Transporting water is of course necessary.
Transporting hot water is ridiculous. It is much more logistically sound to heat it up when needed. Vietnam era immersion heaters were used for decades after (maybe still). They were used to heat food but could heat a large amount of water in a short time for any use.
Soldiers are resourceful. They will figure out a way to rig something up. The military does have equipment to set up hygiene stations. There are portable field showers that the military will set up in rear areas. Showers are not always possible but they are certainly not a sign of weakness. Good hygiene is essential to prevent disease and increase readiness. On paper it sounds tough that you are living in a mud hole to win. A good leader has to worry about food, water, shelter and hygiene for their troops. Shelter and good hygiene are not always possible in combat but when they are you take advantage of it. That cuts down on the number of troops that are taken out of the fight by disease.
This seems like a pretty common occurrence in all wars. Your average cannon fodder in the frontline has a pretty incomplete picture of whatever’s going in the war as a whole, and the opposing side in particular, other than what you can see directly over the sights of their gun.
So obviously what you observe you interpret based on your opinions of the other side. You “know” the US troops lived in ridiculous opulent luxury, so obviously that water tank you saw being delivered is a hot water tank to those precious Americans can take hot showers.
Though I think its also true that your average German soldier, much like the NVA solider mentioned in the OP, had a pretty low opinion of GIs because of this kind of thing. There is something inherent in soldiers psyche that equates putting up with suffering and doing without luxuries with being a better soldier.
My experience in both non-combat field exercises and combat zones: there’s a TON of downtime for most soldiers. After equipment maintenance, area improvement, training, etc. you still have a lot of sitting around and waiting. Typically those in forward positions will have one or more groups of soldiers head to the nearest large encampment or base for hot showers, PX and commissary, a hot meal, and so on. It’s a bit like a day spa but also to get some relief from focusing on purely military concerns 24/7. It’s great for morale, and a refreshed soldier is a lot more enthusiastic about the shittier side of things for at least a while.
No, hot water is never transported, it’s just made on the spot as needed. As someone pointed out, water buffalos carry bulk water and lister bags are used for showers (keeping in mind I’m speaking from my experience 20-30 years ago). For shaving we’d fill up our metal canteen holder, put it on the heater stove in the tent and then find a vehicle with a side mirror we could use. I learned to shave in the dark with no mirror and still shave by feel to this day.
Coleman sells such a system but it’s a black plastic bag not a jug – takes up a lot less room when not full of water.
I can say from Burning Man experience that it doesn’t take all day but only an hour for acceptably warm and two for pretty darn hot. My camp of 2- or 3-hundred people had a pretty fancy shower set up. It was a repurposed fooseball table about three feet off of the ground with tarp sides and a shower curtain. There were hooks for hanging your towel and the shower bag and it was off the ground for water disposal.
You can’t deposit gray water on the playa so it would drain into a large tote and then get pumped into the thousand gallon rented wastewater tank. There were six shower bags available kept on a south-facing rack by the shower. You had to supply your own water and originally, you could use a bag that had been filled for a while then refill it for next use. Unfortunately one year we got a large group that didn’t really get the idea of communal camping who wouldn’t refill the bag so policy was to keep the bags empty, you’d fill one, then wait for it to get hot.
If there is any truth or quasi-truth to the story I would much sooner believe the VC or NVA soldier saw a hot water heater being transported by helicopter and decided that meant US troops were soft.
Then that one word fell off the story some time in the thousands of linked retellings that eventually led us to reddit 40+ years after the war ended.
Agreed on cool showers in hot weather, which Vietnam has in abundance. I take cool showers about 4 months out of the year, just because it’s more comfortable.
But shaving with cold water is not that bad. I’ve been doing it for several years now and have no problem. I was told sometime back that it makes the blade last longer. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but it could be. Now admittedly, I don’t like to shave so only do it about every 4 days, but that has nothing to do with the water temperature. I didn’t like shaving with hot water either.
There’s a grand old tradition in all competitive enterprises, war included, that you take a look at the facts on the ground, and then, whatever those facts are, you use them as support for the proposition that your side is the best, and the other side is the worst.
When The Other Guys are shipping chocolate cake across the world, that means that They are soft and weak, and have no sense of priorities, and will fold under immediately as soon as their decadent luxuries are even slightly restricted. When Our Guys are shipping chocolate cake across the world, it means that We have so much resources and logistical capability that We can afford luxuries in addition to all of the necessities that We have in abundance and They probably lack, and so We’ll wear Them down quickly.
During WWII one of my father’s shipmates nicknamed “Ski” had a heavy blue-black beard and Dad was fascinated to watch him shave in the morning. He’d wash his face, lather up, put a new blade in the razor, and complete the job in abut a minute.
Lather flew in all directions and you could hear the hairs being severed – pickity pickity pick-pick. He would then open the razor and drop the blade into the waste bin before rinsing off and going about his business. Asked why he threw the blade away after one use, Ski answered, “'Cause it ain’t no good any more.”
When stainless steel razor blades were introduced years ago and they would advertise you could get ten or more shaves out of one, Dad mused, “I wonder if ol’ Ski is getting more than one shave per blade now.”
I remember reading circa 1969 (maybe in TIME magazine) about a US officer in the field who requested a chopper to come in to evacuate his wounded. Told that none was available and that they’d have to wait, he instead ordered pizzas to be flown in for his troops. Supposedly, when the pizzas arrived he commandeered the helicopter and had his men taken out that way.
I’ve searched and can’t find a cite even close to this though.
OK, however, does it seem plausible that if the helicopters dedicated to evacuating the wounded were all in use, other helicopters used for pizza deliveries would still be available?
That’s what the article I read was getting at. ISTR, the point was that not at all choppers were under the same command and some of them were actually being used to deliver beer and pizza for a price. In other words that there was a business going on.
Again, even if I am remembering correctly what I read 50 years ago, I am not claiming it actually happened. But it doesn’t seem totally out of the question.
Highly possible there was a business of some sort going on. But those would not have been military helicopters. So, the issue would not have been that one command refused to fly, but another did. More likely, a civilian contractor was called to deliver something (possibly pizza, but probably just general supplies which also happened to contain food which included pizza). Once the civilians aircraft landed, the military commandeered it. It’s possible. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of intra-theater deliveries and personnel movements are done by civilian aircraft and crews.
Soldier “observations” about the greater state of the war based on their anecdata are probably as old as war and of course are usually wildly inaccurate. I have read a few that were pretty logical and accurate though, Paul Golz was a German captured by Americans during the Normandy campaign. When the captive group he was in was moved to the beach head and he saw landing ships and support vessels lining the beaches as far as the eye could see, and even more floating in the channel beyond, he said he knew the war was lost. That was actually a fairly adroit observation, since obviously the ability to establish such a large beach head that the Wehrmacht had been unable to push back into the sea was a clear cut strategic “very bad situation” for German control of Western Europe.
Are there any actual examples of bad priorities in logistics though like the original example?
The film A Bridge Too Far has a similar scene where the British forces besieged in Arnhem getting airdropped replacement hats instead of badly needed ammo and medical supplies but I wonder if that’s a fictional example.