VBC veteran Jerry Augustine published harrowing accounts, with photos, of his service in 1966-1967 with B Company, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 196th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam. Jerry’s first book is Vietnam Beyond, which was followed by
By Jerry Augustine
On evening in the spring of 1966, our 196th Light Infantry Brigade fell into formation at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and learned we were being deployed to Vietnam. A heaviness settled over everyone.
A couple of mornings later, word got around that a soldier had hanged himself in one of the abandoned barracks.
Then, there came an announcement of a battalion-sized guard-duty inspection. More than four hundred men would be looked over, and the prize for the best soldier—the colonel’s orderly—was a flight to Vietnam with the advance party, a three-day trip. The rest of the brigade would endure a thirty-three-day voyage aboard the Alexander Patch and the Darby, two troopships notorious for heat, sickness, and close quarters. I was determined not to spend a month on one of those scows.
I set my mind on winning the position. I studied every spare moment—general orders, chain of command, weapons manuals—never knowing what questions might be thrown at me. My weapon and appearance had to be perfect. I polished and spit-shined my boots for hours, then smeared on a patent-leather coating. I emptied a whole can of Niagara spray starch into my uniform until my pants could stand up against the wall. To blouse the legs, I used two #10 fruit cans with the ends cut out so they formed crisp circles over my boots. I put my whole heart into it.
When the day came, high-ranking officers inspected us, and to my amazement I was named colonel’s orderly. I received commendation letters from the battalion and brigade commanders, three-day passes during the waiting period, and, most important, my ticket to fly with the advance party instead of sailing. The brigade shipped out on July 15, 1966. I stayed behind, checking in every three days and helping clean the vacated billets as I waited for my August 2 departure.
Before all this, in the spring of ’66, when most of our training was done, I had been granted leave to go home and get married. My fiancée and I were to be married in the local Catholic church, and because I hadn’t received First Communion or Confirmation growing up, I completed the Glencliff correspondence course so everything could be done on the wedding day. We married on May 21st—my father’s birthday—with my best friend Jim as best man. Though everything went smoothly, the thought of the coming year in Vietnam was always in the back of my mind. My wife stayed on post for a couple of weeks, and I used every pass I could to be with her and say my goodbyes to family and friends as deployment drew near.
On August 2, I was flown with the officers’ advance party to Vietnam. We traveled through Alaska and Japan before landing at Tan Son Nhut close to midnight on August 4. When the aircraft door opened, the heat and humidity hit me like a wall. I had arrived at my new home for the next 365 days—welcome to the life of a combat infantryman.
I woke up my first morning in Vietnam at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. I folded my dress uniform into my duffel bag and changed into the jungle fatigues I would wear for the next twelve months. Stepping out of the warehouse toward the mess hall, the first things that struck me were the thick, rancid smell in the air and the heavy heat already rising.
After breakfast, I was sent to the airstrip to board a C-130 that would fly the advance party fifty-five miles northwest to Tay Ninh Province, where we would wait for the rest of the unit to arrive. The flight was short but rough, the plane shaking and swerving in a way that made me realize how bare-bones everything was going to be from now on. I had to brace myself on landing to keep from being thrown forward.
I stepped off the C-130 onto a short, muddy strip recently hacked out of the landscape. Soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division—Tropic Lightning—were positioned around us, securing the area as they waited for the 196th to arrive. Off in the distance rose a single high mountain, strikingly out of place in the flat terrain: Nui Ba Den, the Black Virgin Mountain.
I had arrived in monsoon season. Every day around four p.m., dark clouds rolled in and unleashed torrential rain. I was issued a pup tent and cot and told to set up along the edge of the strip and walk to a designated spot for chow three times a day. My unit wouldn’t arrive for about ten days. In the meantime, the rain often poured so hard that a stream ran under my cot. All day and night, slicks, C-130s, gunships, and the occasional Chinook roared in and out.
On that first day, I saw a Huey fly overhead with a body dangling from a rope. A nearby soldier explained it was a South Vietnamese interpreter suspected of being a spy, being forced to talk.
“What the hell am I doing here?” I wondered.
One afternoon a small helicopter with a bubble canopy dropped down only twenty-five feet from my tent. Officers from the 25th hurried toward it, and out stepped General Westmoreland. He finished his business quickly and was gone before I could even think to reach for my camera.
It was a welcome sight when my buddies finally arrived. After ten months of training together, we were like brothers, and it felt good to see familiar faces.
Of course, not all brothers get along. My platoon sergeant, Master Sgt. James Durfee, had never liked me from the day we met at Fort Devens. We tolerated each other, but the tension was always there, waiting to surface.
