NARRATOR: This program includes graphic depictions of war.
Viewer discretion is advised.
BILL REYNOLDS: They took us into some harsh terrain,
in nasty rotten places.
And the more that we patrolled,
the more we made contact with the enemy.
LARRY LILLEY: We thought we were pretty tough,
but when you get so many guys killed or wounded,
it's no longer a game.
[Gunfire and explosions]
JOHN SCLIMENTI: Bullets were going by us,
we could see the water splashing all over the place.
STEVE HOPPER: You can smell the blood,
you can smell the explosions.
BILL REYNOLDS: I figured that was it.
This is my last day in Vietnam,
this is my last day on earth.
WILLIE McTEAR: We were trying to keep each other safe
and come back home alive.
JOHN YOUNG: When we were almost halfway through the tour,
it dawned on all of us that it didn't look like any
of us were gonna be able to make it the year.
NARRATOR: May 1966.
Charlie Company, 4th Regiment, 47th Infantry,
of the 9th Infantry Division is formed at
Fort Riley Kansas.
99% of the men are draftees,
pulled from nearly every state in the nation
as part of the largest yearly draft call of the
entire Vietnam War.
STEVE HOPPER: I was from Illinois and
I hadn't travelled far from Illinois in my 19 years
I had been on Earth.
And now here we were, brand new recruits from
all walks of life.
WILLIE McTEAR: Being from the South,
I was accustomed to two Americas,
a white America and a black America.
And this was being my first integration situation.
I was more nervous about that,
than I was about the training.
LARRY LILLEY: We all had a job to do,
so we worked well together.
It was a blending that made us all better.
It didn't divide us, it made us better.
STEVE HOPPER: We met some crazy guys.
We had one of our guys, Terry McBride,
he had ridden with the Hells Angels.
He was kind of a bad dude, you know.
TERRY McBRIDE: I'm not going to say I had
a problem with authority,
I think they had a problem with me because I
didn't want to fit in their mold and
I didn't mind vocalizing it.
[Laughs].
LARRY LILLEY: Sclimenti was the biggest jokester
in the group.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: So, when I was in Vietnam,
this is what happened.
LARRY LILLEY: You might be asleep,
he'd fill your hand full of whip cream and
tickle and your nose until you went "ah,"
everybody busts out laughing!
RICHARD RUBIO: We were goofing off all the time,
always getting in trouble, and we had a lot of fun.
TERRY McBRIDE: I never knew that a bunch of guys
could get as tied as we did in a short period of time.
LARRY LILLEY: One day, we were part way through
training and Don Peterson is screwing up.
He's joking around and having a good time and
the drill instructor is not happy about that.
So he yells for Peterson, "Get up here!"
And the drill sergeant says, "On your back,
hands and legs in the air and scream.
'I'm a bug' til we are done with our workout."
So for 45 minutes Don was screaming
"I'm a bug, I'm a bug!"
And when PT was over he was Bug.
From then on he wasn't Don Peterson he was Bug!
NARRATOR: Unlike the majority of Vietnam-era soldiers,
who would be sent as individual replacements to
existing military units, Charlie Company is unique.
One of the last American combat infantry units
to be drafted, trained and sent to war together.
LARRY LILLEY: We were told that we were going to
go to Vietnam as a group, right from the start and
pretty soon, through basic training, you realize,
"Oh that won't be bad I'll be with my buddies."
But still, Vietnam hung over our heads like
a dark cloud.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I have come here tonight to report
to you that this is a time of testing for our nation.
RON NESSEN: The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong
are obviously trying to stay away from any major
head on fights with American combat units,
but the communists are continuing their offensive
in the form of terror and guerrilla strikes.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I wish I could report to
you that the conflict is almost over.
This I cannot do.
WALTER CRONKITE: All 10 men aboard were killed when the
US Marine helicopter crashed at sea along
the central coast.
Two other copters were down by gunfire with 3 men wounded.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: We face more cost,
more loss and more agony.
STEVE HOPPER: In December of '66,
we had finished all of our training and declared to be
ready to go to Vietnam, but all of us got to go home
for Christmas and home leave, so to speak, before we left.
