Fifty-two years ago this morning on the battlefield of Khe Sanh, Vietnam, Bravo Company, 1/26 burst out of the confines of siege and siege mentality and went on the attack.
The details of what is now known as Payback are documented in a number of places. But what’s difficult to document is the fury and desperation that occurred when men from separate sides met face-to-face in a morning’s worth of savagery. For two and one-half months they’d blasted and murdered and maimed us and scared the living hell out of us. And we hungered for revenge.
Khe Sanh, 1968. Photo courtesy of Mac McNeely.
We caught them sleeping and we jumped in their trenches and we caught them in their bunkers and we dropped grenades on top of them and shot them when they crawled out and we dropped satchel charges on them and we shot them while looking in their eyes and we burned them alive with flame throwers and lobbed 60 millimeter mortars on top of them and we killed and killed.
The faces of the dead turned sallow and as I ran through the NVA’s trenches, I talked to myself about how the sallow nature of death made them all look the same, whether our side or theirs. They all looked the same and maybe that was appropriate given that the hands of death had choked all life out of them no matter their rank or race.
Blogger Ken Rodgers before the Siege of Khe Sanh began. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.
Most of us were young. Our skipper called us kids. We were kids with lethal weapons and a bitter taste in our mouths and a load of hate in our hearts. Not a hate you reserve for the man you know who stabbed you in the back, but the hate you know against an idea, against an enemy—not individuals—that killed people that you love, and even though . . . even at the time you know . . . even though you’ve been taught thou shall not kill, and love your brother, and turn the other cheek, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, you’re filled with hate and you are going to kill. You need to kill.
Fifty-two years ago this morning.
Enraged, we coveted revenge. Enraged, we needed to salve our pride. Indifference to them as human beings was the hallmark of the morning of 30Mar1968. We felt nothing towards those people over there except the need to see them dead. Payback.
Steve Wiese was an American Hero. I think he would dispute that statement and would have said something like, “The real heroes are the dead, the ones who didn’t come home.”
But he was a hero.
Unlike so many of us who fought with Bravo Company, 1/26 at Khe Sanh, who did 12-month-and-twenty-day tours, Steve extended his time in country and served 18 Months. He joined up with his Bravo Marines when 1/26 was headquartered at Hill 55 southwest of Danang, and could have rotated home in late autumn of 1967, but chose to come back from his leave just in time to endure the Siege of Khe Sanh.
Marines of Bravo Company, 1/26, in Vietnam. Steve Wiese is the third man on the left in the front row. Photo courtesy of Steve Wiese.
In many regards, I think, he was the Marine’s Marine, a leader and a warrior who loved his Bravo Company mates.
A lot of Khe Sanh vets knew Steve better than I did, but what we shared was special: intense and intimate in the ways combat veterans share. We’d been to war and we’d made it home and after decades of keeping our traps shut about our experiences, we opened up and told our stories, separately and together.
And boy, did Steve’s stories impact the message that, after thirty-plus years, went out to America and the world.
Steve Wiese at a reunion of the Khe Sanh Veterans. Photo courtesy of Ken Rodgers
The things Steve said in BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR illuminated the service of all Vietnam Veterans. He said it like it needed to be said, blunt and bold and no-holds-barred. He bared his soul and revealed his vulnerabilities while edifying the men with whom he served.
There were a lot of tragedies in Steve’s life. In Vietnam, with Bravo, he was involved in every battle or firefight of any consequence that happened during his tour.
While I managed to not be in a number of the fights that Steve was in, I lived through enough to get an inkling what it was like for him.
On June 7, 1967, in what has lately been termed by historians to be the last clash in the Hill Fights segment of the Battle of Khe Sanh, Bravo went on a two-platoon patrol off the north end of Hill 881-S. Back then, we patrolled in soft covers and no flak jackets, and we generally ran patrols on the same routes every few days.
Photo of Steve Wiese, second from left along with, on the left, Marcia Franklin of Idaho Public Television’s Dialogue, Betty Rodgers, second from the right, and Ken Rodgers. Photo courtesy of Idaho Public Television.
So, when the NVA ambushed Bravo out there that day, the casualties were devastating. I wasn’t out there. Our squad stayed on the lines but I heard it and I saw it, and how it felt to me then, sticks with me now: emptiness, like some part of me hightailed it and can’t come back. So with that in mind I can only imagine how those men who fought that day—like Steve Wiese—felt.
He gained some notoriety that day when, upon coming in the gate after the patrol returned to the combat base, he barked at a colonel, maybe, or a lieutenant colonel, or a major who tried to soothe the returning warriors with platitiudes. (A load of officers came up on the hill at the end of that fight.)
After returning to his squad area, he expected to be standing tall in front of The Man because of what he said, but instead he was approached by a general, whose name I don’t think he ever enlightened me with, who told Steve to not pay attention to anything that officer had said.
On July 21, 1967, First Platoon of Bravo went out on a patrol on Route 9, east of Khe Sanh, which was ambushed. Steve was out there that day, too, and men with whom he served and bonded, died.
And then there was the Siege and all that came with it.
Including the Ghost Patrol. Steve was a squad leader on that debacle and even though he survived, a lot of the men in his squad didn’t. He carried a ton of grief and guilt over that. His narrative about how he managed to escape and evade the NVA to return to the base is one hell of a story.
