We arrived in Hue and, due to time considerations, went immediately to the Imperial City, scene of intense and savage fighting during the 1968 Tet Offensive. . To call the Imperial City impressive is an understatement, even though many of the buildings have been reconstructed. Even that feat is nothing short of compelling when you look at the detail of the recreations of the original structures. As you can see from the picture to the right, the Vietnamese left many of the original walls intact so that the bullet holes and shrapnel pockmarks would be preserved in some places to remind people of the savage fighting and death that occurred here during the Tet of 1968.
The Battle for Hue City began at 3:30AM on January 31, 1968, and officially ended on March 2, 1968,although the city was declared "secured" on February 26. There were numerous NVA and VC units involved, too many to list. The main US units were 1/1, 1/5 and 2/5 from the Marines (2/5 is the same unit depicted in the sci-fi flick, "Battle Los Angels," a must see for sci-fi fans), the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cav and the 1st of the 501st from the 101st Airborne Division. The NVA and VC Lost more than 5,000 men and women. The US Marines had 142 men killed and 857 wounded; the Army had 74 KIA and 507 wounded; the Vietnamese Marines suffered the worst casualties, with 3845 men killed and 1,830 wounded. Other ARVN units lost hundreds more and thousands of civilians were killed and wounded, as well. It is well known that in the largest bloodbath of the Vietnam War, NVA and VC cadres rounded up and massacred more than 2,800 civilians they deemed, "Enemies of the people." Their mass grave was later uncovered and more than 3,000 civilians were never accounted for.
We left the Imperial City and finally made it to the hotel. Most of the group attended a dinner with Buddhist nuns from one of the local monasteries, but I chose to go to the hotel and just crash, really exhausted from the Tomahawk and Phu Bai stops and the walking we did to get to, and then inside, the Imperial City. The old knees can only take so much, despite the painkillers. The hotel in Hue was nice, although most of us continued to have problems getting onto the Internet, even in the hotel lobby. It was weird how this just “cleared up” once we reached Ha Noi. The next morning, we loaded up early—about 7:00AM for the trip down Highway 9, along the north side of the Ben Hai River—the road to Khe Sanh, and many other sites that are important to so many of us who served there: the Rockpile; Con Thien; Dong Ha, C1 and C2 and LZ Stud (Vandergrift Combat Base), to name a few. This trip was being made for Peter and his wife, Barbara. He was a Fire Direction guy for the 2nd Battalion, 94th Artillery, an Army self-propelled 175 unit. His battery was at Gio Linh, which was back up Highway 1 north of Hue and almost on the DMZ. He is a wonderful guy, dedicated to peace, who was also at Kent State when the four students were killed by members of an Ohio National Guard Unit. Can you imagine? To make it out of Khe Sanh and Gio Linh and then have to watch the events at Kent State unfold a few years later. Fate has no boundaries, apparently.
On the trip down Highway 9, we first stopped at a location near the “Rockpile,” a Marine base that was part of what was referred to as the area within a 54+-square-mile AO known as “Leatherneck Square”: Con Thien and Gio Linh, in the north, traveling east to west; and Dong Ha to Cam Lo, in the south. As you can see from the pictures to the right, Rockpile was reachable only by air. I know that in 1967, the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, was there. I think this was my friend, Jim Gunn’s unit, but I don’t know if he and his company were part of this unit then. . It was an impressive and foreboding structure and another one of those places that was pounded pretty regularly by enemy artillery, rocket and mortar fire. All around it, there are farms and new growth of forest, the result of a large reforestation campaign in areas that were heavily defoliated by herbicides.
We left the Rockpile and continued down QL 9 when we came to a nice paved road heading south over the Ben Hai River. It was the road to the A Shau Valley and, obviously, did not look like this back in the day. The bridge, when I was here, before, was quite rickety and you were never sure it was going to stay together as you raced over it. The picture to the right kind of says it all as you see the road disappear into the Valley. We made this run on a number of occasions to get to 101st fire support bases that were accessible by road when we couldn't get a chopper. Needless to say, it was always at full speed and you stopped for nothing.
