Not 200 soldiers, not even 400. His B company hatchet force had landed directly in the operational security perimeter of the North Vietnamese Army’s second regiment headquarters. Approximately 600 enemy soldiers, artillery positions, command bunkers, supply depots, organized defensive fighting positions with interlocking fields of fire. A division level base area that American intelligence had…
Units that had been at full strength in January were decimated by February. The D445 Battalion, the 274th Regiment, the 33rd NVA Regiment. All of them took devastating casualties. But here’s what that created. These enemy units weren’t destroyed. They were wounded and retreating. They were falling back to their jungle sanctuaries in the Hat…
They could destroy anything they could see. The problem was they could not see anything. The North Vietnamese army and Vietnome controlled when battles happened. They attacked when conditions favored them and vanished when they did not. Standard American infantry battalions, 80 to 100 men moving in formation, conducted massive sweeps through the jungle designed…
He wanted to be a United States Marine. On May 20th, 1959, his 17th birthday, Hathcock walked into a Marine Corps recruitment office in Little Rock and enlisted. The recruiter asked him why he wanted to join. Hathcock’s answer was simple. I want to be the best. The Marines took him. What they didn’t know…
And then there was Vietnam. The domino theory wasn’t just American paranoia. For Australia, separated from Asia by less than 300 m of ocean at its [music] closest point, every falling domino looked like it was pointed south. The fear was simple and visceral. Fight communism in Asia or fight it on Australian beaches. So,…
North Vietnamese Army institutionalized radio telephone operator targeting as primary tactical doctrine. Captured training manuals showed explicit target rankings. Officers rated high value. Machine gunners rated high value. Medics rated moderate value depending on situation. Radio telephone operators rated essential elimination. Essential, not preferred, not opportunistic. Essential. Enemy commanders understood modern warfare. Information wins. Kill…
On June 16th, 1966, a Royal Australian Air Force C130 Hercules transport aircraft touched down at Vanga Air Base on the southern coast of South Vietnam. The temperature was 96° Fahrenheit, humidity at 87%. 75 men of three squadron special air service regiment filed out into the scorching afternoon heat under the command of Major…
I was the mother of the bride. Yet on my daughter’s wedding day, a young coordinator stopped me at the front entrance and quietly said, “Ma’am, you’ve been asked to use the service door in the back.” For a moment, I thought she must have mistaken me for someone else. But she hadn’t. Inside that…
The strange thing about my husband’s funeral wasn’t the silence. It was the whisper. I was standing beside Robert King’s casket, trying to breathe through the kind of grief that makes your chest feel hollow when my 11-year-old grandson, Lucas, slipped a folded piece of paper into my hand. He didn’t look at me. He…
3 weeks before that dinner in Atlanta, my life looked very different from what the Whites imagined. Quiet, predictable, small. At least that’s how most people saw it. I lived alone in a modest brick house in Charleston, South Carolina. The house sat on a quiet street lined with magnolia trees that had probably…
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