The scrabbling of the rats’ feet woke me. I listened to the rain. I wondered if daylight might be near or if the time ran closer to midnight. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was but then figured out that the sound of the rats’ feet was simply the rain in the gutters.

I rose and walked into the kitchen and checked the time. Dawn would show up in about an hour. I sat at the table and thought about the eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen mornings I’d risen since my return from war and then pondered the memories that run at you like a man you never want to see again.

When I get up in the morning, I never know what segment of my experience in Vietnam will show up. It might be rats, or a sense that I’m not sure where I am. It might be incoming artillery rounds thumping my surroundings, or sitting in the trench sharing coffee out of a cup made from a C-ration can while sniper rounds snap over our heads. It could be all four, or more, in a rapid-fire sequence that leaves my heart hammering.

Or maybe something a little more benign.

Like going home and my swift transition from hell on earth to sleeping in the bed in the room where I had studied algebra and managed to sneak out the windows after my parents went to sleep.

One of BRAVO!’s oldest friends asked me, last week, if I might revisit one of those memories: the night I got home to Arizona.

I flew into Tucson on the evening of 4/11/68 and my best friend, his fiancé, and my mom and dad showed up and ran into me as I went downstairs to get my gear. We went to a great Mexican food restaurant and had dinner. We sat at a long table with me sitting with a wall to my back so I could see who came in and who went out and where and when anyone moved.

Idle chit chat bantered back and forth, about mutual friends and acquaintances, the weather, the political chaos. My best friend’s fiancé shot me a serious look and asked me about my war experience.

I began to talk about Khe Sanh: rain, mist, no sleep, humping high hills with lots of gear, filling sandbags and finally when I got to the serious stuff . . . the death, the fear . . . I noticed all of them eating, their faces down towards their plates. The reflection of light from my father’s balding pate hit me in the eyes and like a revelation, I understood that no one cared, or at least savvied, what happened to me.

To this day, I am baffled by the lack of respect, admiration, honor that I think almost all of us warriors thought we had coming when we stepped off those glorious flights home from Nam, back into The World.

With my father, my war created a tension that never resolved in the remaining twenty-one years he lived. More than once, we stood nose-to-nose, ready to tear each other’s hearts out.

Now, after all this time, I think part of the problem, especially with my good friends and family, is that they couldn’t understand, on a visceral level, what had happened at Khe Sanh and as such, there was nothing of merit, or meat, that we could discuss.

My father was a top sergeant in the Army but never saw combat. He once told me the most frightening experience he had was flying over The Hump (the Himalayas) from New Delhi, India to Chongqing, China, to pick up a Japanese prisoner of war. He had little with which to relate to my turmoil and my chaos had little room for him.

Yet I suspect that was only part of our problem, my problem. I think that when I came home, I wanted, I craved, I needed The World to be what it had been in 1966 when I joined the Corps, the kids cruising the town, the girls the same, my life as it had been.

But time is like a river that won’t stop running and what had been in 1966 . . . my life, my friends, my World . . . was not there in April of 1968. And I don’t think I understood that, and as such, the conflict between what I wanted The World to be and what was in reality The Way, were not resolved for 30 years, when I began to realize that I needed to dig into my experiences through getting sober, writing, and accepting that what happened at Khe Sanh was not who I was as a person.

What I thought I had come back to had moved on, leaving me in the detritus of memory.

***

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

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

In the United Kingdom, you can stream at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BZKJXBM.

***

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

***

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

About this time fifty-one years ago, I arrived in Okinawa on my way home from the war and the Siege of Khe Sanh. On the flight between Da Nang and Oki’s Kadena Air Force Base, I gazed around at the men on board. We looked battered, most of us donning dungarees so dirty and worn it seemed like we were prisoners bound for a life of confinement.

A Marine with whom I had an acquaintance, Corporal S, sat next to me. A cannon-cocker, I’d met up with him I don’t know where or when.

When we landed at Kadena, we deplaned and were ordered to fall in and stand at attention, which we didn’t do, and listen to a spiel given by a bunch of Marine Corps NCOs about what we could do on Okinawa and what we couldn’t while at Camp Schwab waiting transfer to the states.

Several of the two-hundred or so Marines who’d been on that plane barked out comments about POGs in Okinawa lecturing real warriors about what and what not to do.

Several of the NCOS jumped right in and instructed us that they were not any different from us; they’d just been wounded three times in Nam, so they had to finish out their twelve-month-and-twenty-day tour on Okinawa.

But collectively, we dirty band of ragged Marines, didn’t buy their explanations. The men facing us were decked out in snappy new dungarees and covers starched and formed as if they were all still in Boot Camp. We hooted . . . and this struck me . . . we hooted as if we could care less about how many times they’d been shot or wounded. And our derisiveness felt good to me, way down, and maybe it wasn’t fair of me or the rest of us, to put their service down, but at the time, it felt damned good.

