The Meanest MO FO in the Valley
John Cleveland, Lieutenant, US Army, 173rd Airborne Brigade,
Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam, July 1970
There was a saying in Vietnam, a GI’s version of Psalm 23, The Lord is My Shepherd. It went like this, “Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will fear no Evil, for I Am the Meanest Motherfucker in The Valley”. You saw it everywhere on Posters in our hootches or living quarters, written on our helmets, and inscribed on the drive-on rags or sweat scarves that we wore around our necks. It touched on life and fear in Vietnam and War, and it was part of our training, that to survive you needed to be fearless, you needed to be meaner than your enemy. That nice guys don’t finish last, they finish dead. It was just something we were all familiar with.
This saying became burned right into my mind one night in late July during my tour. We had a reinforced squad, basically ten guys, doing a night patrol looking for enemy contact. Our enemy moved mostly at night and they had the advantage of knowing the area much better than we did. At night your senses are on fire, even more keen because you can’t see well so your hearing ramps up to make for the difference. It’s amazing what you can see in the dark on a moonlit night without the glare of city lights but this was a moonless very dark night and you could barely see the man in front of you. So, we were wound pretty tight moving cautiously in that black dark.
We were on a narrow trail that started to slope up a small hill about fifty feet in elevation. I was third in line, my normal patrol position with the point man leading and the slack man right in front of me. My point man was probably the bravest guy I ever knew, a skinny 115 pounds soaking wet, but 115 pounds of raw Alabama courage. Russell had faced countless combat situations with me and never blinked, he was just fearless and I trusted him completely. As we approached the top of this hill, the quiet of the night was totally shattered by this ungodly squeal and grunting noise like I had never heard. As I focused to the front to see what the hell we had run into, Russell comes flying by me running back down the hill eyes wide open, the whites of his eyes all I could see in the dark. And He Yells, RUN! When Russell yells run, you run. I hesitated a moment as the slack man went flying by me going back down the hill and suddenly I was face to face with a Monster with two gleaming tusks. It was the biggest boar I had ever seen (actually I had never even seen a boar in person), charging in a rage, scream squealing, slobbering, grunting, madder than hell and man those tusks. He was huge and in the dark he looked probably 10 times bigger than what he actually was. Needless to say, I ran back down that hill as fast as my legs could carry me as did the rest of the squad.
When we got to the bottom of the hill, we all started laughing our asses off at what had just happened. The awesome firepower that a squad of GI’s are capable of is frightening and not something you want to be down range from. If that had been an enemy soldier, I am sure we would have let loose like we always do. Like we were trained to do.
But that bad ass boar punked us good. He was the Meanest Motherfucker in the Valley that night and we weren’t about to challenge that. One of the guys who had been at the rear and did not see what our eyes saw, says, “why didn’t you just shoot it”. I looked at him, laughed, and said that’s easy for you to say being way back here. He was welcome to go up there and face that dude, who was still freaking out at the top of the hill, if so inclined. Having second thoughts, the trooper smartly passed on that. It was a night to remember and we laughed about it many, many times afterward that year, the boar from Hell that punked us all.