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.

Yesterday was National Vietnam War Veterans Day and this morning, March 30, 2025, is the fifty-seventh year since Bravo Company, 1^st Battalion, 26^th Marines went out on an action, finally taking our fight into the trenches of the North Vietnamese Army.

I suspect all of us who took part in that action and are still living remember this day. Like big red flags and big bangs and big winds inside the memory.

One of my comrades who fought that morning calls it the “most significant day in my life” and although it may not be the most important, for me it’s pretty damned big.

For forty-one years I didn’t know this day had earned a name. I found out about it in 2008 when someone asked me if I’d been on the Payback Patrol.

At the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I figured it out.

Payback. Was it payback?

I don’t know, but it was hell and war and glory and death and fright and elation, all rolled into one.

We lined the trench in the dark morning and smoked our cigarettes and mumbled. The spirit of fear flew through and circled back. Voices whispered about what we would encounter. Our artillery batteries fired what seemed like thousands of rounds as we waited to depart. We heard jets dropping bombs and somewhere a chopper. All in support of our assault.

In the platoon briefing, it was my understanding that the patrol was routine, that we were departing the wire to find and return the bodies of our fallen comrades still out there from the ambush of February 25. Based on our patrol of March 21, in which we found no live enemy, I anticipated this action to be similar. Go outside the wire, climb the ridge, find the fallen, put them in body bags, bring them back.

I think I may have been a victim of my overwhelming desire not to go into the kind of combat we would find that morning.

The skipper and his command post came down the trench, the skipper patting shoulders and nodding and smiling. I couldn’t smile.

The word came down, “Move out.”

I dropped my Winston on the muddy deck of the trench.

We charged up the ridge, the world around rocking and rolling, the roars and swooshes and thumps and thunder like the last days of the universe.

Staff Sergeant Gus Alvarado and I brought up the rear, our platoon, Second Platoon, coming up behind the two other platoons that assaulted the ridge on line.

Suddenly we were both on the deck, the world whistling a wild tune, the ripples of pain like a pool of water when a stone is thrown.

Like scoping in and out with a set of binoculars, in and out, consciousness en garde, consciousness intermittent.

I shook my head and got up. Staff Sergeant Alvarado put out his hand and I pulled him to his feet. He’d been hit in the ankle by a mortar tail fin. I had shrapnel in my head but didn’t know it. If the shrapnel had been a little higher on the left side of my head, it would have penetrated the temple and then who knows how I might have reacted.

We inspected where the mortar hit. Close. Too close. But sometimes you are lucky. We went on up the hill.

At the top, the corpsman stopped us and looked at the side of my head. “Shrapnel,” he said.

I looked to our front. What every Marine dreams of when enlisting was going on. Smoke and fire, explosions, Marines in the enemy trench. Stabbing, shooting, ducking, dying.

At that moment I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t articulate what I witnessed and sometimes still can’t.

Gunny Morris came up and said, “Son, are you ok?”

I didn’t want the fuss of any of that and said, “Yes, Gunny.”

His hands were shaking. That frightened me. Him, a man, a veteran of long years, a real Marine, shaking.  

What was obvious to me, out there to our front, was an urgent, vicious, desperate battle where men faced one of the ultimate moments of truth.

How long I stood and watched, I don’t know, the memories like a fractured flicker, click and blank and bam and dark and fear all piled together like kids playing King of the Mountain.

Second Platoon soon moved out and into the melee.

Us, advancing through the enemy trenches, and they were extensive and intricate. Each bunker had a tunnel that led to another bunker so when assaulting them, one Marine needed to be in front of each of the bunkers.

Grenades, rifle fire, satchel charges blowing bunkers to smithereens, our flame-thrower Marines moving through, torching bunker openings, cooking anyone who remained inside.

Bodies littered the trenches. I stopped to look at one, his face the color of saffron. Young, so young.

The word came down from the platoon commander, Lieutenant Dillon, for Staff Sergeant Alvarado and me to move forward to the front of the action and call in some artillery.