BILL REYNOLDS: I remember coming home and just
seeing my mom and dad, my brother and sister,
and my girlfriend was there.
And you know my mom was upset, you know,
she was worried about Vietnam.
And I was just upset to be leaving home.
I wasn't really in fear of my life.
TERRY McBRIDE: I had a lot of my cousins and aunts and
uncles that were saying goodbye to me.
And I could see by the look in some of their eyes that it
was probably the last time they were going to see me.
The whole thing sent a shiver up my back.
And I just said,
"Wait a second, how about everybody just tell me,
I'll see you later."
And I've always had a problem with goodbye.
To me it just sounds too final.
STEVE HOPPER: So I flew back to Illinois and
first thing I did was went out and bought an engagement
ring because I wanted the girl that I was dating,
I guess to give me a real purpose for coming home.
NARRATOR: On January 10th, 1967,
the 160 men of Charlie Company depart
San Francisco Harbour on board a
World War II era transport.
In three weeks time, they will land in South Vietnam
and begin their year long combat tour.
JOHN YOUNG: I wanted to serve.
My father and all my uncles were World War II veterans and
it seemed to me that this was simply my generation's turn.
JACK BENEDICK: We figured within a year the war would be
over with once we got there.
That sounds a little, maybe, unrealistic to some people.
But the training we had at Fort Riley instilled in our
unit this will to win, that we were going to
take care of this war and get it over with.
RICHARD RUBIO: It was like the old World War II movies.
Passing underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
We had a lot of pride.
REPORTER: Nicknamed the "old reliables" for their
distinguished performance in World War II,
the crack 9th Division will add an important plus
to US operations, and raise total troop strength
in Vietnam to another all time high.
GARY MAIBACH: The next morning when we woke up it
wasn't what I would call rough sea but it
was rough enough.
BILL REYNOLDS: That ship was not like cruise ships today.
These things were jolting all over the place
and swaying back and forth.
I look back now and I can laugh about it but
at the time, man, it was pretty miserable.
STEVE HOPPER: Then there were days that the water
was just beautiful.
Just as smooth as glass and you'd enjoy your days
out on the top deck.
There's a lot of things going through your mind
before you actually enter a combat zone
as to whether or not, what your capabilities are.
Regardless of the training you've had,
everybody has a soul about them.
JOHN BRADFIELD: The Red Cross gave us some
pamphlets and things that dealt with our conscience,
because we were actually going to have to kill to keep
from being killed.
That was just the reality of it.
GARY MAIBACH: When we got closer to Vung Tau you could
see the coastline of Vietnam.
Shoreline with a beautiful beach, I mean,
it looked more like somewhere you'd want to
take a vacation than you'd want to fight a war.
STEVE HOPPER: We were out on the deck,
just talking and looking, and you'd see a stream of
tracers off in the distance coming down from a helicopter.
And all of a sudden you realize,
Wow, there's some stuff going on here.
BILL REYNOLDS: We had to gather all of our gear
and get ready to disembark from the troop ship onto
a smaller boat,
a landing craft that was to take us to shore.
You know, it was kind of scary,
we didn't know what to expect.
JOHN BRADFIELD: The gate came down and we came ashore,
and we're all looking around for the enemy,
and all we could see was American personnel.
What we found out was, that it was a reception area.
BILL REYNOLDS: They immediately loaded us
on deuce-and-a-halfs and all of a sudden we find ourselves
busting down this dirt road, dust flying everywhere.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: We're driving through and we could see
these little houses, people were working and the
animals that they were using to plough the fields with
and the bicycles and the little motor scooters.
GARY MAIBACH: The sites and the sounds
and the smells of a totally different land and culture.
It had a surreal aspect to it.
HERB LIND: And they trucked us to Camp Bear Cat,
which was the 9th Infantry Division base camp
at that time.
GARY MAIBACH: And there we were.
No tents, no cots, no nothing.
Welcome to Vietnam, guys!
