The first time Lt Philip Caputo saw the rainforest where he would spend a year commanding a platoon of US Marines in South Vietnam, he remembered, with some dismay, the jungle warfare manual that formed the basis for all his training.
By Paul Ash
“Looking at the green immensity below,” he said later, “I could only conclude that those manuals had been written by men whose idea of a jungle was the Everglades National Park.”
He was not far off the mark. By the time Caputo went to Vietnam, the US Army’s jungle warfare manual, first published in 1941 as the US entered the war, was nearly 30 years old. Despite the hard lessons American soldiers had learned in the bitter, island-by-island slog against the Japanese in the Pacific, the manual had hardly been updated by the time Caputo went to Vietnam.
All jungles are not equal, as generations of soldiers and their commanders would later learn the hard way. From the predators, to the things you can eat, to how the enemy operates in the different rainforests of the world will determine how troops are trained and how good they are at jungle warfare.
This has lessons for the SANDF which has been engaged in peacekeeping missions in some of the thickest deepest rainforest on Earth.
Thirty SANDF Quick Reaction Force (QRF) members recently completed jungle training. Led by instructors from Brazil’s Jungle Warfare Mobile Training Team, the QRF troops learned basic jungle warfare skills such contact drills, live firing exercises, navigation and tactical movement, air support and casualty evacuation.
It will now fall on the 30 troops to train the rest of the QRF in jungle tactics, the SANDF says.
This will be vital for the QRF, part of the United Nations MONUSCO mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to operate effectively in the Congolese rainforest.
That SANDF troops have jungle training is vital if SA is to play its part in African peacekeeping missions, says defence analyst Helmoed-Römer Heitman.
“It is good for us to keep Africa as peaceful as possible,” he says.
With large swathes of Africa covered in thick rainforest it also made sense for SANDF troops to be trained by Brazilian instructors, he adds.
“We don’t have the expertise of the Brazilians. They have real jungle.”
Bad boots and punji sticks
Jungle warfare training is not new to the SANDF. The army has previously sent troops to Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape for jungle warfare training before deploying them with the UN’s Force Intervention Brigade in the DRC.
But as lush, humid and hot as Port St Johns might be it falls far short of the conditions SANDF infantry will experience in the DRC.
This, says John Dovey, security consultant, author and former SA Army Reserve officer, is problematic.
“The forest in which they are doing their jungle warfare training is not a proper jungle,” he says. “And you can only extrapolate so much.”
Dovey, who previously served with the FIB in DRC and saw first-hand the operational challenges, says jungle warfare poses numerous challenges for the SANDF.
Most of the immediate issues concern equipment, especially uniforms, boots and radios.
“The current SANDF camouflage and the prototype of the new uniform are not suited to central Africa in any way,” says Dovey.
“The green is too light and there is too much brown. Our camouflage does not compare to Rwandan or Kenyan camouflage which blends into the foliage much better.”
The SANDF boots are also not ideally suited to the task, he adds.
“We still the use the brown leather boots. They are not jungle boots — they are savanna or desert boots. They are heavy, solid and have no breathability or ability to discard water.”
When Dovey was posted to DRC he and some comrades bought their own camouflage canvas boots.
“They made a big difference,” he says. “They were still not the right things particularly, but they were a lot better.”
While there has been some talk of new breathable canvas boots for the SANDF, Dovey said crucial needs were being overlooked.
“Nobody talks about metal plates [in the soles] to protect against punji sticks, for example,” he said.
Punji sticks — sharpened wooden spikes, often covered in human excrement, placed upright in a shallow, camouflaged hole — are a traditional favourite guerrilla weapon.
“I don’t think anyone actually honestly believes there is going to be an active enemy so they’re not thinking about those practicalities.”
Many rivers to cross
Dovey, who spent some time working along special forces units in DRC, notes that apart from the engineers, no SANDF formations have either the training or equipment for crossing the kinds of deep, wide, fast-flowing rivers that are common in places like the DRC.
“The drills are great when you have a little stream that you have to cross. But when the rivers are 40-60m wide and flowing at 60km/h then it becomes slightly more challenging to cross.”
Wide rivers were not the only problem, he adds. Many of the rivers reached up to shoulder height and troops had to make do without flotation bladders to get their equipment across.
