On yesterday’s date, July 6, in the year  1967, Bravo Company, 1^st Battalion, 26^th Marine Regiment was on Hill 881 south. Third platoon ran a patrol that day and found some four-month old NVA bunkers and an anti-aircraft position about a month old.

A listening post went out and took an incoming hand grenade and had to be called back inside the wire until morning.

I was in second platoon and there isn’t a lot of info available about their activity for that date. Someone probably went out on a listening post from our platoon, too. As a matter of fact, the fragged LP could have been one from second platoon. There was probably an ambush or two out, one from our squad, maybe. We dug some holes, I am sure and filled sandbags and stood watch and burned latrines and burned the trash dump. Fog and mist came in that night and didn’t clear until late the next morning. There is a good chance it rained. We may well have been sniped at by some NVA on the ridge west of us.

I may not have even been on the hill. I could have been down in the rear getting a serious case of jungle rot cured and then finding someone from my home town who was in Alpha Company, I’d have bought some cartons of Lucky Strikes at the PX which was in a little storage box off the air strip. Or I could have been at combat demolition school in Phu Bai. If I was on the hill, I may have joined Richardson and Deedee and Poorman and Roman-Colsada and watched the B-52s drop bombs several ridges over, maybe even in Laos, although we weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing . . . bomb Laos. The sun was mostly gone with just the brassy gold of sunset. When the bombs hit, the atmosphere above the earth boiled into big bubbles hundreds of feet high. Chunks of earth, rocks and trees flipped and surged and filled the bubbles. And then the sound hit us, long after the bombs. We were buffeted by the concussion from a mile or two away, or maybe even farther.

The annual Khe Sanh Veterans reunion is in San Antonio next week and we will begin interviewing Bravo Company siege veterans at 9 AM on Thursday, July 15, 2010 and will continue to interview through Friday the 16^th. We are excited about re-connecting with  my marine comrades and hearing their stories, some I am familiar with, some I have never heard, some with a completely different take on the whole Khe Sanh shebang than I had.

If you are a siege veteran from Bravo, 1/26 who is attending the reunion and you wish to be interviewed, please e-mail my wife, Betty, at bettykrodgers@msn.com or you can call me at 208-340-8889. We have some interview slots left, but they are filling up so please join us and share your memories for a great cause, the documentation and preservation of our trials and turmoil and successes.

We now have our website up at https://bravotheproject.com. If you would like to help us see the project to fruition, you can find information about making donations at the website. We would appreciate any help you can provide.

Semper  Fidelis.