BILL REYNOLDS: They had us digging trenches,
filling sandbags, we were instantly working our
tails off to build our base camp.
JOHN HOSKINS: Hello mom and dad.
Here I am safe and sound at the scenic Bear Cat,
Republic of Vietnam, the armpit of southeast Asia.
Right now I'm sitting in my tent eating two brownies
which were sent by Lieutenant Benedick's wife.
Now I know you don't know who in the hell Lieutenant
Benedick is, but that's him laughing in the background.
[Benedick laughs].
The Republic of Vietnam is not one of the most
sought after vacation spots in the world.
The curfew here at night is from 7:00 at night
until 7:00 in the morning,
and during that time no Vietnamese are allowed to
leave their villages or travel on the roads.
And any Vietnamese you find travelling at night is
considered Viet Cong, and you're authorized
to kill them.
NARRATOR: At Bear Cat, Charlie Company runs its
first patrols outside the base's perimeter.
In this relatively safe area, they become acclimated to the
rigorous Vietnamese countryside and its
oppressively hot and humid climate.
TERRY McBRIDE: It was like going to junior high
before high school.
You were getting broke in on what it's gonna be and
how it's gonna be.
Now you got to realize is how to put all the training
that we had already got into a focal point to where it
made sense that you were gonna actually go out and
attempt to kill somebody while they're attempting
to kill you.
BILL RYAN: At this time last year,
there were 190,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam.
Now there are 415,000.
That build-up has changed the nature of the war that
U.S. forces are able to fight.
REPORTER: Militarily, South Vietnam is divided into
4 army corps areas.
American troops do most or all of the fighting in the
first, second and third corps areas.
The fourth corps area South of Saigon in the
rice rich Mekong Delta is responsibility of the
South Vietnamese army.
There has been talk recently that American units
will be deployed in the Delta.
The terrain is difficult and the South Vietnamese army
has had only limited success.
NARRATOR: In April of 1967, Charlie Company moves to the
Mekong Delta to become part of the Mobile Riverine Force.
The combined Army/Navy element is the first American
unit to be permanently stationed in the Delta.
Charlie and her sister companies will live on board
Navy barracks ships and will be transported into battle
by both helicopters and by upgraded World War II era
landing craft, called Armored Troop Carriers,
or ATCs.
Their mission is to patrol the Delta's 4,000 miles
of waterways comb through its 15,500 square miles
of dense jungles and rice paddies and search out
and destroy the 82,000 enemy soldiers
who pervade the region.
REPORTER: This is where the American war in the
UN-pacified Delta begins.
Half of South Vietnam's population lives in the Delta.
Until now, only Vietnamese forces have tried and largely
failed to rout the Viet Cong from its strongest hold.
In the last analysis, the war against the Viet Cong
will be won or lost there.
[Inaudible radio chatter]
NARRATOR: April, 1967.
Charlie Company begins operations in the Mekong Delta.
The rich farming region is home to an estimated
8 million South Vietnamese civilians;
nearly half of the country's entire population.
It is also the largest stronghold of the Viet Cong.
JOHN YOUNG: The VC was the military arm of the
National Liberation Front, which was the political
organization that worked for the North Vietnamese.
The kind of guys who would spend their nights planting
mines and booby traps and in the daytime
they're rice farmers.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: We walked up onto a school one time where
they were teaching people how to be a Viet Cong.
They had these things that would show booby traps.
There would be a punji pit and they would
show you the punji pit.
Or you would walk into one of the rooms and they had
a large chalkboard with a machine gun or an AK-47 up
there with little arrows and writing all over the place.
And that was very, very eerie.
TERRY McBRIDE: Wherever we went it seemed like you
always had an eyeball on the back of your head.
You always felt watched.
It would be like, them coming to my backyard
and wanting to play.
We were in their backyard and they definitely
wanted to play.
STEVE HOPPER: The enemy was an expert in camouflage.
You could be out on a mission and things go
south real quick.
We had a couple guys fall into some punji traps, you know,
hidden underground and they step on it and
they went down into the hole and these
punji sticks would penetrate their leg.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: You could not get the
feeling how scary that was,
because you didn't even know where to step,
where to kneel.
