This morning, and frankly, many mornings every week, month, and year over the past fifty-eight years, I think of what happened to my mates on this date in 1968.

I was there, in the close vicinity, I heard, I should have been out there, we weren’t allowed out there, we watched them return, we heard the stories, we listened, we whispered, we resented our leaders, we hated our enemy, we wanted revenge, we lived with it, we were guilty, we are guilty, we will always be guilty.

But whatever my recollections are of this anniversary of what has come to be called the Ghost Patrol, they are nothing compared to those who went outside the wire and walked—or were led by a young officer—into an ambush. A slaughter.

When we made the film, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, we talked during each individual interview about the date, the horror, the aftermath.

Here are some things the survivors had to say about that date. I have added some of their additional remarks that are not included in the film and have never before been heard.

Cal Bright

“I was on a patrol on February 25^th. We were leaving at, I think it was like 0800, 0900, something like that. And I ended up being point for a while, and my team member, a Clayton Therrell, who was from Racine, Wisconsin, was directly behind me and we got out so far and he motioned for me to stop. He says, ‘I’m going to take your place,’ he says, ‘This is your first patrol and consequently we just want to be safe.’ I said, ‘Okay, fine,’ and probably within five minutes, all hell broke loose from the back portion of our patrol, and I find out afterwards two or three NVA jumped and suckered part of our platoon into following…chasing them, which they definitely did and that’s when the ambush was really sprung.

“And when I finally hit the ground, I could tell that Therrell was killed. My team leader who was Lance Corporal Thrasher from Oklahoma City, asked me to go up and retrieve the body, or bring him back, he might still be alive. I kind of knew differently, but, okay I would. So I stripped down and went up and grabbed ahold of his flak jacket by the collar and as I was dragging him back, the body was bouncing, jumping back and forth and I could feel bullets whizzing past my head, to my sides, and so in a sense, his body protected mine and I look back and for a long time, in fact I still do it every once in a while, that it should be me instead of him, but I guess the good Lord upstairs had something more in mind for me. “

John “Doc” Cicala

“That’s a tough one. I relive that thing quite a bit. I remember us saddling up and going out the gate. We had a Chu Hoi scout with us and we were supposed to follow a designated route, bracketed on all sides by artillery within an instant. Well, we got about five hundred meters, I guess, outside the gate, crossing the road, and Lieutenant Jacques spotted a couple of North Vietnamese standing over in a field, and he made a decision, we’re going to take ’em prisoner. And I do remember the Chu Hoi telling him no, and a lot of us saying maybe we shouldn’t do this, but he gave the order, so we went to get ’em. And, I guess probably a few hundred yards further out, we crossed the road, we crossed a set of trench lines and then they opened up on us and it was just pure chaos from there on.”

Ben Long

“I helped plan that patrol. We had made the checkpoints. I knew how far they were going out, and from my perspective I thought this patrol should have no problems; there should be nothing to be concerned about. So, I remember watching them go out the wire. You couldn’t see them for very long because it was very foggy. And they soon disappeared and I went back in the bunker. I remember listening on the radio—they were checking in and what they were doin—and then I got busy because the next thing I realized was that they had contact, and I didn’t realize—wow, they’re in contact. How did this happen?  Because I thought, no way they’re going to be in contact when they follow the route that we had prepared for them. So I thought, either in the fog they got lost, or didn’t know where they were, or they were well beyond the checkpoints…it shouldn’t have happened that way.

Company Commander Ken Pipes

“There’s been a lot of things written about that, some of it not good, some of it an attempt to be factual. But it was something that was not uncommon in Vietnam at the fire team, squad, platoon level, and in some instances entire battalions, entire companies.”

Peter Weiss

“I was the backup for Don Jacques, and so when he went out, my platoon—two of the squads—we were the backup. So we were on the radio listening to what happened and when he was ambushed, Captain Pipes came on the radio. ‘Okay, Lieutenant, it’s your time to go out.’ And two squads—we  actually split up—one squad and I went straight out towards where they were. The other squad went to the right, which was up toward the road, because the sergeant I was with had been out there before…had been there for a while, and he knew the terrain. I didn’t know what was out there. I’d never been outside the perimeter other than being on the hill. And unfortunately, he got trapped in the same kind of ambush, and so of that squad—maybe of ten men, I think—four were killed in that ambush.”

Steve Wiese

“It took me thirty-five years before I could get into my mind that we went out there at nine or nine-thirty, whatever it was, ten in the morning, and I didn’t make it back into the base until the sun was going down, and used darkness as a cover to work my way back.

