February 25, 2022

In Their Own Words

Fifty-four years ago today, one of the most despairing events of the entire battle known as the Siege of Khe Sanh occurred.

Third Platoon, Bravo Company, 26th Marines went out on a patrol and were ambushed.

Two squads from Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon went out to relieve them. They were also ambushed.

A lot of the survivors stumbled back into the perimeter over the balance of the day.

The memories still gnaw the guts of the men involved, as well as the men who watched.

What was it like?

Let some of the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who made it home tell you. These comments are from the original interviews done for the film BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. You may recognize some of these remarks from the film and some of them you have never heard. Even though the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, the men often recollected the same events without anyone prompting. That was one of the amazing things about interviewing the men of BRAVO!.

The ambush and ensuing slaughter took on a name:

THE GHOST PATROL

The Ambush:

Cal Bright:

I ended up being point for a while and my team member, Clayton Theyerl, who was from Racine, Wisconsin, was directly behind me and motioned for me to stop. He says, “I’m going to take your place. This is your first patrol.”

Probably within five minutes all hell broke loose.

Theyerl was killed. My team leader, a Lance Corporal Thrasher from Oklahoma City, asked me to go up and retrieve the body. As I was dragging him back, the body was bouncing , was jumping back and forth and I could feel bullets whizzing past my head, and in a sense, his body protected mine.

John “Doc” Cicala:

We crossed a set of trench lines and then they opened up on us and it was just pure chaos from then on.

I watched a guy drop and I took care of a couple of guys and then as I was crossing back over the road because another guy got hit, then the next thing I know I seen a guy pop out of a fighting hole. He hit me a couple of times in the chest.

And then a grenade landed between my legs, and I looked down and I seen it and I yelled, “Grenade.”

I curled up into a ball and it went off. I couldn’t hear or see anything for a minute with all the dirt and everything, and then when I could see my foot over there and I was thinking to myself, This ain’t good. My foot moved and I said, “Well at least it’s still attached.”

Steve Wiese:

You know, most of the guys went down in the first minute. The only reason I survived was I just happened to be standing in a bomb crater where it was like two, two and one-half feet deep where it blew the ground out and I just happened to be walking through that when the ambush opened up.

Ben Long:

Men were getting shot and you could hear that happening.

John “Doc” Cicala:

Lieutenant Jacques came running by and he looked down at me and he said, “Doc,” he said, “get out of here,” he said, “we’re all getting killed.”

1st Platoon tried to relieve the beleaguered Marines:

Peter Weiss:

Two squads, we actually split up, one squad went straight out towards where they were. The other squad went out to the right. And unfortunately he got trapped in the same kind of ambush and so of that squad, maybe ten men, I think, four were killed in that ambush.

They were ordered to retreat while the fight went on:

Mike McCauley:

You could hear it in the distance. We could hear it on the radio. The screams and stuff that was going on.

Steve Wiese:

As soon as I fired a round there were hundreds of guys shooting back.

Cal Bright:

I come across a radio operator who had been killed. To this day I have no idea what his name was.

All I could hear on the radio was, “Hello, hello, is anybody there? Anybody hear us?”

So I keyed the mike and said, “Hello.”

Somebody came back on and said, “Who’s this?”

“Well this is Cal.”

“Cal who?” And I told him and he said, “Who else is there with you?”

I called back and said, “Nobody.”

I could see little helmets in the background. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was just a few meters from the NVA

trench line.

Escape:

Ben Long:

I just started seeing people coming back, not in groups but straggling back and some were wounded.

Cal Bright:

I was able to get out of there after some time. How long? I have no clue.

John ”Doc” Cicala:

They say I made it back to the base maybe six, eight hours.

Peter Weiss:

I went out to get him. Walked through the mine field, not you know, around the side, but through the mine field. And I was scared. Walked through the mine field, walked through the concertina, grabbed…and he was in absolute shock. Grabbed him by the arm and we walked back through the mine field into the perimeter.

Steve Wiese:

I worked my way out and moved down around the back and came back to the base. And it was just like, “Where is everybody?” and I just remember the guys saying, “You’re pretty much it.”

For those who watched and listened, who weren’t in the fight:

Dan Horton:

We knew they were getting hit. We…we wanted to go out. They wouldn’t let us go out. It was just…it all happened so fast and you know it was wild. And we wanted to go out and help them out and bring them in but Headquarters said no.

Ken Korkow:

A number of us went up to Battalion and we begged to go out and get those guys and bring them back. We had to watch while those guys were getting chewed up in front of us. The Marine Corps has this saying, “We always recover our dead.” Nobody said it was going to be over a month before we recovered them. Attitudes turned really bad inside the perimeter.

Lloyd Scudder:

When I finally get back to Khe Sanh, my platoon is wiped out. I don’t know anybody. I feel like I abandoned them, I’ve been trying to prove myself ever since that deal with the Ghost Patrol…I just feel guilty.

The enduring emotional pain was palpable:

Ken Rodgers:

That’s kind of the notorious event at Khe Sanh, was the Ghost Patrol, because all those guys got killed and they got left…the bodies got left out there.

