9 Things Grunts Did in the Rice Paddies of Vietnam to Stay Alive

Mekong Delta, 1968.  The platoon stops at the edge of a flooded rice field, and a dry causeway runs straight through it to the tree line on the opposite side, high and solid. The easiest walk a tired man could wish for.  The newcomers look at the dam. The sergeant looks at her for a long time and says, “Not at the dam.  Into the water.

Then he steps off the edge, kneels in the mud, and begins to wander.    The platoon follows him. Nine things infantrymen did in the rice fields of Vietnam to survive.    The dam, the tree line, the mud, the leeches, the water buffalo, the feet, the reading of the field, the night and the last thing that mattered the most.

None of this came out of the classroom.  Every one of them was studied in this water, and much of it was paid for there.  If these files mean anything to you, leave a like, subscribe, and tell us in the comments where you’re watching from.  Number nine, they stayed away from the dam.  A rice field is a flat sheet of water separated by walls of rammed earth, called dikes.

  They are dry, hard, and stretch in a straight line.  After an hour of waiting, the dam looks like a sidewalk that someone laid just for you. That was the problem. The enemy knew that the American detachment would want this dam, so that’s where he left his surprises. Delta veterans describe the same short list.  A mine buried at the top of the dam, a grenade in a canister embedded in a wall with a stretcher across the path, and a man walking along the dam are a man standing against the sky.

From the tree line a few hundred meters away, the sniper could see his entire silhouette, from head to boots, when there was nothing in front of him.  Many units made the choices that the sergeant made.  Into the water.  It was slower and more exhausting, but water was difficult to mine, and a person in it was much less expressive.

  When the squad had to cross a dam, it crossed it like crossing a busy highway.  Not in an easy spot where the trail intersected with the path, not in a heap. One man at a time at an angle, quickly up and down and down to the next field.  Not every unit did this and not every day.  Where the water was chest-deep or the column had to travel miles into the darkness, men walked along the levees and took their chances.

  But the forward officer did not stop watching the top of the dam.    A patch of land is a different color than the rest.    A small pile of fresh dirt.  A stick stuck in a wall where no farmer needed it.  A piece of rope in the grass. The dam was an easy path.  Those who survived chose the more difficult one. Number eight.

  They dispersed and watched the tree line.  The rice field had a shape that pleased the enemy. Open water, flat as a table, often several hundred meters wide, and on the opposite side is a line of trees.  Palm trees, bamboo, hedges, the edge of the village.  From between these trees you could see the entire field. Nothing was visible from the field except greenery.

    A classic ambush allowed the Americans to advance halfway. Too far to run back.  Too far to rush forward.  Nothing to jump on except water. And the man who throws himself face down in a rice field has his face in the mud and his rifle in the water.  So the infantrymen learned to cross the rice field like those who expect to be shot at.

  They were spread out five or ten meters apart , depending on the terrain, so one gap or one mine couldn’t have knocked down three men at once.  A squiggly line, not a neat goose, so a shooter in the trees couldn’t fire at a line of people.  And they didn’t all pass at the same time.  One element remained on the near dam behind the ground with a machine gun placed on the far tree line while another element waited on the other side.

  When the first group reached the opposite side and descended, the next group set off, one moving, the other watching the whole way.  In some units, the commander would place artillery on this tree line before even one man went down.  If the trees parted, the guns were already aimed.  None of this made the middle of the rice field safe.

Men who have crossed a hundred of them say there was always a moment halfway when the water was waist-deep and the trees were getting closer, when the world went quiet and you waited for it. Mostly nothing came.  When it did happen, a break and a shot at the dam were the difference between a bad day and a massacre.

  From the tree line, everything was visible. The trick was to never let everyone go at once.  Number seven. They struggled with the mud.  Rice mud is not the mud on a baseball field after a rain.  This is river silt, a thick gray paste that has accumulated over a very long time, and it is sticky.  The man steps, and the mud compacts around his shoe.

  He lifts his foot, and the mud retreats.  With every step, the earth tries to hold a piece of him.  She held a lot of shoes.  A wheeze with loose laces could pull the foot up and leave the shoe on the trot.  So the men laced their shoes tightly, all the way to the top, and many wrapped the long ends of the laces around the top of the shoe and tied them tightly.

    The jungle boot helped.  It had two small mesh drain holes low on the rise, so water would drain back when the man climbed onto dry land, and the top was made of canvas and nylon , which didn’t absorb water like leather.  The rifle was raised.  A man waiting up to his waist carried his weapon high, on his chest or above his head, because dirt in the chamber could turn the rifle into a club at the most inopportune moment.