“But the initial ambush, once they opened up, I mean it was bad. I mean they opened up and you know most of the guys went down in the first minute. I mean, it was not a good thing. The actual battle itself at that point went on for hours. The only reason I survived was I just happened to be standing in a bomb crater where it was like 2-1/2 feet deep where it blew the ground out, and I just happened to be walking through that at the time that the ambush opened up. And when the first round went off, I dropped and just…my luck was that I just dropped in that hole. So I was below ground level when all the—you know—all the bullets and everything were going over. And I just laid low.”

Cal Bright

“I come across a radio operator who had been killed—to this day I have no clue who, what his name was. And all I could hear on the radio was, ‘Hello, hello, anybody there, anybody hear us?’ And I never had any training whatsoever as far as talking on the radio. I had none whatsoever.  But I knew, press the mic. So I keyed the mic and said, ‘Hello.’ And somebody come back and said, ‘Who’s this?’ and I said, ‘Well, this is Cal.’

“‘Cal who?’ And I told him. He said, ‘Who else is there with you?’ I called back and I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, “What do you mean? I said, ‘There ain’t nobody here alive; they’re all dead.’ And he said, ‘Where are you at?’ and I says, ‘I’m laying next to a road and I’m overlooking another road that goes down over a hill.’’ And he said, ‘How did you get there?’ I said, ‘This is where we ended up.’ He said, ‘What can you see, from where you are…laying down?’ I could see little helmets in the background.

“Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was just a few meters away from the NVA trench line. I had no clue I was even there, that close to them, and somebody else come on the radio and says, ‘I want to shoot a round.’ He says, ‘I want you to let me know where they land.’  I say, ‘Okay.’

“Next thing, out comes a round—afterwards I found out that it was a Willie Pete round. It was a spotter round, and I went back to him and I said, ‘You need to drop the range down,’ and he says, ‘How much?’ I said, ‘50 yards, 75 yards,’ something, and he dropped it. Shot another round. I says, ‘You need to drop it another 40 yards,’ he said, ‘Okay.’ He says, ‘Bury your head, because we’re going to fire for effect.’ And that was the last I heard, because all of a sudden, bah bah bah boom boom boom, rounds were going off left and right.”

John “Doc” Cicala

“I just watched a guy drop and I took care of a couple of guys and then I was crossing back over the road because another guy got hit, then the next thing I know I seen a guy pop out of a fighting hole. He hit me a couple of times in the chest. I was laying there and the other Corpsman, Frank Calzia, seen me go down and he come running over yelling at me, ‘JC, are you okay, are you okay?’

“And then a grenade landed between my legs and I looked down and I seen it and I yelled ‘Grenade,’ and he hit the dirt and I curled up into a ball and it went off and I couldn’t hear or see anything for a minute with all the dirt and everything and then when I could see, my foot over there and I’m thinking to myself, this isn’t good. My foot moved and I said, ‘Well, at least it’s still attached,’ and by that time Frank came over and he said, ‘You know, we got to get out of here,’ and I told him, ‘Git, you know, go take care of that guy, I’m okay, I’ll take care of myself.’

“And then Lieutenant Jacques came running by and he looked down at me and he said, ‘Doc,’ he said, ‘Get out of here.’ He said, ‘We’re all getting killed.’ And he made it from about here to the wall and I seen him go down and I crawled over to him and he’d caught it right across the legs, both his femoral arteries, and by the time I got to him he’d already bled to death and there was nothing I could do for him.

 Ben Long

“In all the confusion that’s going on, men were getting shot and you could hear that happening and I moved from my bunker. I moved up on top because I not only wanted to listen, but I wanted to see if I could see them, and it was too foggy and I still couldn’t see, but I still stayed outside because I thought maybe I’ll be able to see something. Maybe the fog will float by and I’ll be able to get a glimpse, but really, it was very foggy that day and you couldn’t see hardly anything.

“First Platoon was called up and they were the ones who were supposed to go if it got into trouble and I thought, they’re not going to get in trouble, no problem. I was Platoon Commander for that platoon for 8 or 9 months, for a long time. Those were my buddies. They were my friends. I knew them. And I thought, if they’re going to go out, I want to be their leader. I want to take them out. I know how they work together.

“And so it was hard for me to not be with them. I knew that some of my friends were being shot, some I knew were dying. I heard it on the radio. But it would just tear your heart out. These were guys that I had been working with for a long time. I felt helpless. I felt so powerless. There was just nothing I could do. I mean, I wanted to do something. I think everyone in the company wanted to go out. We wanted to do something, but we got orders: no, no more people, we can’t do that, can’t go out.”

Peter Weiss

“Then we got the word, come back, retreat, and I remember very well, because we were laying out in the open because we got stopped at some point; rockets started coming in.

