Early in the morning of January 21, 1968, the North Vietnamese attacked US facilities all around the base at Khe Sanh. It had been a crazy ten days before the attack.

I had flown back into Khe Sanh around January 11, 1968, after R&R in Malaysia. I brought a quart of Johnny Walker Black Label and a fifth of Smirnoff Vodka, went back to my hooch with Second Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/26, and that evening, some of my comrades and I proceeded to polish off the liquor.

The base hummed with activity when I arrived, and all the scuttlebutt was that we were in for a bad time soon from the NVA. I was getting short, and true to my habit of wishing away all negative anticipation, thought the hullabaloo was BS.

That night, we got drunk.

I had been out of the bush for about a week and had missed a number of chaotic nights when the base was on Red Alert. And true to form of how things occur when you don’t want them to, we went on Red Alert this night of our bacchanalian booze fest, which meant all hands on deck, all hands on watch.

When the Red Alert sounded down the walls of the trench, light from a bright moon illuminated the terrain. There were no clouds or fog. You could see up and down the trench line from one fighting position to the next. Marines stood watch awaiting whatever lurked beyond our concertina-wired perimeter.

One of Bravo Company’s officers came down the trench, checking the lines to see who was asleep, who wasn’t on watch, since every man was supposed to be on deck. We knew this officer. We didn’t like him. As he approached, my comrade said, “Who’s there?”

The man I was with was the squad leader for Third Squad, and like me, he was soused.

The officer, assuming that we could see him—and I admit we could—didn’t utter a word, just kept coming.

As the lieutenant drew near our fighting position, my comrade pulled a .45 caliber pistol and stuck the business end in the officer’s face and using many expletives, advised the officer that if he didn’t give the password, he would blow the officer’s head off.

We got the password. The officer looked at me and spoke my name. I shuddered. The rest of the night, I worried. The next day, I worried. I heard rumors that the brass wanted somebody to pay for insubordination, for disrespect, for being drunk on duty. All of which we were. I was.

But nothing happened. Every day we filled sandbags, dug our trenches deeper, hung concertina wire, stuffed rolls of barbed wire with an explosive, C4, and every night for the next ten days, we were on Red Alert and sober.

When the eve of the Siege arrived, tension hung in the air as if it was trapped in the mist. Puff the Magic Dragon flew overhead and fired its miniguns into the dark, the red line of tracers accompanied by a moan that sounded like the voice of death.

It began early the next morning. The ground jumped, rocked, bent sideways. Shrapnel flew through the dark and our ammo dump went up after being hit by North Vietnamese gunners. CS gas slinked down the trench, and we thought it was the end of the world. We prepared to die.

Later in the morning, things grew relatively quiet.  All the anticipated nightmare that I had chosen to deny hung in the ordnance haze and stunned the ears of my comrades and me. Hell on Earth had come to pass.

Men were killed, wounded, some seriously, some not so much. Our trenches were littered with spent ordnance from our exploded ammo dump. We spent the quieter hours checking on our buddies and tossing out of our trench the hardware that had rained down from the sky.

But even then, I thought it was only a one-off, or I wished and hoped. It would be several weeks before reality hit home. Our survival was something that I could not rely on.

If I’d known the terror and destruction and death to come, I may have stayed dead drunk for the next seventy-six days.

~ By Ken Rodgers

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