8 Things Vietnam Point Men Never Told the Men Behind Them Db

A trail in the morning in the wet country west of the coast. 1969. The light is still gray under the canopy. A column of 20 odd men moves along a foot path a foot and a half wide. 5 m between each man. Nobody talking. At the front is a boy of 20 with his rifle held low across his body and his helmet pushed back off his forehead. He stops.

His left hand comes up open and stays there. 20 men stop behind him, one after the next. The man directly behind him, 8 ft back, goes down on one knee and looks past his shoulder at nothing. There is nothing to see. A bend in the path. Bamboo. The lieutenant back in the middle of the column wants to know what it is.

And the boy at the front does not answer because he does not know. Something is wrong and he cannot say what. And every second he stands there, the men behind him are deciding what they think of him. Hm. 60 seconds. Then he steps off the path to the right into the brush and cuts his way around the bend the long way. And the column follows him, cursing him under its breath.

And nobody ever finds out whether there was anything on the trail. That is one scene and it belongs to no one. It is assembled from many accounts and it happened on a thousand trails to a thousand boys and this file will come back to it. This is not a war story. It is the story the war stories were hiding. Eight things counted down.

They begin with the one a point man might have admitted at the fire base with a warm beer in his hand if a man he trusted had asked him straight. They end with the one he never said to the man who walked behind him for a year and has not said to anyone since. Walking point was not a unit or a rank. It was the first place in a column and somebody had to fill it every morning.

The accounts agree on one thing before anything else. He was the most exposed man in the column. Everyone knew it. And the men behind him were glad, in a way none of them ever said out loud, that it was him and not them. What this file reads comes from the oral history collections at the Library of Congress and at Texas Tech, from the anthologies of the early 80s, from the memoirs of the men who led rifle platoon, and from what veterans have written under the videos on this network. This is the Freedom Bird files.

We read what they kept. One thing before number eight, this file only travels on a like and a subscribe and on a single line in the comments telling this channel where in the world you are watching from. So if it has earned those from you, give them now and then walk with him.

Number eight, he asked to keep it. In most rifle platoon on paper, the point rotated. A platoon leader with the first cavalry division who wrote a memoir about his year describes rotating the point every day and more often in bad terrain or heat and describes distrusting the men who volunteered for it because a man who wanted the point too badly might be looking for a kill or a reputation.

That was the officer’s view. The accounts from the men in the column describe something else happening underneath the rotation. A man who was good at it ended up keeping it often because he asked. A veteran wrote under a video on this network that when he arrived as a new man, he was given a choice between carrying the radio and walking point.

He took the point after a couple of weeks. When the next batch of new men came in months later, he kept it because he knew he was better at it than anyone knew would be, and a column needed experience there more than it needed fairness. He describes the job as needing awareness 180° in front of him and three steps ahead.

And he wrote one more sentence which is the reason this is number eight. He had become accustomed to the freedom that went with the job. That is the thing he never told the men behind him. Not courage, freedom. At the front of the column, nobody was in front of him. He answered to the trail and not to the sergeant. His fear, which every man in that column carried, had a job on point.

It looked at the ground and the treeine, and it kept him alive. Back in the column, the same fear had nothing to do but wait for somebody else to make a mistake. And under that, he did not trust anyone else up there. If a new man on point missed the wire, the man behind him was inside the blast, too.

So, the veteran who kept the point was protecting his own life by refusing to put it in a stranger’s eyes. He did not say any of that because the men behind him had decided it was courage and courage bought a man something in a platoon and the real reason would have sounded like he did not trust them which was true. What it did to him afterward is that he came home and said the words when he said anything and let people hear what they wanted.

A wife heard that her husband had walked point and what she heard was bravery and he let her keep it. 50 years later in the oral histories, some of these men finally corrected for a stranger with a tape recorder. They were not brave. They were careful and afraid. And they had found the one place where being afraid was useful.

They thought he was brave. He thought he was careful. Both were true. And only one of them ever got said. Number seven, he walked by nose and by ear. The accounts describe the senses in an order, and it is not the order a man at home would guess. Sound first, smell second, sight last, because by the time a point man saw it, he was already in it.

The first cavalry platoon leader writes that the best point men had been hunters before the army. Boys who knew how to walk quietly and listen for the thing that was listening for them. That was the job. knowing what the jungle sounded like when nothing was wrong, so that the moment it changed, he changed with it. What changed? The birds going quiet ahead and to the left.

