There’s a photograph of BRAVO! Marine Tom Quigley receiving a purple heart medal while in a hospital bed somewhere in or near the Republic of South Vietnam.
The photo was taken on April 1, 1968, two days after Tom was wounded outside Khe Sanh Combat Base in what has since become known as the Payback Patrol.
Tom served as the radio operator for Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines’ company commander—or Skipper, Ken Pipes.
Tom Quigley
Tom is on my mind the last few days. He passed away on Tuesday, March 22, after battling for 17 years with serious health issues.
Tom, like so many of the men who survived the Siege of Khe Sanh, was a tough, tough man. He was also funny and loving, a family man, a hard worker, a success at many things, a friend. A good and kind person.
Tom liked to tease. He teased me a lot and I will miss his humor, his wry observations about people and about me.
I remember that day when Tom got wounded, March 30, 1968, fifty-four years to the day from this writing.
I was a radio operator, too, for 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant. We were running down the NVA trench on the way to the very front edge of that nasty battle. Staff Sergeant Alvarado and I moved out in order to mark the extreme edge of our perimeter so artillery barrages could be called in to create a barrier between counter-attacking NVA troops and us. This would allow us to save our wounded and retrieve the dead in an orderly withdrawal.
As Staff Sergeant Alvarado and I ran down the trench, I noticed the company command group—Skipper Pipes, radio men including Tom, corpsmen, the company gunny, several forward observers—all standing in a bomb crater.
As Tom liked to say, “The fighting was intense.”
And he wasn’t exaggerating when he said that; the sky chock full of smoke and fog and the cries of fighting men, and wounded, too; the noise…the noise.
I looked again as we ran on, and a barrage of mortar rounds landed in and around the command group; and when the smoke cleared, Marines were scattered everywhere, on the ground, on their knees.
The platoon sergeant and I ran on and years later, when I had the honor of interviewing him for Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, I learned about Tom’s wounds and how even though he suffered from a concussion that forced blood out of the pores of his skin and serious shrapnel wounds, he helped evacuate the others in that bomb crater back to the rear where the medical teams endeavored to provide medical attention to the injured.
Seeing a wounded Tom receiving his purple heart while in that hospital makes me think about how, instead of getting help for himself, he made sure that others were taken care of. I will always admire the sense of duty, loyalty, and courage that compelled him to ensure other wounded men were served. Tom personified the Marine motto: Semper Fidelis.
Badly wounded, he put other wounded men first.
Tom told me that because all of those men died back there at Khe Sanh, he needed to “live a good life because they never got the chance.” And he did have a good life.
Tom didn’t need to talk about all of this. You just knew it, the kind of man, the kind of Marine he was.
Semper Fidelis, Tom. We are going to miss you. Really miss you.
You can read Tom’s obituary here: https://www.staabfuneralhomes.com/obituary/thomas-tom-n-quigley/.
Fifty-four years ago today, one of the most despairing events of the entire battle known as the Siege of Khe Sanh occurred.
Third Platoon, Bravo Company, 26th Marines went out on a patrol and were ambushed.
Two squads from Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon went out to relieve them. They were also ambushed.
A lot of the survivors stumbled back into the perimeter over the balance of the day.
The memories still gnaw the guts of the men involved, as well as the men who watched.
What was it like?
Let some of the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who made it home tell you. These comments are from the original interviews done for the film BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. You may recognize some of these remarks from the film and some of them you have never heard. Even though the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, the men often recollected the same events without anyone prompting. That was one of the amazing things about interviewing the men of BRAVO!.
The ambush and ensuing slaughter took on a name:
THE GHOST PATROL
The Ambush:
Cal Bright:
I ended up being point for a while and my team member, Clayton Theyerl, who was from Racine, Wisconsin, was directly behind me and motioned for me to stop. He says, “I’m going to take your place. This is your first patrol.”
Probably within five minutes all hell broke loose.