The kit itself is not designed for that sort of environment, nor is the backpack nor the webbing.
“Three days later you still have water draining out of that bag,” he says.
Recovering injured personnel from the forest also provided a new set of challenges. Dovey points to one incident where a casevac was called for a special forces operator who had injured his hip in a fall.
An SAAF Oryx was dispatched to the scene but its jungle penetrator — a wedge-shaped device for breaking through treetops and undergrowth — could not get through the triple canopy.
“That was a relatively trivial situation,” he says. “They weren’t under direct threat, they were doing a reconnaissance. If they were in combat and they had casualties they needed to evacuate and get back for treatment in the golden hour, they would struggle.”
Not a walk in the park
The jungle, by definition, hinders rapid or easy movement.
“You can be in that jungle and three days from the edge of it, with no sun,” says Dovey. “It’s truly primordial, old growth with trees that are 300 to 500 years old. It’s impossible to visualise until you’re there.”
The story of Dustoff 65, a US medevac helicopter shot down while attempting to evacuate wounded airborne troops in the A Shau Valley in Vietnam in April 1968, is testament to the difficulty of jungle operations.
The aircraft, a Bell UH-1 Iroquois, was attempting to lower its jungle penetrator through the triple canopy when its tail rotor was destroyed by a rocket. The helicopter plunged into the forest a few hundred metres from the airborne position. The command on the ground dispatched a five-man patrol to find the wreck and bring back any survivors.
It took the team four hours — and one firefight — to find and reach the crash scene where they found three of the four crew still alive. The fourth, crew chief James Richardson, had been thrown from the plunging chopper; it would be weeks before his body was recovered by another unit.
It took the patrol the remainder of the day to move the injured men back to their position and three more days to secure another position where they could hack out of the forest an LZ capable of accommodating another dust off.
“It was three days of being constantly wet, covered with muck, eating cold C-rations, unable to sleep,” platoon commander Tim Lickness wrote years later.
“We were unable to move to a more secure position due to the need to protect the wounded. We used plastic explosives to blow trees for an LZ. The hole we created in the jungle was barely large enough for the rescue helicopter and we marvelled at the skill and courage of that crew.”
While much has also been made of the US experience in Vietnam where troops in contact could usually call in airstrikes or artillery from firebases, both are less useful than the legend would suggest.
“Using artillery is tactically unsound,” says Dovey. “Artillery [rounds] falling into a forested or wooded area will create secondary shrapnel. Unless you are very, very confident of your position, I would not call for supporting fire under those conditions.”
The problem is exacerbated by the difficulty of getting decent satellite signals under the trees.
“Quite often the only time we were able to get any kind of signal was when there was a slight thinning of the canopy because we were crossing a river,” he says.
Verbal communication with comrades in a jungle environment is equally difficult.
“You’re walking patrol, the dude is next to you and then he’s gone,” he says. “You cannot hear him, you cannot see him and yet he’s just five metres away from you,” he says.
A hard rain’s gonna fall
The density of the forest is only part of the reason. The other is the constant noise of rain, says Dovey.
“The rain makes that sussurating sound. At first you notice it then it fades into the background and becomes a white noise that blocks out a lot of other noises,” he says.
The only way for troops to stay in touch with each other in that environment is by being physically close to each other — at least no more than 1m to 1.5m apart.
“The trees are often bigger than 1.5m [and] you can lose each other, so that doesn’t work.”
Exercising command and control under those circumstances becomes enormously difficult, he adds.
Radio communication is also extremely challenging in thick forest. The SANDF urgently needed new radios for effective command and control, says Dovey.
“Our radios battle to reach 5km,” he says.
As the original US jungle warfare training manual says in its introduction, the jungle will impart its hardships on both sides without favour and the side “which better overcomes the difficulties imposed by the environment has a distinct advantage over the opposing force”.
Field Marshall Victor Slim, commander of the Allied forces in Burma in World War II, had another lesson that had been learned the hard way.
“To our men the jungle was a strange, fearsome place; moving and fighting in it were a nightmare,” he wrote.
“We were too ready to classify jungle as ‘impenetrable’… to us it appeared only as an obstacle to movement; to the Japanese it was a welcome means of concealed manoeuvre and surprise. The Japanese reaped the deserved reward, we paid the penalty.”