We passed a Marine machine gun team where the gunner was pounding the head of another Marine. I knew that Jarhead on the ground and my experience with him was he couldn’t control his fear. As I pressed on, I suspected he’d failed in his duty to his fellow Marines.

We passed another gun team manned by men I knew well. One of them, a cocky Puerto Rican kid from New York City—I don’t remember his name, but I see his face as if he was standing here talking to me now—yelled, “Rodgers, what are you doing out here? You’re too short!”

He was right, I was a short timer, five or six days left in the field, but right then, none of that mattered. Men were dying, the NVA were counterattacking.

As the staff sergeant and I hurried through the trench I noticed the company command group down in a bomb crater which included what looked like an NVA prisoner. As I looked at them a second time, a barrage of mortars fell and dust and smoke erupted.

We ran on, I looked a third time and the smoke cleared. Marines lay dead and wounded on the deck, the NVA prisoner on his knees. The one Marine still standing shot the prisoner in the head with a .45 caliber pistol.

For years I forgot I’d seen this event.

In 2010, while we were in San Antonio, Texas, at the Khe Sanh Veterans Reunion filming BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, I met with Skipper Ken Pipes early one morning out on a patio overlooking the San Antonio River. I asked the skipper about that event and my memory of the NVA prisoner’s execution.

He said, “No, that didn’t happen.”

A boat went down the river.

I took a sip of coffee.

The skipper looked me in the eye. “I’m not telling you who shot that prisoner.”

Anyway, when the staff sergeant and I arrived out in front of where all the action had occurred, we called in artillery rounds that landed close and shook the ground and threw dust and chunks of red clay into the air.

Then Bravo began to pull back. Second Platoon formed a line and backed away from the outer edge of our penetration as some of us gathered wounded and dead Marines while men in the front line fired into oncoming NVA soldiers counterattacking.

Smoke and explosions and the roar of war resounded in the air, the ground, and still rattles the inside of my head.

The platoon commander of Third Platoon lost his radio operator and I was assigned to work with him. We headed for the rear of the battle. We had been warned in the night-before’s briefing that Chinese Claymores were hung all around the ground over which we fought and that we should, if possible, stay in the enemy trench.

As we headed back towards the combat base, the lieutenant got out of the trench and started running. I saw Claymores hanging in the branches of naked limbs nearby.

I yelled, “Lieutenant, get back in the trench.” But he didn’t.

So I climbed out and ran after him.

As he hustled along, he tripped a booby trap. Like a rocket it shot out of the ground and hit him. Smoke and debris and fire shot around him like a cloud and some of it hit me in the face. That pissed me off.

He stood bent low and I wondered if he’d fall over dead. I felt something on my face, sizzling the skin.

I yelled and cussed him as I came up and lifted his head. His cheeks and chin were smoking, on fire, so to speak, from white phosphorus, which is pyrophoric or in Marine language, burns on contact with air.

I leaned and grabbed a handful of mud and smeared it on my face to smother the fire as I muttered expletives at him, at the NVA, at war. I grabbed more mud and tried to extinguish the fire on his face. He never fell, never talked, just stared, I guess in shock, until a corpsman arrived and took over his care.

So much of that four- or five- or six-hour fight remains obscured. Too horrible to recall? I wonder if the sequence of events even matters now after all this time. So many images tumble through the back side of my eyes. Who died when and where. What we did and what we saw. What we didn’t do but thought we did. What we did and don’t think we did, don’t remember, don’t want to remember.

One of the striking images I have that doesn’t alter over decades, is our withdrawal.

I walked down the road by myself, radio on my back pressing me down, my emotions like ghosts haunting me.

The faces of our men like skeleton heads, gaunt, and spare, faces like people wanting to burst into tears, but too, elation. For two-and-one-half months we’d been hammered and pounded and scared a thousand times, thousands of moments, our fright like flights of bats invading our bodies, but now, this day, too, we’d gotten even, so to speak. We’d shot some people, and fought our way all through their entrenchments, we’d succeeded, we were someone again, Marines.