Theyerl was killed. My team leader, a Lance Corporal Thrasher from Oklahoma City, asked me to go up and retrieve the body. As I was dragging him back, the body was bouncing , was jumping back and forth and I could feel bullets whizzing past my head, and in a sense, his body protected mine.
Marines on The Ghost Patrol. Photo Courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar
John “Doc” Cicala:
We crossed a set of trench lines and then they opened up on us and it was just pure chaos from then on.
I watched a guy drop and I took care of a couple of guys and then as I was crossing back over the road because another guy got hit, then the next thing I know I seen a guy pop out of a fighting hole. He hit me a couple of times in the chest.
And then a grenade landed between my legs, and I looked down and I seen it and I yelled, “Grenade.”
I curled up into a ball and it went off. I couldn’t hear or see anything for a minute with all the dirt and everything, and then when I could see my foot over there and I was thinking to myself, This ain’t good. My foot moved and I said, “Well at least it’s still attached.”
Steve Wiese:
You know, most of the guys went down in the first minute. The only reason I survived was I just happened to be standing in a bomb crater where it was like two, two and one-half feet deep where it blew the ground out and I just happened to be walking through that when the ambush opened up.
Ben Long:
Men were getting shot and you could hear that happening.
John “Doc” Cicala:
Lieutenant Jacques came running by and he looked down at me and he said, “Doc,” he said, “get out of here,” he said, “we’re all getting killed.”
1st Platoon tried to relieve the beleaguered Marines:
Peter Weiss:
Two squads, we actually split up, one squad went straight out towards where they were. The other squad went out to the right. And unfortunately he got trapped in the same kind of ambush and so of that squad, maybe ten men, I think, four were killed in that ambush.
They were ordered to retreat while the fight went on:
Mike McCauley:
You could hear it in the distance. We could hear it on the radio. The screams and stuff that was going on.
Steve Wiese:
As soon as I fired a round there were hundreds of guys shooting back.
Cal Bright:
I come across a radio operator who had been killed. To this day I have no idea what his name was.
All I could hear on the radio was, “Hello, hello, is anybody there? Anybody hear us?”
So I keyed the mike and said, “Hello.”
Somebody came back on and said, “Who’s this?”
“Well this is Cal.”
“Cal who?” And I told him and he said, “Who else is there with you?”
I called back and said, “Nobody.”
I could see little helmets in the background. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was just a few meters from the NVA
trench line.
Marines on The Ghost Patrol. Cal Bright on the left. Photo courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar
Escape:
Ben Long:
I just started seeing people coming back, not in groups but straggling back and some were wounded.
Cal Bright:
I was able to get out of there after some time. How long? I have no clue.
John ”Doc” Cicala:
They say I made it back to the base maybe six, eight hours.
Peter Weiss:
I went out to get him. Walked through the mine field, not you know, around the side, but through the mine field. And I was scared. Walked through the mine field, walked through the concertina, grabbed…and he was in absolute shock. Grabbed him by the arm and we walked back through the mine field into the perimeter.
Steve Wiese:
I worked my way out and moved down around the back and came back to the base. And it was just like, “Where is everybody?” and I just remember the guys saying, “You’re pretty much it.”
For those who watched and listened, who weren’t in the fight:
Dan Horton:
We knew they were getting hit. We…we wanted to go out. They wouldn’t let us go out. It was just…it all happened so fast and you know it was wild. And we wanted to go out and help them out and bring them in but Headquarters said no.
Ken Korkow:
A number of us went up to Battalion and we begged to go out and get those guys and bring them back. We had to watch while those guys were getting chewed up in front of us. The Marine Corps has this saying, “We always recover our dead.” Nobody said it was going to be over a month before we recovered them. Attitudes turned really bad inside the perimeter.
Lloyd Scudder:
When I finally get back to Khe Sanh, my platoon is wiped out. I don’t know anybody. I feel like I abandoned them, I’ve been trying to prove myself ever since that deal with the Ghost Patrol…I just feel guilty.