“I was right next to someone who I believe was killed because I checked his pulse. My weapon had stopped firing. Couldn’t use it. Just me and the body and I wasn’t sure if I should drag him back. And bullets started coming…being walked toward the two of us. And the last one stopped right at the fellow, right in his chest—must have been a fifty caliber hit him, and I said, ‘He’s got to be dead.’”

Steve Wiese

“You know, the initial blast started quieting down, and then you could tell they were just firing pretty randomly and if anybody moved, they just drew fire. So I just laid there and threw grenades. Shot a clip of ammo out of my rifle which basically I figured out pretty quickly, that was not a smart thing to do. Because as soon as I fired a round there were hundreds of guys shooting back. So, it was like okay, don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Cal Bright

“I was able to get out of there after some time. How long? I have no clue. It was still daylight but I could tell that the sun was—what there was of it—was going down so I figured it had to be late afternoon, early evening.

“I knew where our lines were at, and I was able to evade some enemy soldiers, and I was able to get back, and then, as I was coming back, all of a sudden, here’s these—I didn’t recognize as to who they were until I got closer—South Vietnamese ARVN Rangers. And they were waving at me to stop. And then I could see some American advisors telling me to stop, halt, don’t move. Don’t move, whatever, but I kept coming. And that was when I tripped over barb wire that also had a red triangle-shaped sign on it. Come to find out afterwards, I went through the entire mine field in front of Khe Sanh and never touched a round off. Now I know why they kept telling me to stop  and not to move.

“Again, I’ve never been real religious, or anything whatsoever, but I have to think that the Man Upstairs had something in his…on his agenda. Says, ‘I want to talk to you, young man.’

“I know there has been conflicting reports as far as how many of us went out. I was led to believe there was like anywhere from 60 to 70 of us that went out and there was only just a small handful of us that come back.”

John “Doc” Cicala

“They said I made it back to the base, maybe six, eight hours later. But I did see a lot of guys go down. I seen Clay go down, I seen Jerry Lee Dotson. I took care of them. There’s nothing you could do, it was just chaos for that five or six…probably five minutes or whatever it was. I mean I heard all the stories afterwards. We ran into a battalion-sized force and everything, but it didn’t last long and it wasn’t pretty. That’s for sure.

“I crawled back to the base. I was kind of passing in and out, you know. I don’t remember all the details and I was pretty well messed up myself, but I do remember setting off a trip flare and when that went off I was thinking, ‘Oh, shit,’ but one of the weapons platoon guys—a guy named Eddie Pendergast—had a set of binoculars and he looked out and seen my uniform and he said, ‘Stop, cease fire, that’s a Marine coming in,’ and he physically ran out, him and a couple other guys, and they threw a poncho over the wire, grabbed me and yanked me back over the wire. Took me to Charlie Med.”

Ben Long

“I just started seeing people coming back, not in groups, but straggling back and some were wounded. Some were very severely wounded, and it was just very hard to take, but from my perspective, also what I saw was just a sense of confusion, a sense of ‘what’s going on…what’s happening?’ And it’s like how come we’re not doing anything? How come we’re just standing there? How come we’re not going out?

“We always want to rescue our people and we don’t want to leave our dead and wounded. Nobody was doing anything, and it was hard. Hard to watch that. We wanted to do something, but at the same time, we just couldn’t. So we had to be patient and wait and that was hard, that was really hard.”

Company Commander Ken Pipes

“But that one, that one was the hardest, I think. I think it broke all of our hearts.”

Peter Weiss

“We came back, maybe about three or four of us left, and we then came back into the perimeter. And a couple hours later, we were shelling that area. Planes were coming over dropping bombs, and all of a sudden, out on the outskirts of the wire, a lone Marine came. He was not in my platoon. And then I went out to get him. Walked through that minefield, not, you know, around the side, but through the minefield. And I was scared. Walked through the minefield, walked through the concertina, and he was in absolute shock. Grabbed him by the arm and we walked back through the minefield, back into the perimeter. I was happy that I got him out of there and that we both got back. That was a sad day.”

Steve Wiese

“I ended up leaving my rifle and just trying to work my way through. I had a pistol and I was using that for personal protection because the rifle was useless at that point, and it was just something to carry. I would dive from one bomb hole to another. Work behind anything I could find that was any kind of cover.

“I would lay there for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes. So, in between the firing, when it started to settle down a little bit, I would try to, you know, peek above and see, try to see where I could get to. And it took several hours, you know, of working my way across and moving out of the kill zone.

“Sometimes I’d have to lay there for two hours and wait for the firing to slow down. Towards sundown, in the shadows, I could move better and I worked my way out and moved down around the back and came back to the base.

“Several people came in through the gate, you know, and it was just like, where is everybody? I just remember the guys saying, ‘You’re pretty much it.’ When I got back to my squad area, Author Smith was in the bunker, and he said he was it.”

