While I was smoking my after breakfast cigarette, drying off in the hot sun, I got word from L/Cpl Thomas that we were going on a squad size patrol on the other side of the river. I finished my cigarette, cleaned my M-16 and got my gear ready for the patrol.
We walked and slid down the hill to the road. We walked inline about ten meters apart until we forded the river at a shallow spot. Then we got into a platoon-size wedge and headed northeast, in the general direction of the Rock Pile, following the valley floor through the elephant grass.
Due to a change in their natural habitat and mass hunting of these deer, in the sixties they disappeared from the wild. Now they only live in nature reserves and in captivity.
Vietnamese Sika Deer
We stayed out on patrol nearly all day, but most of the day we spend in a perimeter around a giant rock with jungle growing all over it while one squad climbed up about three hundred feet to the top and checked for signs of NVA. They didn’t find any. This gave me chance to read a book somebody let me borrow, “The Animal Farm.”
On the way back to the bridge, Anderson and I heard something moving in the brush off to our left; we stopped and were getting ready to shoot when a deer came running out from the brush. It was a great relief to see that dee intend of the NVA. We both smiled and kept on walking. This was the first wild animal I had seen in Viet Nam.
By the time we got back to the bridge, the mail truck had dropped off our mail. I got three letters that brightened up my day.
I climbed back up the hill from the road to my hootch and read my letters and heated up a can of beef slices.
Just as it was getting dusk, we heard rockets hitting the Rock Pile, so that we had to put our flack jackets and helmets on and get near our fighting holes with our rifle and ammo, just in case we started getting hit by incoming rockets or mortars. Anderson told me the NVA picked the time right before dark to shot the rockets and mortars because the spotter planes couldn’t spot them when the light was bad. It wasn’t dark enough for the flash of the rock to be seen from the air. The Rock Pile usually got hit once or twice a week just before dark and just after dawn.
We sat there until dark when the rockets quit hitting the Rock Pile. I took off my flack jacket and helmet. I crawled into my hootch and I crashed, since I had last watch and I wanted to get at least six hours of sleep.
