Comprising a Life | The Bonsai, Travels and Haiku of Vaughn Banting

Bullets, sticks and attitude

Now that the Vietnam War has settled in equally among the rest of my memories I can speak of it in less emotional terms and come to grips with some very hard to accept facts.

As every student of history today knows, the Viet Cong were an ingenious group of people well adept at surviving in the jungle with little food, support or comforts. They were experts in camouflage, booby traps and the use of surprise as a tactic in war and seemed able to appear out of nowhere and be gone again just as suddenly.

And it is no secret that even denied their own airspace and against the superior technology of their enemy which included the United States Army, the South Vietnamese Army, the Korean Army, the Thailand Army and the Australian Army, these people came to be the uncontested winners of the war, a war that by the accounts of today's experts we never even should have waged.

But as incredible as these facts now seem, the following photographs will help you appreciate how truly incomprehensible their accomplishments really were.

Looking more like something born of a Boy Scout jamboree than the entrances to enemy bunkers, these Vietcong encampments could be lethal to anyone encountering them in the jungle.

Decorations left from a New Year's celabration in the middle of the jungle

These bunkers would often lead down into a second chamber or series of tunnels.

Viet Cong bench, table and smoke house

Bunkers were often found at the bases of large trees.

Another bunker

Captured documents were sent to the rear for intelligence purposes

Liquid speed found near a wood-drying structure

An enemy gas mask of the crudest form

Crude benches at an indoctrination center where new recruits captured at night from villages were taught / forced to become Viet Cong

After taking a bunker complex we would destroy it but they would only built another one some place else.

Cooking area and wood drying hut

My Lieutenant calling in a fire mission (an artillary strike) on a distant Viet Cong bunker complex

Enemy trail markers like these were inscrutable to us without the help of our "Kit Carson scout", Tabe. Tabe was a Viet Cong who had taken advantage of the Chu Hoi program (literly, 'open arm') and had turned himself in to the Americans ....

....who subsequencly reindoctrinated him into our way of thinking and made him work for us.

Stuff from a dead Viet Cong's pack