By Bruce “T-Bone” Jones, Guest Author

Part One – Becoming a Marine

During the early years of the Vietnam War, the military draft brought the war to the American homefront.  The draft made a significant, personal impact on young American men, including me. Healthy, eligible young men ages 18-25 who didn’t have a deferment faced conscription into the Army. At 21 years old, I knew a draft letter was in my very near future. 

A month earlier, I had reported for a pre-induction physical at the local federal building and was found to be solid cannon fodder for the war. Almost any day I was going to receive a “Greetings from Uncle Sam” letter. I was faced with being drafted and serving in the Army, or volunteering for another branch of the military.

I chose the United States Marine Corps. It was definitely not a conscious choice based on logical evaluation. I wasn’t infatuated with the dress blues uniform; it was a choice of sheer impulse.  After all, the Marine Corps was tough! It had a brave war-fighting tradition and if I was going to participate in a war, I was going to be the “first to fight!” In retrospect, I simply wanted to find out what war was about and if I was tough enough to hack it. 

My boot camp training was just as I thought. It was rigorous and de-humanizing as hell.  The drill instructors tore you down and built you up in the image of a fine killing machine. My body was strong, and my mind was clear. You learned to obey a command without any hesitation, and it was expected to be performed with your very best intention.

Never in my life had I tried so hard to meet a set standard, let alone rigorous Marine Corps standards. It tested me physically and mentally like I had never been tested before. I was proud that I met the mark to become a Marine. At boot camp graduation, I was welcomed into the warrior society of the United States Marine Corps. OOORAAHH!

Based on my high aptitude test scores, I was scheduled to attend electronics school at C&E Battalion, MCRD San Diego after my thirty-day boot camp leave. With a MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) of Electronics Radio Repairman, I was supposed to receive training in electronics. In short, I had been assigned the “brass ring” of MOSs in the Corps. Even if I was sent to Vietnam, I would never go on any combat patrols or ever leave a secure area; I would be repairing radios “in the rear with the gear.” I had it made! 

The training consisted of 10 weeks of basic electronics class and 36 weeks of radio repair. You were required to pass a weekly test to move on through the course curriculum. If I had studied harder instead of drinking every night off-base or at the EM Club, I might have finished the training. At 21, I had become a drunken shit-bird! 

After 11 months of failing out of every electronics school C&E Battalion had to offer, the first sergeant called me into his office.

“Well, PFC Jones, you have managed to piss away one of the best training opportunities in the Marine Corps. What the hell do you want your Marine Corps to do for you, Jones? What career choice are you looking for?” 

Bluntly I replied, “Well I know I don’t want to repair radios in Vietnam sitting in an air-conditioned hardback hooch in Da Nang.”  

First Sergeant Davis looked at me with his face crimson red and yelled, “Well, Marine, I’ve got just the right job for you. You will remain in the ‘Eeelektronicks’ field that you tested so high in, but your MOS won’t be so fancy. I am shipping your sorry ass to Camp Pendleton for Ground Radio Operator School and then VIETNAM. Now, how do you like that?” 

I responded like the fool I was then, “Doubt if I have much choice, Top.” 

He looked at me with total disapproval and said, “No shit, Marine, and in addition, you get thirty days of mess duty before I send you on your way! And now, get the fuck out of my office!” 

The United States Marine Corps wanted an intelligent radio repairman. They got a dumb, radio-humping grunt!

Part Two – Arriving in Vietnam

After Ground Radio Training at Camp Pendleton, a thirty-day Christmas leave, and Staging Battalion, I arrived in Vietnam. I was assigned to an 81mm mortar section that was located near the Dai Loc Bridge a short distance from Hill 55 outside of Da Nang and was ordered to report to this mortar section as a replacement forward observer radio operator.

I was now officially assigned to Bravo Company 81s, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines Regiment, and yes I was an “FNG” with three days in-country!  A truck had just dropped me off in front of the Bravo Company mortar section after a short drive from Hill 55 to the bridge. 

The day I arrived, the Marines in the mortar crew were running gun drills on a mortar, trying to beat their individual set-up times. The competition consisted of a man standing upright over the mortar and on command, dropping down to his knees and spinning the mortar tube in the base plate and positioning the tripod in alignment with the aiming stakes. Then he had to use the horizontal and vertical sights to level and adjust the mortar for an accurate, rapid set-up. If the gun was verified to be “on bubble” and set up accurately on the correct azimuth, the time was recorded, and the competition would continue with the next man trying to beat the fastest set-up time. 

I later understood that if a man was consistently the fastest and the most accurate, he could assume the position of “gunner” on the gun crew. So, there I was, standing there watching men throw a mortar into position while screaming and cussing at each other.  It was not until they had tallied their set-up times that they even acknowledged me.

“I’m the new forward observer radio operator,” I said. They just looked at me with blank expressions and then one Marine said, “Gilbert, take him to see Staff Sergeant Luck.”

As we walked across the bare patch of ground that made up the Bravo section of 81mm Mortars, I couldn’t help but notice how casual everyone acted. No helmets, no shirts, and all their rifles propped up next to their flak jackets inside the gun pits. Maybe Vietnam wouldn’t be so bad after all.

I just HAD to ask THE question: “Get any action around here, Gilbert?” 

“I have been here less than two months and almost nothing,” he replied. “The grunts catch a few sniper rounds on patrol, but otherwise it’s quiet. The gooks leave us alone, and we leave them alone.” 

We approached a large bunker. Country Western music was playing inside and a drunken voice was singing along, slurring the lyrics to a Willie Nelson song.

“This here is the Fire Detection Control Center (FDC) bunker. Fire missions start and end here and…all the ‘lifers’ live here.” Gilbert stuck his head in the doorway and yelled, “Staff Sergeant Luck! Your new radioman is out here. He’s reporting in!” Then he turned around and without saying another word, walked off leaving me standing alone outside the FDC bunker. That was my introduction to the best friend I would ever serve with in Vietnam.

I was assigned the job of humping the PRC 25 radio for the Bravo Company 81s mortar forward observer. Sgt. Joe Castillo was a “Tex-Mex” from Corpus Cristi, Texas, and he was a veteran of ten months in Nam. A forward observer team is comprised of a forward observer (FO) and a radioman who provides mortar support to a Marine company in the field. The FO reads the topographical map and directs the mortars on the base where and what to fire at the enemy. The radioman relays all the FO’s directions and carries the radio in the bush.

Joe could read a map better than most of the company officers, and his skill was highly respected by the command staff of Bravo. He always knew where we were in the bush, which was a valuable skill required to prevent errant rounds from landing on our “friendlies.” I learned quickly to listen to all his advice about humping in the jungle and how to be a competent radioman.

Whenever and wherever units of Bravo Company went into the field, we went too. Early on, I struggled physically to hump all my gear and a radio that weighed 20 pounds plus a spare battery. Joe’s advice and support helped me to adapt to the rigors of humping the mountainous terrain around the Khe Sanh Combat Base. He would even carry the radio to give me a rest and help prevent my heat stroke!