The enduring emotional pain was palpable:
Ken Rodgers:
That’s kind of the notorious event at Khe Sanh, was the Ghost Patrol, because all those guys got killed and they got left…the bodies got left out there.
Ken Pipes:
I think it broke all of our hearts.
As I wrote this blog, sadness got in my bones and showed me a bit of the agony that we all felt that day. You’d think one could get over this stuff. You hope you get over it.
Fifty-four years ago, the Siege of Khe Sanh had switched into high gear. Tet churned the South Vietnamese landscape. On February 4th, the NVA assaulted Hill 861-A, breached the perimeter before a savage fight drove them off. Echo Company, 26th Marines, suffered 33 killed and wounded.
The Special Forces camp at Lang Vei was being overrun the morning of February 7th with seven Green Berets killed or missing and three others taken prisoner by the NVA. The North Vietnamese deployed tanks. We heard them out in the misty night, or imagined we did.
On February 8th, the NVA overran a platoon from Alpha Company, 9th Marines, on Hill 64 before being driven off. Twenty-seven Marines died in that fight.
Meanwhile, the incoming rocked us on a daily basis.
What was it like?
Let some of the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who made it home tell you about the shock and fear. These comments are from the original interviews done for the film BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. Some of the comments made it into our final cut, some of them you have never read. Even though the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, the men often recollected the same events without anyone prompting. That was one of the amazing things about interviewing the men of BRAVO!
Trench at Khe Sanh
All of the men talked a lot about the incoming artillery, rockets and mortars.
And not always in a manner one would expect.
Mike McCauley:
Some of the time the rockets would hit a bunker, the bunker would be destroyed and there would be a rat nest in there with small, baby rats, pink fleshy things, and we’d do away with them. The parents…we’re talking rats. Now I’m not talking about American little mice-rats, I’m talking about rats with fur, huge rats. We wanted to train them to carry our packs.
The incoming seemed like it never ceased and the men remembered that.
Ken Pipes, The Skipper:
Incoming in a defensive perimeter can become very disconcerting and very disturbing, particularly if it goes on around the clock. And ours did.
Peter Weiss:
You’d lose men, not just in the field, but we lost them in those trenches, and latrines and other places.
Tom Quigley:
It was just a constant barrage. You just caught sleep when you could. Your nerves was on edge all the time. You could laugh and joke around, but I mean each day was serious because it seemed like someone was getting it every day, either wounded or killed, unfortunately.
And not just the big stuff, the 152s and the 130s and 120s, the mortars, but other incoming, too.
Ron Rees:
Rounds from a sniper, I mean it was like a mosquito. They were buzzing your head constantly. You just realized that that was a bullet.
The nature of the incoming often gave you time to think about what was coming.
Dan Horton:
You never knew when it was coming until you heard it leaving the tube. Then you knew it was coming but you didn’t know where it was landing. Of course, we had the Khe Sanh Shuffle. We learned to do that real good. Everywhere you moved on base you had to be ready to look for shelter because you never knew.
Frank McCauley:
If you heard it screaming you were safe. If it was a short scream you were in serious trouble.
Ron Rees:
From the time you heard that round leave the tube until its impact, you imagined death. You’re thinking all along, is it you?
Michael E. O’Hara:
Day after day after day and January pretty quick became February and I thought to myself, this is crazy. People don’t understand what it’s like for all that artillery to come in like that. It’s meant to do more than just tear up your body. It’s meant to tear up your mind. It will scare you to death. I’ve told people time and time again, there is no way I can explain it but it’s like a freight train coming through the bathroom when you’re taking a shower. And you know its coming and you can’t get out of the bathroom and it will just scare you to death.
Khe Sanh TAOR
Photo courtesy of Mack McNeeley
Lloyd Scudder:
I was scared to death…that shhhewww and the whistling of the rockets and that poof of the mortars and the kapoof shoooosheeewhirwhirwhir. You know that right there scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t get deep enough in the trench. I don’t care if it was five feet, ten feet, twenty feet, I couldn’t get deep enough.