As we continued down the road, we passed through several Bru (one of Vietnam’s indigenous tribes) villages, with their beautiful houses on stilts because of the monsoon flooding of the Ben Hai. There were Bru women on the roadside selling fruits and vegetables and they were wearing wonderful native clothing with complex embroidery and many colors. Over the years, the indigenous people of Vietnam have, until very recently, been treated very badly by the Vietnamese government and many non-indigenous Vietnamese. . It has been very similar to the way we treated African Americans until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the ways in which we still treat our own Native Americans. However, I learned that things are getting somewhat better for Vietnam’s native people. Their young people are encouraged to advance their education and technical skills and the government subsidizes these things. They are still, however, treated much as our Native Americans are and there is a shitstorm going on over the plan for the government to seize native land for developers. Sound familiar?
On the bus ride, Peter spoke to us, quietly and fervently, about what he had experienced at Khe Sanh. It was both sadly and quietly emotional and, occasionally, humorous, as he talked about getting out of the base on a gun ship so he could go on R&R and the two weeks he spent after his R&R hiding out in Da Nang and making up excuses to his unit why he couldn't get back. I don’t know about the others, but I was crying during most of his talk to us because his pain was palpable and as he talked about those that he knew his artillery strikes had caused to die, I was focused on all of the dead—from both sides—that I had seen during my own time in Vietnam. One of EOD’s jobs was to check dead bodies—from both sides—for ordnance and booby traps after an enemy attack. Sometimes this was on a remote fire base in the A Shau Valley, such as Fire Support Base Rifle; or on the Qui Nhon airfield when the VC attacked shortly after I arrived in-country; or the many trips we made to Graves Registration to remove ordnance from American bodies just in from the field. Sometimes, when we opened the body bag, there was not much there and, somehow, we became numb to this experience. We had to, I guess, or we would have lost minds—and, maybe I eventually did—and not been able to perform our mission. I don’t know how many bodies I actually checked, but I’m guessing it was several hundred. It has always been my main issue in terms of what Vietnam did to my psyche. This trip back has helped me to relieve my soul of this burden and I feel significantly lighter—I can’t think of a better term—after my experiences on this journey. It was as if I had been carrying around some part of the spirits of the men I had “disarmed” and I was able to leave them where they belonged.
Then we arrived at the site of the former Khe Sanh Combat Base—actually located near the village of Xom Cham—where Marines and other servicemen were under siege from January 21 – April 5, 1968. Although the Vietnamese government still attempts to paint this battle as a victory for them, the truth says something quite different. Several of the photos we saw inside the museum contained outright lies under them and others were grossly inaccurate. I intend to communicate with the Vietnam Embassy in Washington about this because some of the claims on the photos are just despicable and it is things like this that keep many US veterans—particularly Marines—from coming back on trips like ours. First, the contention that the Marines “abandoned,” or otherwise “ran away” from Khe Sanh—as two photos claim—is complete bullshit. It was General Giap who withdrew his army from the battlefield; the US soldiers never withdrew, as that phrase is commonly understood in military parlance. The US and its allies lost something like 475 men at Khe Sanh and in the surrounding hill battles.
During the operation to open up Highway 9 and lift the siege at Khe Sanh—Operation Pegasus—the 1st Cav and Marines lost another 125 men. The best estimate of PAVN killed in and around Khe Sanh is something like 5,500, but it could have been as high as 10,000. As those of us who fought in Vietnam know, the enemy often removed their dead from the battle area. However, Marine reports that counted actual bodies seen and counted show 1,602 enemy dead. Given the massive B-52 and other air and artillery strikes on enemy positions, one can only imagine how many PAVN men were simply vaporized. I don’t mean to belabor the point, but if the Vietnamese government’s position is still the same as reflected in some of the photographs we saw, it is an indefensible and dishonest position.
Looking around the site of the former base at Khe Sanh, we saw two original bunkers, piles of steel plate, possibly from the old runway, and numerous pieces of US ordnance and war machines. It was a sobering view of what the men who fought there had accomplished and seeing it, now, as a peaceful coffee plantation was a mind-altering experience. It was hard to imagine the complete and continuous bedlam and chaos that was extant on the ground, and in the air, during those 76 days that the base was under siege, and the peaceful scene that we saw today. We eventually gathered around a Buddhist altar and Peter poured his heart out about what he had been witness to when he was there during the siege and how his actions as an artillery fire direction controller had impacted his life ever since. We each lit incense and placed it on the altar, saying our own private thoughts to those of both armies that had perished there, or had been physically and spiritually wounded and managed to survive. I laid my chip from The Wall on the altar and told my brothers who died there that their names had been memorialized for all time and that they were not forgotten, at leas, not by me or the people I was with.
