A war story

One of those stories that happens in war, and a “how to” at the end.

The first battle at Loc Ninh, Oct.-Nov. 1967

More thoughts from John McCoy -

"The famous snake capture! That is a story all by itself. It was a LARGE Python. I mean a really huge Python. It took about 8 or more men to pick it up. It was at least 12 feet long, maybe a lot longer. I have never seen a longer or bigger Python before or since. We were out on patrol, headed back in to the NDP at the south end of the Loc Ninh airstrip, when Lt. Fortenberry walked up, holding the front of the snake, followed by several men from his platoon trying to hold the rest of this enormous constrictor. He informed me that we had all just walked over the snake. That didn't make me feel too comfortable. The snake apparently had eaten recently, as it had a bulge about the size of a small pig about three or four feet back from its head. We all speculated on what it had eaten. Lt. Fortenberry managed to find a large cardboard box, about the size of a refrigerator, and put the snake in that. They named the snake 'Lurch.'

"Either that night, or the next night, we came under attack again. I remember Fred Hill and I were heading for our bunker when the first mortar rounds started dropping in on the runway. Fred looked over at the box that had held Lurch, and realized the box had been tipped over somehow and Lurch was loose. When Fred brought this to my attention, I hesitated to jump in the bunker, as I figured Lurch just might be in there. The mortar rounds were moving down the runway, falling closer to our bunkers, so I opted to take my chances with the snake and jumped in the bunker. I may have let Fred go first. Lurch wasn't there, and we never saw him again. I hope he crawled out to the rubber trees and scared a few VC to death.

"One thing I remember about Loc Ninh - we were trying something new so the jet pilots and gunship pilots could identify the perimeter of the NDP at night: we had been told to take an empty C-ration can and fill it 3/4 full of sand, then saturate it with either diesel fuel or gasoline. When darkness came and the attack started, we were to reach as far out of the firing port of our bunker as we could and place the can there, then light the fuel. The pilots could see the burning fuel in the cans from the air, but it was not visible to the VC on the ground. This trick seemed to work very well. Those pilots never fired inside our NDP, but sure hugged up close on the outside of the NDP a few times. I am convinced that those pilots saved our lives."

http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~realmccoy/locninh.html

What country you guys from? Oh. That one.

http://www.pbase.com/d_berry/image/92343413

(I wasn’t anywhere close to Loc Ninh in Oct-Nov 1967, but had been at Lai Khe (28 Inf base camp) a few months before. It’s a funny thing – You can be in an area and a month-long fight happens, but you don’t know anything about it. People back home probably knew more about Loc Ninh from TV and newspaper news than we did, some 100 kilometers away.)