The next morning we fell in and received orders for all of us to report here and there around Camp Schwab for mess and maintenance duty.

Right up front, Corporal S told the duty NCO, “Go to hell.”

Unlike him, I reported to the BOQ and spent the morning policing the barracks for transient officers. When I left for chow, I asked the duty NCO why they made us clean up while there were barracks full of new Marines headed to Nam who needed something to do.

He didn’t answer, just scowled at me.

I have never figured out why they did that—made us clean up, unless it was punishment for our salty attitudes out on the tarmac at Kadena—and that morning stint was my last. I spent the next two days shooting hoops at the base gym with Corporal S.

My mother used to tell me, when I complained about vacuuming the house or mowing the lawn when I should have been playing with my buddies, that an idle mind was the tool of the devil, and maybe the Marine Corps had similar sentiments.

Nevertheless, if the Marines in charge of keeping things running at Camp Schwab depended on me and Corporal S, and I suspect, the rest of us who arrived on that flight out of hell a few nights before, they were sorely disappointed.

***

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

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

In the United Kingdom, you can stream at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BZKJXBM.

***

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

***

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

One of the more gratifying experiences we’ve enjoyed with our BRAVO! encounters is the recognition that is coming to so many of the men who served with Bravo Company, 1/26, during the outfit’s time in Vietnam. On September 28, 2014, Vincent Mottola was honored in his hometown of Medford, Massachusetts.

Unlike a lot of other wars in which United States armed forces have been involved, the honors and remembrances due the men and women who served in Vietnam have been slow to come.

Regardless of how one feels about the morality or efficacy of our efforts in that war, the men and women who fought and died there, not to mention those who have returned, were not responsible for our government’s choice of wars. They were called to serve and they did, some giving the ultimate sacrifice for, in most cases, something they thought was worth doing.

Honoring Vincent Mottola. Photo Courtesy of Marie Chalmers

So we are very happy to crow about the honors that are coming now to the men of Bravo who gave up their youth, their naiveté, and in many cases their lives for something they thought was of value.

Below are some photos taken and sent to us by Vincent Mottola’s cousin, the vibrant Boston native, Marie Chalmers. These photos are of the ceremony conducted in Medford, Massachusetts, where Vinnie Mottola was memorialized by having a street corner named in his honor.

Vinnie is one of the veterans to whom BRAVO! is dedicated, thanks to the generosity of the Mottola family. He was killed in action at Khe Sanh Combat Base on February 23, 1968. You can find out more about Vinnie here.

Below are some photos of the event in Medford. Photos courtesy of Marie Chalmers.

This first photo is of the street sign for the newly named corner.

Vincent A Mottola Square

The second photo in this three-photo series is of Medford Mayor Michael McGlynn and the Marine Corps color guard.

The last is a photo of Vincent Mottola’s family who joined together at the naming of Vincent A Mottola Square.

Ooorah and Semper Fidelis, Vincent Mottola!

We look forward to upcoming screenings at the Meridian Library in Meridian, Idaho, on October 22; Oceanside, CA, on November 1; and Newport Beach, CA, on November 15, 2014. Please join us and invite your friends.

If you would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this winter or spring, 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 to stay up on our news and help us reach more people.

Screen writer and script doctor Lance Thompson muses on the movie.

It is ironic but true that the inhuman ordeal of combat often evokes the highest attributes of humanity–courage, sacrifice, selflessness and love.  These ideals are convincingly demonstrated in Ken and Betty Rodgers’ feature documentary Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor.  Bravo! is the story of a company of marines during the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War.  The story is told through the reminiscences of a handful of those marines, of whom Ken Rodgers is one.

Eschewing the animated maps, clumsy recreations and armchair revisionists, Bravo! focuses entirely on the personal experience of combat.  Viewers may not learn the historical, strategic, or political significance of the battle.  But they will certainly gain at least a glimpse if not a profound understanding of what it felt like to be there.

Archival footage, still photographs, and vintage audio recordings are sprinkled throughout the movie, but only as punctuation.  The power of the narrative comes entirely from the veterans who tell their stories on camera.  Some are animated and expressive, others quiet and contemplative.  As each recounts the experience from his own perspective, the film becomes a tapestry of individual threads of memory–intensely personal and vividly sharp.  The picture that emerges will horrify, inspire, challenge, and leave the viewer deeply moved.

The stories in Bravo! are told by older men, but they were lived by teenagers, fresh out of high school, with no experience to prepare them for war.  They were not unlike generations of young Americans who were summoned from family kitchen tables and dropped into front line trenches to confront a brutal and determined enemy.  Like those generations before and since, they were thrown into the crucible of conflict where their hearts and souls were tested.  Like those generations before and since, some faltered, some triumphed, all endured.  There can be no greater tribute to the depth and resilience of the human spirit.  Bravo! honors them.

Lance Thompson is a screen writer and script doctor who is privileged to know Ken and Betty Rodgers, and is thankful that they chose to tell this very important story.