You hear people talk about moments of sublimity, moments when for a short time, they saw into a bigger arena than the day-to-day mishmash of life.

March 30, 1968, was one of those days for me. It was honor and blood and fear and noise and rage and death and brotherhood—maybe even love—that no one who has not been in the fire of combat will understand.

And not just me, but to the men I served with. Here is some of what they told us in the interviews we conducted with them regarding March 30, 1968.

What you will read below is not in any chronological order. The comments from these Marines are in alphabetical order.

Chaotic, of sorts, just as firefights are chaotic.

Cal Bright:

And then, March 30^th, we went back out and that was payback time. The Skipper would not allow me to be Point, because he knew I had a score to settle. But he did allow me to be on the left flank. And part of the squad that I was covering for was drawing fire from a couple, three bunkers and somebody told me—I was carrying an M-79  grenade launcher at the time—and they said, “We need some rounds over in this one area.”

And so consequently I used them as a guide, like an aiming stake, and they said I got a hole-in-one because the round went right in the doorway. And it eliminated whatever was in it.

Ken Korkow:

As we went out through our wire, we were getting artillery support in front of us. Boom boom.

I saw the Marine Corps at its best. The Marine Corps is really designed to have peace, but you get peace through strength, you get peace through war.

And I started hauling guys back in. I left my cartridge belt and my .45 behind. I looked like a blooming idiot, you know, and I was a blooming idiot. That’s why old politicians send young kids off to war. Young kids are stupid, they’re invincible. They’re caught up with adrenaline, plus when you don’t care if you’re going to die, you are ready to do crazy things.

All I had in my hand was a K-Bar. Again, that’s really pretty stupid. But the K-Bar was just to rip utilities open, make some tourniquets, stop some bleeding, be able to pull another guy in.

This other guy that I brought in, he’s laying on his back and he’s screaming, “My leg, my leg.”

And when I come up, there’s a hole blown in his flak jacket and a bunch of his guts exposed and I’m thinking his leg must really be screwed up. It was his right leg tucked underneath his back. I pulled his right leg out. Just a piece of shrapnel right on his ankle. I thought, Cowboy, you got no clue, your leg’s not your problem. Got him drug on back to a bomb crater.

Going out after another guy, running ahead, again, you didn’t have to look for wounded people. We had a bunch. And on the lip of a bomb crater there’s Ben Long and Steve Wiese, and, as I’m running by, Ben hollers at me, “Get down.”

I turned to him this way and I said, “Come out and enjoy the war.”

And right then three shells got me. The closest one was about two foot away; the furthest one was about 8 foot away. There was one in between and they were either 60- or 61-millimeter mortar and Ben’s got this ruddy complexion, and I mean it just drained, because he’d just seen one of his good men get blown to bits in front of him and he just got this horrified look on his face. It’s drained.

Ben comes out and he says, “We’ll get you back, you’ll be okay,” and I said, “Don’t worry about me, go get that other guy.”

Well, my helmet’s been blown off, I’ve got shrapnel here under the eye, both arms are totally useless, ah, this leg’s got a big hole in it. I’m telling you, I could not have taken another step.

Ben Long:

When the light started coming, it was foggy. And I thought, whoa, this is good. I really think God is with us. Because that covered us from being seen in our advancing on the enemy position and so, we started to advance; we had .50 caliber machine guns that were firing over our heads. We had to go through a little valley.  It wasn’t very deep, but deep enough that we could have cover from the .50 calibers and then as we approached the trench line, they ceased, and at that point what I remember was the fog lifted. And we could see pretty clearly. And we surprised them.

But, they were still in bunkers and trench lines, and it became hand-to-hand, it became very slow progress because they were a well trained unit. They were North Vietnamese regular army people and had been well trained.

Part of my job was to set up a battalion aid station that went out with us. We took a doctor out with us, and so we had set that up, and immediately people were being wounded and so I was starting to help bring wounded back. Bringing some dead back.

I had a 60-mortar group that was with me. Corporal Korkow was in charge of that and he said, “I’ve shot all my rounds, what do you want me to do?”

And so I started using them to help me to bring dead and wounded back.

Corporal Wiese and I ran into a bomb crater. This bomb crater was over our heads, I mean it was a big bomb crater. And we yelled at Corporal Korkow, “Get down, get down.”

But he didn’t do it. And then about six mortars went off. He was riddled. Because he had a flak vest and diaper on, it didn’t kill him.

I remember one went through his helmet. Blood was just pouring down. So we put on a couple of tourniquets and took him back to the doctor.

I really think Captain Pipes was the one that really made this thing a success. He was cool, he was calm, he knew what he was doing, he was wise in his directing of people.

Even though he was wounded, he was still doing it, still directing, and I remember we were pulling back, and he had given orders to pull back, to come back in. He stood outside the wire until the last man was in. Before he would go in himself. He was just a great leader. And we were very fortunate to have him and for him to be guiding us that day.

Frank McCauley:

March 30^th was one of those days where it was just—well, it was the most important day in my life. We got up very early in the morning, probably 4 o’clock in the morning, and were rounded up and we went outside the line.

I can’t believe we made it out through the line, out through the canyon and valleys and came up on that ridge and it was very, very, very foggy.

We broke out of the jungle into a flat, barren, chewed up area of nothing but bomb holes and dirt divots and we saw the end of a trench and a VC come out of the trench and squatted just outside the trench line and took a shit.

Someone said, “Let me get him…shoot him.”

This guy with an M-16 shot him, pow, and he was down.

We had this one guy charging at us. He was probably a hundred feet, maybe a tiny bit farther away, but he was coming right at us, for what reason I don’t know, he didn’t even have a weapon and one of the guys said, “Let me get him, let me get him,” and I’m just there…

I’m a Roman Catholic and I do not wish to take anyone’s life and so I was kind of hoping I could get through this experience without ever using my weapon. I was good with that.

Anyway, this guy took a .45 and he aimed and he shot and he was right beside me and that guy, full bore running at us, folded like a cheap pocketknife, went back maybe a foot in the air and fell to the ground.

This other guy, just beyond that one that came rushing at us knows suddenly, we’re there. So, he is running full bore away from us, and there’s a guy with a LAAW, one of those light armored, ah…like a bazooka. He says, “Let me get him.”

This is so strange because we’re all young idiots and I hadn’t ever killed anyone and I had never fired my weapon except at a range, so I really didn’t wish to play this game, but everyone was really excited about doing this.

The whole weird part was it’s a running human being away from us, and this guy takes this LAAW—It was perfect. That round goes off and you can watch it go through the air and it hit him dead center.  And it just blew up and it was like you could see right through him, schwee, pure light, and he was down.

See, I just wasn’t raised that way, and I didn’t want to participate, and I was really amazed that there were so many people that were greedily trying to kill someone out there. But I guess that’s a good reason because they were actually trying to kill us, too, but I hadn’t come to that realization yet. I just saw us killing them, I hadn’t seen them kill us yet.

I got down behind this tree because I’d already seen a few dead people and I started to get worried that, you know, maybe, gosh, this is not just quite a game, and I peeked up to find out where everyone else was and bark just flew up in my face and I noticed a person beyond and they weren’t fifty feet away and they had dropped down and so I plinked a couple of rounds and I could get down, and we did that two or three times and then I realized this was pop goes the weasel and so I quickly got up there, out of rhythm, and when he came up I just squeezed and shot and the oddest thing, my instructor from the range in Camp Pendleton was there explaining to me about breathing and squeezing.

I took my first shot—right in the head, right in the forehead.

I had just done something I really didn’t wish to do and twenty feet away, is another pop goes the weasel but he’s shooting at my guys over here. He’s only twenty feet away and he keeps popping up and shooting. I didn’t want to think too much about it; for one thing he’s shooting live ammo at my people, so I just took aim and waited and as he did it, I played the game again where I just squeezed and shot. I hit him dead, right through the temple and he was gone.

I’m sitting there going, this ain’t good. I was supposed to be with others so I kind of moved and rolled away and went down into this giant crater that was left by some big B-52 bomb that was about ten feet deep and probably twenty feet across and a little puddle of water at the bottom and I’m sitting there, crouched on the edge of the bowl.

It scared the shit out of me because when I first rolled into there, I could see some green uniforms and then I thought, oh shit, and then I realized that they were American uniforms but they were three  dead Americans laying there sprewed across the sides of the ditch.

Then all of a sudden something catches my eye and this guy comes charging in—one of our guys—and he gets down and his head’s just about ground level and then he goes woooom and whips back, his helmet flies and he falls right at my feet and his brain goes across the dirt and I’m sitting there on the side of this hill looking at this guy and he’s like a gold fish, his eyes are bulging like a Chihuahua.

And then all of a sudden somebody else comes down and it’s a guy who’s been shot and so he’s sitting over there and then another guy comes in that’s a Corpsman and I tell the Corpsman, “You gotta help this guy,” and he comes quickly over and he starts to push the brain back into the skull, and he goes, “I can’t do anything for this guy,” and he quickly goes over to the guy who had his arm shot.

