By Ken Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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March 21, 1968

On the morning of March 21, 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, went outside the wire. As far as I know, it was the first time anyone had ventured out into the hellscape surrounding the combat base since the Ghost Patrol debacle of 25February1968.

We went out early as the ever-present fog and mist lifted. We got on line, something Marines have done since the United States Marine Corps’ inception in 1775, and we swept off to the southeast towards one of the NVA’s trenchlines.

1st Squad was on the left, 2nd Squad in the middle and 3rd Squad on the right. The platoon sergeant and I were behind the formation, bringing up the rear. I was his radio operator.

Being a short-timer, I shivered and my mouth felt like the cracked bottom of a dry creek bed. I didn’t know what awaited. We went as feelers to test the enemy’s strength. I felt like a little chunk of chum to bait the NVA.

As we tread down an incline into a shallow valley, .50 caliber machine guns opened up from our rear, firing over our heads, giving all of us some cover. I could see the tracer rounds as they streaked like red jets into the tree line on the opposite ridge, our initial destination.

Grenade. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

As our formation neared the summit of the ridge, the .50 calibers firing from our lines were supposed to cease fire. As 3rd Squad reached the summit of the ridge, the .50 caliber fire continued. I witnessed as those big, hot rounds began hitting amongst our marines.

Busy monitoring the radio I carried made it difficult to process what I saw: that instantaneous chaos up there where that friendly fire had hit around our men.

That’s what we called it, “friendly fire,” like it was nothing to worry about. It was our friends shooting at us. So why worry?

My first encounter with friendly fire was on June 7, 1967, when the fire team I was in went out on an LP on Hill 881 South. One of our own men evidently hadn’t received the word about our departure. We exited the south gate and swung around on the west side below the wire a ways and settled in.

Not long after, something bounced in among us and the fire team leader, a seasoned warrior name John T. Poorman, said, “Grenade.” It went off right there amongst the four of us. We didn’t wait around, thinking it was the NVA sneaking up for an assault. We went straight up, with Poorman jabbering into the handset of our radio that we were “coming in.” We barged through the wire barrier in front of one of our machine gun bunkers.

Fortunately only one person was hit. It was Corporal Poorman, and his wound wasn’t serious.
We soon found out that one of our machine gunners, thinking the hill was about to be probed, lobbed that grenade down there. He was a “friendly.”

On a sunny morning in the fall of 1967, 2nd Platoon patrolled at the bottom of Hill 881 South when attacked by two Marine Corps Hueys. Lucky for us, a lot of big boulders were lodged in the creek we followed so we dove behind them and lay low while our lieutenant pleaded with someone out in radio frequency land to get those choppers to stop firing rockets and machine guns at us. They were friendly, too, and luckily, no one was hit this time.

But on 21March1968, someone did get hit, in the back, by friendly fire. Corporal Jacobs, 3rd Squad’s leader, took one in the back that destroyed his flak jacket and flayed the skin and muscles of his back. He required a lot of stitches but lived and went on to fight and earn laurels for his bravery and leadership in Vietnam. He was a hell of a Marine.

I have always marveled at the way the military, or large organizations of most kinds, like to coin a term for something that lowers war’s brutal nature to a case where the brutality appears less vicious, damaging, deadly.

Friendly fire. The word is accurate but infers incongruity, and if you are the one getting hit by friendly fire, it ain’t friendly.

People tend to blame things like friendly fire on the chaos of war and I suppose there is some truth to that, but there is also the human factor: not paying attention to what is going on and not doing your job, like passing along word about something, your own guys, your allies moving into harm’s way.

On 21Mar68 we made it back into the base and were exhilarated because, other than five Marines wounded by enemy activity and one by friendly fire, we got in the enemy’s trench, reached all our checkpoints and returned to our area without any of our own being KIA.

Blogger Kn Rodgers at Khe Sanh in 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

At the time, I recall thinking that the enemy had finally hightailed it back into Laos or up north to their own country. But the next night, the NVA laid an artillery shelling on us like we’d only endured a few times. They pounded the hell out of Bravo Company’s lines and I spent the night with my face buried in a fighting bunker. Unbeknownst to us, not far from our lines, the NVA massed for an attack with the intent of overrunning us, killing us all, or if not all, then marching our remnants up the Ho Chi Minh Trail into years of captivity.

But that assault was shattered by our own air strikes and artillery and lucky for us, none of that supporting fire went awry to kill any of us with “friendly fire.”

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