09 Vietnam
- When I was 10 or 11, living in Warsaw,
- my father brought home an American newsmagazine
- with a story on the success of our snipers
- in the Vietnam war.
-
- I’d daydream about the soldier
- sent out alone into the field,
- where he’d perch high up in a tree to wait –
- to wait several days if needed –
- till a Vietcong officer
- happened into the scope of his gun –
-
- there to be picked off silently
- at a distance of up to 500 yards away,
- his men scrambling for cover like ants.
-
- Seen from the sky, everyone on the ground
- must have looked like ants too.
- Except that the jungle surrounding
- the Ho Chi Minh trail, Khe Sanh, &
- nearly everywhere else that battles raged
- gave the enemy cover.
-
- And when that jungle was peeled back
- with Agent Orange or napalm,
- the Vietcong just burrowed down further
- in a nest of caves and tunnels
- crisscrossing underground.
-
- But what US intelligence couldn’t see down there,
- they were determined to hear.
- So the Air Force took to dropping wireless transmitters
- called ADSCIDs
- – “Air delivered seismic intruder devices” –
- which would pierce the jungle
- & stick in the ground like darts.
-
- These formed a cellular network
- that carpeted the terrain
- & picked up the enemy
- all around & below.
-
- * * *
-
- Well, that surveillance network mostly failed.
-
- But the errors were not in the signals,
- but rather in the sheer number of transmissions
- that streamed into headquarters,
- overwhelming the analysts working on their huge
- (but still-primitive) mainframe computers.
-
- So in one famous battle,
- the ADSCIDs did pick up the vibrations
- of troops & tanks stealing through the jungle
- to surround a Marine encampment,
- but no one analyzed these tapes
- till after the over-run,
- in the operation’s post-mortem.