So I’m sitting there in this hole watching a Corpsman work on somebody, and a guy who’s gulping at me, and three dead along the edge, and I go, this ain’t the hole I need to be in. So I quickly crawled out and the incoming was coming like crazy, mortars, and so I saw a small hole, someplace to save my ass, so I haul butt and I jumped with my rifle in my hand, and as I was getting through the air I suddenly realized—and you can’t stop because you’re…you’re in the air heading for this hole–that it’s occupied. It’s got dead people in it, which I didn’t know until after I did a pushup in the air and did not go down on him.

I’m face to face with a guy who’s been dead for quite a while, and he had very little skin on his face. On his skull, it’s just parchment, skin peeled like a creek bottom that’s been dried out, and he’s got maggots coming out of his eye sockets but no eyes, and coming out of his nose and then below him is another guy in the same shape. These are two decayed, bad-news bodies. but they’re not ours, they are Vietnamese.

I finally met up with my machine gun guy—I was supposed to be the A-Gunner to him—and came into a hole, and this other tall Corporal came in and he decides that the reason everyone else around us is dying is because there’s a machine gun nest over there and it’s like a 150 feet away and it’s nothing but more than a big sandbag with a tiny slit in it and they’re ripping on us, and so he says, “Come on, it’s our job, we got to knock it out.”

I’ve seen enough war movies to realize the first wave on a machine gun nest doesn’t make it. He goes, “Come on, let’s go,” and he actually tried to drag me and the machine gunner out of that hole and head for that spot, and I hadn’t even seen it yet.

I go, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.”

Okay, we will do it because that’s kind of what we are supposed to be doing. But I wanted to just see what we were doing, I mean, once I left the bomb hole I really would love to find out where we were going. I don’t want to go out of that hole blind. So I took a peek and I could see the sandbag, and I could see where it was at and I said, “Okay.”

I put a new clip in and I looked at the dirt in front of me and I thought, that’s cool, that’s the last thing I’m going to see because I’m going to fall right face down in that shit when I leave this hole.

So, we charged out of there, all three of us, and I was in the middle, and the machine gunner was here, and the knucklehead was here and a third of the way there, he spun, got hit and left us.

I put every round, all twenty rounds dead center through that little teeny weeny slit and the machine gunner was chewing up those sand bags and we made it, we made it, and jumped over the sandbags and there’s this big pit and two dead gooks and of course the guy with the machine gun, his adrenaline is flowing, but he just blasts them anyway.

I got hit in the leg with shrapnel. A bomb, a mortar, went off right next to my leg and it violently rolled me over. I lost my helmet, lost my rifle.

I laid there in shock because I could feel my leg was burning but I couldn’t feel anything below the burn. All I could feel was cool wet which actually is kind of weird for blood.

I look down and my boot and leg—everything was still there and I’m thinking, well it’s got to be separated, so I wiggled my toes and my toes wiggled back in my boot and I went, ah, shit, it felt like my boot was filling up and overflowing with blood but I still had a leg.

I worked my way down and into a trench and headed toward where we had come in, and lo and behold, the steps that leave the trench where we first shot that guy taking his morning dump, there’s the guy that led the charge against the machine gun nest and he is half passing out and he clutches me. He’s clutching me. He’s going, “Help me, help me.”

And I’m thinking, ah, man, my leg, I can’t.

There’s a Marine crawling next to us, headed towards the rear, and he’s wounded and then suddenly I see this guy coming, and boom, he whips his head, helmet splits, and he’s got no chin. He grabs his chin–all he’s got are upper teeth and a big giant tear in his neck–and he grips it and throws his rifle down and spins and starts running back, but no, in just a matter of two steps he stopped and grabbed the guy on the ground and they both hobbled away toward the rear and I’m thinking shit, if a guy with no chin can help somebody, then with my little dumb leg I can probably do it.

So I say, “Okay,” and I got him in a fireman’s carry and we walked out. I’m gimping and then suddenly automatic machine gun fire opened up on us and he takes a round, I can feel when it hit. He moves on my body and I went holy shit and I went like as fast as—I was flying, I don’t think I even touched ground much, but I hauled ass with him on my back.

I saw a hole and I just chucked him and fell in on top of him. And unfortunately, on that run his arm, which had already been wounded, got hit again and the arm was gone.

It was one of those days. Definitely one of those days.  Anyway, that was my experience with my first kill, and to see people die, and you don’t want your children to experience that.

That’s why I don’t believe in war anymore.

Mike McCauley:

I said, “Ah, oh man, fix bayonets?” At this time, I’m saying this is the real deal and I told the rest of the guys, “Fix bayonets,” and I could see on their faces what it must have looked on me because this is not good. Fix bayonets.

It was almost like popcorn being made, where you heard pop…pop…pop…pop, pop, pop, and then guns started opening  up everywhere, automatic weapons, a lot of small arms, and then we hit the trenches and all hell broke loose, and ah, flames were going off, LAAWS were being shot, rifles,

I jumped into a trench. There was an NVA soldier, he didn’t know what the hell was going on, as much as we did, and I shot him, and I remember his eyes and I remember him going down.

Minutes were hours, hours were seconds, I don’t know how—I don’t even remember how—everything slowed down and speeded up and it was just crazy.

Michael O’Hara:

5 o’clock in the morning always comes too quickly, especially when you are doing something like this. It’s pitch black. Foggy. You couldn’t see.

There were three platoons. Our platoon, Second Platoon, went out of the wire first, ahead of the company and we set up a point where the rest of the company could come and pass through us.

Everything’s cool, nothing’s going on yet, and then the first and the third platoon came out and swept through our position.

First and Third Platoon were the ones that went into the jaws of the tiger first. They went through holy hell. And they paid a terrible price for it.

The order came back to fix bayonets. And that’s when everybody knew this deal was on. It was now.

And we had a ringside seat to it all. And there is really no way to explain what was going on there. I mean, it was flame throwers, it was rockets. Eddie Pendergras, he’s running around with 60 mortars, just sticking it on the ground and dropping into the tube and just pooomp, doing it by ear, you know, Kentucky windage, and they are shooting machine guns at this kid and he’s just dropping them all over the place.

We started setting up in squad rushes and when it was time for my squad to go, Jake says, “Let’s go,” and so we all went forward, and for just a minute we all broke discipline. Once he said, “Go,” we all just took off—and he like to never got us stopped—so we could provide the cover fire we were supposed to.

When I got in those trenches, First and Third Platoon had killed so many of them people that there were just bodies everywhere. I don’t think my foot ever touched the ground. And I was in that trench, I know, for over an hour.

The next moment, the next minute, the next hour it was just—well I will carry it with me the rest of my life.

It was just bodies to your kneecaps in there.

I don’t know if it was Captain Pipes, or who it was said, “Pick that Marine up and take him back.” And I bent down and picked him up and it was Hank Norman.

And everybody just loved him, he was just a great guy. He was just a hell of a nice guy and when I saw who it was, I just—it was just a real ass-kicker, just represented all the heartache of Bravo Company right there, all the names, right there in the bucket, all of them, and I picked him up and put him over my shoulder.

And Kenny Pipes was standing there and I thought to myself, my god, he was blood from one end to the other, I mean he was soaked in it. I thought he’d been hit by machine gun fire, but the guy was standing up, and he had been wounded severely in his armpit and he’d been shot right in the head with a rifle, although it didn’t penetrate his helmet liner, it just hit his helmet. And he had two radios and he was talking to the air on one radio, and he was talking to the artillery on the other radio. And here, all his best friends are laying right here dead at his feet and this guy’s still taking care of business, you know, he’s not losing it, he’s not passing out, he’s taking care of business, and we’ve got bodies laying everywhere.

And then I took Lieutenant Norman and I carried him back. I don’t know how far it was, but I will always remember he weighed so much, he was so heavy my legs ached so bad. And I just kept telling myself, don’t you dare drop him, whatever you do, don’t drop him. And I got back to the APC and there’s just bodies stacked in the damned back, and I laid him down just as gently as I could, and then we began cleaning the mess up.

You just…you just don’t know what it’s like to see a 19 year old kid—I believe it was Rash, but I’m not sure—I think it was Rash, laid out on his belly in the mud, sticking his rifle that direction, gives you the thumbs up and tells you to go that [the opposite] direction, and he knows damned good and well he’s never going to get up out of that mud. He knows he‘s dying for you. And people just cannot understand that.

I have something that most people in the rest of the world will never own, no matter how wealthy they become, or how smart they are, or what they know, but for a little bitty space in time, I was allowed the distinct privilege and the high honor of walking across hallowed ground with the bravest Marines that have ever worn the uniform and it was my privilege. And I will honor their memory until I take my last breath.

Ken Pipes—Company Commander of Bravo:

There was a building anger and a building desire to get outside the wire and to kill as many of them sons-o’-bitches as we could kill.

It was looking the tiger in the eye and riding the elephant.  And I think we carried away from that a lot of things, but the tiger blinked and the elephant knew we could ride him. And we did.

Was it a payback? Was it a payback? I don’t think so. Because the price that we paid then and before, you can’t put a price on. It can’t be bought. I think we proved that retribution was made. And I saw and was part of some of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.

