The Long Road Back From Hill 55Chapter 3
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The Long Road Back From Hill 55Chapter 2 free porn video
Things were pretty quiet for the next couple of weeks.
We were busy on different details burying the dead and made some half-hearted forays into VC territory to flush out any remnants of Charlie’s assault forces. I noticed that most of the dead enemy bodies were actual Vietcong and a smattering of tribesmen from the Laotian and Cambodian regions. I only saw one or two actual North Vietnamese regular army types. I thought that was strange since this attack was being touted as an attack from the North on the freedom loving people of the democratic South.
The elusiveness of the VC was probably their best weapon. You didn’t know who they were, where they were coming from, or what they wanted as their real objective.
It just seemed like that major advantage was all thrown away in the Tet offensive.
Years later, I read in a report that the success of the Tet offensive was actually a major defeat for the enemy forces. The original VC who had been fighting a successful guerilla war ever since 1941 followed their orders and went to their doom just like the 600 into the valley of death. Only it was thousands and not just 600.
In fact, General Giap admitted he was forced to take the action because of political pressure from Hanoi to eliminate the “upstart” Vietcong.
This sort of deviousness was a facet of the Indochinese culture never appreciated in Western circles.
The so-called “turning point” of the Vietnam conflict was really a product of anti-war media efforts to undermine both the South Vietnamese government and the SEATO coalition forces that included other countries such as: South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and several other token units.
The media propaganda was highly successful with concerted efforts in the American press and most of the Western world. The hostile press made mincemeat of the field reports and “body counts” were considered figments of Pentagon imagination.
Early one morning, I got called to the bridge by a young Lance Corporal. He was telling me,
“You got to see this, Sarge! It is totally weird!”
In a land of chaos, it was hard to define weird.
The raging brown water was frothing at the edges from the torrential rainfall in the moonless night. At first, I thought there were stacks of logs being floated down the river like from some lumber yard. Then, I realized there were no lumber yards in Vietnam. Most of the wood they used in building was imported and firewood was better picked up off the ground. Dead burns better than live.
My eyes made an adjustment with my brain housing group and the logs turned into dead bodies. There were literally hundreds of dead bodies floating down the river under our bridge. Usually, there was an odd dead body here and there and we would put a round in it just to make sure it wasn’t a dreaded North Vietnamese “Frogman”. We would run short on ammo if we tried it on this mind boggling onslaught of the floating dead. I told the Lance Corporal to just try to keep a running “dead” count not a head count and let them all continue on their journey.
I informed the company commander of the incident and he kind of laughed it off and told me not to put it in writing. Later, I found out that the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) had “cleared and destroyed” a sizable chunk of Phu Loc 5 and Phu Loc 6 upriver. We had taken a lot of casualties in that area and figured there was no need for us to get involved in our host government’s methods of pacifying rural areas.
After that incident, the peaceful river seemed a little less peaceful and a lot more treacherous.
We were running a little short on rations and ammo near the end of February. A lot of our supplies got diverted down to Saigon because they had a couple of logistical bases go up in flames. Rumor was that it was really sabotage and not an unfortunate accident like it was reported. Bottom line was we had to stretch what we had for a bit.
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