Spending six weeks in a foxhole tells me our leaders are not aggressively pursuing the damn enemy. Let me tell you how an Infantry unit is supposed to run combat OPS/patrols. Now, this may be their basecamp, but; the location sounds more like an outpost. I was Infantry. I was an 11B then 11F before Infantry OCS, airborne and SF officer’s course. I had a company of mostly Rhade Montagnards in Vietnam with three great SF NCO’s as platoon leaders. We rarely operated with any arty support. Only some local security OPS were we within 15K’s of 105 howitzers. Most OPS were 50-70 plus K’s from our basecamp/HQ. We operated on the Cambodian border and mostly with 32 men total. We used a lot of cover and concealment to move and if we had to cross open ground I’d send a six man unit across with one carrying a radio so they looked like a six man recon team. Once they scouted the other side they’d radio back it was OK. We’d set up a perimeter at night with four eight man squads. Each squad had an M60 gunner and asst., an M79 man and 5 riflemen. Every rifleman had a LAW plus an M60 mortar round he carried in his ruck. One squad had my M60 mortar man who was good. We all put our M60 round in a stack near him. We had 50% awake in two shifts all night. We did not take a crap on OPS as we were given a handful of lomotil pills prior to any OP. When we came back we were given a brown bomber. That pill would send you running to the latrine. If a man needed to pee- he did not go more then a few feet off. We had TAC air on call 24/7 and helicopter gunships from 0900- 1600 hours.
Said he was sure he was going to die as they were a couple of platoons spread out across the edge of the valley, divided into groups of 3-4 hundreds of yards apart, with an unknown number of enemies across from them, with no significant support of any kind available. They had dismounted and walked about 12 miles from their dropoff point. Can't recall what he said the elevation was.
He faced frequent sniper fire and what he described as "an occasional storm of fire that was never anywhere close to us," and barely laid eyes on an insurgent. He was told that the enemy wasn't supposed to know they were there, so no smoking and no leaving the foxholes to take a dump.
Finished his story by saying "yeah, pretty f###ing sure they knew we were there."