To see the men of Bravo Company moving out with fixed bayonets and going through those trenches, almost fearlessly, was one of the most amazing things I have ever been a part of in my whole life.

And it just signifies and exemplifies what a fine group of Marines that we were fortunate to be a part of.

My God, what men.

Tom Quigley:

Captain Pipes gave me an order to fix bayonets, and at that time it seemed like, all of a sudden, reality sunk into me. I mean, I don’t know what I thought I was doing out there. I mean, this wasn’t a sunny picnic, but it didn’t really hit me that this was going to be a major encounter, a major battle, and my heart just sunk in my throat, you know.

He said, “Call the other platoons and tell them to fix bayonets,” so I got on the radio, and I advised Bravo 1 and Bravo 3, “This is Bravo 6…fix bayonets.”

I had said to the captain when he gave me the order…I said, “Do what?”

And he said, “Be advised to fix bayonets.”

One of the platoon radio operators came back to me and said, “Do what?”

I said, “Be advised to fix bayonets.”

And then I started looking around and I was seeing these Marines taking bayonets out of their backpacks, out of their pants leg, their cartridge belt, wherever they had them, putting them on the end of their rifles and then again, I thought to myself, this is the Real McCoy. It finally hit me, even though I’d been hurt twice earlier, I may not come back from this day.

It seemed like we had just started out, and then a round or two of small arms fire went off and then it just seemed like Charlie all of a sudden realized we were out there. And, once that happened, then all hell broke loose.

Once we started going, there was no walking. All of a sudden, it was an all-out assault. And we started running.

Our command group consisted of the five of us. There was Captain Pipes, his battalion radio operator, Lance Corporal Bragg, I carried the company radio, and then there was Lieutenant Hank Norman who was our artillery forward observer and his radio operator.

The first bomb crater I remember we got in, rounds hit right outside the bomb crater. And the Skipper said, “We got to get the hell out of here, they’ve got us spotted.”

And, then we got into an NVA trench line and at this time the fighting was intense. I mean, there was charging, there was shooting, there was grenade throwing, satchel charges, flame throwers.

Somehow I ended up next to a man with a flame thrower and again, talking like we’re talking here, I asked him, “How long does one of those tanks last of the fire,” and whatever he told me, it wasn’t any time at all—just seconds, and I said to  him, “Well that doesn’t seem very long.”

He said, “If you’re on the other end of it, it’s an eternity.”

As we went further into the NVA trench line, I remember Lieutenant Norman behind me. He had seen our senior Corpsman get hit with shrapnel by a mortar and he had started to stand up and say, “Doc’s been hit,” and when he did, I was crouched in the trench line. I had one hand on my rifle and the other hand on my receiver, and I turned around to hear what he said.

And by that time, several rounds of enemy mortars fell right on top of us, and it took Lieutenant Norman right out. His radio operator was hit, his face kind of busted out bloody, blood running through his fingers. I was hit, Captain Pipes was hit, and his battalion radio operator was also hit.

We were all knocked out, just in a matter of seconds. The rounds came in and knocked every one of us out and then, like I said, unfortunately killed Lieutenant Norman. And I wasn’t more than six feet, seven, eight feet from him. And he took the brunt of the round that I caught shrapnel in my side and my hand had also busted out in blood. I thought I had lost a few fingers but then I found out later it was concussion had forced the blood from out of the pores of my hand.

I could feel the blood start dripping down my back and a Marine from mortars came crawling through the line and I said, “Man, get this radio off my back,” and he unhooked me.

I was able to wiggle out of it. The senior Corpsman, who was also wounded, ended up putting a bandage on me and he probably saved my life because he told me later—we were in the same hospital ward in Japan, Yokosuka—that when I first had asked him how bad it was he said it wasn’t bad at all and then he told me later when I had asked, he said blood was just spurting.

Ken Rodgers:

I’ve got 2 days to go in-country. I really don’t want to be here doing this, fellas, ’cause I’m going home. I’m supposed to go home in two days.

But they didn’t care.

And I had to go because if I didn’t, I couldn’t face my fellow Marines.

Sergeant Alvarado, who was the platoon sergeant, and I ran up through all this mayhem, bodies everywhere, people wounded, and the Skipper, the company commander, was down in a shell hole and there was blood coming out of his ears and his nose and all these guys laying around there dead.

We ran up in front of everybody and Lieutenant Dillon says to me, “Well, mark the spot so they know where you are at.”

I said, “I don’t know what color.”

He said, “It’s a canary!” So I reached and got a yellow smoke grenade and threw it out there and it billowed up, and right then this barrage of artillery—right out in front of us, American  stuff—just flattened everything out there.  And then we just started moving back and picking up the dead Marines.

One of the other platoon commander’s radio man got shot, and by that time we had too many radio men, so they sent me with this guy.

I don’t remember why, but we were going towards the rear and he kept getting out of the North Vietnamese trench and I kept yelling at him to get back in the trench because there were booby traps. I could see these Chinese claymores hanging in the dead trees and he got out of the trench again and was running down the side of the trench and he tripped something and this white phosphorus booby trap came up and hit him and blew off his jaw, if I remember right.

White phosphorus is poison and burns on contact with the air. So his face was burning and I was putting mud on his face. I was really angry at him because I got hit in the face with this stuff. So I was mad at him for not doing what I told him.

I think maybe out of a hundred guys, we had maybe ninety wounded, had quite a few casualties and dead. We killed a bunch of them.

It went on four or five hours like that, up close and personal combat. That was what you joined the Marines for. Be careful what you wish for.  What you join the Marines for is that moment of truth. That was a moment of truth for me and probably for everybody there.

Peter Weiss:

We went on the move and we moved forward fairly smartly, and there was a lot of action going on. At one point I remember I was lying down in a bomb crater, right at the edge, and a grenade came at me, and I mean two feet from me. It’s one of those great stories, there was nobody around to jump on it and be a hero and I just laid there and I started trying to slide away from it, but it never went off and I thought, whoa, now I can move forward. God is with me.

We swept forward, probably went through at least a half dozen bunkers and personally, one guy in front, shooting into the bunkers while a guy went around and dropped grenades into each of these bunkers.

There was corporal whose name was Wayne Moore. His father had been a Marine and he was a tough, tough, kid. And he’s with me and we’re moving forward and he said, “This is the best. When I get out of the Marine Corps, this is what I want to do.” And I thought, are you crazy?

We were right next to each other, he was killed. Boom. He’s dead. Wham.

We moved forward and then we could see NVA soldiers coming from that little village below. We had gone that far, and we knew about where we were supposed to stop. Because Pipes said, “You stop when you see the road.” And we saw the road. So we fired at these guys, and we took a couple of them down.

We retreated and just so happened to find Donald Warren’s body laying about where we had started. And I picked it up and how heavy it is to carry someone who is dead.

Steve Wiese:

Captain Pipes sent the word out on the radio and said, “Fix Bayonets” and that took me totally back. You know, like, fix bayonets? That just brought instant pictures of hand-to-hand combat. I can remember telling the guys in the squad, “Okay, everybody, fix bayonets,” and they were like, “What?

It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then.

We started to sweep in towards that tree line and when that opened, we were kind of pinned down there for a while and there was firing going on back and forth and Wayne Moore jumped up. It was like he’d had enough and he jumped up and charged that machine gun bunker and he was shot several times and didn’t make it, and when he went down, Author Smith jumped up and he charged that bunker and he was shot a couple of times but he made it into the trench line and Author was in the trench line shooting his rifle, going into the machine gun bunker, pulled out his bayonet and the last thing I saw of him was fighting with a bayonet in the bunker.

And he basically took that bunker.

And all of a sudden there was just a big roar, and everybody jumped up and we all started charging the line. And I remember us running toward that line firing. I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing…it was like a ribbon effect. Everybody down that line was just getting up and taking off towards that trench.

These guys, Wayne and Author, were closer than brothers. We had gone through a lot. It was a tough day.

That was a pretty good firefight, that was a pretty good battle going on. It went on for several hours and I got to see some of the most heroic actions anybody could ever witness. To charge a machine gun bunker, that’s a tough thing to swallow.

But I’m glad I’m alive to say it, too, to be a witness to it. So, how I made it out of there, a typical guy, with hard times dealing with the war, is why did I make it out, you know? Why didn’t I get shot that day, when everybody around me was falling, I guess it wasn’t meant to be.

After most of the battle, when we were trying to regroup, Lieutenant Long—he was XO at that time—saw me, and here was a guy that was hit by a mortar, and he was pretty badly wounded, and the lieutenant called me over and needed help. When we picked him up we pulled him back to the rear and I just remember thinking this guy, you know, was almost a waste, I mean why are we trying to drag this guy back?

I just assumed he died and one of my memories of that was this guy, basically a dead man to me, five years ago, I think, I get a phone call. I was coming back from a job and I get a call on my cell phone and he goes, “Do you believe in guys coming back from the dead?”

And I’m like…I say, “What?”

He told me who he was and he goes, “I just remember this blond-haired angel dragging me out.”

That was pretty amazing, to find out this guy had actually survived and was doing well. His name is Ken Korkow, and he ended up getting a Navy Cross that day for his actions.

