What Is Was Like For A Grunt To Survive The Night In A Firebase In Vietnam
What Is Was Like For A Grunt To Survive The Night In A Firebase In Vietnam
It’s just after 3:00 in the morning and you’re lying behind a machine gun on the edge of a firing base in South Vietnam. The afternoon rain has soaked everything you own. The last flare went out a while ago and the jungle in front of you is black and silent. What you can’t know is that enemy soldiers have already crawled through that darkness until they are one meter away from your weapon.
You’ll only find out when they stand up. And on a fire base, you live with that possibility every night, from dusk till dawn. That happened in the early hours of May 13, 1968 at the Corral fire support base, north of Saigon. Gunner Andy Forsdike was part of an Australian machine gun team entrenched in front of the large guns.
And Ashley Eekens, head of military history at the Australian War Memorial, recorded what he saw when the attack began. In Forsdike’s words, the Viet Cong rose up all around us . They had crawled until they were just over a meter away from the M60, and we didn’t even know they were there. He was an Australian gunner fighting alongside the Americans that spring.
But the fear he described was shared by every “grunt,” the colloquial term for an infantryman spending a night in one of these hills. So how did a young soldier manage to stay awake, sane, and alive during nights like those? One after the other. A fire support base used to be a hill that army engineers had cleared with bulldozers, so that a battery of six howitzers could fire in any direction and cover infantry patrols miles away in the jungle.
According to HistoryNet, US and allied forces built more than 8,000 of these bases between 1961 and 1973. That figure is repeated on the internet as if 8,000 fire bases existed at the same time, and that was never the case. Most were temporary, built for a single operation and then abandoned. The infantry soldiers were there to protect the cannons.
Typically, a single infantry company guarded the perimeter. And the U.S. Army Center for Military History describes an earthen wall called a ” berm,” with a line of trenches behind it that connected the fighting bunkers. In front of the berm ran spiraling barbed wire, with the intervening ground sown with Claymore mines and trip flares.
The U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center adds one more unpleasant surprise. Buried barrels of gelatinous gasoline called “leaks”, which could be activated from a bunker to launch a wall of burning napalm over the wire. Pay attention to that wire, because almost everything that happens later in this story happens right there.
As the light faded over the jungle, a long night awaited the soldier , and the clock was already ticking. At dusk, the entire base was also put on alert. All the men were awake behind their weapons on the embankment, because last light and first light were the hours when an attack was most likely.
Then the Claymore mines were pointed towards the tree line and the cable flares were laid across the approaches. A veteran writing for UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies , describing his nights in the field, recalled a rule that no one needed to be told twice. Nobody untied their boots at night.
The same thing was happening in the hills . You slept in your uniform, with your boots tightly tied and your rifle within reach , because if the base was attacked, there wouldn’t be time to get dressed. After that, the night was divided into shifts. On a normal night, half of the men stayed awake while the other half slept, switching every couple of hours.
That same veteran admitted that 50% was a high alert level. But in enemy territory, he said it was literally a matter of life or death . On the worst nights, when intelligence warned of an attack, the entire company went on 100% alert and nobody on the hill slept. Some men did not spend the night within the perimeter.
Each afternoon, two or three soldiers with a radio were sent beyond the Claymores into the darkness as a listening post. Their job was to listen for the enemy first, whisper a warning over the radio, and return through their own perimeter without being shot down by their own side. Remember that detail, because at a fire base, one night, nobody came out.
Around midnight, the real enemy for most soldiers was their own body. After a day filling sandbags in the heat, they had to stare at a black line of trees for hours. And just as a man’s eyes began to close, the guns behind him fired. Throughout the night, howitzers fired a few shells at a time toward trails, river crossings, and likely rally points where the enemy might move.
The army called it harassment and interdiction fire. And a Texas A&M University study on this practice describes its purpose as denying the enemy rest, movement, and resupply. The problem was that those cannons were within the same perimeter as the Americans who were trying to sleep next to them. And when a tired guard heard something on the perimeter, a weapon could fire an illumination flare that hung from a parachute and tinted the jungle a ghostly white.
But those flares swayed as they fell, and every shadow on the perimeter swayed with them. A tree stump turned into a crouching man, and a bush seemed to be crawling toward the embankment. On nights like that, nervous guards would sometimes fire at shadows. Until that moment, the night belonged mainly to the defenders. They had barbed wire, mines, flares, and weapons.
That balance was about to change. The men whom the soldiers feared most at that time arrived one by one, crawling on their stomachs. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sappers were commandos trained for a single task : crossing the wire. Arnold Blumberg , writing for Vietnam magazine, explains that sapper recruits could spend from 3 to 18 months learning demolitions and how to cross open terrain without making noise.
They undressed until they were in shorts, blackened their skin with charcoal and grease, and advanced slowly using their fingertips as probes. When a sapper’s fingers found a booby trap, he would tie its firing pin with a sliver of bamboo that he carried between his teeth. When he found the cable that led to a Claymore mine, he cut it.