Steve Wiese during his interview for BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers.
And then there was the savage Payback Patrol where he was a squad leader in First Platoon and again, lost a lot of good Marines.
After he came home, he put up with all the guff and lack of respect that came with being a Vietnam Vet, and he suffered tragedies that would break folks with less steel in their spine.
He loved his Marines and he cherished and honored them whether dead or alive.
IF you were one of his Marine Brothers, he supported you. He showed up when the manure hit the fan.
One of the strongest moments in BRAVO! Is when Steve says this, “I’ve had people say, ‘Well, that was 30, 40 years ago. Why don’t you get over it?’ You know, I wish I could. I wish I could get over it. But on the other hand, it’s like I don’t ever want to forget these guys. I don’t want to forget what I’ve seen, what I was witness to. And I don’t want to forget them and their memories.” And he never did.
Steve wouldn’t have called himself a hero, but I will.
After the Ghost Patrol of 25Feb1968, no larger units sortied outside Khe Sanh combat base for almost a month. We sent out some listening posts but those were small and they went out after dark and came in before sunrise while the mist still hung low to the ground.
But on today’s date fifty-two years ago, as the sun threw up the first hint of daylight, we Marines of Second Platoon, Bravo, 1/26 stood in the trench and smoked our Camels and Winstons and Salems, flinched at the incoming rounds, heard the scrape of scuffed jungle boots in the red mud at the bottom of the trench. Noted some mumbles.
And if fear had sounds, they would have ricocheted in the deep trench, off the walls, against the sandbags. Being Marines, we needed to keep the fright quarantined to a slow boil at the bottom of our guts. We must not entertain the notion of fear because its insidious gnawing weakened us.
And then out the gate we went, crossed over the minefield, got on line and charged across the vale and up the ridge towards the NVA position in the vicinity of where the Ghost Patrol had traveled.
After the Siege. Photo courtesy of Mac McNeely
Our big guns on base boxed us in with ordnance, geysers of red mud, black smoke and the din of combat suddenly crammed in our ears and brains, sucking the breath out of our lungs. And as we headed towards our objective, our allies to the rear, on the base, fired machine-guns over our heads.
As the Marines of my old squad, Third Squad, reached the top of the ridge, explosions erupted among them and then .50 caliber rounds fired by our guys, our allies, our mates, ripped into the men of Third Squad. I saw the rounds hit; flashes and bodies pirouetting, falling.
The explosions I suspect were from NVA mortar rounds and RPG rounds, but the machine-gun fire was what we call friendly fire. Friendly fire.
Up top, while the wounded were medevacked, we got in the NVA trench and headed east. At one point elements of First Squad, who were on point, veered off to the north, away from the trench.
We’d been briefed to stay in the NVA trench because it was believed that the surrounding terrain was infested with booby traps.
When this went down, I had about fifteen days left in the field. I’d survived my twelve month-plus tour by being good at surviving, being lucky, not being heroic, just doing my job and keeping it as low profile as possible.
So I was shocked as I took off, out of the trench, sprinting behind the Marines of First Squad, yelling, “No, no,” and when several turned at my words—and as I think of it now, how they heard me in the furious din that boomed around us—how they weren’t blown up by some of that ordnance and how we all didn’t get blown to smithereens by the mines and booby traps out there where we had wrongly ventured, is a wonder to me to this day.
But, nobody lost legs or died or anything. We just got back in the NVA trench and drove on towards our goal.
Not far from our destination, a gate we could enter through the maze of our own mines and wire and booby traps, the man on point triggered an NVA booby-trapped grenade that went off. He went down, but then got up and a Corpsman went to succor him and after that, we went in, missing some of the men with whom I’d served previously in Third Squad. The squad leader, Corporal Jacobs’ back had been rent by one of those .50 caliber rounds that had been delivered by the friendly fire. He stood there among us like nothing had happened to him.
Author Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael O’Hara.
After we all retired to our area, we shouted and jumped up and down and the Marines sent historians to record our thoughts. I remember relief. I remember a sense of satisfaction, and I also remember feeling extremely elated. How I imagined exaltation. I was bad, I was indestructible. I was alive.
And we’d gotten in their trench. Their trench.
We were…were…were unbreakable, we were shatterproof, we were everlasting.
The thing that sticks in my mind after all these years was that high, that feeling that I stood atop a throne at the apex of the world was at that moment so different from the almost two months of despair that permeated everything that I had lived through. Thousands upon thousands of incoming rounds that shook the ground—some that roared like railroad engines and some that hissed like sneaky spirits—and dismembered men I knew and didn’t know, who at that time and in that place were like twin brothers to me.
I realized that for two months I’d lived on huge doses of luck and that sometime, if the siege did not stop, I’d be hit by a whooshing chunk of shrapnel that would sever an arm or a leg, or I’d be sitting in my bunker and a rocket round would crash through the roof and my fellow Marines would be gathering my parts that were pasted on the sandbag walls, or a sniper would put a round through my brain.
So, having been in their trench, and having survived, and for at least a few hours, having been on top, the aggressor, the winner so to speak. Yeah, I was elated. I was bad.