  This channel had already been closed by what some men were pulling on the muzzle to keep it clean, and the wait was exhausting the men.  Every step is a small fight. The backpack is getting heavier.    My legs start to tremble.  The crossing, which on the map looked like a short walk, could knock the resistance out of a sturdy young man before he reached the distant dam.

  Sometimes the man would sink to his hips and could not get out on his own.    The next man in line would take him by the arm or shoulder straps and pull while the stuck man twisted one leg and then the other.  No one made any speeches about it. The man who pulled you out one hour was the one you pulled out the next.

  The dirt wanted to keep the man in place.  His friend was the one who wouldn’t allow this.  Number six.  They were dealing with leeches. The leeches were in the rice fields.  Not everywhere and not every day, but often enough that many veterans never recover from it.  They waited in the calm water and damp grass along the levees, and the line of waiting men was the best food they had seen all year.

  The rule that the old guys passed on to the new guys was simple.  Don’t tear it off.  It was said that a leech that was torn off could leave part of its mouth in the skin.  And in this water, a small bite can turn into a wound that doesn’t heal for weeks.  So the grunts forced the leech to release it on its own. Touch it with the lit end of a cigarette and it will curl up and fall, or let it be sprayed with insect juice, the insect repellent most men carried.

The leech fell off in a matter of seconds.  The bite continued to bleed for some time, and the man learned to shrug as a trickle of red liquid ran down his leg.  It was even better not to let them in. Men tucked their pants tightly into their boots or tied them with shoelaces, and some taped their pants at the ankles.

  This didn’t always work.  So during the halt, when the column climbed the dam to rest, the pants would come down and the men would look at each other.  Legs, ankles, waist, and a few places a man would rather not discuss in mixed company. The leech on the man’s hand was a joke. The leech elsewhere received much more attention from its master.

The enemy was waiting at the tree line.  The leech was waiting in your pants and was much more patient .  Number five.  They respected water buffalo.  The water buffalo was the tractor of the delta.  A large gray animal with its horns thrown back, it pulled a plow through flooded fields and carried whatever needed to be carried.

  And for a rice farmer, it was the most valuable thing he had after his land.  The Huskys noticed something strange about these animals from the very beginning.  A buffalo that weighed more than half a dozen men combined allowed a small Vietnamese boy to sit on its back and spanked it with a stick.  The same buffalo, looking at the column of Americans, lowered its head.

  It has been widely reported that animals have reacted to the scent of strangers, men who ate different foods, and those who used insect repellent. Whatever the reason, many veterans remember a buffalo charging at them through a rice field and grown men running through the water like schoolchildren.  So these grunters gave them space.

  They would walk widely around the grazing buffalo, and if one was worried, they would slowly back away and let the village boy calm him down with a few words and a slap on the side.  And most of them didn’t shoot him for no reason.  A dead buffalo could ruin a family’s harvest for an entire season.  In many areas this meant a claim against the Americans and often some kind of payment, but the lack of payment did not put plowing back on schedule that year.

  And the village that watched the Americans kill its buffalo for nothing will never tell those Americans where the mines are. Men who understood this treated animals as they were.  Someone lives standing in the mud.  An attacking buffalo could scare a platoon to death.    A dead man could cost them an entire village.  Number four.

They took turns getting out of the water.  Here’s the part of the cutlet that hurt the most people, and it had nothing to do with the enemy. A man’s legs are not made for life in water.  Leave them wet long enough and the skin will become white and soft. Then it cracks and peels.  Then ulcers appear, and then the person cannot walk.

  In Vietnam, it was called “rice foot” or ” dipping foot.”  And by many accounts , there were areas in the Mekong Delta where it killed more people than the Viet Cong.  This channel has already covered how the army first saw the problem.    What is important here is what the infantrymen, and in particular the 9th Infantry Division, did with it.

You have been in the water since dawn.  It’s late in the day, and you have n’t had dry feet since yesterday.  Your soles burn with every step.  At the rest stop, you sit on the dam, unlace one shoe, and take off your sock.  And the skin underneath looks like it’s been in the bathtub for a week.  White, wrinkled, disheveled between the fingers.

  Then you remember the plastic bag deep inside your backpack.  Inside it is one pair of dry socks, the most valuable thing you own .  You towel dry your foot as thoroughly as possible, pull on a dry sock, and for about 10 minutes you are the happiest person in the Delta. Units in Delta learned to incorporate this moment into the plan.

Veterans of the 9th Infantry Division describe a system in which a company would spend a limited period in the water, usually described as a day or two, and then come out on dry land to recover their legs while another company came in.    The exact time varied depending on the unit and the year, but the goal was to get people out before their legs broke.

The commanders checked their legs.  Doctors examined them at the halts. Many men have learned to take off their boots at every opportunity, even for 5 minutes, and let the sun warm their skin.  And the bag of dry socks lay at the bottom of the backpack, wrapped as carefully as the letters from home.

