09/26/2026
Many of APT/Allen High’s young men were drafted and bore assignments to Vietnam; we remember them and others that trained at Fort Polk for such impactful and life changing missions.
If a man you know went to Vietnam, there is a strong chance he learned how to do it in the pine woods of Vernon Parish, Louisiana. 🪖
Fort Polk became the Army's largest infantry training center in June of 1962, right as the war began to pull. Recruits did basic training on South Fort. Then they crossed over to North Fort, and North Fort had a name of its own.
They called it Tiger Land. There was a sign over the entrance reading Tiger Land, Home of the Vietnam Combat Soldiers, and the men who went through it remember it with a specificity that has not faded in sixty years.
It was eight weeks of advanced infantry training built to be Vietnam as closely as Louisiana could manage, and Louisiana could manage far more than you would expect. The heat is the same. The humidity is the same. The standing water is the same. The Army built two mock Vietnamese hamlets out there, with thatched huts, earthen berms and lines of sharpened bamboo stakes, and ran young men through them over and over, setting off simulated b***y traps, walking point, learning what a trip wire feels like against a shin before the day it matters.
The Army's own history says more than one million soldiers trained at Fort Polk during the Vietnam War. By 1969, Fort Polk was sending more soldiers to Vietnam than any other post in the United States.
Think about what that did to the towns around it. Leesville, DeRidder and every crossroads in Vernon Parish spent a decade as the last piece of America an enormous number of nineteen year olds ever saw. The last hamburger. The last phone call home from a booth outside a gas station. The last Saturday night.
The infantry training center closed in the spring of 1976, once the draft was over and the Army had become a volunteer force. The mock villages went back to pine.
For a whole generation of American men, the last ordinary place on earth was a patch of Louisiana. A lot of them have never been able to smell wet pine without going straight back. 🇺🇸
