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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