We left Khe Sanh and headed back down Highway 9 where we stopped in Dong Ha to have lunch. The Marines had a huge ammo dump, here, and it was hit by incoming artillery on June 20, 1968, blowing their ammodump all to hell. Lew Black, from the 184th team I was on in Qui Nhon, was killed there on July 18, 1968. I have a photograph from The Wall of his name. We finished lunch and then went to the site of the former Marine and Army artillery base at Gio Linh, where Peter’s unit was located and where he spent a lot of time directing fire at NVA positions, both inside what was then South Vietnam, and over the DMZ into North Vietnam and while constantly under attack, himself, from incoming artillery fire. From everything he told us, and from what I’ve read, it was another place of unmitigated hell. As you can see from the picture to the right, the base at Gio Linh had been stripped of all vestiges of plant growth and was a barren wasteland. We found the entrance to the old base, now completely overgrown with bush and trees and with a blown up tank still guarding the entrance. We made our way down a skinny, leaf-covered path until we were standing in what was probably a central location inside the former artillery base. As we moved down the trail—not everyone went because of the thick “bush”—my head was on a swivel looking fopr unexploded ordnance--once an EOD operator, always an EOD operator, I guess.
We came to a site near a nice tree and Peter said this would be a good place to pay homage to the men who had died at Gio Linh and to his friend, Keith Francis Perrelli, a Marine artillery forward observer, who had been killed near Con Thien during a mortar barrage on his FO team on September 27, 1968. He was only twenty years old when he died. We lit incense and placed them in the ground under the tree and Peter placed a small gold cross near the joss sticks. Ed found a piece of a broken joss stick near the tree, so we knew we were not the first ones to pray at this site. We each had our private thoughts and Peter spoke some more about his time, here, his friends who had died and his gladness to have returned to this place, once a living hell and now a peaceful forest. Vela read a poem he had written that was extremely powerful and which I know caused most of us to tear up. It was about a Vietnamese mother who had lost her son in the war and her meeting with a former US solider who had come back, just as we had. At the end of the poem, the Vietnamese mother said that the American would now be her son. That’s just exactly how it is, here, as the story I told, above, about John Howard Priesthoff, II, shows.
We made our back to the bus and then traveled to the area of the bridge over the Ben Hai River that had separated South and North Vietnam. It was the same bridge that the first US POWs had crossed into freedom in 1973, an event that my friend, Dick Tobiason, an Army pilot, was involved in; he helped bring these men home and I know how strongly it affected him. He is one Oregon’s true veterans’ advocates and has done herculean work to see that all veterans are honored. Today, he helps with “Honor Flight,” a group which raises funds to take World War II veterans to Washington to see their memorial. To be honest, I was just emotionally exhausted and actually woke up on the bus, parked on the side of the river that used to be North Vietnam. The rest of the group walked across the long bridge from what was the South Vietnam side, as I watched a lone water buffalo munching away. When the group finally appeared and was approaching the location of this very large animal, John was photographing it and I guess he got a little too close, because you could see that water buffalo raise his head and snorted, sort of giving a warning to stay clear. Rumor had it during the war that the water buffalo could smell “round eyes” and didn’t like the smell. It was always amazing to watch some tiny Vietnamese child leading these beasts around, or even riding on their backs. Everyone got on the bus and we made the long ride back to our hotel, all very tired and having to pack for our flight to Ha Noi at 7AM, the next morning.
I’m going to end this, here, so I can get it posted with a lot of new pictures. I’ll next talk about my very emotional experience flying out of the Hue-area airport—now the “Phu Bai International Airport”— located on the site of the Phu Bai Combat Base airport that I and my teammates in the 287th EOD team had flown out from on numerous missions, I also flew out of here in a C-130 at the start of my last flight home on March 24, 1970. It was a very different experience 42 years later. The short video I made, below, is the take-off to Ha Noi, but it looked the same, looking out of the window of this big jet, as it had when I looked out the window of that C-130.