Sometimes there’s good things that come out, you know. That was one of the good things, to get that phone call.

Somebody actually made it back and survived when you didn’t think he was, you know, alive.

***

Like I said earlier in this blog:

Chaotic

~ By Ken Rodgers

_______________________________

Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this blog, 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 courageous 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.

In our last blog we wrote about incoming rounds of mortar, rocket and artillery fire from the NVA surrounding Khe Sanh.

One of the worst nights I remember happened when, on March 22, 1968, the NVA fired salvo after salvo after salvo into our lines. It wasn’t the worst night we had by far, but—and maybe this is my memory or related to a particular mood I was in at the time—it seemed like the enemy gunners were shooting directly at us, Bravo Company 1/26.

The day before, the Marines of 2^nd Platoon Bravo went outside the wire and assaulted the ridgeline out front of the Gray Sector at the base. They crested the ridge, got in the enemy trench and swept from south to north, then went west, back to the base.

The wounded were a result of friendly fire from support troops to the rear and when one Marine tripped a booby-trapped grenade.

Back in our lines, the elated men of 2^nd Platoon high-fived and slapped hands, hooted and hollered. For two months they’d been trapped inside the base. For once, they got out and although they didn’t engage in any meaningful getting-even with the NVA, they got out, in the enemy lines, in the NVA’s trenches.

The next night all hell broke loose. Incoming incoming incoming. I felt like I’d be face down in the bottom of our trench for the rest of my life.

One of the new Marines to Bravo, Ron Rees, was seriously wounded that night of the 22^nd. Lots of Marines were wounded but Ron got his third Purple Heart that night and he’d only been in-country for three weeks. Worked out to one wound per week.

When we interviewed Ron for the film, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, we, the filmmakers, witnessed an amazing rendition of one man’s memory of that terrible time.

I asked Ron one question, and he began to talk, to tell his story.

Think of it, so much violence and fright, being a new guy and never knowing the names of most of the Marines you served with, and all of the chaos jammed into a three-week tour of duty.

An excerpt from Ron’s expanded interview:

“Sniper rounds were like a mosquito. They were buzzing your head constantly.

“It isn’t a matter of if you’re going to get hit, it’s going to be a matter of when you get hit…how many times you get hit. But you’re going to probably get hit.

“You’ve seen people get hit. The artillery rounds go off and they are so close in proximity to you and you’ve got blood running out of your ears, your nose, pretty much every orifice in your body from the concussions.

“Those things go off and the shock waves come off of them, the concussion bounces and comes up and your body just bounces off the ground.

“So every time you would hear a round leave the tube, be it a mortar, which was just silent death, or a big artillery round or a rocket, it’s terrifying, deafening, terrifying; it is intimidating.

“You see the results of it all around you, and if it’s not next to you, you can hear them screaming and calling for the Corpsman, but the incoming doesn’t stop. When there’s hundreds and in some cases thousands of rounds coming in into that base, you hear it leave the tube, and just the seconds that it takes—and you know how long it is—I couldn’t tell you as we sit here but I certainly knew then—what it was from impact, whether it was an artillery or a mortar, when you heard it leave, you knew how long you had—and from the time you heard that round leave that tube until its impact, you imagined death. You’re thinking all along, is it you?

“We were down towards the middle of the base, standing there talking. All of a sudden there was a rocket. I didn’t even hear this rocket coming in and it came so fast that we just barely had time to hit the dirt and find a bunker, but when it was all said and done and the dust settled—and I definitely had the blood coming out of me then from its impact—the  one guy that was with us that we were talking to—he was from another unit—was a Corpsman—he absolutely took a direct hit.  And there was just blood splattered, you know, and it just tells you, and me, how fast life really happens and goes away from you. Not minutes and seconds and moments, but it’s just a hundredth of a second, a breath and it’s gone.

“I really learned to live—because of the incoming and counting and everything else—to live by the second.  You hear people say they live like that, I mean they literally live like that. My whole life I’ve never stopped living like that. 

“Just thank God that you are alive and you are breathing and you didn’t take the hit.

“I was first wounded on the 6^th of March realizing I got to Khe Sanh on the first or second of March as a replacement for the Ghost Patrol.

“My last wounds came later.

“This round came in. I don’t know where it hit but it blew…I was out of the trench. The trench was probably about six feet deep.  And the guy that I went over with, his name was Ron, he told me I was probably about fifty feet behind that trench line.

“Weird, because everything was slow motion; everything is in slow motion. I can see shrapnel falling, I can hear voices plain as day and I hear people calling, ‘Corpsman, anybody need a corpsman?’

“People ran by me, somebody said, ‘Do you need a Corpsman?’ and I answered, ‘No.’

“Another Marine came to me and he’s looking at me and he’s talking to me and everything is just in slow motion, it’s like you’re not even hearing, they’re in a different space.  I’ll never forget that.

“He’s looking at me and in the conversation I’m looking at him and in a minute, I see sweat, but it wasn’t sweat. I was covered in blood. My face—eventually I got to see it—was like I had been shot point blank with a shotgun. Ah…my boot was gone, my pants from my knee down were gone, and ah…the blood, well, from my knee…thank God when I got hit it didn’t go across or it would have taken my leg off. It went in and it blew a hole from my knee all the way up to my hip.

“Next thing I know this guy’s calling for a Corpsman for me and somebody puts me on a stretcher and they put me on a litter and take me to Charlie Med, where I was given morphine and got operated on.”

These kinds of memories are a reason so many combat vets have the long stare in their eyes. And if and when they come back, are different people from the folks who first went to war.

We would like to publicly thank you, Ron, for sharing your life-changing personal experiences with us and our viewers. You have helped so many others understand more about war and its impact on those who serve. Semper Fi.

~ By Ken Rodgers

_______________________________

Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this blog, 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 courageous 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.

March 6, 1968

Fifty-eight years ago, we stood in a knot in the trench outside a dark hatch into a bunker. We talked.

Incoming had been light of late, and we felt safe, although as the month went on, many days and nights found our noses buried in red mud as incoming rockets, mortars and artillery rounds thundered, pounded, wounded and killed our comrades.

But not on March 6, 1968. Not in my memory.

Besides me, there was O, S, J and R talking about, I suspect, home, mail, chow, war.

Someone came down the line from the platoon command post and told us a C-130 bound for Khe Sanh had crashed in the mountains not far away.

And there were Marines from our company aboard.

Most of the men were from other platoons and remained nothing but names, but one Marine we knew. A machine gun squad leader. A big Irishman, red mustache, a temper to match the myth. Some of us hated him. Some of us admired him. Some of us were indifferent. He didn’t care and if he did, now it wouldn’t matter.

We stood there, no one saying anything.

I looked at the red mud in the bottom of the trench.

Lance Corporal R grunted.

PFC O wiped a tear from his eye.

Even though he hated the squad leader, PFC S shook his head and no happiness spread across his face.

Lance Corporal R grunted again.

Then he said, “Lord, don’t you know it’s a terrible thing.”

He paused, one beat, two beats, then finished, “Better them than me.”

Better them than me—down deep, we all knew the truth of that.

Better them than me.

~ by Ken Rodgers

_______________________________

Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this blog, 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 courageous 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.

This morning, and frankly, many mornings every week, month, and year over the past fifty-eight years, I think of what happened to my mates on this date in 1968.

I was there, in the close vicinity, I heard, I should have been out there, we weren’t allowed out there, we watched them return, we heard the stories, we listened, we whispered, we resented our leaders, we hated our enemy, we wanted revenge, we lived with it, we were guilty, we are guilty, we will always be guilty.

But whatever my recollections are of this anniversary of what has come to be called the Ghost Patrol, they are nothing compared to those who went outside the wire and walked—or were led by a young officer—into an ambush. A slaughter.

When we made the film, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, we talked during each individual interview about the date, the horror, the aftermath.

Here are some things the survivors had to say about that date. I have added some of their additional remarks that are not included in the film and have never before been heard.

Cal Bright

“I was on a patrol on February 25^th. We were leaving at, I think it was like 0800, 0900, something like that. And I ended up being point for a while, and my team member, a Clayton Therrell, who was from Racine, Wisconsin, was directly behind me and we got out so far and he motioned for me to stop. He says, ‘I’m going to take your place,’ he says, ‘This is your first patrol and consequently we just want to be safe.’ I said, ‘Okay, fine,’ and probably within five minutes, all hell broke loose from the back portion of our patrol, and I find out afterwards two or three NVA jumped and suckered part of our platoon into following…chasing them, which they definitely did and that’s when the ambush was really sprung.