John “Doc” Cicala:
A lot of fear from everybody. You know, from everybody.
But in spite of all the hell raining down, men still showed courage, showed some attitude.
John “Doc” Cicala:
I saw so many acts of heroism, guys running to help other guys.
Steve Wiese:
Knowing that tonight is going to be another night, you know when the sun goes down, the rockets and mortars are going to start in again and you know it’s just a crap shoot whether you get hit or not.
One night I stood up on the roof of my bunker in the middle of a rocket attack and went, “Hey, here I am, man, take your best shot.” You know, it’s either you get me now or you’re not going to get me. I remember a few rockets came in and I thought, maybe this isn’t agood idea.
Fifty-four years ago today, the Siege of Khe Sanh commenced and for roughly 77 days, the battle roared and the scenes of carnage and death and courage were featured on television screens across America.
While the participants’ families and friends sat in their easy chairs in their living rooms, watching with horror, going to work and church and school with the thoughts of death and fear in their minds, the men who fought the battle dug in.
What was it like?
Let some of the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who made it home tell you. These comments are from the original interviews done for the film. Some of them made it into the final cut, some of them you have never read before. Even though the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, the men often recollected the same events without anyone prompting. That was one of the amazing things about interviewing the men of BRAVO!
Khe Sanh TAOR 1968
Photo Courtesy of Mack McNeeley
On the night before the boom lowered and the siege began some of the men had a sense of foreboding.
KenRodgers:
I went out in the trench and I think I had first watch and as I was getting off watch it was misty. You could see through the mist and there was Puff the Magic Dragon flying around and all you saw was the blur of the tracers and hear the thing and it was moaning. I understood then that something was going to happen.
Cal Bright:
Everything was all nice and quiet. As a matter of fact it was, more or less, too quiet.
The initial eruptions of incoming found most of the men of Bravo 1/26 in their racks. The chaos ripped them out of their sleep and into the trenches and fighting holes.
Dan Horton:
There’s an explosion in the doorway of the hooch. Slammed me against the bulkhead. Then I knew the shit was hitting the fan here. Scared the crap out of me, of course, I was all discombubulated.
Cal Bright:
All Hell broke loose.
Michael E. O’Hara:
I was there digging holes in the trench. I wanted to go down as far as I could go. I was scared.
Lloyd Scudder:
I went outside and tried to curl up in a ball as much as I could. I looked like a turtle underneath my helmet.
Then the ammo dump took a direct hit.
Mike McCauley:
When the ammo dump exploded, man, we thought it was atomic.
Cal Bright:
It was obvious that they, the NVA, had been reconning the area for quite some time because you can’t hit an ammo dump with artillery and rockets and score direct hits without practicing. And it took them no time at all.
Ken Rodgers:
Our own artillery rounds that were stored in the ammo dump were cooking off and shooting straight up into the air and coming down on us.
Tom Quigley:
The NVA rounds had hit our ammo dump, and in the ammo dump was a lot of CS canisters and those went off and the gas started coming in through our hooch.
Mike McCauley:
Nobody had their gas masks with them so everybody’s trying to find a gas mask.
Ken Pipes:
The CS gas that was blown out of the dump was burning and settling into the trenches because it goes to the low ground and into the bunkers.
Debris at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of David Douglas Duncan.
Guys were getting hurt. Guys were dying.
Ken Korkow:
We got a lot of incoming and I’ll tell you, three separate times, incoming was so close to me I didn’t jump down, the concussion of the shell actually knocked me to the ground.
John “Doc” Cicala:
I heard ‘em yelling for a Corpsman and I started running down the trench line and the next thing I know I was looking up at the sky and I heard a Marine calling for a Corpsman and “where the hell is that son-of-a-bitch?” I was kind of lying there dazed and I got up and I picked up my helmet and I had the tail fin of a mortar in the top of my helmet. It must have hit me and knocked me out.