JOHN YOUNG: You're always angry and you're always
scared because you think that could have been me,
just as well as him.
And that's the bad thing about mines and booby traps.
You suffer and you can't do any harm back
against the enemy.
And that builds up inside soldiers to a level,
at which something is going to happen.
TERRY McBRIDE: We were on board the ships,
the big boats, and they told us we had a mission the next
day to make sure all of our weapons were clean and that
we'd be out the door at about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.
NARRATOR: On the morning of May 15th,
Charlie Company launches its first large scale
operation in the Delta.
They are headed to an area known to American forces
as the Cam Son Secret Zone.
US intelligence has reported that approximately
200 Viet Cong soldiers are in the area resting and
recovering after a battle with another American unit.
Charlie Company's orders are to pin the VC down and
finish them off.
HERB LIND: In a war like this,
you don't fight to gain terrain and control it.
You are just trying to eliminate the enemy.
WILLIE McTEAR: We were trained as infantryman to seek
the enemy and destroy him.
Period.
GARY MAIBACH: We were getting closer and closer,
and the waterways were getting narrower and narrower.
You're just so tensed and keyed up.
BILL REYNOLDS: And you come off of that landing craft,
you didn't know what was gonna be there when you got
off of that ramp.
RON NESSEN: Companies are broken down into platoons
of 20 or 30 men.
Separated by considerable distance,
the platoons are sent into the bush to search
for the Communists.
The Viet Cong refuse to fight bigger American units
unless they are taken by surprise.
So, the idea is to entice the Communists to jump an
outnumbered platoon then rush in reinforcements,
artillery barrages and air strikes when the
enemy shows himself.
In the simplest terms, the platoons are bait.
JOHN BRADFIELD: We continued to advance,
and it was really quiet, real quiet.
[Explosions and gunfire]
JAMES NALL: All of a sudden everything started
opening up on us.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: Bullets were going by us,
we could see the water splashing all over the place.
STEVE HOPPER: You could smell the blood,
you could smell the explosions.
BILL REYNOLDS: It's amazing it's chaotic!
You just think, "God, this is not like the movies."
JOHN YOUNG: We had just crossed a rather large rice
paddy dike so we got on the defensive side of the dike
and took stock of what was going on and that's about the
time that we found out we had one entire squad
still out there in that rice paddy in the open,
and that it appeared that all of them were down and hit.
[Inaudible radio chatter]
JOHN SCLIMENTI: We could hear the radio starting to
squawk all over the place.
You could hear the guys screaming and yelling and you
could see one or two guys flounder or flop around.
NARRATOR: May 15th, 1967.
Charlie Company is engaged in its first major battle
in the Mekong Delta.
One of their 10 man squads is caught in the open
and is taking heavy casualties.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: One of the sergeants says,
"Hey we need some volunteers to go out there
and get these guys."
I don't think anybody had to sit there and say,
"Hey I'm gonna be a volunteer."
I think what happened is this group that was trained,
and knew their brothers were out there just
took it upon themself.
And people would just jump up and we off and ran.
JOHN YOUNG: I was running, and running, and running,
and finally off to my right, there was a
G.I. lying there.
I said, "This is sergeant Young,"
I said, "I'm here to take you back."
And he said, "OK" he said, "but" he said,
"I can't move my legs."
And so I lay down flat in the rice, and I said,
"Can you crawl up on my back,
can you pull yourself up onto my back?"
And he was able to do that.
And I got up on my hands and knees and started
crawling back towards the platoon.
And I finally got back to where the men who were
still back at the rice paddy dike could see us.
John Sclimenti saw me, and he came running out to
help me get him the last few meters back.
NARRATOR: With the wounded out of the way,
Charlie Company's commander can call in helicopter
gunships without fear of hitting his own men.
[Inaudible radio chatter]
STEVE HOPPER: It's amazing how chaotic things are one
moment and then at some point the last shot is fired
and it's over, it's quiet.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: When you're in battle,
your training takes over,
your emotions are on auto-pilot.
