This is a time of the year that I call the “season of the siege.” Memories of Khe Sanh in 1967-1968 always flood my mind, but in the winter and early spring of every year the memories infest me with louder shouts from the ghosts of my history.

Those ghosts showed up to bother my memories yesterday when I read a piece from Ernie Pyle’s book about World War II titled, Brave Men. In his books about that war, Pyle rarely mentioned generals and admirals, politicians, global strategy. He stuck to the mundane inconveniences, joys and heartaches encountered by the snuffy, the grunt, the flyboy, the squid, the dogface. Particularly interesting to me was Pyle’s reference to candles, specifically to the need for candles on the Anzio beachhead just south of Rome, Italy, in early 1944.

In Vietnam, we needed candles, too, so I suddenly felt an affinity with those men trapped in Kesselring’s Steel Ring that surrounded the American 5th Army at Anzio. Sure, the very fact that I went through boot camp, got shot at by the enemy, shot at the enemy, slept in the mud and rain, lived in a hole in the ground, provides plenty of common experience with the warriors at Anzio. But that need for candles, that mundane luxury, and it was a luxury, puts our—theirs and mine—shared misery and fear on a footing so common and un-heroic that it makes me smile just thinking of it.

Ken Rodgers, © Betty Rodgers, 2012

Candles were necessary and important because they allowed us to see in our hooches. We had no electrical power, we had no barracks, we had no lights dangling down from the sandbagged roofs of those holes we chiseled out of the hard, red ground of Khe Sanh.

We wanted light to read by and to fix our C-ration meals and to see the faces of the other men we were talking to. I don’t recall if the Marine Corps provided candles. They provided C-rations and chocolate and Big Hunk bars, they provided cigarettes and toilet paper and matches and heat tabs. But I don’t recall candles.

In my experience, the candles I burned on Hills 881S and 861 and at the Khe Sanh Combat Base came from my mother. A variety of candles, but mostly white, long and thin, tapered and not much bigger around than my thumb.

When packages from home didn’t show up due to weather or some other factor, we had to figure out how to manufacture our own candles. We learned the hard way not to throw out those mounds of spent candle wax that looked like the remains of lava that had run into a flat spot and pooled. After some nights of dark—the hooches were dark most of the time—without candlelight, we learned to save our spent candle wax so that we could make replacements.

The candles we made were never as effective as the ones we got from home, but they served in a pinch. I have clear images of two of us Marines bent over in the fluttering light of our last candle, with a thread from a piece of Marine Corps green canvas or two or three threads from a jungle dungaree entwined to create a wick, melting our stash of old wax so we could construct a new source of light.

Besides candles, mail from home brought us socks and books and Chapstick and goodies from our mothers’ kitchens. My mother and her friends sent me a lot of packages with so much stuff, I had plenty of goodies to spread around…cookies and hand-dipped bonbons and brownies, to name a few delights.

And after the siege heated up in February 1968, those packages became scarce and when they did arrive, they came in bunches and often the cookies were moldy and the candles had been taken out of our packages…by whom, we never knew.

As I look back on it now, what was more important to me, and probably a lot of the Americans and their allies at Khe Sanh, were the letters from our parents and our wives and our friends. Their expressions of love and concern helped harden our resolve to survive the horror of the siege.

The last month of my tour in Vietnam, I was charged with traveling up from the trenches to the company office to collect the mail for 2nd Platoon. I carried a red box that was full of letters written by Marines and Corpsmen in our platoon to someone back home. When I arrived at the office, I delivered the outgoing mail and picked up whatever was there for the men in our platoon. Since the mail arrived in fits and starts, sometimes if took me multiple trips across that deadly no-man’s land, so to speak, between the relative safety of our positions and where I picked up the mail.

The company office was an underground bunker that housed the Company 1st Sergeant and the office clerks. We usually met and gathered the mail in a big tent that was set up over the bunker. There was a hole that led down into the bunker from the tent.

I remember once, when I was diddy-bopping down the trench after sipping coffee and shooting the moose with some 2nd Platoon buddies, something slammed down onto the top of my helmet and jarred my head down into my neck. This was a feeling that wasn’t unusual, since all the times I had to traverse from trench to office I often found myself having to dive behind some kind of structure or into a hole with the arrival of mortars or rockets or artillery rounds. A lot of those times, I ended up jamming my helmet into a sandbag abutment or the wall of a fighting hole. After recovering from my initial shock, I saw that it was Staff Sergeant Alvarado, the platoon sergeant, who had bonked me on the head with that red mail box.

He said something to the effect, “It’s way past mail call, Rodgers.”