Peter Weiss:
I didn’t know it at the time: the radioman who had been killed. Must have been killed right at the door of the bunker. Touching a body…first time I touched a dead body. It was like, “Oh, my God.”
After hours and hours of explosions, the ammo dump going up, the CS gas in the trenches, things calmed down.
John “Doc” Cicala :
The rest of the morning was just taking care of every guy that had shrapnel wounds.
Mike McCauley:
It was pretty chaotic.
Steve Wiese:
I thought, my God, you’re not going to survive this. Little did I know that it was going to go on for 77 days.
We will be screening BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR in West Jefferson, North Carolina at 3:00 PM on Thursday, November 18. Come join us at the Parkway Theater. Filmmakers Betty and Ken Rodgers will be there in person to talk about the film along with Bruce and Francine Jones. Bruce served with the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines at Khe Sanh as did filmmaker Ken Rodgers.
On November 20th at 10:00 AM at the Library in West Jefferson, we will be screening our second film, I MARRIED THE WAR, about the wives of combat veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq. Francine Jones, one of the strong and courageous women in the film, will be on hand to discuss the project along with the filmmakers, Betty and Ken.
As Veterans Day approaches, our thoughts turn to the wars fought in our lives and our friends and loved ones who served, some living, some now gone. We think of them, see their faces, hear their voices.
Our films speak to some of the issues surrounding war and combat. We wouldn’t have been able to create these stories without the help of all our friends and supporters, who are many. Thank you!
After the Ghost Patrol of 25Feb1968, no larger units sortied outside Khe Sanh combat base for almost a month. We sent out some listening posts but those were small and they went out after dark and came in before sunrise while the mist still hung low to the ground.
But on today’s date fifty-two years ago, as the sun threw up the first hint of daylight, we Marines of Second Platoon, Bravo, 1/26 stood in the trench and smoked our Camels and Winstons and Salems, flinched at the incoming rounds, heard the scrape of scuffed jungle boots in the red mud at the bottom of the trench. Noted some mumbles.
And if fear had sounds, they would have ricocheted in the deep trench, off the walls, against the sandbags. Being Marines, we needed to keep the fright quarantined to a slow boil at the bottom of our guts. We must not entertain the notion of fear because its insidious gnawing weakened us.
And then out the gate we went, crossed over the minefield, got on line and charged across the vale and up the ridge towards the NVA position in the vicinity of where the Ghost Patrol had traveled.
After the Siege. Photo courtesy of Mac McNeely
Our big guns on base boxed us in with ordnance, geysers of red mud, black smoke and the din of combat suddenly crammed in our ears and brains, sucking the breath out of our lungs. And as we headed towards our objective, our allies to the rear, on the base, fired machine-guns over our heads.
As the Marines of my old squad, Third Squad, reached the top of the ridge, explosions erupted among them and then .50 caliber rounds fired by our guys, our allies, our mates, ripped into the men of Third Squad. I saw the rounds hit; flashes and bodies pirouetting, falling.
The explosions I suspect were from NVA mortar rounds and RPG rounds, but the machine-gun fire was what we call friendly fire. Friendly fire.
Up top, while the wounded were medevacked, we got in the NVA trench and headed east. At one point elements of First Squad, who were on point, veered off to the north, away from the trench.
We’d been briefed to stay in the NVA trench because it was believed that the surrounding terrain was infested with booby traps.
When this went down, I had about fifteen days left in the field. I’d survived my twelve month-plus tour by being good at surviving, being lucky, not being heroic, just doing my job and keeping it as low profile as possible.
So I was shocked as I took off, out of the trench, sprinting behind the Marines of First Squad, yelling, “No, no,” and when several turned at my words—and as I think of it now, how they heard me in the furious din that boomed around us—how they weren’t blown up by some of that ordnance and how we all didn’t get blown to smithereens by the mines and booby traps out there where we had wrongly ventured, is a wonder to me to this day.
