I've heard of Apaches and Comanches who could recognize the "stench of the White Man", but I thought that was a matter of the US Cavalry and Texas Rangers' lack of sanitary habits on patrol -shitting anywhere convenient while the Injuns made sure to bury their waste and hide the other signs that they were in the area. Maybe this is the same principle as British soldiers who claimed they could smell the garlic when fighting French or Italians.MKSheppard wrote:Various books over the years. The smelling people before you see them trick is real; the VC had an especially distinctive smell due to the fact that they slathered nuc mam onto everything they ate; and the part about South American troops putting on pretty damn strong cologne before going out on jungle search n destroy missions is from another book the name which escapes me.Did you read this somewhere or are you making it up?
I meant in the field for weeks or months at a time, not patrols who were flown back to base when their shift was over. The men in my dad's unit grew facial hair when they lived with the Montagnards, but that had more to do with a lack of clean water and the fact that one of the men was black and exempted from shaving because he had extra-kinky facial hair (both often led to ghastly infections: if you think a hard boil on your leg or your ass hurts like hell, imagine one on your chin). SF units are often exempted from certain rules, but it's not because their officers are trying to encourage their men to look a certain way or to hide their smell (going for days at a time without bathing makes it more likely someone will notice you, not less), it's because necessity comes first and petty rules are like extraneous gear: a burden they don't need.Even regular infantrymen when they go out into the field stop shaving because they need that water for more important things. The difference is SF elicts that look all the time; rather than out of necessity -- they're not out in the field long enough to grow that beard for example.
This is no different from submarine crews, who finally had to give up their beards in the early 1980s.
That sounds kinda fishy unless Marcinko's men had really small feet. ARVN boots and uniforms were IIRC made locally to fit their specifications since American hand-me-downs usually didn't fit. Maybe they cobbled ARVN-style soles onto American boots.Right now; I'm re-reading after a very long period the first couple of books that were written by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman together. With Marcinko, it's VERY important to apply a bullshit correction factor -- from what I've heard from people who were around at the same time that Marcinko was in the service, he was a legend -- in his own mind.
However, it does detail that after a while, Marcinko's men stopped wearing the standard US jungle boots, and went to the beta-boots that the ARVN wore, then finally to the kind of rubber tyred sandals the VC wore. Going to the ARVN boots makes a lot of sense -- because in many cases, the VC knew that Marvin the ARVN would just go out, fire a couple thousand rounds into the jungle, then go back into barracks, so they weren't that much of a problem when encountered. So if you took advantage of that by wearing Beta-boots instead of normal US Jungle boots; the VC would see your tracks and go: "Ah, Marvin the ARVN is in the area; everyone calm down, they won't press us too hard." opening them up to an attack by US forces they didn't suspect were in the area.
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- PeZook
, and that's evolution.
