The HORRORS of a Cherry’s First Days in Vietnam

The HORRORS of a Cherry’s First Days in Vietnam

He is 19 years old and 11 days ago he was sitting in his mother’s living room. Now he is standing on a strip of tarmac at an airfield outside Saigon  and the heat hits him before the noise does. A wall of wet heavy air that makes his uniform feel like it’s already soaked through before he’s taken  10 steps.

 He has not yet fired his rifle at anything alive. He does not yet know what incoming sounds like compared to outgoing. He does not know that the man standing next to him, sunburned,  silent, 3 weeks from going home, has already decided not to learn his name yet. Because learning a new man’s name too early is its own kind of bad luck in this particular war.

 The army has a word for what this soldier is, Cherry. And the next several weeks of his life will be spent almost entirely on the process of no longer being one. This is the story of that process. from a departure terminal in California to a fire base somewhere past the wire  and what it actually took for a raw replacement to survive long enough to stop being new.

 We’re going to look at the actual timeline behind that transformation, the specific training built around what genuinely killed men in this particular war, the strange contrasts of life in the rear areas, the mentorship system that mattered more than any manual, and the small accumulated moments that eventually  without ceremony turned a liability into a trusted member of a squad.

 The pipeline that produced a cherry started well before Vietnam at a converted terminal at the Oakland Army base in California, where the US Army processed the overwhelming majority of its soldiers headed to Southeast Asia throughout the war. It is  worth being precise here about timeline because the popular image of a boy going straight from a high school graduation to a jungle firefight compresses a process that in reality took months rather than days.

 A drafted or enlisted infantryman first went through roughly  8 to nine weeks of basic training, followed by another eight weeks or more of advanced individual training specific to his job, infantry training in particular. Only after that full training pipeline, typically four to 6 months from induction,  did a soldier receive orders and travel to Oakland for final processing before deployment.

What could genuinely happen quickly was the last leg, the gap between receiving final orders and actually landing in country, sometimes as short as 1 to two weeks  once a man’s name came up on the manifest. That distinction matters because it’s the difference between an accurate  story and a common myth about this war repeated so often it’s taken as fact.

 The system was fast at the very  end. It was not fast overall, and it’s worth remembering that fact whenever you hear the shorthand version of this story told without the months of training that came before it. At Oakland, the atmosphere had less in common with a military sendoff than with a factory floor. Long lines of young men in their underwear moved through physicals and paperwork under fluorescent light, funneled forward by clerks working a schedule, not a ceremony.

 Outside the gates in the later years of the war especially, anti-war demonstrators gathered with signs  and in some documented accounts flowers urging departing soldiers to refuse orders before they ever left. Most walked past without engaging either way, exhausted by the process behind them. The war they  were being sent to fight had already become, by the late 1960s, a domestic argument as much as a military campaign,  and a drafty standing in that line experienced both halves of it within the same few hours. The flight

itself underlined the distance  being traveled in every sense of the word. Commercial charter aircraft, often civilian airlines contracted by the military, carried soldiers on a journey of roughly 20 hours or more across the Pacific, landing most commonly  at Bian Hoa Air Base outside Saigon into heat and humidity that soldiers who served described consistently across units and years  as a physical shock unlike anything training had prepared them for.

 Cabin crews on these flights by multiple veteran accounts delivered a genuinely strange final announcement before deplaning.  Soldiers carrying anything they shouldn’t be were told to simply leave it behind in their seats, no questions  asked, because customs and military police would be searching bags and bodies on the ground.

It was for many new arrivals the first hint that discipline in this war looked different from what basic training had described. From Ben Hoa, buses carried new arrivals a short distance to a reception and processing  center, most commonly at Long Bin, the largest American base complex in the country.

These were not standard civilian buses. Windows were covered in wire mesh rather than glass,  a countermeasure against grenades thrown from roadside crowds, and the ride itself, however short, was often escorted by armed jeeps. It was a small, blunt lesson in the nature of the war a new soldier had just joined.

 The line between a secure area  and an active one wasn’t always visible until you were already inside it. and the men riding those buses absorbed that lesson silently, watching the wire mesh rattle against the window frame with every bump in the road. What struck many new arrivals almost as hard as the heat was the demographic makeup of the country  itself, visible even on that short bus ride.

 Villages along the route were populated overwhelmingly by the very young and the very old. Young men of fighting age were in large numbers simply absent from daily civilian life,  having been absorbed into the war on one side or the other, whether the American aligned South Vietnamese forces, the regular North Vietnamese army, or the Vietkong insurgency operating throughout the countryside.

For an American teenager raised on a much cleaner mental picture of combatants and civilians, it was an early and disorienting introduction to a war where that line was drawn very differently than training films back home had suggested, and it planted  a specific, quiet unease that stayed with many soldiers well past their first weeks in country.

