Bong Song River Archives

THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT, SECOND PART, 30 Days Has September

There existed no corridor through the jungle, like the one that cut through the undergrowth located on the other side of the river. There, the night before, it had been easy to move back and forth through that protected passage to communicate, supply, reinforce,...

TWENTY-NINTH DAY, THIRD PART, Thirty Days Has September

by James Strauss | 149 comments

I huddled in what I had come to consider my cave, a dry place in a wet world of drizzling misery. The bottom of the cave, although consisting of sandy dirt rather than stone, like its walls, was mildly dusty from going many years without being touched by outside...

THE TWENTY-NINTH DAY, 30 Days Has September

by James Strauss | 166 comments

I lay in the muck of oozing mud seeping slowly up through the packed, cracked, and broken debris of jungle and aging decay. The smell was of the damaged sort I’d come to know as my home away from home down inside the A Shau Valley expanse. I wondered if the smell...

TWENTY-EIGHTH NIGHT, THIRD PART, 30 Days Has September

by James Strauss | 123 comments

Whole Man and his A-6 Intruder were gone, and the jungle below was silent, as well as the drums mounted on what was left of the upper lip of the cliff. The lack of the mind-numbing drumbeats was balanced by the emptiness I felt over losing what air support we’d had...

TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY, SECOND PART, 30 Days Has September

by James Strauss | 80 comments

I slept in my scooped out small spot atop the mud, dug down through the normal couple of feet of debris that covered those areas of the jungle not occupied by bamboo groves, trees, lianas and tubers, not to mention the vast dense thickets of ferns and other...