To reiterate what Skipper Ken Pipes said: It broke all of our hearts.

They are still broken.

~ By Ken Rodgers

To learn more about each of the men in this blog, click here.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

57 years ago I’d been on R and R in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and had just returned to Khe Sanh.

I’d just turned 21, one of the oldest men in Second Platoon, Bravo Company, 26^th Marines.

I’d be of legal age to drink in a bar in my hometown if I lived that long.

Just turned 21, a bit salty, with almost 10 months in-country.

The night before, January 20, Snoopy circled the combat base. Heavy mist hid the plane except for the red streams of tracers waving into the foggy Khe Sanh sky. The plane’s engine moaned and so did her guns.

In the morning, shouts, the earth a rocking, bucking bronc.

Voices of men who never scream, who always laugh and joke and bitch but now, no laughter. Screaming.

The black sky of early morning alive with red, oranges, yellows of fire.

The deafening sounds of incoming, outgoing, explosions, the thunder of scuffed jungle boots in the damp trench.

No time for coffee and cigarettes this morning.

Fear runs rampant like a wild beast, the heart thump, thump, thump.

Sergeants duckwalking below parapets telling us, “Get your asses up, into your fighting holes and face the enemy.”

We crawl into our bunkers as our NVA-targeted ammo dump starts to go up, gas, gas, gas masks on, the whistle of our own ordnance falling from our sky, our sky.

We look through our bunker apertures for the enemy we know will soon appear, in the wire, sappers first, the onslaught behind. We watch, our muscles tight, our thoughts long gone from the girl in the back seat of Daddy’s brown Buick.

A gash in Corporal Taylor’s right leg from flying shrapnel. Blood on the deck.

The ammo dump goes full-blown and the sky turns into a miasma of gas and smoke. Errant artillery rounds. Our rounds. 105s, 106s, 155s, our home away from home now a wreck and pummeled piece of a map.

Convery’s right arm in a sling, his jaws wired shut.

Down the trench to contact other platoons.

Marines in the bottom of the trench.

Crushed legs, broken arms. Haul out the morphine and pop them in the thigh.

We stand and throw the spent rounds from our dump out of the trench.

NCOs bark orders. Staff Sergeant what’s-his-name digs with his fingers in the bottom of the trench, barking like a dog, but not orders; barking his fear and his need to leave. It’s the last we see of him, sent back to the real world.

We wait.

Later. Hours later.

No ground attack comes, the ammo dump still cooks off, squiggly lines of smoke in the sky.

We think that tomorrow things will be like they were before.

We don’t yet know about the attack on Khe Sanh village or the assault on Hill 861 earlier this morning.

Wishful thinking: just a one-time event.

We are in for a rude awakening. Little do we know we will endure the onslaught for another 77 days.

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.

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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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In late February and on the 1st Day of March, 1968, the NVA massed at least a regiment out to our front with the intention of overrunning the Khe Sanh Combat Base.

Deep down in our guts, where the kind of knowledge resides that keeps you alive—not the information we learn later in life, but the intuitive stuff that dwells in our guts from our early ages—we knew they were out there and that they meant to kill or imprison us all. Knowing that turned us into salty, irreverent and determined men. We cleaned and loaded our M16s, our M60s, our M79s and waited for death to show his face.

Lucky for us, B-52 raids and heavy artillery attacks on the massing enemy forces blunted the impending assault.

Ron Ryan, KIA 6March68. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

Even though we never had to face crack NVA sappers breaching our concertina wire barriers during the 77 day seige, the consistent pounding of the incoming rounds and the threat of more attacks wore on us like big-gritted sandpaper rasping on soft wood.

On March 6th, a C-130 with the call sign BOOKIE 762 flew to Khe Sanh from Danang with a load of Marines, Navy Corpsmen and the freelance photographer Robert Ellison whose photos of the Siege of Khe Sanh became famous and who we’ve written about before in this blog series.

A near mishap with another aircraft forced BOOKIE 762 to abort its landing. The C-130 flew away from the combat base and crashed into a fog-enshrouded mountain, killing all aboard.

Stretchers at Khe Sanh. Photo by Dave Powell.

There were at least five Marines from Bravo, 1/26 on that flight, most returning from R & R. There were also a number of PFCs listed as being with H & S Company, 1/26, some of whom I am sure were new guys bound for Bravo Company as replacements for the casualties of the Ghost Patrol.

There were two men on that flight that I knew or knew of: the photographer, Ellison, and Corporal Ron Ryan, a machine gun team leader who had been with Bravo since the fall of ’67.