What's tough for you is when the battle stops.
When the battle stops, all of a sudden you start
thinking about, "What coulda happened to me?"
STEVE HOPPER: And the enemy has either fled or
they were killed.
And you're talking, you're cleaning up.
And, as we did in Vietnam,
we did a head-count on how many enemy had been killed.
That was a measure of success.
JOHN YOUNG: And we knew for sure by then that
Don Peterson was dead.
And two of the men in our platoon who were good friends
of Don Peterson's were able to go out there in
the rice and find him, find his body,
and carry him back to the platoon positions.
JAMES NALL: Emotionally, it really hurt me 'cause
I had never in my life seen a guy die,
until Peterson died.
GARY MAIBACH: Don was, was one of those people
who was the glue that held the unit together.
He was going home but not the way I wanted him to.
BILL REYNOLDS: They had a poncho covering him,
and the chopper lifted off, and we were barely airborne,
and that poncho flew right out the door.
It was just looking at him,
seeing him dead there was just,
God, it was like, "This is real."
And I thought, if they can get Pete,
we got a lot of problems.
NARRATOR: In the final tally,
American forces are credited with over 100 enemy killed.
By the military's statistical standards,
May 15th is considered a clear US victory.
But like most battles in Vietnam,
May 15th is also considered too small for
an official name.
Charlie Company's baptism of fire will receive no press,
and will be recorded simply as a date.
STEVE HOPPER: May 15th, such a important day to us.
But I doubt if anyone back home,
other than maybe Don's family and Don was married,
heard much about that.
BILL REYNOLDS: And it was kind of hard to get your head
wrapped around that; how frightful the situation
we were in and how back home it was "A day in the life."
And that was the beginning of what was to be
some pretty gruesome days ahead.
RON NESSEN: Since I've been home from Vietnam dozens of
people have asked me "What's really going on there?"
If these questioners are representative,
it indicates that many Americans are confused by
conflicting reports about the situation in Vietnam.
The success in Washington is measured in cold statistics,
the number of Viet Cong killed,
the number of pacification cadres graduated.
In Vietnam, success is persuading one old man
to point out where the communists have hidden
the booby trap.
It is talking one old woman into luring her son
away from the Viet Cong.
STEVE HOPPER: You could walk through a village and
people were friendly, but yet you were walking down
a very well-beaten path within their village and
one of your guys steps on a land mine or a booby trap
or they trip a hand grenade.
And it really caused you to doubt how much the people
were with us because they had to know those things
were in place.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: We got orders to go through and
find their food and these guys had big, big, big,
piles of rice and we got orders to destroy it.
Now these people worked their butt off to do this,
I mean these guys were peasants.
And the Viet Cong used to come by and take that stuff
from them to supply their armies and stuff.
And here we were supposed to make friends
with these people.
Well, I can tell you right now these guys weren't
real happy after we left.
JOHN YOUNG: I think the great majority of the people
of the Delta were in the really sad situation of
being caught in the middle.
If they cooperated too much with us,
it would cost them when the VC showed up at night.
And if they cooperated too much with the VC,
then if we found out about it,
we were going to make it hard on them.
So no matter what they did, they were going to lose.
STEVE HOPPER: Our salvation, and I think the way we
maintained our sanity, that helped us a bit,
was going back to the ship.
It was a real treat to get back from a patrol and
you've been in water up to your hips or up to your
shoulders for 3 or 4 days and you've got a nice
air conditioned clean shower to go to spend
a couple of days off.
LARRY LILLEY: It was time to regenerate,
and part of that regeneration was reading mail from home.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: Mail call was a big deal.
And people used to get care packages all the time.
Now, one of the guys who used to have the best care
packages was Larry Lilley.
LARRY LILLEY: I had a wife and a sister-in-law that sent
me boxes of cookies and popcorn and when I got that
stuff everybody was happy.
Everybody got cookies, everybody got the popcorn.
NARRATOR: On June 19th, 1967, five months into their
year long combat tour, Charlie Company launches a
massive operation with sister companies
Alpha and Bravo.
