In this blog post, we introduce the first of the fourteen former Marines and Navy Corpsmen who were interviewed in the making of Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor.

Meet the Men–Ron Rees

Ron Rees as a young Marine

I enlisted in the Marine Corps August, 1967 in Des Moines, Iowa where I had attended Des Moines North High School.  I enlisted under the “Buddy Program” with my friend, Ed Olivetta, and entered the Marine Corps the day after my 20th birthday in September, 1967 and began my training.

I landed in Viet Nam around Feb 27th, 1968 at Da Nang Airport with my 0311 MOS  designation as a rifleman. Shortly after exiting the Continental Airlines plane and passing the long line of Marines who resembled zombies more than the soldiers we were used to seeing, I was about to find out why they appeared that way.

You cannot be trained—and I am not sure how one could ever be prepared—for the actual horrors of war. I was handed a set of orders and told that I would be going to Khe Sanh and assigned to Bravo Company as a “replacement” for one of the many Marines who had  been recently killed in an ambush just outside of their lines.

Upon arrival, I was assigned to Bravo Company’s 3rd Platoon. My assignment was a Claymore Mine bunker in the Grey Sector.  I had a new Marine in this bunker with me the night of March 22nd when all hell RAINED SHRAPNEL down on Khe Sanh yet again. We were on “Red Alert 100%” due to reports of an all-ground assault on the base that night.

At some point it all became a blur to me, and still is even now. I know that something very significant happened to our Claymore bunker.  The new Marine and I ran into the bunker where our squad leader was. We were told to go to another bunker in the trench where we could go off 100% duty and get some rest.

Next thing I knew I was above ground. EVERYTHING was in slow motion…smoke, shrapnel, I could see it all. And very clearly, people were yelling for CORPSMAN, CORPSMAN, CORPSMAN.  Then someone asked me if I needed a corpsman. I said No! Then a Marine came up to me and in an instant, reading his eyes and at the same time wiping the sweat from my face, I realized what was obvious to him:  It was blood, not sweat that covered my face.  My utilities were gone from the knee down and blood was shooting out of a wound in my knee. I have been told by my friend who went to Khe Sanh with me (Ron Semon) that I was blown over 30 feet back of the trench line from the inside of a bunker. I still cannot imagine!  How do you survive that?

I was taken to Charlie Med. I wish I knew by who, but I will never know that. I would love to thank those brave Marines who took me there during the HAIL OF INCOMING that was literally non-stop all that night. Years later I did meet Dr. Feldman, who helped repair my wounds, at my first Khe Sanh Veterans reunion in San Diego, where I was also reunited with our company commander, Ken Pipes, whom I have never forgotten.

Ron Rees

I have been in the trucking industry most of my adult life, and have been a coach for the past 8 years. For the past 6 years I have coached girls’ basketball, and for 4+ years coached middle school 8-man football. This past year I was invited to assist with our high school’s varsity football team.  I am blessed to have been very successful with all my teams.

I look at the flag at the start of every game, and along with everyone else take pride in all that she represents. But I ALWAYS look at her and thank first ALL THOSE MARINES WHO SERVED WITH BRAVO COMPANY AT KHE SANH AND THOSE WHO ULTIMATELY “GAVE THEIR ALL,” for it was because of them and all those other servicemen/women who made the ultimate sacrifice in combat that made it possible for our fine youth of today to have the opportunity, among other things, to participate in sports as so many of those MARINE HEROS did before joining the Marine Corps.

YES! I thank them every time, to give or to show them the respect they so rightfully deserve.  I know how precious life really is, and just how important these last years of true innocence really are (middle school through High school).

I have often mused, over the years, about how the NVA went about their manpower buildup prior to the beginning of the Siege of Khe Sanh. They must have been assembling most of the summer, yet through late summer and fall and early winter of 1967, any sign of them was sparse. During those months Bravo Company generally skated in the getting-hit-by-the-enemy department. Which suited me. By the time I had been in-country for three months, I hoped I’d get out of there without ever seeing any of the lambast-smash-mouth of combat.

As I write this blog entry, it is mid October 2011. By mid October 1967, Bravo Company had begun preparing to occupy Hill 881 South to the west of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. Some of us who had been in Bravo for a while had spent time on Hill 881 South soon after the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines arrived in the Khe Sanh area in early May of 1967 after the hill fights. After patrolling in the vicinity of the combat base and operations to the east and southeast, Bravo assumed control of Hill 881 South from late May through June of 1967.

