You hear people talk about moments of sublimity, moments when for a short time, they saw into a bigger arena than the day-to-day mishmash of life.

March 30, 1968, was one of those days for me. It was honor and blood and fear and noise and rage and death and brotherhood—maybe even love—that no one who has not been in the fire of combat will understand.

And not just me, but to the men I served with. Here is some of what they told us in the interviews we conducted with them regarding March 30, 1968.

What you will read below is not in any chronological order. The comments from these Marines are in alphabetical order.

Chaotic, of sorts, just as firefights are chaotic.

Cal Bright:

And then, March 30^th, we went back out and that was payback time. The Skipper would not allow me to be Point, because he knew I had a score to settle. But he did allow me to be on the left flank. And part of the squad that I was covering for was drawing fire from a couple, three bunkers and somebody told me—I was carrying an M-79  grenade launcher at the time—and they said, “We need some rounds over in this one area.”

And so consequently I used them as a guide, like an aiming stake, and they said I got a hole-in-one because the round went right in the doorway. And it eliminated whatever was in it.

Ken Korkow:

As we went out through our wire, we were getting artillery support in front of us. Boom boom.

I saw the Marine Corps at its best. The Marine Corps is really designed to have peace, but you get peace through strength, you get peace through war.

And I started hauling guys back in. I left my cartridge belt and my .45 behind. I looked like a blooming idiot, you know, and I was a blooming idiot. That’s why old politicians send young kids off to war. Young kids are stupid, they’re invincible. They’re caught up with adrenaline, plus when you don’t care if you’re going to die, you are ready to do crazy things.

All I had in my hand was a K-Bar. Again, that’s really pretty stupid. But the K-Bar was just to rip utilities open, make some tourniquets, stop some bleeding, be able to pull another guy in.

This other guy that I brought in, he’s laying on his back and he’s screaming, “My leg, my leg.”

And when I come up, there’s a hole blown in his flak jacket and a bunch of his guts exposed and I’m thinking his leg must really be screwed up. It was his right leg tucked underneath his back. I pulled his right leg out. Just a piece of shrapnel right on his ankle. I thought, Cowboy, you got no clue, your leg’s not your problem. Got him drug on back to a bomb crater.

Going out after another guy, running ahead, again, you didn’t have to look for wounded people. We had a bunch. And on the lip of a bomb crater there’s Ben Long and Steve Wiese, and, as I’m running by, Ben hollers at me, “Get down.”

I turned to him this way and I said, “Come out and enjoy the war.”

And right then three shells got me. The closest one was about two foot away; the furthest one was about 8 foot away. There was one in between and they were either 60- or 61-millimeter mortar and Ben’s got this ruddy complexion, and I mean it just drained, because he’d just seen one of his good men get blown to bits in front of him and he just got this horrified look on his face. It’s drained.

Ben comes out and he says, “We’ll get you back, you’ll be okay,” and I said, “Don’t worry about me, go get that other guy.”

Well, my helmet’s been blown off, I’ve got shrapnel here under the eye, both arms are totally useless, ah, this leg’s got a big hole in it. I’m telling you, I could not have taken another step.

Ben Long:

When the light started coming, it was foggy. And I thought, whoa, this is good. I really think God is with us. Because that covered us from being seen in our advancing on the enemy position and so, we started to advance; we had .50 caliber machine guns that were firing over our heads. We had to go through a little valley.  It wasn’t very deep, but deep enough that we could have cover from the .50 calibers and then as we approached the trench line, they ceased, and at that point what I remember was the fog lifted. And we could see pretty clearly. And we surprised them.

But, they were still in bunkers and trench lines, and it became hand-to-hand, it became very slow progress because they were a well trained unit. They were North Vietnamese regular army people and had been well trained.

Part of my job was to set up a battalion aid station that went out with us. We took a doctor out with us, and so we had set that up, and immediately people were being wounded and so I was starting to help bring wounded back. Bringing some dead back.

I had a 60-mortar group that was with me. Corporal Korkow was in charge of that and he said, “I’ve shot all my rounds, what do you want me to do?”

And so I started using them to help me to bring dead and wounded back.

Corporal Wiese and I ran into a bomb crater. This bomb crater was over our heads, I mean it was a big bomb crater. And we yelled at Corporal Korkow, “Get down, get down.”

But he didn’t do it. And then about six mortars went off. He was riddled. Because he had a flak vest and diaper on, it didn’t kill him.

I remember one went through his helmet. Blood was just pouring down. So we put on a couple of tourniquets and took him back to the doctor.

I really think Captain Pipes was the one that really made this thing a success. He was cool, he was calm, he knew what he was doing, he was wise in his directing of people.

Even though he was wounded, he was still doing it, still directing, and I remember we were pulling back, and he had given orders to pull back, to come back in. He stood outside the wire until the last man was in. Before he would go in himself. He was just a great leader. And we were very fortunate to have him and for him to be guiding us that day.

Frank McCauley:

March 30^th was one of those days where it was just—well, it was the most important day in my life. We got up very early in the morning, probably 4 o’clock in the morning, and were rounded up and we went outside the line.

I can’t believe we made it out through the line, out through the canyon and valleys and came up on that ridge and it was very, very, very foggy.

We broke out of the jungle into a flat, barren, chewed up area of nothing but bomb holes and dirt divots and we saw the end of a trench and a VC come out of the trench and squatted just outside the trench line and took a shit.

Someone said, “Let me get him…shoot him.”

This guy with an M-16 shot him, pow, and he was down.

We had this one guy charging at us. He was probably a hundred feet, maybe a tiny bit farther away, but he was coming right at us, for what reason I don’t know, he didn’t even have a weapon and one of the guys said, “Let me get him, let me get him,” and I’m just there…

I’m a Roman Catholic and I do not wish to take anyone’s life and so I was kind of hoping I could get through this experience without ever using my weapon. I was good with that.

Anyway, this guy took a .45 and he aimed and he shot and he was right beside me and that guy, full bore running at us, folded like a cheap pocketknife, went back maybe a foot in the air and fell to the ground.

This other guy, just beyond that one that came rushing at us knows suddenly, we’re there. So, he is running full bore away from us, and there’s a guy with a LAAW, one of those light armored, ah…like a bazooka. He says, “Let me get him.”

This is so strange because we’re all young idiots and I hadn’t ever killed anyone and I had never fired my weapon except at a range, so I really didn’t wish to play this game, but everyone was really excited about doing this.

The whole weird part was it’s a running human being away from us, and this guy takes this LAAW—It was perfect. That round goes off and you can watch it go through the air and it hit him dead center.  And it just blew up and it was like you could see right through him, schwee, pure light, and he was down.

See, I just wasn’t raised that way, and I didn’t want to participate, and I was really amazed that there were so many people that were greedily trying to kill someone out there. But I guess that’s a good reason because they were actually trying to kill us, too, but I hadn’t come to that realization yet. I just saw us killing them, I hadn’t seen them kill us yet.

I got down behind this tree because I’d already seen a few dead people and I started to get worried that, you know, maybe, gosh, this is not just quite a game, and I peeked up to find out where everyone else was and bark just flew up in my face and I noticed a person beyond and they weren’t fifty feet away and they had dropped down and so I plinked a couple of rounds and I could get down, and we did that two or three times and then I realized this was pop goes the weasel and so I quickly got up there, out of rhythm, and when he came up I just squeezed and shot and the oddest thing, my instructor from the range in Camp Pendleton was there explaining to me about breathing and squeezing.

I took my first shot—right in the head, right in the forehead.

I had just done something I really didn’t wish to do and twenty feet away, is another pop goes the weasel but he’s shooting at my guys over here. He’s only twenty feet away and he keeps popping up and shooting. I didn’t want to think too much about it; for one thing he’s shooting live ammo at my people, so I just took aim and waited and as he did it, I played the game again where I just squeezed and shot. I hit him dead, right through the temple and he was gone.

I’m sitting there going, this ain’t good. I was supposed to be with others so I kind of moved and rolled away and went down into this giant crater that was left by some big B-52 bomb that was about ten feet deep and probably twenty feet across and a little puddle of water at the bottom and I’m sitting there, crouched on the edge of the bowl.

It scared the shit out of me because when I first rolled into there, I could see some green uniforms and then I thought, oh shit, and then I realized that they were American uniforms but they were three  dead Americans laying there sprewed across the sides of the ditch.

Then all of a sudden something catches my eye and this guy comes charging in—one of our guys—and he gets down and his head’s just about ground level and then he goes woooom and whips back, his helmet flies and he falls right at my feet and his brain goes across the dirt and I’m sitting there on the side of this hill looking at this guy and he’s like a gold fish, his eyes are bulging like a Chihuahua.