I was very familiar with Staff Sergeant Alvarado since I was his radio operator. He was a good NCO and did a fine job of helping lead 2nd Platoon. But right then, he’d gotten into my craw, and me, always looking for an appropriate moment to challenge authority, ripped into him about what he could and couldn’t do to me. I remember yelling at him that he could write me up or remove me from my duties, but he was not to ever touch me, hit me or assault me in any way. Of course, the vernacular of Khe Sanh required that I throw in more expletives than normal words, but I won’t go into those details here.

And to Staff Sergeant Alvarado’s credit, the only thing he did was grimace like I’d stung him in some way. I grabbed the mail box and off I went, highly irritated and not without some remorse for not doing my duty in the first place.

After the Payback Patrol of 3/30/1968, I remember (because I was so “short” I could walk underneath a short-legged table) taking my replacement up to that tent over the company office to get the mail. Men from all of the platoons were there, sitting around with piles of mail and a clerk in the middle calling out names of addressees. Bravo Company had so many casualties by that time—way over one-hundred dead and wounded—that it was hard to know who was where and who was alive or in Danang at the hospital or on a hospital ship or rotated back to the States.

Of all the things I recall about my time in Vietnam, this incident stands out in my memory. We hadn’t had mail for quite some time and all of a sudden piles were available and each platoon had a goodly heap of letters and packages, but the biggest mound was for the Marines not there.

As we were sorting the mail this way, three rocket rounds swooshed in and exploded outside. I had been in Vietnam longer than any of the other Marines sitting around that tent, and like a snake escaping a raptor, I was across the deck and down that chute into the bunker where the office was.

The top sergeant ordered me to get out, and for a second I felt like ripping into him for being a pogue and hiding down in that hole while us snuffies fought the war. But I didn’t. I climbed out and collected the mail, and along with my replacement, carried all that mail to 2nd Platoon.

When I got home, my mother was asking me if I got this, and if I got that, and no, I hadn’t, and since I was gone from the nightmare of that misunderstood war, I hoped that someone down there in 2nd Platoon ended up with my goodies and my white socks and my candles.

DVDs of BRAVO! are available. For more information about purchasing BRAVO! DVDs, go to http://bit.ly/18Pgxe5.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way we can spread the word about the film and the Vietnam War.

Yesterday I awoke early, when the dark still hung from the eaves and leered into my dreams like spirits of long-lost warriors. It was January 21, 2014. Most January 21sts are like that for me…an early awakening, an early rising, coffee and pondering January 21, 1968, the beginning of the Siege of Khe Sanh.

Here in Idaho it was dark and foggy and the stench of inversion settled into every crevice it could get its stinky fingers into. I thought about the men I served with and where they are now, if they are anywhere, and what they are doing and whether or not I am in contact with them. I thought about the day before the beginning of the Siege, and how it became clear to me that my experience in Vietnam was about to become more violent, and I thought about the night before as Puff the Magic Dragon spit curving arcs of red death at the NVA out in front of my bunker. I thought about the awful shock of being awakened around 5:30 AM on the 21st by a crescendo of terror that shook the ground, and frankly, shook me, too.

Still groggy from sleep, I got my gear and bolted into the trench, and light and fire and noise drove me into the bottom of the trench, on my face. Something thudded into my lower back below my flak jacket. My back and jungle dungarees sizzled and I smelled singed flesh and I wondered if I could move my legs. I started screaming, “I’m hit, I’m hit.”

Steve Foster, who was in my fireteam, scrambled over and began to laugh. Normally you would think that someone who would laugh at another man’s wounds was really weird but if you knew Foster, well… He scraped whatever was on my back and got his face close to my ear and said, “It’s only clods.” And then he laughed some more.

Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh, Courtesy of the Estate of Dan Horton

I rose and went to my fighting hole and someone came by and ordered me into the machine gun bunker close by which was manned by wounded men, one with a huge gash in his shin and another with his face bandaged so he couldn’t open his mouth, and his arm in a sling. We watched outside for the enemy to overrun us, but they never came. The gas from the exploding ammo dump, which was close by, forced us to put on gas masks.

It wasn’t much better for the next seventy-seven days. And a lot of those days were worse than January 21, 1968.

For years I kept my memories of that day secret. Only I was allowed access to those terrifying moments that crept up my spine and stopped me in the middle of whatever I was doing. Nobody cared much about what happened to me at Khe Sanh unless they knew me well or were at the Siege or went through something similar. All of us Vietnam Vets were hibernating, I think, until it became cool to have been a veteran of the Vietnam conflict. As long as we let our memories sleep, we were almost the same as being gagged.

But now, the stories are rolling out of us like a river that has finally thawed. We are speaking and we are telling our story, about our war—not our fathers’ war, but our war—which in its own way was as nasty and deadly as any war fought any time or place.

Part of the story of Khe Sanh has been told by Betty and me in our film, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. It is not the only story, by any means, but it is my story and it is the story of the company of Marines I served with and in many ways it is a story that speaks for all Vietnam Veterans and maybe even veterans of other wars.

