8 Things a Grunt Did Walking Point in Vietnam That Kept the Whole Column Alive D

You are looking down at a boot print. It’s fresh, pressed into a side trail, and the tread is wrong. It isn’t the Vibram pattern you know from American jungle boots. You know exactly whose print this is. You haven’t seen him yet. He is less than 10 ft away. That’s Craig Jorgenson in 1970 walking point for Apache troop, first Squadron 9th Cavalry.

A CBS news crew was with his unit that day, and they filmed what came after. Walking point meant going first into whatever the ground was hiding. Well, the whole column behind you trusted what you saw. These are eight things point men did that kept that column alive, starting with what they did to their own bodies, and ending with the strangest one of all.

The enemy marked his own booby traps on purpose, and point men learned to read the marks. Why would an army do that? That’s number eight. If you walked point or slack yourself, you’ll know inside a minute whether we got this right. Number one, the things he didn’t do. T.J. McGinley served in Tiger Force, a recon platoon of the 101st Airborne, and it taught him how loud an ordinary rifle company really was.

From inside the jungle, his team could hear line companies moving half a mile away. In a line company, McGinley says the point man was hacking away at the jungle with a machete. A whole company announcing itself to anyone listening. But recon point men moved like the opposite of that. They didn’t smoke, nobody talked above a whisper.

McGinley learned from Tiger Force point man John Gerch had to sneak through the jungle without breaking a branch, going around the growth instead of cutting through it. He even worried about his own rifle, because an M-16 knocking against a rock carries a long way. For a long range patrol, being heard ended the mission.

Their job was to find the enemy and call others in. Those teams left C-ration cans behind because the cans rattled. One Ranger veteran, Gary O’Neal of the 173rd’s long range patrol, describes going further still. No soap and no aftershave before a mission and local food for days. So his team smelled like the enemy instead of like Americans.

At night they talked by touch. A squeeze on the arm instead of a word. A line company was never going to move like a six-man team. It had too many men, too much gear, and a machete up front. But the man at the head of it could try. Number two. A round in the chamber. An American veteran describes the point man state of mind in three parts.

A round chambered, the safety on, and the expectation every step that you are walking into an ambush. Alan Allen of A Company first battalion sixth infantry walked point with an M79 grenade launcher and hated it. A single shot launcher whose high explosive round won’t even arm up close is a bad thing to carry at the head of a column. So when his company got a pair of Stevens 12-gauge pump shotguns, Allen offered to carry both weapons if it meant getting one.

He loaded double odd buckshot into a gun so worn it effectively held four shells. Eventually his platoon leader took the M79 off him. William Heath, a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, flatly refused to walk point with only an M16. They gave him an M16. Shotguns were never standard issue for point. Units found them where they could, but point men wanted them for one reason.

As Allen puts it, you couldn’t see the hole until you got right up on it. On the 24th of May, 1968, he sees a wall of foliage across the trail with a small dark patch at the bottom. It doesn’t look good. An AK muzzle comes out of it. Tracers go past his head. He’s been beaten to the draw. Allen jumps over a bush and throws a grenade. Number three.

The man beside him used to be the enemy. If he gets sick, you go to the hospital with him. That was the rule William Heath was given about Tran Do, the Kit Carson scout assigned to walk point with him. Kit Carson scouts were former Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers who had come over to the south side and now worked alongside American units.

Heath and Tran Do did language training together and Heath was told the two of them were a team. It sounds like a strange arrangement, but nobody knows how a trap gets set like the side that sets it. Heath describes his job as walking point with Tran Do while the scout taught him to recognize booby traps, bunkers, and the way the enemy usually operated.

Asked whether Tran Do actually spotted those things, Heath’s answer was one word, yes. So, the man teaching an American to read the enemy’s work had once been part of it and he walked beside that American in the most exposed spot in the column. Scouts like him turn up again later in the story.

But in 1970, Tran Do went home for Tet, the Lunar New Year, and he never came back. Heath never found out why. Number four, who walks point and when he’s done. About a week into the jungle, T.J. McGinley was asked if he was married. He said no. The reply came back, “Good, you’re our new point man.” That was one way a man got point. Veterans describe others.

Allan Allan volunteered because he didn’t trust city kids who’d never been in the woods. William Heath told his lieutenant he’d walk point since he’d always taken it in training. In Allan’s company, point was shared at first because, in his words, “It’s not really a safe place to be.” It rotated until the men who were good at it became the regulars.

Heath says they did give him a break from it. So, point didn’t automatically go to the new guy. It went to whoever the column trusted. But every man on point had a limit. Dean Jorgenson’s unit, another point man came to him said he was missing stuff and asked him to take over. One veteran interviewed on camera says he was pulled off point when he realized he was looking for a small booby trap just to get out of there.

Then, there’s Allan Allan after the 14th of May, 1968. That day on Hill 352 earned him a Silver Star in the same fight where Staff Sergeant Finnis McCleery earned the Medal of Honor. Afterward, Allen says he turned into kind of a coward. He didn’t want to walk point much anymore, but he walked it anyway.

Two weeks later, on the 28th of May, he sees movement on both sides of a knoll. He freezes. He’s shot in the lower back. So, how long did point men last? You’ve probably heard a number, days or a few weeks, and no record backs it up. The one figure we could find is a single 9th Infantry Division veteran’s estimate for his own battalion.

One to two months, and that same man walked it for months. Some veterans say their point men didn’t last long. There’s no official count. Everything so far kept the point man alive. The last four kept the column alive. Number five, the halt and the man right behind him. The worries about point often picture a man alone out front.

Veterans describe a pair. Behind the point man walked the slack man, close enough to see his hands because the point man’s hands did most of the talking. A single hand signal could stop the column or turn it without a word. McGinley walked slack for about two weeks behind a point man named Larry Riley before he took point himself.

One day, Riley sees a bunker McGinley doesn’t. He doesn’t say a word. He gives a hand signal, and the two of them split up to flank it. The bunker opens fire. Riley is hit, and so is the man behind McGinley. A scout dog handler describes the same system with the dog leading it. The dog freezes, its head snaps to the right, and its ears go up.

The handler drops and turns to tell his slack man they’ve got something. When he opens fire, his slack man opens up with him. Hand signals and danger crossings were taught, but deciding when to stop 100 men was the point man’s call. An America veteran describes a night move where the flares went up and everyone did the same thing.

Stop, kneel, and try to blend into the background. That in abandoned Hedgerow Village, his sergeant held the whole column kneeling while he, the point man, crossed alone to the next hedge. Everyone behind him waited to see if he made it without getting shot. The front sounds like the worst place in a file, but William Heath didn’t see it that way.

He’d walk at the very back or at the very front because the enemy aimed for the middle where the officer and the radio were. Number six, reading the jungle. You notice the silence before you understand it. The insects have stopped, the animals have gone quiet. McGinley describes exactly that. It would get real quiet with not even the bugs making noise, and you knew somebody was around.

Pre-recon veteran lists the same signs. Footprints, smells, sounds, and the moment the jungle suddenly goes dead quiet, then the smell. McGinley says North Vietnamese soldiers because of their diet gave off a particular odor. Allan Allan kept his methods simpler. He watched for movement or for anything that didn’t look in place.

Veterans sometimes call it a sixth sense, and McGinley agreed good point men could almost feel danger. But when point men explained that feeling, it turns into a list. The bugs stopped, the smell was wrong, something didn’t look in place, the print was fresh. Each sign alone meant little. Together, they meant stop. Which brings us back to Craig Jorgenson and the boot print.

He had left the trail on purpose. He spotted fresh prints on a side trail and read them correctly, a North Vietnamese boot pattern. But the man who made them was less than 10 ft away, and while Jorgenson was still looking down at the print, that man shot him in the leg. Vietnamese scout with the unit ran out and laid down fire so Jorgenson could crawl behind a tree.

