we spoke only in whispers most of the time.

I remember seeing some big centipedes that had a red body, being about a foot long and several inches wide. I was told that if one of those bit (stung?) me it would make me very sick. We usually took off our boots at night to sleep, and in the morning before putting those boots on, as a precaution, we would turn each boot upside down and shake it, in case anything had crawled into it during the night. I never found anything in my boots but one morning I saw a guy turn his boot upside down, smack it and a huge tarantula spider about as big as my hand fell out of it.

There were earthworms that grew to about 18 inches long or more and about as big around as my thumb. They were a dark purplish/brown, almost black, and the first time I saw one it scared me. I was standing with my legs a couple of feet apart and happened to look down and saw this 18 inch long thing on the ground right between my boots. I thought it was a snake and jumped out of the way. Amid laughter a couple of the guys informed me it was a worm, not a snake.

There were snakes out there though and some mighty nasty ones at that. I saw a number of snakes in Vietnam but I didn’t encounter as many snakes in Vietnam as I have, and still do, in southern Louisiana. On one occasion I did see a big black cobra that was about eight feet long. That fella impressed the hell out of me but years later I learned they can grow to twice that long. I saw a few bamboo vipers, had learned about them in training at Fort Polk, and saw my first one during the orientation course at the 4th Infantry Division Replacement Center at An Khê when I first reported to the Division. The bamboo viper was a small pale green snake and was the deadliest snake in Vietnam. It was known to us G.I.’s as “two step”, the legend being that it was so deadly, that if it bit a soldier, the soldier took two steps and then died. They didn’t kill a human being that fast but their venom was some of the deadliest on the planet.

I walked point (first man in line) for the entire Company on one occasion as we left a re-supply location and brought the Company on a trail down the side of a mountain, before reaching the base of the mountain where the three platoons split up and went their separate ways. Halfway down that mountainside as I came to a tree by the side of the trail, at the base of the tree I could see a little bright green snake that I immediately recognized as a bamboo viper. I stopped, turned around and pointed out the snake to the guy behind me. I then walked a good fifteen feet or so to the right off the trail and continued a ways downhill past that tree before veering back onto the trail. After continuing down the trail for a couple of minutes, I looked back up the mountain and could see the long line of G.I.’s coming down the trail behind me. As that line got to the tree with the snake, the entire line wound its way to the right and then back to the trail again.

During a period of about a week or a little longer we operated in an area where there were tigers. I never saw one but at night we could hear them. Tigers don’t roar…they growl. And they make all kinds of other noises that are difficult to describe. A comparison of those noises can be made to the sounds that domestic little kitty cats make when they’re fighting, mating, challenging or calling each other, and then imagining those sounds coming from something that doesn’t weigh 8-15 pounds, but rather weighs one or two hundred pounds. Most of the time the low, guttural noises coming from a tiger give the impression they’re complaining about something. Or they’re very unhappy about something.

Cats have an excellent sense of smell and good night vision. In the jungle it’s so pitch black at night a human can’t see his hand in front of his face but that tiger can not only smell that human, he can see him in the dark quite well. It was a real spooky feeling to hear those big cats making noises in the jungle around us. We could hear one calling from a mountain across the valley and then another answer that call, and the one answering would sound very close to our position. On a number of occasions while sitting in my foxhole, I could swear a tiger was no more than fifteen or twenty feet away in the dark, when he growled out something I felt was directed to us G.I.’s, that said “I’m extremely pissed you’re here” or “if I get any more upset I’m gonna charge into your foxhole and rip your lungs right out of your body”. Swear to God that’s what some of them were saying to us out there in the dark. It was very evident they did not appreciate us being in their back yard. They sent chills up and down our spines.

I remember one occasion where we descended the side of a mountain by moving down a stream bed that wound its way downhill through the jungle. The stream itself was only a few inches deep and not very wide, and it flowed down a pathway of solid rock, a dark gray slate looking rock. The water cut channels through the rock and we walked down the rock on either side of the stream. Trees and vines were all around us and the branches and leaves of the taller trees loomed high above us. At one point, as we moved downhill, a few small objects started impacting and bouncing on the rocks around us. At first we thought they might be hand grenades being thrown at us by the enemy but none exploded. We figured out in short order that the objects were fruit and pine cones being thrown at us by monkeys or orangutans in the trees above us.

Leeches were a real problem for us in the jungle. Little caterpillar/wormy/slug looking things that could penetrate skin and suck the blood right out of someone, swelling the leech up to two or three times its normal size. They were nearly everywhere and in some places we encountered hundreds of them. We had to be careful and not try and pull a leech off our body that had started to suck our blood. If we did we could break off a part of it under our skin which resulted in a bit of a mess. Some guys removed leeches from their body by burning the leech with a cigarette. I used insect repellent. If I got a leech on me then I used my ever present little plastic bottle of insect repellent and squirted some on the leech. The leeches didn’t like the chemicals in that repellent. That usually was enough to make it break contact with my skin so I could knock it off or otherwise remove it.

I tucked my trouser legs into the tops of my boots and tied the bootlaces very tightly, wrapping them around the top of the boots at least once or twice before tying the laces tightly at the top. I wrapped the lower part of my trousers close to my legs and tied a nylon rucksack strap tightly around my legs below my knees to keep those trouser legs close to my body. I then soaked my boots with insect repellent. All of this was done to try and keep the leeches from crawling up the inside and outside of my trousers and it worked very well. One or two times however I woke up with a leech on the top of my head who had engorged itself on my blood during the night.