But, nobody lost legs or died or anything. We just got back in the NVA trench and drove on towards our goal.
Not far from our destination, a gate we could enter through the maze of our own mines and wire and booby traps, the man on point triggered an NVA booby-trapped grenade that went off. He went down, but then got up and a Corpsman went to succor him and after that, we went in, missing some of the men with whom I’d served previously in Third Squad. The squad leader, Corporal Jacobs’ back had been rent by one of those .50 caliber rounds that had been delivered by the friendly fire. He stood there among us like nothing had happened to him.
Author Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael O’Hara.
After we all retired to our area, we shouted and jumped up and down and the Marines sent historians to record our thoughts. I remember relief. I remember a sense of satisfaction, and I also remember feeling extremely elated. How I imagined exaltation. I was bad, I was indestructible. I was alive.
And we’d gotten in their trench. Their trench.
We were…were…were unbreakable, we were shatterproof, we were everlasting.
The thing that sticks in my mind after all these years was that high, that feeling that I stood atop a throne at the apex of the world was at that moment so different from the almost two months of despair that permeated everything that I had lived through. Thousands upon thousands of incoming rounds that shook the ground—some that roared like railroad engines and some that hissed like sneaky spirits—and dismembered men I knew and didn’t know, who at that time and in that place were like twin brothers to me.
I realized that for two months I’d lived on huge doses of luck and that sometime, if the siege did not stop, I’d be hit by a whooshing chunk of shrapnel that would sever an arm or a leg, or I’d be sitting in my bunker and a rocket round would crash through the roof and my fellow Marines would be gathering my parts that were pasted on the sandbag walls, or a sniper would put a round through my brain.
So, having been in their trench, and having survived, and for at least a few hours, having been on top, the aggressor, the winner so to speak. Yeah, I was elated. I was bad.
52 years ago today, one of the most significant events in my memory of Khe Sanh’s siege occurred in what has now become known as the Ghost Patrol. When Marines and Corpsmen from Third Platoon of Bravo Company 1/26 were ambushed by a battalion of NVA, a squad from First Platoon went out to relieve them, and they were ambushed, too. A lot of good Marines, young men with futures that would never be discovered and fulfilled, died that day.
I have written about this a lot over the years I suppose in hopes of finding resolution, and yet I still return to the memories almost daily.
I recall our skipper, Ken Pipes, talking about the event one evening, sadness drooped on his shoulders like a too-heavy mantle. He talked about a patrol on Guadalcanal—the Goettge Patrol, led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge—that was ambushed by Japanese forces and which lost almost its entire 25-man contingent.
Ken Pipes at Khe Sanh.
Skipper Pipes talked about how bad things happen in war and how the Ghost Patrol was another of the long list of actions where Marines were attacked and nearly obliterated. But his and my recognition of this fact of war had no effect, as far as I could tell, in lessening his profound sense of loss, and responsibility, related to the ambush of 25Feb68.
The Ghost Patrol has been the subject of a number of news articles, battle studies, and for a while was used as a case study in the Scouting and Patrolling class at the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico, Virginia where all new Marine Corps officers and warrant officers are trained. One of the things they taught in that course was how it feels to lose your troops/mates in the chaotic heat of battle, and in retrospect, the ensuing grief.
One of the online dictionaries defines grief as “deep sorrow, especially the sorrow caused by someone’s death.”
Grief comes in a variety of types. According to the website WHAT’S YOUR GRIEF (https://whatsyourgrief.com/ ), grief can be prolonged, anticipatory, masked, disenfranchised, secondary, cumulative, inhibited, ambiguous, complicated, normal, traumatic, abbreviated, exaggerated, absent, prolonged, chronic, and collective, to name a few.
Blogger Ken Rodgers while at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.
As far as I can discern from my short appraisal of the types of grief, I suffer—or have suffered, related to the events surrounding the Ghost Patrol: normal, prolonged, complicated, traumatic, chronic and collective grief.