This time, intelligence has reported a sizable
Viet Cong force is near a small village called Can Giouc.
TERRY McBRIDE: We were cruising along and
I remember talking to Hoskins and I said,
"John, so what is it that we're going after?"
and he said, "Mack, he said, this is going to be a day."
He said, "Its going to be a helluva day."
And then I started looking around and there was women
that were grabbing their kids and were pulling them
into their hooches as we are going by.
It's like, it was an omen that something was
going to happen.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: We were sweeping an area and
all of a sudden the radios just went crazy.
You could hear them all over.
[Inaudible radio chatter]
HERB LIND: We received word that our sister battalion had
made some contact in an area south of where we
had started out.
So my company received orders from battalion that
we were going to be picked up again by the ATCs that we
had been inserted with earlier and would be moved
to another area.
What I'm attempting to do is draw out what the battle of
19 June looked like from my perspective and where I was,
where the company was at the time.
So we were picked up, up here, put on the boats,
brought down here and reinserted right here.
We believed that the enemy was to the south and
there would be another American unit coming up
from the south.
We were going to catch them out in the open.
So we unloaded off of our ATCs,
my first platoon on the right my second platoon in
the middle and my third platoon on the left.
JOHN YOUNG: And we were headed off in the direction
of sort of a scattered group of hooches and from just
across the canal a 50-calibre machine gun opened up!
HERB LIND: I had not left the vicinity of the boats.
Lt. Benedick, my second platoon leader,
screamed on the radio "We're hit, we're hit!"
JACK BENEDICK: We had 15 or 16 guys hit
when the fire first started.
They were definitely waiting for us.
RICHARD RUBIO: I could tell it was total chaos.
Because everyone was getting hit at the same time.
BILL REYNOLDS: And so there we were,
trying to figure out where in the hell is the enemy?
HERB LIND: What we discovered was that the VC
were not south of us but were north of us.
There was a machine gun bunker here,
and a machine gun bunker here and another one here.
Our best estimation was that it had to be
at least a battalion sized unit or larger,
and that would be Viet Cong approximately 400 to 500 men.
And our strength at that time would have been right at 120.
JOHN YOUNG: We're up against a seriously
over-sized enemy unit.
We were out numbered on the ground.
Depictions of war.
Viewer discretion is advised.
June 19th, 1967.
Charlie Company is fighting a heavily armed
Viet Cong force nearly three times their size.
Positioned inside concrete machine gun bunkers,
the VC are ripping them to shreds.
HERB LIND: Once we identified where the main machine gun
fire was coming from, we pretty much could pin it down,
but we didn't have anything large enough to
destroy the bunkers that the VC had built up.
We determined we had to call in heavier artillery.
NARRATOR: Four and a half miles to the southeast,
the Riverine Force's mobile artillery barges key
in the enemy's coordinates and begin blasting
the VC bunkers.
HERB LIND: And it looked like direct hits,
but not stopping the machine guns from operating.
NARRATOR: With artillery ineffective,
Charlie Company calls for air support.
Within minutes, American fighters are
streaking overhead; attacking the VC bunkers
less than 100 yards away.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: The jets flew by so close,
you could see the guys faces in the plane.
You could see the moisture come off the wings
of the airplane.
TERRY McBRIDE: You could feel the impact,
you could feel the ground fall from below you and
then reach back up and smack you.
NARRATOR: But after two hours of intense battle,
the Viet Cong machine guns have not been silenced and
the number of critically wounded is growing.
TERRY McBRIDE: I remember a couple helicopters just
flying straight over, like observing, you know,
what is going on in the battle front.
And all of a sudden, one of the helicopters just
turns and comes back around and lands.
GARY MAIBACH: The first medevac came in and
I was helping a couple of guys up into the helicopter
when the door gunner started firing right over my head.
BILL REYNOLDS: That chopper started to lift off,
and BAM I could see a blast through the windshield
and the pilot grabbed his shoulder.
That chopper set right down,
the rear rotor swung and that chopper
wasn't going anywhere.
