10 Things Grunts Were Ordered Never to Do in Vietnam and Did Anyway JJ

a road west of Coochi, 1968. The standing order for the armored personnel carrier is plain, and the crew heard it from a captain that morning. Troops ride inside, hatches down. The track pulls out with 11 men on it, and not one of them is inside. They sit on the roof with their boots hanging over the sides, a case of rations under the machine gun, the driver’s head out of his hatch.

The captain watches them go and says nothing. That is one order. There are nine more. How the infantry rode, what they wrote on their helmets, what they did with the pills and the aftershave and the selector switch, what they carried that they were told not to carry, what they ate, what they kept in the platoon, how close they stood and how they counted the days.

10 orders given in good faith and broken every day. Not one was rebellion. Everyone was field logic and in most cases the field was right. A like and a subscribe cost you nothing and a comment saying where you are watching from helps this channel more than you know. Number 10. Ride inside the track.

The armored personnel carrier was designed as a battle taxi. Infantry rode inside under the roof behind the aluminum and dismounted through the ramp at the objective. The armor was there to be used. A man on the roof was throwing away the one thing the vehicle gave him. The men who rode the tracks in Vietnam in the mechanized battalions of the 25th Infantry Division and the 9inth and in the 11th Armored Cavalry rode on top almost from the start.

There were three reasons and each one was learned the hard way. The first was the mine. The enemy buried mines and old artillery shells in roads and trails, and the aluminum hull was not built to take a blast from underneath. When a track hit a mine, the floor came up. Men inside took the blast through the floor plates and their own seats. Men on the roof were thrown clear, and a lot of them stood up.

Once a battalion had seen one track hit with men inside, the order was dead in that battalion. The second was the heat. The hull was a metal box with a diesel engine in it, closed up in a 100° sun, and the air inside did not move. On the roof, there was wind. The third was speed. A man inside came out through the ramp at the back, in line, one at a time.

A man on the roof rolled off the side in one motion, away from the fire. In an ambush, the men on top were on the ground and shooting while the men inside were still waiting for the ramp. So the units put sandbags on the floor for the mine, gun shields for the exposed gunners, and let the men ride on top. The army’s own doctrine came around to the practice by the second half of the war. The armor was there to be used.

The men used it as a floor. Number nine, nothing on the helmet cover. Uniform regulations were clear. The helmet was army property. The cloth cover was camouflage and camouflage did not have writing on it. In Vietnam, the helmet became the one personal surface a rifleman had. Everything else he wore was identical to the man next to him, and everything else he owned was in a foot locker 200 m behind him.

So, the cover got written on hometowns and the names of girls. The short-timer calendar, a grid of days inked on the side and blacked out one square at a time. Born to lose, born to kill, and next to it the peace sign. sometimes on the same helmet. The ace of spades in the band, which has its own story. The men who ran the war from the rear did not like it, and in a lot of divisions there were sweeps.

The officers who lived with the men in the field mostly looked the other way. The reasoning was simple. A man who has been walking for 11 months in a uniform with no name on it needs one thing that says who he is. The enemy could not read it at 100 meters and the man’s morale was worth more than the regulation.

The calendar mattered most and we will come back to it. The helmet said who he was. The regulation said whose it was. Number eight. Take your malaria pills. This one has its own file on this channel. So, it gets the short version. There were two pills. A large one once a week. Chloricquin and primacaine in one tablet.

And from about 1966, a small one every day. Dapsone. for the strain. The big pill did not stop. Both were in order, and in a lot of units, the weekly pill came with a formation. The men lined up. The medic put the tablet in the mouth. The sergeant watched it go down. The army ran the formation because it knew what happened without it.

A lot of men palmed the pill and dropped it later. Some spat it out around the corner. The weekly tablet upset the stomach badly for some men. That was the reason most men gave. Veterans also describe a quieter arithmetic that some men did and would not say out loud. Malaria was a bed in a hospital with sheets for a month, and a month was a month.

The medical histories of the war put the case rate high enough that the army kept the pill line running to the end. It was not a doubt about the medicine. It was a doubt about the men. And it was earned. The pill worked. The line was there because the men did not always let it. Number seven. No scent in the field.

The briefing came before the patrol. No after shave. No scented soap. No cigarette after dark. No repellent right before you set the ambush. The enemy could smell you and he did not need to see you. The reasoning was physical. In still air under a canopy on a wet night. A smell hangs where it is made and drifts slowly along the ground.

A man who has lived on rice and fish sauce and has not touched soap in weeks smells like the forest. A man who has lived on cigarettes and rations and hair tonic does not. Veterans of the long range patrol teams describe eating enemy rations for days before a mission for exactly this reason and not washing for the same reason.

