Yesterday was National Vietnam War Veterans Day and this morning, March 30, 2025, is the fifty-seventh year since Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines went out on an action, finally taking our fight into the trenches of the North Vietnamese Army.
I suspect all of us who took part in that action and are still living remember this day. Like big red flags and big bangs and big winds inside the memory.
One of my comrades who fought that morning calls it the “most significant day in my life” and although it may not be the most important, for me it’s pretty damned big.
For forty-one years I didn’t know this day had earned a name. I found out about it in 2008 when someone asked me if I’d been on the Payback Patrol.
At the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I figured it out.
Payback. Was it payback?
I don’t know, but it was hell and war and glory and death and fright and elation, all rolled into one.
We lined the trench in the dark morning and smoked our cigarettes and mumbled. The spirit of fear flew through and circled back. Voices whispered about what we would encounter. Our artillery batteries fired what seemed like thousands of rounds as we waited to depart. We heard jets dropping bombs and somewhere a chopper. All in support of our assault.
In the platoon briefing, it was my understanding that the patrol was routine, that we were departing the wire to find and return the bodies of our fallen comrades still out there from the ambush of February 25. Based on our patrol of March 21, in which we found no live enemy, I anticipated this action to be similar. Go outside the wire, climb the ridge, find the fallen, put them in body bags, bring them back.
I think I may have been a victim of my overwhelming desire not to go into the kind of combat we would find that morning.
The skipper and his command post came down the trench, the skipper patting shoulders and nodding and smiling. I couldn’t smile.
The word came down, “Move out.”
I dropped my Winston on the muddy deck of the trench.
We charged up the ridge, the world around rocking and rolling, the roars and swooshes and thumps and thunder like the last days of the universe.
Staff Sergeant Gus Alvarado and I brought up the rear, our platoon, Second Platoon, coming up behind the two other platoons that assaulted the ridge on line.
Suddenly we were both on the deck, the world whistling a wild tune, the ripples of pain like a pool of water when a stone is thrown.
Like scoping in and out with a set of binoculars, in and out, consciousness en garde, consciousness intermittent.
I shook my head and got up. Staff Sergeant Alvarado put out his hand and I pulled him to his feet. He’d been hit in the ankle by a mortar tail fin. I had shrapnel in my head but didn’t know it. If the shrapnel had been a little higher on the left side of my head, it would have penetrated the temple and then who knows how I might have reacted.
We inspected where the mortar hit. Close. Too close. But sometimes you are lucky. We went on up the hill.
At the top, the corpsman stopped us and looked at the side of my head. “Shrapnel,” he said.
I looked to our front. What every Marine dreams of when enlisting was going on. Smoke and fire, explosions, Marines in the enemy trench. Stabbing, shooting, ducking, dying.
At that moment I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t articulate what I witnessed and sometimes still can’t.
Gunny Morris came up and said, “Son, are you ok?”
I didn’t want the fuss of any of that and said, “Yes, Gunny.”
His hands were shaking. That frightened me. Him, a man, a veteran of long years, a real Marine, shaking.
What was obvious to me, out there to our front, was an urgent, vicious, desperate battle where men faced one of the ultimate moments of truth.
How long I stood and watched, I don’t know, the memories like a fractured flicker, click and blank and bam and dark and fear all piled together like kids playing King of the Mountain.
Second Platoon soon moved out and into the melee.
Us, advancing through the enemy trenches, and they were extensive and intricate. Each bunker had a tunnel that led to another bunker so when assaulting them, one Marine needed to be in front of each of the bunkers.
Grenades, rifle fire, satchel charges blowing bunkers to smithereens, our flame-thrower Marines moving through, torching bunker openings, cooking anyone who remained inside.
Bodies littered the trenches. I stopped to look at one, his face the color of saffron. Young, so young.
The word came down from the platoon commander, Lieutenant Dillon, for Staff Sergeant Alvarado and me to move forward to the front of the action and call in some artillery.
We passed a Marine machine gun team where the gunner was pounding the head of another Marine. I knew that Jarhead on the ground and my experience with him was he couldn’t control his fear. As I pressed on, I suspected he’d failed in his duty to his fellow Marines.
We passed another gun team manned by men I knew well. One of them, a cocky Puerto Rican kid from New York City—I don’t remember his name, but I see his face as if he was standing here talking to me now—yelled, “Rodgers, what are you doing out here? You’re too short!”
He was right, I was a short timer, five or six days left in the field, but right then, none of that mattered. Men were dying, the NVA were counterattacking.
As the staff sergeant and I hurried through the trench I noticed the company command group down in a bomb crater which included what looked like an NVA prisoner. As I looked at them a second time, a barrage of mortars fell and dust and smoke erupted.
