Today, January 21, 2012, is the forty-fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Khe Sanh. For those of us who endured that seventy-seven day nightmare, or any part of it, one of the salient notions we feel, we think about, is how we went from young boys to hardened Marines. I would say hardened men, but I don’t know that we became men because of Khe Sanh. I think we became hardened, seasoned veterans, and even though we wore haggard faces tinted with the color of fear, we were mostly still just boys.

Regardless, we went from naive youngsters to warriors forever marked by the taste of battle. We got high on the risks of dying and some of us never came down from that, and its long lasting effects helped drive some of us to kill ourselves. Some of us tried like all hell to emulate the scintillating rush of combat in the things we did back in “the world” as we liked to call the United States in 1968.

In the film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, we have had the honor of employing interviewee photographs that were taken before the Siege began. In those pictures you can see the hopefulness, the eagerness of youth etched on each youngster’s face. We were children, mostly, and it shows.

Thanks to the men in the film, we have some of these images of our youth to look at here.

Cal Bright

Mike McCauley

Ron Rees

One of the issues that the film Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor contemplates is the journey from youth to hardened warrior and its lifelong effects on all of us. This is not a new story.