And then all of a sudden somebody else comes down and it’s a guy who’s been shot and so he’s sitting over there and then another guy comes in that’s a Corpsman and I tell the Corpsman, “You gotta help this guy,” and he comes quickly over and he starts to push the brain back into the skull, and he goes, “I can’t do anything for this guy,” and he quickly goes over to the guy who had his arm shot.

So I’m sitting there in this hole watching a Corpsman work on somebody, and a guy who’s gulping at me, and three dead along the edge, and I go, this ain’t the hole I need to be in. So I quickly crawled out and the incoming was coming like crazy, mortars, and so I saw a small hole, someplace to save my ass, so I haul butt and I jumped with my rifle in my hand, and as I was getting through the air I suddenly realized—and you can’t stop because you’re…you’re in the air heading for this hole–that it’s occupied. It’s got dead people in it, which I didn’t know until after I did a pushup in the air and did not go down on him.

I’m face to face with a guy who’s been dead for quite a while, and he had very little skin on his face. On his skull, it’s just parchment, skin peeled like a creek bottom that’s been dried out, and he’s got maggots coming out of his eye sockets but no eyes, and coming out of his nose and then below him is another guy in the same shape. These are two decayed, bad-news bodies. but they’re not ours, they are Vietnamese.

I finally met up with my machine gun guy—I was supposed to be the A-Gunner to him—and came into a hole, and this other tall Corporal came in and he decides that the reason everyone else around us is dying is because there’s a machine gun nest over there and it’s like a 150 feet away and it’s nothing but more than a big sandbag with a tiny slit in it and they’re ripping on us, and so he says, “Come on, it’s our job, we got to knock it out.”

I’ve seen enough war movies to realize the first wave on a machine gun nest doesn’t make it. He goes, “Come on, let’s go,” and he actually tried to drag me and the machine gunner out of that hole and head for that spot, and I hadn’t even seen it yet.

I go, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.”

Okay, we will do it because that’s kind of what we are supposed to be doing. But I wanted to just see what we were doing, I mean, once I left the bomb hole I really would love to find out where we were going. I don’t want to go out of that hole blind. So I took a peek and I could see the sandbag, and I could see where it was at and I said, “Okay.”

I put a new clip in and I looked at the dirt in front of me and I thought, that’s cool, that’s the last thing I’m going to see because I’m going to fall right face down in that shit when I leave this hole.

So, we charged out of there, all three of us, and I was in the middle, and the machine gunner was here, and the knucklehead was here and a third of the way there, he spun, got hit and left us.

I put every round, all twenty rounds dead center through that little teeny weeny slit and the machine gunner was chewing up those sand bags and we made it, we made it, and jumped over the sandbags and there’s this big pit and two dead gooks and of course the guy with the machine gun, his adrenaline is flowing, but he just blasts them anyway.

I got hit in the leg with shrapnel. A bomb, a mortar, went off right next to my leg and it violently rolled me over. I lost my helmet, lost my rifle.

I laid there in shock because I could feel my leg was burning but I couldn’t feel anything below the burn. All I could feel was cool wet which actually is kind of weird for blood.

I look down and my boot and leg—everything was still there and I’m thinking, well it’s got to be separated, so I wiggled my toes and my toes wiggled back in my boot and I went, ah, shit, it felt like my boot was filling up and overflowing with blood but I still had a leg.

I worked my way down and into a trench and headed toward where we had come in, and lo and behold, the steps that leave the trench where we first shot that guy taking his morning dump, there’s the guy that led the charge against the machine gun nest and he is half passing out and he clutches me. He’s clutching me. He’s going, “Help me, help me.”

And I’m thinking, ah, man, my leg, I can’t.

There’s a Marine crawling next to us, headed towards the rear, and he’s wounded and then suddenly I see this guy coming, and boom, he whips his head, helmet splits, and he’s got no chin. He grabs his chin–all he’s got are upper teeth and a big giant tear in his neck–and he grips it and throws his rifle down and spins and starts running back, but no, in just a matter of two steps he stopped and grabbed the guy on the ground and they both hobbled away toward the rear and I’m thinking shit, if a guy with no chin can help somebody, then with my little dumb leg I can probably do it.

So I say, “Okay,” and I got him in a fireman’s carry and we walked out. I’m gimping and then suddenly automatic machine gun fire opened up on us and he takes a round, I can feel when it hit. He moves on my body and I went holy shit and I went like as fast as—I was flying, I don’t think I even touched ground much, but I hauled ass with him on my back.

I saw a hole and I just chucked him and fell in on top of him. And unfortunately, on that run his arm, which had already been wounded, got hit again and the arm was gone.

It was one of those days. Definitely one of those days.  Anyway, that was my experience with my first kill, and to see people die, and you don’t want your children to experience that.

That’s why I don’t believe in war anymore.

Mike McCauley:

I said, “Ah, oh man, fix bayonets?” At this time, I’m saying this is the real deal and I told the rest of the guys, “Fix bayonets,” and I could see on their faces what it must have looked on me because this is not good. Fix bayonets.

It was almost like popcorn being made, where you heard pop…pop…pop…pop, pop, pop, and then guns started opening  up everywhere, automatic weapons, a lot of small arms, and then we hit the trenches and all hell broke loose, and ah, flames were going off, LAAWS were being shot, rifles,

I jumped into a trench. There was an NVA soldier, he didn’t know what the hell was going on, as much as we did, and I shot him, and I remember his eyes and I remember him going down.

Minutes were hours, hours were seconds, I don’t know how—I don’t even remember how—everything slowed down and speeded up and it was just crazy.

Michael O’Hara:

5 o’clock in the morning always comes too quickly, especially when you are doing something like this. It’s pitch black. Foggy. You couldn’t see.

There were three platoons. Our platoon, Second Platoon, went out of the wire first, ahead of the company and we set up a point where the rest of the company could come and pass through us.

Everything’s cool, nothing’s going on yet, and then the first and the third platoon came out and swept through our position.

First and Third Platoon were the ones that went into the jaws of the tiger first. They went through holy hell. And they paid a terrible price for it.

The order came back to fix bayonets. And that’s when everybody knew this deal was on. It was now.

And we had a ringside seat to it all. And there is really no way to explain what was going on there. I mean, it was flame throwers, it was rockets. Eddie Pendergras, he’s running around with 60 mortars, just sticking it on the ground and dropping into the tube and just pooomp, doing it by ear, you know, Kentucky windage, and they are shooting machine guns at this kid and he’s just dropping them all over the place.

We started setting up in squad rushes and when it was time for my squad to go, Jake says, “Let’s go,” and so we all went forward, and for just a minute we all broke discipline. Once he said, “Go,” we all just took off—and he like to never got us stopped—so we could provide the cover fire we were supposed to.

When I got in those trenches, First and Third Platoon had killed so many of them people that there were just bodies everywhere. I don’t think my foot ever touched the ground. And I was in that trench, I know, for over an hour.

The next moment, the next minute, the next hour it was just—well I will carry it with me the rest of my life.

It was just bodies to your kneecaps in there.

I don’t know if it was Captain Pipes, or who it was said, “Pick that Marine up and take him back.” And I bent down and picked him up and it was Hank Norman.

And everybody just loved him, he was just a great guy. He was just a hell of a nice guy and when I saw who it was, I just—it was just a real ass-kicker, just represented all the heartache of Bravo Company right there, all the names, right there in the bucket, all of them, and I picked him up and put him over my shoulder.

And Kenny Pipes was standing there and I thought to myself, my god, he was blood from one end to the other, I mean he was soaked in it. I thought he’d been hit by machine gun fire, but the guy was standing up, and he had been wounded severely in his armpit and he’d been shot right in the head with a rifle, although it didn’t penetrate his helmet liner, it just hit his helmet. And he had two radios and he was talking to the air on one radio, and he was talking to the artillery on the other radio. And here, all his best friends are laying right here dead at his feet and this guy’s still taking care of business, you know, he’s not losing it, he’s not passing out, he’s taking care of business, and we’ve got bodies laying everywhere.

And then I took Lieutenant Norman and I carried him back. I don’t know how far it was, but I will always remember he weighed so much, he was so heavy my legs ached so bad. And I just kept telling myself, don’t you dare drop him, whatever you do, don’t drop him. And I got back to the APC and there’s just bodies stacked in the damned back, and I laid him down just as gently as I could, and then we began cleaning the mess up.

You just…you just don’t know what it’s like to see a 19 year old kid—I believe it was Rash, but I’m not sure—I think it was Rash, laid out on his belly in the mud, sticking his rifle that direction, gives you the thumbs up and tells you to go that [the opposite] direction, and he knows damned good and well he’s never going to get up out of that mud. He knows he‘s dying for you. And people just cannot understand that.