Collective grief, in my case, means that besides my problems with the malady, I am joined by a relatively large number of my fellow Khe Sanh survivors in our grief that is also prolonged and chronic and traumatic.
The French playwright Moliere said, “If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.”
For years, for decades, I tried like hell to stuff the grief I felt from my mates having been massacred on today’s date fifty-two years ago. And from my experience, I can say it probably didn’t help to do that. In the Marines back then, and maybe now, too, you were just supposed to tough it out. War’s hell and all that kind of sentiment, or lack of sentiment thereof. But all my grief demanded to be let out.
I think again of Bravo Skipper Pipes and it seems to me that so much of the life he lived in the too-short time I knew him was dedicated to the memories of the men he led who died at Khe Sanh and especially to all those casualties on 25February1968. His grief was palpable. It was long term. It directed him to constantly search for ways to honor those who didn’t come home.
Steve Wiese. Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers.
Over the years, people have asked me why I don’t just get over it.
When we made BRAVO!, Steve Wiese said it best:
“I’ve had people say, ‘Well, that was 30, 40 years ago. Why don’t you get over it?’ You know, I wish I could. I wish I could get over it. But on the other hand, it’s like I don’t ever want to forget these guys. I don’t want to forget what I’ve seen, what I was witness to. And I don’t want to forget them and their memories.”
52 years ago today I awoke and realized that the end of my life could come at any moment. Before, even though Khe Sanh had been under siege for 20-plus days, I’d been quite optimistic that all would end soon and well.
Bayonet and Scabbard for an M-16
On February 5th, 1968, NVA troops had attacked the Marines of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, penetrating the barbwire lines and a vicious up-close battle ensued.
On February 6th and 7th, 1968, NVA troops had assaulted and overrun the Special Forces Camp at Lang Vei and part of their weaponry—tanks! The first time tanks had been used by the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. All that long and scary night, I heard tanks. Doubt began to slither into my soul like a cobra in the mist. Did I hear them? Didn’t I? Am I crazy? And following doubt, the cold viper of fear followed.
On February 8th, 1968, NVA troops had attacked and penetrated the defenses of Hill 64, manned by Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. A lot of good men died that day in another up-close-and-personal melee.
Misgivings started kicking the inside of my mind. No relief for Khe Sanh was in sight. Supply aircraft were blown out of the sky. The airstrip was damaged. Men I served with were maimed and dying.
Joining the Marine Corps, for me, was an act of pure impulse, like stepping off the edge of a cliff which is shrouded in a thick fog. I fully believed that I would land on my feet on some unseen safe ledge. My optimism defeated any doubt I might have harbored.
But the Marine Corps has trained millions of warriors and they know that when the bullet meets the breastbone and fear begins to gnaw and nibble, the warrior might begin to entertain doubt.
And I believe that’s one reason for the vicissitudes of Marine Corps training. The physical and mental exercises of Boot Camp. The harassment. Then the hard training in what they now call the School of Infantry.
They want to harden your body, your heart, your mind. They want your backbone ramrod straight when the manure hits the fan. They know doubt and they aim to defeat it.
Blogger, Ken Rodgers
But 52 years ago today doubt crept in.
I doubted I could overcome fear.
I doubted my country could save me.
I doubted my ability to do what must be done to survive. The hard things: Die for your brother, charge under deadly fire up a hill with fixed bayonets like Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate Army warriors after he told them, “Give them the bayonet,” and meet your enemy face-to-face. And kill him.
Stonewall Jackson
As the Siege wore on, doubt seeped into my bones, my skin, my attitude, and at times I felt as if the end of the world would show up any minute: A barrage of 152 Millimeter artillery rounds that would obliterate me, the deadly hiss of an 81 Millimeter mortar round hurtling out of the misty sky to send me home in a body bag, or a sniper round that would slap against the side of my head leaving me with a momentary expression of complete surprise before I slumped into the red mud in the bottom of the trench.