By October 1967, a large number of Marines who had served with Bravo rotated back to the States and a draft of young Marines arrived to replace them. I came off R & R the day before a typhoon struck and as the typhoon whipped and battered our tents, we holed up in our bivouacs for a day or two until the storm blew itself out. Then we saddled up and hiked up from the combat base, through Hill 861 onto Hill 881 South. At the time, as I recall, Bravo Company, at least the second platoon, was a mess. We had a new lieutenant who had yet to earn his chops, and the old lieutenant had left a lot of Marines with sour tastes in their mouths. We had a new company commander, too, who was trying to square us away.

And it rained and the wind blew and once we were established on Hill 881 South, our hooch roofs leaked and the leeches were everywhere and our fingertips were perpetually wrinkled. In our squad, Third Squad, we couldn’t find a squad leader who was competent enough to lead us. We kept getting new leaders. They kept failing. We went on patrol after patrol, wet from top to bottom, red mud soaked into our skin. The whole time, the commanding officer of Bravo, Captain Bruce Green was on our case, our platoon commander’s case. He rode us pretty hard.

On one patrol, Captain Green gassed us. He had repeatedly given orders to us to carry our gas masks. We went on a company minus patrol, and after a frustrating day of getting lost in thick fog, we took five on a hill northeast of Hill 881 South and he threw gas grenades in among us. I saw him preparing to do it, so the men in my fire team put on their gas masks, which they carried, so we weren’t as panicked as the other men in the patrol. It was like a herd of horses headed for the barn. Rag tag collections of Marines splattered over the muddy red landscape, up one hill and into a valley, up another hill and into a valley, until all of us, thank goodness, reported back to the hill. There was some butt chewing going on with Captain Green doing the chewing. We all carried our gas masks after that.

Under Captain Green, we patrolled long and hard, got in condition, got sniped at from the ridge to the west, spent many a night soaked out on ambush or listening post as rain water dripped dripped dripped off the tips of tree limbs, off the sharp, pointed ends of elephant grass.

On patrol we often ran into sign that the NVA was around, anecdotal evidence, footprints squished in the red mud, and here or there a cartridge from an AK-47, a 61 MM mortar round or two. But we had no idea what was to come, the buildup of the two-plus NVA divisions, the siege. We just thought they were units passing through on their way down to the flats, to Con Thien and Cam Lo, Dong Ha and Phu Bai, where the fighting had raged all summer and autumn long.  We didn’t get into any firefights, but by the time Captain Green got promoted to Major and we had a new skipper, Captain Pipes, we were a bunch of seasoned, in-shape Marines.

All the while though, the NVA was building up and as I look back on it now, they were most likely often sitting in a tree line, watching us as we patrolled by them. I recall that sometimes, when I walked point, the sense  we were being watched was palpable. We knew the enemy was very close at hand…I don’t know how we knew, we just knew from the way the hair stood up on our arms when we approached certain pieces of terrain, or the strange smells we encountered from time to time, the old scent of fire, or bad tobacco. And we looked for him because that was our job, but we did not stumble over him and I suspect that was because he chose not to be stumbled over. He was waiting for something bigger…the Siege of Khe Sanh. I often think about that patrol where Captain Green gassed us and I wonder how many NVA soldiers hid out there in the jungle grass and the triple canopy copses that hugged the ever-present streams. I wonder if instead of picking us off, one by one, or capturing us, they didn’t almost die laughing as we stumble-bummed our way back to the hill.

On a different note, next week we will submit Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor to two more film festivals, Tribeca in New York, and South-by-Southwest in Austin, Texas. Last week we screened the film to a group of local supporters here in Boise who could not see the film at our previous private showing. There were a lot of film people in the group, and as has been consistent throughout our screenings, they were impressed; they were moved by the movie. As a result of that screening, we have received an unsolicited request for a film “screener” from a documentary distributor—an unusual occurrence for first-time documentary filmmakers. Ooorah!

One of the things that has been resolved in the course of creating the film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, is the questioning of my memory. When it comes to the Siege of Khe Sanh, I have questioned if I really saw this or that over the years. Maybe what I thought I saw on a particular occasion was something that someone else told me about and over a period of decades became my memory, my experience.

But over the last eighteen months, a number of things I thought I saw, and then discounted as the memories began to fade, have been rekindled as my special truths.

For instance: February 13, 1968.