I have something that most people in the rest of the world will never own, no matter how wealthy they become, or how smart they are, or what they know, but for a little bitty space in time, I was allowed the distinct privilege and the high honor of walking across hallowed ground with the bravest Marines that have ever worn the uniform and it was my privilege. And I will honor their memory until I take my last breath.

Ken Pipes—Company Commander of Bravo:

There was a building anger and a building desire to get outside the wire and to kill as many of them sons-o’-bitches as we could kill.

It was looking the tiger in the eye and riding the elephant.  And I think we carried away from that a lot of things, but the tiger blinked and the elephant knew we could ride him. And we did.

Was it a payback? Was it a payback? I don’t think so. Because the price that we paid then and before, you can’t put a price on. It can’t be bought. I think we proved that retribution was made. And I saw and was part of some of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.

To see the men of Bravo Company moving out with fixed bayonets and going through those trenches, almost fearlessly, was one of the most amazing things I have ever been a part of in my whole life.

And it just signifies and exemplifies what a fine group of Marines that we were fortunate to be a part of.

My God, what men.

Tom Quigley:

Captain Pipes gave me an order to fix bayonets, and at that time it seemed like, all of a sudden, reality sunk into me. I mean, I don’t know what I thought I was doing out there. I mean, this wasn’t a sunny picnic, but it didn’t really hit me that this was going to be a major encounter, a major battle, and my heart just sunk in my throat, you know.

He said, “Call the other platoons and tell them to fix bayonets,” so I got on the radio, and I advised Bravo 1 and Bravo 3, “This is Bravo 6…fix bayonets.”

I had said to the captain when he gave me the order…I said, “Do what?”

And he said, “Be advised to fix bayonets.”

One of the platoon radio operators came back to me and said, “Do what?”

I said, “Be advised to fix bayonets.”

And then I started looking around and I was seeing these Marines taking bayonets out of their backpacks, out of their pants leg, their cartridge belt, wherever they had them, putting them on the end of their rifles and then again, I thought to myself, this is the Real McCoy. It finally hit me, even though I’d been hurt twice earlier, I may not come back from this day.

It seemed like we had just started out, and then a round or two of small arms fire went off and then it just seemed like Charlie all of a sudden realized we were out there. And, once that happened, then all hell broke loose.

Once we started going, there was no walking. All of a sudden, it was an all-out assault. And we started running.

Our command group consisted of the five of us. There was Captain Pipes, his battalion radio operator, Lance Corporal Bragg, I carried the company radio, and then there was Lieutenant Hank Norman who was our artillery forward observer and his radio operator.

The first bomb crater I remember we got in, rounds hit right outside the bomb crater. And the Skipper said, “We got to get the hell out of here, they’ve got us spotted.”

And, then we got into an NVA trench line and at this time the fighting was intense. I mean, there was charging, there was shooting, there was grenade throwing, satchel charges, flame throwers.

Somehow I ended up next to a man with a flame thrower and again, talking like we’re talking here, I asked him, “How long does one of those tanks last of the fire,” and whatever he told me, it wasn’t any time at all—just seconds, and I said to  him, “Well that doesn’t seem very long.”

He said, “If you’re on the other end of it, it’s an eternity.”

As we went further into the NVA trench line, I remember Lieutenant Norman behind me. He had seen our senior Corpsman get hit with shrapnel by a mortar and he had started to stand up and say, “Doc’s been hit,” and when he did, I was crouched in the trench line. I had one hand on my rifle and the other hand on my receiver, and I turned around to hear what he said.

And by that time, several rounds of enemy mortars fell right on top of us, and it took Lieutenant Norman right out. His radio operator was hit, his face kind of busted out bloody, blood running through his fingers. I was hit, Captain Pipes was hit, and his battalion radio operator was also hit.

We were all knocked out, just in a matter of seconds. The rounds came in and knocked every one of us out and then, like I said, unfortunately killed Lieutenant Norman. And I wasn’t more than six feet, seven, eight feet from him. And he took the brunt of the round that I caught shrapnel in my side and my hand had also busted out in blood. I thought I had lost a few fingers but then I found out later it was concussion had forced the blood from out of the pores of my hand.

I could feel the blood start dripping down my back and a Marine from mortars came crawling through the line and I said, “Man, get this radio off my back,” and he unhooked me.

I was able to wiggle out of it. The senior Corpsman, who was also wounded, ended up putting a bandage on me and he probably saved my life because he told me later—we were in the same hospital ward in Japan, Yokosuka—that when I first had asked him how bad it was he said it wasn’t bad at all and then he told me later when I had asked, he said blood was just spurting.

Ken Rodgers:

I’ve got 2 days to go in-country. I really don’t want to be here doing this, fellas, ’cause I’m going home. I’m supposed to go home in two days.

But they didn’t care.

And I had to go because if I didn’t, I couldn’t face my fellow Marines.

Sergeant Alvarado, who was the platoon sergeant, and I ran up through all this mayhem, bodies everywhere, people wounded, and the Skipper, the company commander, was down in a shell hole and there was blood coming out of his ears and his nose and all these guys laying around there dead.

We ran up in front of everybody and Lieutenant Dillon says to me, “Well, mark the spot so they know where you are at.”

I said, “I don’t know what color.”

He said, “It’s a canary!” So I reached and got a yellow smoke grenade and threw it out there and it billowed up, and right then this barrage of artillery—right out in front of us, American  stuff—just flattened everything out there.  And then we just started moving back and picking up the dead Marines.

One of the other platoon commander’s radio man got shot, and by that time we had too many radio men, so they sent me with this guy.

I don’t remember why, but we were going towards the rear and he kept getting out of the North Vietnamese trench and I kept yelling at him to get back in the trench because there were booby traps. I could see these Chinese claymores hanging in the dead trees and he got out of the trench again and was running down the side of the trench and he tripped something and this white phosphorus booby trap came up and hit him and blew off his jaw, if I remember right.

White phosphorus is poison and burns on contact with the air. So his face was burning and I was putting mud on his face. I was really angry at him because I got hit in the face with this stuff. So I was mad at him for not doing what I told him.

I think maybe out of a hundred guys, we had maybe ninety wounded, had quite a few casualties and dead. We killed a bunch of them.

It went on four or five hours like that, up close and personal combat. That was what you joined the Marines for. Be careful what you wish for.  What you join the Marines for is that moment of truth. That was a moment of truth for me and probably for everybody there.

Peter Weiss:

We went on the move and we moved forward fairly smartly, and there was a lot of action going on. At one point I remember I was lying down in a bomb crater, right at the edge, and a grenade came at me, and I mean two feet from me. It’s one of those great stories, there was nobody around to jump on it and be a hero and I just laid there and I started trying to slide away from it, but it never went off and I thought, whoa, now I can move forward. God is with me.

We swept forward, probably went through at least a half dozen bunkers and personally, one guy in front, shooting into the bunkers while a guy went around and dropped grenades into each of these bunkers.

There was corporal whose name was Wayne Moore. His father had been a Marine and he was a tough, tough, kid. And he’s with me and we’re moving forward and he said, “This is the best. When I get out of the Marine Corps, this is what I want to do.” And I thought, are you crazy?

We were right next to each other, he was killed. Boom. He’s dead. Wham.

We moved forward and then we could see NVA soldiers coming from that little village below. We had gone that far, and we knew about where we were supposed to stop. Because Pipes said, “You stop when you see the road.” And we saw the road. So we fired at these guys, and we took a couple of them down.

We retreated and just so happened to find Donald Warren’s body laying about where we had started. And I picked it up and how heavy it is to carry someone who is dead.

Steve Wiese:

Captain Pipes sent the word out on the radio and said, “Fix Bayonets” and that took me totally back. You know, like, fix bayonets? That just brought instant pictures of hand-to-hand combat. I can remember telling the guys in the squad, “Okay, everybody, fix bayonets,” and they were like, “What?

It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then.

We started to sweep in towards that tree line and when that opened, we were kind of pinned down there for a while and there was firing going on back and forth and Wayne Moore jumped up. It was like he’d had enough and he jumped up and charged that machine gun bunker and he was shot several times and didn’t make it, and when he went down, Author Smith jumped up and he charged that bunker and he was shot a couple of times but he made it into the trench line and Author was in the trench line shooting his rifle, going into the machine gun bunker, pulled out his bayonet and the last thing I saw of him was fighting with a bayonet in the bunker.

And he basically took that bunker.

And all of a sudden there was just a big roar, and everybody jumped up and we all started charging the line. And I remember us running toward that line firing. I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing…it was like a ribbon effect. Everybody down that line was just getting up and taking off towards that trench.

These guys, Wayne and Author, were closer than brothers. We had gone through a lot. It was a tough day.

That was a pretty good firefight, that was a pretty good battle going on. It went on for several hours and I got to see some of the most heroic actions anybody could ever witness. To charge a machine gun bunker, that’s a tough thing to swallow.