When people you know, and people you are related to by virtue of being in the same company, die, the realization that they will not be coming back gets up on your shoulders and weighs you down, and when the deaths accumulate, the accumulated burden debilitates more and more and more.

When I think of those deaths now, fifty years later, the thoughts still dredge up images of those Khe Sanh days, reminding me of the stacks of stretchers we would see outside the battalion aid station or Charlie Med.

The American poet, Dorianne Laux has written, “No matter what the grief, its weight,/we are obliged to carry it.”*

And with the added burden of the deaths of the men on BOOKIE 762, our grief, its weight, drove us down down down further into the depths of despair. And as the verse says, we were definitely bound to bear the weight. Which we did. Which we do.

When the word came down of the wreck of that plane, a bunch of us were standing in the trench jiving around, and “shooting the moose,” as I recall it. And then we were informed of the deaths—more deaths—and it was like there was no end to death and there would be no end and we were there to receive it and see it and deal with it.

We choked on the words stuffed down our throats, wanting to let them out. But they were trapped inside. All of us sucked long, hard drags on a Lucky, a Winston or a Salem and stared at the red mud deck, the chiseled red walls of the trench. Our thoughts about those men, Ryan, and the others, shrouded us, left us wondering if we would be next. Would it be us?

Lance Corporal R, a former mortician’s assistant from Albany, Georgia, with whom I had served in Bravo Company for almost a year, looked at me and shook his head.

A genuine wit and one of the great homespun philosophers with whom I have ever come in contact, he shook his head again and whispered to me, “Lord, don’t you know it’s a terrible thing.”

He paused, and from experience I knew he had more to say on the subject. He looked me dead in the eye for what seemed like a long time—his eyes seemed bigger than normal, their whites like lighted flares in the night—and then he said, “Better them than me.”

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh prior to the beginning of the siege. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

The brutal honesty of that saying, that moment, bored right down inside my guts and made me stop and ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing in Khe Sanh, the Marine Corps. Was a world so brutal as what we found at Khe Sanh something I wanted to be part of?

And even though I realized I agreed with him, and secretly reveled in my survival, I still felt some kind of guilt, some kind of loss, because those men would not be coming back to us—their family in Vietnam—nor would they go back to hug their mothers and their sisters, their wives and girlfriends.

And there was a passel of grief tied up in the notions that bombarded me as I kept thinking of those men, thinking of Lance Corporal R’s words, feeling guilty because I was alive.

And the grief weighed down and I am obliged to carry it—even now.

*Dorianne Laux, “For the Sake of Strangers,” from her book of poems, WHAT WE CARRY.

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3rd and 1st Platoons of Bravo Company, 1/26 walked into two ambushes that decimated 3rd Platoon and a little later, part of 1st Platoon while it moved to reinforce 3rd Platoon. The event remains one of the most horrifying of my memories of that long and terrible siege.

Prior to this date, back in 1968, Bravo Company ran patrols out on the south and east sides of Khe Sanh without much action, and it was a surprise when 3rd Platoon marched into the initial ambush that morning.

The patrol is well documented in books and films, and the action’s memories haunt the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who managed to work their way back to the combat base. For some of the men, it took hours to get back. Some don’t really recall coming back. It is a horror story. The few Marines I recall seeing and talking with that day looked at me with eyes haunted by the terrors of that fire fight.

For us, back in the base, the news about the debacle out in the field came through radio communications. If one stood radio watch, he heard the sad and frightening blow-by-blow account through the frantic calls of radio operators on site. We also got the news from the sounds of warfare out to our front.

Photo of Marines on the Ghost Patrol. Photo courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar

It was misty that day, as it was on many days at Khe Sanh, but that didn’t deter the report of explosions and small arms fire that flew at us from out of the field.

We sat and waited and wondered if we would go out to relieve them. Several squads from our platoon, 2nd Platoon, mustered and saddled up and made way to the gate near the trash dump, and awaited orders to go out and help the Marines trapped in those ambushes.

Not picked to go out, I received orders to man a portion of the trench where our platoon was billeted. Instead of Marines in fighting holes all over the place, large gaps appeared between our manned positions. I recall thinking that if the NVA came at us right then and breached the concertina barrier, we were all, as the saying goes, “toast.”

That scared me. I recall Corporal A, who arrived at Bravo Company about the same time I did, being in charge of those of us manning the lines, and it was a great comfort to me when I heard the scuff of his boots in the red mud. I wasn’t alone.

Later, the Marines of 2nd Platoon who had been ordered to stand by to go out in the field began filtering back into our positions with wild tales of incoming pinning them down as they tried to move out the gate. They also cussed the higher-ups who put out the incomprehensible word that any relief for those wounded and dying Marines out there would not come to pass. Orders came down—some opinions I’ve heard and read attribute the orders to Lyndon B. Johnson, president at the time—for us to remain inside the combat base. We abandoned those men.