But then, after two months of getting pounded, pounded, pounded, we went into action. Action overcame doubt. I still feared mightily every possible way I might die, and I feared other things like what was out there that I didn’t know—yes, all of that. But I needed to concentrate on the tasks at hand, so doubt, for me, didn’t disappear; but it waned.
More than once we charged up hills with fixed bayonets, into the teeth of death, my doubt forgotten because I had a job to do.
Fifty-two years ago this morning, the Siege of Khe Sanh began with a bang when the NVA hit one of the base’s ammo dumps and the world seemed, for that morning at least, to erupt into a volcano of death and fear.
As I write this, I can close my eyes and the visions of that morning and what followed flood me, a wide river of molten hot lava-thoughts that sizzle the inside of my memory.
The night before the siege began, the tension felt so thick we could have ladled it with a spoon. Puff the Magic Dragon, or Spooky as some folks called the plane, circled the combat base that squatted alone, enveloped in fog. The red tracer arcs from Puff’s guns cut great waving sweeps through the damp mist and the moans and groans of the guns led me to ponder ghosts.
The following morning, the world came apart at the seams and I wondered if I would survive the onslaught. But I did, we did, some of us, anyway.
Images of men lying in the trench with smashed leg-bones still haunt me, and the sergeant in the machine gun bunker with a gouge ripped down the shin of his right leg, and our CS gas, released when the dump blew up, sneaking across the red mud to make our lives more difficult, and in the case of some of our Marines, forcing them to operate in deadly situations.
The men I served with at Khe Sanh were stalwarts. I don’t think there is a better word to describe them. Even though we were just a bunch of kids. Kids.
A lot of us didn’t make it out of that hellhole. I think of men I knew well, in that significantly special way warriors know and love each other, who paid the ultimate price for the right to say they were United States Marines.
Moments dart out of the mist of memory. A big, gap-toothed smile, a Marine helping me negotiate an angry, rain-swollen river, a Marine who just loved to dance.
Blogger Ken Rodgers. While at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of the estate of Dan Horton.
One of them I see sitting in a hooch with a bunch of other Marines, his new utilities a stark contrast to the tattered and faded ones I wore. Mine stained with the red mud of Khe Sanh, his looking snappy.
In 2010, Betty and I went to The Wall to take some photos of names and I ran into a fellow looking for the name of that Marine I now envision in my mind. When he found out I knew the man whose name he sought, he broke down in a highly motional moment that keeps creeping into my consciousness, and every time the moment comes, I am reminded of the tentacles of life severed by death.
Right now, their faces, the dead of Khe Sanh, roll through me like a filmstrip. A wink, a frown, a flippant reaction to the guns of the North Vietnamese, a row of freckles on high cheekbones, that particular look you see in the eyes of a Marine who knows he may soon die. Those Marines are here, with me in the moments of my recall even though they’ve been gone fifty-plus years.
They are part of me. Part of the person I have become.
Greetings from BRAVO!. We have some really great news to share.
Last year we sold out of DVDs and it took a while to choose the best source for manufacturing a new lot. But we got it done, and are happy to say there are plenty of brand new DVDs in stock. If you’d like one for yourself, or have been planning to gift DVDs to a veteran, friend, relative, or library, they are again available for purchase here.
If you prefer to watch your movies through digital download, BRAVO! is still available on Amazon Prime Video here.
For your friends or family in the UK, BRAVO! is also available here.
And because you’ve had such a positive impact on our passion for exploring large issues through intimate stories, and educating the world about the cost of war to humanity, we invite you to learn more about our current film project, I MARRIED THE WAR. This new documentary, now in post-production, is the story of wives of combat veterans from World War II to the present. As with BRAVO!, it, too, can educate the wider public and has the potential to reach thousands—if not millions—of citizens who can be helped by this story.
We invite you to join the effort with your financial support, and to learn more about this new endeavor here.
Thank you for your continued interest, encouragement, and support of our efforts to foster a dialogue about the lasting costs of war.