Still, we began the work of building the Tay Ninh base camp and settling into the rotation of duties among companies, platoons, and squads.
The mission of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade was to block North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and across the Cambodian border toward Saigon. Days were brutally hot, dry, and dusty—well over 100 degrees—and we were constantly soaked in sweat. Our tents, or hootches, went up quickly and became welcome shelter after missions or a break from the sun. A raised wooden floor, a bunk, and a footlocker were luxuries we were glad to have.
Much of our early work focused on building perimeter bunkers around the base camp. We spent entire days filling sandbags under direct sun, stacking them over frames of eight-by-eight beams to withstand small-arms fire, mortars, RPGs, and other explosives. Perimeter security began as soon as construction started. Rifle platoons rotated through “bunker line duty” around the clock, usually three men per position, taking one-hour watches with two hours of rest. Although the bunkers were sturdily built, I preferred sleeping on the ground behind them; I always saw the bunkers as potential targets.
Base camp required a range of duties—KP, gear maintenance, and the infamous burning of human waste mixed with kerosene, a job no one wanted and few escaped.
The NVA 9th Division was active in nearby War Zone C, and Operation Attleboro—the first major multi-battalion operation of the war—had just begun. As new arrivals, most of our work stayed inside the perimeter or on security posts.
Once the bunkers were complete, our platoon sergeants began sending us on ambush patrols—one of the infantry’s most feared duties. Each day, predetermined sites were selected along suspected enemy routes. My first ambush was also my first night outside the wire. Most ambushes were squad-sized—six to eight men—though some were larger. Over my tour, I went on about a hundred of them, usually two per week.
A typical ambush team included an RTO, the squad leader, riflemen, grenadiers with M79s, and sometimes an M-60 machine-gun crew. Each of us carried a claymore mine to set in front of our positions. At dusk, Sgt. Ronald S. Figueroa led us out for my first patrol, our squad moving into place as other patrols departed nearby. A priest stood at a portable table giving Communion, and some soldiers prayed before heading into the dark. The look we exchanged with one another—fear mixed with determination—never left us. I had the same feeling every time I stepped off on patrol.
We moved out by compass about half a mile from camp, staying off trails and passing quietly behind village hootches. The night was humid, and the yards were thick with tall grass and scattered palms. As we moved behind one hamlet, the ground suddenly vanished beneath me. I dropped straight into a backyard well.
Instinctively, I threw my rifle aside to keep it from hitting the water. Weighted down with gear, I sank fast. Sgt. Fig reached into the darkness with his rifle butt, and I grabbed hold until he could haul me up by my web gear. After a moment of shock—and a little muffled laughter—we continued on to set up the ambush. I spent the night soaked, covered in insects, and smelling like a sewer, but no enemy passed through our position.
Not long after, our platoon was tapped for a rare full-strength ambush patrol. Just before dusk we moved out, crossed a large dried rice paddy about a mile from camp, and took up positions on a small island of trees in its center. Claymores were set, and we dug in for a long night of two-man positions—one hour on watch, one hour asleep.
The heat and mosquitoes made rest almost impossible. During my 4–5 a.m. shift I was shaken awake as my buddy collapsed next to me, instantly asleep. Fifteen minutes later, word passed down the line: movement approaching. We whispered the alert from position to position and raised our claymore triggers. A figure and a hulking shape emerged from the darkness—a farmer leading a single water buffalo, both violating the curfew.
As they passed directly in front of me, the buffalo’s flank brushed so close I could reach out and drag my hand across its wet, leathery hide. I held my breath, grateful when it didn’t react. We let the farmer continue on, unaware he had walked through the center of a fully armed ambush.
When the base camp was finally complete, we moved fully into search-and-destroy operations throughout Tay Ninh Province. Our mission was to disrupt the NVA 9th Division’s 272nd and 273rd Regiments as they moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and hid supply caches just across the Cambodian line. At the time, we were not permitted to cross the border or engage inside Cambodia, even though we knew enemy forces operated freely there.
Operation Attleboro was underway, and the 196th worked alongside the 25th Infantry Division, which had just fought a major engagement against the 272nd VC Regiment. The body count over five days reached 758 enemy dead, with more dragged away. We uncovered huge rice caches—stacks of 100-pound sacks on hand-built platforms six inches off the ground. Many bags were stamped CARE, which surprised us. Chinooks, tanks, and APCs hauled the thousand tons of recovered rice to be distributed to South Vietnamese villagers.
Most fighting took place deep in the jungle, where the enemy could hide, strike at night, and slip away. We moved often through areas stripped bare by herbicides; the orange-striped drums of Agent Orange were a common sight. If VC infiltrated local villages, it fell to us to clear them out, though they rarely engaged us in daylight.
