February 25, 2022
In Their Own Words
Fifty-four years ago today, one of the most despairing events of the entire battle known as the Siege of Khe Sanh occurred.
Third Platoon, Bravo Company, 26th Marines went out on a patrol and were ambushed.
Two squads from Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon went out to relieve them. They were also ambushed.
A lot of the survivors stumbled back into the perimeter over the balance of the day.
The memories still gnaw the guts of the men involved, as well as the men who watched.
What was it like?
Let some of the Marines and Navy Corpsmen who made it home tell you. These comments are from the original interviews done for the film BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR. You may recognize some of these remarks from the film and some of them you have never heard. Even though the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, the men often recollected the same events without anyone prompting. That was one of the amazing things about interviewing the men of BRAVO!.
The ambush and ensuing slaughter took on a name:
THE GHOST PATROL
The Ambush:
Cal Bright:
I ended up being point for a while and my team member, Clayton Theyerl, who was from Racine, Wisconsin, was directly behind me and motioned for me to stop. He says, “I’m going to take your place. This is your first patrol.”
Probably within five minutes all hell broke loose.
Theyerl was killed. My team leader, a Lance Corporal Thrasher from Oklahoma City, asked me to go up and retrieve the body. As I was dragging him back, the body was bouncing , was jumping back and forth and I could feel bullets whizzing past my head, and in a sense, his body protected mine.
John “Doc” Cicala:
We crossed a set of trench lines and then they opened up on us and it was just pure chaos from then on.
I watched a guy drop and I took care of a couple of guys and then as 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.
And then a grenade landed between my legs, and I looked down and I seen it and I yelled, “Grenade.”
I curled up into a ball and it went off. 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 was thinking to myself, This ain’t good. My foot moved and I said, “Well at least it’s still attached.”
Steve Wiese:
You know, most of the guys went down in the first minute. The only reason I survived was I just happened to be standing in a bomb crater where it was like two, two and one-half feet deep where it blew the ground out and I just happened to be walking through that when the ambush opened up.
Ben Long:
Men were getting shot and you could hear that happening.
John “Doc” Cicala:
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.”
1st Platoon tried to relieve the beleaguered Marines:
Peter Weiss:
Two squads, we actually split up, one squad went straight out towards where they were. The other squad went out to the right. And unfortunately he got trapped in the same kind of ambush and so of that squad, maybe ten men, I think, four were killed in that ambush.
They were ordered to retreat while the fight went on:
Mike McCauley:
You could hear it in the distance. We could hear it on the radio. The screams and stuff that was going on.
Steve Wiese:
As soon as I fired a round there were hundreds of guys shooting back.
Cal Bright:
I come across a radio operator who had been killed. To this day I have no idea what his name was.
All I could hear on the radio was, “Hello, hello, is anybody there? Anybody hear us?”
So I keyed the mike and said, “Hello.”
Somebody came back on and said, “Who’s this?”
“Well this is Cal.”
“Cal who?” And I told him and he said, “Who else is there with you?”
I called back and said, “Nobody.”
I could see little helmets in the background. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was just a few meters from the NVA
trench line.
Escape:
Ben Long:
I just started seeing people coming back, not in groups but straggling back and some were wounded.
Cal Bright:
I was able to get out of there after some time. How long? I have no clue.
John ”Doc” Cicala:
They say I made it back to the base maybe six, eight hours.
Peter Weiss:
I went out to get him. Walked through the mine field, not you know, around the side, but through the mine field. And I was scared. Walked through the mine field, walked through the concertina, grabbed…and he was in absolute shock. Grabbed him by the arm and we walked back through the mine field into the perimeter.
Steve Wiese:
I worked my way out and moved down around the back and came back to the base. And it was just like, “Where is everybody?” and I just remember the guys saying, “You’re pretty much it.”
For those who watched and listened, who weren’t in the fight:
Dan Horton:
We knew they were getting hit. We…we wanted to go out. They wouldn’t let us go out. It was just…it all happened so fast and you know it was wild. And we wanted to go out and help them out and bring them in but Headquarters said no.
Ken Korkow:
A number of us went up to Battalion and we begged to go out and get those guys and bring them back. We had to watch while those guys were getting chewed up in front of us. The Marine Corps has this saying, “We always recover our dead.” Nobody said it was going to be over a month before we recovered them. Attitudes turned really bad inside the perimeter.
Lloyd Scudder:
When I finally get back to Khe Sanh, my platoon is wiped out. I don’t know anybody. I feel like I abandoned them, I’ve been trying to prove myself ever since that deal with the Ghost Patrol…I just feel guilty.
The enduring emotional pain was palpable:
Ken Rodgers:
That’s kind of the notorious event at Khe Sanh, was the Ghost Patrol, because all those guys got killed and they got left…the bodies got left out there.
Ken Pipes:
I think it broke all of our hearts.
As I wrote this blog, sadness got in my bones and showed me a bit of the agony that we all felt that day. You’d think one could get over this stuff. You hope you get over it.
But you don’t.
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