The company proceeded along the eastern base of the sheer cliff rising a thousand feet above it. My arrival in the midst of Kilo’s Marines, and reaching the base of the glacis changed none of that. The fire from the other jungle inhabitants, the enemy, remained...
I examined the great stone wall, the wall that rose up from the bottom of the valley for a full thousand feet, vertically rising without big enough cracks, hand-holds or other features to allow it to be climbed without serious mountaineering equipment. The 175’s had...
I huddled in what I had come to consider my cave, a dry place in a wet world of drizzling misery. The bottom of the cave, although consisting of sandy dirt rather than stone, like its walls, was mildly dusty from going many years without being touched by outside...
No fewer than fifty Marines worked to drag the downed trees and jungle foliage up to the end of the bridge, and then secure it to the structure using the ropes that had been tied to make a cargo net for unloading the last resupply chopper and getting the supplies...
I lay in the muck of oozing mud seeping slowly up through the packed, cracked, and broken debris of jungle and aging decay. The smell was of the damaged sort I’d come to know as my home away from home down inside the A Shau Valley expanse. I wondered if the smell...