Part Three – Our FO Team

In June, our two-man FO team grew to three with the addition of Gilbert Wall. He was assigned to replace Sgt. Joe Castillo who was going on leave to the US. Joe had extended his tour in Nam for six months and was going to be re-assigned to an MP unit in Da Nang. MP duty was SWEET! And SAFE!  Air-conditioned housing, dry cot with a real mattress, hot showers, and cold beer and steaks!  But before that sweet duty could begin, he had to train Gilbert as his FO replacement.

Joe indicated to me that he was satisfied with Gilbert as a potential replacement. He had been recommended by Staff Sgt. Morris because he’d shown an interest in the functions of the FDC. He had asked a lot of questions about directing mortar fire, more so than any other mortar man within the section. In addition, he was excellent at using a lensatic compass which was critical for directing outgoing rounds and adjustment during a fire mission. Gilbert’s OJT began by going on all Bravo Company patrols and observing Joe in the pre-patrol meetings with the Bravo command group.

My first months in Nam passed by quickly with the same monotonous patrols with only one disastrous contact with the NVA. It was on June 7^th, and it was bloody! It was NOT a proud day for Gilbert and me. Bravo Company was hit by 30 mortar rounds and then we were assaulted by an overwhelming force of 40 NVA. It was our first patrol without Sgt. Castillo, who by then was home stateside on leave. 

Gilbert tried to call in a fire mission, but I could not make contact with our mortars on top of 881! I tried to switch to our back-up frequency but still could not communicate with the guns. The incoming machine gun fire and grenades had us pinned down and all we could do was stay low while I fiddled with that damn PRC 25 radio! When the enemy was finally beat off, the only thing Gilbert and I did to support Bravo was to carry a dead Marine to the med-evacuation area.       

During his training, Gilbert and I became good friends. We were together 24/7. Gilbert was almost 21 and more mature than the 18-19 year-old men we served with in Nam.  During our off hours or on radio watch, we talked about our families, civilian jobs, and girls!

Gilbert was a Blackfoot Indian from Browning, Montana. He grew up in a large family like me, and like me he was raised poor, and that was where the comparison ended. I learned that he was a product of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school system. At age eight, he was sent to a BIA boarding school in Flandreau, South Dakota, 1,140 miles from his home. He described the school as a harsh Dickensian existence, one that the students were expected to bear in rigid obedience and prescribed silence.

They cut off his long hair, forbade him to speak his tribal language, confiscated all his personal belongings that were “Indian,” and dictated their harsh rules of conduct. Gilbert was to spend the next twelve years at the school with only summer breaks at home in Montana. But these summer trips home ended when the students became teenagers.  In their teens, the students remained at the school year-round.

The local farmers would “hire” the older boys and girls as farm hands and domestics during the summer. The children were not paid for their work and were told their earnings were being saved and would be given to them upon graduation. Gilbert said he never did receive the money when he graduated!  He said the education was terrible and although he was good at math, he was not able to read or write well when he graduated. I realized right then that Gilbert had a much different life growing up than I did.  

While Gilbert was quiet, his actions and the way he carried himself spoke volumes about his character.  Between us, our friendship was strong; we knew we could count on each other. That bond would soon be tested under very dangerous conditions during our first combat with the NVA. 

During most of July, Gilbert’s training and our patrols continued with no sighting of the NVA. Every time we stopped to take a break on patrol, Sgt. Castillo would ask Gilbert to identify our current location on his map. When we set up camp for the night, they would huddle together to discuss and plan the nightly “on call” missions and select defensive targets to protect us in case of an enemy attack. It was rigorous “show and tell” training and Gilbert was learning fast! He grew more confident with each passing day. 

On July 20th, 1967, First Platoon was assigned to conduct a recon sweep away from the combat base to Route 9. Our orders were to run a patrol along this road to discover any potential ambush sites that could intercept and destroy our supply convoys coming north to our base. Vietnamese “Highway” Nine was no more than a narrow gravel road that ran alongside the Dai Trang River. Barely wide enough for two trucks to pass by together, it was the only overland road to the Khe Sanh Combat Base.

Day one of the sweep consisted of humping overland to Route 9, then setting up defensive positions on the high ground overlooking the road for the night. On the morning of July 21, we descended to the road, organized our positions for the march, and proceeded south down Route 9. The platoon formation consisted of one column on the left flank on the high ground above the road, and another column on the right a short distance below the road near the river. The command group and our FO team were in the middle of the road, followed by a 60mm mortar team.

It was not long before the pace slowed to near zero. The left flank on the high ground was faced with some very formidable terrain and had slowed the entire platoon down.  They were in a thick bamboo forest with a jungle canopy that almost completely blocked the sunlight, darkening their path forward. In addition, the ground sloped precipitously downhill on the column’s right side. The platoon commander had instructed that the left column remain slightly ahead of the remainder of the platoon, and if possible, stay in visual contact with the other Marines on the road.

Neither of these was the case. The order was given to the left column to proceed as planned, and after getting ahead of the rest of the platoon, the movement on the road would commence. It wasn’t 15 minutes later that the left column made enemy contact! They were almost in the dark, in a firefight with a dug-in NVA ambush, and it was going very badly for the Marines on the left flank. 

Almost simultaneously, the remainder of the platoon came under withering fire to the front and our right across the river. Joe immediately crouched down, looked back at me and Gilbert and said, “Standby, fire mission!” I immediately closed the two-foot gap between Joe and me while saying, “Whiskey Bravo, this is Whiskey Bravo 1, fire mission, over.”

By the time I keyed the handset on my radio and voiced those words, I was crouched directly behind Joe, waiting for his next words.  He had always instructed me to remain close to him during a fire mission. Over and over he would say, “T-Bone…when the shit hits the fan, you had better be crawling up my ass!  We don’t want to miscommunicate and fuck up a fire mission. We’re supposed to kill the gooks, not our own men!” 

Joe pulled his map out of his flak jacket and quickly yelled the target grid with the corresponding azimuth and then said, “Fire one round of Whiskey Papa (white phosphorous or WP), will adjust.” I immediately repeated his directions and then nervously looked behind me and there was Gilbert Wall listening intently.

The radio crackled in a few minutes; it seemed like a lifetime. I heard, “One round Whiskey Papa, out.” I began to repeat the response from the guns located at the previously destroyed bridge site along the river, and Joe interrupted me mid-sentence, “I heard.”

We all started to look for our WP spotter round to impact so Joe could begin his adjustments to his target. After waiting enough time for the spotter round to impact and not seeing its white cloud across or up the river, Joe yelled, “Moving up,” and started running up to the next bend in the road. Gilbert and I scrambled up and ran after Joe. We didn’t catch up to him until he had run around the bend in the road and was crouched down near a sheer cliff along the road looking for that spotter round. 

All the while we were conducting our fire mission, the “mad minute” had begun!  Responding with small arms fire from individual Marines, machine guns, M79 grenade launchers, and 60mm mortars all firing across and up the river. Rifle, machine gun fire, and explosions could be heard coming from the high ground with the NVA matching our firepower.

Hugging the ground while our eyes scanned for the tell-tale wisp of white smoke from our spotter round, the entire FO team came under intense NVA fire. Machine gun bursts landed above our heads showering us with rock fragments, and then it happened!  I looked to my left and Joe was trembling while blood spurted out between his partially opened flak jacket. I looked closer and there was a gunshot wound in his upper chest.  He started to slump to the ground and his face lost its color; he was dead! 