The bug juice, the army repellent had a smell that carried and it went on at dark or not at all. The men broke the rule in the base camp and obeyed it in the bush, and that is the honest shape of it. A man coming off a patrol shaved with whatever the exchange sold and lit a cigarette in the open. A man going on one did not.

The uniform he wore in the field went 2 weeks and more without washing in many outfits until nobody in the platoon could smell it anymore, and that was the point. A rifle company of a hundred men moving through the bush announced itself in ways a smell did not add much to. A six-man team lying in a hide for 3 days lived or died on it.

The rule was not about being clean. It was about being from there. Number six, semi-automatic fire controlled bursts. The rifle had a selector with three positions, safe, semi, and full automatic. training said the middle one. Fire aimed shots. Fire a short burst only when you have to. The reasons were three. A magazine on full automatic was empty in about 2 seconds.

A rifle on full automatic climbed and after the second round, the shots went over the target and a barrel run hot on auto for magazine after magazine did not do a rifle any favors. The men called full automatic rock and roll. And when the shooting started, a lot of them flipped the selector all the way down.

In the first 3 seconds of a contact, nobody in the squad can see the enemy. He is in a tree line at 30 m, and all a man sees is muzzle flash and leaves coming apart. The side that puts the most fire into that tree line in those 3 seconds is the side that gets to stay where it is. That is fire superiority. and a rifleman on full automatic bought it faster than a rifleman firing aimed shots at nothing he could see.

Then the magazines were empty and the reasoning caught up. In most outfits, the first mad minute belonged to the riflemen, and after it the fight belonged to the machine gun and the grenadier, the two weapons that could actually reach a bunker. The riflemen fed the gun, covered the gunner, and fired short bursts at what they could see.

Sergeants taught new men to spend the first magazine and save the rest. The army’s own reviews from the war put fire discipline near the top of what it wanted. Taught better. When the rifle was redesigned in the years after Vietnam, full automatic came off the selector and a three round burst went on in its place.

That change came from what the men had done with the switch. Doctrine said, “Semia.” The first 3 seconds said otherwise and then doctrine was right again. Number five, never carry a captured weapon. The order came from more than one direction. Regulations covered captured weapons as property to be turned in. Supply had no ammunition for them, and a man with an enemy rifle in his hands was a man his own side might shoot.

Some men carried one anyway, and they were the men who could make the case. point men in some units, the long range patrol teams, the special operations teams that went across borders. The enemy’s rifle had a reputation for working after it had been dropped in a patty and dragged through mud.

A team working in enemy country could pick up ammunition on the trail. Most riflemen who tried it stopped, and the reason they stopped is the reason for the order. You are on point. The trail bends left through bamboo and you have been walking it for an hour and the rifle in your hands is the one you took off a dead man 3 weeks ago because it never jams.

There is a noise ahead, not a footstep, a pop of bamboo or a bird. You do not know. You put two rounds into it. The sound your rifle makes is a sound every man behind you has learned in his sleep and in his gut to connect with one thing. The enemy. 30 rifles come around toward the sound toward you. It takes about a second for the man behind you to remember whose rifle that is.

It is a long second and you spend it on the ground with your hands away from the weapon. That is why the practice died in most line units. Not because a sergeant said so, because the enemy’s rifle had a voice and the voice was on the wrong side. Men who carried one kept it in the pack until they were sure of the situation or they gave it up.

The rifle worked. The sound did not. Number four. Do not eat or drink anything local. Medical briefings were firm. Water from the village well. Ice from a block on a cart. A bottle of soda a child handed up to the truck. A bowl of noodles from a roadside stand. None of it. Dysentery, hepatitis, worms. The army had a water point, a purification tablet, and a can of rations, and that was the diet.

The men bought the soda anyway. The children along any road an American convoy used sold cold Coca-Cola and a local beer with a number for a name and ice in a bag, and the truck slowed down for them. The water in a canteen was warm and with the tablet in it tasted of the tablet. Halazone has its own file here. So one line, nobody liked it.

A cold soda from a kid on a bicycle or a beer from the woman who ran the stand at the edge of a village was the difference between an afternoon and a bad afternoon, and men paid whatever was asked. There was a story the men told about ground glass in the Cokes, and it should be said as what it was. A rumor repeated in a lot of units passed on as something that happened to a man in another company.

The medical record of the war has plenty of dysentery and hepatitis from local food and water and that was the actual danger and it put men in the hospital in numbers. The ice was the worst offender. The soda in a sealed bottle was mostly what it said it was. The men knew the risk. On a road on a hot day, most of them bought the soda anyway. The army issued water.

