Cowboy Archives - James Strauss

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

No fewer than fifty Marines worked to drag the downed trees and jungle foliage up to the end of the bridge, and then secure it to the structure using the ropes that had been tied to make a cargo net for unloading the last resupply chopper and getting the supplies...

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...

THE TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY, THIRD PART, 30 Days has September

by James Strauss | 74 comments

Puff came in for the third time, orbiting Hill 975 and pouring what seemed to look like liquid fire into the mountain, while it sounded for all the world like the place was being chewed up with a giant out of control chainsaw. The way the big cargo plane tilted and...

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...

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH DAY, SECOND PART, 30 Days Has September

by James Strauss | 110 comments

The Skyraiders broke the dawn, and everything else, apart, as they came in over the river at an altitude that had to be less than a hundred feet. First light was upon the valley, and the smoke coming up from the still-burning dried mud of the river bank could be seen,...