I must have been on at least a hundred ambushes in Vietnam. None of them ever amounted to much, but some were sure as scary as hell. When I was in charge of the ambush, I liked to place claymores along the trail all tied into my position so that I could set off the ambush with maximum surprise and killing power all at once. I usually tried to place the 60 to enfilade down the trail without putting the other positions at risk. I liked to be in charge of ambushes. I never fell asleep on one and I never let anyone else zonk out either. Generally, I'd place the guys in two-man positions with 50 percent alert. If we were really exhausted and I had enough men, I'd do three-man positions but that's as far as I'd go.

Early in my first tour I had a squad leader who would moan in his sleep. He'd begin low and then change octaves in rapid succession so that it sounded as if he were shifting gears on a sports car. We called it "driving his car". It scared the shit out of me a couple of times. We'd shake him awake and whisper "Hey, Sarge -- you're driving your car again."

"No, I'm not goddamn it!," he'd usually grunt. Then he'd go back to sleep and start all over again. One night he and I almost got in a fistfight. It would have been comical if it wasn't so fucking terrifying.

This guy couldn't read a map for shit and he'd get us lost on patrol and not let anyone else see the map. I can't tell you how many times he'd have to pop smoke or have the main body fire three rounds so he could hone in on the sound. So much for stealth and surprise.

This shit took place in the Chu Pong mountains along the Cambodian border where the Battle of the Ia Drang had been fought two or three months before. It was deep, triple-canopy primordial jungle, signs of heavy NVA traffic everywhere. One day he took us out on a long patrol. We were saturating the area with small patrols seeking contact with the NVA. We were some distance from the company CP, maybe an hour and a half into the march, when the point man freezes and drops. We all hit it and were down on our bellies staring out at the trunks of huge trees -- I thought they might be teak or mahogany. There was some low vegetation, sustained somehow by the dappled light that managed to trickle through the leaves, but aside from that, little concealment.

The jungle floor was thick with dead leaves. When we have moved through it, it rustled like autumn. Now we were still, prone, primed and listening to other footsteps sloshing through the dead leaves. Knowing Sarge, my first thought and first fear was that he had gotten us lost and that we were hearing some other small unit and that we stood a chance of getting into a firefight with other Americans. The noise was too big to be a squad-sized patrol. It sounded like at least a company -- maybe a battalion. The sound was coming straight for us. Sarge got on the radio and the rest of us got as small as we could, checked our shit and got ready for the inevitable. I hoped that if it was the NVA that somehow they wouldn't see us. I didn't like the odds. Artillery or air support be for shit in those trees -- even if Sarge, by some miracle, got the coordinates right.

The rustling grew nearer. Now I could hear twigs snapping -- these guys had no sense of noise discipline. I saw movement, but couldn't make it out. The rustling leaves and cracking trigs reached a crescendo. I flicked my selector switch to full-auto and waited for a target.

Suddenly, three grayish primates rumbled into view. Too big for monkeys, I guess they were a kind of small ape. There must have been at least twenty of them. Unaware of their green-clad cousins pissing their pants about twenty meters away, they chased each other and cavorted until Sarge broke out in a high cackle of laughter. Then we all cracked up. The apes, stopped, stared in our direction for a moment and then took off in another direction.

I don't know what Sarge told the old man. We broke for chow, stayed where we were for about an hour and somehow made it back to the company CP without getting lost.

Sarge was a big, ugly black man. He didn't like it when they started calling him Tarzan -- and we didn't like to be called his "little apes". But the names stuck -- and that's what we were. Tarzan took some grenade shrapnel in a firefight near Bong Song, an area north of Qui Nhon, along the coast. It wasn't bad, but bad enough that I knew he wasn't coming back.

Tarzan never stopped driving his car on ambushes and OPs. I wonder if he still drives in his sleep. If so, he probably tells his wife "No, I'm not. Leave me alone goddamn it."