The stories that followed ate the inside of my guts, and that sensation remains with me today.

It took almost two months for the remains of those brave and forsaken men to be retrieved.

I recall, late on this date, fifty years ago, sitting in the trench with a Marine, Lance Corporal W, whom I knew from 3rd Platoon. A Native-American, he’d participated and lived through most of the combat action that Bravo Company had seen. He told me about what happened out there. About the death of 2nd Lieutenant Don Jacques, platoon commander of 3rd Platoon, about the ambush, and how he and others had carried the body of Lt. Jacques back. When he talked about bodies and wounds, the gunfire and death, I shivered.

Forty years later, when I first heard the fire fight of February 25th termed Ghost Patrol, I thought of cheesy movies and found the glib nature of the name offensive. But over the years, I’ve gotten used to it. I think it very appropriate, because the ghosts of those men keep appearing in my memory.

The ghosts show up in the families of the fallen, too. Last year I came in contact with a brother of one of the men who died on that patrol. He is haunted by the recollections of his brother back when they were young, and when his brother joined the Marines and went off for adventure and to do what generations of 20th Century America did: Joined up and fought. And what remains for him and for all of us, is the ghost, the ghosts.

Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of the late Dan Horton.

The men of the Ghost Patrol are now just names to most people but the images of them lying in bomb craters with red water in the bottom, waiting for us to save them inhabit my being.

The ghosts often show up in my dreams. Together we man a trench in a night so dark it is almost impossible to see. I hear them breathing, the sound of dungarees swishing with motion, the clink and clack of weapons. And occasionally, I see some light, maybe the moon, the stars, or a flare, reflecting off the whites of their eyes.

And it haunts me.

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A lot of the great followers of BRAVO! have become personal friends, too. Back when we first dreamed of making a film, Lance and Pam Thompson became some of our initial mentors and have been supporters for years. Recently they gifted me a beautiful book of narrative and photographs titled REQUIEM centered on the work of all the photographers who were killed or went missing in the Indo-China, Vietnam and Cambodian wars of the mid-twentieth century.

One of the first photos I found as I thumbed through the striking pictures was a portrait of Robert Ellison who snapped a lot of photos of Bravo Company during the siege before his untimely death on a flight into Khe Sanh on the 6th of March, 1968.

Jarheads like me often sat around the trench aware that Ellison might sneak up and photograph one of us and if you were lucky enough for that to happen, you wanted to appear most vigilant, squared away, warlike, masculine. I doubt he was interested in capturing any image except what was to him, the emotional truth of a moment, the ragged determination, the fright, the courage the defenders of Khe Sanh exhibited.

Marines of Bravo Company, 1/26, on February 25, 1968. Photo by Robert Ellison. Used with permission.

We saw him often, in the trench with his camera, trying to be insignificant. But he knew his job was to portray the reality of war and so he willingly appeared at moments the grunts in the trenches tried to avoid such as the ammo dump going up in red and orange flame on 21 January, a trench full of very frightened men trying not to be pulverized by incoming 152 MM artillery rounds, the ambushed Marines of the Ghost Patrol. It was his job to show the world the ugliness of war in a stark and beautiful way.

My most memorable experience with him was on a day about a month into the siege when the base was taking an awful pounding from the NVA. When that happened—round after round after round of small stuff and big stuff and everything in-between shaking our world—I looked for a place to hide and so did most of the other Marines with whom I served.

We tried to get small. We tried to get away, but there was none of that—getting away. On the day in question, I sat in a bunker, back against a wall. On my left, the trenchline to the north, on my right, the trenchline to the south, and to my front, the trench itself passing right through the bunker where I sat.

I had my knees up against my chest and my head down on my knees, and I flinched with every explosion, and I bounced from the impact of the big ones that landed close and I…I don’t know if I can explain how it feels to be overwhelmed with the fear that all that artillery delivers along with the concussion and shrapnel and roar.

I do know that on that day, I sank deeper and deeper into an abyss. In reality, there was no escaping the physical aspects, the screams and the chaos, the men you knew were probably dying. No escape unless you could hide somewhere inside the mind.

Enduring the barrages allowed agony to creep into the small parts of your body, liver and lungs, vessels and veins, cells, molecules. It was physical input, what was happening outside, feeding what you were on the inside—the great and the ignominious.

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

I recall it well, after fifty years. My mind hightailed it away from my body. I could see myself not just sitting on my butt in the damp red mud, but also walking on a tightrope, or maybe a roof peak. On my left was insanity. On my right, sanity but with a caveat that outside, the end of the world as I knew it stalked. I was confused and didn’t know whether to jump to the left, to the side that whispered to me of safety (and some sort of insanity), or to the right, into the outside, the known, the specter of death, or maybe a leg gone, or an arm. No eyes, no jaw.

