Anyone who has been there can identify, and those who haven't have no idea of how miserable life was in the field during the monsoon season. Units with tracked vehicles had their own set of problems. This photo is a good, but not extreme example. It shows an armored personnel carrier negotiating what was basically a river of mud inside the perimeter. To one side is a tent that is on its own little island, surrounded by mud. I saw a tank swamped by a wave of mud when the driver hit a dip with a little too much speed. By necessity, mech and armored units had to move frequently because the wet ground and daily rains caused roads and pathways to turn to mud. Occasionally, personnel carriers literally had to be pulled out by tank retrievers. To compensate, drivers would swing a little wider, which eventually caused the mud to swamp interior bunkers and make the perimeter impossible to navigate. Perimeter bunkers were also muddy and filled with water. They were pretty much useless for fighting.

Other joys of the monsoon were the increased humidity and being somewhere on the scale from damp to soaking wet all the time, sometimes for weeks on end. Fungal infections (jungle rot) were a constant problem, especially when there wasn't a source of dry socks. Most of us developed ringworm to some extent.

A look at the photos from the Battle of Xom Bo II should tell you all you need to know about the difficulty of fighting under these conditions. You couldn't really dig in and visibility was even more limited, especially when it was raining.

Given my choice, I would rather have spent 2 months of dry season in the field than 1 month of monsoon.

Photo courtesy of Don Scott