Today is the 250^th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. 

Formed at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia at the beginning of the American Revolution, the Marines have been a part of most American wars and police actions since then, as well as helping out a few other governments and companies on the sly. I often think of Lieutenant General Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient, who said, “War is a racket,” and he said, “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period, I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” 

I think there are a lot of folks who might agree with those sentiments. I’m not sure that I do—wholeheartedly, anyway—and I see my service as something that, in some ways, I am very proud of. No one that I know who fought at Khe Sanh would love war. War is something to hate, as far as I’m concerned. A dirty business that costs money and lives and wrecks families. Nevertheless, I have some pride. 

I joined the Corps quite spontaneously in August 1966 and went to boot camp on October 4 with three other men from Arizona. We boarded a bus in Phoenix, went to San Diego and stepped into a world so different in many ways than what we thought the world should be. Yellow footprints, where we first stood, scared out of our wits because drill instructors stood on either side of us, in front of us, in our faces, in our ears, screaming what maggots we were, what communists we were, and a lot of vulgarity I will not share. It was tough both mentally and physically. Wore us down, wore us out. Some refused to be worn down and didn’t make it; couldn’t say they were United States Marines. The name we wanted so much to wear. 

As soon as my training was done, I went to war in Vietnam and when I came home in 1968, Vietnam Veterans were not particularly welcome. 

I got cussed at by angry protesters while getting ready to leave El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, and I got challenged in a VFW post back home sometime in 1972 by some vets of America’s “big war.” A few years later, some guy who’d painted ships in Long Beach or San Diego while serving in the Navy during World War II laid into me about how Vietnam Vets couldn’t whip their way out of a wet paper bag. At that moment, instead of busting heads like any salty old Marine would do, I decided not to have anything to do with being a veteran. No Veterans Affairs, no VFW, American Legion, nothing, nil. 

And of course, you really can’t unbecome a combat vet. All the debris you accumulate from warfighting rides your back for life, but for decades I never told anyone about my combat experiences, some of which were ferocious and frightening. I never verbalized what I felt, that I’d done my duty and served the United States at a time when some of us thought it needed to be served. 

Fast forward to the early 2000s and we, warriors of the 60s, suddenly became heroes and I ‘ve heard “Thank you for your service” ad nauseum, and not that I don’t appreciate the recognition of the sacrifice—and make no mistake, it was a sacrifice—I can’t help asking myself, as if I was talking back to those of my own generation, “Where’d you serve, “ or “What did you do while my comrades were being blown to hell in the trenches of Khe Sanh?” But I don’t. I nod and say, “Thank you,” because I know that they generally mean well, and the belated recognition is better than nothing. 

These days, the war still hammers a steady thump in my mind, invading the portals of my memory constantly, and I think of all the good men I served with. I think of the bad ones, too, and there were more than a few. But maybe they weren’t “bad,” but just in an environment that was, to say the least, quite often unkind. People died, and people were maimed, and fear roared through the air and assaulted you, and it rained and rained, and it was hot, and snakes and leeches and rats. 

Later in my life, I rekindled some of the old camaraderie I had with my Marines and Navy Corpsmen. Some of these men have turned out to be close friends, but unfortunately, time is taking its toll on us, along with old wounds and Agent Orange. 

While in the Corps, I never celebrated the Corps’ birthday, even though it was a big deal. A lot of my good buddies would rent dress blues and deck their girlfriends or wives in fancy outfits and go off to the Marine Corps Birthday Ball while I hung out in the barracks or on duty or in my San Diego apartment. 

In the 1990s I started to attend some birthday events and had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs, a lot of memories that wormed into my mind. 

This year, Betty and I are traveling so we may decide to hang out at a VFW post somewhere today. I’ve gotten over my anger at what happened at the VFW post in 1972. 

So, here’s a toast to all my old mates, deceased and still kicking, and to all Marines everywhere who stood on those yellow footprints on Day One, I say, “Semper Fidelis and Happy Birthday.” 

~ By Ken Rodgers

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Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing our films and stories with friends and other veterans. 