I saw two Marines dragging a body down the middle of the road. As I came parallel to them, I looked down and noticed the writing on the back of the dead Marine’s flak jacket. I sagged.

The night before, that Marine, a corporal who I’d known and served with for almost thirteen months, came to see me and handed me an envelope with his dog tags and asked me to send them to his parents.

He was supposed to rotate out of the field on his way home a day or two after the battle.

I asked him why he was giving the dog tags to me to send home, he said, “I’m not going to make it home. I’m going to die tomorrow.”

Anger swelled in my head, and I gave the envelope back and yelled at him that you could not think that the enemy would kill you. You could not give in. “They will not kill you,” I hissed.

To this day, that exchange and what followed, his death, my thoughts on it, have eaten at me. Was I wrong, was I right, does it matter? Obviously, it matters because, well, here I am speaking about it after fifty-seven years.

After the smoke and fire and thunder settled, someone told me that another Marine who I’d served with for months and months and who was a short-timer, too, had cut off one of his toes with an entrenching tool to avoid going out on the patrol.

My rage boiled and I charged down through our bunkers and fighting holes with the intent of challenging him, calling him “Coward.”

As I approached, he sat outside his bunker on the edge of a cot, his foot wrapped in fresh, white bandages.

I yelled, “I’m short and I went out. A lot of us went…” But he shook his head and said, “Don’t be judging me.”

I stopped, turned and walked off. I’m still judging him. Judging me.

_______________________________________________

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.

By Ken Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________

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

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

By Ken Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That word never came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_________________

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

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

Fifty-two years ago this morning on the battlefield of Khe Sanh, Vietnam, Bravo Company, 1/26 burst out of the confines of siege and siege mentality and went on the attack.

The details of what is now known as Payback are documented in a number of places. But what’s difficult to document is the fury and desperation that occurred when men from separate sides met face-to-face in a morning’s worth of savagery. For two and one-half months they’d blasted and murdered and maimed us and scared the living hell out of us. And we hungered for revenge.

We caught them sleeping and we jumped in their trenches and we caught them in their bunkers and we dropped grenades on top of them and shot them when they crawled out and we dropped satchel charges on them and we shot them while looking in their eyes and we burned them alive with flame throwers and lobbed 60 millimeter mortars on top of them and we killed and killed.

The faces of the dead turned sallow and as I ran through the NVA’s trenches, I talked to myself about how the sallow nature of death made them all look the same, whether our side or theirs. They all looked the same and maybe that was appropriate given that the hands of death had choked all life out of them no matter their rank or race.

Most of us were young. Our skipper called us kids. We were kids with lethal weapons and a bitter taste in our mouths and a load of hate in our hearts. Not a hate you reserve for the man you know who stabbed you in the back, but the hate you know against an idea, against an enemy—not individuals—that killed people that you love, and even though . . . even at the time you know . . . even though you’ve been taught thou shall not kill, and love your brother, and turn the other cheek, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, you’re filled with hate and you are going to kill. You need to kill.

Fifty-two years ago this morning.

Enraged, we coveted revenge. Enraged, we needed to salve our pride. Indifference to them as human beings was the hallmark of the morning of 30Mar1968. We felt nothing towards those people over there except the need to see them dead. Payback.

***

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After the Ghost Patrol of 25Feb1968, no larger units sortied outside Khe Sanh combat base for almost a month. We sent out some listening posts but those were small and they went out after dark and came in before sunrise while the mist still hung low to the ground.

But on today’s date fifty-two years ago, as the sun threw up the first hint of daylight, we Marines of Second Platoon, Bravo, 1/26 stood in the trench and smoked our Camels and Winstons and Salems, flinched at the incoming rounds, heard the scrape of scuffed jungle boots in the red mud at the bottom of the trench. Noted some mumbles.

And if fear had sounds, they would have ricocheted in the deep trench, off the walls, against the sandbags. Being Marines, we needed to keep the fright quarantined to a slow boil at the bottom of our guts. We must not entertain the notion of fear because its insidious gnawing weakened us.