 These videos take hours of extensive research to get  right, and it takes you just 3 seconds to subscribe. It’s free and you can always change your mind later. Hit subscribe right now. Reception centers themselves were strange layered places and veterans who passed through them describe an environment that could feel almost absurdly safe in one direction and lethally serious in the other, sometimes within the same city block.

 Some larger rear installations maintained recreational facilities that would have looked at home almost anywhere. Service clubs offering hamburgers slot machines and touring entertainment acts, all operating inside a perimeter defended by bunkers, wire, and claymore  mines. That contrast did real psychological work on new arrivals,  whether or not anyone intended it to.

 It taught quickly that safety in this war was not a fixed condition. It could exist 30 ft from active defensive positions and vanish entirely a mile down the road. and the men who  adjusted fastest to that instability tended to survive their first weeks with the fewest mistakes. The formal incountry training that followed, typically about a week at a division base camp before assignment to a line unit, repeated a great deal of material soldiers had already covered stateside map reading, radio procedure, weapons

maintenance drilled again to the visible frustration of men who felt they’d already done it a hundred times. What differed was the framing. Instructors reportedly pushed a single repeated  question through every lesson. Could a man do this specific task in complete darkness, disoriented while under direct fire? Most enemy contact in Vietnam statistically and by the consistent testimony of veterans across units happened at night or in low visibility.

 and a soldier who could field strip  and reassemble his weapon by feel rather than by sight had a meaningfully better chance of surviving a night attack than one who needed light to do it. The repetition, tedious as it felt to men who’d already sat through it once,  was itself the point.

 Part of this training focused specifically on sound, because in the dense jungle terrain much of the war was fought  in, soldiers frequently heard the enemy well before they ever saw him. Instructors drilled new arrivals on distinguishing the report of an AK-47 from an M16. The sound of enemy small arms fire from friendly, a skill that in a genuine firefight could be the difference between correctly identifying where danger was actually coming from and firing blind in the wrong direction.

Some instructors reinforced the lesson bluntly, firing live rounds deliberately high over the heads of seated replacements to demonstrate exactly how disorienting and immediate real gunfire sounded compared to a training range recording.  An exercise that scattered more than a few men in genuine, if brief, panic, an embarrassment the instructors  treated as part of the curriculum rather than a mistake to apologize for.

 The most sobering block of this training covered booby traps, and it’s worth stating the documented scale honestly rather than repeating an inflated figure that circulates informally. Official Army casualty studies from the warplace mines and booby traps as the cause of somewhere in the range of 11 to 17% of American casualties in Vietnam.

 A lower share than commonly assumed, but still a substantial and specifically dreaded category of injury. Because these devices were engineered  deliberately to wound rather than kill outright. A wounded man required evacuation, tied up a medevac helicopter, occupied a fire team’s  attention, and inflicted a form of damage on unit cohesion and morale that a single confirmed kill often didn’t.

 Instructors cataloged the specific threats in detail. pressure release devices triggered by a soldier’s own weight. Pungi pits lined with sharpened filthcoated stakes and traps fashioned from the American’s own discarded equipment. Abandoned ordinance and ration cans repurposed by the other side. The instruction was blunt. Ammunition or gear left behind to lighten a man’s load routinely ended up as exactly the kind of device being taught about in that same classroom, which meant burying or burning what you didn’t use wasn’t housekeeping. It was

self-defense extended forward to whichever patrol walked that ground next. Assignment to an actual rifle company brought a cherryface to face with the specific arithmetic that shaped how this war was fought and measured at every level above him. American strategy, particularly through the mid to late 1960s, prioritized attrition, measuring progress in confirmed  enemy casualties rather than territory held, a metric usually referred to informally as body count.

 That measurement pressure ran down through every level of command, and its  presence, in the form of tallies and scoreboards outside company areas, some topped with a handpainted skull and crossbones, was one of the more unsettling pieces of institutional culture a new man encountered on his way to the field.

 It was for many replacements the  first direct evidence that the war they’d been trained to fight was being evaluated at the highest levels by a number their own company commander was expected to help push upward. The final transition from base camp to an actual forward position ran through a fire base, a fortified clearing built around artillery positions and ringed with bunkers, wire, and early warning devices like trip flares and mechanical ambushes rigged along the likely approaches.

 The contrast between arriving replacements and the men they were joining was immediate and entirely visible. New arrivals showed up in clean, unbleached fatings  and gleaming boots. The veterans they were meeting had faded, torn uniforms, deep sunburn, and in many documented accounts wore their gear loosely, beltless, bootlaces slack, an adaptation to jungle conditions that had nothing to do with looking sharp and everything to do with what actually worked after months in the bush.

 It was, without either side needing to say so out loud, a visible measurement of how far a man still had to go. And veterans who’d already made that same trip themselves rarely bothered pointing it out directly. They didn’t need to. What actually got a cherry through those first weeks alive was rarely a training manual.