BRAVO! Common Men, Uncommon Valor can be viewed on Amazon Prime. We also have DVDs available, which can be ordered on our website at https://bravotheproject.com.

You can find information about our companion film featuring eleven amazing spouses of combat veterans from various eras at https://imarriedthewar.com. I Married the War can be viewed on Amazon. DVDs are also available via the website.

Greetings from BRAVO!. We have some really great news to share.

Last year we sold out of DVDs and it took a while to choose the best source for manufacturing a new lot. But we got it done, and are happy to say there are plenty of brand new DVDs in stock. If you’d like one for yourself, or have been planning to gift DVDs to a veteran, friend, relative, or library, they are again available for purchase here.

If you prefer to watch your movies through digital download, BRAVO! is still available on Amazon Prime Video here.

For your friends or family in the UK, BRAVO! is also available here.

And because you’ve had such a positive impact on our passion for exploring large issues through intimate stories, and educating the world about the cost of war to humanity, we invite you to learn more about our current film project, I MARRIED THE WAR. This new documentary, now in post-production, is the story of wives of combat veterans from World War II to the present. As with BRAVO!, it, too, can educate the wider public and has the potential to reach thousands—if not millions—of citizens who can be helped by this story.

We invite you to join the effort with your financial support, and to learn more about this new endeavor here.

Thank you for your continued interest, encouragement, and support of our efforts to foster a dialogue about the lasting costs of war.

On Cinco de Mayo my leave was about done, but before heading back to Camp Pendleton I traveled down to Nogales, Mexico, with friends, and we attended a bullfight. There was a lot of hoopla at the arena: folks all dressed up, the men in suits and the women in fancy dresses. I recall the men wearing fedoras that matched the hues of their outfits, white and tan and other tints of light brown. The ladies looked to me like they should be going to Mass instead of to a bullfight.

The fancy red and black advertising bills that hung all over the walls of the city announced three matadors who would kill three bulls as part of a wider celebration to observe the holiday which commemorates the Mexican Army’s defeat of a French army at the Mexican city of Puebla in 1862.

The white walls of the arena reflected the bright light. It’s warm that time of year on the Arizona-Mexican border and besides the weather, the beer, Modelo, was warm and something that I’d prefer not to consume but I did. Every time I took a swallow it caught in the back of my throat and I wasn’t sure if it would go down and stay down or rocket out through my nose and my mouth all over my lap and the people sitting in front of me.

The Kill

The bullfights seemed steeped in a tradition I didn’t really understand; the honoring of the bulls as if they were heroes, the formal entrance into the ring by the participants that reminded me of Marine Corps ceremonies I’d been a part of. The matadors and picadors reminded me of ancient warriors, and the horses protected by what looked like quilted armor hinted at a more martial tone to the event. Bugles blew at what seemed like critical moments in the performance and I thought of bugle calls we answered to in the Corps: Taps, Reveille, Assembly.

And then the torment and killing of the bulls began. The toreros—bull fighters—stabbed the bulls with sharp, short spears called banderillas and men on horses stabbed the bulls with long spears and the matador used a cape to tire out the animal and to create a kind of performance art before killing the bull with one clean thrust of a sword that punctured his tortured and weakened heart through a soft spot behind its lowered head.

What bothered me was how the crowd loved the action and cheered at the torture the bulls were put through, the stabbing and the capes the matadors used to entice and lead the bulls around the bullring.

The first two matadors failed to kill the bulls cleanly and the crowds did not like that, hissing and acting like the bull had more of their respect than the men who were supposed to kill the animals.

The third matador, who was the star of the whole day’s shebang, did manage to kill the bull with some panache and I had to admire his apparent physical skills, even though the repeated stabbing of the bull on the neck and shoulders beforehand tipped the odds in the matador’s favor.

Watching the bulls stagger around made me dizzy and the beer turned pretty damned bitter and the crowd’s thirst for the savagery of it all surprised me. It seemed a metaphor for what I’d seen at Khe Sanh. Brutal battles, bayonets grinding into bone, death-maimed men, and all of us, on both sides—NVA and Yanks—debauched with savagery.

