It All Started with a Photo.

A view from the hill: Antenna Valley and the Song Thu Bong.

This is supposed to be about motorcycles. And journeys. But, though I ride everyday, sometimes those journeys are in my head.

Sometimes I time travel.

So it was last night. Don't know what started it. I was on-line, looking for something -- truth be told, I don't remember what -- and saw a link. That took me to another; about a Marine and his time in-country (Viet Nam). Seems he was on a little hill. Hill 300 the Marines called it in '67, when he was there. Out in the middle of way-begone and nowhere, it just happened to sit dead astride three things: the north end of the Antenna Valley; the largest coal mine in Viet Nam and; the main northern branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So the Marines decided that there ought to be an outpost there and they plunked some boys down and began to build a camp.

Quiet place. Surprising when one considers that Antenna Valley, though not as famous as the Ah Shau, was just as nasty a place from a combat standpoint and that the trail in that area was running steady with NVA Regular Army.

Quiet place. At first.

I guess Clyde (The Viet Cong or "Charlie" were irregular guerrillas. NVA Regular Army we called "Clyde". A much more serious name for a much more serious and professional soldier) took that as a throwing down of the gauntlet or just too much to pass up.

After a while they hit those Marines and they hit 'em hard. Hellova battle on that hill. I do believe one of those Marines won "The Medal" in that one. 1967. The hill was empty once again.

None of that had a damn thing to do with me.

But, in '68 the brain-trust decided we really needed a presence on that hill. And, as luck would have it, they just happened to have a Special Forces OD-A (Operational Detachment - "A") with nothing much to do as in May of 1968, their camp - at the other end of Antenna Valley - a place called Kham Duc, had gotten overrun by two divisions of that same NVA. So they took the surviving members, added a few more and sent Detachment A-105, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, to Hill 300, known thereafter by its real name: Nong Son Mountain. And they set about finishing the camp the Marines started but never got to complete.

That's where the time travel begins. In that link I followed, there was another link. To a photo taken by that Marine who wrote his account of the battle for Hill 300. Of the camp under construction. Of the camp as A-105 knew it at first.

See, A-105 had this skinny little 1LT Executive Officer for a time. Harper, Timothy F., 1LT, INF, MOS: 31542 (Special Forces/Airborne/Ranger Qualified, Infantry Unit Commander). And that mountain was my home for what seemed -- and quite possibly was -- a lifetime.

It was not a quiet place.

We used those trenches you see as the way we got around camp. Stick your head up -- take fire. Most of the camp, that we built with the Sea-Bees, was underground. The view I don't have is to the west. There was a huge ridge line there and they had snipers and .51 Cal. heavy machine guns that fired anytime they had a shot. Hell, we kept an M-1D sniper rifle in the crapper. It faced that ridge line and had no door so you could return fire while you did your business. I shit you not (pun intended). And all this was in camp. Operations were, to say the least, interesting.

The AO was all a mass of NVA and, damn, they were fine soldiers. Those boys were tough -- and good. Though, while I admire their professionalism, I guess, as we used to say, we were tougher and better. I survived, those I faced didn't.

The hard math of war.

So this picture took me back in time. Saw things I hadn't in over forty years. That Marine took that picture from the exact spot where I read the "Dear John" letter from my fiancee, Susie. I remembered how narrow that little "Dogleg left" of a camp was. So narrow a Huey on the helipad had the tail-boom hanging over the edge and I saw pilots drop backwards off the hill (it was about 4,000' straight down on three sides) and kick pedal to get it turned around just to get through translational lift. I remembered all the friends, Vietnamese and American, who made it and who didn't. I remembered bulldozer races down that twisty, narrow, little road we cut in the side of that hill with the See-Bees during monsoon season, when the mud was calf deep and you had to use opposite controls because the track you locked up would skid faster than the one still turning. And one of those bulldozers taking a 3,000' swan dive (the See-Bee Chief dove off in time) because the Chief missed a turn. I remember the little assault boats we had. We kept them down in the town for running river Ops. -- which we never did, but they had big Johnstons on them and swivel mounted M-60 machine guns on the front, so we "requisitioned" a slalom ski from some REMF in Da Nang and would roar up the Song Thu Bong cutting tight turns because they were shooting at us from the banks and the guy up front would return fire. I remembered my students when, as a Viet Namese linguist, I was able to teach my English classes down in the local school and how the kids giggled when I would get up on the desk and roar like a tiger to teach them how to say "R". I remember our rations arriving each month. Three live pigs (squealing in a cargo net below a helicopter), ten cases of dried mackerel and a hundred 100 lbs. bags of rice. To feed the 700 we squeezed onto that hill. Eight Americans, 32 Montagnards, 10 RVN Special Forces and 671 Vietnamese CIDG.

I remembered that skinny little 21 year old 1LT standing in the mud in '69, wondering how he was going to fill the shoes of the finest officer he ever knew as CPT Earl J. Stewart left the team.

    

I remembered it all. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. The the sublime and the horror. 

And, after a very long night, I remembered the most important thing of all. Right or wrong, good or bad, valid or not that war may have been -- but, I kept the faith. My country called. I and those fine men with whom I served, answered. My OCS, Jump, Ranger and Special Forces school classmate Roger Lee Johnson, kept the faith. Special Forces kept the faith. Let those who hate us and think us fools do so. They will never know what it is to have: Kept. The. Faith.

And on those long nights, that is enough.

For: Roger Lee Johnson, 1LT, INF, Det. A-105, 5th Special Forces (ABN). KIA: 28 SEP 1968, Nong Son, Quang Nam Province, Republic of Viet Nam. 

Forever, Brother.