The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) had a 57 MM recoilless rifle emplacement out in front of the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam—South Vietnamese Army) lines and harassed us (both the ARVNs and the Marines), sending their shells into our lines, scaring the hell out of us. Some men were hit, maybe some killed, and on February 13 the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion sent out a six man patrol to silence that gun. Second Platoon—my platoon—of Bravo Company sent out a squad to back up that ARVN patrol.

By then I was a short-timer in Vietnam and the siege was really beginning to heat up. So as we wended our way outside the wire and down into the valley below the ARVN lines, I felt the cold fingers of fear squeezing my spine. I had a fire team to command and I had to keep my guard up so that I didn’t appear frightened. I tossed my usual bravado (which at that moment was pretty counterfeit) around like hand grenades.

We sat up in a bamboo thicket on a line perpendicular to a well used game trail that wore a lot of sign of human traffic too. The bamboo was so thick you couldn’t see two feet in any direction except back towards the trail. We all set in and began to look to our front, our sides, and our rear. I remember sweat on my upper lip as I licked my chapped lips.

The thicket was too quiet. Like nothing in the world was alive. Even though planes were taking off and landing not three hundred meters to our rear and artillery rounds and rockets were flying overhead into the NVA positions to our front and from the NVA into our trenches in the combat base. I remember my mouth was dry and I quickly drank a canteen of water. I wanted to smoke a Camel but feared the smell would draw someone to kill me. I looked for bamboo vipers and leeches. I looked for the enemy. I listened for him.

Suddenly gunfire erupted to my front. Men were yelling in Vietnamese and there was screaming like someone was in pain. At least one someone, maybe more. Unbeknownst to me, the ARVNs had ambushed the 57 MM recoilless rifle crew and killed most of the North Vietnamese, capturing the gun. In the course of the fight, the ARVN lieutenant in command of the patrol had been wounded and found himself isolated from his men. As they took casualties trying to rescue him, he killed himself so they wouldn’t have to endanger any more men. I didn’t know any of this then, I could only hear the racket and the gunfire and the screaming and soon I could hear someone coming back up the trail. With my M-16 ready, the safety clicked off, I watched as the ARVN patrol hurried by with the captured 57 MM weapon and some wounded men. They waved their arms as they moved by, jumping around and rapidly jabbering in Vietnamese.

Right after they passed through our position, we formed up and followed them into Khe Sanh Combat Base. I was the last man into the file, so I pulled tail-end Charlie all the way back waiting for the enemy to sneak up and shoot us.

Later that night, a runner came down from the platoon commander and ordered me to bring one of my fire team members with me up to the command bunker. The mist hung down like a mother’s breath on a child just found dead in the crib. Flares fired from 105 MM howitzers lit the night and clanked and squeaked on their parachutes as they floated towards the ground. You could hear them hiss as they burned, and their smoke trails snaked away in the nighttime breeze.

At the command bunker, two ARVN stood out in the trench with a shrouded body on a stretcher. The lieutenant told me to take them up to Graves Registration. At the time, I was under the impression that the corpse on that stretcher was an NVA officer, but now I believe it was that ARVN lieutenant who killed himself. Nevertheless, it was my duty, along with Furlong, or Foster, or O’Hara, or Horton (I do not remember who) to escort the Vietnamese soldiers and the corpse through our lines and into the middle of the base so that no one shot the ARVN troopers, thinking they were the enemy.

No lights. Thick fog. We stumbled around and responded to halts, who-goes-there from a number of positions—artillery units, cooks, motor pool outfits, and who knows who else—before we located Graves Registration. I walked in; the ARVNS close behind with their dead officer. As I talked to the NCO in charge, I heard the thump of feet running down a hall somewhere in the rear of the bunker. Suddenly a Marine burst out, looking back over his shoulder with his hands up like Green Bay Packer wide receiver, Boyd Dowler. A foot floated out from the corridor that the Marine had just vacated and dropped into his outstretched hands. As he caught the foot, he yelled, “Touchdown.”

It was ugly, macabre, sick, demented and pretty damned funny, or so I thought at the time, because I burst out laughing. Something we do to retain our humanity in moments of extreme horror, we laugh, joke, grin. Even to this day, I still smirk—I could say smile, but that is too beautiful a word for this occasion—when I think about that foot, which is quite often.
 
