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.)

Every day

One step at a time. Put this foot in front of that foot, that foot in front of this foot. Forget about the heat. Ignore the pain that started five minutes after you moved out, the pain in the lower back, the pain that worked its way up your back, to your shoulders and you want to arch your back and transfer the pain somewhere else, except there is no other place, because every place hurts.

The hurt is the same pain you put up with yesterday, the day before yesterday, the same pain you will put up with tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. You will put up with the pain until the day, the hour, the minute you climb the ramp and get on the plane that takes you home. And when you climb the stairs on the ramp, you will take the pain with you, a passenger on your back.

You put up with the pain because you don’t have a choice. You put up with the pain just as you put up with the cuts and scrapes and bruises, chipped fingernails and the dirt and grime beneath what’s left of your fingernails, the dirt and grime that won’t wash out maybe until you’re in a place where civilized people don’t have that dirt, that grime.

Every part of you hurts, places you didn’t think could hurt. Your feet and ankles and knees, sure. You walk for a living, don’t you? That’s your sole purpose, to go from here to there, and the only way to get there is to walk. Every part that supports your feet and ankles and knees -- those parts hurt. Your fingers hurt. Your ears hurt. And your eyes, when you haven’t had enough sleep, when you know you could sleep all day and most of the night.

Every part of you hurts, okay?

Ben Noonen one day said, “My face hurts, Man. My face hurts.”