Delta, 1^st Battalion, 12^th Cavalry, dug in late that afternoon on a bushy hill in the rolling piedmont of Quang Tri province, a few miles south of the DMZ. Khe Sahn – the reason we’d flown north from the Bong Son plain on the central coast earlier in the month – was already enveloped in a tightening ring not far to the west.

 Bong Son had fixed itself in our memories as a kind of mythical hell. Our last time there, before sitting out Christmas in an eerily quiet An Lao valley, was Tam Quan, the battle with the North Vietnamese Army’s 22^nd Regiment, where we lost Cortes-Rosa, Southerland, Tierno, Flores, O’Niel, Hicks, and Lebron-Domenech. And where Captain Orsini was wounded, who was awarded the DSC, was replaced by Richard Kent.  And, where Allan Lynch was awarded the Medal of Honor. Pending that award, we’d left Allan behind at Camp Radcliff – An Khe. The paperwork wouldn’t actually be filed until the next fall, when witness statements were found in a previously unopened Conex container flown north with us. Not much had happened since the move north. The 1^st Brigade secured and built– was still building, actually - LZ Sharon, its base just outside Quang Tri city. We’d patrolled an area of operations but not found much. There was the occasional small sharp contact, quickly broken off, already only hazily recalled.

We laagered in the afternoon (we didn’t use that word – the mech guys and tankers did (we ”resupplied”). Perhaps we got a hot meal in maramac cans, beer and soda iced down in garbage cans, or just the usual cases of charlie rats, ammo, socks, and such.

It started as a quiet night, and Vietnam, when it was quiet, was deathly quiet – a terribly wrong metaphor, since death in Vietnam didn’t come in the quiet at all, but in the staccatos of M-16’s and AK-47’s, each distinctive, in the zzzzip of ball rounds cutting the air; the double detonations of an RPG,  the first its launch, the second deadly; the pungent odor of cordite.

I’d gotten the platoon’s sector of the company perimeter, checked the lay-in of the M60’s, coordinated platoon boundaries right and left, suggested targets – defensive and H&I – to the artillery forward observer.

Our platoon sergeant – it might have been Johnson then – attended to resupply and to the platoon CP. Everyone took turns digging – something we did without complaint – and attending to other things like putting up a hooch, two ponchos, though sometimes in the dry season and in the relative open of the piedmont, we’d dispense with such luxury accommodations. Squad leaders would have fields of fire cleared, OP’s assigned, be working on resupply.

Soon after locating and securing that night’s company position, we’d have gotten a single CH47 Chinook or multiple Slicks (UH-1D Iroquois “Huey”) with our night defensive pack – mortars, extra claymores, ammunition, our rucksacks – whenever possible we were light in the field – rifle, ammunition, grenades, radios – the basics, the rest “hooked out.”

Sometimes – after dark, after all work was done and the first watch was set – we’d talk quietly, about “the world,” and the “round-eyed girls” there, carefully cupping our cigarettes.

That eve of the Tet holiday was one of those nights of quiet talk, and at some time, someone had a radio, and AFVN was reporting “the battle for Vietnam.” Tet 1968 was underway. I have no idea why a radio would be on after dark in the bush, but there it was, and we were listening to the battle for Vietnam under a starry sky on that bushy hill in the piedmont.

We stayed up late that night, listening, talking, thinking about it all; a kind of heavily armed slumber party. We’d usually be down with the sunset, with a second, or third, watch – radio, perimeter, OP – coming up. This time we listened and wondered where we’d be going on the next day. Something in each of us wanted to get into it, this battle for Vietnam, and equally, something in each of us didn’t, wanted to just be able to continue our walkabout in the piedmont, no one gets hurt. We knew better, we’d go somewhere into this battle, and no one would ask us what we thought, or what we wanted, we’d just go where the slicks took us.

Sometime overnight, Captain Kent – a self-effacing West Pointer who’d told us his sole fame at the academy derived from his membership in its Jewish Choir (true, it’s in his yearbook entry) – got our mission, when we’d be picked up, where we were going, some idea of why, that last part only a guess, to patrol for some NVA unit believed to be in the area, going toward, or coming from one of those soon-to-be-famous places like Hue. Not just ‘like’ Hue, but actually Hue, just down Highway 1 from that bushy hill in the piedmont.