On the bus ride, Peter spoke to us, quietly and fervently, about what he had experienced at Khe Sanh. It was both sadly and quietly emotional and, occasionally, humorous, as he talked about getting out of the base on a gun ship so he could go on R&R and the two weeks he spent after his R&R hiding out in Da Nang and making up excuses to his unit why he couldn't get back. I don’t know about the others, but I was crying during most of his talk to us because his pain was palpable and as he talked about those that he knew his artillery strikes had caused to die, I was focused on all of the dead—from both sides—that I had seen during my own time in Vietnam. One of EOD’s jobs was to check dead bodies—from both sides—for ordnance and booby traps after an enemy attack. Sometimes this was on a remote fire base in the A Shau Valley, such as Fire Support Base Rifle; or on the Qui Nhon airfield when the VC attacked shortly after I arrived in-country; or the many trips we made to Graves Registration to remove ordnance from American bodies just in from the field. Sometimes, when we opened the body bag, there was not much there and, somehow, we became numb to this experience. We had to, I guess, or we would have lost minds—and, maybe I eventually did—and not been able to perform our mission. I don’t know how many bodies I actually checked, but I’m guessing it was several hundred. It has always been my main issue in terms of what Vietnam did to my psyche. This trip back has helped me to relieve my soul of this burden and I feel significantly lighter—I can’t think of a better term—after my experiences on this journey. It was as if I had been carrying around some part of the spirits of the men I had “disarmed” and I was able to leave them where they belonged.
Then we arrived at the site of the former Khe Sanh Combat Base—actually located near the village of Xom Cham—where Marines and other servicemen were under siege from January 21 – April 5, 1968. Although the Vietnamese government still attempts to paint this battle as a victory for them, the truth says something quite different. Several of the photos we saw inside the museum contained outright lies under them and others were grossly inaccurate. I intend to communicate with the Vietnam Embassy in Washington about this because some of the claims on the photos are just despicable and it is things like this that keep many US veterans—particularly Marines—from coming back on trips like ours. First, the contention that the Marines “abandoned,” or otherwise “ran away” from Khe Sanh—as two photos claim—is complete bullshit. It was General Giap who withdrew his army from the battlefield; the US soldiers never withdrew, as that phrase is commonly understood in military parlance. The US and its allies lost something like 475 men at Khe Sanh and in the surrounding hill battles.
During the operation to open up Highway 9 and lift the siege at Khe Sanh—Operation Pegasus—the 1st Cav and Marines lost another 125 men. The best estimate of PAVN killed in and around Khe Sanh is something like 5,500, but it could have been as high as 10,000. As those of us who fought in Vietnam know, the enemy often removed their dead from the battle area. However, Marine reports that counted actual bodies seen and counted show 1,602 enemy dead. Given the massive B-52 and other air and artillery strikes on enemy positions, one can only imagine how many PAVN men were simply vaporized. I don’t mean to belabor the point, but if the Vietnamese government’s position is still the same as reflected in some of the photographs we saw, it is an indefensible and dishonest position.
Looking around the site of the former base at Khe Sanh, we saw two original bunkers, piles of steel plate, possibly from the old runway, and numerous pieces of US ordnance and war machines. It was a sobering view of what the men who fought there had accomplished and seeing it, now, as a peaceful coffee plantation was a mind-altering experience. It was hard to imagine the complete and continuous bedlam and chaos that was extant on the ground, and in the air, during those 76 days that the base was under siege, and the peaceful scene that we saw today. We eventually gathered around a Buddhist altar and Peter poured his heart out about what he had been witness to when he was there during the siege and how his actions as an artillery fire direction controller had impacted his life ever since. We each lit incense and placed it on the altar, saying our own private thoughts to those of both armies that had perished there, or had been physically and spiritually wounded and managed to survive. I laid my chip from The Wall on the altar and told my brothers who died there that their names had been memorialized for all time and that they were not forgotten, at leas, not by me or the people I was with.