The bloody images of Khe Sanh, that bull fight, the cheering Mexican crowd rejoicing in the chaos, visions of dead men lying in the dust, the incompetent matadors down in the ring, the bulls staggering around the sandy arena with hearts as big as the State of Sonora were all mixed up in my mind. Ole! Dios mio!

I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough, almost knocking several men down as they stood on the steps in the aisle as I charged out of the bullring. I knew enough border lingo to understand the names they called me but instead of punching someone in the nose, I had to escape the scenes of the bulls being dragged from the sandy arena floor, the bouquets of red flowers and fedoras tossed into the ring. The scarlet of the flowers highlighting the burgundy tint of the blood on the ground.

Author Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael O’Hara.

Outside, I squatted in the shade up against the walls of the arena and waited for my friends to come out. They thought it was glorious and a righteous example of culture and history and the influence of Spain’s glory days upon the world.

That memory is clear in my mind and I have gone back to it many times, me sitting on my haunches looking up at them as they talked excitedly about the action in the ring, their smiles, me seeing the blood red mud of Khe Sanh, dead men dragged down the dusty road.

Dios Mio! The savagery.

***

NEWS!

BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime.

This link will take you directly to BRAVO!’s Amazon Prime site where you can take a look at the options for streaming: https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

***

ON THE SCREENING FRONT:

At 3:00 PM on May 27, 2018, BRAVO! will be shown in Paris, TN at the Krider Performing Arts Center. You can find out more about this event and the Krider Performance Art Center here.

***

If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town, please contact us immediately.

***

DVDs of BRAVO! are available. Please consider gifting copies to a veteran, a teacher, a history buff, a library, a friend or family member. For more information, go to https://bravotheproject.com/store/.

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

On leave at home in Arizona, waiting to head to Camp Pendleton for my next Marine Corps billet, I spent a lot of time partying and sleeping and driving around at five AM on dusty farm roads, moving at 70 MPH or faster in my parents’ brown Buick LeSabre, a chilled can of Coors on the seat between my legs.

Feeling guilty because I’d promised the men of Bravo, 1/26, special things that I would send along when I got home: brownies, cookies, a fifth of Chivas Regal. Instead of arranging to send those goodies, I got drunk and ate home-cooked chow and aimlessly drove amongst the cotton and alfalfa fields like a sheriff’s deputy speeding to a bank robbery.

Cotton crop ready for harvest near the author’s original home in Arizona

Later in the Arizona mornings, with a newspaper on the kitchen counter and a cup of Folgers steaming in my hand, I read about the war. Most of what I read concerned news about battles in places I did not know, head counts of dead people, both the enemy and our folks. I suspect I hoped for news about the men I’d served with, but 1968 was a tumultuous year for the war and a host of stories were out there; too many, I imagine.

Even though I tried, I couldn’t shove scenes of my year at war out of mind. Wrecked helicopters and busted sandbags and triple canopy jungle that hid who knew what, the tangle of vines, and the last two-and-one-half months of my tour, the thump and thunder of incoming, incoming, incoming.

All the images and sounds of war got mixed up in keg parties in the foothills north of Tucson and me in the Buick LeSabre, sitting in the drive-through lane at six in the morning at Pinal Liquors waiting for them to open, or on a date in Tempe with one of my old girl friends, me not having anything to say about anything that was familiar to her about English 101 or Sociology or what kind of swimming suits her other friends were planning to wear when they went water skiing at Saguaro Lake the next weekend.

On Easter, my mother demanded I go with her to church where she had volunteered me to deliver a speech about the war in Vietnam. I stood up in a church for the last time—unless it was for a wedding or a funeral—and tried to get the words out that might enlighten folks about what it was like to crawl through mud and slime to save your life.

