We were heading for the first dike.  I pulled myself up, wiped the sweat from my forehead and  breathed deeply, relieved to be out of the muck even for just a minute.  I could see where we were heading:  a thick jungle area at the edge of the rice paddy.  I heard Paul behind me approaching the dike. “C’mon Grieb, you’ve been there long enough”.  He prodded me to move on, since we were supposed to keep a distance in the moving formation.  “One round will get you all” was the constant admonition.  It was unusual for Paul to directly assert himself in this fashion.  I wrote it up to the heat and humidity which made us all irritable.  I plunged back into the mire not ready to take on the next 50 yards or so to the wooded area.  My irritation at Paul’s prodding increased as I looked back and saw him standing on the dike, taking a longer break than I was granted.

    On the dike to our left I could see one of the small signs placed on the dike indicating booby traps.  Sometimes they had a grenade drawn on them, sometimes actually indicating “Danger” in English or sometimes the Vietnamese “luu-dan” for grenade.  That’s why we were walking the paddies instead of the dikes, not that they weren’t capable of mining or trapping them also. It was a good tactic for them to place the signs, whether they were trapped or not, since it slowed us down and tired us out.  Sometimes we just ignored them and walked the dikes, but not today-they were taken seriously. They could also serve as a warning to the local peasants who used the paths. The Viet Cong depended on the local peasants for support and did not want to endanger the source of their sustenance.   

   As we approached the edge of the paddy, it was decided that we would try to find a way through the thicket.  Gregory and I were assigned to try to find a way through while the rest of the squad waited in place.  It was pretty much of a swamp, with submerged roots and vegetation thickly entwined and the path we started out on soon disappeared and maneuvering became a struggle.  The sergeant could see our struggle and called us back.  As I turned to go back, I saw a chest-high Chicom grenade wired to a thin sapling and if I would have walked just slightly to my left, I would have hit the short wire tied between two saplings and to the pin.  It sent a chill up my back, since I had walked by it previously on the way in and had not noticed it.   My way out of the rest of the thicket was much more guarded than the way in.  Back in the clearing, I fired a M-79 grenade round into the area of the trap.  Since we didn’t get a secondary explosion, it must not have set it off, but we weren’t going to check.