But I’m glad I’m alive to say it, too, to be a witness to it. So, how I made it out of there, a typical guy, with hard times dealing with the war, is why did I make it out, you know? Why didn’t I get shot that day, when everybody around me was falling, I guess it wasn’t meant to be.

After most of the battle, when we were trying to regroup, Lieutenant Long—he was XO at that time—saw me, and here was a guy that was hit by a mortar, and he was pretty badly wounded, and the lieutenant called me over and needed help. When we picked him up we pulled him back to the rear and I just remember thinking this guy, you know, was almost a waste, I mean why are we trying to drag this guy back?

I just assumed he died and one of my memories of that was this guy, basically a dead man to me, five years ago, I think, I get a phone call. I was coming back from a job and I get a call on my cell phone and he goes, “Do you believe in guys coming back from the dead?”

And I’m like…I say, “What?”

He told me who he was and he goes, “I just remember this blond-haired angel dragging me out.”

That was pretty amazing, to find out this guy had actually survived and was doing well. His name is Ken Korkow, and he ended up getting a Navy Cross that day for his actions.

Sometimes there’s good things that come out, you know. That was one of the good things, to get that phone call.

Somebody actually made it back and survived when you didn’t think he was, you know, alive.

***

Like I said earlier in this blog:

Chaotic

~ By Ken Rodgers

_______________________________

Thank you for reading, and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this blog, our films, and stories with friends and other veterans. 

BRAVO! Common Men, Uncommon Valor can be viewed on Amazon Prime. We also have DVDs available, which can be ordered on our website at https://bravotheproject.com.

You can find information about our companion film featuring eleven courageous spouses of combat veterans from various eras at https://imarriedthewar.com. I Married the War can be viewed on Amazon. DVDs are also available via the website.

As I sat on a cot in a bunker shooting the breeze with some other Marines, Staff Sergeant Alvarado came down the trench line. I heard his jungle boots in the dirt. He stuck his head in the bunker and nodded at me. “You’re rotating home, Rodgers.”

I said, “Now?” The day I’d waited over twelve months for had finally arrived? A couple of days before he’d said the same thing and when I jumped up and ran out of the bunker, a different one, shouting, “I’m gone, I’m gone,” he stood against the wall of the trench with his arms folded before he burst into laughter and said, “Just messing with you.

This time he nodded. “You are going home. Get your gear.”

I gathered my web gear and wool blanket and poncho liner and then hurried to Supply for my sea bag before going to the platoon command post to make sure I was out of there. Lieutenant Dillon wished me well, and Alvarado gave me a package to mail to his uncle in Texas. I rushed to the company office for my orders and then to the command post to get my orders endorsed by the Skipper.

The bunker was packed with Marines: radio operators, the gunny, the executive officer, Mr. Long, and the Skipper looking battered by war and wearing an arm in a sling.

Mr. Long looked at my orders and told me I wasn’t due to rotate until the following day, but the Skipper looked at me, smiled and remarked, “He did a good job out there the other day. Let him go.”

Mr. Long said, “Okay, but you may get some resistance from Battalion when you go to get your orders endorsed.”

In the span of less than an hour, I saw the last of—at least for over four decades—the best officers I ever served under in the USMC: Ken Pipes, John Dillon, Ben Long.

At Battalion Headquarters I was routed into the office of a major whose name I do not remember. I reported, at attention, and said what I’d come to do. He looked at my orders and then at me and at my orders and said, “Were you on that patrol on the 30^th?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

“What was your job?”

“Radio operator for Second Platoon’s platoon sergeant.”

He nodded and looked at my orders, then looked at me with an icy stare before signing. My heart thumped and danced. I was going home.

Before handing me my orders, he stood and stuck out his hand. I was shocked. No officer had ever shaken my hand. I took it, we shook, he said, “You Marines are what makes the Marine Corps the finest light infantry the world has ever known. Semper Fidelis.”

He teared up and I did too and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I went down the trench to the location where you caught choppers down to the coast. We sat in a low spot as CH-46s, Hueys and CH-34s came in and out hauling men and ammo and gear, taking body bags. I waited.

A Marine I served with before Nam came along, told me he’d been with 1/9 and was going home. We waited.

Dust blew when the choppers landed and took off.

We waited.

A breeze blew in and rattled the black body bags.

We waited.

Then we finally boarded a CH-46, circled the base once and then flew east. I didn’t sit. The crew chief told me to sit. I stood. I imagined flying over NVA emplacements and taking gunfire through the bottom of the chopper and I figured if I stood it would lessen the chances of taking rounds through the ass.

We crossed wild and green country pocked by bomb craters and then a land of rice paddies before we landed at Dong Ha close to the north coast of South Vietnam. At the transient barracks I checked in, grabbed a rack in a hooch, took a long, long, long shower, the hot water like memories of home. Then chow, hot, too…real food.

Later, a bunch of us stood around the hooches and smoked our nicotine. I kept imagining incoming. I looked for holes to hide in. There were slit trenches outside each hooch. I knew where I’d head. The entire time we stood there I never said a word about the ordeal at Khe Sanh, and the 1/9 Marine who’d ridden out of Khe Sanh with me didn’t either.

The next morning, I woke early, headed to the air strip for a ride to Phu Bai and our battalion rear. A Marine I’d served with at Camp Pendleton sat on a table waiting for a ride. We talked for a minute, where he’d been, where I’d been. Originally we’d both been in Bravo but then he got an opportunity to go to a cush job at Division as a courier. I remember when it happened. We were on 881 S in May of 1967. He came over and found me and told me he was leaving.

There at the Dong Ha airport, I told him he’d made the right decision. He nodded. A plane landed and I got on. I marched to Headquarters, turned in my weapon and assorted other gear and found a hooch full of men from Bravo Company. In the morning, I drew pay and we bought beer and got a galvanized tub and ice from the chow hall and took it all back to the hooch and started to enjoy a moment when no one was trying to kill us.

We hadn’t had a full can when the duty officer at the battalion rear, a 1^st lieutenant, burst through the door with an indignant look on his face. I tried to explain. I said it was my fault, I was going home, so to hell with him.

He wasn’t sympathetic. So we hauled the iced beer up to the headquarters office. As we came in, there sat Major Bruce A. Green who liked to remind us that when he was a captain and our company commander, that BA stood for badass.

He was another officer I respected for his courage and integrity. I’d walked point for him many times during our occupation of Hill 881 South in the fall of the year.

When he first cast his fierce glance on me, I winced, but he never said a word. That night, my beer was shared with everybody in the transient barracks at Battalion Rear.

The next morning, I caught a flight to Danang.

I checked in at the new transient barracks.

A staff sergeant said, “You’re way behind on your inoculations. Time to get them caught up.”

I said, “I’m going home, Staff Sergeant, so I don’t really need any more shots.”

He said, “You want to go home?”

I caught a bus out to the dispensary and checked in. The corpsmen lined up on my right and left, needles in their hands, smiles on their faces. I’ve forgotten the list of inoculations. It was long and painful. I was a pincushion. They enjoyed delivering my discomfort. Later the lymph nodes in my underarms swelled.

I headed for the PX and on the way ran into Q Ray Jacobs, my old squad leader. We sat at a counter and ate cheeseburgers and drank milk shakes. What a glorious indulgence, a reward for still having all our limbs, the eyes, the body.

We headed to the Navy hospital to check on some of our comrades who’d been wounded on March 30, but when we got there, we found out they’d been transferred to hospital ships or to Japan.

Then we headed to the club over by the airfield. We started strong, beer and beer and beer, before we headed to see Jake’s buddy who was in a missile battery nearby.

We joined him at the enlisted men’s club to visit and watch a film. I ordered a case of beer for our table but the club manager, some staff sergeant, shut the club down because he suspected we’d create some mayhem even after I offered to spread the beer around. The usual dose of nightly beer ran at two cans so I figured by sharing, it was okay to go ahead and watch the movie. But he shut it down anyway.

Outside, Jake said goodbye to his friend, and we staggered off to find the transient barracks. Right before we exited the missile installation, Jake said, “Wait,” and we headed back to the club, darting from shadow to shadow like we were warriors.

When we got there, we noticed the lights were on inside and Jake said, “Get up on the roof.” I did.

He followed and whispered, “When that son-of-a-bitch comes out, let’s jump him. You get his legs and I’ll pound his head.”

And we did.

We awoke in a tent full of cots in a field full of tents, the sun shining, the sound of planes taking off and landing. Our heads hammered and our mouths were dry. Jake headed for the airfield and a flight back to Bravo and I headed to the transient barracks where I lay in bed all day and fretted about getting home.