“And when I finally hit the ground, I could tell that Therrell was killed. My team leader who was Lance Corporal Thrasher from Oklahoma City, asked me to go up and retrieve the body, or bring him back, he might still be alive. I kind of knew differently, but, okay I would. So I stripped down and went up and grabbed ahold of his flak jacket by the collar and as I was dragging him back, the body was bouncing, jumping back and forth and I could feel bullets whizzing past my head, to my sides, and so in a sense, his body protected mine and I look back and for a long time, in fact I still do it every once in a while, that it should be me instead of him, but I guess the good Lord upstairs had something more in mind for me. “

John “Doc” Cicala

“That’s a tough one. I relive that thing quite a bit. I remember us saddling up and going out the gate. We had a Chu Hoi scout with us and we were supposed to follow a designated route, bracketed on all sides by artillery within an instant. Well, we got about five hundred meters, I guess, outside the gate, crossing the road, and Lieutenant Jacques spotted a couple of North Vietnamese standing over in a field, and he made a decision, we’re going to take ’em prisoner. And I do remember the Chu Hoi telling him no, and a lot of us saying maybe we shouldn’t do this, but he gave the order, so we went to get ’em. And, I guess probably a few hundred yards further out, we crossed the road, we crossed a set of trench lines and then they opened up on us and it was just pure chaos from there on.”

Ben Long

“I helped plan that patrol. We had made the checkpoints. I knew how far they were going out, and from my perspective I thought this patrol should have no problems; there should be nothing to be concerned about. So, I remember watching them go out the wire. You couldn’t see them for very long because it was very foggy. And they soon disappeared and I went back in the bunker. I remember listening on the radio—they were checking in and what they were doin—and then I got busy because the next thing I realized was that they had contact, and I didn’t realize—wow, they’re in contact. How did this happen?  Because I thought, no way they’re going to be in contact when they follow the route that we had prepared for them. So I thought, either in the fog they got lost, or didn’t know where they were, or they were well beyond the checkpoints…it shouldn’t have happened that way.

Company Commander Ken Pipes

“There’s been a lot of things written about that, some of it not good, some of it an attempt to be factual. But it was something that was not uncommon in Vietnam at the fire team, squad, platoon level, and in some instances entire battalions, entire companies.”

Peter Weiss

“I was the backup for Don Jacques, and so when he went out, my platoon—two of the squads—we were the backup. So we were on the radio listening to what happened and when he was ambushed, Captain Pipes came on the radio. ‘Okay, Lieutenant, it’s your time to go out.’ And two squads—we  actually split up—one squad and I went straight out towards where they were. The other squad went to the right, which was up toward the road, because the sergeant I was with had been out there before…had been there for a while, and he knew the terrain. I didn’t know what was out there. I’d never been outside the perimeter other than being on the hill. And unfortunately, he got trapped in the same kind of ambush, and so of that squad—maybe of ten men, I think—four were killed in that ambush.”

Steve Wiese

“It took me thirty-five years before I could get into my mind that we went out there at nine or nine-thirty, whatever it was, ten in the morning, and I didn’t make it back into the base until the sun was going down, and used darkness as a cover to work my way back.

“But the initial ambush, once they opened up, I mean it was bad. I mean they opened up and you know most of the guys went down in the first minute. I mean, it was not a good thing. The actual battle itself at that point went on for hours. The only reason I survived was I just happened to be standing in a bomb crater where it was like 2-1/2 feet deep where it blew the ground out, and I just happened to be walking through that at the time that the ambush opened up. And when the first round went off, I dropped and just…my luck was that I just dropped in that hole. So I was below ground level when all the—you know—all the bullets and everything were going over. And I just laid low.”

Cal Bright

“I come across a radio operator who had been killed—to this day I have no clue who, what his name was. And all I could hear on the radio was, ‘Hello, hello, anybody there, anybody hear us?’ And I never had any training whatsoever as far as talking on the radio. I had none whatsoever.  But I knew, press the mic. So I keyed the mic and said, ‘Hello.’ And somebody come back and said, ‘Who’s this?’ and I said, ‘Well, this is Cal.’

“‘Cal who?’ And I told him. He said, ‘Who else is there with you?’ I called back and I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, “What do you mean? I said, ‘There ain’t nobody here alive; they’re all dead.’ And he said, ‘Where are you at?’ and I says, ‘I’m laying next to a road and I’m overlooking another road that goes down over a hill.’’ And he said, ‘How did you get there?’ I said, ‘This is where we ended up.’ He said, ‘What can you see, from where you are…laying down?’ I could see little helmets in the background.

“Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was just a few meters away from the NVA trench line. I had no clue I was even there, that close to them, and somebody else come on the radio and says, ‘I want to shoot a round.’ He says, ‘I want you to let me know where they land.’  I say, ‘Okay.’

“Next thing, out comes a round—afterwards I found out that it was a Willie Pete round. It was a spotter round, and I went back to him and I said, ‘You need to drop the range down,’ and he says, ‘How much?’ I said, ‘50 yards, 75 yards,’ something, and he dropped it. Shot another round. I says, ‘You need to drop it another 40 yards,’ he said, ‘Okay.’ He says, ‘Bury your head, because we’re going to fire for effect.’ And that was the last I heard, because all of a sudden, bah bah bah boom boom boom, rounds were going off left and right.”

John “Doc” Cicala

“I just watched a guy drop and I took care of a couple of guys and then 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. I was laying there and the other Corpsman, Frank Calzia, seen me go down and he come running over yelling at me, ‘JC, are you okay, are you okay?’

“And then a grenade landed between my legs and I looked down and I seen it and I yelled ‘Grenade,’ and he hit the dirt and I curled up into a ball and it went off and 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’m thinking to myself, this isn’t good. My foot moved and I said, ‘Well, at least it’s still attached,’ and by that time Frank came over and he said, ‘You know, we got to get out of here,’ and I told him, ‘Git, you know, go take care of that guy, I’m okay, I’ll take care of myself.’

“And then 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.’ And he made it from about here to the wall and I seen him go down and I crawled over to him and he’d caught it right across the legs, both his femoral arteries, and by the time I got to him he’d already bled to death and there was nothing I could do for him.

 Ben Long

“In all the confusion that’s going on, men were getting shot and you could hear that happening and I moved from my bunker. I moved up on top because I not only wanted to listen, but I wanted to see if I could see them, and it was too foggy and I still couldn’t see, but I still stayed outside because I thought maybe I’ll be able to see something. Maybe the fog will float by and I’ll be able to get a glimpse, but really, it was very foggy that day and you couldn’t see hardly anything.

“First Platoon was called up and they were the ones who were supposed to go if it got into trouble and I thought, they’re not going to get in trouble, no problem. I was Platoon Commander for that platoon for 8 or 9 months, for a long time. Those were my buddies. They were my friends. I knew them. And I thought, if they’re going to go out, I want to be their leader. I want to take them out. I know how they work together.

“And so it was hard for me to not be with them. I knew that some of my friends were being shot, some I knew were dying. I heard it on the radio. But it would just tear your heart out. These were guys that I had been working with for a long time. I felt helpless. I felt so powerless. There was just nothing I could do. I mean, I wanted to do something. I think everyone in the company wanted to go out. We wanted to do something, but we got orders: no, no more people, we can’t do that, can’t go out.”

Peter Weiss

“Then we got the word, come back, retreat, and I remember very well, because we were laying out in the open because we got stopped at some point; rockets started coming in.

“I was right next to someone who I believe was killed because I checked his pulse. My weapon had stopped firing. Couldn’t use it. Just me and the body and I wasn’t sure if I should drag him back. And bullets started coming…being walked toward the two of us. And the last one stopped right at the fellow, right in his chest—must have been a fifty caliber hit him, and I said, ‘He’s got to be dead.’”

Steve Wiese

“You know, the initial blast started quieting down, and then you could tell they were just firing pretty randomly and if anybody moved, they just drew fire. So I just laid there and threw grenades. Shot a clip of ammo out of my rifle which basically I figured out pretty quickly, that was not a smart thing to do. Because as soon as I fired a round there were hundreds of guys shooting back. So, it was like okay, don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Cal Bright

“I was able to get out of there after some time. How long? I have no clue. It was still daylight but I could tell that the sun was—what there was of it—was going down so I figured it had to be late afternoon, early evening.

“I knew where our lines were at, and I was able to evade some enemy soldiers, and I was able to get back, and then, as I was coming back, all of a sudden, here’s these—I didn’t recognize as to who they were until I got closer—South Vietnamese ARVN Rangers. And they were waving at me to stop. And then I could see some American advisors telling me to stop, halt, don’t move. Don’t move, whatever, but I kept coming. And that was when I tripped over barb wire that also had a red triangle-shaped sign on it. Come to find out afterwards, I went through the entire mine field in front of Khe Sanh and never touched a round off. Now I know why they kept telling me to stop  and not to move.

“Again, I’ve never been real religious, or anything whatsoever, but I have to think that the Man Upstairs had something in his…on his agenda. Says, ‘I want to talk to you, young man.’

“I know there has been conflicting reports as far as how many of us went out. I was led to believe there was like anywhere from 60 to 70 of us that went out and there was only just a small handful of us that come back.”

John “Doc” Cicala

“They said I made it back to the base, maybe six, eight hours later. But I did see a lot of guys go down. I seen Clay go down, I seen Jerry Lee Dotson. I took care of them. There’s nothing you could do, it was just chaos for that five or six…probably five minutes or whatever it was. I mean I heard all the stories afterwards. We ran into a battalion-sized force and everything, but it didn’t last long and it wasn’t pretty. That’s for sure.