All of a sudden, I felt a hard slap and a strong sting on the right side of my neck.  Instinctively I reached up and felt a bloody patch on my neck and my finger discovered a bullet hole! I was stunned but didn’t go into shock. As I turned to my right, reacting to the gunshot wound, I observed Gilbert was lying in the road behind me.

I started to reach for him and then I saw a blue-green-yellow flash above my head and my field of vision shrunk and waves of concussion hit my body. In addition, I felt these little bumps and pin pricks all over my head, face and arms.  My vision started to disappear! I lost the sight of my left eye almost immediately and I could barely see out of my right eye. I later found out that an RPG had exploded near us and that caused all the shrapnel to hit us.

Squinting with my right eye, I rolled Gilbert over and blood squirted from his mouth.  I had learned in our battlefield first aid class that this was a sign of a bullet or shrapnel wound through one or both lungs. Guessing, I tipped him on his right side and luckily he was shot through that right lung so he could breathe with his remaining good lung. I also found out later that the bullet had entered through Gilbert’s left shoulder and the round had exited through his right lung and side. 

My adrenaline must have disappeared soon after because the last thing I heard Gilbert say as I passed out was, “T-Bone, lie down and play dead!” 

The firefight ended as soon as it had started. I regained consciousness while being lifted through the door of a med-evac chopper. Lying on the floor of the chopper, Gilbert made eye contact and I began to moan. Gilbert reached over with a comforting hand on my shoulder and said, “What the hell just happened to us?” I responded with tears in my eyes, “We lost Joe! And we found the NVA!” The chopper lifted off and I was so glad to be alive!  

We thank T-Bone for sharing his memories in this guest blog. He and his wife, Francine, have been devoted supporters of our documentary films. In two days, on July 23, please join us in wishing T-Bone a very happy and healthy 80th birthday!

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Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing Bruce’s story with friends and other veterans. 

BRAVO! 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, one of whom is Francine, at https://imarriedthewar.com. I Married the War can be viewed on Amazon. DVDs are also available via the website.

Sitting at my desk, I thought I’d written about June 7, 1967, a lot, but searching through years of blogs, I found I hadn’t written anything near what I imagined. Maybe it’s because I live through that day so much. In memory. The muscular memory of fear and new understanding that life can be hard, brutal, and vicious and deadly, and there is no happy ending to some events.

The following is a blog I composed on June 7, 2014.

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As I write this blog, the date is June 7, 2014. Recognition of the date leads me to ponder a June 7 forty-seven years ago.

Not long after returning from Vietnam in April, 1968, I was cruising the streets of my hometown with one of my high school friends who looked at me and said, “Rodgers, you could fall in a bucket of manure and come out smelling like a rose.”

I didn’t quite know how to respond to that comment but now I remember thinking that, yeah, I’d been lucky in my life.

During the Siege of Khe Sanh I was one of the lucky members of Bravo Company. I didn’t go out on the Ghost Patrol and my platoon, 2nd, wasn’t in the first wave of attackers as we assaulted the NVA on March 30, 1968. Yes, I had to deal with incoming and snipers and going out on listening posts at night, but for the most part I was pretty lucky. And yes, I learned to tell where incoming was going to hit by the sound it made leaving the tube and yes I didn’t stick my head up so a sniper’s round could rip the top of my head off, but sometimes you didn’t hear the incoming leave the tube and sometimes you had little choice, you had to stick your head up. So you needed some luck to survive.

Some folks say that luck is only being prepared but in the case of the Marine Corps, you really don’t have any choice about when you get picked to go into action.

I was pretty lucky before the Siege, too, because I didn’t go out on the Bravo Company patrol of June 7, 1967. Two squads from 2nd Platoon along with other squads from our unit went out on a company-minus patrol which we thought would be a routine exercise off the north end of 881 South that morning. The squad I was in was chosen to remain behind and man the lines. I was fairly new to the outfit, so I remember that it seemed like just another day in my tour. Instead of humping the hills outside of Khe Sanh, I’d fill sandbags and stand watch.

It wasn’t long before we could hear activity going on and it wasn’t the kind of activity that you want to hear. Even though I didn’t know a lot of the guys in our platoon very well, I can still remember feeling empty. Empty and a little frightened, too. Our squad leader was monitoring the action on a radio, or trying to, and gave us some confused information about what was going on. It all sounded like a lot of chaos to me. Bravo Company hadn’t been lucky and had walked into a well-planned ambush, or at least that’s what I remember.

Eventually the battle was ended and our men came back in. There was only one problem. We were short 18 Marines and Corpsmen. And I knew some of them.

I had never felt anything like what I felt as I heard the list of names of our dead and saw the blank look on the faces of the men who returned. I knew well enough to keep my mouth shut and not say anything stupid. I wanted to apologize and to sympathize and to…I wanted to reach out to them but I realized that wouldn’t do much good.

The men of 2nd Platoon who didn’t go out on that patrol sat there and talked in hushed voices. Inside, in my guts and my chest, I felt drained, like something had vacuumed my innards. I couldn’t imagine what the men who had been out there felt like. (Later in my tour, during the Siege, I would get firsthand experience.)

One of the things I remember best from that day is my fireteam leader’s reaction to news that his best buddy was KIA. They’d come over from 3/26 about a month before. My team leader was the most stoic man I ever knew but on that day, he cried. He didn’t try to stop the tears. He didn’t try to hide them. He let them go and they streamed down his brown face. I wanted to reach out and hug him but we didn’t do that kind of thing back then, or that’s what I believed, anyway.

A few days later we reorganized the platoon and within several weeks we acted like we had forgotten all about what happened on June 7. But we hadn’t. We were just trying to move on, hoping to be lucky enough not to end up like those good men who hadn’t come back from that action.

The names of those men:

Lance Corporal James Blaz
Lance Corporal John Chase
Corporal Ronald Crooks
Lance Corporal Robert Francis Enderby
Corporal Edward Furlong
Private Gale Gotti
PFC Thomas Healy
PFC Kenneth Johnson
Lance Corporal Kenneth Keefer
PFC Steven Millett
PFC Larry Morris
PFC Wayne Pitts
PFC Frank Shovlin
PFC Philip Van Deusen
Lance Corporal Edward Vercouteren
HN (Corpsman) Gregory Vercruysse
Corporal Walter Ward
PFC Larry Worthen

Semper Fi, Marines.

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Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! 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 spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com. I Married the War can be viewed on Amazon or Vimeo. DVDs are also available via the website.

Every morning at five, in the tan Buick LeSabre, two six-packs of cold Coors, and on the dirt roads south of town, north and east and west, a rooster tail of dust, a splash through mud where irrigation water escaped from lower ends of fields and ditches. Skunks in the road and racoons; the dogs of farms on long chains barking their ugly fury.

One beer two, the trailer houses white and brown, the farm pickups, black irrigation hoses, cottonwoods on the corners sucking all the water from the ground, the hawks of spring on the tops of poles, the kettles of vultures circling, circling.

