By Ken Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Ken Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That word never came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are just weeks away from the forty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Khe Sanh. I think about the siege every day, but I don’t always think about the weeks immediately before its commencement.

After being relieved by India Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment on Hill 881S the day after Christmas, 1967, Bravo Company went down into the perimeter of the Khe Sanh Combat Base and took over their old lines on the east and southeast ends of the perimeter in what was called Gray Sector.

While in Gray Sector, we filled sandbags and filled sandbags and filled sandbags. We must have been taking a lot of photos, too, because in the course of creating the film, we came upon a fair number of photos that were taken in the time between vacating 881S and moving into Gray Sector.

Besides filling sandbags, we dug trenches, beefed up hooches, built fighting positions, sometimes ran ambushes at night as well as listening posts. And…we filled sandbags. When we weren’t doing that, or going on patrol, or sleeping and chowing down, we stood watch.

Marines from Second Platoon, Bravo Company, Gray Sector, Khe Sanh Combat Base

Some of us had transistor radios that we played at night and listened to Armed Forces Radio. They played a lot of great tunes back then. The types of tunes then were often different than what warriors listen to now, echoing the cultural changes we have undergone since 1968. The country music wasn’t as slickly rock-and-roll as it is now, and the rock they played in 1968 was mild compared to what was to come as well as what I hear on the radio these days. They played a lot of soul music, too, which is a far cry from the hip hop young warriors probably enjoy today. Though the music may be different between then and now, I suspect listening to it in either era aroused similar emotions…longing, sadness, but also a sense of hope, that you just might make it home to be with friends and family doing the things you love to do.

Some of the music I remember was “Happy Together” by The Turtles and “I Just Stopped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In” by the First Edition which had Kenny Rogers singing the lead before any of us really knew who he was. We heard “Ode to Billy Joe” by Bobbie Gentry and “The Letter” by the Box Tops. We heard Wilson Pickett, and Martha and the Vandellas, and Dianna Ross and the Supremes, and James Brown and Lou Rawls singing about Chi-town’s “hawk.”

One of our favorite songs back then was Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” We used to try and sing along and I can only imagine how that sound carried over the concertina wire barriers, across the bamboo thickets and into the hidden posts of our enemy. Even now, when I hear that song, it takes me back to the trenches. It takes me back to the men I served with, a lot of whom are gone and as I think of them, I get misty and something catches in my craw.

When we listened to Otis singing, we tried to dance and boogaloo around the trenches and the bunkers while we puffed on Salems and Camels (which we were not supposed to be smoking on watch, or listening to music either, because we were breaking light and sound discipline). More than once, the duty NCO or Officer of the Day would come by and if we didn’t catch on to his imminent arrival, we’d get our butts chewed out.

When we figured out our singing wasn’t so hot, we’d let Danny Horton take over. Man, he could warble tunes as well as any of those folks we listened to. B J Thomas songs were his staple and he really liked “California Dreaming” by the Mamas and Papas. When he was singing, it took me back to my southern Arizona home and my friends, and sitting around the front room with my mom and dad talking. It made me remember sweet spring nights when the orange blossoms saturated the dark. It was a link to home, it was…how can I describe it…almost magic.

Dan Horton at Khe Sanh

After January 21st, we turned the radio down, or turned it off, because by then the war was way too up-close and personally serious, although I do remember hearing Hanoi Hannah taunt us when one of those who owned radios chose to turn her on. We also listened to the news and heard about how bad we had it at Khe Sanh.

And it was bad. It was bad all over Vietnam that late Winter and Spring of 1968. Maybe we knew that, but all we really knew was what we were enduring. And the radio was our tether to the outside, to Otis Redding and “California Dreaming.”

Speaking of California Dreaming, We are taking BRAVO! on the road in March and April. As of now, we have tentatively talked about screenings in Chico, Sacramento, San Francisco, Fresno and the Camp Pendleton areas of California, and beyond to Reno and Las Vegas in Nevada, and Moscow, Idaho.

If you are interested in bringing the poignant sizzle of BRAVO! to your area as an educational or fund raising event, you may be interested in hosting a screening of the film. If so, please contact us so we can talk about what is required.