“I crawled back to the base. I was kind of passing in and out, you know. I don’t remember all the details and I was pretty well messed up myself, but I do remember setting off a trip flare and when that went off I was thinking, ‘Oh, shit,’ but one of the weapons platoon guys—a guy named Eddie Pendergast—had a set of binoculars and he looked out and seen my uniform and he said, ‘Stop, cease fire, that’s a Marine coming in,’ and he physically ran out, him and a couple other guys, and they threw a poncho over the wire, grabbed me and yanked me back over the wire. Took me to Charlie Med.”

Ben Long

“I just started seeing people coming back, not in groups, but straggling back and some were wounded. Some were very severely wounded, and it was just very hard to take, but from my perspective, also what I saw was just a sense of confusion, a sense of ‘what’s going on…what’s happening?’ And it’s like how come we’re not doing anything? How come we’re just standing there? How come we’re not going out?

“We always want to rescue our people and we don’t want to leave our dead and wounded. Nobody was doing anything, and it was hard. Hard to watch that. We wanted to do something, but at the same time, we just couldn’t. So we had to be patient and wait and that was hard, that was really hard.”

Company Commander Ken Pipes

“But that one, that one was the hardest, I think. I think it broke all of our hearts.”

Peter Weiss

“We came back, maybe about three or four of us left, and we then came back into the perimeter. And a couple hours later, we were shelling that area. Planes were coming over dropping bombs, and all of a sudden, out on the outskirts of the wire, a lone Marine came. He was not in my platoon. And then I went out to get him. Walked through that minefield, not, you know, around the side, but through the minefield. And I was scared. Walked through the minefield, walked through the concertina, and he was in absolute shock. Grabbed him by the arm and we walked back through the minefield, back into the perimeter. I was happy that I got him out of there and that we both got back. That was a sad day.”

Steve Wiese

“I ended up leaving my rifle and just trying to work my way through. I had a pistol and I was using that for personal protection because the rifle was useless at that point, and it was just something to carry. I would dive from one bomb hole to another. Work behind anything I could find that was any kind of cover.

“I would lay there for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes. So, in between the firing, when it started to settle down a little bit, I would try to, you know, peek above and see, try to see where I could get to. And it took several hours, you know, of working my way across and moving out of the kill zone.

“Sometimes I’d have to lay there for two hours and wait for the firing to slow down. Towards sundown, in the shadows, I could move better and I worked my way out and moved down around the back and came back to the base.

“Several people came in through the gate, you know, and it was just like, where is everybody? I just remember the guys saying, ‘You’re pretty much it.’ When I got back to my squad area, Author Smith was in the bunker, and he said he was it.”

To reiterate what Skipper Ken Pipes said: It broke all of our hearts.

They are still broken.

~ By Ken Rodgers

To learn more about each of the men in this blog, click here.

_______________________________

Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this blog, 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 courageous 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.

In my most recent entry to this blog, I talked about my inability, even after the horror of January 21, 1968’s attack on Khe Sanh, to believe that it was more than a one-off attempt by the NVA to catch us weak or asleep.

By mid-February, I’d been disabused of that notion and as the month rolled forward, my acceptance that things would not get better but would only get worse drummed me like a dead rat stomped into the red mud at the bottom of the trench.

On February 5, 1968, NVA troops briefly overran much of Hill 861-A just west of the combat base which was occupied by Echo Company, Second Battalion, 26^th Marines. Echo engaged in up-close-and-personal combat before they drove the enemy off the hill.

On February 7, the NVA overran the Special Forces compound at Lang Vei and used tanks in their assault. PT-76 tanks. Not something we’d worried about in our daily trench digging. We imagined that night and into the early morning, enemy attacks with armored vehicles crashing through the wire and wondered how we could possibly fight that. We thought we heard them out there. All night long.

The next day, a platoon from Alpha Company, First Battalion, 9^th Marines, was attacked on Hill 64 not far outside the perimeter of the combat base. A nasty, vicious firefight ensued with heavy casualties on both sides. In our trench, we waited, biting fingernails, writing letters home to moms and girlfriends and wives. Gloomy letters, angry letters, defiant letters. Maybe, as we wrote on our stained sheets of paper, wings of hope tried to lift us up so when the moment came that we needed to fight for our lives, we would own the spirit to become ferocious.

On February 10, 1968, the men of 3^rd Squad, 2^nd Platoon, Bravo Company, First Battalion 26^th Marines, were filling sandbags when a C-130 designated BASKETBALL 813, flew in from the east and was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire. The plane circled around the base and came in from the west. We watched, nobody talking, as the obviously wounded flight managed to get onto the runway before it skidded off. The plane burned and smoke and flames erupted from the fuselage. We were not more than one-hundred yards from the event. We watched as men jumped out of the cockpit. By then, the horrors of war were old hat. We were numb, and this and subsequent events would numb us more.

Later in the month, Bravo, 1/26 suffered a blow on the 25th in which the NVA first ambushed a patrol and then a relief patrol that went out as reinforcement. The losses were devastating for the men of the company. I will have more to say about this at a later date.

The amount of incoming artillery—rocket and mortar rounds—also increased, often pinning us in the trench for what seemed like hours as the ordnance rocked the ground. We heard a lot of the NVA artillery leave the tube and the big ones, the 152-millimeter rounds, sounded like trains as they approached. Men died, men were wounded, men almost broke. We discovered one of our staff sergeants whining like a beaten dog as he dug into the bottom of the trench.

But maybe what saved us from going completely nuts were a few events that led to chuckles. Sometimes it was morbid stuff, but those who have been through hell often understand the warped humor humans can dig into when circumstances necessitate.

I don’t remember exactly when these following three things happened, specifically, but I’m pretty sure they all occurred before the 20^th of February.

Early into the siege, the 37^th RVN Ranger Battalion, our allies, arrived at Khe Sanh and dug in on a line in front of some of 1/26’s entrenchments.

One evening, just before sundown, I was ordered to report to the platoon commander’s bunker. It was our squad’s turn to conduct an LP (listening post) for the platoon, and it was my fire team’s turn to stand that particularly distasteful duty.

We all hated LPs. Four Marines out in the dark, trying to stay alert, trying to stay alive, knowing that if the enemy approaches, it’s the LP’s duty to alert the base and in doing so has an almost 100 percent chance of being discovered and killed.

We hated everything about it. Leeches, and rain and mud, and dark, dark, nothing to see beyond the reach of your arm. Trying like hell to stay awake.

But it was our turn, so when the platoon commander told me we would be running the LP with a team of RVN Rangers, I wasn’t happy; but who cared besides me? I was ordered to lead the other seven members of the listening post out to the end of the air strip where two slit trenches awaited our stay for the night.

The Rangers didn’t speak English, or if they did, none of them volunteered to talk to us and none of the Marines knew Vietnamese beyond Dien Cai Dao which we bastardized to Dinky Dao, and the French word Beaucoup to Boocoo.

But just before dusk died, we arrived and set up in the two trenches. The whole scene seemed menacing to me: two teams, can’t talk, different cultures, dark coming, North Vietnamese out there creeping around, maybe just beyond our position. A wall of tall jungle grass stood close to our front. I remember thinking that if the enemy came at us, we wouldn’t see any of them before they burst out within a few feet of where we sat.

I assumed my Vietnamese colleagues were whispering the same thing that I told my team, to keep an eye on that wall, to keep ears open, keep eyes moving, because when one stares at things directly in the dark, the immovable moves.

I felt lucky because all the men in the team, my American team anyway, had been in-country for at least three months and had been on a lot of night patrols, ambushes, and LPs.

One of the things about being a low-ranking grunt is that you never get enough sleep, so when we went out on LPs, even though the upper echelon expected us all to stay awake all night, we took turns watching and operating the radio which we employed on a regular basis to report that the situation was all secure.

Dark slammed down and we watched. I noticed all the Rangers sat ramrod straight, wide awake. I imagine now, their eyes big as half dollars.

When dawn broke and a weak morning light hinted at rising, I woke the team and looked at the Rangers. They glared at us Jarheads, and one of them took his right index finger and made a sign as if cutting a throat. I remember thinking that no one was dead, so no harm done, no worries. And we got some sleep, even if it was fitful and edgy with the lurking threats.

I called into the platoon radio operator and told him we were coming in. We made sure the four Marines were in front. The Vietnamese Rangers came in the rear so that no Marine mistook them for NVA sneaking in.

Sometime later, I am not sure how long, a few days, a week—sometimes I wish I’d kept a diary—the Rangers and the NVA got into a firefight out beyond the perimeter of the base. I think it was an attempt to stop the NVA from shooting a recoilless rifle into our lines. The Ranger unit’s officer was killed.

They sent our platoon, or part of it, out as security or backup or relief for the ARVN Rangers. We went out and into a bamboo thicket so dense you had trouble seeing the men on either side. We were ordered to dig in but I do not think any of us dug in. We sat down on the ground and in anticipation of battle, we looked at bamboo. Bamboo to the front of us, to the side of us, to the back of us. Thick and stifling and dreary.

