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These stories are true, but the names may be The Montagnard tribesmen, indigenous to the Central Highlands, were, properly motivated, fierce and loyal fighters. They were in the Stone Age, hunting with blowguns, crossbows and traps. Train them to use an M-16, give them a blanket and a sack of rice and they'd go hunt 'Cong all day and all night. The bounty for a 'Cong was a nice, warm US Army blanket...the 'Yards had a lot of them for those cold, damp monsoon seasons. Special Forces and the CIA really liked the 'Yards because of their capacity for battle and ferocious courage. They were truly warriors and recognized their fellow warriors among the SF troops and CIA mercenaries who operated along the shadow land "over the fence" in Cambodia and Laos, forging strong bonds of loyalty. Near Pleiku, Special Forces had built a base camp from which they operated CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group) teams. They had a hospital and company- sized camp. Charlie Company, 5th Special Forces. As part of the training to turn a 'Yard into a SF warrior, there was Airborne training. Upon completion of the basic portion of that training, there would be an air drop. One misty morning, early in 1970, we got the call that there'd been a bad accident during airborne training and we had almost forty wounded 'Yards on the way in, all with leg injuries. They arrived in ambulances, stacked like cordwood in terrible agony. As we unloaded them, we were shocked to see that their legs were all broken in a variety of ways. Very few simple fractures, most with multiple compound fractures, some with femurs forced through the pelvis into the abdominal cavity. They'd been dropped too low. When a person jumps with a parachute, the long "risers" act as a shock absorber, stretching enough to not rip the person in half when the canopy opens, working kind of like a bungee cord. As the risers reach their maximum "stretch", they start to compress back to their original length, pulling the jumper back upward. The "slack" distance is about 50 feet of bounce. These men had been dropped just low enough that the riser stretch had put them about 5 feet BELOW ground level, snapping their legs like toothpicks, then pulling them back up about 30 feet and dropping them back onto their broken legs. As we worked our way through the terrible wounds, we had no option but to amputate most of those legs. The bones were horribly shattered and damaged. Taken individually, in a Stateside hospital, we could probably have saved a lot of those legs. It would have taken a good orthopedic team, good physical therapy and a ton of time. In our circumstances, about all we could do was cut off the legs, make the stumps usable and evac them to their own hospital. We heard that many of them had died from infections and complications of their wounds. It was a terrible tragedy, but just one of the many we experienced. Comments: E-mail me Thanks for visiting ...SP5 Steven Streeper
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