I was in Tet1 Feb-Apr 68 and Tet2 May 68 as an infantry air mobile grunt. Was pretty intense, but I would add, ANY Grunt/Gyrene in ANY active prolonged firefight regardless the theatre would rightly describe their conflict as high intensity. Combat troops usually spent many hours/days/weeks in endless trudging boring patrols punctuated by those high intensity nerve shattering, bowel loosening firefights that could leave you trashed inside for days from the adrenaline rush. 
to anyone in uniform that had successfully survives all of the thousands pieces of hot metal seeking a lodging place in their bodies in these times.
Fact: The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one yearThe phrase low intensity combat really means low press coverage combat. Not to diminish the combat experience of Vietnam but in Chuck Pfarrer's biography he describes how he and his fellow seals in Lebanon were subject to artillery barrages almost daily for about a year and, at least by his account, some of the Vietnam vets he was with said that it was worse than their tours in Vietnam. Mogadishu is very good example. The
only reason that anybody has ever heard of it is because it made the news. And even then it was one or two years before people knew what actually happened, and then another several years before the public was aware.
The point i was trying to make when I started this thread is that it really irks me, and more to the point, irks this generation of war fighters when they come back to the states by and large the average attitude they are met with from their countrymen is "there's a war??".
BTW Redcatcher, I wore that 199th patch briefly in the early 90s.
