Word: bamboos
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...Huey hit the ground, its six passengers were out and running. Their faces streaked with camouflage paint, their black and green "tiger suits" blending into the foliage, their black-stocked M-16 automatic rifles at the ready, they faded swiftly into the perennial twilight of 80-ft. trees, impenetrable bamboo thickets, and tangles of thorn and "wait a minute" vines. This was "Lurp Team Two," a long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, sent to seek out two Viet Cong regiments that their outfit was itching to locate, engage and destroy. Within moments, Team Two was itself...
Hanging Tough. Team Two measured the passage of the night in careful inhalations, silent exhalations, and the clack of bamboo signal sticks used by the Viet Cong patrols that passed within 50 feet of its hideout. Then, at 2 a.m., a single shot blasted the night: Brown's radio man, shifting his M16, had accidentally triggered a tracer round -almost certainly disclosing the team's position. Brown hung tough, hoping that the cross-wave of jungle echoes would confuse the enemy searchers. It did, and at dawn the team moved back in to hunt out the Viet Cong...
...Bamboo Poles. Scarcely three miles south of the DMZ, the Communists attempted to overrun the camp of Con Thien, defended by two companies of Marines and three companies of Vietnamese irregular forces advised by a U.S. Special Forces team. The entire 4th Battalion of the North Vietnamese 821st Regiment attacked, led by two companies of sappers who cut their way through the Marines' barbed-wire perimeter by thrusting ahead of them satchel charges and bangalore torpedoes mounted on the tips of bamboo poles. The Marines hit back with rapid M-16 rifle fire and grenades, plus twin...
...South Viet Nam. The Ho Chi Minh trail, a 200-mile "logistical wonder" according to U.S. officials, is a massive maze of roads, bridges, waterways and paths complete with primitive motels. In recent months its roads have been paved with crushed stone or topped with pressed laterite. Camouflages of bamboo and branch roof it over where the jungle canopy is balding. Bridges are often built 6 inches under water so that they will be difficult to spot from...
...classic military historian. It offers no vast clash of arms; no divisions sweep and pivot to the grand strategy of latter-day Clausewitzes. Instead there are quick, dirty fire fights-usually on no more than platoon or company scale-set in copses of bamboo and thorn vine so thick that men kill at a range of 10 ft. without having once seen each other. It is a war of leg-shearing booby traps and dung-smeared punji stakes, of professional skill and personal courage. It is also a war that is tailor-made for a writer like S.L.A. Marshall...