The Sunday after I returned home from the war was Easter. My mother begged me to go to church. I remember her asking me to make a talk about the war. At the podium, the words crumbled and stumbled out of my mouth. Women in white dresses sat and gawked. Afterwards, they cornered me, their eyes like windows of sorrow. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

On Cinco de Mayo I met friends and we traveled to Nogales, Mexico, for the bullfights. I had a date with a girl I went to grade school with. I hadn’t seen her since the fifth grade. She didn’t excite me, but neither did the two blind dates I had earlier during my post-Vietnam leave. Women looked like mirrors that showed only my face, a wounded face, a face in need of more than they could deliver.

The bullfights turned my stomach. The picadors with their long spears jabbing the bulls and the banderillas with their barbed sticks stuck in the bull’s shoulder muscles and then the matador weaving his red cape magic then stabbing the bull, a thrust through a small opening behind the head and into the heart, the kill.

Two of the three matadors couldn’t kill the bulls as what tradition and the crowd demanded. When the third did, the celebrants crammed in the bullring went insane with their cheers. It made me sick to my stomach.

I wonder why I continue to write this stuff after fifty-eight years. Maybe I don’t have an answer. Maybe I need to figure out what I think and by writing it out, I will know what I think. Maybe I think it’s important enough to visit, and visit, and visit again and try to get it right.

The best and the worst of men I met in Nam, and sometimes we were one and the same: bad, and good, the necessities of duty and survival a broad, heavy yoke. We were just kids carrying the load. Good men, yes. Many, some of them I guess I loved. They say that battle and bad times make for strong bonds.

I wrote a letter to my parents in late February 1968 when the Siege of Khe Sanh pounded my very existence, ripping my mental condition into pieces that would never fully fit back together the way they were prior to my tour of duty. In the letter I was bitter and defiant, mostly, I think, due to articles we read about us being in peril, a peril—though real—we didn’t want to acknowledge.

Unbeknownst to me, my mother gave that letter to the woman who wrote a column in the local paper, and they printed much of it verbatim. Some of my vitriol was aimed at protesters. I think we, the men of Khe Sanh, felt betrayed, in a way, by what was happening in streets and on campuses across the globe. I understood dissent and the right to express your feelings and the right to not be in favor of the war, but on an emotional level, all that dissent stung.

When I got home, people mentioned the article to me and thought I was a war monger. I was called war monger. I fought that dammed battle at Khe Sanh and hated it. No one who went through that would love war, but in the same vein, we felt we’d done something important, stood up to a much bigger adversary and prevailed.

I felt betrayed.

Nothing at home was the same, or would it ever be, for me, the world tilted on its head, so to speak.

~ By Ken Rodgers

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Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! 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 spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com. I Married the War can be viewed on Amazon or Vimeo. DVDs are also available via the website.

As I sat on a cot in a bunker shooting the breeze with some other Marines, Staff Sergeant Alvarado came down the trench line. I heard his jungle boots in the dirt. He stuck his head in the bunker and nodded at me. “You’re rotating home, Rodgers.”

I said, “Now?” The day I’d waited over twelve months for had finally arrived? A couple of days before he’d said the same thing and when I jumped up and ran out of the bunker, a different one, shouting, “I’m gone, I’m gone,” he stood against the wall of the trench with his arms folded before he burst into laughter and said, “Just messing with you.

This time he nodded. “You are going home. Get your gear.”

I gathered my web gear and wool blanket and poncho liner and then hurried to Supply for my sea bag before going to the platoon command post to make sure I was out of there. Lieutenant Dillon wished me well, and Alvarado gave me a package to mail to his uncle in Texas. I rushed to the company office for my orders and then to the command post to get my orders endorsed by the Skipper.

The bunker was packed with Marines: radio operators, the gunny, the executive officer, Mr. Long, and the Skipper looking battered by war and wearing an arm in a sling.

Mr. Long looked at my orders and told me I wasn’t due to rotate until the following day, but the Skipper looked at me, smiled and remarked, “He did a good job out there the other day. Let him go.”

Mr. Long said, “Okay, but you may get some resistance from Battalion when you go to get your orders endorsed.”

In the span of less than an hour, I saw the last of—at least for over four decades—the best officers I ever served under in the USMC: Ken Pipes, John Dillon, Ben Long.

At Battalion Headquarters I was routed into the office of a major whose name I do not remember. I reported, at attention, and said what I’d come to do. He looked at my orders and then at me and at my orders and said, “Were you on that patrol on the 30^th?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

“What was your job?”

“Radio operator for Second Platoon’s platoon sergeant.”

He nodded and looked at my orders, then looked at me with an icy stare before signing. My heart thumped and danced. I was going home.

Before handing me my orders, he stood and stuck out his hand. I was shocked. No officer had ever shaken my hand. I took it, we shook, he said, “You Marines are what makes the Marine Corps the finest light infantry the world has ever known. Semper Fidelis.”

He teared up and I did too and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I went down the trench to the location where you caught choppers down to the coast. We sat in a low spot as CH-46s, Hueys and CH-34s came in and out hauling men and ammo and gear, taking body bags. I waited.

A Marine I served with before Nam came along, told me he’d been with 1/9 and was going home. We waited.

Dust blew when the choppers landed and took off.

We waited.

A breeze blew in and rattled the black body bags.

We waited.

Then we finally boarded a CH-46, circled the base once and then flew east. I didn’t sit. The crew chief told me to sit. I stood. I imagined flying over NVA emplacements and taking gunfire through the bottom of the chopper and I figured if I stood it would lessen the chances of taking rounds through the ass.

We crossed wild and green country pocked by bomb craters and then a land of rice paddies before we landed at Dong Ha close to the north coast of South Vietnam. At the transient barracks I checked in, grabbed a rack in a hooch, took a long, long, long shower, the hot water like memories of home. Then chow, hot, too…real food.

Later, a bunch of us stood around the hooches and smoked our nicotine. I kept imagining incoming. I looked for holes to hide in. There were slit trenches outside each hooch. I knew where I’d head. The entire time we stood there I never said a word about the ordeal at Khe Sanh, and the 1/9 Marine who’d ridden out of Khe Sanh with me didn’t either.

The next morning, I woke early, headed to the air strip for a ride to Phu Bai and our battalion rear. A Marine I’d served with at Camp Pendleton sat on a table waiting for a ride. We talked for a minute, where he’d been, where I’d been. Originally we’d both been in Bravo but then he got an opportunity to go to a cush job at Division as a courier. I remember when it happened. We were on 881 S in May of 1967. He came over and found me and told me he was leaving.

There at the Dong Ha airport, I told him he’d made the right decision. He nodded. A plane landed and I got on. I marched to Headquarters, turned in my weapon and assorted other gear and found a hooch full of men from Bravo Company. In the morning, I drew pay and we bought beer and got a galvanized tub and ice from the chow hall and took it all back to the hooch and started to enjoy a moment when no one was trying to kill us.

We hadn’t had a full can when the duty officer at the battalion rear, a 1^st lieutenant, burst through the door with an indignant look on his face. I tried to explain. I said it was my fault, I was going home, so to hell with him.

He wasn’t sympathetic. So we hauled the iced beer up to the headquarters office. As we came in, there sat Major Bruce A. Green who liked to remind us that when he was a captain and our company commander, that BA stood for badass.