The ARVN Rangers we escorted to Graves Registration dropped the stretcher and vacated the premises. We laughed harder at that than at the foot flying into the hands of the pranking Marine mortician. Outside, I found them huddled in a niche of the trench, squatting like Vietnamese were prone to do. Like wild animals trapped in a cage, their eyes darted left and right as I approached. What little light could be captured from the night gleamed in the whites. We escorted the ARVNs back to Second Platoon’s command bunker, or we must have, because I retain absolutely no memory of what happened after seeing that night-gleam in their eyes.

On another note, we have been showing an almost finished version of the film to private invitation only screenings. The response has been…well…extremely gratifying.

You can see more about what is happening with Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, at our Indiegogo cloudfunding site at www.indiegogo.com/Bravo-Common-Men-Uncommon-Valor. You can also find us on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/bravotheproject.

February 25th is, for the men who served with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines at Khe Sanh, a day that owns a particular and personal infamy. We left a lot of good Marines on the field that day. Guest blogger Bill Jayne was in Bravo Company on February 25th, 1968. He shares some of his memories and his thoughts.

The story of 25 February is well-known. It was the day of the Ghost Patrol when Lt. Jacques’ 3rd Platoon was almost wiped out within about a thousand meters of the Khe Sanh perimeter. This is a story of the 1st Platoon, the reaction force that never reached the 3rd Platoon.

My memory says February 25, 1968 dawned relatively clear and a little cool on the Khe Sanh Plateau. I kept my too-small field jacket on. Although our hold on the area was related to the weather, it was much more important to note that two days before more than 1,300 rounds had impacted somewhere on the combat base and one of ours had died along with four others. Vinny Mottola was an 0351—rocket man—who was funny, irreverent, and always carried his own weight. He died with the crew of a 106mm recoilless rifle when something big, probably a rocket, hit them.

The next day, the 24th, Bravo Company had a few wounded from incoming but no KIA. After filling sand bags and other housekeeping chores most of the day, my fire team from the second squad of the 1st Platoon, had an LP on the night of the 24th. Out in that almost liquid darkness, when a Marine shifted his weight in our LP position, it sounded like Gen. Giap leading legions of NVA into position for a human-wave attack. When a piece of 782 gear scraped against the clay, it was the tanks that overran Lang Vei coming to gun us down. Maybe my fears were close to the truth. Military intelligence knew the NVA were digging trenches perpendicular to our lines so they could stage assault troops close to our positions.

Yet, by 0715 the next morning, we were back inside the wire. Very soon, we started hearing the noise of small arms fire out where Bravo’s 3rd Platoon was on patrol. Our squad and another from 1st Platoon saddled up and headed out the wire.

We paralleled the access road to Rte. 9, heading southeast. I thought I saw movement in a tree line ahead and told PFC Joe Battle “Get out on the right, you’re the only protection we have.” Joe immediately headed toward the brush growing alongside the road.

He was a big, lanky black Marine who said he was from Houston, Texas. Just about a week shy of his 19th birthday, he could be pretty funny. One time, Joe asked a bunch of us if we knew what “KKK” stood for. Nobody said a word until Joe, cracking up, informed us that the right answer was “Kool Kolored Kids!”

I don’t remember if Joe shot expert, but I know he was a good shot. One night in early February the fog was so bad they kept our LP outside the wire in the morning until the sun started to clear the mist. We saw a Vietnamese heading for our lines wearing nothing but a piece of parachute. “Dung lai!” we yelled, but he kept running. He was downhill and about 75 meters away but Joe stopped him with two M16 rounds that hit him in the arm.

A couple of weeks later, moving toward the sound of the fire that was consuming 3rd Platoon, Joe tripped the ambush that stopped 1st Platoon. The fire came at our squad from two sides and at very close range. Joe was down…out of sight, gone forever. Three or four of us hit the deck and returned fire. Had Joe saved our lives? I think so. What’s a “hero?” Joe did his duty and he has always been a hero in my mind.

We returned fire against the unseen enemy so close to us but it was going nowhere. We took a couple of wounded from the small arms fire and then, like the hammers of hell, mortars came down on top of us and we had to pull back.

Just a few meters behind us, the squad leader, Cpl. Don Whittaker lay dead. It looked like he’d gone down in the first burst of fire that hit us. A raw-boned, serious guy from rural Missouri, he was 19. Whittaker was fairly new to our squad. I think he was filling in for our regular squad leader. I don’t remember Whittaker well, but Mac McNeely recalls speaking to him at some length and says he considered “Whit” a friend. He had been hit several times in the chest, abdomen and trunk. There’s no doubt in my mind that he died facing the enemy trying to do his job.

