Jungle Fighting in the Central Highlands

As a replacement, a friend of mine joined one of the units chronicled in this work shortly after the incidents described. Here's a brief glimpse of his life as an infantryman. A medic is mentioned who, I believe, survived the destruction of a platoon mentioned in the book.

Nine Days In May: The Battles Of The 4th Infantry Division On The Cambodian Border, 1967 by Warren K. Wilkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An engrossing description of infantry combat as American units reacted to North Vietnamese Army ambushes and assaults, with young U.S. draftees battling a hardened enemy, often in hand-to-hand fighting.

Struggling in the dense forests of Vietnam's Central Highlands at a time when most Americans still supported the war, the U.S. companies and platoons generally possessed excellent small unit leadership. They would need all the help they could get as they clashed with the NVA under triple-canopy forests that often blocked out the sunlight as well as supporting artillery fire.

Wilkins touches on the U.S. strategy of attrition, and the political constraints that hobbled American forces, leaving them unable to pursue the NVA into their bases across the Cambodian border. Reduced to counting bodies, the 4th Infantry Division could never put away their foe. The fraud of body counts and the untouchable nature of enemy sanctuaries negated the courage and endurance of the men, eventually forcing 4th Infantry Division units to battle over the same ground again and again until the attrited Americans finally withdrew.

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