The NIGHTMARES of Being a Point Man In Vietnam

Between 1965 and mid-1970, mines and booby traps caused 11% of all American deaths and 17% of all American wounds in Vietnam. In 1968 alone, that figure spiked. Lieutenant General William C. Gribble Jr. told Congress it reached approximately 25% of all casualties. Every one of those statistics hit one man first, the point man.

 One soldier, 15 to 50 m ahead of his platoon, walking single file through jungle where visibility was measured in feet. No detection gear that worked. No armor. No technology between his boot and a bouncing betty except his own eyes and whatever instinct the jungle had wired into his nervous system. Staff Sergeant John Gurch walked that position for three consecutive tours.

Five Silver Stars, three Purple Hearts, the best point man his unit ever produced. The jungle got him anyway. The jungle in III Corps didn’t let you spread out. Triple canopy overhead, wait-a-minute vines at shoulder height, visibility measured in feet. A platoon moved single file because the terrain gave it no other option, and the man at the front of that file absorbed everything the jungle had waiting.

 Every mine, every tripwire, every ambush. Lieutenant General William C. Gribble Jr., the Army’s Chief of Research and Development, told the House Armed Services Committee in April 1971 that approximately 25% of all US casualties in 1968 came from mines and booby traps. The technology to find them before a man’s boot did, reliable electronic mine detection that worked in dense vegetation, didn’t exist.

 On 22 April 1968, near Long Binh, the 199th Infantry Brigade, the Redcatchers, pushed a fresh replacement onto point within his first week in country. Standard Brigade policy. One week of Redcatcher training at Long then the front of the column. That day, an ambush killed nine men, including Staff Sergeant John M. Weatherford of Mesquite, Texas, who had just returned from R and R.

Sergeant Bill Brooks found the new man afterward, sitting catatonic among the wounded. Two days in the bush. Brooks. He just looked at me and didn’t answer. That FNG broke on day two. Other men did this job for months. Some volunteered for it. The question that matters is what the role actually demanded, and why most soldiers couldn’t do it even once.

The point man walked 15 to 50 m ahead of the main body in moderate jungle. In heavy bush or darkness, the interval collapsed to 3 to 5 m, close enough for hand signals to pass because nobody spoke. Nobody smoked. Communication was hands-only. Behind point, the slack man followed at 5 to 25 m, often carrying an M79 grenade launcher with a beehive round chambered.

 The two weapon combination, point’s M16 on full auto plus slack’s beehive, was designed to keep enemy heads down until the rest of the platoon moved up. That was the theory. In practice, it meant two men alone in the green, absorbing the first seconds of whatever came next. Rotation was constant because no human nervous system could sustain it.

First Lieutenant Robin Bartlett, A Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, 1st Air Cavalry Division, 1968 to 1969, rotated his point man every day, and sometimes two or more times a day, depending on the terrain and the heat. Veterans described degraded alertness after two to four hours. The point man seeing green and more green until his pattern recognition failed and the jungle became wallpaper.

Two opposed selection models ran simultaneously across Vietnam, and the contradiction tells you everything about the role. The 199th Brigade threw new arrivals onto point within days. Trial by fire. Break them in or break them. Tiger Force and LRRP units used only proven volunteers. Sergeant Roger J.

 Morris, 1st Battalion, 327th Airborne. Point men appointed themselves and chose their own slack man. They were often the first wounded or killed. They knew this beyond a shadow of doubt and performed the job in spite of it. Bartlett was mistrustful of soldiers who were anxious to walk point. He was also mistrustful of his own ability to do it. He tried it once.

 That story is coming. But first, what the point man actually carried in his head, not on his back, in his head. The cognitive load was simultaneous and unrelenting. He scanned the ground for tripwires and disturbed earth. He read the vegetation, cut bamboo, foliage that looked too brown, anything masking a position.

 He watched the canopy for snipers, and he listened for the thing that wasn’t there. Bartlett. The point man had to be alert to noises such as the click of a safety switch. Being alert to no noise was also important. If the birds weren’t chirping or monkeys weren’t screeching, this could be a sign of danger and possible ambush. Private Graham Sherrington, 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, 1966, who served as a forward scout in Phuoc Tuy Province, described the weight of it.

 It was a lonely, stress-filled job and one of great responsibility. If you made a mistake, it could cost not only your life, but the lives of many people behind you. That is the scene before every firefight. The green wall. Heat pressing through the canopy. Sweat blurring the eyes. The insects going quiet. The point man processing a hundred inputs per second, knowing that the one input he missed would be the last thing he ever didn’t see.