 It was in case after documented case, an individual  mentor, an experienced soldier only months ahead of him who took the new man aside and taught him what the army’s own instruction hadn’t fully covered. How to pack and balance a rucks sack that could weigh 60 lb or more. distributing the load so it didn’t concentrate on the shoulders alone.

 What to throw away entirely? Air mattresses that squeaked with every shift of body weight. Standard issue underwear that chafed raw in constant  heat and moisture. A leather belt that invited insects into places insects had no business being. How to tie a spare set of dog tags into bootlaces rather than wearing both around the neck where metal striking metal produced a small sharp sound  that could carry further than anyone comfortable wanted to think about.

 Noise discipline repeated by veteran after veteran and oral history accounts of this period was treated as seriously as marksmanship because in ambush country  sound traveled faster and further than any single rifle round. And a careless clink of metal at the wrong moment could compromise an entire squad’s position before a shot was ever fired.

 These same mentors taught a cherry to smoke cupped under a poncho  liner so the ember couldn’t be spotted to distinguish outgoing artillery from incoming fire. And above all not to walk into the bush imagining himself the hero of a war movie. A mindset veterans agreed with striking consistency got men killed faster than any missing piece of gear ever did.

 Trust in this  environment was earned rather than issued accumulated through demonstrated competence. rather than rank or time in country alone. A new man’s first patrols,  his first night on bunker guard watching a starlight scope, his first road security details spent learning to read the presence or absence of local villagers as a genuine form of intelligence.

 All served the same purpose. Veterans taught replacements that when children selling soda or cigarettes suddenly vanished from a stretch of road, it often meant local families already knew something the Americans didn’t. Reading the absence of ordinary civilian life was a battlefield skill no manual back home covered. Each of these small experiences converted a cherry from a statistical liability the rest of the squad had to actively watch over into a functioning member of a unit that depended on him.

 The physical toll of those first patrols deserves its own accounting, separate from enemy contact entirely. A company moving through dense jungle might advance only a fraction of a mile across several hours, bent under 60 or more pounds of gear, soaked through within minutes. Nothing in most young men’s civilian lives, however athletic, had prepared them for that accumulating exhaustion.

 Veterans taught replacements to ration water, pad rucks sack straps with a rolled towel, and roll sleeves down against razor-edged elephant grass. These were not comfort measures. They were necessities that determined whether a man finished a patrol functional or as a liability to the squad around him. Acceptance, when it finally arrived, rarely came as a single dramatic moment.

 It came  in increments small enough that a man sometimes only recognized the change after the fact. It came when a veteran who’ scolded a cherry for wasting water later explained without being asked  exactly why the men wore towels wrapped around their necks. It came when a  medic treating razor cuts from elephant grass used a man’s actual name instead of the generic label he’d been carrying since he arrived.

 It came when an older hand defended a nervous replacement against another veteran’s open contempt,  reminding the room, usually without much sentiment attached, that every single man present had once been exactly as scared and exactly as useless as the one currently being mocked. And it came quietly in small private rituals soldiers marked for themselves.

 a canteen cup raised at the end of a first  full day in the bush. One day logged against a fixed, inflexible clock counting down toward home. That clock, the standard 12-month individual tour, was itself one of the defining and unusual features of how America fought this particular war compared to earlier conflicts.

 A soldier in Vietnam wasn’t fighting to help his country win an extended campaign  the way earlier generations had understood the term. He was fighting to survive a fixed personal calendar. And every experienced  man around him, regardless of unit or background, was counting down the exact same way, a shared private arithmetic that connected  men who otherwise had almost nothing else in common.

 By the close of those first difficult weeks, a cherry was no longer entirely new, even if he’d have been the last person to say so out loud himself. He had learned to move quietly in genuine darkness, to distrust open trails and unfamiliar sounds and discarded cans lying in places they shouldn’t be, to carry an exhausting physical load while rationing water.

 He desperately wanted to drink freely,  and to lean on the men immediately around him rather than on any lingering illusion of individual heroism. He had not become fearless, and by every honest  veteran account, the men around him would have trusted him considerably less if he had. He had simply absorbed enough of an unwritten curriculum taught by mentors and enforced by an indifferent jungle that punished carelessness without exception to finally be counted as one of the squad rather than a name still being

deliberately withheld. The label faded gradually rather than through any formal ceremony, worn away through accumulation rather than removed all at once. One patrol, one lesson, one uneventful night survived at a time until the day, sometimes only a few months later, when that same man found himself standing beside a fresh replacement of his own,  deciding the way it had once been decided for him, exactly when it made sense  to finally learn the new kid’s name.

 If you served in Vietnam and remember your own first days as a cherry or an FNG or remember the specific man who took the time to walk you through it, tell us what you remember in the comments because that account belongs in the record every bit as much as anything documented here. Share this video to help preserve an accurate account of what this  specific transition actually looked like.

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