The Education of Corporal John Musgrave by John Musgrave

Author:John Musgrave [Musgrave, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Operation Buffalo

Con Thien, fall of 1967, taken during the siege. Left to right: Sam Tatum, Dan Cooney, and Corporal Bourne. The last Marine’s name is unknown; he was killed shortly after this photo was taken. The other three were wounded at Khe Sanh.

We called our stay at Con Thien, that three-top hill just south of the DMZ, “time in the barrel.” We were the fish. The NVA had the shotguns. They stuck them in the barrel and blasted away. Without fail, they hit something with every shot. Con Thien was such a small area that it was constantly getting pounded with artillery from North Vietnam, only two miles away. They simply couldn’t miss. Marines in the Third Marine Division in northern I Corps in the spring and summer of 1967 called the DMZ the Dead Marine Zone, because we lost so many of our men up there. Our unit had suffered so many casualties on and around Con Thien in a series of battles and sweeps that we began to think Delta Company was doomed. That’s how we got the name the Walking Dead, or Dying Delta.

On the morning of July 2, 1967, the 1-9 Marines had commenced Operation Buffalo, a sweep of an area at the southern edge of the DMZ in which two companies—Alpha and Bravo—were ambushed by the NVA. Bravo Company was overrun, fired upon from three sides, and almost completely wiped out. Thirty mortar rounds came raining down upon them in less than three minutes. Alpha Company, which had been sent to rescue the survivors from Bravo, was soon pinned down and gutted. The only unit that 1-9 had left to send out as a reaction force was the Third Platoon of Delta Company, my unit, and we were totally underresourced.

I remember fewer than thirty of us climbing onto the backs of four tanks and riding toward the DMZ. Though we knew what we were getting into, not one of us hesitated. We were terrified, yes. But those were our buddies out there getting killed, and we were Marines. We couldn’t leave them out there. If all we could do was die with them, that was what we would do, but we weren’t going to abandon our friends.

In the distance, we heard one of the biggest firefights of our lives. The radiomen were telling us about the things that were coming over the radio, and they weren’t good. The fighting was just beyond the firebreak, or the McNamara Line, and we could hear Bravo Company getting slaughtered, because one of the radiomen had a speaker on his radio and he cranked it up. There were kids dying on the radio, and there was one kid out there who was holding the transmit switch and begging them to come and help him, saying, “Everybody’s dead. Please come and get me. Please help me. Help me. Help!” and he wouldn’t let go of the transmit switch. So when he finally broke squelch, we knew he was dead.

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