Gunfire and screaming rose from the unseeable front and we waited, the moments like hours. Then on a trail nearby, we heard chatter and laughter and soon a group of men appeared that we could see as they got close to our positions. They giggled and I wondered if it was from the relief of still being alive after tons of fear released itself and they retreated. When they passed, I saw they were our allies. They carried a body, and then more men appeared toting a recoilless rifle, either a 57mm or 81mm.

After they passed us, we returned to our positions.

Later, when the sun went down, another Marine and I were called up to the platoon command post. When we arrived, two ARVN Rangers waited in the trench with a covered body on a stretcher. It was the ARVN Ranger officer killed earlier that day.

The lieutenant told me to escort them up to Graves Registration—the morgue—so that some Marine on watch back at rear echelon units didn’t kill them because they looked like the NVA.

It was an overcast night which I think was a boon to us; no light to expose us to the enemy.

I led the other Marine along with the two Vietnamese carrying the stretcher and reported to Graves Registration. Either a corporal or sergeant began to write out paperwork. Right then, the sound of footsteps running came from a hall. I looked around, nervous, wondering why someone would be running. Another Marine burst out of that hall and ran across the room, his arms up like a wide receiver in a football game, and right behind, a foot, all by itself, came flying out. He caught it like he was on his way to a touchdown. Something dropped. I looked. The two Rangers were gone. The stretcher lay on the ground, the body as unaware as any dead man. I laughed at the situation. Maybe I was sick, but I laughed as did my mate and the Marines working there, some of them morbidly dulled after dealing with a deluge of body parts, blood, and dead men.

Outside, I found the two Rangers squatting in the trench. The light leaking from the mouth of the hatch lit their eyes, which were glazed in fear. Maybe they were worried that whoever used to own that foot would be haunting the place and the men who worked there, forever. We, the Americans, thought the Vietnamese feared the spirits of the dead. Most of my comrades and I did not believe spirits of our dead hung around after the end, or that the spirits even cared.

The month ticked on. One catastrophe to another, one day to night, to day. Death and fear lurking in the shadows.  Maybe those were the spirits we needed to fear.

One of the irritating things about the Siege was the lack of chow. C-rations were our mainstay and over time we adopted our favorites. Pound cake, canned peaches, chicken noodle soup, and beans with franks are some I remember as being palatable.

During the month of February, chow, like mail from home, got scarce, we went down to two meals a day, and on certain days, even less.

So, when the platoon commander ordered me to take a procurement patrol up to the supply dump, I was  more than ready. During combat, in the Marine Corps, you don’t steal what you need, you procure.

The dark night hung on us like a cape. We worked our way between our behind-the-line units so as not to draw attention.

We came at the dump from the back. There was a wire fence. We defeated that obstacle. Inside, large pallets of stacked goods covered with tarps were arranged in neat and tidy rows. We had to search beneath the tarps for food.

Finally, we located a pile of stacked cases of C-rations and started gathering a couple of cases per man. There were seven or eight of us. We got canned fruit, and grapefruit juice, too.

We eased back to the fence and just before exiting the supply dump, someone demanded, “Who’s there?”

Everyone froze. A Marine came out of the dark with the business end of an M-16 pointed at us.

None of my people wanted a confrontation. We certainly didn’t want to get shot in our own supply dump after surviving the hellacious incoming we’d been experiencing.

I gave him the password.

He looked at the cases of food and told us to drop them.

I asked him his plans.

He said, “Turn your asses in.”

I said, “Man, we need chow and we were ordered to come down here and procure some food.”

“Who gave that order?”

I didn’t want to incriminate the platoon commander, the platoon sergeant, or anyone else.

One of the other Marines got into a conversation with the guard about his home, his accent; maybe they were from the same locale. I do not recall.

The conversation veered to how long he’d been in-country. He said, “Outta here tomorrow.”

I said, “Man, you are so short. Why don’t you just let us go?”

He shook his head and frowned.

Someone managed to dig up some MPC (military payment certificates) and flashed them in the guy’s face. He looked at the money, he looked at us, he looked at the rations.

He took the money.

We delivered our bounty to the command post and the lieutenant told us to return to our squad area.

We went back, disappointed because we had nothing.

Later, the platoon right guide came around and dropped off a couple of cases of C-rations. No fruit, no juice.

The rations were so old, from the time of the Korean War in the ‘50s, it was hard for us to eat them. But we did.

And we survived, most of us, to live a few more minutes, a few more days, maybe all the way until we again stood inside the good old USA.

~ 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 courageous 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.

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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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 courageous 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.

Since Veterans Day, I’ve been thinking a lot about service: the kinds of service, who served, and the term, “Thank you for your service.”

When a man my age sits across from me and notices my USMC hat and looks away, and looks back, looks away, and then says, “Thank you for your service,” I am always flummoxed, and sometimes unable to do much but utter, “Thanks.”

And sometimes I want to ask him where and when he served—but I don’t—and hypothetically, if he answers that he didn’t serve, I want to say, “Why not?” But then that’s really none of my business, so I never ask.

Today, in my thoughts, the bigger notion is me wondering if those folks know what that word actually means—service—and I suspect they do on some level, their level, probably because experience is the only level about which we can speak with any authority.

They may have served their church, or at the school, or at the food bank, all worthy efforts, for the most part, but when they speak those words, “Thank you for your service,” to a military person, do they have any idea about what service actually means?

Maybe I am thinking specifically from the point of view of a combat vet, and maybe a Marine, because, hell, that’s what I am.

I am not talking just in terms of the actual physical damage of combat, death, wounds, etc., but about the psychological damage to the killer, too. The PTSD thing, the thing that never leaves you once you get down to it: the ghost, the haunt, the monster who reminds you of the monster you can become if provoked, if necessary.

I wonder if the “Thank you for your service” folks—a lot of them anyway—understand the ugly truth that the job of so many military people is to engage, or support engagement, in the act of killing.

Yeah, we kill. We killed. We will kill. We might be killed.

Ten years ago, Betty and I journeyed to Quantico to receive an award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation and while at the ceremony, the Commandant of the Marine Corps gave a speech that focused on the mission of the Marine Corps.

In the talk, he spoke about the job that Marines do quite often and quite well. He talked about having to go somewhere to kill some people.

He literally said, “Our job is to kill people.”

To kill. Kill.

Granted, the crowd was Marines or Marine Corps Heritage Foundation supporters, but there it was, on the table, the word “kill,” like a three-day-old trout. You can’t avoid it, or what it means.

Most of our leaders—even though they understand the goals of a mission might include killing some people—muffle and sidestep so the good folks who want no part of the dirty business of death don’t have to confront the ugliness of what being an American often means.

We kill to attain the goals of our mission. Not always, because sometimes just the threat of killing does the job; but still, it’s often about fear and life and killing.

When I served in Vietnam in the sixties, we spent our days dealing with the specter of death that hung in the air day and night. Friends died. Enemies died. And sometimes we wanted to kill.

I tried like hell to kill people when the opportunity afforded itself and when necessity demanded, “Kill!”

In February, 1968, at the height of the Siege of Khe Sanh, when the North Vietnamese Army kicked the hell out of us pretty damned well, an event happened that really sticks in my mind.

It was night. I wasn’t due to go on watch for a while. I was wide awake. I went down the trench, bent low to hide my head. I don’t remember where I might have been headed, but on the way, I ran into Stein who’d served with me for the entire eleven months I’d been with the battalion in Nam.

He was on top of the platoon command post with an M-14 rifle with a starlight scope which enabled the shooter to see figures moving around in the dark.

I climbed up and Stein told me he was shooting at men over in the enemy trench which was quite a way out from where we lay on the roof.

It was damp and misty and black as hell, the only light coming from explosions of incoming enemy ordnance or the quick, bright muzzle flashes of our outgoing replies.

I wanted to get a look at the enemy out there and I wanted to shoot one, or two, or two hundred; to get even, to stop them, to match man for man the comrades they had stolen from us.

We bickered and argued, and eventually he let me take a look. The enemy troops were not clear, but I could see them moving and breathed deep and squeezed the trigger. Yep, I tried. Maybe someone’s mother mourned when she found out I’d killed her son. I don’t know. Maybe I missed. But I tried.

Stein and I handed the rifle back and forth for a while until we stopped shooting at people, not knowing if we’d really done any damage. But there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that we’d done something: our part. At least I felt that way. That my small contribution, my small “service,” would make a difference in the big and horrible killing we were part of. That we were expected to do. That we were asked to do by the American public. This is what we are now thanked for.

Today, it doesn’t feel so great, knowing they are thanking me for something they probably have no knowledge of. Killing.

~ 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.

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.

By Ken Rodgers

In our previous blog, we posted a memory of a Marine killed in action at the Siege of Khe Sanh. It’s been almost fifty-eight years since the siege, and the men who manned the trenches there are still on my mind a lot of the time.

Here’s another story I wrote a few years ago about a Marine KIA whom I knew fairly well: David A. Aldrich.