Marine and BRAVO! supporter extraordinaire Terry Hubert says that our job—Betty’s and mine—is to educate, and we hope that the film educates folks about what Vietnam Veterans went through and what it means to us now. There are messages in the film, it seems, that speak to some universal truths about conflict and humanity.

Part of the way we are educating America about the Vietnam War is by traveling around the country to give screenings. We are getting set to hit the road and travel to my home town of Casa Grande, Arizona, where we will screen the film in the historic Paramount Theatre on February 13 at 7:00 PM. In addition to educating folks, the proceeds from the screening of BRAVO! (entree fee is $10.00) will help fund the Pinal County Veterans Memorial.

If you are in the area, come by and catch a look at this powerful and poignant film. We’d really like to meet you, or get reacquainted if we have already met. You can find out more details about the Casa Grande screening at http://www.paramountfoundation.org/EVENTS.html.

On March 22, 2014, BRAVO! will be screened at VFW Post 1924 in Fallbrook, CA. BRAVO! Skipper Ken Pipes lives in the area and will be on hand along with Betty and me when we show up to screen the film. More details to come on this screening.

On March 29, 2014, BRAVO! is provisionally scheduled to screen for veterans incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California. As soon as we know more, we will provide the information.

On March 30, Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day, we will be on board the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, The National Liberty Ship Memorial at Pier 45, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, CA. The proceeds from this screening will benefit the SS Jeremiah O’Brien’s Memorial. Again, more details are to come.

Another way we are trying to educate the public about the Vietnam War is through the sale of DVDs. For more information about purchasing BRAVO! DVDs, go to http://bit.ly/18Pgxe5.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way we can spread the word about the film and the Vietnam War.

Early in each year, my mind turns to events that happened forty-six years back at the Khe Sanh Combat Base in Vietnam. During the seventy-seven day siege that began on January 21, 1968, certain events ensued that are permanently emblazoned in my memory.

One of the most memorable—and for me, disastrous—events that occurred out of a litany of disastrous events is what has come to be called the “Ghost Patrol” that happened on February 25th, 1968, when the Third Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/26, went outside the Khe Sanh Combat Base on a patrol that turned into a catastrophe. The patrol, somewhere around fifty-four Marines and Navy Corpsmen, was ambushed by a much larger unit of the North Vietnamese Army, and twenty-seven Marines were KIA and a large number were WIA. For years we thought the count of KIAs was twenty-eight, but one Marine surprised us in 1973 when he showed up among the other 590 POWs freed from incarceration in the North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps.

Another one of the men on that patrol received serious facial wounds but survived, got back into the combat base and was medevaced out, eventually making it back to the States and then medically retired from the Marine Corps. Military doctors created a new face for this Marine, but more was damaged than the his body, and in the mid-1970s, he committed suicide.

In the last few years, one of this Marine’s Khe Sanh brothers, Seabee Mike Preston, set about to get that man’s name etched into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall) on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Even though this Marine was not technically killed in action in Vietnam, many of the Khe Sanh veterans felt strongly that the man’s death eight years later was a result of his wounds received on 25 February 1968.

Mike Preston, who has a great deal of experience helping veterans, spent forty-five months working with attorneys (including the casualty section at USMC Quantico who encouraged Mike during his efforts), other veterans, medical personnel, doctors and the VA in attempts to see to it that the Marine would be properly honored as he deserved.

On the left, Mike Preston and on the right, Ken Rodgers, Sonora, CA 2013 ©Betty Rodgers 2013

Mike spends a lot of his time working with disabled vets. He’s helped get another Vietnam veteran’s name on The Wall. Mike has taken thirty to forty veterans to visit The Wall to “make their bones,” as he calls it. He counsels vets from our more current conflicts, trying to help them understand what all those feelings are inside them that they cannot comprehend, the unexplainable rage and paranoia and sense of distance from anyone who wants to love them. Mike says, “The healer is being healed by healing another. After all, we are our brothers’ keeper.”

Last November, over tacos in the Sierra foothills town of Jackson, California, Mike, Betty and I talked about Mike’s plight to honor the Vietnam veteran, specifically this Marine who was wounded on 25 February 1968. After his forty-five months of effort and sweat and rage at the system that sometimes makes it so damned hard to honor those who fight for this country, Mike received information about this Marine that negated all reasonable attempts to get his name on The Wall, which would have raised the number of recognized combat deaths from 58,286 to 58,287.

Even though this man had a clean record while in the Marine Corps, even though he’d been a real gunfighter who showed up whenever the manure hit the fan, even though he had gotten his brothers’ backs when they needed him, he will ultimately not be honored on The Wall as a casualty of the Vietnam War.