That night I boarded a bus to the airfield and went through an inspection of all my gear. As I stood in line with the contents of my sea bag spread on a table, Michael O’Hara, who’d been in my fireteam in the fall of 1967, entered with another detail of men headed home. He grinned and laughed and said, “Three purple hearts, going home six months early.”

Outside, waiting for a ride, I saw another bus head out. O’Hara smiled at me through a window. My detail then went to the airfield, boarded a C-130 and headed for Okinawa.

When we departed the plane, a group of snappy Marine NCOs waited for us and began a litany of orders, suggestions, and how they too had been in Nam, so they understood everything that was going through our minds and thoughts.

I looked down the line at the two-hundred or so filthy, thin, gaunt-faced Marines and back at the starched utilities on the men doing the talking. Somone on our side laughed. The sound, for a moment, was alone and singular, but then, another and another until we all laughed.

The next morning, they stuck me on a work detail to clean the base officers’ quarters. I did it until noon and then went AWOL playing basketball by myself in a gym devoid of other Marines.

At night I hit the EM club and beer and beer and beer and the new music I’d never heard: Van Morrison, Spencer Davis Trio, Aretha.

On the day we departed for home—the day I’d wanted for almost thirteen months, on that day—we loaded onto a Continental Airlines 707 headed for El Toro Air Station outside Santa Ana, California.

We sat in the plane on the tarmac for over an hour as the pilot kept reassuring us we would go home and the civilian flight attendants, all women, moved back and forth, delivering soft drinks and water. It had been months since any of us had seen women like those. And if the others were like me, we dreamed.

I sat next to a porthole window on the side of the flight and watched B-52s lumber down the runway, their wings waving up and down as if they bid me farewell. I thought about their destinations and the bombs falling and the bodies blown into little bloody chunks and wondered if some of them were headed to my former Khe Sanh home where my mates might still be locked in deadly combat.

After we took off, I sat on the edge of my seat like a kid on the way to the Dairy Queen for his first ever soft serve cone.

As we flew east, the pilot pointed out the island of Iwo Jima. I looked out the window as we flew over and it was so small, so insignificant there in the miles and miles of sky and scudding clouds, the ocean.

I felt deep in my guts the rage and anger of the place, and wondered if, decades later, Khe Sanh might feel the same in posterity. And to me.

After arriving at El Toro, we were bused to the LA airport. I had called and called my folks from LA but there was no answer, so I called my best friend Mikel’s mother—funny how after over a year, her phone number was banked in my memory—and she said she’d pass the word.  

As I waited to catch the plane, I found a bar and ordered a beer. I looked at all the hustle and bustle. I half expected people to welcome me home. But I don’t think they cared.

I was joined by a boot Marine headed out on leave before he hit the ground in Nam. He asked me what it was like. I tried to tell him.

I said the same thing I’d been told upon arriving in Nam, “Keep your head down.”

I arrived in Tucson greeted by Mikel, his fiancé, Susan, also a good friend, and my parents. We went to Mikel and Susan’s favorite Mexican food restaurant, El Charro, and as we ate tacos and burros and enchiladas, I tried to tell the four of them what I’d been through at the Siege of Khe Sanh.

As I talked, and the talk was disjointed and halting, not one of them looked at me.

After fifty-seven years, the salient image in my mind from that moment is the light shining toward me from the top of my father’s balding head.

~ Ken Rodgers

_____________________________________

Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! can be viewed on Amazon Prime. We also have DVDs available, which can be ordered on our website at https://bravotheproject.com.

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

Fifty-one years ago today at Khe Sanh, Marines from 1st and 3rd Platoons of Bravo/1/26 went out on patrol from the combat base and walked into an ambush that killed 27 Marines and Corpsmen and wrecked the psyches and memories of a hell of a bunch of young warriors.

This event, now known as the Ghost Patrol, has been written about a lot by both me and other folks, and it was the subject of a field problem in the Scouting and Patrolling Course at the United States Marine Corps Basic School where all new Marine Corps officers and warrant officers receive training. So what I say here isn’t any revelation of new events.

What strikes me now, after all these years, is how raw the memories can be when someone recalls the names, the weather, the terrain, the terror of that day.

For those who survived, the memories are indelibly scratched into the psyche and cannot be kicked out of the mind. For those of us there who witnessed that massacre in one way or another—what happened—the memories are also pretty much inescapable.

Marines on The Ghost Patrol. Photo Courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar

But it’s not just the combatants who live with images of those men. There are also the families who haven’t been able to forget, either.
Since Betty and I made BRAVO!, we have had a lot of communications with folks who lost family members at Khe Sanh.

I recall one day picking up my cell phone and seeing I had a voicemail message from the brother of a Marine killed on the Ghost Patrol. He had found me by chance when he discovered a DVD of BRAVO! in a museum. He hadn’t known about the film until then, and was stunned to see his brother’s name listed in the litany of the dead from that terrible day, February 25. We talked a number of times and I told him I did not know his brother, but if I could help him with any info, I’d be happy to do so.

Then I remembered that a friend of ours had sent a donation to memorialize this Marine in the film credits. In fact, he had recovered the Marine’s remains when a patrol from Bravo and Delta Companies, 1/26, went out and retrieved them.

Here’s what really sticks with Betty and me. My Marine buddy and the brother were able to meet up and talk about memories, about what happened, and hopefully the get-together helped the deceased Marine’s brother process the recollections and questions that had flooded his mind for over fifty years.

Stark image from the Ghost Patrol. Photo courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar

Not long after, I received a call from another man whose brother was also KIA on the Ghost Patrol. I knew that Marine, not well, but still, we’d arrived at Bravo Company about the same time and although he went to a different platoon, my recollections of his renown as a joker, a gung-ho Marine, an ebullient young man who entertained his comrades, matched the brother’s memories.

We discussed that Marine and the film and I could tell from the telephone conversation that what I said had helped him settle something in his thoughts—what it was I have no idea, but it was palpable over the phone.

When we set out to make BRAVO! it was an endeavor to tell the story, preserve the history if for no one else, at least for me. But the creation of the film has turned into so much more for not just Betty and me, but also for lots of other folks who have those memories and ties that they don’t want to chuck out like a set of dirty dungarees. After all the years, the intimate pain still grates.

BRAVO! lives on and as proof, we have more screenings coming up in March.

Blogger Ken Rodgers while at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

On March 9, 2019 at 5 PM the film will be screened at the Paramount Theatre in Casa Grande, Arizona—my hometown—in association with the Arizona Marine Corps League’s spring convention. The screening is open to the general public. The event will begin with a panel discussion followed by the film, then a Q&A will end the evening. Proceeds from the event—a $10 advance donation per attendee or $15 at the door or VIP seating at $15.00—will go towards funding the Marine For Life program that helps Marine Corps veterans and their families transition from active duty to civilian life, including education opportunities, employment and other veteran and community resources. More details about the event can be found here: https://m901.org/category/event/.

On March 29, 2019, BRAVO! will be shown in La Grande, Oregon (our Oregon premiere!), as part of the local Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans celebrations. More details soon.

We look forward to seeing you at these events, and greatly appreciate your help in spreading the word. Semper Fi.

***

BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime.

This link will take you directly to BRAVO!’s Amazon Prime site where you can take a look at the options for streaming: In the US you can stream at https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

In the United Kingdom, you can stream at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BZKJXBM.

***

If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town, please contact us immediately.

***

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject?ref=hl.

The Christmas season is upon us and as I do every year, I think about many of the Christmases I’ve lived through including my tour with the 26th Marines in Vietnam.

In the house where I grew up, we celebrated Christmas with lots of hoopla and family and giving and eating and singing Christmas carols, getting bicycles and sleeping bags and new shotguns. So when I went to Nam, I harbored expectations that Christmas might still be something special. But it wasn’t, at least not in the traditional sense of the festivities to which I was accustomed.

A story that I often see mentioned in articles on the internet describes Christmas on the Western Front, World War I, 1914. Across the British-German trench lines, combatants on both sides met and observed spontaneous and unofficial truces and exhibited a more Christ-like behavior to one another than they had been practicing during the preceding months. Although in some places, this apparently did not happen and there were some vicious battles fought on Christmas Day between Allied and German troops.

Christmas on Hill 881 South, 1967. Jimmie McRae. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

I don’t think Christmas truces happened in World War II or Korea, but I believe the opposing powers, the NVA and Vietcong and the US and its allies, declared one every year from 1965 through 1972 in Vietnam. It seems to me the truces served as an attempt to recognize that some level of humanity remained in the most savage of human interactions.

In 1967, the Christmas truce was in effect, but few of the Marines with Bravo 1/26 up on 881 South believed it would come to pass.
We ran a long patrol the day before Christmas, we ran a short patrol on Christmas Day followed by hot chow that was delivered up on the hill via chopper from the combat base. We got some mail and although I can’t say for certain, I suspect I received hand-dipped chocolate bonbons and cookies and white cotton socks and candles from my family, all of which I shared around the squad.

