January 20

On today’s date, fifty years ago and the day before the Siege of Khe Sanh erupted, I woke my fire team before first light to go on a work detail.

One of the men in my team slept hard and didn’t like to wake up. This happened a lot. I finally told him if he didn’t get out of the rack and eat some chow, I’d kick his ass.

That was a mistake. We didn’t really think much of each other. He jumped up and wrapped me in a bear hug. A strong kid from Detroit, he squeezed and made mention about my heritage and my mother. I thought he’d crush my chest.

Somehow I struggled and freed my arms and with my left hand found a metal bucket on a shelf in the bunker. Using both my hands, I clutched it and drove it down on the top of his skull.

He dropped me as blood shot into his brown hair, down the sides of his head and over his forehead into his eyebrows.

Concertina Wire. Attribution: Wikipedia

My stomach churned at the sight of all that blood and I figured there would be hell to pay. I sent him to see the corpsman while we ate chow. Word came back that he went to the battalion aid station to get his head stitched up.

We went off and built a concertina wire barrier somewhere behind the main trench lines. All day I worried about the private, his split open head and the ramifications with which I would have to deal.

While we pounded posts into the ground and strung concertina wire, a Huey flew over with a man hanging below. It looked like his hands were tied to a cable. The helicopter had no markings that would identify it as an American chopper.

We all watched as the Huey flew above a line of ragged trees that grew along the south side of the base and dragged the dangling man through the tree tops. I still imagine the sounds I imagined at the time—snapped bones, ripped flesh, the wash of guts and other organs impaled on the remains of broken branches.

For years, I didn’t remember the incident of the chopper dragging that man but I did remember splitting the private’s head open. Not until the mid 1990s did I recall the Huey and the dangling man and it wasn’t until 2010 that I was sure I’d seen what I saw. I was worried that I had taken someone else’s memory and made it mine. One of the men who we interviewed for BRAVO! asked me, while we were filming him, if I remembered seeing the Huey and the man hanging below.

Fifty years ago, when we arrived back at our fire team area the private with the busted head waited. He seemed quite pleased with a head full of stitches and that he didn’t have to help string concertina.

As I stood there peering at the top of his head, someone down the line set off a claymore mine by accident. When I looked that direction I saw Marines charging into their fighting positions and for the first time, an inkling of what was to come at the Siege of Khe Sanh snuck into my consciousness.

A time lapse of Spooky firing it’s miniguns.

Later that night, I took first watch. A heavy mist hung over the combat base. I walked up and down the trench, thinking, I suspect, about the bloody skull and the man who’d been hanging from the bottom of that Huey. I know I thought about that claymore mine and the echoes of its explosion that bounded along our lines.

I heard a soft, low moan and shivered. A waving line of red tracer fire sketched out of the sky and out to the front of our position. We called that moaning weapon, an airplane, Puff the Magic Dragon but it was more commonly known in Vietnam as Spooky.

And spooky it was as the red tracers etched a curved crimson line into the misty night and the low, sad moan of its sound followed and made me think of lamentations from spirits of the dead.

Ken Rodgers prior to the beginning of the Siege. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

As I got ready to go off watch, I stood at the back of my hooch and stared into the night.

It was spooky.

***

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.

It’s the time of the year when veterans of the Siege of Khe Sanh seriously reflect on events that led up to and occurred during the months of January, February, March and April 1968. That’s forty-five years ago. I remember watching television back in 1986/87 and hearing people talk about the 45th anniversaries of some of the darkest days of World War II; Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal. I remember thinking, man, that’s a long time, forty-five years, but here we are, forty-five years since the events that trigger the most violent memories I own.

The actual big bangs of the siege of Khe Sanh began for me on January 21st, 1968, but my mind often goes back to events that occurred the day before.

My fire team rose early and we went on a work party to the south side of the combat base where we strung concertina wire barriers. As we worked, C-130s and C-123s and Caribous landed and six-bys hauled building materials and the pace of preparation for the anticipated North Vietnamese attack was furious.

