Read They Marched Into Sunlight for Free Online

when it came to tree leeches. If a soldier wore boots, the tree leeches could dig in, but with sandals at least they could be spotted immediately. The sight and sound of tree leeches haunted every man who marched down the Truong Son trail. Triet saw no tigers along the way, nor did he encounter enemies from the Saigon Special Forces, but he would never forget the tree leeches. They lived under leaves that fell from the trees, and when troops came by, the creatures smelled a human feast approaching. Triet and his comrades would hear a cranky yrrow, yrrow sound and see the trail move and the leaves rustle, and they knew that beneath the leaves tens of thousands of leeches were heading toward them en masse. The audacious bloodsuckers were about the size of pen tips before they gorged. They attached themselves in spherical hordes.
    Salt was among the most precious rations Triet carried. It was meant for cooking, but he used it for another purpose. At the end of the day he wrapped a piece of cloth around the tip of a stick and soaked it in salted water. This became his leech-removing prod for the next morning; the salt would make leeches jump from his feet. Instead of salt for flavoring, Triet and his squad often used the ash from charcoal to flavor their meals, which usually consisted of pressed rice along with greens they had picked along the way. Every hour they took a ten-minute break to gather food for dinner, collecting what they could find at the side of the trail: mostly bamboo sprouts and greens known as machete heads and airplane heads. When they reached camp for the night, they gathered and washed the greens, boiled them, spread them out on two nylon ponchos, and took out their chopsticks for a communal dinner.
    Lunch was a small portion of pressed rice, if available, and for energy in the early afternoon Triet reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny piece of the hundred grams of ginseng that he had bought in a traditional medicine shop in Hanoi. At an aid station in the Central Highlands, where there was no rice, his squad was provided a can of corn. It was divided evenly among the men, twenty kernels per soldier a day. During one stretch near the end of the march, they went seven days without rice. The storage bins at an aid station were empty, and the commander decided that if they waited around for rice, they might all get sick and die and have no one to bury them, so they kept moving. For morning sustenance they relied on what they jokingly called ca-phe doc, which means “hill coffee”—not the sort one would buy at the market. Every night, if possible, Triet and his squad camped next to a stream, which meant they were in a low-lying drainage area and the walk the next morning would be on a steep incline up the next mountain. They usually walked uphill from dawn until ten or eleven before reaching a crest, and this difficult ascent was their hill coffee because it unfailingly woke them up.
    The first southbound troops reached their destination on March 27. Triet’s squad arrived weeks later. Their new headquarters were at two base camps, one hidden deep in the jungle of War Zone C near the Cambodian border above Tay Ninh, about sixty miles to the northwest of Saigon, and another across the Saigon and Song Be rivers to the northeast in War Zone D. The camps were on the rim of a larger region of Vietnam called Eastern Nam Bo, where many native southerners had fought the French in the early 1950s. Abandoned tunnels and trenches from that earlier struggle were still evident. “Eastern Nam Bo is full of hardships but exudes gallantry,” troops had sung as they left the region to relocate in the North in 1954. Now they were back in this familiar landscape where they would fight and die for another fourteen years.
    Once in the South, the soldiers were reorganized into fighting units, part of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Vo Minh Triet, whose war name was Bay Triet, became part of a regiment with the