A third member of the squad died that day: Hospitalman Lloyd W. Moore, the corpsman, the “doc.” He was about a month shy of his 22nd birthday. No one from Bravo Company really remembers him. He joined 1/26 (H&S Co.) on 27 January and probably spent some time at the Battalion Aid Station. I don’t know when he joined Bravo Company and 1st Platoon. How could it be that nobody remembered him? I don’t know. It seems like we had a revolving door for corpsmen around that time, but still…

He was from Wilmington, N.C., where I have made my home for the past five years and I’ve learned a lot about him. First of all, nobody called him “Lloyd.” His father was L.W. Moore, a prominent citizen of the city and when his son was killed in action at Khe Sanh, it was front page news. So, the son was known as “Whit,” short for his middle name, or even “Spider.” His sister, his cousins, his friends, other corpsmen he served with in Rota, Spain, and other stops in his service history remember him well.

He liked to hunt and fish and he graduated high school from Carolina Military Academy. Like Cpl. Don Whittaker—the other “Whit” from our squad—he was religious but a corpsman buddy said he enjoyed going on liberty, too. Another corpsman buddy said he had a presentiment of death before he shipped out to Vietnam. We didn’t know him long enough to learn any of that.

As our squad came apart, he moved around to help the wounded until he was felled by mortar shrapnel that hit him in the base of the neck. A hero? It almost seems like Navy corpsman and hero are synonymous. A posthumous Bronze Star valor award recognized his actions. I recognized him from a picture sent to me by a local veteran who had researched all those from this area who had been killed in action from WWI through Vietnam.

As I opened the digital photograph attached to an email from the researcher, I instantly recognized the dead corpsman on that little piece of earth that seemed literally “God forsaken.” I didn’t know his name (except from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and from Chaplain Stubbe’s research about Khe Sanh). I didn’t remember where he was from, or anything about him except his face and that he died doing his job.

“Lead” in my pack? The thought of that day and the almost unbelievable but irrevocable tragedy of the Ghost Patrol and our three dead from First Platoon has never been far from my consciousness in the 43 years since it happened.

Why was I spared? Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that? What would have happened if we had done this, if we hadn’t done that? Over and over.

Almost 30 years ago, I learned from reading a book that 25 February 1968 was a Sunday. Just like I didn’t know “Whit” Moore’s name or anything about him, I had no idea of the day of the week.

I was married, a father of two wonderful children, working in a very gratifying job helping fellow veterans. And, I was searching for answers, trying to learn how to make something other than crushing weight out of the lead in my pack. I was doing a lot of reading, thinking and talking about God and religion and I asked a priest if he could tell me what the readings were for that prosaically named “Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time.”

The second reading hit me like a bolt of lightening. It was St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, verses 54 through 58:

And when this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality, then the word that is written shall come about:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.We knew no victory on that field in 1968. There was death, and failure, and regret, loss and pain; the story of human life on earth compacted into a diamond of humbling memory. Yet, God was there, too, and He left His message of victory and redemption to be discovered in His word and in the example of the steadfast heroes of Bravo Company.

Bill Jayne enlisted in the Marine Corps for two years in September 1966. Originally from the Hudson Valley of New York state he went to boot camp at Parris Island and joined 1/26 on Hill 55 in early 1967. He was a rifleman, 0311, but found himself in H&S Company and then Bravo Company as a clerk. An insubordinate streak landed him in 1st Platoon of Bravo Company in October 1967. Patrol, patrol, patrol; Hill 950, Hill 881S, etc. After college he ended up in Washington, DC, working for a small magazine and then a big lobbying organization involved with heavy construction. A chance phone call in 1979 led to the opportunity to serve as an early volunteer on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and then a career in the US Department of Veterans Affairs. He ran the National Cemetery Administration’s (NCA) State Cemetery Grants Program and later the Federal cemetery construction program. In his 20+ years with the NCA he had a role in the establishment of about 50 new cemeteries for veterans and their families, every one of them a “national shrine” to the memory of those who served in the military. He is now retired in Wilmington, NC.

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Khe Sanh and we will note the date with a guest blog by Michael E. O’Hara who served with Bravo Company, 1/26, at the siege.

