Ted G. Arthurs > Quotes

“Most of my grunts carried 25 or 30 magazines,”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“Watches are issued to leaders, not to us riflemen.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“the 173rd Airborne Brigade was the only outfit that I know of which spent over an entire year in the jungle without ever once returning to a rear”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“Don’t ever make fun of the one man who’s afraid,” goes an old infantry adage. “HE might be the only one who completely understands the situation.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“In a rucksack outfit, the medic humps a rectangular piece of canvas which becomes a litter once a bamboo pole is inserted through a channel along each side.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“one of those big red mountain scorpions nailed me right between the knuckles of two fingers of my hand. Kinda painful.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“the little blue lights in front of his eyes, which are a prelude to heat exhaustion.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“awful laterite ground. Webster’s definition does not do it justice. “A red residual soil in humid tropical regions, used as ore of iron, aluminum, manganese or nickel.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“Every man in Vietnam was required to take a large red pill each Monday, to prevent vivax malaria. This was the mildest form of malaria, comparable to a bad case of the flu—and recurrent up to fifteen or so years.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“the grenade projectile had a safety feature requiring that it travel between seventeen and twenty-seven feet after leaving the weapon’s muzzle, before it armed itself, that the”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“just as straight as a pulled string.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“giving him their azimuth of approach so that they would not be fired upon by the wary Second Bat survivors.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“It’s like settling down through a well, with the sides of the well being trees and the massive rotor seeming to miss their trunks just by inches.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“Fire ants got ’im. It happened to me once before I learned to watch fer their nests. He blundered into a big nest of ’em an’ they all drop on ya at once an’ start bitin’ ya by the dog-gone numbers—like a hundred of ’em”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“the brain and killed a lot of soldiers.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“the flechet round had no such safety feature and could kill your buddy one foot away if discharged accidentally.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“The great aorta, in a grown man’s body, is almost as large as the inside of a garden hose.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“To help prevent malaria, jungle troops must roll down their sleeves and button their collar starting at six o’clock each evening because mosquitoes are night biters.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“They can’t eat you,” lectured Doc, “unless your flesh is putrid, you know, decaying, then they can get their little mouths into you. That electrical tingling was thousands and thousands of those little mouths trying to eat us.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“wear their hand grenades, namely to carry them inside their extra canteen pouches which we carry for that purpose. The pins can’t snag or nothin’ an’ drag out an’ then activate the grenade. They are very handy to reach durin’ a firefight an’ yer regular canteens with water go into the ruck an’ hangin’ on the outside by their chain.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“is that they also carry the much deadlier Falciparum strain of malaria which can easily kill a soldier or can cause brain damage. It’s nothing to fool with and to prevent needless casualties, our malaria control measures dictated that at dusk each evening, all the troops must roll down and button sleeves, apply mosquito ointment and button the collar of the fatigue jacket in order to minimize bites.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“fat rat’ was a two quart soft plastic canteen worn on the outside of the rucksack.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“You couldn’t have helped him and that gave the sniper one more excellent chance to kill another soldier very quickly and then to be on his merry way. He may have been afraid that his second shot would have helped us to pinpoint him, but you can bet your boots that you were in his sights and then he had second thoughts and that’s the only thing which saved you.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“the Army’s new, portable nylon jungle litters.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“lime aid did not come from goodie packs, but that his girlfriend and his mom always slipped one into a letter to him. He said that any other flavor was too sweet for the chlorine and only made one more thirsty.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“The hand grenade,” he announced, “the number one accidental killer of friendly troops. Who”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne

“ran two lengths of bandages through Buddha’s mouth, back at the hinge of his jaws and we had to pull up and down at the same time to get him to turn loose.”
― Ted G. Arthurs, Land With No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne