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

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

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

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

Chaotic, of sorts, just as firefights are chaotic.

Cal Bright:

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

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

Ken Korkow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Long:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank McCauley:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I go, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike McCauley:

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

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

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

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

Michael O’Hara:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was just bodies to your kneecaps in there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Pipes—Company Commander of Bravo:

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

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

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

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

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

My God, what men.

Tom Quigley:

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “Be advised to fix bayonets.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Rodgers:

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

But they didn’t care.

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

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

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

I said, “I don’t know what color.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Weiss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Wiese:

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

It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then.

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

And he basically took that bunker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I’m like…I say, “What?”

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

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

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

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

***

Like I said earlier in this blog:

Chaotic

~ By Ken Rodgers

_______________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cal Bright

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

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

John “Doc” Cicala

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

Ben Long

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

Company Commander Ken Pipes

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

Peter Weiss

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

Steve Wiese

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

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

Cal Bright

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

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

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

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

John “Doc” Cicala

“I just watched a guy drop and I took care of a couple of guys and then I was crossing back over the road because another guy got hit, then the next thing I know I seen a guy pop out of a fighting hole. He hit me a couple of times in the chest. I was laying there and the other Corpsman, Frank Calzia, seen me go down and he come running over yelling at me, ‘JC, are you okay, are you okay?’

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

“And then Lieutenant Jacques came running by and he looked down at me and he said, ‘Doc,’ he said, ‘Get out of here.’ He said, ‘We’re all getting killed.’ And he made it from about here to the wall and I seen him go down and I crawled over to him and he’d caught it right across the legs, both his femoral arteries, and by the time I got to him he’d already bled to death and there was nothing I could do for him.

 Ben Long

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

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

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

Peter Weiss

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

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

Steve Wiese

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

Cal Bright

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

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

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

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

John “Doc” Cicala

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

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

Ben Long

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

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

Company Commander Ken Pipes

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

Peter Weiss

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

Steve Wiese

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

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

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

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

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

They are still broken.

~ By Ken Rodgers

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

_______________________________

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

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

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

I recently received two articles from friend and BRAVO! supporter Norma Jaeger about the power of story to help heal mental health issues. As I read the articles I was particularly struck by two notions.

One: The notion that we need to reclaim our stories—and by that I mean that the memories we have, whether they are related to combat or not, are somewhere in our minds—and by reclaiming them, rethinking them, telling them for the first time or relating them again, we allow ourselves to investigate how those stories are relevant to who we have become.

Two: Mention the unmentionable; dig down and remember those instances that are so horrible and so frightening that we want to hide them from ourselves. Quite often our failure to think about, relive, and analyze the unmentionable moments of our lives can lead to mental and/or physical issues that may be harmful.

Cal Bright

The interesting thing is that when we try to hide the unmentionables from ourselves, they really don’t hide down there, dormant, obedient, submissive. They try their damnedest to worm their way out of the vault in which we attempt to lock them. They want out, they need to get out. Out, so we can examine them and discover what they really mean vis à vis the person we are now as well as the person we wish to become.

For Khe Sanh veterans it is the season of remembering. The particular time of year rolls around every January and sticks in our minds through the end of spring. For the various men who served during the siege there are ample examples of unmentionables that for years have been crammed and stuffed into the dark and inaccessible places of our memories.

John “Doc” Cicala

Three days from now, on February 25, most Khe Sanh vets will recall—and in some cases mentally relive—a platoon-sized patrol outside the east end of the combat base. That event has come to be called “The Ghost Patrol.” The Marines of 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/26 and later 1st Platoon of the same outfit ran into a slaughter house of an ambush sprung by the North Vietnamese. The battle decimated the Marines and left them mired in the chaos of combat. They received little help from the combat base. They saved each other the best they could. Some were forced to save themselves, and in a number of cases, could not comprehend how they even managed to survive.

Now, forty-nine years later, that patrol…that ambush…has gained a sort of fame, so to speak, where the lessons learned by the warriors on both sides are now being taught to the incoming generation of new combatants.

According to Reverend Ray Stubbe’s publication titled PEBBLES IN MY BOOTS, VOLUME 4, the North Vietnamese Army uses the events of February 25th in their training on how to set up ambushes. And as Betty and I found out last spring while at Quantico to receive an award for BRAVO! from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, The Ghost Patrol is also the subject of a field problem during a class on Scouting and Patrolling in The Basic School which all officers in the Marine Corps attend before they are assigned to their initial deployments.

Peter Weiss

For those of us who endured or witnessed that sorry, sorry event, the magnitude of what happened in The Ghost Patrol is imprinted on our souls. But other people not involved in the death and mayhem, most of them not even alive in 1968, also saw—or see—value in remembering, in a kind of way, the events of that day.

And aside from instructional purposes, is there any other value in recalling what happened on February 25, 1968?

In BRAVO! three Marines, Cal Bright, Steve Wiese and Peter Weiss and one Navy Corpsman, John Cicala, talk about the events of that day. The pain and horror, the knife-edged realization that the memories remain as virulent now as they ever were, are etched all over their remembrance of The Ghost Patrol. Maybe the recollections are a little softened by time, but they are still capable of delivering an overdose of pain.

Steve Wiese

They reclaimed their stories. In the moments when I interviewed them, they told—they witnessed again—the horrors of that day. I can only imagine the courage it took for them to discuss events that even though decades old, could disrupt the calm demeanor these men normally carry. The moments they described—mentioning the unmentionable, the painful unmentionable, to one degree or another—bore on their faces like a map of the blasted land around Khe Sanh in 1968.

I am not a psychologist and don’t pretend to know much about how moral injury, PTSD and TBI affect us, but I believe that those four men, by revealing to us their memories about The Ghost Patrol, found some relief from the nagging images and the unpleasant reactions they suffer as a result of that infamous battle.

Marines on The Ghost Patrol. Cal Bright on the left. Photo courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar

And I think there is something in their examples for each of us to think about. Most combat veterans have experiences like The Ghost Patrol in one form or another, and a lot of the memories of those moments stay chilled in the recesses of their minds. And not just combat vets, but every one of us has things dwelling in our memories that we would rather not think about; things that fester there like splinters jammed deep beneath the skin. Like all things that fester, they can become toxic and dangerous, and as such we need to acknowledge them through talking to a friend, a counselor, writing them down, painting or drawing them in a picture, or reliving them in a documentary film so we can begin to put them in their proper place inside the framework of our lives.

Again, we should reclaim those memories instead of letting them simmer in the back of the mind. Let them become a vital and much less toxic part of who we have become. Retelling our tales, whether to a friend, in a poem, or to a mental health professional, allows us the opportunity to change the foreign into the recognizable. It makes that which remains unspoken into the verbalized and may very well allow us access to a new sense of awareness about our story and its relationship to our wellbeing. And that can’t do anything but help.

_______________________________

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

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

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

Next week Betty and I will be journeying to Texas, to the Khe Sanh Veterans Reunion which will be held at San Antonio’s El Rancho Tropicana Hotel.

Just a little over six years ago, we set out from Montreal, Canada, where we were attending the Montreal Jazz Festival with our friends and relatives, Chuck and Donna Dennis, to head out to San Antonio for the 2010 reunion, and to film nine of the interviewees in the film, BRAVO!.

Back then, when we began the journey to tell the story of Bravo Company, 1/26 at the Siege of Khe Sanh, we had little to no knowledge of how to make a film. But, we knew we needed interviews, so undaunted, we marched on and showed up in San Antonio, made arrangements for a space to conduct interviews, picked up our videographer at the airport and proceeded to film the men.

John “Doc” Cicala, Frank McCauley, Mike McCauley, Michael E O’Hara, Ken Pipes, Ron Rees, the late Lloyd Scudder, Peter Weiss and Steve Wiese sat down and talked to me and the crew about their remembrances of the siege and what it meant to them then, in 1968, and what it meant to them in July 2010.

The late Mark Spear at the Khe Sanh Veterans reunion in San Antonio, Texas, July 2010

I often think of the intestinal fortitude these men demonstrated as they sat down and let their emotions bleed out for all the world to see. I recall sitting there across from them, hearing their stories, marveling at the way they just let it all spill out, and if it wasn’t all, it was certainly enough to wow the folks who would eventually work on and sit down to watch their powerful testimonies about fear, death, loss and ultimately, their victories over the obstacles that their experiences at Khe Sanh threw in front of them. The men were inspiring.

Now, six years later, we are going back to San Antonio and for me, it feels like we are coming full circle. Two of the men in the film, Dan Horton and the aforementioned Lloyd Scudder, are no longer with us as is also the case with videographer Mark Spear, and it makes me very happy that we got the interviews done—in the case of Dan and Lloyd—before these Marines left us.

I am also very grateful that we got to know Mark Spear before he made a way too early journey from those he loved and those of us who appreciated his sensitive, funny, artistic nature.

Some of the men in the film will not be there in San Antonio to sit around and talk about the war and our memories of it and how the film affected our views of that experience. And I wonder, in the case of those who have not said so, if BRAVO! in any way changed their lives, helped or hindered them in their ongoing drive to live on in spite of the mental and physical affects of the combat we faced during the Vietnam War.

The Late Lloyd Scudder at his Bravo! interview.

Personally, what can I say about what BRAVO! has done for me? Well, for starters, I can say that I am now hooked on making films.

And I am now immersed in the world of combat veterans and all the accoutrements both good and bad that come with having let oneself become so immersed. Organizations, acquaintances, events, travel—yes, it’s greatly changed the world I personally inhabit.

And I think, in some ways, it’s helped me come to grips with my own horrors, the ones that lurk just behind me as I try to keep the memories of January, February, March and early April 1968 caged in some form of mental box.

It taught me that the men I knew in the trenches at Khe Sanh survived (as did I) second-by-second high grade fear, wounds, loss, and in most cases came out the other end able to deal with all the bad stuff. It taught me that the soul, however one wishes to describe or define it, can be ripped, stripped, battered and stabbed, but in the end, it can still emerge in triumph.

The keenest knowledge I’ve gained is the realization that instead of being alone, I know that there are a multitude of warriors who have experienced what I did—the constant fear that rides you like you were an underfed jackass, the need to be brave even though it may lead to your death, the loss of your friends’ lives. I have siblings, so to speak, who have trod or are now treading the treacherous ground with me.

The late Dan Horton at his Bravo interview at Ann Arbor, MI

For years, intellectually, I understood that I endured what millions have endured in war, but emotionally, I felt all alone, out there on a limb so to speak where no one could reach me.

Making BRAVO! taught me that there are others, right now, out there with me.

So I’m looking forward to getting to San Antonio and seeing who I know so we can sit around and talk about it all. Maybe we will laugh and maybe we won’t, but it will not matter, because I will not be alone.

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

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

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

Several weeks back we wrote a blog entry about how BRAVO! has become a part of the training regimen for new Marine officers at The Basic School at Quantico and we were amazed, as filmmakers, how the movie had grown into something we could not have imagined. What began as an attempt to tell a story about a small group of Marines at the Siege of Khe Sanh has since been used, for example, in college film classes, and high school history classes, and several California prisons, and creative writing classes and as part of a symposium on the humanities and the Vietnam War.

To the list of uses, add BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR as a tool to help veteran court personnel understand the ravages of war and why some veterans might go off the rails, so to speak, and run afoul of the law.

On June 1, 2016, BRAVO! was screened at the 2016 Justice For Vets Convention in Anaheim, California and an interested group of attendees watched the film and then participated in Q & A with the filmmakers. The questions asked were incisive and spoke to the attendees’ interests in veterans, TBI, PTSD, crime and justice.

The folks who came to see the film were judges, attorneys—both prosecuting and defense—court clerks, mentors, psychologists, police personnel, parole and probation officers, court coordinators, and more.

As I attended the conference, the thought came to me: Why do veterans deserve a different court system than everybody else and over the course of a couple of days, I got some answers.

Veterans courts aren’t the only courts that treat offenders differently. There are drug courts, and mental health courts and tribal courts, to name a few. So veterans aren’t the only folks getting special treatment in the justice system.

I heard more than one presenter at the conference explain it this way: Veterans went to serve the country and it is understood that the service was often hazardous. Now they have returned and have had some troubles transitioning into civilian life. Many of them have physical injuries and injuries to the soul and now it is time for us, American society, to serve them in their time of need. Like they did for us. And one of the ways we can serve them is to allow them to go through the veterans’ court program.

Left to right: Michael Jackson, Anne Jackson, Betty Rodgers, Ken Rodgers. Michael is a retired Air Force Colonel and Anne is a prosecutor. The Jacksons share their expertise on veterans, combat and family issues all around the nation. Photo courtesy of Brian L. Meyer.

Apparently, the first veteran’s court was established in Buffalo, NY. There are over two hundred veteran court systems in the country now and the trend is growing in local jurisdictions nationwide.

And why? They seem to work. One of the founders of the Buffalo veterans court is Patrick Welch, PhD, a Marine who served as an enlisted man in Vietnam and was awarded a Purple Heart for the wounds he received there. Dr. Welch told a group of us why veterans courts are important, “Because incarceration doesn’t work.”

So, to avoid institutionalizing veterans in the prison system, it is thought to be cheaper and more effective to run offenders through a special court system.

These courts are fairly new and the experience society has had with them has yet to stand the test of passing years, but time after time Betty and I heard that the recidivism—the rate of veterans coming back into the court system after having successfully completed veterans courts—is significantly lower than the old established court system. This is a major win.

We initially became interested in veterans courts here in Idaho where we have six veteran court systems and it appears they are doing a good job of helping veterans who run afoul of the legal system for one reason or another.

Left to right: Dr. Brian L. Meyer, Interim Associate Chief of Mental Health Clinical Services, Supervisory Psychologist, and Substance Abuse/Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Specialist at the H.H. McGuire Veterans Administration Medical Center and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, Ken Rodgers and Betty Rodgers. Photo courtesy of Anne Jackson.

We couldn’t be more pleased to know that BRAVO! has now become a tool to help veterans court professionals and volunteers understand the underlying trauma generated by combat.

And thanks you very much to the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, Justice for Vets, Terrence Walton and his entire staff at the NADCP for inviting us to screen BRAVO!

So, to the men of BRAVO!: Cal Bright, John Cicala, the late Dan Horton, Ken Korkow, Ben Long, Frank McCauley, Mike McCauley, Michael O’Hara, Ken Pipes, Tom Quigley, Ron Rees, the late Lloyd Scudder, Peter Weiss and Steve Wiese, a big oorah! Because in overcoming your reluctance (and fears) that created a barrier to you telling your stories about the Siege of Khe Sanh and all its horrors, you have, besides recording an important piece of history, become educators to the folks who administer our veterans courts.

If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this coming summer, fall, winter or next spring please contact us immediately.

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

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

Last week Betty and I flew into Chicago, rented a car and drove down to Springfield, Illinois, the burial place of our 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. We traveled there as the guests of the Staab Family and to screen BRAVO! at the Hoogland Center for the Arts as part of a Flag Day benefit for the planned Oak Ridge Cemetery Purple Heart Memorial in Springfield.

We arrived in town and were met by BRAVO! Marine Tom Quigley, a native son of Springfield who was instrumental, along with PJ Staab and the Staab Family, in making these events happen.

The next morning, Betty and I met Tom at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library where Tom and I were interviewed by local radio personality Jim Leach of WMAY radio. Betty, Tom and I were impressed with Jim’s knowledge of the Vietnam era and the Siege of Khe Sanh in particular. You can hear the interview here: http://wmay.com/assets/podcasts/20140612jlsBravo.MP3.

Later, Betty and I walked down to the Hoogland Center for the Arts where we met with their events manager, Vanessa Ferguson, and checked out the facilities for the screening. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped in at the First Presbyterian Church and looked at their seven fabulous Tiffany stained glass windows and the pew where the Abraham Lincoln family sat during church services.

Left to Right: Tom Quigley, John Cicala, Michael E O’Hara, Cal Bright, Ben Long and Bruce Stuckey.
Photo courtesy of Ken Rodgers

During the day, Bruce & Francine Jones and Bruce & Judy Stuckey arrived. Bruce Jones, alias T-Bone, was a radioman for 81 Millimeter Mortars and spent a lot of time on patrol with Bravo Company. Bruce Stuckey was a radio man for Bravo Skipper Ken Pipes. That evening, we all went out for dinner at Saputo’s Italian Restaurant where we were joined by Tom’s wife Nancy and daughter Erin Parsons and her family. If you are ever in Springfield, I suggest you try the fare at Saputo’s. It is rumored that Al Capone liked to dine there, and as we tucked into our ravioli and manicotti and other dishes, I imagined seeing Al parade in with his entourage, all wearing natty summer suits and two-toned fancy shoes, ladies of the night hanging onto their arms.

Also arriving in Springfield later that night was BRAVO!’s associate producer, Carol Caldwell-Ewart.

The day of the screening, Betty and I and BRAVO! Marine Michael O’Hara, who had arrived early that morning, toured the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum—definitely worth the fees and the time it takes to watch the films, view the exhibits and look at all the memorabilia.

BRAVO! Marines Cal Bright and Ben Long with his wife Joyce, and John “Doc” Cicala who was one of Bravo Company’s corpsmen, arrived that day too. We all met at the Hoogland before the screening and had a moment to visit while Carol, Betty and I worked with the staff to make sure everything was in order.

The very capable A/V tech estimated that over 300 folks came out to donate funds to help build the Oak Ridge Cemetery Purple Heart Memorial and to watch BRAVO!. The evening started off with a reception hosted by the Staab Family. Right before the film was shown, Master of Ceremonies PJ Staab introduced all of the Khe Sanh vets in attendance, and we were honored by an enthusiastic standing ovation from the audience. I haven’t ever been honored like that since my return from Vietnam in 1968. You must recall that the Vietnam Veteran wasn’t particularly popular back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Somehow we were blamed for our political leaders’ decisions, so the standing ovation was particularly heartwarming. And the ovations didn’t stop there! We were also honored at the end of the film as the credits ran, and yet again before a snappy and informative Q & A session that followed.

The scene at Staab Funeral Home in Springfield, just before the Ride in Honor bike run.
Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers.

The next morning, all of the BRAVO! folks met for a special breakfast and then as some headed home, five us—Michael E. O’Hara, John “Doc” Cicala, Carol, Betty and I—traveled over to the Staab Funeral Home where lines of motorcycles threaded across the parking lots in anticipation of the annual Ride in Honor, a bike run to four of the area’s veteran’s memorials.

I had never been around one of these bike runs—I’ve heard about them—so it was exciting to see all the bikes with their multi-hued frames and the colorful characters who were riding them. Again, the bikers chipped in funds to participate in this event with the proceeds going for the Purple Heart Memorial.

Just prior to the run, PJ Staab invited us to meet his Aunt Catherine, the last of the World War II era Staab generation. We of course said, “Yes,” and followed PJ upstairs to visit with Aunt Catherine for a while. And what a delight! She’s seen the film twice and wanted to meet us.

Then it was off in a roar of engines to the veteran’s shrines, the first being the Oak Ridge Cemetery where the planned Purple Heart Memorial will be built. Also located at Oak Ridge is President Lincoln’s tomb as well as commemorative tributes to the men and women who fought and died in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Michael E. O’Hara, Doc Cicala, Bob Cowles, Tom Jones and I made up a detail that placed a wreath on the Vietnam War Memorial.

I have never been a part of anything like the placing of the wreaths, so it was humbling to be a participant. Both Bob Cowles and Tom Jones have been instrumental in getting the Purple Heart Memorial project off the ground. Betty and I first met Bob Cowles, a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War, when he arranged for us to interview Tom Quigley for BRAVO! in 2010 at the Springfield VFW Post. Tom Jones, also a Vietnam Veteran and Navy Corpsman who served with Force Recon, is the author of the novel LOST SURVIVOR about an African-American’s journey to fight in Vietnam.

Left to right: Bob Cowles and Tom Jones.
Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers.

After placing the wreath at Oak Ridge, we proceeded to travel to the memorials at New Berlin, Spaulding and the National Veterans Cemetery at Camp Butler where we again placed wreaths at each location. We were treated to a poetry reading and to a trumpet rendition of “Taps.” Before departing Camp Butler, the crowd of bikers lined up and hugged and thanked each one of us for our service. It was intimate and humbling for each of us. For a generation of veterans who were pretty much shunned by their country, it is amazing, after 46 years, to be getting some thanks for what we did. We were young then, and wanted to do what was required, and we wanted to do it well.

We finished the day with another trip to Saputo’s, this time with PJ Staab and his lovely wife Ruth. For me it was sausage and peppers with a side of spaghetti. And they got the red sauce right.

Thanks to PJ Staab and the Staab Family, to Jessica McGee, to the Marine recruits who acted as ushers at the screening of the film, to the Hilton for our lodging and the Hoogland Center for the Arts for a screening venue, to all the folks who came to see BRAVO! and to Springfield with its wonderful memorials. And thanks to Carol Caldwell-Ewart and to the men of Bravo and their wives for traveling to participate in this special weekend.

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

DVDs of BRAVO! are available. For more information go to https://bravotheproject.com/buy-the-dvd/.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way you can help spread the word about the film and what it is really like to fight in a war.

BRAVO! Marine Michael E. O’Hara was the guest speaker at the Brown County, Indiana, Memorial Day celebration hosted by Veterans of Foreign War Post 6195. The event was held on the courthouse lawn and Brown County’s fallen veterans of war were honored. Michael O’Hara is an articulate and passionate man who, when he sets out to do something, does it with an eye to perfection. His speech is moving and memorable and does us all proud. You can read Michael’s speech here:

http://www.thisisbrowncounty.com/2014/05/28/welcome-home-vietnam-veterans/.

Michael E. O’Hara during his interview for Bravo!

On a separate note, as we move into the summer season, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR will be screened in a number of places. Here’s what we can tell you about future showings right now. We hope you will join us or send an interested friend or relative.

• Springfield, IL – The Staab Family of Springfield presents BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR on June 13, 2014, 7:30 PM, at the Hoogland Center for the Arts located at:

420 South Sixth Street, Springfield, Illinois.

The film’s producers, along with several of the men featured in the film, will take part in a Q & A session immediately following the screening. Never before have so many of BRAVO!’s stars attended any one screening. You will meet Cal Bright, John Cicala, Ben Long, Michael E. O’Hara, Betty Rodgers, Ken Rodgers and Tom Quigley. Springfield is Tom Quigley’s hometown. Also in attendance will be the film’s Associate Producer, Carol Caldwell-Ewart.

This is a free event, but donations will be gratefully accepted for a proposed Purple Heart Memorial at Oak Ridge Cemetery.

Here’s a link to the radio ad about this event. You will hear the voices of Dan Horton, Steve Wiese and Michael E. O’Hara. Staab Family IN HONOR WEEKEND 060414

Michael O’Hara in Vietnam

• Chicago, IL – Union League American Legion Post 758 presents BRAVO! on July 24, 2014 at the Union League Club of Chicago.
More details to follow.

• Southern California – We are screening the film in Southern California around The Marine Corps Birthday and Veteran’s Day. Specific times, dates and locations to follow.

• If you would like to host a screening in your town this summer or fall, please contact us immediately.
DVDs of BRAVO! are available. For more information go to https://bravotheproject.com/buy-the-dvd/.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way you can help spread the word about the film and what it is really like to fight in a war.

BRAVO! Marine Michael E. O’Hara muses on the passing of BRAVO! Marine, Lloyd “Short Round” Scudder. Both Lloyd and Michael are featured in the documentary film, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR.

8/19/2013 – Some of you may know at this point that Lloyd Scudder, that lovable little guy we all affectionately called “Short Round,” has slipped away from us so quickly we all were surprised. Ken Pipes states he talked to him just last evening and he was making plans to return home from his recent heart surgery on Friday. Isn’t that how it always is? We just refuse to accept the inevitable and when we least expect it we get bit right on the rump. I had been out this morning and got home after the noon hour. When I opened Cal’s (BRAVO! Marine Cal Bright) e-mail the chair literally shot out from under me as I began to immediately try to process the information. (That’s a round-about way of saying I began to cry as I was falling to my knees.)

Each of us has our memories. Cal and Short Round were pals all along at Khe Sanh. I first met Short Round when he returned to the platoon after visiting his brother on an in-country R&R. That of course was after 25 February. This is when Lloyd and I began to pal up. I was at the end of 2nd Platoon and his bunker was the beginning of 3rd Platoon area. We would talk often before Watch in the evenings.

But our paths would cross again in ’69, I believe it was. I was stationed at the Weapons Section at Camp Horno, Camp Pendleton, California, and was a primary instructor giving the classes on the M16A1. I was just a few days from going on leave when Short Round came into the section as a corporal. It was there he would be assigned to the hand grenade range. We didn’t get to spend much time together as I was soon going home for about a 3-week leave. I told him I would see him when I got back. I never did. That was when he experienced the event that would change his life forever. A private dropped the grenade in the pit. It killed the private and severely injured Lloyd’s eyes, both hands and arms. We all (Khe Sanh Veterans) know they had to amputate his hands in the end. To add insult to injury the Marine Corps did everything in their power to make him a scapegoat over that event which would cause him much heartache and sorrow over the years. He even had trouble getting his VA benefits. But he endured.

I think the next time I saw him was at the 1995 Khe Sanh Veterans reunion in Las Vegas. That was when I realized the grenade incident nearly blinded him as well.

He sure was a hoot wasn’t he? You just couldn’t help but love ol’ Short Round. I pray for his family and wish them well. Short Round is now at rest, finally, guarding the gates until his relief arrives, as always, Standing Tall.

Semper Fi Marine Scudder.
It was my pleasure to serve with you.

BRAVO! supporter Jean Hegland muses about the film, history and the Vietnam War

Although I grew up with the Viet Nam war, it was never very real to me. I was born in 1956, and in the 1960s when my parents began to watch the nightly news on our family’s first television, reports of Viet Nam conflict were nightly fare when I wandered into the living room to check on dinnertime. After Walter Cronkite had finally announced, “And that’s the way it is,” and the television was turned off, discussions about the wrongness of the war and the inadequacies of the politicians who were promoting it were often a topic of my parents’ conversation as we ate.

But despite its frequent appearance in my family’s living and dining rooms, in many ways the Viet Nam war was an abstraction. I knew my parents were against the war—I couldn’t fathom how anyone could actually be for the crumpled bodies and destroyed landscapes I glimpsed on our TV screen—but no one I knew was directly affected by the conflict. My parents’ affiliation with the military had ended when they were discharged at the end of World War II (my father from the Army and my mother from the WAVES); and the draft was cancelled and the conflict in Viet Nam was officially over before any of my brothers or boyfriends were impacted. Later, when I went to college, there were few vets in the circles I ran in, and those I did meet—and occasionally even dated—seemed very reluctant to discuss their experiences in what they called “Nam.”

I suppose I was used to veterans staying silent about their war experiences. Although my mother privately told me that my father had been decorated for his service when he was a medic in the South Pacific, he himself never spoke of his experiences to anyone. I never heard my uncle or my aunt speak about their experiences in WWII, either, nor my other uncle who had been a fighter pilot in Korea, nor my great uncle who fought in France in WWI. And of course my ancestors who’d fought for the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War and those who fought for America during the Revolutionary War were also silent.

Novels such as Johnny Got His Gun, and The Red Badge of Courage, and later, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Things They Carried, and Matterhorn taught me a little about what war might be like for a soldier, but I have Ken and Betty Rodger’s remarkable documentary film Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor to thank for bringing the experience of soldiers at the Siege of Khe Sanh excruciatingly close.

I understand that no one who wasn’t there can ever really appreciate what those men endured during the 77 days of siege, and I also have some inkling of what a truly remarkable group that particular battalion of soldiers were, but after having watched Bravo! I feel I know much more than I did before about a soldier’s experience of the horror, pity—and glory—of war.

I wonder if anyone can listen to Cal, John, Daniel, Ken Korkow, Ben, Frank, Mike, Ken Pipes, Tom, Ron, Ken Rodgers, Lloyd, Peter, Steve, and Michael share their stories without experiencing both shudders and tears, if anyone can watch that film and not be haunted by it afterwards. Each time I watch Bravo!, I am appalled by the situation those men—then kids the age of my lovely son and his dear friends—were literally thrust into as they leapt out of moving planes and had to scurry to safety. I am heartbroken by the suffering they endured and the appalling waste that occurred. But I am also struck by the fierce, bright spirit of each of those men, by their commitment to each other in the face of such horrible odds. I am stirred not only by their courage in 1968 when they sacrificed so much to defend what turned out to be “a worthless patch of ground,” but also by their courage now, as veterans willing to risk further tears and nightmares in order to share their memories with the rest of us. Thanks to them, I feel I understand much more than I did before—not enough, to be sure, but a great deal more.

Bravo! has not changed the opinion I grew up with that the Viet Nam War was a horrible mistake, but it has deepened my sympathy for everything that those who fought in it endured, increased my appreciation for everything that they achieved, and my gratitude for the huge sacrifices that they made. It has given me fresh insight into all the silent warriors in my own family, too, and has encouraged me to reflect on the strange and compelling machine that war is, and why it is that we humans seem to have such a hard time getting beyond it. For all that, I am very grateful.

In addition to expressing my gratitude to the brave men who allowed their intimate stories to be captured on film, I also want to applaud Ken and Betty Rodgers, whose hard work and commitment brought Bravo! into being, and whose skill as interviewers (along with Mark Spear) and vision and craft as story-shapers helped to make Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor the compelling—and transformational—film that it is.

Jean Hegland is the author of the novels Into the Forest and Windfalls.

Today’s guest blogger, nationally recognized historian and journalist Gregg Jones, muses on the Siege of Khe Sanh.

In the autumn of 2010, I had just finished writing a nonfiction book about America’s rise to world power in the Spanish-American War and the subsequent colonial war in the Philippines that bedeviled Theodore Roosevelt’s young administration. While my editor read my manuscript, I began weighing possible subjects for my next book. I had spent years researching the death of my uncle and eight comrades on a B-24 bomber crew in World War II, and so that story was high on my list. At the same time, another subject called to me: America’s war in Vietnam.

My interest in the Vietnam War had its roots in my lifelong love of American history. Growing up in a small southeast Missouri town, the American Civil War had been my passion, and I had devoured books by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote. I was nine years old in the summer of 1968 when we piled into our ’64 Chevy Impala for a family vacation to Washington, D.C. I persuaded my parents to stop at every Civil War battlefield in our path, but each day our journey into America’s past was jolted back to the present by newscasts and headlines about the widening war in Vietnam. As we walked through Arlington National Cemetery a few days later, we could not help but notice all the fresh graves. We watched in solemn silence as a flag-draped coffin passed the Custis-Lee Mansion on a horse-drawn caisson, and then, some minutes later, the sound of Taps echoed over the hallowed hills. Back home in Missouri, my family followed events in Vietnam on the CBS Evening News and in our local newspaper. Every so often, the paper wrote about some hometown boy who had died in America’s service in Indochina. Eventually, fourteen young men from my hometown of 15,000 people would never return.

Gregg Jones

Two years ago, as I began to seriously consider a book on the Vietnam War, I debated two questions: What should be my focus? And could I write something of lasting historical value? Three events occupied my thoughts: the battle for Khe Sanh; the Tet offensive; and the fall of Saigon. As a student of American military history, I had long been fascinated with the former two events. While I read everything I could about Khe Sanh, I initially decided to take a broader approach and chronicle the experiences of several men who fought in Vietnam in 1968.

Almost from the beginning, I found myself drawn deeper into the epic story of Khe Sanh.

Three Khe Sanh veterans—Michael O’Hara, Tom Quigley and Dennis Mannion–were my first interviews in the project. When I first contacted Michael, he was wary. He wanted to know who I was and why I wanted to write this book. They were fair questions, and I answered these and others in detail. I explained that I had been a Pulitzer Prize finalist in my 29 years as an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent, and I had spent 10 years in Southeast Asia.

I told Michael about the years of work I had done on weekends and holidays to unravel the mysteries of my uncle’s lost bomber crew, tracking down family members of the men and arranging for a memorial to be placed in the Austrian meadow where the bomber crashed on the afternoon of October 1, 1943. When I told him that the remains of my uncle and his comrades had been returned to the United States in early 1950 and buried in a group grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, he could barely contain himself. Michael had stood almost in that exact spot, paying tribute to several comrades from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines. It turned out that some of the Marines killed in the “Ghost Patrol” of 25 February 1968 had been buried in a group grave just a few yards from my uncle’s crew.

Months passed and Khe Sanh continued to dominate my thoughts. Michael, Tom and Dennis shared their experiences and generously put me in touch with other men who had served there. I became an associate member of the Khe Sanh Veterans Association. Last summer, I drove up to Rochester, Minnesota, to attend the annual reunion as Michael’s guest.

Those three days I spent with the Khe Sanh veterans rate among the most memorable 72 hours of my life. I met some exceptional men and their families, and witnessed the extraordinary bonds that forever sustain Khe Sanh survivors. I spent hours recording the experiences of Ken Pipes and other Khe Sanh veterans like Ghost Patrol survivor Cal Bright. (I also witnessed some priceless karaoke performances by such iconic Khe Sanh Marines as Tom Eichler and Bruce “T-Bone” Jones.) I left Rochester inspired by these men. On the drive back to Texas, I resolved to focus my book on what the defenders of Khe Sanh had endured and achieved in those red clay hills in 1968.

Four weeks later, I handed my literary agent a 40-page proposal that laid out the book that had begun to take shape in my head—a narrative history of the epic battle for Khe Sanh, based on extensive interviews with enlisted men and officers who were there. My agent sent the proposal to a dozen top trade publishing houses in New York and Boston. There was immediate interest, but ten publishers eventually retreated to the tired conventional wisdom regarding books on America’s most unpopular war: We like the proposal, but Vietnam War books just don’t attract enough readers…. I wanted to say: Well, they should! Fortunately, two publishing houses believed in my vision for a new book about Khe Sanh. I settled on Bob Pigeon at Da Capo Press, who told me that he had long wanted to do a major book about Khe Sanh.

And so the project, now a book focused solely on Khe Sanh in 1968, took life.

The project timetable calls for me to deliver a manuscript to Da Capo by 31 December of this year. As of this writing, I have interviewed 52 men who served at Khe Sanh in 1968, and I will be speaking with many more in the coming days. I have been moved and inspired beyond words by the accounts I have heard, testaments to the camaraderie and indomitable spirit of the men who served at Khe Sanh. The great challenge I face in the months ahead is transforming these hundreds of hours of priceless interviews into a narrative worthy of these men and their service.

Among the powerful accounts I have gathered is that of a fellow writer who had been a young Marine rifleman from Arizona in 1968. Spending time with Ken Rodgers and his wife Betty at the Rochester reunion had been one of my personal highlights. I had become aware of their film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, even before I began contacting Vietnam veterans. Later, Ken and Betty generously invited me to attend the private screening of their film with Bravo Company veterans. I thought I had steeled myself for the experience, but the power and raw honesty of Ken and Betty’s interviews swept away my defenses. I’ve never shed more tears than I did while watching the scarred survivors of Bravo Company speak of their experiences at Khe Sanh.

As I move ahead with my own modest effort to preserve the history of Khe Sanh, I am closely following Ken and Betty’s important work to bring Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor to a wide audience. Financially and emotionally, they put themselves on the line to make this film. It is an extraordinary piece of documentary art. Whatever your opinions of the war, the young Americans who served our nation in Vietnam deserve to have their stories told in movies like Bravo!, and in books like that which I hope to create. If I may paraphrase Ken and Betty’s powerful prologue, this is not a pro-war or anti-war statement. This is about what happened. And, as Americans and intelligent beings, we need to remember.

A Missouri native, Gregg Jones is the author of Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream (New American Library/Penguin, 2012) and Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Westview Press, 1989). He is currently writing a narrative history of the 1968 battle for Khe Sanh, which will be published by Da Capo Press in 2013. He was a Pulitzer Prize-finalist investigative reporter and foreign correspondent before writing books full time.