Print
This past summer I was privileged to return to my small town in Northern Minnesota while the traveling Vietnam Wall exhibit was there. The town was quite proud of having landed the exhibit and pulled out all the stops to give it a welcome.
My son and I arrived in the evening after the events were over. The dark wall lay like a funereal curtain across the now well-trod grass of the park, stretching between two pine trees. In front of it, just as in front of the real wall, people had left flowers, pictures and other tributes. A few people, some of them proudly wearing floppy boonie hats cinched under their chins, jungle boots or other parts of their Vietnam gear, walked slowly and silently across the wall. Off to one side under a small canopy several visitors talked with one of the supervisors of the exhibit who was linking them to various resources.
There are some who are not fans of the traveling wall, seeing it as inappropriate or even exploitative, but it did not feel that way as the late afternoon sun morphed the wall into a long shadow across the green. My son, who lives in DC, has of course seen the real wall, yet he was as transfixed as those Northern Minnesotans who were seeing it for the first time. I tried to personalize the experience for him, searching for names I knew and talking about their lives and even talking about those whose names I could not find.
Then my eyes lit unexpectedly on the name of Terry Roach, father of Maryscott O’Connor of My Left Wing. He had died in the battle of Khe Sanh, whose story I related in two past essays. I had a friend at Khe Sanh so I have some idea of what it was like to be marooned in the jungle on what some said was a suicide and needless mission, surrounded by the enemy in what some were wondering would become America’s Dien Bien Phu.
In honor of Veteran’s Day I offer this tribute to Terry Roach and all the others who have honorably served their country. The approximately six thousand troops at Khe Sanh were eventually surrounded by more than triple that number of North Vietnamese troops. In perhaps one of the last great artillery battles, the North Vietnamese began mercilessly pounding the garrison, sending anywhere from a thousand to two thousand rounds a day at the troops who had dug into the red clay soil that was to give the Khe Sanh veterans the name for their newsletter. A thousand rounds a day is 42 rounds an hour–an incoming shell almost every minute.
But, of course, the shells did not come in so neatly spaced, instead they came in waves that pinned the troops into the bunkers they had dug and then fortified sometimes as much as three feet thick with anything they could find including old ammunition cases and other supplies. There they could only lie and wait and hope none of the shells was a direct hit. On the first day of the siege the North Vietnamese created probably their biggest artillery damage on the site when a shell landed on the ammunition dump, resulting in the destruction of 16,000 artillery shells and a large supply of C.S. tear gas which spread over the entire base.
Meanwhile, the bombing response to the siege, which bore the colorful and, in some ways, apt nickname of Operation Niagra poured more conventional bombs on the area around Khe Sanh than had been dropped on all of Japan during World War II.
In reading accounts of soldiers who served at Khe Sanh and knowing one personally, what surfaces again and again is the perilousness of life “above ground” and the rats. The symbolism is inescapable, men who lived like rats found themselves plagued by huge rats who found the bunkers an inviting place. Soldiers had a choice of fighting off the rats that scampered underground or going above ground. At one point, Bruce Geiger remembers,
The B-52 strikes left large numbers of NVA dead around the base perimeter, the rats began feeding on the decaying corpses. A major panic took place when the doctors at Charlie Med identified rats infected with bubonic plague and began giving booster shots to large numbers of Marines.
Accounts of Khe Sanh have about them the flavor of the trench warfare of the First World War. In fact, the North Vietnamese began digging their own trenches outside the perimeter, trying to get them as close as they could before American aircraft could bomb them. One trench almost succeeded in reaching under the airfield, no doubt to fill it with explosives and destroy the supply route. They also mounted periodic “human wave” attacks, going “over the top” of their own trenches in an attempt to overrun one section of the lines defending the base. The Americans also sent troops to probe for the enemy in the equivalent of the World War One No Man’s Land.
Terry Roach was one of the true heroes of Khe Sanh. On February 8, 1968, he commanded a unit that repelled a serious North Vietnamese assault that almost overran our lines. Here is what the Vietnam Veterans website says about what Lt. Roach did that day (the punctuation is theirs):
On February 8, 1968 an attack by North Vietnamese troops from the 101D Regiment of the 325C Division occurred around 4:45 am. The enemy was assaulting a Marine outpost on HILL 64 defended by a platoon from ALPHA COMPANY 1ST BATTALION 9TH MARINES ” THE WALKING DEAD. ”
This platoon was led by LIEUTENANT ROACH. The North Vietnamese troops quickly overran the northeast sector of the outpost. What followed is described in the book ” VALLEY OF DECISION ”
“Roach raced across the top of the hill and tried to organize his men, providing cover fire for surviving Marines who were wounded or trapped.”
By 9:00 am a relief platoon from Alpha Company mounted a counterattack and repelled the enemy within 15 minutes. 21 Marines were KILLED IN ACTION on HILL 64, including LIEUTENANT TERENCE RAYMOND ROACH JR who was posthumously awarded the BRONZE STAR MEDAL with ‘V’ device PURPLE HEART MEDAL.
Today while Bush sleeps, the rest of us toss and turn in a kind of national insomnia. In some quarters an argument rages over the Iraq War between those who say they support the troops but not the cause and those who maintain that if you cannot support the cause you do not support the troops. Yet reading what the troops wrote and are still writing about Khe Sanh, it seems abundantly clear that most soldiers fought to preserve the SYSTEM that put them there–American democracy.
More than anyone else, these people in uniform recognize democracy can be imperfect, just as the person fighting beside you may not be someone you would choose to have there. Like democracy, wars do not often meet our ideals. America tolerated racism, lynchings, the Klan. World War II was not a John Wayne movie. Yet American soldiers will give their lives for that democracy and for that person next to them.
The sacrifices of the troops at Khe Sanh were not made with the hope that America would remain as static as William Westmoreland–for no one at Khe Sanh would ever want to put an army under a Westmoreland again-but that we would continue to perfect what has been termed the American experiment. Their deaths might make it possible for another Lincoln or another FDR to remake our country; they might spawn more ideas like the eight-hour day, Social Security, women’s suffrage, and the Voting Rights Act.
That is why we owe them our thanks and honor them on this day.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