 Tim O’Brien, who served with the 23rd Infantry Division in Quang Ngai Province, wrote the line that every point man recognized. You’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin. All you can do is whimper and wait. 25 April 1969, Long Dat district, Phuoc Tuy province. Corporal Roy Zeke Mundine OAM, 5th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, Aboriginal soldier on his second tour, was acting forward scout when his section approached a suspected bunker system. Mundine advanced to investigate.

His words, “We saw this bunker system, so I went forward to have a look at it and I tripped a mine of some description and it just went off, bang, blew my leg off.” He continued issuing orders to his section for more than 40 minutes while engineers cleared a path to reach him. Mentioned in dispatches.

 The mine that took Mundine’s leg was almost certainly Australian, an M16 jumping jack lifted from 1 ATF’s own barrier minefield, an 11 km fence packed with approximately 20,292 mines laid between Dat Do and the coast under Brigadier Stuart Graham’s orders in 1967. Viet Cong sappers dug them up by the thousands and re-laid them on Australian patrol routes.

 Historian Greg Lockhart’s conservative count, 55 1 ATF soldiers killed and approximately 250 dismembered and wounded between May 1967 and November 1971, roughly 10% of all Australian casualties in the war. During one period in mid-1969, stolen Australian mines accounted for up to 80% of 1 ATF casualties. Sapper Robert Earl, 1 Field Squadron, Royal Australian Engineers, described the cruelest adaptation.

 The VC would set a lifted M16 mine, pull the pin from a grenade, and sit the mine on top. When Australians found the mine and unscrewed it to disarm it, lifting the mine detonated the grenade beneath. The point man’s job wasn’t just to find the mine, it was to survive finding it. Bartlett, the lieutenant who rotated his point men every day, who understood the role better than most officers in Vietnam, tried walking point himself once.

Climbing a steep trail in the Central Highlands, a man appeared on the trail directly in front of him. Bartlett backpedaled, jumped behind a tree, finger tightening on the trigger. Something told him not to fire. The man was friendly. Bartlett, “It was then I realized I did not have the skill to walk point.

 My platoon sergeant had been right.” A competent infantry officer, Munson country, nearly killed a friendly because the cognitive load of point exceeded everything he trained for. The job Bartlett couldn’t do for 5 minutes, men like Mundine and Gerch did for months. The gap wasn’t courage, it was a cognitive discipline most humans don’t possess.

15 through 19, July 1969, the A Shau Valley. Staff Sergeant John Gerch, the man Tiger Force called the best point man they ever produced, was in his third consecutive year in Vietnam. T.J. McGinley, who walked Gerch’s slack, described watching him work. “Watching John on point was like watching a puff of smoke maneuver through the dense foliage, not disturbing anything while meticulously observing everything in front of him.

” On the 19th, the element was ambushed. The platoon leader went down, exposed in the kill zone. Gerch dragged him out under fire, assumed command, led a countercharge that broke the ambush, then pushed forward again to recover two more wounded. He was mortally wounded shielding an aid man and a wounded officer from an adjacent unit.

Posthumous Medal of Honor, five Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars with Valor, three Purple Hearts, three tours. The unit’s complicated history, Tiger Force, E Company, First Battalion Airborne, 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, included allegations of war crimes during 1967 operations in Quang Nai that won the Toledo Blade a Pulitzer in 2003.

Gurtch’s conduct was never implicated. His Medal of Honor was for 1969. McGinley, I owe him my life because of what he had taught me. Early war folklore held that the Viet Cong let the point man pass to spring the ambush on the main body. Sherington’s battlefield experience says otherwise.

 Battalions in later tours found that when they bumped the NVA, the first thing that would happen would be the forward scout being killed or wounded by an RPG rocket or a burst of fire. US Army doctrine confirms it. The ambush kill zone is sprung with the most casualty producing weapon the moment the maximum force is inside the trap.

 In dense jungle, that meant killing point first to seal the exit. The point man wasn’t bypassed. He was the first target. No published statistic isolates point man casualty rates from general infantry rates. Bartlett states this explicitly. The 11%, 17%, 25% figures are for all infantry.

 The point man’s individual odds were almost certainly worse, but nobody kept that number. The army counted the dead. It didn’t count them by where they walked. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study found that 30.9% of male Vietnam theater veterans developed PTSD over their lifetimes. For the men who spent months as the first human sensor between their platoon and death, scanning every shadow, reading every silence, absorbing every first step into the unknown, that number is a floor, not a ceiling.

 A puff of smoke moving through the foliage, not disturbing anything, observing everything. Gone.