I’ve been having an ongoing e-mail conversation over the last several years with a Marine named Dave Evans who was in Marine Corps Training in the States with David A. Aldrich. Both of these Daves arrived together in Danang, South Vietnam, in March of 1967, and one of them went to Hill 55 with the First Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment. That was Dave Aldrich. I arrived on Hill 55 a day later. So Aldrich (that’s what we called him…we didn’t normally call anyone by first names in Vietnam) and I got to know each other fairly well, even though we were technically assigned to different platoons after our initial orientation while in the main battalion position on Hill 55.

Aldrich, I believe, had an MOS of 0351 (the Virtual Wall states that he was an 0311) which meant he shot what we called “rockets,” but which might be more simply understood as bazookas. I was an 0311, an infantryman, a grunt. I was assigned to Second Platoon and he went to Weapons Platoon, Bravo Company.

Aldrich was a quiet guy with a big smile and a mellow sense of humor. He stomped through mud and jungle grass with 1st and 3rd Platoons on patrol, too, but it seems like he was with us, 2nd Platoon, most of the time through the spring and summer of 1967 as the 26th Marines moved north from Hill 55 to the Khe Sanh Combat Base. He was with us through the monsoon season and up on Hill 881 South in the fall of the year. He was there, sharing chow with us, and jokes, playing cards, listening to the newest music on Corporal Mitchell’s portable record player…Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Aretha and Otis Redding and The Jefferson Airplane.

Those days through the fall of ’67 were hard, wet and dreary and Aldrich was along all the time, shooting his rockets when necessary. Dealing with the wet rounds that failed to go off. That was tough for him, getting those dud rounds, those wet rounds, out of those tubes without them cooking off and blowing his arms and face off. I recall how cool he was about it. If he was sweating, he remained unflappable, only the barest hint of tension in the grit of his teeth. But even if he was scared (and of course he was) he certainly didn’t want it to show…we were Marines.

When the siege began, Aldrich came around my bunker a lot and stood watch with us and he and I talked about going home…home…like heaven. I remember one terrible day, February 25, 1968, our Third Platoon got ambushed and First Platoon went out to relieve them and they got ambushed, too. We, Second Platoon, were left to man the company’s lines. The NVA was pounding the trench line with sneaky 82-millimeter mortar, rockets and train-wreck 152 mm artillery, keeping us down, keeping us locked in the perimeter so we couldn’t go get our friends, our mates, who were dying out there within ear shot.

It was one of the worst days of my life. My whole body shook. I imagined the red fire and searing teeth of death and conflagration. The end was here and I didn’t want to face it. I wanted my life.

As this was going on, Aldrich came up and engaged me in conversation. He must have seen my shaking. I can only imagine how white my face must have been. How shrunken down into my utilities and flak jacket I must have been, as if that could have made any difference. But he didn’t act like he was seeing anything out of the ordinary. He soothed me with his words. He steadied me.

Aldrich and I survived a lot of mayhem and death during the siege. We both made it all the way to the end of our tours. Then came March 30, 1968, what has been called the Payback Patrol. Aldrich had one day to go…he was scheduled to leave the field on March 31. I was scheduled to go on April 1. The evening before the patrol, the word got passed to me that Aldrich was looking for me so I went to his bunker, stuck my head in, saw he was slouched on a cot. I went in and sat down. He abruptly handed me an envelope.

I said, “What’s that for?”

“Make sure my parents get this?”

“What is it?”

“My dog tags.”

I began to yell at him. I refused to accept the envelope.

He said, “If I go out tomorrow, I won’t come back alive.”

I yelled. I yelled. I yelled. “If you believe that now, that’s what will happen.”

He nodded.

I said, “You’ve got to believe they can’t get you. If you believe they can’t get you, they won’t.”

He shook his head. We went back and forth, him resigned, me enraged, angry, and screaming. He wasn’t buying what I was saying. I didn’t accept the envelope.

The next day was four or five hours of speeded-up, slowed-down hell. It was like Dante says in his poem, Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” I survived it and a lot of Marines didn’t. I remember walking down the red dirt road after we were ordered back into the perimeter. Men staggered along the lane. Some wore bandages on their heads, their arms and legs; some wore looks on their dirty faces that reminded me of dead people. Two men dragged a body down the middle of the road. I passed them and looked down. Even though his face was turned toward the red clay, I knew it was David A. Aldrich, Corporal, USMC.

I’ve been haunted by these images for over forty-five years. What could I have done to prevent Aldrich’s death? What could he have done? Did my failure to accept the envelope with the dog tags dishonor him? Maybe when I get done writing this, the images will stop coming.

Later that day, the word came down the trench line asking if anyone had seen Aldrich. He was missing in action, they said. I went up to the Platoon Command Post and told them I had seen his corpse. “You’re sure?” they asked me. “Yeah,” I said. The platoon sergeant went up with me to Battalion Headquarters and I signed affidavits of some sort saying I’d seen him dead. I signed the papers. He was dead. Killed in action.

For years I’ve had a sneaking fear that somehow I was wrong, and David Aldrich is locked away in some prison cell in Hanoi. Seeing his name on the wall soothes that fear. Somewhat.

Dave Evans asks that if anyone knew David Aldrich, please contact him at usmcdevans@yahoo.com.

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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.

September’s changes lead me to ponder the past: war, return to home, my comrades at Khe Sanh. One of the most poignant memories I have is of encounters with people at The Wall in Washington, DC, in September of 2010 when we first began making BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. Some of these memories keep popping into my head and have for years, so I’m sharing this excerpt from an earlier blog about one of those experiences:

We’ve been to The Wall twice this trip to take photos and film the names. Last Sunday we went down early while the Park Service was tidying up after the twin revivals conducted by Glenn Beck and Al Sharpton. The sun glared and dew coated the grass.  A few people moved among the endless plastic bags of trash that lined the paths and walkways.

The Wall was damp and looked like it had been hosed off, so there was little hope we could immediately take any pictures because each name was coated with tiny bullets of water. I dug out my trusty big blue kerchief and began to wipe the water off the names. I started at panel 35E with Steven Hellwig and was interrupted from my chore by an earnest young man and woman who asked me how to find names, to understand the logic on the wall. I said to myself , what logic; logic to all this? But I didn’t say it aloud because there is no logic. Instead I said, “Where you from?”

He smiled and so did she. “We’re from Alabama and we’ve been here for the Beck revival, and we thought we’d come pay our respects to some men from our town who served and died.” I expected wild-eyed Beck followers but these people were polite and earnest. I explained how The Wall works and then went back to drying names and worked through the subsequent panels until I was at 46E on my knees wiping off Gregory Kent and Jimmie Lafon McRae when a short man about my age holding a digital camera knelt next to me and asked if he could borrow my kerchief to dry a name when I was done.

He was tanned and had a hard New England accent. For some reason, I blurted, “Who you looking for?”

“Gregory Kent.  He and I ran track together in high school and . . .”

I blurted, “I know him.”

He stared at me. “You know him?”

I hesitated. “I knew him. We served together.” The stare on his face made me think he wasn’t sure he believed me.

I pointed my finger at him like a pistol and went on, “You’re from Boston, right?”

“I live in Florida, but yes, I’m from Boston.”

I looked down and wiped the name again. “I served with him until he was killed on March 28, 1968, with this fellow.”  I pointed two rows down to Jimmie Lafon McRae.

He sat back on his heels and looked at me like someone contemplating stabbing a snake. I hesitated again and then nodded. “They stepped out of a hooch and were talking along with Ron Exum from Philadelphia. A mortar landed between them, and Kent and McRae were killed.” I could have told him that there were shrapnel holes in Kent’s chest that spewed like oil gushers, but I didn’t.

The man said, “My name’s Sully Grasso and, and  . . .”

I looked at the names and brushed at them though they were already dry. I thought about Greg Kent, and how he liked to talk about dancing. He said he loved to dance, dance, dance.

Sully Grasso said, “Greg Kent won the state championship and could have gone to the Olympic trials, but he joined the Marines instead. I’m here for Glen Beck’s memorial and I want to take a picture and a tracing and I want to write an article . . . this is a miracle.”

I don’t think I believe in miracles, but I didn’t tell him that. I just cleared my throat as I looked away. He took my photograph, twice, as I knelt there. He asked my name and the pertinent details of Kent’s death.

I wrote on a piece of yellow-lined paper from my legal pad the barest of details as I remember them. He went to get something to trace names. Betty and I continued taking photos. Sully came back and took more pictures and traced the names, Gregory Kent and Jimmie L McRae. Then he walked up to me. Tears swelled in his eyes. I couldn’t look at him. He leaned towards me and I stuck out my hand to shake in order to avoid more intimate shows of emotion, but he pulled me close and hugged me.

He said, “God knows my heart, and He sent you here to meet me. He knows my heart. I didn’t have any idea about how Greg died, and now I know.”

I’m not sure I even believe in God, but I didn’t tell him that. The steps of people walking by echoed off the smooth surface of The Wall. A multi-colored wreath stood at the junction of the monument’s east and west wings, and an old, scuffed jungle boot sat there by itself in front of panel 22W. A red rosebud stuck up from inside the boot. I nodded at Sully and thought about how Kent liked to prance around and dance, his energy exploding out of him, and then he was gone.