On Christmas Eve, we had a church service and before I went on watch, I decided to go down and participate. On the way to the tent where they held the service, I listened to men softly speaking about the holiday and whether or not the truce would hold.

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh, 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E O’Hara.

In the church tent, the chaplain and his assistant led a non-denominational service that included some songs, communion, a sermon with some readings from the Bible. One of the songs, I think it was the last one we sang—which I didn’t sing even though we had been given reproduced copies of the words—was altered from the original “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” (also known as the Navy Hymn) written by William Whiting and adapted with the all-service lyrics and an added stanza composed specifically for the Marine Corps which read:

Eternal Father, grant , we pray,
To all Marines, both night and day,
The courage, honor, strength and skill
Their land to serve, Thy law fulfill;
Be Thou the Shield forevermore
From ev’ry peril to the Corps.

While everybody else was singing I heard the words, “Fire Mission called in to the 81mm mortar battery just outside the church service. That was followed by mortars leaving the tube, the crash of them off to the west, towards Laos, and I wondered who was out on Christmas Eve, during the Christmas truce, that needed a fire mission. Maybe it was just the regular interdiction barrages we sent out, or maybe it was a recon team out there in danger.

I thought it all pretty weird. Truce and Christmas and Jesus’ birthday and the words to that hymn and killing and 81mm mortars.

It jarred me on a spiritual level. Deep and hard and so damned incongruous.

I went back and hit the rack but soon was awakened by the words, “Red Alert.” So, there wasn’t a Christmas truce at all, and I wondered who decided there was or wasn’t, and we all stood watch, all night, the fog so thick you could almost lean up against it. Gloomy and full of the ghosts of doubt and death and fear.

But we weren’t attacked that night. We didn’t hear any sound of sappers sneaking up to the wire. We didn’t hear anything but the occasional cough of a Marine on watch or the soft cries of someone in a nightmare.

***

On a separate note:

Betty and I are making another film titled I MARRIED THE WAR, about the wives of combat veterans from World War II until the present. We have finished interviewing eleven dynamic wives and have now embarked on turning their stories into a documentary film.

I Married the War

We are soliciting donations to help us get this movie edited, sound mixed and color corrected. If you are in a giving frame of mind, please check out the website for the new film at http://imarriedthewar.com/ and scroll down to the section about donating.

We appreciate our friends and followers and know we cannot succeed at our filmmaking efforts without their generous support.

***

BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime.

This link will take you directly to BRAVO!’s Amazon Prime site where you can take a look at the options for streaming: In the US you can stream at https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

In the United Kingdom, you can stream at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BZKJXBM.

***

If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town, please contact us immediately.

***

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject?ref=hl.

FLEET MARINE FORCE

(FMF)

Navy Corpsman

In today’s guest blog, a reprint of an entry from January 2016, BRAVO! Marine Michael E. O’Hara muses on Navy Corpsmen and Marines

The latter part of 2015 was not especially kind to me. I had a serious surgery in September and in November I suddenly fell ill once again and suffered a somewhat sustained period of time in the VA hospital, about 45 days all told. I am now home and greatly improved, Thank You very much. I mention that only because it reminded me of a time long ago and the special folks who endeared themselves to me.

Never, in our glorious past has any one group of individuals EVER earned the respect and the admiration of Marines across the globe than our FMF Navy Corpsmen, more commonly referred to as “Doc.” Most folks have no idea what these brave men have endured just to be called Doc. They train with the Marines, they deploy with the Marines, and they patrol with the Marines. They are as much a Marine as anyone can be without actually enlisting. Not a patrol goes through the wire without Doc.

Doc is everywhere. He was on the beach at Tarawa and on every island campaign in the Pacific. There was even a Doc who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. Doc was at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir when Chesty Puller’s men were withdrawing through that awful frozen (-30) tundra of North Korea. Doc not only tended to the wounded but was required to deal with many horrific amputations due to frostbite. Sometimes they had a real M.D. to help, but not very often.

Doc was in Lebanon in 1958 and again in 1983 when the Marine Barracks was attacked and over 200 Marines were lost. Doc is everywhere. Doc has been to all the little unknown conflicts most people have long since forgotten. Doc also went to a place that became known as “The Nam.”

2 January 1968. Bravo Company, 1/26 had been deployed Oct-Dec to 881 South. When we left the hill the day after Christmas, 1967, we ran a long operation up the Rao Quan River to the north. It was January when we got back and were assigned to the combat base. The NVA had broken a truce (SOOPRISE) and we were called back to the base. We sacked in with Alpha Company on the north side of the runway. By midnight, Danny Horton and I were delirious. We had not used our purification tablets which made our water non-potable, and as a result were really sick.

John “Doc” Cicala, US Navy Corpsman with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines at Khe Sanh.

Our platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Gus Alvarado, was dispatched to tend to us and we were taken straight away to a tent. A firefight had just erupted with members of Lima Company close to the tent we were in. I was so sick I never moved from the table. Everyone else was on the ground. This was the beginning of my very first hospital stay, if that is what you would call it.

I think I was there 16 days, maybe. They finally said we had amoebic dysentery. It can kill you if not properly treated. But Doc was there. This tent was known as the BAS, Battalion Aid Station. It was a dark, sandbagged hole in the ground. I don’t remember much of the first ten days but I know Doc took wonderful care of me. Soon I was discharged from BAS and sent back to Bravo. I was very weak.

I would see or hear about Doc’s brave actions many more times during the Siege. You see, the reason Marines love Doc is because they know that if they take a bullet, if they lose a limb to a mortar round and call for Doc, he will come, just like he has always done. It makes no matter how heavy the volley, Doc will charge into the guns to tend to his wounded Marines. He has always done so and he continues to do so to this day. Make no mistake, Doc for sure is one of our most unsung Heroes.

Doc Cicala from our 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, is a fine example. Shot through one of his lungs and with grenade fragments to his groin, he still continued on the day of the 25 February ambush doing what he could to help guide others who were literally crawling back to the perimeter on their stomachs.

Second Platoon’s Doc Thomas Hoody, who spent many nights braving the incoming artillery patching up Marines, would visit me in the night twice during the month of March to check on my wounds.

I am sure the Docs in first platoon showed every bit as much raw courage and bravery as well. But one of the most searing moments of my tour came on 30 March when Doc and I met up close and very personal when our roles were reversed in the middle of one of the bloodiest damn firefights of the entire war.

Richard Blanchfield had served better than 6 years as a United States Marine. He got out, enlisted in the United States Navy and became a Doc. He was a replacement for the Third Platoon on 30 March. He had only been there a few days at the most. I didn’t even know him.

By the time I met him, the entire company was at “Fix Bayonets” and we were definitely engaging Charley. In fact, we were all in a virtual dead run to get these guys who had killed so many of our fellow Marines. Doc Blanchfield was well ahead of me. He had already tended to a wounded Marine and had just got up on the edge of a bomb crater when mortars simply rained down on him and the whole command group as well.

When I reached the edge of the crater, he was about halfway down and sliding in the loose dirt. There were two dead Marines and numerous dead NVA in the crater. Those two Marines certainly earned their pay that day. Doc had, by this time, stuck 2 morphine needles in his own leg. His arm was nearly blown off at the shoulder. At first I was in as much shock as he was, but I regained my composure and began to tie him off. After slowing down the bleeding, I tied two battle dressings together and wrapped him all around so he at least wouldn’t do any more damage to what was left of his arm. I thought he would die.

Guest blogger Michael E. O’Hara at Khe Sanh

The battle was still in full assault so I laid him back and comforted him as well as I could and left him. I have not seen him since but he did survive and miraculously his arm was saved.

After getting involved with the Khe Sanh Veterans in 1992 I found out Doc Blanchfield was living in Oceanside, California. We talk once a year on the phone. He has never failed to send me a card for each and every holiday since that first call. I still have not seen him. He was very pained by what happened to him and I understand. He did say Thank You that first call.

Like I said earlier, I was in the hospital over this past Veterans Day holiday. Most folks understand that 10 November is the Marine Corps Birthday, so we were also celebrating 240 years of glorious history. That is a very long time for sure, a time in which we have come to celebrate the lives and courageous acts of many from our ranks. I could write pages, even a book or two recounting all of our Heroes for sure.

A wheelchair-bound Marine (a volunteer) was my only visitor on this Marine Corps Birthday. He had lost both legs in Vietnam. We had a grand conversation. He brought me candy, S/F.

I have read a great deal about the wars of the last ten years and the men who have gone in my stead now that I am old and grey. Don’t ever let anyone tell you this generation is lost. I am just as proud of our young Marines today as I ever have been.