Ken Pipes:

I think it broke all of our hearts.

As I wrote this blog, sadness got in my bones and showed me a bit of the agony that we all felt that day. You’d think one could get over this stuff. You hope you get over it.

But you don’t.

DVDs of BRAVO! are available @ https://bravotheproject.com/store/.

A digital version of BRAVO! is available in the US on Amazon Prime Video @ https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject?ref=hl.

The new documentary film from Betty and Ken Rodgers, I MARRIED THE WAR, is now available to watch. Check it out at https://imarriedthewar.com/.

In Their Own Words

Fifty-four years ago, the Siege of Khe Sanh had switched into high gear. Tet churned the South Vietnamese landscape. On February 4th, the NVA assaulted Hill 861-A, breached the perimeter before a savage fight drove them off. Echo Company, 26th Marines, suffered 33 killed and wounded.

The Special Forces camp at Lang Vei was being overrun the morning of February 7th with seven Green Berets killed or missing and three others taken prisoner by the NVA. The North Vietnamese deployed tanks. We heard them out in the misty night, or imagined we did.

On February 8th, the NVA overran a platoon from Alpha Company, 9th Marines, on Hill 64 before being driven off. Twenty-seven Marines died in that fight.

Meanwhile, the incoming rocked us on a daily basis.

What was it like?

Let some of the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who made it home tell you about the shock and fear. These comments are from the original interviews done for the film BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. Some of the comments made it into our final cut, some of them you have never read. Even though the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, the men often recollected the same events without anyone prompting. That was one of the amazing things about interviewing the men of BRAVO!

All of the men talked a lot about the incoming artillery, rockets and mortars.

And not always in a manner one would expect.

Mike McCauley:

Some of the time the rockets would hit a bunker, the bunker would be destroyed and there would be a rat nest in there with small, baby rats, pink fleshy things, and we’d do away with them. The parents…we’re talking rats. Now I’m not talking about American little mice-rats, I’m talking about rats with fur, huge rats. We wanted to train them to carry our packs.

The incoming seemed like it never ceased and the men remembered that.

Ken Pipes, The Skipper:

Incoming in a defensive perimeter can become very disconcerting and very disturbing, particularly if it goes on around the clock. And ours did.

Peter Weiss:

You’d lose men, not just in the field, but we lost them in those trenches, and latrines and other places.

Tom Quigley:

It was just a constant barrage. You just caught sleep when you could. Your nerves was on edge all the time. You could laugh and joke around, but I mean each day was serious because it seemed like someone was getting it every day, either wounded or killed, unfortunately.

And not just the big stuff, the 152s and the 130s and 120s, the mortars, but other incoming, too.

Ron Rees:

Rounds from a sniper, I mean it was like a mosquito. They were buzzing your head constantly. You just realized that that was a bullet.

The nature of the incoming often gave you time to think about what was coming.

Dan Horton:

You never knew when it was coming until you heard it leaving the tube. Then you knew it was coming but you didn’t know where it was landing. Of course, we had the Khe Sanh Shuffle. We learned to do that real good. Everywhere you moved on base you had to be ready to look for shelter because you never knew.

Frank McCauley:

If you heard it screaming you were safe. If it was a short scream you were in serious trouble.

Ron Rees:

From the time you heard that round leave the tube until its impact, you imagined death. You’re thinking all along, is it you?

Michael E. O’Hara:

Day after day after day and January pretty quick became February and I thought to myself, this is crazy. People don’t understand what it’s like for all that artillery to come in like that. It’s meant to do more than just tear up your body. It’s meant to tear up your mind. It will scare you to death. I’ve told people time and time again, there is no way I can explain it but it’s like a freight train coming through the bathroom when you’re taking a shower. And you know its coming and you can’t get out of the bathroom and it will just scare you to death.

Lloyd Scudder:

I was scared to death…that shhhewww and the whistling of the rockets and that poof of the mortars and the kapoof shoooosheeewhirwhirwhir. You know that right there scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t get deep enough in the trench. I don’t care if it was five feet, ten feet, twenty feet, I couldn’t get deep enough.

John “Doc” Cicala:

A lot of fear from everybody. You know, from everybody.

But in spite of all the hell raining down, men still showed courage, showed some attitude.

John “Doc” Cicala:

I saw so many acts of heroism, guys running to help other guys.

Steve Wiese:

Knowing that tonight is going to be another night, you know when the sun goes down, the rockets and mortars are going to start in again and you know it’s just a crap shoot whether you get hit or not.

One night I stood up on the roof of my bunker in the middle of a rocket attack and went, “Hey, here I am, man, take your best shot.” You know, it’s either you get me now or you’re not going to get me. I remember a few rockets came in and I thought, maybe this isn’t a good idea.

DVDs of BRAVO! are available @ https://bravotheproject.com/store/.

A digital version of BRAVO! is available in the US on Amazon Prime Video @ https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In..

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject?ref=hl.

The new documentary film from Betty and Ken Rodgers, I MARRIED THE WAR, is now available to watch. Check it out at https://imarriedthewar.com/.