There was a plant in Vietnam where many soldiers encountered wait a minute what is so special about it?

Answer 1

Contrary to the "Hollywood" movies (films) not every infantry (grunt) patrol had machetes. Leg units may have had a ready supply of them, but mechanized grunts, sure didn't have them. And mechanized infantrymen did an awfully large amount of "dismounted" leg work.

"Wait a minute vines", were simply jungle vines. They acted like strings or ropes, you couldn't see them, they'd just grab you. Especially your weapons. M-16 rifles seemed to carry OK, but the M-14 rifle had a metal butt plate that swung open and it's magazine was heavy gauge steel, and larger than the short light weight aluminum M-16 magazines (20 rounders were far more common than the 30 round M-16 magazines & 20 round M-16 magazines jammed less than the 30 rounders did). The "wait a minute vines" loved to grab that M-14's steel butt plate & magazine. The vine would pull your rifle one way, your forward pushing motion through the jungle kept you going another way, so you fell, and your rifle was pulled from your hands. Then you had to "struggle to get up" (fight more vines), then "struggle to retrieve your rifle" from the other vines that grabbed your rifle. POINT MEN suffered the most during these "dismounts", as they were the ones that encountered them first.

Machingunners (M-60) had similar problems, but they walked further behind the other men. So by the time the sixty gunner reached the "trouble spots" the vegetation had mostly been trampled fairly well enough for him to get through more easily.