  The Viet Cong could put a person in the hospital.  The water could hold an entire mouthful, one pair of legs at a time.  Third, they read rice. After a few weeks in the Delta, the boy began to see the rice fields the same way the farmer did, and the fields spoke.  A dam that was intact yesterday, but broken today. Someone cut through it, perhaps to move water, perhaps for some other reason.

  A new path was being laid through the standing rice, the bent stalks leading to the tree line.  Fresh dirt on a dam that should have been dry.  Men who walked the same section of a rice field three times noticed when something changed and learned to talk about it out loud.  But the best alarm system in the Delta was the people.

    The rice village has a rhythm that lasts from dawn to dark every day.  Women bowed in rows, old men with buffaloes, children ran along the dams.  When the platoon found an empty field on a work morning, the farmer, who was always there, did not disappear anywhere.  The children who usually followed the column, asking for candy, suddenly kept their distance.

  Many veterans say the hair on the back of their necks stood on end.  The silence was a warning. This does not make farmers enemies.  Most of them wanted to harvest their crops and stay alive. Stuck between two armies on their own fields.  Staying away was sometimes the only protection a family had.  And perhaps the only warning she dared to give.

The field was full of signs. The most important was the farmer who was not in his field.  Number two.  They spent the night on a hill.  When the lights went out, the open field was the last place anyone wanted to be.  So closer to dusk, the infantrymen got out of the water.  The night position was where the ground was a little higher.

The junction where two large dams meet.  The edge of the farm, where the houses stood on raised ground, was a small island of land with a few trees.  Some units would stay in one place until dark, show everyone watching how they were setting up, and then move to their actual position after dark. This is often reported, and it has ruined many someone’s plans.

  Then the digging began.  In the delta, a person could often dig about a foot and come across water. Therefore, the pits were shallow, and the walls rose, not fell.  Sandbags were filled with whatever dirt was at hand, heavy and wet.  A person could spend the night in a pit half filled with water, behind a wall of wet mud.

It was still better than a rice mound.  Claymores were coming out onto the levees.    The causeway, which the infantrymen avoided during the day, was the road the enemy would want to take at night. So the mines went out along the approaches, opposite the dams leading inland.  Some units also launched flares there.

  And then everyone listened. The delta is noisy at night with thousands of frogs.  Veterans still talk about the moment the frogs stopped. When the noise in one direction suddenly died down, something moved there, and the men around the perimeter woke up silently. During the day they stayed away from the dam. At night they let the dam bring the enemy to them.

First, they carried each other to the side.  When a man drowned in a rice field, he drowned in water.    A wounded man in the Delta could have drowned in a field where the water did not reach his waist. So his buddies reached him, held his head high, and dragged him by the collar, by the shoulder straps, by anything they could hold on to, through the mud and water to the nearest dam, because the dam was the only shelter and the only dry land a medic could work on.

The medic was going to work behind the earthen wall, and someone contacted him on the walkie- talkie.  A smoke grenade was released, and the dust collection began. Veterans describe how it approached low over the water, the rotary breakwater flattening the rice in a wide circle and throwing spray at everyone.

  Often there was no dry place to land.  The skids landed in a rice field and the men carried the wounded man through the water on their knees, sometimes under fire from the tree line, and pulled him out the door. Then it disappeared, low and fast, and the platoon began to wait again.  The rice field is a place that many Vietnam veterans still dream of.

Not a jungle, not a fire base, not calm water, just green rice and a line of trees on the opposite side.  Today, the men who returned home are in their 70s and 80s, and many of them can’t drive past a flooded field in the spring without gripping the steering wheel tightly. Men who smell the wet earth after a heavy rain and find themselves somewhere else for a second.

  Men who still look to the far edge of any open field before setting foot on it. Dam, forest line. Dirt and leeches–all this was of little importance.  None of this mattered as much as a person who wouldn’t leave you in the water.  Back in the Delta in 1968, a sergeant looked at a dry light dam and said, “Not the dam, into the water.

”  By the end of their journey, most newcomers were saying the same thing to the next newcomer .  That’s how this grunt stayed alive in the rice fields.  They listened to the man in front of them and did the same for the man behind them. Now it’s your turn. What did these fields teach you that you still remember?  And what was the name of this place? Tell us in the comments.

  The best story will become a future file on this channel.  If this story is worth your time, leave a like because it will put this file in front of the next man who once pulled his buddy out of the mud.  Share it with someone who was waiting in those fields next to you, and sign if you were one of the men who crossed them.

  For the men who waited in the fields, for those who dragged their friend to the dam, and for the crews who swam low over the water to pick him up, and for those who didn’t return, this story is for you.