Myself, I doubted we would see much action of any kind and I held that opinion, reason one, because we had been warned and warned and warned of impending attacks, none of which had come to pass, the boy-cries-wolf kind of situation, and reason two I now suspect was denial. I had been in Vietnam ten months and had managed to miss any kind of significant action and figured I should be able to skate my way right through the rest of the war without encountering significant danger.

That January 20th, 1968, as we pounded stakes into the ground and attached the concertina wire to the stakes and ran strands of barbed wire through the inside of the concertina, an unmarked Huey began to fly around with something attached to the bottom of a line hanging off the chopper. When it approached us, we could see that the thing hanging from the line was a man. The chopper dragged the man through the air and the tops of trees and as we watched, I don’t recall any one of us saying a word. No “What the hell’s going on?” or “Looks like motivation time for a prisoner of war.” Not a word. As if we were each out there on our own seeing something that only we could see, and about which we could not comment.

In 2010 when we interviewed the men whose words and memories are the backbone of our documentary film, BRAVO!, one of them brought up that chopper. When he brought it up he posed the subject in the form of questions, did I see it? and was it okay to talk about it? Was it okay to talk about it in 2010, forty-two years later? Why couldn’t we talk about it back then, in 1968? I recall that, thinking that. Why didn’t we talk about it in 1968?

I remember when I first remembered the event. In the mid 1990s. Not remembered every day of the last forty-five years as I have so much of what happened at Khe Sanh. I remembered that chopper with its special cargo twenty-seven years later. Why did I not think about it before then, and why didn’t I think about it more often?

The Marine I interviewed who brought up that scene…how should I phrase it?…seemed flabbergasted about what had happened that morning in January 1968. There was a man hanging on a line being dragged by a helicopter. Yeah, sitting in San Antonio, in the safety of time’s passing and a totally different place, we should have been flabbergasted. There was a man hanging on the end of that line who was probably going to die because he wouldn’t tell whoever was dragging him what they needed to know, or needed to hear. And if he did not die, then he would be severely damaged.

But back in 1968, as we watched that event, we weren’t particularly flabbergasted, indignant, angry; or I wasn’t, anyway. We were just…or so I remember and it has been forty-five years now and maybe my memory is failing or faulty…we were just…ho hum.

When the interviewee asked me if I remembered seeing that event, I recall feeling a little sense of satisfaction or relief because when I think about it now, when I thought about it in the mid-nineties, I wasn’t sure if I really saw it, or if I had manufactured the memory, so it made me happy that he had seen it too…kind of made me happy.

When we saw it in 1968, we weren’t happy or sad, I suspect, or alarmed or anything, we were just…this is hard to get a handle on…we were just…just, well, it was just part of the scene, the business we were in, the killing and the mayhem and the fright. Just part of a day’s work, like stringing concertina.

When I first recalled seeing that man dangling from the cable, I wrote a poem about it, an attempt, I suppose, to translate experience into art. The poem showed up in my chapbook of poetry titled Trench Dining, published by Running Wolf Press, ©2003.

Tortures

by Ken Rodgers

We unrolled concertina wire
the German kind
with razors for slicing hide
in a hundred places

We pounded metal stakes
into red earth
and attached the concertina
ripped utility jackets torn hands

To the southwest
two hundred yards away
a Huey
with a body dangling
hands tied to a cable

The chopper maneuvered
some ponderous war hawk
towing the man
through the tops of conifers
surviving along the perimeter

Gazing at that scene
I bet myself
that for a hit off a Lucky Strike
and some hot chow
he would tell us
where to ambush
old Ho Chi Minh

He jerked on the cable’s end
when his feet caught
and flipped sideways
when he bounced off trunks

Years later
finally
when the drama
seized my windpipe
I heard him scream
I heard branches snapping
and other things snapping too

But at the time
looking up from the wire
I couldn’t hear shrieks
only the whap whap whap
of helicopter blades
the clang of hammers
driving stakes
the curses of men with razor ripped hands