A cooking fire, hours old, carried on a wind he could not feel on his skin. Fish sauce, a tobacco that was not American tobacco. One account describes a point man teaching his replacement to read turned over leaves on the path and three rocks laid in the shape of an arrow head, which was not the jungle’s work. And it ran both ways.

A veteran wrote under a video on this network that toothpaste could get a man killed in a jungle war because the other side could smell it a long way off. Then there is the sentence this file has read more than once in different words. And one veteran put it in his own words under a video on this network.

He learned to smell the enemy in the jungle once he had learned what he was smelling. And when he realized he could do it, he was afraid it meant he was turning into an animal. That is why he never explained it. Two reasons, one on top of the other. The first is that it sounded like superstition. A sergeant wanted a reason he could put on the radio and it smells wrong was not one.

So he learned to say he had seen something when he had smelled it because seen was a word the column accepted. The second reason is the animal. A man of 20 who has discovered that he can smell another human being through a 100 meters of wet jungle has learned something about himself that he does not know what to do with.

And the last people he was going to tell were the ones who depended on him for it. What it did to him afterward is that the nose came home. wood smoke from a neighbor’s yard on a still evening. A certain kind of fish cooking. He would leave a restaurant with the food untouched and on the drive home he would say nothing because the true answer was that he had smelled something that meant for one year of his life that he was about to die and it would have sounded like superstition at the kitchen table too.

He never said it smelled wrong. He said he had seen something. He was lying. and the lie kept the column moving. Number six, the easy path. Every trail in that country wanted him to walk down the middle of it. It was the fastest way to where the map said the column should be, and it was the one place in the jungle the point man feared more than any other because everybody knew where the trail was. The wire was on the trail.

The grenade in a ration can with a thin green wire strung across at shin height, the trap the first cavalry platoon leader describes as the commonest one he saw, was on the trail. The sharpened stakes in a pit were just off it, on the side a man would step to if he saw something on the path and moved to avoid it.

So the point man did not step where the trail wanted him to step. He walked the edge on the harder ground. He cut his own path through the brush off the trail, and the column cursed him for it, because cutting was slow and loud. He watched for the markers the other side left for its own men. A veteran wrote under a video on this network that in the area he worked, the traps were marked so subtly that a man had to be taught to see them.

Three lines in the dirt, three tufts of grass, three stones lined up. Three of anything where the jungle does not count. Why he never told the men behind him is the reason this one is at number six and not lower. They could see him leave the path. And they could feel the extra hour it cost them. What they could not see was why on this bend and not the last one, and he could not tell them, because telling them would have meant telling them how often he had almost stepped.

A point man who described at dusk the wire he had seen at the last possible second that afternoon would have had a column the next morning that did not trust him. So he said nothing and the men behind him thought he was slow. What it did to him afterward shows up in the family accounts in a way the men themselves laugh about.

He does not walk on the path. 50 years later on a sidewalk cut across a lawn. He walks on the grass beside it and his grandchildren have asked why. and he has never given the real answer because the real answer is that the easy path is where they put the wire. The trail was the fastest way through. He never once took it and never once said why.

Number five, the slack man. Behind the point man walked a second man close and the accounts call him the slack man or the coverman depending on the unit. 8 ft back, close enough to be inside whatever happened to the point man, and far enough not to be inside all of it. His job was to look where the point man could not.

The point man looked at the ground and straight ahead. The slackman looked up and to the sides and at the thing the pointman had just walked past. A veteran of the 101st Airborne, who wrote a poem about the job years later, called the slackman the thing that kept the point man connected to being alive and gave him one more duty, to make sure the point man’s letter got home to his mother, if it came to that.

The thing the point man never said is that he trusted the slackman more than he trusted any officer he ever served under. Not as an insult to the officers. Some of them were good, but the lieutenant was 30 m back with a map and a radio, and the slackman was 8 ft back with eyes, and the slackman was the one who would see the thing the point man had missed in the half second before it mattered.

Two men, one looking down and one looking up, each alive because of what the other was looking at. Neither of them ever said so, and the accounts are consistent about why. to say it was to name a debt that could not be paid. The slackman might be dead next week or home next month and then there would be a new slackman and a man cannot say, “You are the one who keeps me alive twice in a year and have it mean anything either time.

