From his vantage point the Special Forces Sergeant peered into the gloom, staring hard trying to see movement against the black background of trees and the light mist rising off of the stream. He was in a spider hole, fancy name for a simple hole in the ground but covered with a mat of branches and leaves, the top was propped up by a stick, leaving roughly 6 inches open in order to see. Spaced out from his position were 10 more holes each 5 meters apart, his hole was besides a worn trail leading from the stream bank and meandered through the jungle growth in the direction of a small Montagnard village. It was here that the Sergeant hoped he would at last have some luck, and if his meticulously plotted map and intelligence reports were correct he hoped to surprise a party of Viet Cong insurgents who had been raiding and terrorizing the numerous small villages in the AO-Area of Operation. Some six weeks prior this group of VC had entered a village under the alleged protection of the Sergeants A Detachment and forcibly taken all the young male Montagnards along with all the stored food and the radio given to the villages to call for help. As an object lesson to this village the VC had mutilated the pregnant wife and unborn child and savagely mutilated its head man as well. Since that terrible night the Sergeant had been driven in his efforts to locate and exterminate the VC raiding party. By carefully working and plotting intelligence reports from a number of village sources he had plotted the movements of the group after each incident, he hoped he had discovered a pattern to their movements but twice he had taken his small group of 10 men and painstakingly set up elaborate ambush sites only to fail as the group had not appeared as he had predicted. Other team members had lost interest claiming that they could not predict when and where this VC would strike next. Still he would not let it go, he had selected his 10 man group from those who had relatives in the village that had been hit so very hard. He had armed half the squad with M-2 full automatic carbines and the other half with M3 45 caliber full auto sub machine guns. He had drilled them countless hours until he was assured they had all his instruction down pat and would not screw it up. To that end he had moved the squad to what he believed to be a good ambush site, had them dig the spider holes and dispose of all the displaced earth. Then they had made women covers for the holes. To insure they remained awake, each man was made to swallow two "green Hornet" Amphetamine capsules to keep them awake. In addition a piece of black commo wire was looped around each man's wrist. At frequent intervals he could assure himself that, by the answering tugs of the wire that the men were awake - a sharp series of three tugs was the signal that the Ambush was about to be sprung. Each striker would pass the three sharp tugs on the next man in line. Thus all would be ready.