He was another officer I respected for his courage and integrity. I’d walked point for him many times during our occupation of Hill 881 South in the fall of the year.

When he first cast his fierce glance on me, I winced, but he never said a word. That night, my beer was shared with everybody in the transient barracks at Battalion Rear.

The next morning, I caught a flight to Danang.

I checked in at the new transient barracks.

A staff sergeant said, “You’re way behind on your inoculations. Time to get them caught up.”

I said, “I’m going home, Staff Sergeant, so I don’t really need any more shots.”

He said, “You want to go home?”

I caught a bus out to the dispensary and checked in. The corpsmen lined up on my right and left, needles in their hands, smiles on their faces. I’ve forgotten the list of inoculations. It was long and painful. I was a pincushion. They enjoyed delivering my discomfort. Later the lymph nodes in my underarms swelled.

I headed for the PX and on the way ran into Q Ray Jacobs, my old squad leader. We sat at a counter and ate cheeseburgers and drank milk shakes. What a glorious indulgence, a reward for still having all our limbs, the eyes, the body.

We headed to the Navy hospital to check on some of our comrades who’d been wounded on March 30, but when we got there, we found out they’d been transferred to hospital ships or to Japan.

Then we headed to the club over by the airfield. We started strong, beer and beer and beer, before we headed to see Jake’s buddy who was in a missile battery nearby.

We joined him at the enlisted men’s club to visit and watch a film. I ordered a case of beer for our table but the club manager, some staff sergeant, shut the club down because he suspected we’d create some mayhem even after I offered to spread the beer around. The usual dose of nightly beer ran at two cans so I figured by sharing, it was okay to go ahead and watch the movie. But he shut it down anyway.

Outside, Jake said goodbye to his friend, and we staggered off to find the transient barracks. Right before we exited the missile installation, Jake said, “Wait,” and we headed back to the club, darting from shadow to shadow like we were warriors.

When we got there, we noticed the lights were on inside and Jake said, “Get up on the roof.” I did.

He followed and whispered, “When that son-of-a-bitch comes out, let’s jump him. You get his legs and I’ll pound his head.”

And we did.

We awoke in a tent full of cots in a field full of tents, the sun shining, the sound of planes taking off and landing. Our heads hammered and our mouths were dry. Jake headed for the airfield and a flight back to Bravo and I headed to the transient barracks where I lay in bed all day and fretted about getting home.

That night I boarded a bus to the airfield and went through an inspection of all my gear. As I stood in line with the contents of my sea bag spread on a table, Michael O’Hara, who’d been in my fireteam in the fall of 1967, entered with another detail of men headed home. He grinned and laughed and said, “Three purple hearts, going home six months early.”

Outside, waiting for a ride, I saw another bus head out. O’Hara smiled at me through a window. My detail then went to the airfield, boarded a C-130 and headed for Okinawa.

When we departed the plane, a group of snappy Marine NCOs waited for us and began a litany of orders, suggestions, and how they too had been in Nam, so they understood everything that was going through our minds and thoughts.

I looked down the line at the two-hundred or so filthy, thin, gaunt-faced Marines and back at the starched utilities on the men doing the talking. Somone on our side laughed. The sound, for a moment, was alone and singular, but then, another and another until we all laughed.

The next morning, they stuck me on a work detail to clean the base officers’ quarters. I did it until noon and then went AWOL playing basketball by myself in a gym devoid of other Marines.

At night I hit the EM club and beer and beer and beer and the new music I’d never heard: Van Morrison, Spencer Davis Trio, Aretha.

On the day we departed for home—the day I’d wanted for almost thirteen months, on that day—we loaded onto a Continental Airlines 707 headed for El Toro Air Station outside Santa Ana, California.

We sat in the plane on the tarmac for over an hour as the pilot kept reassuring us we would go home and the civilian flight attendants, all women, moved back and forth, delivering soft drinks and water. It had been months since any of us had seen women like those. And if the others were like me, we dreamed.

I sat next to a porthole window on the side of the flight and watched B-52s lumber down the runway, their wings waving up and down as if they bid me farewell. I thought about their destinations and the bombs falling and the bodies blown into little bloody chunks and wondered if some of them were headed to my former Khe Sanh home where my mates might still be locked in deadly combat.

After we took off, I sat on the edge of my seat like a kid on the way to the Dairy Queen for his first ever soft serve cone.

As we flew east, the pilot pointed out the island of Iwo Jima. I looked out the window as we flew over and it was so small, so insignificant there in the miles and miles of sky and scudding clouds, the ocean.

I felt deep in my guts the rage and anger of the place, and wondered if, decades later, Khe Sanh might feel the same in posterity. And to me.

After arriving at El Toro, we were bused to the LA airport. I had called and called my folks from LA but there was no answer, so I called my best friend Mikel’s mother—funny how after over a year, her phone number was banked in my memory—and she said she’d pass the word.  

As I waited to catch the plane, I found a bar and ordered a beer. I looked at all the hustle and bustle. I half expected people to welcome me home. But I don’t think they cared.

I was joined by a boot Marine headed out on leave before he hit the ground in Nam. He asked me what it was like. I tried to tell him.

I said the same thing I’d been told upon arriving in Nam, “Keep your head down.”

I arrived in Tucson greeted by Mikel, his fiancé, Susan, also a good friend, and my parents. We went to Mikel and Susan’s favorite Mexican food restaurant, El Charro, and as we ate tacos and burros and enchiladas, I tried to tell the four of them what I’d been through at the Siege of Khe Sanh.

As I talked, and the talk was disjointed and halting, not one of them looked at me.

After fifty-seven years, the salient image in my mind from that moment is the light shining toward me from the top of my father’s balding head.

~ Ken Rodgers

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Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! 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 spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com.

Yesterday was National Vietnam War Veterans Day and this morning, March 30, 2025, is the fifty-seventh year since Bravo Company, 1^st Battalion, 26^th Marines went out on an action, finally taking our fight into the trenches of the North Vietnamese Army.

I suspect all of us who took part in that action and are still living remember this day. Like big red flags and big bangs and big winds inside the memory.

One of my comrades who fought that morning calls it the “most significant day in my life” and although it may not be the most important, for me it’s pretty damned big.

For forty-one years I didn’t know this day had earned a name. I found out about it in 2008 when someone asked me if I’d been on the Payback Patrol.

At the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I figured it out.

Payback. Was it payback?

I don’t know, but it was hell and war and glory and death and fright and elation, all rolled into one.

We lined the trench in the dark morning and smoked our cigarettes and mumbled. The spirit of fear flew through and circled back. Voices whispered about what we would encounter. Our artillery batteries fired what seemed like thousands of rounds as we waited to depart. We heard jets dropping bombs and somewhere a chopper. All in support of our assault.

In the platoon briefing, it was my understanding that the patrol was routine, that we were departing the wire to find and return the bodies of our fallen comrades still out there from the ambush of February 25. Based on our patrol of March 21, in which we found no live enemy, I anticipated this action to be similar. Go outside the wire, climb the ridge, find the fallen, put them in body bags, bring them back.