And of course, there were the mosquitoes. I kept all exposed skin drenched in insect repellent. Face, hands, neck. A mosquito bite was not only irritating but those aggravating insects could also spread malaria. The main ingredient in our insect repellent was a chemical called Deet, and its peculiar smell is an odor very familiar to an Infantryman who served in Vietnam. It’s a smell I never forgot and anytime I do smell it my memory is transported right back to the jungle again.

Some of the guys from 3rd Platoon who I was out in the jungle with September-October 1970.
Standing left to right:
Charles Lewis, Henry "Ski" Jankowski, John "Goose" Bryce, Wayne "Andy" Anderson, Michael "Spanky" Sullivan.
In front left to right: Dodd "Utah" Owens, Henry Shillings.

Walking Point

After being with the platoon for a couple weeks I was designated to walk point for the platoon (first man in line). Still being a "new guy" to Vietnam I thought this might not be such a good idea. I informed the Lieutenant that they might rather want someone up front who was experienced, as I knew I still had much to learn. The Lieutenant told me I would do fine and directed me to take the point. I wasn't trying to shirk my duty. I truly believed we would all be safer with someone who knew what they were doing walking point. I suppose it was naive of me to not understand that often they made the "new guy" do that dangerous job, because nobody knew him and therefore nobody cared if he got killed.

Actually, as it turned out, I preferred walking point to walking slack (last man in line). I walked slack once, and it was for me an unnerving experience. As last man in line I was consistently turning my head to look behind me, afraid that an enemy might be sneaking up behind me. Several times I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle and stand up, scaring me into quickly jerking my head around to scan the jungle in back of me. A few times I stopped, turned completely around, faced the rear, and intently surveyed everything. When I faced the front again I would sometimes find the column had gone on and left me by myself, and a couple of times had gone completely out of my sight. That was a moment of panic. So I hurried to catch up to them, understandably nervous that they might turn a certain way that I hadn't noticed, and I could be separated and get lost from them forever.

One day as I was walking point I led the platoon through the jungle and came to a slight depression that may have been a dry stream bed. On the other side of that depression the jungle turned from green colors to brown colors. The bushes were not leafy, fluffy affairs, but instead were jagged looking, sharp edged ugly things that were more brown in color than green. Much of the growth was brown branches all intertwined together, and had big thorns. And beyond it, where we couldn’t see, everything looked dark and foreboding.

This was not an area of deforested, Agent Orange sprayed dead vegetation. The trees rose above it all and still had their green, leafy tops. But the stuff close to ground level was nearly all devoid of anything green, and the brown color of it all didn’t fit with the jungle we had become accustomed to.

I stopped dead in my tracks and stood there, contemplating it all. Something told me not to go into that brown area. I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that I felt that something bad lived in that area. It was more than bad, it was something evil. Definitely evil. Not of man. It was palpable, I could feel it, as if there were an invisible barrier in front of that brown growth. Every ounce of my being told me not to go any further. It was an odd sensation, a mixture of fear in addition to an incredibly strong feeling that this was not a place in which to venture.

The column had stopped behind me. After a minute Lieutenant Randolph came up to me and asked why I had stopped. I was at a loss for words, and simply held an outstretched hand toward the brown area. A minute or more passed as we both stood there saying nothing. After a while I said “I don’t think we should go in there.” The Lieutenant didn’t ask me why I thought that, and as I looked at him I could see he was having difficulty in dealing with this phenomenon also. His demeanor was one of confusion, and he wouldn’t look at the area of the jungle that was causing us both problems. He took out his map, and examined it, and when he spoke, at first, he stammered and stuttered and didn’t make sense. He didn’t question or challenge me as to why I thought we should change our direction of travel. He didn’t even say “I agree we shouldn’t go in there” or anything similar. He eventually said “We can go around this way” and pointed to our right, in the direction of green jungle. I moved us to the right and led the platoon into vegetation more green.

It was obvious to me this was not something I was imagining, as it had a definite effect upon Lieutenant Randolph as well, even though he didn’t appear to understand it was affecting him. I never forgot about this incident, and the strong feeling that I had encountered evil out there in the jungle. Years later I did some research on the Montagnards of Vietnam and found something curious about the Rhadé and Bahnar tribes who inhabited this area of South Vietnam. Their religion involved the belief in spirits, or yang, and of the many spirits they paid attention to, there was a category of errant spirits who were capable of great evil. The Rhadé believed those errant spirits lived in such dark places as caverns and recesses in the forest, and particularly, the mountains.

I’m not a follower of organized religion, and I know that some primitive religion is based on superstition and even myths. But many of those primitive religions come from long ago, when humankind was closer to nature and the earth. And without the trappings and distractions of modern life and society, those people may have been closer to seeing the pure essence of good and evil. I do believe that life, for the most part, is a struggle between good and evil. I know that evil can be created by human beings, but I believe that evil also exists by itself, as a force all its own. I will always believe, that on that day in the jungle covered mountains of Binh Dinh Province, we ran into a place where evil lived. Perhaps that is why we encountered no Montagnards or their villages in that area. Maybe they knew, and had known for centuries, that evil lived out there in the mountains southwest of Binh Khê.

Lieutenant David E. Randolph, Platoon Leader for 3rd Platoon

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