Afterwards, all the ladies in the church who were friends of my mother’s cornered me with attempts to tell me how glad they were that I made it home, but to me it was like being trapped, under attack by an enemy I could not understand. I didn’t think I could somehow explain that instead of a brotherhood based on Jesus like we’d heard about that day, I survived because of a brotherhood based on the 7.62mm bullet and the bloody bayonet and the M79 grenade launcher, and that my salvation at Khe Sanh came in part from men I didn’t even know—nor probably ever would—who sortied out of Thailand and Guam with B-52s loaded with tons of bombs and by jet pilots who dropped napalm on the NVA hidden in the valleys to our front and all the supply flights that kept us knee-deep in ammo and fed with a minimum amount of chow.

So I fled church for a Camel cigarette and another sortie down to the liquor store for a six-pack of Coors and a pint of Old Crow. Ooorah! And then I drove around the streets I used to know, and thought and remembered.

When I pondered then and think now about Khe Sanh—the Americans who died in that place, and who knows how many of the enemy—I see the red dust on everything and the red mud that got on your hands and face and stuck like cement to whatever it came in contact with: M16s, entrenching tools, jungle boots. I see trenches roaring with runoff from rain, rain, incessant rain, and I see Marines standing knee-deep in the torrent as the black night surrounds them, choking down their thoughts of home. I see men crammed into bunkers sharing lies about sex and home and cars and fighting. I see grunts storming up the sides of steep hills choked with jungle grass that sliced their skin. I see bodies on the ground, their faces the yellow tint of the dead. I see myself leaning over to find out if I know who the dead might be. I see a hell of a waste of lives spent over a piece of land that, when matters settled out, wasn’t that important.

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh just before the siege began in January 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

I see young men who went to war as Marines and who for the most part proved eager to quash the evil of the world. In my mind’s eye I see many of their names etched into the black stone on The Wall and who they were and what they did in Vietnam will weigh down my thoughts as long as I am able to think.

The memories of the dead—and the living—are strong.

***

NEWS!

BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime. Please check it out if you are interested, and please consider sharing this news with your friends and contacts whom you think might be interested in seeing the film. And please ask them to give us a review if they would. It will help get the film out to a broader audience.

This link will take you directly to BRAVO!’s Amazon Prime site where you can take a look at the options for streaming: https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

***

ON THE SCREENING FRONT:

At 3:00 PM on May 27, 2018, BRAVO! will be shown in Paris, TN at the Krider Performing Arts Center. You can find out more about this event and the Krider Performance Art Center here.

***

If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town, please contact us immediately.

DVDs of BRAVO! are available. Please consider gifting copies to a veteran, a teacher, a history buff, a library, a friend or family member. For more information, go to https://bravotheproject.com/store/.

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

Dear friends of Bravo! – Our film has just hit Prime Video on Amazon! We couldn’t be more excited because now this profound story is available via streaming to an entirely new audience!

It has been a long and wonderful journey to bring our labor of love to this point, and it’s all due to the many people who have come alongside to make it a reality. First was receiving Bravo Company Skipper Ken Pipes’ endorsement, then the encouragement from film experts Lance and Pamela Thompson. We knew we were on our way when the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation gave us a start-up grant. Next came the men who said, “Yes, I will tell my story,” and making the connection with the late Mark Spear who became our perceptive videographer. Of course Bravo! would not be the film it is today without the heart, talent, and expertise of our incredible editor, John Nutt, who provided the top-notch editing and post production.

BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR

Since then, we could never begin to list the people who have become a big part of Bravo! with their encouragement, financial support, feedback, screenings, DVD purchases and a myriad of other efforts that have spread this story far and wide, ultimately helping to touch the hearts of thousands of veterans and others. Now we believe that on Amazon, our film will touch thousands of more lives.

Amazon will help Bravo! reach this new audience if it gets 100 reviews before the end of April. We’d be most grateful if you and your friends would show your support of these courageous men by leaving a heartfelt review (however brief), and a rating. Could you take a few minutes to help us with this? If so, click the link below and stream the film (you can let it run in the background if you’ve already seen it, but you must stream the entire film).

THANK YOU for helping us with this exciting milestone for Bravo!. As always, we really appreciate your support.

Click here to go to Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor on Amazon Prime.