I think I may have been a victim of my overwhelming desire not to go into the kind of combat we would find that morning.

The skipper and his command post came down the trench, the skipper patting shoulders and nodding and smiling. I couldn’t smile.

The word came down, “Move out.”

I dropped my Winston on the muddy deck of the trench.

We charged up the ridge, the world around rocking and rolling, the roars and swooshes and thumps and thunder like the last days of the universe.

Staff Sergeant Gus Alvarado and I brought up the rear, our platoon, Second Platoon, coming up behind the two other platoons that assaulted the ridge on line.

Suddenly we were both on the deck, the world whistling a wild tune, the ripples of pain like a pool of water when a stone is thrown.

Like scoping in and out with a set of binoculars, in and out, consciousness en garde, consciousness intermittent.

I shook my head and got up. Staff Sergeant Alvarado put out his hand and I pulled him to his feet. He’d been hit in the ankle by a mortar tail fin. I had shrapnel in my head but didn’t know it. If the shrapnel had been a little higher on the left side of my head, it would have penetrated the temple and then who knows how I might have reacted.

We inspected where the mortar hit. Close. Too close. But sometimes you are lucky. We went on up the hill.

At the top, the corpsman stopped us and looked at the side of my head. “Shrapnel,” he said.

I looked to our front. What every Marine dreams of when enlisting was going on. Smoke and fire, explosions, Marines in the enemy trench. Stabbing, shooting, ducking, dying.

At that moment I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t articulate what I witnessed and sometimes still can’t.

Gunny Morris came up and said, “Son, are you ok?”

I didn’t want the fuss of any of that and said, “Yes, Gunny.”

His hands were shaking. That frightened me. Him, a man, a veteran of long years, a real Marine, shaking.  

What was obvious to me, out there to our front, was an urgent, vicious, desperate battle where men faced one of the ultimate moments of truth.

How long I stood and watched, I don’t know, the memories like a fractured flicker, click and blank and bam and dark and fear all piled together like kids playing King of the Mountain.

Second Platoon soon moved out and into the melee.

Us, advancing through the enemy trenches, and they were extensive and intricate. Each bunker had a tunnel that led to another bunker so when assaulting them, one Marine needed to be in front of each of the bunkers.

Grenades, rifle fire, satchel charges blowing bunkers to smithereens, our flame-thrower Marines moving through, torching bunker openings, cooking anyone who remained inside.

Bodies littered the trenches. I stopped to look at one, his face the color of saffron. Young, so young.

The word came down from the platoon commander, Lieutenant Dillon, for Staff Sergeant Alvarado and me to move forward to the front of the action and call in some artillery.

We passed a Marine machine gun team where the gunner was pounding the head of another Marine. I knew that Jarhead on the ground and my experience with him was he couldn’t control his fear. As I pressed on, I suspected he’d failed in his duty to his fellow Marines.

We passed another gun team manned by men I knew well. One of them, a cocky Puerto Rican kid from New York City—I don’t remember his name, but I see his face as if he was standing here talking to me now—yelled, “Rodgers, what are you doing out here? You’re too short!”

He was right, I was a short timer, five or six days left in the field, but right then, none of that mattered. Men were dying, the NVA were counterattacking.

As the staff sergeant and I hurried through the trench I noticed the company command group down in a bomb crater which included what looked like an NVA prisoner. As I looked at them a second time, a barrage of mortars fell and dust and smoke erupted.

We ran on, I looked a third time and the smoke cleared. Marines lay dead and wounded on the deck, the NVA prisoner on his knees. The one Marine still standing shot the prisoner in the head with a .45 caliber pistol.

For years I forgot I’d seen this event.

In 2010, while we were in San Antonio, Texas, at the Khe Sanh Veterans Reunion filming BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, I met with Skipper Ken Pipes early one morning out on a patio overlooking the San Antonio River. I asked the skipper about that event and my memory of the NVA prisoner’s execution.

He said, “No, that didn’t happen.”

A boat went down the river.

I took a sip of coffee.

The skipper looked me in the eye. “I’m not telling you who shot that prisoner.”

Anyway, when the staff sergeant and I arrived out in front of where all the action had occurred, we called in artillery rounds that landed close and shook the ground and threw dust and chunks of red clay into the air.

Then Bravo began to pull back. Second Platoon formed a line and backed away from the outer edge of our penetration as some of us gathered wounded and dead Marines while men in the front line fired into oncoming NVA soldiers counterattacking.

Smoke and explosions and the roar of war resounded in the air, the ground, and still rattles the inside of my head.

The platoon commander of Third Platoon lost his radio operator and I was assigned to work with him. We headed for the rear of the battle. We had been warned in the night-before’s briefing that Chinese Claymores were hung all around the ground over which we fought and that we should, if possible, stay in the enemy trench.

As we headed back towards the combat base, the lieutenant got out of the trench and started running. I saw Claymores hanging in the branches of naked limbs nearby.

I yelled, “Lieutenant, get back in the trench.” But he didn’t.

So I climbed out and ran after him.

As he hustled along, he tripped a booby trap. Like a rocket it shot out of the ground and hit him. Smoke and debris and fire shot around him like a cloud and some of it hit me in the face. That pissed me off.

He stood bent low and I wondered if he’d fall over dead. I felt something on my face, sizzling the skin.

I yelled and cussed him as I came up and lifted his head. His cheeks and chin were smoking, on fire, so to speak, from white phosphorus, which is pyrophoric or in Marine language, burns on contact with air.

I leaned and grabbed a handful of mud and smeared it on my face to smother the fire as I muttered expletives at him, at the NVA, at war. I grabbed more mud and tried to extinguish the fire on his face. He never fell, never talked, just stared, I guess in shock, until a corpsman arrived and took over his care.

So much of that four- or five- or six-hour fight remains obscured. Too horrible to recall? I wonder if the sequence of events even matters now after all this time. So many images tumble through the back side of my eyes. Who died when and where. What we did and what we saw. What we didn’t do but thought we did. What we did and don’t think we did, don’t remember, don’t want to remember.

One of the striking images I have that doesn’t alter over decades, is our withdrawal.

I walked down the road by myself, radio on my back pressing me down, my emotions like ghosts haunting me.

The faces of our men like skeleton heads, gaunt, and spare, faces like people wanting to burst into tears, but too, elation. For two-and-one-half months we’d been hammered and pounded and scared a thousand times, thousands of moments, our fright like flights of bats invading our bodies, but now, this day, too, we’d gotten even, so to speak. We’d shot some people, and fought our way all through their entrenchments, we’d succeeded, we were someone again, Marines.

I saw two Marines dragging a body down the middle of the road. As I came parallel to them, I looked down and noticed the writing on the back of the dead Marine’s flak jacket. I sagged.

The night before, that Marine, a corporal who I’d known and served with for almost thirteen months, came to see me and handed me an envelope with his dog tags and asked me to send them to his parents.

He was supposed to rotate out of the field on his way home a day or two after the battle.

I asked him why he was giving the dog tags to me to send home, he said, “I’m not going to make it home. I’m going to die tomorrow.”

Anger swelled in my head, and I gave the envelope back and yelled at him that you could not think that the enemy would kill you. You could not give in. “They will not kill you,” I hissed.