January 2011, 43 yrs Later

I first heard that term, Lead in Their Pack, nearly twenty years ago in an article written for the Khe Sanh Veterans Newsletter by Col. John Kaheny USMC (RET). It is a metaphor for the emotional baggage, pieces of broken hearts that Warriors carry with them always. It’s a heavy burden.

Why is Bravo (Company) so different you might ask? For beginners let’s look at the stats you will never see. Bravo represented about 2.5 per cent of the total population at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. All told about sixteen rifle companies. Bravo took roughly 27 per cent of the total KIA’s. Nearly half the company was lost and virtually everyone else was WIA, some more than once. While other companies most certainly had their hands full going toe to toe with Charlie, it was usually when Charlie brought the fight to them. Bravo met the enemy on three occasions during the Siege. Each time we took the fight to Charlie and it was up close and personal. We got in Charlie’s trench. The first time, February 25th, was a disaster. Twenty-seven Marines were lost and we were forced to withdraw. It was the beginning of an American tragedy.

The third platoon had been lost some 800 meters to our front. That is within the range of a good set of eyeglasses. We were ready to saddle up at first light the next day and continue the fight. We were told to stand down. The tactical thing to do was to run airstrikes over the ambush site. What? There were still many Marine bodies which needed to be recovered. We were denied. It would be nearly a month before we were allowed by the Brass (Washington) to reconnoiter the area for a possible raid on the site. We again took the fight to Charlie in his trench but on this occasion he chose to retreat. We suffered around 20 casualties but no KIA’s.

Finally on the 30th day of March we would be given the opportunity to avenge our fallen. Make no mistake, we slaughtered Charlie wholesale that day but we lost another twelve good Marines and many more had been maimed. The remains of the fallen were recovered days later (imagine) and interned in a mass burial in St. Louis. In 1973 we found out one had been taken POW and had been imprisoned over five years in Hanoi. He survived the war.

For Marines, to leave your Brothers on the field of battle like that is a cardinal sin. Even though as Marines we follow orders we still carry those awful feelings with us today. It is an eternal pain. We call it “Lead in your Pack”. What tempers the pain in my heart is the memory of their faces, so young and hardy, and yet so willing to die for “each other.” I have stated many times and it is worth repeating, “It was my distinct privilege and high Honor to have known, and to have walked such Hallowed ground alongside such Brave and Courageous young Marines.

Now being in the “Autumn” of my years I know my tears will soon cease and my heart will rest as I get closer to the wire where I will enter the Main Gate after my final patrol.

Godspeed and Semper Fidelis to Marines everywhere.

Michael E. O’Hara grew up and continues to live in Brown County in Southern Indiana.
Michael graduated in May 1966 and by April 1967 had voluntarily enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

Michael “went for four” and served one tour overseas during the Vietnam War with the 26th Marine Regiment, 1st Battalion, Bravo Company during the “Siege ” of Khe Sanh.

Upon returning to the States, Michael became a Primary Weapons Instructor for the Marine Corps 2nd Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton, CA. Michael was Honorably Discharged on the early release program a year early.

Michael and his partner Maxine have been together 37 years having raised five children, nine grandkids and have two great grandchildren.

Michael is a retired custom home builder and has spent much of his life dedicated to Veterans affairs and in particular to those with whom he served. He is a life member of the Khe Sanh Veterans Organization.

Michael now spends most of his free time with two of his four smallest granddaughters flying R/C airplanes.
***

Last Wednesday, 11/10/2010, the Marine Corps’235th birthday, Dan Horton, a former Marine from Garden City, Michigan passed into what awaits.

I served with Dan in Vietnam from June 1967 through late March 1968. We lived through long patrols, rain, mist, fog, filling sand bags, being attacked by rats, by leeches, sixty-some-odd days of the siege, until he was wounded during a patrol outside Khe Sanh on March 21, 1968.

Dan was a tough kid with a big chip on his little shoulder, not unlike a lot of Marines I knew in the 1960s. He was sarcastic, cynical, negative and often didn’t choose to cooperate.

But those aren’t the things I choose to remember today. He was also funny, kind, talented and loyal. Remember, I said he was tough, and when the bullets were flying, he’d show up with a loaded M-16, plenty of ammo and grenades, looking for a fight. And in Vietnam, in 1968, that was important. Although he might try to gold-brick out of a work party, he never shunned ambushes, listening posts, walking point, or often more difficult, taking a turn out on the flanks where lone Marines often meet their end.