Kent called together his platoon leaders, gave us an order of lift for the air assault, our destination landing zone, order of march for leaving the LZ, and that ‘objective.’ We took it all back to our platoons, setting our own order of lift, squad, platoon SP, squad, etc., sector responsibility on landing – usually first straight ahead from each of our slicks, then if it’s a cold LZ, rallying to a clock direction, probably 6 o’clock that day, since we’d be last in the company’s order of march. Wherever we were going, we weren’t the most important move on that day, for we sat on that hill for most of the morning, then finally it was ‘slicks inbound,’ smoke was out and the first platoon got ready to scramble aboard.

We flew low and fast, east toward the coast, to a dry paddy landing zone south of Quang Tri. Part of the I Corps coastal plain north of the Hai Van pass on Highway 1 this side of Danang,  the terrain was flat, divided into then-dry rice paddies, palm-filled villages dotting the landscape, connected by footpaths adjoining sandy ridges, dunes they might be called, but not the loose sand closer the coast. We were third in the order of march; first and second platoon, and the company command party were in the LZ ahead of us, and moved off it in the lead, to the south. We followed.

Whatever the third platoon’s own order of march for its own squads that day. I was in the lead squad, as usual. The point team was ahead, the lead squad leader near me, a gun behind. From there – or sometimes from just behind that first squad, I would more likely be able to tell what was happening in contact. That day, because of what followed, I think the lead squad’s M60 was behind me.

We continued south, platoons in column, moving more slowly than usual, starting and stopping. We traveled through hamlets, and past a small well in an open area within one of them. Ahead of us some had quickly stopped for water; I believe some further back in the third platoon also stopped.

We’d just passed that well, and not yet cleared the built-up area of the hamlet when “all hell broke loose,” down the path. This was an explosion of sound, a huge crashing clash of scores of weapons all together that drowns any of those distinctive sounds in other, more sporadic, engagements.

Two platoons were pinned down by fire in an ambush ahead of us, where the path passed a low rise on the left of the direction we were heading. I may have decided to move the platoon to the left on my own, or it may have come as an order; there was no way to go ahead, that would just run into the next platoon, and from the sounds, into a kill zone. Follow me. As we started go left and ahead, keeping the firing to our right, I had the handset in my grip, tugging the platoon radio – and Brian, to whose back it was attached – along. Follow me. I’d said it, and how trite was that, the Infantry School motto? But what else is there to say? It’s too damn noisy to say anything else, and there’s no time to discuss anything. You don’t get to call a time out.

We moved a hundred yards, maybe a bit further, on an angle to the left, until we encountered a ditch across our front. The firing was to our right, and some of it was coming up that ditch. But across, that was the way we had to go, I knew it, that there we’d be behind that ambushing enemy. I crossed. I thought for a moment I was alone that no one had followed. I was wrong, one soldier, a SP4 separated from the rest of his platoon, the second, I think, just ahead of us when the firing broke out. He’d followed me, looked at me, asked, “Where are we going?” “There,” I said, “along that ridge.” We were now behind it, and clearly there was the sound of AK’s firing, most away from us, some not. No conscious thought of that, though. After a few ineffective rifle rounds into the dirt of that rise, a muttered, “let’s go,” and we rushed forward, now with grenades – I usually carried four – preparing one on the run. Reaching the nearest spider hole, I pushed a grenade into it, rolled away, and without waiting for its detonation, went for the next, then continued down the line to my left. My companion had caught up, and worked in the other direction, doing the same.

Finally, as firing went quiet – not just where we were, but elsewhere on the field, those weren’t the only positions of the NVA enemy – we exhausted our grenades, and almost immediately, the rest of the third platoon came up to where we were, and secured that ridge. The sound of firing was now replaced by the thump-thump-thump of the dust off (medivac) slick. Captain Kent had been wounded early in the contact, and PFC Billy Lee Wright, a medic, was killed in action.

Our old friend, Captain Donald Orsini, returned to Delta to replace Kent, who had first joined us when Orsini was wounded at Tam Quan.

That was our Tet, what I remember of it, anyway. Other units of the 1^st Cavalry Division were in the battle at Hue. We returned to a combination of a lot of search and not much destroy, along with some firebase security though February and March. Then in April, the routine would change once again with Operation Pegasus – the relief of Khe Sahn.