We left Khe Sanh and headed back down Highway 9 where we stopped in Dong Ha to have lunch. The Marines had a huge ammo dump, here, and it was hit by incoming artillery on June 20, 1968, blowing their ammodump all to hell. Lew Black, from the 184th team I was on in Qui Nhon, was killed there on July 18, 1968. I have a photograph from The Wall of his name. We finished lunch and then went to the site of the former Marine and Army artillery base at Gio Linh, where Peter’s unit was located and where he spent a lot of time directing fire at NVA positions, both inside what was then South Vietnam, and over the DMZ into North Vietnam and while constantly under attack, himself, from incoming artillery fire. From everything he told us, and from what I’ve read, it was another place of unmitigated hell. As you can see from the picture to the right, the base at Gio Linh had been stripped of all vestiges of plant growth and was a barren wasteland. We found the entrance to the old base, now completely overgrown with bush and trees and with a blown up tank still guarding the entrance. We made our way down a skinny, leaf-covered path until we were standing in what was probably a central location inside the former artillery base. As we moved down the trail—not everyone went because of the thick “bush”—my head was on a swivel looking fopr unexploded ordnance--once an EOD operator, always an EOD operator, I guess.
We came to a site near a nice tree and Peter said this would be a good place to pay homage to the men who had died at Gio Linh and to his friend, Keith Francis Perrelli, a Marine artillery forward observer, who had been killed near Con Thien during a mortar barrage on his FO team on September 27, 1968. He was only twenty years old when he died. We lit incense and placed them in the ground under the tree and Peter placed a small gold cross near the joss sticks. Ed found a piece of a broken joss stick near the tree, so we knew we were not the first ones to pray at this site. We each had our private thoughts and Peter spoke some more about his time, here, his friends who had died and his gladness to have returned to this place, once a living hell and now a peaceful forest. Vela read a poem he had written that was extremely powerful and which I know caused most of us to tear up. It was about a Vietnamese mother who had lost her son in the war and her meeting with a former US solider who had come back, just as we had. At the end of the poem, the Vietnamese mother said that the American would now be her son. That’s just exactly how it is, here, as the story I told, above, about John Howard Priesthoff, II, shows.
We made our back to the bus and then traveled to the area of the bridge over the Ben Hai River that had separated South and North Vietnam. It was the same bridge that the first US POWs had crossed into freedom in 1973, an event that my friend, Dick Tobiason, an Army pilot, was involved in; he helped bring these men home and I know how strongly it affected him. He is one Oregon’s true veterans’ advocates and has done herculean work to see that all veterans are honored. Today, he helps with “Honor Flight,” a group which raises funds to take World War II veterans to Washington to see their memorial. To be honest, I was just emotionally exhausted and actually woke up on the bus, parked on the side of the river that used to be North Vietnam. The rest of the group walked across the long bridge from what was the South Vietnam side, as I watched a lone water buffalo munching away. When the group finally appeared and was approaching the location of this very large animal, John was photographing it and I guess he got a little too close, because you could see that water buffalo raise his head and snorted, sort of giving a warning to stay clear. Rumor had it during the war that the water buffalo could smell “round eyes” and didn’t like the smell. It was always amazing to watch some tiny Vietnamese child leading these beasts around, or even riding on their backs. Everyone got on the bus and we made the long ride back to our hotel, all very tired and having to pack for our flight to Ha Noi at 7AM, the next morning.
I’m going to end this, here, so I can get it posted with a lot of new pictures. I’ll next talk about my very emotional experience flying out of the Hue-area airport—now the “Phu Bai International Airport”— located on the site of the Phu Bai Combat Base airport that I and my teammates in the 287th EOD team had flown out from on numerous missions, I also flew out of here in a C-130 at the start of my last flight home on March 24, 1970. It was a very different experience 42 years later. The short video I made, below, is the take-off to Ha Noi, but it looked the same, looking out of the window of this big jet, as it had when I looked out the window of that C-130.
Stu
ReplyDeletereally appreciate the thoughts and feelings evident in these blog posts, It is clear the trip was a good , while very emotional experience for you and all the others on the trip. Your discussion about body clearance before graves registration took charge of the bodies, especially brought back very vivid memories.. Amazing how the clear a picture the mind can make , even after 40yrs or so.. I read a great deal of your last blog post with tears in my eyes. Its interesting to me how my experience all those yrs ago, for only eight months, can have such lasting impact. No one goes to war and comes back the same - ever. This war certainly keeps on giving, as evidenced by the baby you we holding. Even after all these generations , the poisons remain in the genetic lines..
Thanks so much for your comments. I am working on the final post and it should be up later today. I am going to print the picture of me and the baby and put it on my "life" wall.
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