RAT PATROL
No eulogies were ever muttered over the corpses—this was a fight to the death, with no quarter asked or given.
Every single night, the enemy attacked our remote firebase in Vietnam in continuous, relentless waves. Fearlessly pressing forward while totally oblivious to their own casualties, they kept on coming. No matter how many of them we killed, more took their places and joined the attacks. These nightly assaults erupted on all sides of us, and no isolated nook or cranny of Fire Support Base Maude was safe from the repeated, fanatical attacks. Wave after wave. Attack after attack. Night after night.
We ruthlessly employed every available weapon in these “close quarter” encounters. We used rifles, pistols, bayonets, machetes, entrenching tools, our 105 mm howitzers’ trail handspikes, makeshift traps—and even our gloved fists and combat boots. In extremis, we grabbed our helmets and swung them mercilessly at the invaders. This combat was always hand-to-hand, quite literally a “tooth and nail” struggle that could only end at dawn’s arrival, when the suicidal enemy finally, grudgingly withdrew to sanctuaries at the base of the hill on which our firebase stood.
Every morning, we formed up in a long, continuous “line abreast” formation and, sweeping across our artillery battery’s position, gathered dozens upon dozens of enemy corpses. Then we unceremoniously tossed their lifeless bodies over our hilltop base’s steep sides and into the deep valley below. No eulogies were ever muttered over the piles of enemy corpses—this was a fight to the death, with no quarter asked or given.
Unlike the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers we faced, this fanatical enemy never entered