And never forget this: Wherever you find these Marines, you will find Doc, ready, willing and able to charge into the guns if necessary. He will, as he has always done, come when he hears the word Doc.

Guest blogger Michael E. O’Hara.

Semper Fidelis to our Navy Corpsmen everywhere you serve.

Michael E. O’Hara served with 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines at Khe Sanh during 1967 and 1968. He earned three Purple Hearts.

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BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime.

This link will take you directly to BRAVO!’s Amazon Prime site where you can take a look at the options for streaming: In the US you can stream at https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

In the United Kingdom, you can stream at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BZKJXBM.

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If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town, please contact us immediately.

***

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On Cinco de Mayo my leave was about done, but before heading back to Camp Pendleton I traveled down to Nogales, Mexico, with friends, and we attended a bullfight. There was a lot of hoopla at the arena: folks all dressed up, the men in suits and the women in fancy dresses. I recall the men wearing fedoras that matched the hues of their outfits, white and tan and other tints of light brown. The ladies looked to me like they should be going to Mass instead of to a bullfight.

The fancy red and black advertising bills that hung all over the walls of the city announced three matadors who would kill three bulls as part of a wider celebration to observe the holiday which commemorates the Mexican Army’s defeat of a French army at the Mexican city of Puebla in 1862.

The white walls of the arena reflected the bright light. It’s warm that time of year on the Arizona-Mexican border and besides the weather, the beer, Modelo, was warm and something that I’d prefer not to consume but I did. Every time I took a swallow it caught in the back of my throat and I wasn’t sure if it would go down and stay down or rocket out through my nose and my mouth all over my lap and the people sitting in front of me.

The Kill

The bullfights seemed steeped in a tradition I didn’t really understand; the honoring of the bulls as if they were heroes, the formal entrance into the ring by the participants that reminded me of Marine Corps ceremonies I’d been a part of. The matadors and picadors reminded me of ancient warriors, and the horses protected by what looked like quilted armor hinted at a more martial tone to the event. Bugles blew at what seemed like critical moments in the performance and I thought of bugle calls we answered to in the Corps: Taps, Reveille, Assembly.

And then the torment and killing of the bulls began. The toreros—bull fighters—stabbed the bulls with sharp, short spears called banderillas and men on horses stabbed the bulls with long spears and the matador used a cape to tire out the animal and to create a kind of performance art before killing the bull with one clean thrust of a sword that punctured his tortured and weakened heart through a soft spot behind its lowered head.

What bothered me was how the crowd loved the action and cheered at the torture the bulls were put through, the stabbing and the capes the matadors used to entice and lead the bulls around the bullring.

The first two matadors failed to kill the bulls cleanly and the crowds did not like that, hissing and acting like the bull had more of their respect than the men who were supposed to kill the animals.

The third matador, who was the star of the whole day’s shebang, did manage to kill the bull with some panache and I had to admire his apparent physical skills, even though the repeated stabbing of the bull on the neck and shoulders beforehand tipped the odds in the matador’s favor.

Watching the bulls stagger around made me dizzy and the beer turned pretty damned bitter and the crowd’s thirst for the savagery of it all surprised me. It seemed a metaphor for what I’d seen at Khe Sanh. Brutal battles, bayonets grinding into bone, death-maimed men, and all of us, on both sides—NVA and Yanks—debauched with savagery.

The bloody images of Khe Sanh, that bull fight, the cheering Mexican crowd rejoicing in the chaos, visions of dead men lying in the dust, the incompetent matadors down in the ring, the bulls staggering around the sandy arena with hearts as big as the State of Sonora were all mixed up in my mind. Ole! Dios mio!

I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough, almost knocking several men down as they stood on the steps in the aisle as I charged out of the bullring. I knew enough border lingo to understand the names they called me but instead of punching someone in the nose, I had to escape the scenes of the bulls being dragged from the sandy arena floor, the bouquets of red flowers and fedoras tossed into the ring. The scarlet of the flowers highlighting the burgundy tint of the blood on the ground.

Author Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael O’Hara.

Outside, I squatted in the shade up against the walls of the arena and waited for my friends to come out. They thought it was glorious and a righteous example of culture and history and the influence of Spain’s glory days upon the world.

That memory is clear in my mind and I have gone back to it many times, me sitting on my haunches looking up at them as they talked excitedly about the action in the ring, their smiles, me seeing the blood red mud of Khe Sanh, dead men dragged down the dusty road.

Dios Mio! The savagery.

***

NEWS!

BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime.

This link will take you directly to BRAVO!’s Amazon Prime site where you can take a look at the options for streaming: https://amzn.to/2Hzf6In.

***

ON THE SCREENING FRONT:

At 3:00 PM on May 27, 2018, BRAVO! will be shown in Paris, TN at the Krider Performing Arts Center. You can find out more about this event and the Krider Performance Art Center here.

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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.

Fifty Years Gone—April 11, 1968

I fidgeted inside a Continental Airlines 707 in Okinawa waiting for the B-52s lined up on the flight line to take off. I glanced at the tattered and dog-eared pages of a Max Brand book I’d been trying to read for months about a buckaroo named Destry. Then I peered around at the others on the flight, all of them Marines (other than the crew), none of whom I knew. I looked out the port hole and studied the B-52s again. Their dark fuselages ginned-up images of hell, avengers and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. When the B-52s finally rolled forward, their long wings drooped and prompted metaphors of sharp-taloned hawks.

And then we were airborne, over the Pacific, headed for home, my thoughts saturated with scenes and noises and stenches of the battlefield. And even though I tried to read about Destry, nothing else managed to crowd into my mind except memories of Khe Sanh.

We flew over Iwo Jima. It looked like a distorted version of a figure eight and I wondered about all those men who had died over that little piece of volcanic rock.

Iwo Jima from the air.

At El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, we deplaned. I wanted to drop down, do a pushup and kiss the deck, but I didn’t. We put up with Marine Corps hassle as we processed to go on leave and then board a bus to LA and the airport.

After I got my airline ticket to Tucson, I called home, trying to tell someone that I needed a ride, but no one answered. I finally contacted the mother of my best friend who told me she’d make sure someone showed up to get me.

I waited in the airport lounge, smoking Camels and drinking real beer—Coors beer—wanting someone to say something about me being home, being alive, being a Vietnam vet who’d sacrificed for his county. Nobody said a damned thing except the bartender who muttered “thanks” when I left him a tip.

Not long before I climbed aboard my flight, a young Marine came in and plopped down at the bar in a seat next to me. He was going on leave before shipping out for Nam. He wanted to know what it was like. I said, “Keep your head down.”

On the flight to Tucson, I sat next to a girl who seemed about my age. She wouldn’t look at me. I could have struck up a conversation but I didn’t know what to talk about. I didn’t think she’d care about 152mm artillery rounds that shook the ground, severed arms and legs, and if they landed too close to you, forced blood out of the pores of your body.

At Tucson, my parents met me as I headed down a set of stairs to baggage claim where my best friend and his fiancé waited. I could tell by the way they all stared at me that I wasn’t quite the person they’d expected.

We went to a well-known Mexican food restaurant in Old Town. I craved green chili. After we sat, I ordered a Coke. I wanted a beer but didn’t think my mother would approve.

Our meals arrived and I talked about Khe Sanh, what I saw, how I felt. They didn’t look at me, just turned to on their ground beef tacos, their green chili and queso enchiladas.

For decades after, when thinking about that moment, the top of my father’s balding head would invade my mind. It was what they showed me as they ate: the tops of their heads.

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

At the time, I thought nobody was interested in what happened and maybe, in general, that was the attitude of a lot of Americans; they didn’t want to have to consider the particulars of death and carnage. But now, I think, my family and friends just didn’t know how to respond to what I described, since the Siege inhabited a universe too far outside the ken of their experience.

So, I just shut up.

By myself in the back seat of my parents’ Buick, riding through the black Sonoran Desert night, I looked out the window and thought about Khe Sanh, the siege, the dead, my fear, the memories of which I naively imagined would just slip away.

***
NEWS!

BRAVO! is now available in digital form on Amazon Prime. Please check it out if you are interested, and please consider sharing this news with your friends and contacts whom you think might be interested in seeing the film. And please ask them to give us a review if they would. It will help get the film out to a broader audience.

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ON THE SCREENING FRONT:

At 3:00 PM on May 27, 2018, BRAVO! will be screened in Paris, TN at the Krider Performing Arts Center. You can find out more about this event and the Krider Performance Art Center here.

***

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.

50 Years Gone—April 4, 1968

Early that morning, I got the word to go home. Staff Sergeant A stomped down the trench and told me as I sat with Marines of 3rd Squad sharing C-ration coffee and unfiltered Camels and palavering about women and GTOs.