And then out the gate we went, crossed over the minefield, got on line and charged across the vale and up the ridge towards the NVA position in the vicinity of where the Ghost Patrol had traveled.

Our big guns on base boxed us in with ordnance, geysers of red mud, black smoke and the din of combat suddenly crammed in our ears and brains, sucking the breath out of our lungs. And as we headed towards our objective, our allies to the rear, on the base, fired machine-guns over our heads.

As the Marines of my old squad, Third Squad, reached the top of the ridge, explosions erupted among them and then .50 caliber rounds fired by our guys, our allies, our mates, ripped into the men of Third Squad. I saw the rounds hit; flashes and bodies pirouetting, falling.

The explosions I suspect were from NVA mortar rounds and RPG rounds, but the machine-gun fire was what we call friendly fire. Friendly fire.

Up top, while the wounded were medevacked, we got in the NVA trench and headed east. At one point elements of First Squad, who were on point, veered off to the north, away from the trench.

We’d been briefed to stay in the NVA trench because it was believed that the surrounding terrain was infested with booby traps.

When this went down, I had about fifteen days left in the field. I’d survived my twelve month-plus tour by being good at surviving, being lucky, not being heroic, just doing my job and keeping it as low profile as possible.

So I was shocked as I took off, out of the trench, sprinting behind the Marines of First Squad, yelling, “No, no,” and when several turned at my words—and as I think of it now, how they heard me in the furious din that boomed around us—how they weren’t blown up by some of that ordnance and how we all didn’t get blown to smithereens by the mines and booby traps out there where we had wrongly ventured, is a wonder to me to this day.

But, nobody lost legs or died or anything. We just got back in the NVA trench and drove on towards our goal.

Not far from our destination, a gate we could enter through the maze of our own mines and wire and booby traps, the man on point triggered an NVA booby-trapped grenade that went off. He went down, but then got up and a Corpsman went to succor him and after that, we went in, missing some of the men with whom I’d served previously in Third Squad. The squad leader, Corporal Jacobs’ back had been rent by one of those .50 caliber rounds that had been delivered by the friendly fire. He stood there among us like nothing had happened to him.

After we all retired to our area, we shouted and jumped up and down and the Marines sent historians to record our thoughts. I remember relief. I remember a sense of satisfaction, and I also remember feeling extremely elated. How I imagined exaltation. I was bad, I was indestructible. I was alive.

And we’d gotten in their trench. Their trench.

We were…were…were unbreakable, we were shatterproof, we were everlasting.

The thing that sticks in my mind after all these years was that high, that feeling that I stood atop a throne at the apex of the world was at that moment so different from the almost two months of despair that permeated everything that I had lived through. Thousands upon thousands of incoming rounds that shook the ground—some that roared like railroad engines and some that hissed like sneaky spirits—and dismembered men I knew and didn’t know, who at that time and in that place were like twin brothers to me.

I realized that for two months I’d lived on huge doses of luck and that sometime, if the siege did not stop, I’d be hit by a whooshing chunk of shrapnel that would sever an arm or a leg, or I’d be sitting in my bunker and a rocket round would crash through the roof and my fellow Marines would be gathering my parts that were pasted on the sandbag walls, or a sniper would put a round through my brain.

So, having been in their trench, and having survived, and for at least a few hours, having been on top, the aggressor, the winner so to speak. Yeah, I was elated. I was bad.

***

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52 years ago today, one of the most significant events in my memory of Khe Sanh’s siege occurred in what has now become known as the Ghost Patrol. When Marines and Corpsmen from Third Platoon of Bravo Company 1/26 were ambushed by a battalion of NVA, a squad from First Platoon went out to relieve them, and they were ambushed, too. A lot of good Marines, young men with futures that would never be discovered and fulfilled, died that day.

I have written about this a lot over the years I suppose in hopes of finding resolution, and yet I still return to the memories almost daily.

I recall our skipper, Ken Pipes, talking about the event one evening, sadness drooped on his shoulders like a too-heavy mantle. He talked about a patrol on Guadalcanal—the Goettge Patrol, led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge—that was ambushed by Japanese forces and which lost almost its entire 25-man contingent.