To this day, that exchange and what followed, his death, my thoughts on it, have eaten at me. Was I wrong, was I right, does it matter? Obviously, it matters because, well, here I am speaking about it after fifty-seven years.

After the smoke and fire and thunder settled, someone told me that another Marine who I’d served with for months and months and who was a short-timer, too, had cut off one of his toes with an entrenching tool to avoid going out on the patrol.

My rage boiled and I charged down through our bunkers and fighting holes with the intent of challenging him, calling him “Coward.”

As I approached, he sat outside his bunker on the edge of a cot, his foot wrapped in fresh, white bandages.

I yelled, “I’m short and I went out. A lot of us went…” But he shook his head and said, “Don’t be judging me.”

I stopped, turned and walked off. I’m still judging him. Judging me.

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Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! 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 spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com.

By Ken Rodgers

After fifty-seven years, the month of March 1968 seems like a long, drawn-out nightmare. Another month of more heavy NVA incoming, and a month when the Marines of Bravo Company went outside the wire and got into the NVA trenches. Into their trenches. Twice.

The first incursion, a probe, I suppose, into the enemy lines occurred on March 21. Second Platoon went out at dawn and assaulted the enemy dug in along a tree line to the east of our sector. The most traumatic action came when some of our support from the Khe Sanh lines opened fire overhead with .50 caliber machine guns, and due to some mess-up, aimed directly into the ranks of the Marines on our right flank. Friendly fire. Some of our men were wounded and some were evacuated and then we climbed on up the ridge into the NVA’s trenches, which were empty except for a few booby traps and a dead enemy soldier.

The next night and into the following morning, the NVA buried us in barrage after barrage after barrage, so much of it, or so it seemed to me, aimed directly into Second Platoon’s area of responsibility, which was in the gray sector of our lines.

Lying in the bottom of a fighting hole in the trench, I imagined those NVA gunners, angry at us—Second Platoon—punishing us for having the audacity to break out and get in their trenches. It went on and on, ground like a jumping bean, pain from fear-induced clenched jaws and tensed muscles fatigued and pained after the long bombardment, mind so tired of death, survival, killing, hate and yes, right then, I hated.

The second time we went outside the wire was March 30 and I will revisit that event in a later blog post. That battle was death, hell and glory. What we all thought we wanted, I suspect, when we enlisted, but not what we thought or dreamed it to be when the crap hit the fan.

Days before our patrols of March, on March 6, an incoming flight loaded with Marines, Corpsmen and the photographer Robert Ellison crashed on a mountain outside the base with forty-nine men on board.

Ellison, whom I wrote about in the previous blog concerning February 25 and the Ghost Patrol, had departed Khe Sanh and taken his photos down to the coast to send back to the States. Images that would immortalize so much of the agony of the siege.

Also on board was a Marine, Corporal Ron Ryan, who had been with Bravo’s Second Platoon and the leader of our machine gun squad. He’d been on R and R and was returning to duty.

Some Marines in the platoon didn’t like Ryan, but when word came down about the never-to-return lives and lost plane, a lot of sad faces drooped around the trenchlines in remembrance and even honor of Ryan, his brash confidence, his imposing aura and size, his magnificent handlebar mustache.

The memories of that day are in my mind and return and return, and in flashes. In the trench with Third Squad, Second Platoon, me, now a radio operator assigned to the platoon sergeant, along with O’Hara, Horton, Carwile, Jake, and Richardson. Suddenly quiet, nothing but a slight breeze kissing green and mud-red sandbags. All of us looking at the ground, thinking death, thinking comrades, when Richardson said, “Lord don’t you know it’s a terrible thing. Better them than me.”

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Thank you for reading and sharing our story with friends and other veterans.

You can find information about our companion film featuring eleven spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com.

By Ken Rodgers

February 25, 1968, now known as the Ghost Patrol, is like a festered boil on the back where you can’t scratch, dig, burst the skin and let the pus flow.

How remembrance haunts these days of February, the last days at Khe Sanh, the faces like ghosts in a movie, now here, there, a different man, the ones I loved, the ones I didn’t. Dead, mauled, wounded, still living.

Twenty-seven fellow Marines from my company died that day. Another we thought had been killed in action showed up years later when he got off the plane bringing American POWs home from the Hanoi Hilton.

For me, what happened is still blistered on the parts of my brain where trauma, fear, despair and memory meet.

Third Platoon Bravo, First Battalion, 26^th Marines, went outside the wire on the Gray Sector of Khe Sanh Combat Base the morning of February 25^th on what we, at the time, thought of as a routine patrol over a route that all of us in the company—if we’d been there any length of time—had made. Routine, I thought when I heard they were going out. Routine.

They encountered a couple of NVA soldiers off in the distance and went to “get ‘em” as Doc Cicala, one of the platoon’s corpsmen, told me forty-two years later.

In hindsight, what happened was an example of the “draw play” metaphor in combat utilizing a term that came from football.

Th Marines walked into an ambush and what followed was devastation and chaos. Marines from First Platoon, Bravo Company, went out to help and were also ambushed.

From our positions along the line, we heard the firefight. We heard, if we had access to radios on the company frequency, the distress and fear and alarm in the voices coming through our headsets. We heard the rumors sweeping down the trench. Second Platoon saddled up, mostly on our own initiative, and some Marines even went down to the gate in anticipation of being ordered to relieve the besieged Marines.

That word never came.

Shame. Shame on us, we thought. Shame on colonels and generals and politicians and anyone who had a hand in making the decision to let those men stay our there and either die or crawl back to our lines, which a number did, some seriously wounded, some with no memory of how they made it, some with memories so distinct the evasion necessary to escape death haunted them, and haunts them still.

A photographer, the late Robert Ellison, not in the military, but who was documenting the savage hell for the defenders of the base, went out the wire and took a lot of photos of the men in various stages of returning to the base.

Those photos were plastered all over the world, it seemed, and for those of us who failed to relieve our battered brother Marines, every look at the photos over the ensuing years brought the shame back down like a bat intent on sucking your blood.

Still sitting here, thinking of this, that day, those men, some of whom I knew, some whom I befriended later, brings a shroud of sadness that I cannot get rid of.

People tell you, “Man, that was so long ago. Let it ride.”

But I can’t and neither can the others who were comrades with me, with those Marines and Corpsmen on February 25, 1968.

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Thank you for reading and sharing our story with friends and other veterans.

You can find information about our companion film featuring eleven spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com.

By Ken Rodgers

I suspect that everyone who sees combat has terrible times, terrible days, or years. For me, at the Siege of Khe Sanh, the month of February stands out. Not only did the heavy incoming arrive on an almost daily basis, but combat on the ground, and in the air, took on a furious character.

When we weren’t in the middle of it, we had ringside seats, and the evil stink of rumor crept among us, a whisper that added angst to every bite of the spare supply of C-rations we crammed into our mouths.

Some of my salient memories follow.

On the early morning of the fifth, the enemy assaulted Hill 861-A, manned by Echo Company, Second Battalion, 26^th Marines. The NVA came through the perimeter wire and were on the hill. A vicious fight ensued, and the enemy finally withdrew. While this was going on, NVA mortars and artillery pounded the combat base below, to silence our guns that would help defend 861-A.

