Thank you Chaplain Claude Newby I couldn't say it any better

[squatting dog]

"The regular infantryman’s combat tour was a year—if he made it all the way of near total misery. He was always wet and muddy or hot and soaked with sweat, engulfed in the stench of unwashed clothing and bodies. Often, he drank water that was “fortified” with dead polliwogs and leeches; and he was accustomed to finding leeches in unpleasant places on his person. Several factors rendered the regular field trooper’s existence incomparable to that of anyone else. These factors included carrying everything they needed on their backs; constant vigilance around the clock; unending danger; spirit-draining, back-breaking, and exhausting labor; and an existence almost devoid of such creature comforts as frequent baths, clean clothes, beds, and uninterrupted nights.
They humped and dug every day. They pulled perimeter guard, OP duty, or ambush every night, no matter what else occurred. All this was interspersed with intentional dashes into combat and those totally unexpected times of terror during firefights and ambushes by the enemy. And with all this, the regular infantryman got few breaks even during occasional stints providing firebase security or palace guard. Exhaustion and sleepiness were the grunts’ constant companions.
The infantryman came to the war alone, committed to a one-year tour. If he survived the first battle, he was accepted as a veteran. He lived in unrelenting stress, and endured unimaginable horrors. Often he would carry the bodies of killed or terribly wounded buddies, sometimes for hours until they could be flown from the field; there was no escape from close companionship with death and maiming. Nothing compares to the regular infantryman’s existence in combat, not in the Army and not in life…"

Chaplain Claude Newby

 

[911]

Great story. The line about the water brought back a memory. Eleven of us had been on patrol and some of us had run out of water. The other guys only had a little left, so they weren’t in the sharing mood. We soon came upon a stream, but we didn’t know where it had been. If you haven’t been to Vietnam, I’ll tell you that this water could have been used for most anything, including for animals to dump their feces into.

We didn’t have time to get a fire going and boil it, but we carried water purification tablets with us. So, I took a bottle of these tablets, which I had never used before due to mistrusting them, out of my pack and without reading the instructions, I dropped 5 tablets into each of my 2 canteens. The first drink that I took, I would have sworn that I was drinking Clorox. It tasted that bad. I later learned that I only needed to drop 1-2 tablets in each canteen.