” What it did to him afterward is the quietest thing in this file. At a reunion 50 years later, two old men stand next to each other at the bar and do not say it then either. A wife asks who that is. He says, “He walked behind me.” She hears that as a small thing. It was the largest thing in his life for one year, and it is not going to be said now.

The lieutenant had the map. The slackman had his back. He would have followed the second one anywhere and never told him. Number four, the halts. Go back to the trail at the top of this file because this one is about the 60 seconds. A point man stopped the column when something was wrong. Sometimes he could say what. Most of the time the accounts are honest.

He could not. He had a feeling from the birds or the smell or the way the light fell on a patch of trail that was slightly too clean. And he put his hand up and 20 men stopped in the heat and waited. The arithmetic of a halt was brutal, and every man in the column could do it. A halt cost time, and time in the heat cost water.

So when the point man put his hand up and nothing was there, the word came back down the column and the word was not kind. Spooked seeing things. The men who walked point described being mocked for it by men they liked, and they describe being wrong far more often than they were right. A point man who stopped on a feeling stopped 20 times for nothing, and then the one time.

The accounts all have one, and they tell it in fewer words than the 20. He stopped. He did not know why. He went off the trail or forward on his belly, or sent the slack man to look, and there it was, the wire at shin height, the fresh dirt, the bunker mouth under the brush with something in it. And nobody in the column ever mocked a halt again.

Why he never told the men behind him about the 20 is that the 20 were the price of the one and he knew it and they did not. A point man who let himself be talked out of stopping by the heat or by the jokes at dusk would walk the whole column into the one. So he had to keep stopping and be wrong and take it.

The man who trained his replacement in one of the accounts told him the only advice in this file that every point man gives in the same words, “You will always be scared.” What he did not add is that the fear was the instrument. The column needed to believe the man in front was steady, and the truth was that he was the most frightened man in it, and that was why he was good.

What it did to him afterward is a thing the families describe without knowing what they are describing. A man who stops in a doorway before he walks into a room. A man who pulls the car over on a country road for no reason his wife can see and sits for a minute and drives on. A man who at 70 has his hand halfway up at the end of a supermarket aisle before he remembers where he is.

He was wrong 20 times and right once. The 20 were the price. He paid it in front of the men and they laughed and that was the job. Number three, the day they took him off. Every point man came off the point eventually. Sometimes it was a new lieutenant who believed in rotation and enforced it. Most often it was the calendar. A man with a few weeks left in country was taken off point in many units by custom, and the custom was meant as a kindness.

Nobody wanted to write to a mother that her son had walked into a wire with 19 days to go. The thing he never told the men behind him is that the day they took him off point was worse than the day they put him on it. Men who walked point later said it a little embarrassed because it sounds insane to anyone who was not there.

But the reasons are plain enough. His life was now in another man’s eyes and he had spent 8 months learning not to trust that. His fear had nothing to do and it did not go away. It just wandered and he could see from forth in line he could see the new man on point walk past things. A leaf turned over a patch of ground a shade too smooth.

The new man did not stop and the old point man could not say anything without undercutting him in front of the column. So he walked behind him with his hand halfway to his rifle for an entire day. Some asked to go back on. A short-timer who asked to walk point in his last two weeks was not thanked for it by the men behind him.

To them he had been given the one gift the war handed out, and he was trying to give it back. There was no way to explain it that did not sound like an insult to the new man or like madness. So he said nothing and counted the days and walked forth. What it did to him afterward is that the weeks he dreams about when he dreams are not the months on point.

It is the last three weeks behind somebody else. The weeks where he could see it coming and could not put his hand up. They gave him the back of the column as a gift. He never told them it was the worst place he had been. Number two, the man who came after him. When a point man came off, somebody went on. And in most of the accounts, the old point man had a few days to make a point man out of him.

He walked slack behind the new man close and talked low and showed him the wire and how it looked when the light was behind it. The edge of the trail, the markers, the hand. In one account from a light infantry brigade, a new man was put on point as part of being broken in with an experienced soldier right behind him. to watch and teach.

What the old point man told the new one was everything that could be said. What he did not tell him is the subject of this file. He did not tell him about the smell because it could not be taught. And a man told to smell for the enemy will smell nothing and stop trusting his own nose. He did not tell him about the feeling that stopped the column because a new man told to stop on a feeling would stop every 50 m and then he would stop stopping at all.

And he did not tell him that the fear was the instrument because a new man would hear it as a sentence and not as a tool. So he gave him the mechanics and kept the rest and the new man walked in front. Huh. And in some of the accounts the new man was hit in the second week or the third. The old point man heard about it at the rear or read it in a letter from a man still in the column or found the name years later on a wall.