On the night of February 7, the NVA assaulted the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, not far from Khe Sanh Combat Base. Using tanks, they broke through the defenses and the camp fell after a nasty fight. During the middle of the night, we got word that enemy tanks were in the area. Tanks. I remember thinking I heard the squeak and crank of tank tracks out in the night. Mostly my imagination, I suspect. We were taking heavy incoming fire to create more chaos, so all the noise added to our anticipation. Dark, and death, and fear, and a horrendous racket.

In our area, our squad leaders told us to saddle up in anticipation of relieving Lang Vei, but we never left the combat base. I think there is still, after fifty-seven years, some residual anger from the men who survived the fight at Lang Vei, as well as some residual guilt among the Marines who didn’t come out to save them. I recall, about ten years ago, hearing an audio clip from the commanding officer of the Third Marine Division, explaining in graphic and direct terms why he refused to go out and save the camp and the men who didn’t get out.

Continuing salvos of incoming killed men on the surrounding hills and men in the trenches and men in their bunkers. A plane was lost south of Lang Vei while bombing enemy tanks.

Alpha Company, First Battalion, Ninth Marines, had a platoon stationed on a location known as Hill 64. On February 8, the NVA, led by a bugle call, assaulted Hill 64 and an hours-long firefight went on. With the enemy in their trenches, the Marines of Alpha fought. Eventually a relief column from the company managed to fight its way onto Hill 64 as the enemy was driven off. To those Marines who fought on the hill, the subsequent call to abandon must have been a bitter pill.

On February 10, an incoming C-130, callsign Basketball 813, approached Khe Sanh, but at the last moment veered off the runway approach and flew low around the south side of the base and came in from the west. It was obvious to us, standing there on the ground watching, that something was wrong, maybe mechanical, maybe a wounded bird from the NVA flak constantly flying into the air. The plane came in hard and fast and veered off the runway and wrecked close to our lines. It ignited and men came dropping from the windows of the cockpit as the plane burned.

On 23 February, 1968, the NVA sent at least 1,307 rounds of incoming into the base. Mortars, rockets, artillery. Some of them big guns—152mm howitzers—and you learned to recognize the sound of the round leaving the tube—thump—and then you knew it was already in the air and on its way. They sounded like freight trains. If you survived long enough, you knew the fear they threw at you along with the hot metal and shrapnel that tore flesh and cut off legs and arms, and you learned the details of the thump and if the thump spoke in a very particular vernacular, you knew that where you lay in the trench would soon erupt. Despite the hell and mayhem and death, you got up and moved.

We received lots of new guys during the month of February. When the 152s fired, I would yell, “Move, a round is on its way,” and many times the men gawked, mouths open, their fear refusing to let them crawl to a different place in the trench.

On 25 February, besides a debacle I will write about soon, NVA trenches were detected within 25 meters of our perimeter. If we didn’t feel surrounded before, we did then. Marines with stethoscopes listened to the sounds of the enemy digging their trenches. We imagined tunnels beneath us, mined with tons of explosives to erupt and kill us all.

On February 28, The NVA launched a massive assault on the ARVN troops sharing the line with us. The din of combat sailed over the ground into our ears. Our bombers and artillery units pounded the attackers and the ARVNs bravely fought them off more than once, their courage under fire in stark contrast to so many of the disparaging rumors we had heard concerning ARVN troops. In this case, they didn’t disappoint us.

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Thank you for reading and sharing our story with friends and other veterans.

You can find information about our companion film featuring eleven spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com.

57 years ago I’d been on R and R in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and had just returned to Khe Sanh.

I’d just turned 21, one of the oldest men in Second Platoon, Bravo Company, 26^th Marines.

I’d be of legal age to drink in a bar in my hometown if I lived that long.

Just turned 21, a bit salty, with almost 10 months in-country.

The night before, January 20, Snoopy circled the combat base. Heavy mist hid the plane except for the red streams of tracers waving into the foggy Khe Sanh sky. The plane’s engine moaned and so did her guns.

In the morning, shouts, the earth a rocking, bucking bronc.

Voices of men who never scream, who always laugh and joke and bitch but now, no laughter. Screaming.

The black sky of early morning alive with red, oranges, yellows of fire.

The deafening sounds of incoming, outgoing, explosions, the thunder of scuffed jungle boots in the damp trench.

No time for coffee and cigarettes this morning.

Fear runs rampant like a wild beast, the heart thump, thump, thump.

Sergeants duckwalking below parapets telling us, “Get your asses up, into your fighting holes and face the enemy.”

We crawl into our bunkers as our NVA-targeted ammo dump starts to go up, gas, gas, gas masks on, the whistle of our own ordnance falling from our sky, our sky.

We look through our bunker apertures for the enemy we know will soon appear, in the wire, sappers first, the onslaught behind. We watch, our muscles tight, our thoughts long gone from the girl in the back seat of Daddy’s brown Buick.

A gash in Corporal Taylor’s right leg from flying shrapnel. Blood on the deck.

The ammo dump goes full-blown and the sky turns into a miasma of gas and smoke. Errant artillery rounds. Our rounds. 105s, 106s, 155s, our home away from home now a wreck and pummeled piece of a map.

Convery’s right arm in a sling, his jaws wired shut.

Down the trench to contact other platoons.

Marines in the bottom of the trench.

Crushed legs, broken arms. Haul out the morphine and pop them in the thigh.

We stand and throw the spent rounds from our dump out of the trench.

NCOs bark orders. Staff Sergeant what’s-his-name digs with his fingers in the bottom of the trench, barking like a dog, but not orders; barking his fear and his need to leave. It’s the last we see of him, sent back to the real world.

We wait.

Later. Hours later.

No ground attack comes, the ammo dump still cooks off, squiggly lines of smoke in the sky.

We think that tomorrow things will be like they were before.

We don’t yet know about the attack on Khe Sanh village or the assault on Hill 861 earlier this morning.

Wishful thinking: just a one-time event.

We are in for a rude awakening. Little do we know we will endure the onslaught for another 77 days.

February 25, 2022

In Their Own Words

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

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

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

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

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

What was it like?

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

The ambush and ensuing slaughter took on a name:

THE GHOST PATROL

The Ambush:

Cal Bright:

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

Probably within five minutes all hell broke loose.

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

John “Doc” Cicala:

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

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

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

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

Steve Wiese:

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

Ben Long:

Men were getting shot and you could hear that happening.

John “Doc” Cicala:

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

1st Platoon tried to relieve the beleaguered Marines:

Peter Weiss:

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

They were ordered to retreat while the fight went on:

Mike McCauley:

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

Steve Wiese:

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

Cal Bright:

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

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

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

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

“Well this is Cal.”

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

I called back and said, “Nobody.”

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

trench line.

Escape:

Ben Long:

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

Cal Bright:

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

John ”Doc” Cicala:

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

Peter Weiss:

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

Steve Wiese:

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

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

Dan Horton:

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

Ken Korkow:

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

Lloyd Scudder:

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

The enduring emotional pain was palpable:

Ken Rodgers:

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

Ken Pipes:

I think it broke all of our hearts.

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

But you don’t.

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