Troops Believed Drugged

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31230, 30 November 1966, Page 17

Troops Believed Drugged

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

SAIGON, Nov. 29.

North Vietnamese troops are fighting so tenaciously in South Vietnam’s central highlands that American soldiers believe they are drugging themselves with heroin before going into battle.

Captain Linwood Knight, commander of a rifle company of the United States

25th Infantry Division, said his men had captured North Vietnamese packs containing heroin while chasing enemy units through the denselyforested mountains of southern Kontum Province bordering Cambodia. “They dope themselves before going into battle, and when they get hit, they just

keep going, and one bullet is not enough to stop them,” Captain Knight said. A doctor in his company said he was convinced the North Vietnamese troops “got high” on pain-killing drugs. Heroin, akin to morphine, is derived from the opium poppy, a plant which grows in abundance in Laos, through which North Vietnamese troops are said to pass on their way into South Vietnam. The doctor said: “You shoot a man and he!s wounded real bad, but he keeps running at you. They just take a long time to die. An American soldier usually goes down the first time he’s hit.”

During a battle last week “the enemy started screaming at us like a bunch of wild Indians—they must have been doped,” he added. Although the belief that both North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops sometimes fight under the influence of pain-killing drugs is widespread among American soldiers in the field, senior United States Intelligence officers say they have no definite proof.