Skipper Pipes talked about how bad things happen in war and how the Ghost Patrol was another of the long list of actions where Marines were attacked and nearly obliterated. But his and my recognition of this fact of war had no effect, as far as I could tell, in lessening his profound sense of loss, and responsibility, related to the ambush of 25Feb68.

The Ghost Patrol has been the subject of a number of news articles, battle studies, and for a while was used as a case study in the Scouting and Patrolling class at the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico, Virginia where all new Marine Corps officers and warrant officers are trained. One of the things they taught in that course was how it feels to lose your troops/mates in the chaotic heat of battle, and in retrospect, the ensuing grief.

One of the online dictionaries defines grief as “deep sorrow, especially the sorrow caused by someone’s death.”

Grief comes in a variety of types. According to the website WHAT’S YOUR GRIEF (https://whatsyourgrief.com/ ), grief can be prolonged, anticipatory, masked, disenfranchised, secondary, cumulative, inhibited, ambiguous, complicated, normal, traumatic, abbreviated, exaggerated, absent, prolonged, chronic, and collective, to name a few.

As far as I can discern from my short appraisal of the types of grief, I suffer—or have suffered, related to the events surrounding the Ghost Patrol: normal, prolonged, complicated, traumatic, chronic and collective grief.

Collective grief, in my case, means that besides my problems with the malady, I am joined by a relatively large number of my fellow Khe Sanh survivors in our grief that is also prolonged and chronic and traumatic.

The French playwright Moliere said, “If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.”

For years, for decades, I tried like hell to stuff the grief I felt from my mates having been massacred on today’s date fifty-two years ago. And from my experience, I can say it probably didn’t help to do that. In the Marines back then, and maybe now, too, you were just supposed to tough it out. War’s hell and all that kind of sentiment, or lack of sentiment thereof. But all my grief demanded to be let out.

I think again of Bravo Skipper Pipes and it seems to me that so much of the life he lived in the too-short time I knew him was dedicated to the memories of the men he led who died at Khe Sanh and especially to all those casualties on 25February1968. His grief was palpable. It was long term. It directed him to constantly search for ways to honor those who didn’t come home.

Over the years, people have asked me why I don’t just get over it.

When we made BRAVO!, Steve Wiese said it best:

“I’ve had people say, ‘Well, that was 30, 40 years ago. Why don’t you get over it?’ You know, I wish I could. I wish I could get over it. But on the other hand, it’s like I don’t ever want to forget these guys. I don’t want to forget what I’ve seen, what I was witness to. And I don’t want to forget them and their memories.”

***

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52 years ago today I awoke and realized that the end of my life could come at any moment. Before, even though Khe Sanh had been under siege for 20-plus days, I’d been quite optimistic that all would end soon and well.

On February 5th, 1968, NVA troops had attacked the Marines of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, penetrating the barbwire lines and a vicious up-close battle ensued.

On February 6th and 7th, 1968, NVA troops had assaulted and overrun the Special Forces Camp at Lang Vei and part of their weaponry—tanks! The first time tanks had been used by the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. All that long and scary night, I heard tanks. Doubt began to slither into my soul like a cobra in the mist. Did I hear them? Didn’t I? Am I crazy? And following doubt, the cold viper of fear followed.

On February 8th, 1968, NVA troops had attacked and penetrated the defenses of Hill 64, manned by Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. A lot of good men died that day in another up-close-and-personal melee.

Misgivings started kicking the inside of my mind. No relief for Khe Sanh was in sight. Supply aircraft were blown out of the sky. The airstrip was damaged. Men I served with were maimed and dying.

Joining the Marine Corps, for me, was an act of pure impulse, like stepping off the edge of a cliff which is shrouded in a thick fog. I fully believed that I would land on my feet on some unseen safe ledge. My optimism defeated any doubt I might have harbored.

But the Marine Corps has trained millions of warriors and they know that when the bullet meets the breastbone and fear begins to gnaw and nibble, the warrior might begin to entertain doubt.