He’d told me twice before that I was going home: once, the day after the Payback Patrol, and then two days later, only to find out he was joking, as he liked to call it. When he said that, “I’m just joking,” he laughed and leaned over and slapped his quadriceps.

I didn’t think it was funny. And on this particular morning, as I looked at him like he was full of crap, he glared at me like all staff non-commissioned officers in the Marine Corps were wont to do. I still didn’t believe him, and I sat there looking into his eyes and I’m sure my feelings swarmed across my face.

Photo of Dong Ha, 1968. Reminiscent of the transient barracks where the blogger spent the night of 4-4-68. Photo from Pinterest.

He said, “Get up and go home, Rodgers. That’s an order.” And he clomped off.

I followed him down to the platoon command post and stuck my head in and Lieutenant D said, “Good luck, Rodgers, you’ve been a pretty good Marine. Occasionally damned good. Sometimes not so good. Gather your gear and get down to the company CP and report to Captain Pipes.” He got off his cot and stuck out his hand. His big mitt enveloped mine as we shook.

I divvied up my M-16 magazines and poncho liners and other gear among any of the men who needed them and figured I’d fight it out later with the supply personnel when I showed up short of gear in Phu Bai.

I walked up and down the trench slapping hands and jive-assing with everybody in 2nd Platoon that I knew, and then marched for the company CP. When I stuck my face into the bunker men crammed the innards: radio operators, the company gunny, the executive officer and Captain Pipes who sat against the sandbagged walls with his arm in a sling and other parts of his head and torso bandaged due to the wounds he received on the Payback Patrol.

The executive officer told me I was a day early, and that I should go back to 2nd Platoon. Captain Pipes asked me what platoon I was in, and when I told him I was in 2nd Platoon and was the platoon sergeant’s radio operator, he asked me if I’d been out there on Payback (we didn’t call it that, then, we called it March 30th). I nodded and he smiled. In an earlier blog where I wrote about Christmas Eve, I said that when Captain Pipes smiled at me back then, it was the only time a Marine Corps captain had ever smiled at me. But it wasn’t because he smiled as I stood there at that moment. And he said, “Let him go.”

The executive officer sent me down to Battalion where I explained my situation to a bunch of corporals who sent me to see sergeants who referred me to staff NCOs who sent me on to see a major who sat alone in a big room in a deep bunker. This is one of the damndest memories I have of this experience. When he asked me if I’d been on the Payback Patrol and I said, “Yes, Sir,” he took my orders and signed them and then he stood, snapped to attention and saluted me. For a moment I felt flummoxed, and then I saluted him back. Then he shook my hand. That was pretty amazing, a major saluting me in reverse order of how it should be.

I headed for the LZ where the helicopters came in to deliver men and gear and pick up men and body bags filled with people killed in action.

On the way down there, I stopped and looked off to the southwest to Hill 471 which was under assault from elements of the Walking Dead, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. As I watched the tiny figures head up that hill, I thought about hand-to-hand combat, bombs and incoming, dead people. And then I went on down to the LZ where I sat for hours as chopper after chopper came in. When I tried to get on each one, the crew chief would shake his head or yell, “That’s a negative, Marine.”

Sometime during my wait, another Marine showed up who’d been through training with me back in The World. He was also going home. He was a lance corporal whose last name was R. He looked battered, skinny, his face gaunt after seventy-some-odd-days of incoming and pitched battles. He needed a new set of dungarees.

We chatted, but not much, mostly just sat there as I pondered all I’d seen. The horrors and the blood and the flesh separated from the tendons and bones of men I’d come to revere. Every time a loud noise sounded, R would flinch and so would I, and I wondered if I looked as bad as he did, and then I understood that I did.

A pile of filled body bags were stacked against a sandbagged revetment. I kept looking at them and wondering if I knew any of the intelligences that had once inhabited the remains.

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh, 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E O’Hara.

Late in the day, a CH-46 came in and R and I got on along with those body bags. On the flight to Dong Ha, even though I was ordered to do so, I refused to sit down in case we took anti-aircraft fire through the bottom of the bird. I wanted to make the smallest target possible.

At Dong Ha I checked into the transient barracks and spent over an hour in the hot shower trying to get the red mud of Khe Sanh out of the pores of my skin, as if cleansing myself of the dirt of that place would purge me of all that I had seen.

Later, after chow—real chow, hot chow—I stood outside the mess tent with a group of Marines, one of whom I’d known well in boot camp and ITR. For several hours I listened to men talk about Tet and Hue and Con Thien, including that Marine. I could tell by the way he kept staring at me that he wanted to hear my tale. But I didn’t say anything about anything.

No words could dig their way from my thoughts to my mouth.

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On the screening front: On April 7, at 1:00 PM Bravo will be screened at the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, Idaho. following the screening, there will be a panel of Khe Sanh survivors who will talk about the experience. You can find out more about the event and the Warhawk Air Museum here.

At 3:00 PM on May 27, 2018, BRAVO! will be screened in Paris, TN at the Krider Performing Arts Center. You can find out more about this event and the Krider Performance Art Center here.

***

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.

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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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/.

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All through the 77-day Siege of Khe Sanh we learned how to live with less of everything except ammo and conflict. It was one of those exercises in finding out how little you could live with and how much you could live without.

What we had a lot of was death and fear, two things linked by chains that the mind manufactured. For some of us, even though we escaped death and maiming, we were wrecked by the accumulative effects of fear.

One of the things we didn’t get enough of was chow. Our major source of nutrition, C-rations, for me at least, were always the meal of last resort. If I could get A-rations (hot chow in the mess hall) or B-rations (hot chow delivered out into the field)), I’d take them over C-rations anytime (we received neither A or B-rations during the Siege.) But even our C-ration allotments were cut down from three meals to two per day, and sometimes even less, to one-and-one-half, or even one.

What was left of the post office at Khe Sanh where our packages from home might show up some time.

A lot of us got care packages from home loaded with things we loved to eat . . . chocolate chip cookies and carrot cake and other stuff, jerky, salami . . . but the perilous nature of flights into Khe Sanh made delivery an iffy deal and when packages came, they had often been in storage so long that everything would be moldy or crushed or rifled through by someone in the battalion rear at Phu Bai.

So it was of some interest to me when the platoon commander ordered me to lead a patrol, after dark, down to the battalion supply depot to procure some extra rations for all of us.

Procurement is an ancient and accepted activity in the military and is really nothing more than a form of theft, robbing from Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. The reality was, we were hungry, losing bulk, and someone out there had what we needed. Down at the supply dump it was damned important for them to hang onto whatever it was they husbanded, but our needs, in our minds, trumped their duty.

So we set out after dark. Six of us. We sneaked down the trench and out the back of our lines as the mist hung like a curtain. We crossed a flat area devoid of structures, then past a few bunkers where, if you got close, you heard men talking in low tones.

We came into the supply dump from the back, climbed under a half-assed fence and turned to on mounds of supplies that were covered with big tarps. We found a lot of stuff we weren’t looking for, but eventually we found cases of #10 cans of sliced pears and sliced peaches and grapefruit juice.

A couple of the men picked up as many cases as they could carry while still keeping ahold of their M-16s. We discovered stacks of C-ration cases and loaded up with those, too.

We struggled with our burdens as we tried to sneak back out without making a lot of racket.

At the fence we were challenged by a guard, “Halt, who goes there?”

I whispered something like, “Ignore him and get out.”

But he wasn’t having any of that. “Halt or I’ll shoot.”

I wasn’t sure if he’d shoot or not. I said something like, “Okay.”

We dropped our loads and for what seemed like an eternity we stood there, him pointing his rifle at us, us pointing our weapons—our M-16s and M1911A .45 caliber pistols—back.

I said something like, “Let us go. We’re starving to death down there in the trenches.”

He said, “Maybe so, but it’s my job to keep this stuff secure,” and he nodded at the piles of gear in the supply dump. “So,” and here he waved the business end of his M-16 at us, “I’ve got to turn your dumb asses in.”

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh, 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E O’Hara.

It’s funny how you can panic at the littlest stuff. I thought, for a moment, about dropping my loot and threatening to light him up. Then I thought better of it, and then I didn’t know what to do.

Someone from my side took over, started rapping about Ohio—because he’d recognized the accent of the guard’s speech—and how they were both home boys, what my man missed about the Midwest: young women, summer nights, high school football.

The guard said, “Yeah, man, and I’m rotating out of here in three days.”

Somehow, my Marine talked him into letting us go with the loot. An exchange of Military Payment Certificates greased the squeaky wheel and we sneaked back to our platoon command post where the lieutenant took all of the #10 cans of fruit, all the grapefruit juice, and most of the C-rations.

When we got back to our squad area and opened the C-ration cases, we discovered those particular meals were manufactured during the Korean War. They were old and tasted like it.

We never saw any of the fruit or fruit juice.

***

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.