We ran on, I looked a third time and the smoke cleared. Marines lay dead and wounded on the deck, the NVA prisoner on his knees. The one Marine still standing shot the prisoner in the head with a .45 caliber pistol.
For years I forgot I’d seen this event.
In 2010, while we were in San Antonio, Texas, at the Khe Sanh Veterans Reunion filming BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, I met with Skipper Ken Pipes early one morning out on a patio overlooking the San Antonio River. I asked the skipper about that event and my memory of the NVA prisoner’s execution.
He said, “No, that didn’t happen.”
A boat went down the river.
I took a sip of coffee.
The skipper looked me in the eye. “I’m not telling you who shot that prisoner.”
Anyway, when the staff sergeant and I arrived out in front of where all the action had occurred, we called in artillery rounds that landed close and shook the ground and threw dust and chunks of red clay into the air.
Then Bravo began to pull back. Second Platoon formed a line and backed away from the outer edge of our penetration as some of us gathered wounded and dead Marines while men in the front line fired into oncoming NVA soldiers counterattacking.
Smoke and explosions and the roar of war resounded in the air, the ground, and still rattles the inside of my head.
The platoon commander of Third Platoon lost his radio operator and I was assigned to work with him. We headed for the rear of the battle. We had been warned in the night-before’s briefing that Chinese Claymores were hung all around the ground over which we fought and that we should, if possible, stay in the enemy trench.
As we headed back towards the combat base, the lieutenant got out of the trench and started running. I saw Claymores hanging in the branches of naked limbs nearby.
I yelled, “Lieutenant, get back in the trench.” But he didn’t.
So I climbed out and ran after him.
As he hustled along, he tripped a booby trap. Like a rocket it shot out of the ground and hit him. Smoke and debris and fire shot around him like a cloud and some of it hit me in the face. That pissed me off.
He stood bent low and I wondered if he’d fall over dead. I felt something on my face, sizzling the skin.
I yelled and cussed him as I came up and lifted his head. His cheeks and chin were smoking, on fire, so to speak, from white phosphorus, which is pyrophoric or in Marine language, burns on contact with air.
I leaned and grabbed a handful of mud and smeared it on my face to smother the fire as I muttered expletives at him, at the NVA, at war. I grabbed more mud and tried to extinguish the fire on his face. He never fell, never talked, just stared, I guess in shock, until a corpsman arrived and took over his care.
So much of that four- or five- or six-hour fight remains obscured. Too horrible to recall? I wonder if the sequence of events even matters now after all this time. So many images tumble through the back side of my eyes. Who died when and where. What we did and what we saw. What we didn’t do but thought we did. What we did and don’t think we did, don’t remember, don’t want to remember.
One of the striking images I have that doesn’t alter over decades, is our withdrawal.
I walked down the road by myself, radio on my back pressing me down, my emotions like ghosts haunting me.
The faces of our men like skeleton heads, gaunt, and spare, faces like people wanting to burst into tears, but too, elation. For two-and-one-half months we’d been hammered and pounded and scared a thousand times, thousands of moments, our fright like flights of bats invading our bodies, but now, this day, too, we’d gotten even, so to speak. We’d shot some people, and fought our way all through their entrenchments, we’d succeeded, we were someone again, Marines.
I saw two Marines dragging a body down the middle of the road. As I came parallel to them, I looked down and noticed the writing on the back of the dead Marine’s flak jacket. I sagged.
The night before, that Marine, a corporal who I’d known and served with for almost thirteen months, came to see me and handed me an envelope with his dog tags and asked me to send them to his parents.
He was supposed to rotate out of the field on his way home a day or two after the battle.
I asked him why he was giving the dog tags to me to send home, he said, “I’m not going to make it home. I’m going to die tomorrow.”
Anger swelled in my head, and I gave the envelope back and yelled at him that you could not think that the enemy would kill you. You could not give in. “They will not kill you,” I hissed.
To this day, that exchange and what followed, his death, my thoughts on it, have eaten at me. Was I wrong, was I right, does it matter? Obviously, it matters because, well, here I am speaking about it after fifty-seven years.
After the smoke and fire and thunder settled, someone told me that another Marine who I’d served with for months and months and who was a short-timer, too, had cut off one of his toes with an entrenching tool to avoid going out on the patrol.
My rage boiled and I charged down through our bunkers and fighting holes with the intent of challenging him, calling him “Coward.”
As I approached, he sat outside his bunker on the edge of a cot, his foot wrapped in fresh, white bandages.
I yelled, “I’m short and I went out. A lot of us went…” But he shook his head and said, “Don’t be judging me.”
I stopped, turned and walked off. I’m still judging him. Judging me.
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Thank you for reading and for honoring all Vietnam War veterans by sharing this story with friends and other veterans. BRAVO! 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 spouses of combat veterans at https://imarriedthewar.com.