The CBS crew filmed what came after. He read that sign exactly right. The man who left it was just closer than anyone could see. Number seven, staying off the trail. A trail is the fastest way through the jungle, but that’s exactly why it was dangerous. The Marine Corps put it on film in 1967. The training film Viet Cong Mines and Booby Traps tells Marines that mines and booby traps turn up on footpaths and trails, along hedgerows, on fence gates, and on rice paddy dikes.

The Marine Corps Film Archive summary of the film adds helicopter landing sites, high grass, footbridges, and land nobody could farm. It’s closing instruction is blunt. Stay off trails and away from places you sense he’s likely to have booby trapped. William Heath took that literally. He wouldn’t take trails at all.

He went through what he called virgin territory because untouched ground was where you were least likely to run into a mine. Craig Jorgenson was walking off the trail the day he found that print. Alan Allan remembers a trail cut into a hillside under a bluff where somebody could have been dug in, and in his words, he would have been mincemeat.

Here, the training and the men agreed, but the price was paid in sweat. Off the trail, you’re pushing through bamboo and vines. The column behind you is moving at a crawl, and the point man wears out fast. Every hour away from it costs sweat and daylight. That earns described that trade constantly, and many of them made it anyway.

The same film noticed one more thing, and it matters for the last item on this list. The Viet Cong rarely mined the areas that were farmed by day. Number eight, reading the enemy’s handwriting. 1/9 Infantry Division point man working the plain of reeds near the Cambodian border says he found seven, eight, nine tripwires in a single day.

He never wore his glasses while he searched for them. He was reading the ground the way the Marine Corps film taught it. Fishing line tripwires, some running straight up to a grenade on a bent bamboo arch, covered pits built to give way under a man’s weight, lined with punji stakes, a pattern of cracks in the dirt that’s too regular, a rise or a dip shaped too neatly, fresh dark earth over a buried mat which will dry and settle later, souvenirs and abandoned enemy gear left out as bait.

But the same film says something stranger. Booby traps had to be marked, it explains, to protect Viet Cong troops and neutral civilians. Remember those farmed fields the enemy rarely mined? His own people walked this ground, too, so he left them warnings. Three rocks or three sticks beside the road, an arrow on a stick point toward danger, feather toward safety, four knotted tufts of grass marking a square, a stick shaved flat and set at 45° pointing at a mine 1 m away.

A curved bamboo stick or two sticks in a V pointing at a punji trap. The film’s advice to Marines was almost gentle. Watch them as they move around. Avoid the places they avoid. Every marked trap meant a Viet Cong soldier had set it and then left a sign for his own men and for the farmers who worked that ground.

On his side of the war, that was the careful thing to do, but it left a trace and the trace was readable. Former enemy soldiers like Tran Duc knew how their side set traps and the markers were part of that system. A scout who changed sides brought the alphabet with him. Every one of those marks was written for somebody else.

A point man who could read three rocks by the road or a knot tied in the grass was reading the enemy’s handwriting. And unlike that footprint on the side trail, this handwriting was meant to be read. Point men still miss things. A veteran interviewed on camera remembers the step his foot comes down on a shoe box mine rigged to an RPG warhead.

He freezes afraid it’s a pressure release device that will fire the moment he lifts his foot. Nothing happens. The tripwire had rusted and snapped. An older sergeant comes forward to help him. The sergeant walks right onto another booby trap. He dies later. Most of what you’ve heard in this video comes from the men themselves in interviews recorded decades later and from a CBS crew in a Marine Corps training film made while it was happening.

Craig Jorgenson, Alan Allen, T.J. McGinley, William Heath, Larry Riley walked in front of one of them. Tran Du walked beside another and then he was gone. When they got it right, nothing happened at all. The column walked around three rocks by the road and kept going and nobody wrote down the explosion that never came. If you walked point or slack, tell us in the comments what you watched for that no manual ever printed.

And when a column did get hit, the men who came in to pull it out rode in the open doors of a Huey. What they did in those doors, that no manual covered either, is the next video.