All along, Mike’s premise was that the war made this man what he had become and ultimately made him a casualty, even though the war had been over for three years by the time of his suicide. After his nearly four-year effort, Mike finally got a look at the man’s records. He found out that this Marine had a history of problems prior to his service in the Corps that would have prevented his attempts to even enlist in the USMC in the first place if the authorities had known about them. He also had a history of mental problems and drug abuse after his discharge, so claiming that the war forced him to terminate his own life became impossible to prove.

Mike says that the memorial fund he helped found in the name of this Marine paid for, and had placed on his grave, a military headstone that was due him from the country he served. Mike wishes to thank Mr. Bill Jayne, a BRAVO! Marine, who before retirement was with the National Cemetery Administration for the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Bill helped facilitate the purchase of the headstone. Semper Fidelis, Bill Jayne.

Mike also thinks the Marine Corps deserves a compliment because in just a matter of weeks they helped this individual perform honorably under what could be, at the very least, termed as trying circumstances. Civilian society, for whatever reason, could not do this.

Mike, Betty and I further mused on the proper way to honor a veteran of war. If he has serious problems as a result of the conflict, does it diminish his service? Does the fact that he was in trouble before he enlisted somehow diminish his service? How do you decide? Where do you draw the line? Mike Preston says that what is important in thinking about these issues is that this man should be remembered for what he did from the time he raised his hand and took his oath at induction until the completion of his military obligation, “nothing more, nothing less.”

BRAVO!’s Cover Art

Ever wonder about the person and story behind the art? We have been so pleased with the reaction to BRAVO!’s graphic design that we’d like to tell you more about its genesis.

Early on, we realized the message conveyed by our posters, DVD cover, and other items should be created by a professional. We knew we had exceptional elements, but didn’t quite know how to put them together in a way that would impart the heart and soul of these Bravo Company men and their story.

BRAVO! Graphic Image by Mike Shipman © Kingfisher Arts, LLC 2013

It started with Betty and BRAVO! friend Sheila Robertson visiting the Boise indie theater, The Flicks, and meeting with owner Carole Skinner. Carole took the time to show us many of the posters she keeps on hand, from the old classics to present-day films. From that experience, we knew we preferred a deep, rich, blue background. Sheila suggested using the Marine Corps dress blues…perfect!

We also knew we had a one-of-a-kind photo, provided by Mike McCauley. The faces you see are Steve Wiese’s actual Bravo Company squad. Steve Wiese is on the far right, and Mike McCauley on the far left. Both Steve and Mike are in the film; some of the other fellows, a few of whom are mentioned in BRAVO!, were killed at Khe Sanh.

With concept and photo in mind, we then turned to our friend and Idaho photographer Mike Shipman, http://www.mikeshipman.com/#!/index. Mike took our ideas and added his own to produce the final piece. He photographed Gary Sullivan’s Marine Corps dress blues to use as the background, and Ken’s Purple Heart medal and Vietnam service ribbon for the other elements in the composition. Mike photographed Gary Sullivan in his dress blues at Gary’s place of business, Quinn’s Restaurant and Lounge in Boise. (Quinn’s is well known for its lively USMC Birthday Party every year on November 10.) The other elements were photographed and composited at Mike’s home studio in Nampa, Idaho.

Monique and Mike Shipman © Betty Rodgers 2013

We couldn’t have been more pleased with the end result. Once again, as has happened since the beginning, we put a collaborative effort into the hands of a true professional, and it paid off.

A full-time photographer with a degree in wildlife biology, Mike Shipman has made a big impact in the photography world here in Idaho and beyond. His work is commissioned by a fascinating variety of businesses, he travels around the globe to places like Zanzibar and Uruguay to photograph and experience the culture, and he teaches workshops around the U.S. from Maine to San Francisco and locally here in the Boise area. He lists his workshop services at http://www.blueplanetphoto.com/#axzz2qKfGp5g4.

Ken and Betty participated in a special workshop with Mike this last May. We traipsed up to the south fork of the Payette River and learned about long exposures. Standing alongside the flowing river, Mike taught us to relax, to settle into the environment and begin looking at detail. “What subject draws your eye? What is it about the subject that draws your eye? What detail can you single out to photograph?” We began to see the way the water slipped around and over individual rocks and boulders, we saw how the color changed, and we saw textures and patterns. Then Mike taught us about composition and balancing “film” speed, shutter speed and lens openings to capture what we observed and felt. It was a remarkable day.

Mike is also an accomplished writer, as you will note on his website and newsletter. We were honored to feature his Bravo! blog in 2012 at this link: https://bravotheproject.com/2012/05/07/bravo-2/.

We were fortunate to meet Mike when we first moved to Boise, and have benefitted from his teaching, mentoring, and friendship ever since. We are very proud that he is a significant player in the BRAVO! you see today.

DVDs of BRAVO! are now for sale with a limited-time special offer at http://bit.ly/18Pgxe5.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way we can spread the word.