The kid on the bicycle sold cold. Number three, no pets in the field. Regulations did not allow it. A rifle company did not have a dog or a monkey, and the reasons were sanitary and practical. An animal barked at night. An animal ate rations. An animal got hurt, and a man went back for it.

In a lot of units, depending on the sergeant, there was a dog anyway. a puppy bought in a village for a few pyesters or one that walked into a firebase and stayed. Veterans described the platoon dog riding the track, sleeping in the hole with whoever was on watch, hearing incoming before the men did. The dog was the one that mattered. A man who has not touched anything soft in 5 months would sit and put his hand on a dog, and the sergeant who allowed it knew what he was buying.

Some dogs stayed with the company for a year and passed from one squad to the next as the men went home. Almost none of them came home. Regulations, quarantine, and the airplane made sure of that. The army’s own scout and sentry dogs were mostly left behind at the end, too, and that is a separate file and a harder one.

For the platoon dog, it was simpler and just as sad. The man rotated out. The dog stayed. Somebody in the next squad picked up the leash. The rule was written for hygiene. The dog was kept for the same reason the helmet was written on. Number two, never bunch up. 5 m. It was the first order a man heard in training and the last one he heard before a patrol.

Keep your interval spread out. One round will get you all. Sergeant said it in those words, and most riflemen could say it in their sleep. and it was broken every day in three places. Mail call. The chopper came in with a red bag and the whole platoon stood in a knot around the man who read the names because a letter from home was the only thing that mattered in that hour.

The chow line at a resupply when hot food came out in cans and the men stood at arms length to get it and the chopper pad where 20 men waited for the sound of the bird. The reason for the order was the mortar round. A single round in the middle of a spread out platoon hurt one man, maybe two. The same round in the middle of a chow line hurt eight.

The enemy knew where mail call happened and when hot food came in because he watched the helicopters and a mortar crew with one tube and a few rounds could ruin a company in the 30 seconds after the chopper lifted. A rocket propelled grenade did the same thing to a group in a bunker doorway. The most dangerous thing a squad did all day was to stand near each other.

And the men knew it and did it because they were tired and hungry and wanted their mail. Sergeants fought it and mostly lost. Veterans described the same sergeant breaking up the same knot of men at the same pad every week and the men drifting back together as soon as he turned around.

It is the most human item on this list. Men who had walked in perfect interval all day because they were afraid stood shoulderto-shoulder at dusk because they were lonely. Number one, do not count the days. There was no regulation with those words in it and sergeants said them anyway and officers. A man who counts his days becomes a short-timer and a short-timer is a problem.

He is careful in ways that get other men hurt because he will not go first. or he is careless because he has decided he has made it. Either way, he is not the man he was at month 6. Do not count. The day will come. The men counted, most of them from the first day, and the count was the most important number in the war. The calendar on the helmet, a stick carried in the last weeks, notched once a day, and that stick has its own file.

The count had a language. A man with less than a 100 days was short. A man with less than 30 was so short he needed a ladder to get into his boots. A man with orders in hand had an attitude with initials for a name. And the polite version was that he did not care anymore. The army disliked it for the reason it gave. And the reason was true.

Men got hurt in their last weeks and other men got hurt because of them. That is why in many units there was a rule the army never wrote and sergeants enforced anyway. Nobody short walks point. Nobody short takes the last patrol if it can be helped. The squad moved its short man to the rear of the file, gave his spot on the perimeter to a new man, and when the day came, got him to the pad and put him on the bird.

The men needed the count for the reason the army feared it. A year was too long to hold in one hand. A man could hold a week. He could hold a 100 days if he could see them on his helmet going away one by one. The count was not the man giving up. It was the man agreeing to stay one square at a time.

The army said, “Do not count.” The man said, “Give me something else to hold.” And the army had nothing. Back on the road west of Cooai, the track goes out with 11 men on the roof. Two of them have calendars on their helmets. One is spitting a pill into the dust. One has a puppy inside his shirt. They are not defying anyone.

They are doing what the ground taught them. And the captain who says nothing knows it. The order was written by a man who was right about a war on paper and the men rewrote it for the war they had. Now it is your turn. Which order did your outfit break every single day and which one did you never break? The best answer becomes a future file on this channel.

If this one was worth your time, leave a like because it puts this file in front of the next man who wrote on top. Share it with the family that has heard him say he never wrote inside and never understood why. And subscribe for more of what they didn’t put in the textbooks. To the men who broke the rules that needed breaking and kept the ones that kept them alive, this one was for