Here is the arithmetic, and the men who describe it do the sums out loud 50 years on for a stranger with a tape recorder. If he had kept the point, the new man would not have been on it. If he had told him the thing he did not tell him, the new man might have stopped. And on the other side of the ledger, the things he tells himself in daylight, that nobody can be taught to smell, that the thing that got the new man might have been set for the fourth man in line and taken the old point man just the same. Both columns of figures are real. The men who carry them described never being able to make them balance. Why he never told the new man the rest while there was still time is the plainest answer in this file. He had not been told it himself. He had learned it on the trail alone with his hand up and the column cursing him. And he believes it could only be learned that way. And under that belief is the other one, the one he says last, if he says

it, that saying it out loud to a boy on his first morning would have sounded like what it was, which was a man handing over the most exposed place in the column and being glad to. What it did to him afterward is that there is a name he did not know for very long, and he knows it better than the names of men he served a year with.

He never wrote to the boy’s mother. He has stood at the panel with that name on it and has not gone closer and has not been able to explain to his own family why that name and not another. He taught the new man everything that could be said. The rest could not be. He has spent 50 years wondering whether that was true or whether he just believed it.

Number one, the one he walked past. This is the one at the bottom. and he never said it to the man behind him because the man behind him was standing there when it happened. The point man’s step was not the trigger for everything on the trail. Some of what the enemy laid was meant for him and some of it was not. A veteran wrote under a video on this network that by 1969 in the area he worked, the other side was rigging unexloded ordinance, artillery rounds, and aircraft bombs to fire on command so that the blast would take a squad and not one man. A device set for the middle of the column let the point man walk over it. The point man walked past. The slackman walked past. The third man or the fifth or the radio operator with the antenna marking him from a 100 meters did not. He was first.

First was supposed to be the one who got it. That was the deal. The one nobody had signed and everybody understood. The reason the men behind him were glad it was him and not them. And then it was not him. It was a man behind him. and the point man was standing 10 meters ahead whole turning around. The arithmetic of that has two answers and he has never been able to choose one.

Either he missed it, in which case it was his, or it was set for the middle of the column, and no eyes on earth would have caught it, in which case it was nobody’s. The accounts describe men going back over that stretch of trail in their heads for 50 years and finding the wire some nights and not others.

Some say they did see something a half second before and did not stop because they had stopped 20 times that week for nothing. Those are the ones who say the least. Why he never said it to the slackman is that the slackman was there. He was 8 ft back. He walked past the same thing, and he never once asked the point man whether he had seen it, and the point man never once asked him.

two men who had walked past the same yard of trail, one of them the man whose job it was to see, and neither of them ever said the sentence in 50 years. At the reunion, at the bar, it is the one thing in the air between them, and it stays there. What it did to him afterward is that the deal he had made with the men behind him was broken, and he was the one it broke in favor of.

He was supposed to be the first to fall, and he did not fall. That is not survivors guilt. The way the books describe it, it had a job title attached. There was a man in the column whose job was to catch that and it was him and it caught somebody else. He carries the name and the stretch of trail. He has never said to the slackman, “The one man alive who was there, did you see anything?” Because the answer either way is a thing neither of them could live beside.

He was first. It was supposed to be him. It was the man behind him and he has not been able to explain to anyone in 50 years why that is the thing he cannot put down. The trail in the morning, the bend, the boy of 20 with his hand up and the column stopped behind him. He is still standing there in the way that matters.

He never found out whether there was anything on that trail. He went around it the long way and he never told any of them what the 60 seconds were made of. 50 years later, he is a man in a doorway with his hand halfway up and nobody in his life knows why. Now it is your turn. If you walked point, what did you smell or hear or see that you never explained to the men behind you? And what did you say instead? And if you were the man behind him, the slackman or fourth in line, what did you decide not to ask him on the trail or at the reunion or ever? One line is enough. The best answer becomes a future file. If this one earned it, give it a like because that is what carries it to the next man who stood with his hand up on a trail in 1969 and has never said what he was waiting for. Share it with the wife who thinks he walked point because he was brave. And subscribe so this channel

can keep reading what the man in front never said to the men who followed him. To the men who walked first and to the ones eight feet behind them who looked where they could not, this one was for you. Put his name in the comments. The file stays