One awful day remains fixed in my mind. Our job was to retrieve American dead from the 25th and 1st Infantry Divisions, which had fought in a field three days earlier.
We carried out more than thirty bodies. The heat had hardened them like mannequins. One major’s face was shattered; the smell of decay hung over everything. That night we were ordered to establish night defensive positions on the same ground. Flies swarmed the blood-soaked soil, and the stench made men vomit as they dug foxholes.
A New Weapon
When we arrived in Vietnam, we expected to carry the M14, the rifle we had trained with for ten months. We knew it inside and out and could strip and reassemble it blindfolded. Instead, we were issued a weapon we’d never seen fired: the M16 Armalite assault rifle.
It was light and compact—5.56mm, just under forty inches long, a little over six pounds empty—and it became the standard issue. But we were the guinea pigs for its early problems. We went on our first missions and ambush patrols without ever having test-fired it. Too many soldiers died with cleaning rods in their hands, trying to knock out a jammed spent cartridge—the only round they got off in a firefight.
The first time I fired mine, the empty case stuck in the chamber with the rim chipped off. Later, we learned the slow-burning ball powder left deposits in the gas tube that caused instant jams. The humid climate corroded the chambers, too, until they were redesigned and chromed. Thirty-round magazines often misfed because of weak springs. Over time, these flaws were corrected and the M16 became a reliable weapon, but early on, we carried rifles we couldn’t fully trust in the middle of combat.
Jungle Rot
Life in the field meant constant heat, sweat, and grime. The hundred-degree days, the wet clothes that never really dried—these took a toll. A friend of mine developed such severe rashes and open sores on his legs that he was reassigned as battalion PX clerk for his entire tour.
I developed jungle rot on my penis and tried to treat it myself, too embarrassed at first to see a medic. When the condition got worse, I was sent to a military hospital compound. While waiting, I saw a soldier submerged in a tub of ice with only his head above the cubes. A medic told me a tank had driven off while he slept against the tracks; he’d been dragged through barbed wire and fuel cans that ignited, leaving him badly burned. It was a sobering sight.
The remedy for my problem was a mixed a paste of penicillin and talcum powder.
The Mule
On missions away from the helicopters, we humped everything on our backs like mules. When the mortar platoon joined us, I was often assigned to carry the 35-pound base plate of the 81mm mortar in addition to about 35 pounds of my own gear.
Seventy pounds of equipment in 100-plus degrees, day after day, was punishing. Many evenings, when we set up our night defensive positions, I would fall onto my back like a turtle, soaked, too exhausted to roll over. My buddies had to unstrap my gear. The next day, we were back at it.
Dealing with the Locals
We spent many days far out in the boonies, moving from village to village, searching for enemy activity. Whenever possible, I tried to engage with the local people, especially children. I carried a Vietnamese–English booklet and learned common phrases, practicing whenever I could. When we entered a village and I spoke a few words in Vietnamese, people often gathered around, curious and amused. Sometimes they would bring me ice water or soda. I was occasionally called up to help with simple communication during interrogations, but the real joy was joking with the kids.
Once, on a hot midday march, our company halted at a fork in the road where a wooden bridge crossed over a muddy pool. We were stuck for a while as the command decided which way to go. It was blistering, so a few of us begged permission to swim. Our platoon leader finally agreed. As we stripped down to our trousers and jumped in, about a dozen children from a nearby friendly village appeared. When I called out to them in Vietnamese, they jumped in too. The water looked like chocolate, thick with mud. I was strong enough to “shot-put” the kids up into the air, and they laughed and came back for more. For a short time, we forgot where we were.
When we climbed out to dress, I discovered around twenty-five leeches attached to my body, their heads buried in my skin—even on my scrotum. My squad leader, Sgt. Moke from Hawaii, used a lit cigarette and insect repellent to make them release their grip; pulling them off by hand risked leaving the heads behind and causing infection. The children watched and giggled. For them, leeches were just part of life.
Creatures
Vietnam was full of things that could sting, bite, or kill you. Fire ants were everywhere; once, while eating C-rations, I sat too close to a tree, and they swarmed up, stinging me so fiercely it felt like dozens of needles. We were also warned about banded vipers—short snakes with alternating bands of brown and off-white. The story was that if they bit you, you’d only manage three steps before you dropped dead.
Operations
Behind all of this daily grind were major operations: Attleboro, Cedar Falls, Gadsden, and Junction City. Each had its own objectives and statistics, but for us on the ground, they meant more time in the jungle and the constant effort to stay alive.