Lucky for me, I heard the snap of a camera shutter which drew me out of my mind, my fear. I looked to my right and there knelt Robert Ellison, taking photos of me.

I think I had mixed emotions. He had found me in a battle inside my mind, maybe at one of my worst moments at Khe Sanh, maybe the worst moment of my life. I was vulnerable, exposed, caught in the act of battling cowardice. (You couldn’t afford to be a coward there. Peer pressure would gobble you up, not to mention the guilt that would ride your back, spurring you like a devilish master for the rest of your life.) But I also understood that his intervention in my moment of doubt probably saved me from going crazy. And that has earned him my undying thanks.

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Forty-eight years ago on February 25, 1968, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment’s Third and First Platoons were trapped in a nasty ambush that has since become something of a legend in the lore of the Marine Corps.

Third Platoon, on a patrol outside the wire at Khe Sanh Combat Base, was ambushed by troops from the North Vietnamese Army and when elements of First Platoon attempted to relieve Third Platoon, they were also ambushed.

I wasn’t out there that day. I was sitting inside the wire, peering in the direction from which the gunfire and explosions were coming, and listening to the strained voices of men in extreme danger come over the radio.

I have written about the event—now known as The Ghost Patrol or the Lost Patrol—before, and one of the reasons I keep writing about it is because the memories of that day and the men we lost preys on my mind.

Photo of Marines on the Ghost Patrol. Photo courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar

At the time, and for some time after, we, the Marines and Corpsmen of Bravo Company, didn’t call it The Ghost Patrol or the Lost Patrol. I don’t think we called it anything. We didn’t need to because it loomed large in our psyches and in some regards, for some of us, it remains so today.

Unfortunately for mankind, this kind of event is fairly common in warfare and I suspect will remain so as long as we humans send our warriors into harm’s way.

You don’t have to go back very far in history to find record of the mayhem that ensues when a combat operation falls apart. S. L. A. Marshall, in his book titled THE RIVER AND THE GAUNTLET about the American 8th Army’s debacle in Korea, describes in detail fire-fight after fire-fight in which American troops were wounded, killed and captured, their units chewed up by the Chinese Army in November of 1950.

The thing that’s on my mind now, as I write this, is that if it is so common, why is it so devastating to us? Of course it’s because these sorry, dismal events happen to real people. More than maps and strategies, the things that we as warriors often remember are the faces or our comrades before and after the combat, the memories of a shared can of peaches or pears, three on a match, telling stories about back home as we brew coffee in a C-ration over the heat from a chunk of C-4. It’s personal.

In our film, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, we manage to capture some of that sense of loss that we, the men of Bravo Company, felt, as the events of February 25 tumbled about us. The loss. Such a waste. If only things had occurred differently. But they didn’t. They don’t. And of course, it wasn’t just us. Every service has had and will have the moments where close comrades are lost as an operation falls apart.

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

There was a civilian photographer at Khe Sanh (there were several) when the events of February 25 happened, and his name was Robert Ellison. Ellison captured some graphic and profoundly revelatory photographs of some of the Marines and Corpsmen involved in The Ghost Patrol. He was roaming around outside the base perimeter, helping wounded Marines struggle in while he took photos of the faces of war. What he captured on film reveals the men in ways that are heart rending. I share a few of his photos in this blog.

Unfortunately, Robert Ellison became a casualty of the Vietnam War on March 6, 1968, while aboard a plane on its way back to Khe Sanh from the coast. That plane crashed into a mountain outside the combat base and Ellison was killed along with all the other men on that flight. The photographs he left us are a powerful legacy.

Marines hauling a casualty during the Ghost Patrol. Photo courtesy of Robert Ellison/Blackstar

Yes, combat is about people and personal loss and the things that happen to our souls when we go through the nightmares of war. In many ways, I think, our souls are damaged, often until the end of our lives.

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The Siege of Khe Sanh ended for me the moment I got on a CH-46 and flew to Dong Ha. As far as I can recall, that happened around April 4, 1968. As the big bird swooped off, I looked back at Khe Sanh and began to let the notion that I had survived soak into my soul. I was gone.

I hopped flights from Dong Ha to Phu Bai to Danang to Okinawa to El Toro and finally to Arizona on April 11. No more killing. No more hiding in a hole. No more whiz bang smash crash kaboom from incoming; except in my dreams.

As I traveled from the war to home and then from bar to bar to bar in the United States, I fought like hell any attempts to wonder about what was going on at Khe Sanh. I read the papers every morning and read the daily death tolls but I had already managed to jam a metaphorical arm’s length between the Khe Sanh Combat Base and me.