In other words, a soldier could place his booby traps and Claymores at nightfall, and a sapper he never saw could deactivate them without making a sound. Sometimes they managed to get all the way in . At a Marine artillery position called Firebase 6 Shooter, at about 2 a.m. on February 23, 1969 , a sapper reached out from the darkness and threw a grenade into the fire direction bunker.
Jack Wells, the battery’s executive officer , wrote about that night for Vietnam magazine, and First Lieutenant Paul Busetti, who was inside, summed up the moment in five words. I thought it was all over. Think about that for a second . A sapper’s hand emerged from the darkness and entered the bunker where the entire battery’s fire was directed.
The sappers proved that a handful of well-trained men moving at night could enter a defended American position. The United States applied the same idea in reverse. Deep in Laos and Cambodia, small MACVSOG reconnaissance teams spent their nights hiding in the enemy’s backyard, where a simple broken branch could give them away.
If you want to know that side of the story, we put everything we found into an ebook called the SOG Files. It’s on our website, True Vietnam Docs, and the link is in the description. And if this is worth your time, subscribing is the easiest way to help the channel continue its research. Here comes the sound every soldier in trouble on a hill wanted to hear. It came from heaven.
A slow, twin-engine cargo plane from World War II called the C-47, rebuilt as a gunboat with three rotary machine guns firing from its left side. The troops called him Puff the Magic Dragon. Their radio signal was Spooky. And despite what you read on the internet, they are two names for the same plane.
According to the Air Force Armament Museum, each minigun could fire up to 6,000 projectiles per minute. That’s the rate of fire of a single weapon, and the plane was carrying three. With one tracer bullet every five, the fire burst from the night like a solid red rope, and the gunboat could hover for hours, launching flares and sweeping the wire.
But flares and gunboats are only useful if someone sees the attack coming. At Fire Support Base Maryanne, nobody did it. Maryanne was a US division base on a ridge north of South Vietnam. In the darkness of March 28, 1971, some 50 sappers from the 409th North Vietnamese Sapper Battalion slid down the wire in teams of three to six men.
Keith Nolan, who interviewed the survivors for his book Sappers in the Wire, discovered that they entered without a single guard in a single perimeter bunker raising the alarm . No listening posts were sent out that night because the commander judged them to be more dangerous to his own men than they were worth. That decision seemed insignificant at the time. It wasn’t.
Within minutes, the sappers were moving between the bunkers with explosive charges. Nolan counted 30 Americans dead and 82 wounded. The US division’s death toll is 33 and 83 wounded, and Time magazine reported 76 wounded at the time. The Times headline called it a massacre. So be careful whenever you hear the claim, which even appears in a HistoryNet explanation, that no US bases were invaded.
That phrase only survives if ” invaded” means captured and held. The sappers were loose inside Maryanne. The Australians in Coral lost an artillery position. And at a base called Landing Zone Bird, the attackers broke through the perimeter. Bird is also where the defenders found their last resort. On December 27, 1966, three battalions of the 22nd North Vietnamese Regiment attacked this artillery base of the 1st Cavalry Division in the Kim Son Valley.
Specialist 4 John McInn told Al Hemingway of Soldier of Fortune magazine that he remembered the moon peeking through the clouds and, in that light, hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers coming towards them in single file. Their position was overrun and McInn and his men played dead. He lay there praying, waiting to be shot in the head.
What the gun crews did next is the part that still sounds impossible. They lowered their howitzers to a horizontal level and fired “beehive” projectiles point-blank at the attackers. Howitzers loaded with about 8,000 tiny steel darts each. The Center for Military History estimates the toll at 27 Americans killed and 67 wounded.
More than 60% of the defenders were on that hill. Bird is cited as the first time shrapnel ammunition was fired in combat, and McInn lived to tell the tale. Then, finally, the sky above the tree line began to turn gray. Dawn brought another state of alert and, at many bases, a minute of madness. Each weapon on the perimeter firing into the jungle at once to drive out anyone still hiding near the fence.
Then the medical evacuation helicopters arrived and the survivors set off to tell what the night cost Coral. By 6:30 that morning, the Australians had recovered their lost artillery position, and the memorial puts the death toll for that first night at 11 Australians and 28 wounded. Private Brian Buzzard was a 21-year national service soldier in the mortar platoon that was overwhelmed.
18 men, five of them deceased. He told Clare Hunter of the memorial, “We all thought we were going to die.” When he tried to describe the night itself, illuminated by flares and tracers, he called it both psychedelic and insane. And every man who came down from those hills at dawn had spent the whole night knowing the same thing Forske learned at Coral: that the enemy might already be close enough to touch him .
In the city of Hue in 1968, the Marines did not have a hill to defend. They fought street by street with Patton tanks.