And I believe that’s one reason for the vicissitudes of Marine Corps training. The physical and mental exercises of Boot Camp. The harassment. Then the hard training in what they now call the School of Infantry.

They want to harden your body, your heart, your mind. They want your backbone ramrod straight when the manure hits the fan. They know doubt and they aim to defeat it.

But 52 years ago today doubt crept in.

I doubted I could overcome fear.

I doubted my country could save me.

I doubted my ability to do what must be done to survive. The hard things: Die for your brother, charge under deadly fire up a hill with fixed bayonets like Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate Army warriors after he told them, “Give them the bayonet,” and meet your enemy face-to-face. And kill him.

As the Siege wore on, doubt seeped into my bones, my skin, my attitude, and at times I felt as if the end of the world would show up any minute: A barrage of 152 Millimeter artillery rounds that would obliterate me, the deadly hiss of an 81 Millimeter mortar round hurtling out of the misty sky to send me home in a body bag, or a sniper round that would slap against the side of my head leaving me with a momentary expression of complete surprise before I slumped into the red mud in the bottom of the trench.

But then, after two months of getting pounded, pounded, pounded, we went into action. Action overcame doubt. I still feared mightily every possible way I might die, and I feared other things like what was out there that I didn’t know—yes, all of that. But I needed to concentrate on the tasks at hand, so doubt, for me, didn’t disappear; but it waned.

More than once we charged up hills with fixed bayonets, into the teeth of death, my doubt forgotten because I had a job to do.

We gave them the bayonet.

***

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Fifty-two years ago this morning, the Siege of Khe Sanh began with a bang when the NVA hit one of the base’s ammo dumps and the world seemed, for that morning at least, to erupt into a volcano of death and fear.

As I write this, I can close my eyes and the visions of that morning and what followed flood me, a wide river of molten hot lava-thoughts that sizzle the inside of my memory.

The night before the siege began, the tension felt so thick we could have ladled it with a spoon. Puff the Magic Dragon, or Spooky as some folks called the plane, circled the combat base that squatted alone, enveloped in fog. The red tracer arcs from Puff’s guns cut great waving sweeps through the damp mist and the moans and groans of the guns led me to ponder ghosts.

The following morning, the world came apart at the seams and I wondered if I would survive the onslaught. But I did, we did, some of us, anyway.

Images of men lying in the trench with smashed leg-bones still haunt me, and the sergeant in the machine gun bunker with a gouge ripped down the shin of his right leg, and our CS gas, released when the dump blew up, sneaking across the red mud to make our lives more difficult, and in the case of some of our Marines, forcing them to operate in deadly situations.

The men I served with at Khe Sanh were stalwarts. I don’t think there is a better word to describe them. Even though we were just a bunch of kids. Kids.

A lot of us didn’t make it out of that hellhole. I think of men I knew well, in that significantly special way warriors know and love each other, who paid the ultimate price for the right to say they were United States Marines.

Moments dart out of the mist of memory. A big, gap-toothed smile, a Marine helping me negotiate an angry, rain-swollen river, a Marine who just loved to dance.

One of them I see sitting in a hooch with a bunch of other Marines, his new utilities a stark contrast to the tattered and faded ones I wore. Mine stained with the red mud of Khe Sanh, his looking snappy.

In 2010, Betty and I went to The Wall to take some photos of names and I ran into a fellow looking for the name of that Marine I now envision in my mind. When he found out I knew the man whose name he sought, he broke down in a highly motional moment that keeps creeping into my consciousness, and every time the moment comes, I am reminded of the tentacles of life severed by death.

Right now, their faces, the dead of Khe Sanh, roll through me like a filmstrip. A wink, a frown, a flippant reaction to the guns of the North Vietnamese, a row of freckles on high cheekbones, that particular look you see in the eyes of a Marine who knows he may soon die. Those Marines are here, with me in the moments of my recall even though they’ve been gone fifty-plus years.

They are part of me. Part of the person I have become.

***

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