The last few days in Khe Sanh I’d promised Alvarado that I’d contact his uncle as soon as I returned and I promised Jake the Snake I’d send him a fifth of Chivas Regal and I suspect I promised a lot of other things to the men I fought with. But as soon as my legs steadied on the tarmac at El Toro, I let all the promises drain out of me along with a ton of the tension that tied my neck in knots.

I immersed myself in the glory of home, my buddies, the alcohol, and the women, not that I could get close to them or anyone, family or otherwise. But I tried to forget it all and I for sure didn’t wonder what was happening at Khe Sanh.
For me it was kaput, finis, dead, over.

American warrior on Hill 471.

But it wasn’t. Men were still being killed and maimed at my old homestead. Besides the warriors still trapped inside the combat base and surrounding hills, elements of the 1st and 3rd Marine Regiments and the United States Army’s 1st Air Cav, in what was named Operation Pegasus, were driving up Route 9 in an attempt to relieve Khe Sanh.

On April 6 while I was in Phu Bai turning in my gear at the battalion rear, Marines and Corpsmen from Bravo 1/26 and Delta 1/26 went out on a patrol and picked up the remaining bodies of the Bravo Company men who were killed on February 25.
On April 6 through April 8, Marines from 2/26 were moving off of Hill 558 to drive the enemy from the field and were engaged in three days of vicious combat.

On April 13, two days after I got home, Felix Poilane, the French national whose family owned one of the coffee plantations at Khe Sanh, was killed in a plane crash while coming back to Khe Sanh. That day, I was already running around with my old college roommate drinking cases of Coors.

On April 14, Operation Pegasus was complete and Operation Scotland II began, and the main breakout by the Marines of Khe Sanh started.

In Operation Scotland II, elements of the 26th and 9th Marines began to drive into the surrounding country and maul the North Vietnamese Army. 1/9 hit Hill 689. Marines from 3/26 assaulted Hill 881-N, which had always been a symbol of the North Vietnamese Army’s ability to battle toe-to-toe with us.

While all this fighting was going on, I was boozing it up on Cinco de Mayo in Nogales, Mexico, and traveling to Phoenix to hang out in honkytonks. Then I was with 5th Battalion Recon at Camp Horno, and all the time, for me, Khe Sanh was over.
Later, while I was rappelling on San Clemente Island and running along the beach at Camp Pendleton, the Marines were still fighting and dying at Khe Sanh.

On June 18, Operation Charlie began with the abandonment of the Khe Sanh Combat Base a primary goal. To get this job done, more Marines died. Khe Sanh was destroyed by our own forces.

On October 9, 1968, a ceremony was held at Khe Sanh—or more specific, the base’s remains—to memorialize the men who died defending the place. By the time of the Khe Sanh ceremony in October, I had been transferred to San Diego to begin a year of . . . even though I was still a Marine . . . living somewhat like a civilian.

After the Siege ended, over 600 Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force personnel perished in Operations Pegasus, Scotland II and Charlie. That number is much larger than the number of men who died during the Siege itself.

To be honest, in the back of my mind, while I lived my stateside life, I knew men were dying over there. But I was trying to stuff all those thoughts and the memories they led to. But some encounters made it impossible to hide from the recollections of my time at Khe Sanh.

Casualties on Hill 689.

For instance, one of the men I served with as a radio operator at Khe Sanh was stationed with me at San Diego. We had shared a bunker for over a month during the Siege. In San Diego we never spoke of our time in Vietnam. I suspect he was doing the same thing I was, trying to bury the recent past. But every time I looked in his face, his weary eyes talked to me about the days and nights spent cooped up like rats, the times we went outside the wire and assaulted NVA trenchlines.

I was also stationed with a Marine who was an engineer with the unit that blew up the Combat Base during Operation Charlie. One night he described to me the action, explosion by explosion. It all made me sick with disgust.

All those men who had died before, during, and after the Siege . . . thinking of them made me think, what a waste. Those brave and frightened men who died during the relief and the breakout, men of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 9th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 26th Marines, 3rd Recon, and associated support units, pilots and flight crews. Seabees and Corpsmen and pilots and air crews from the Navy, pilots and air crews with the Air Force, pilots, air crews, special forces and ground-pounders with the United States Army. People like the photographer Robert Ellison, killed while serving as a civilian photojournalist. All the ARVNS and the local Bru montagnards who fought with us and died. Yes, it all made me sick with disgust.

I think a lot of fellow Vietnam veterans still battle memories of their time in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. For their sake, I hope the sacrifices made on both sides accomplished something beyond the death and despair.

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