But that’s not all I want to talk about, either. I want to talk about how Dan could sing. I remember many nights on watch with him, when he’d break into something by B J Thomas, like Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. Dan was a top-notch warbler who could sing pop songs and ballads as well as anyone I have ever known. When the trench was roaring like a river at the tail ends of typhoons, or when the monsoon rolled on and on, the white skin of our hands, feet, and fingers wrinkled (and we wondered whether permanently), when some Lieutenant or sergeant would bust our asses for cooking coffee while on watch, or smoking Lucky Strikes, or talking jive about Detroit and Phoenix, he’d erupt into music that made my guts, my ribs, my heart shimmer. He was my pal. My main man in the hooch, the guy who ate with me, shared my toil, my war.

I recall one wet and soppy night when no one (neither the enemy nor us) could move because of the wet. We got drunk with a certain hated second lieutenant and plotted to assassinate him. Dan and I followed him into the officers’ mess where we helped the lieutenant eat parts of several gallons of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. Of course, we didn’t kill the lieutenant. What we did do was come to dappled with red Khe Sanh mud the next morning beneath the mechanical water buffalo with our dry mouths begging somebody to turn it on so we could get a drink of water and wash away the bitter remains of beer and ice cream.

And there were the listening posts where we hid beneath ponchos as the rain pounded down around us. We whispered about who was crazy enough to be out there moving around in the slippery red mud that set you on your butt again and again, soaking your ass, your utilities that were already damp enough to wring out. And the cold chow we ate when we couldn’t get a heat tab lit. And the red alerts when we weren’t allowed to sleep, and then long patrols the next day with the jungle grass slicing our hands, or wet feet forcing water out of our socks and jungle boots. He was my pal.

Then the siege began and we crawled around in the bottom of the trench and hid from the incoming, so close to each other we could feel each other’s heat. Again, we went on listening posts and called in artillery on enemy gun placements, their aiming stakes glowing an eerie green in the misty nights of late winter. And then I went on to become a radio man and moved out of the squad and he got wounded on patrol, March 21, 1968.

And in 1969 he came down to where I was stationed in San Diego. He climbed up the stairs of the barracks as I went to see who wanted to talk to me. And I saw him. And it was like a pariah had come down out of the hills to eat me. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to see him. Today, I remember him standing there trying to talk to me and I remember feeling like a perfect ass because I had nothing to say, and I remember him leaving and right then I hoped I’d never see him again.

Over the years I wondered why I shunned him like that, but then in those days, I was hesitant to talk to anyone about Khe Sanh. So I remembered the things about him that irritated me—the “I’ll kick your ass if you mess with me” attitude, the goldbricking, the negative comments about most things, the sarcasm. And I forgot him, for the most part. My pal.

In 1993 I attended the Khe Sanh Veteran’s reunion in Washington, DC and he showed up. I didn’t see much of him until he plopped himself down in a seat at a booth where Betty and I were eating lunch. He grinned at me and we talked a little bit about what each of us was doing, what had transpired in those 25 years, what we planned. We talked a little about memories of fire fights, the siege and other things. Then he smiled at me and said, “I miss your sarcastic ass.” And then he got up and he left and went home.

Later, we got in touch via e-mail and he sent me tons of forwards that illustrated his sense of humor, his outlook on life. Sometimes I wanted to tell him to stop, but then figured it showed that he was at least thinking of me.

Then all the cancers showed up, and I kept in touch with him on a different level. Here was a man whom I would never have befriended outside the realm of combat, but I was concerned. More than concerned, I was worried about him. What for? I’d shunned him in 1969, yet here I was worried about how long he would be around.

We met again at the reunion in 2009 in Denver. I didn’t recognize him at first, although he recognized me. He talked about his life and his past and his mistakes. We laughed. He’d made more than his share of mistakes. He knew it, but admitted that he’d make a lot more. I admitted some of my mistakes, too, but not my reaction to him in 1969.

Betty and I went to see Dan in August of this year and filmed him for the documentary we are making. I don’t think he really wanted to be seen in the condition he was in, or maybe it was his natural reluctance to revisit our shared travails all those years before. From the looks of him I didn’t think he’d last very long and he knew it too and our visit was tainted with that knowledge, but then tainted is a poor word. His imminent leaving cast a shield over us and we were at peace with our past, the war and all that shit.

As I write this, Dan is being interred at the Great Lakes National Cemetery, in Holly, Michigan. He’s going in his pressed dress blues, his spit-shined shoes, his polished brass.