GARY MAIBACH: A second helicopter came in,
and we were able to load some of the casualties
on that one.
And that was the most horrific thing I think I'll
ever see in my life.
It had just started to get up in the air and it was hit.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: And this thing starts twirling
around and swinging around like this.
WILLIE McTEAR: And it swayed this way,
and it swayed that way.
JOHN BRADFIELD: It went up and then came back over.
GARY MAIBACH: Up and over, and right smack down.
JAMES NALL: There were about 5 or 6 guys in there.
It came back down on them.
BILL REYNOLDS: Seeing that chopper go down was just,
you know, God are we gonna get out of this today?
NARRATOR: Unable to evacuate the wounded,
and running dangerously low on ammunition,
Charlie Company is becoming increasingly desperate.
Captain Herb Lind radios a nearby Navy squadron
commander who suggests a risky plan.
HERB LIND: One of the squadron commanders was a
lieutenant commander named Dusty Rhodes.
He had what they called a monitor gunboat.
Dusty Rhodes knew that we were in trouble.
He says, "I know that canal," he says,
"It's high tide right now, I think I can make it up."
JOHN YOUNG: If he goes up the canal,
he's gonna have to back it down,
cause there isn't nearly enough room for
it to turn around.
And if the tide gets down too far while he's up there,
he could be grounded.
HERB LIND: There was a risk,
a very definite risk,
but what options do we have in a situation like that?
We tried artillery, we tried the air.
I would have welcomed anything that day
to help us out.
And Dusty Rhodes was willing to take the risk.
One of the things he needed was somebody to
direct his fire.
And when he came in, I said I would do it.
JOHN YOUNG: Captain Lind, carrying his own radio,
stood up and walked alongside that monitor,
selecting targets for it to engage.
I remember looking up there and seeing him,
and I thought, "If I've ever seen a
brave man in my life there he is right there."
HERB LIND: He backed out before the tide came back in,
and that really alleviated the situation
for Charlie Company.
So, Dusty Rhodes is a hero to me.
NARRATOR: With the machine guns finally silenced,
Charlie Company gains the upper hand for the first time
in nearly five hours.
But with the remaining Viet Cong still fighting
from their position on the north side of the canal,
the battle is not yet over.
First and second platoons are ordered to pull back
to the ATCs and prepare to cross the canal
to launch a final ground assault against the VC.
BILL REYNOLDS: And as we approached our boats,
this guy turned to me, and it was our company commander
and he says, "We're assaulting the other side."
And I thought, "After what we've already
done and already happened?"
As we boarded that boat, I figured that was it.
This is my last day in Vietnam.
This is my last day on Earth.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: We all got on line and we started
rushing the fire, everybody's shooting,
automatics are going.
JOHN YOUNG: We were all advancing as fast as we could,
and firing weapons as fast as we could.
I think at that moment we all just went
a little bit crazy.
I'm not sure how many we got and then,
almost that quickly, it was just over.
HERB LIND: We didn't really know at that time how many we
had killed or how bad we had crippled them.
And by that time it was starting to get dark and so
we pulled back and between myself and the battalion
commander we decided that we better go into a defensive
posture for the night.
GARY MAIBACH: We had no idea if they were going to
assault us again, how many were there.
We had no idea what was going to happen.
HERB LIND: The next day we were primed and ready.
We thought we probably were going to have more
battle to face.
And we eased up and started to try to move forward and
received no resistance,
no shots fired at us what so ever.
So eventually we got up and spread out.
Then we discovered that during the hours of darkness
the enemy retreated.
NARRATOR: June 19th.
Charlie Company's largest battle in Vietnam would
become known as the battle of Can Giouc.
A decisive US victory,
the combined American forces nearly wiped out
two entire Viet Cong companies;
killing over 250 enemy soldiers.
Charlie Company suffered 11 killed.
Among the dead is second platoon medic Bill Geier,
who was shot while rushing to save wounded soldiers.
He died in the arms of Bill Reynolds.
BILL REYNOLDS: There wasn't anything he wouldn't
do for his buddies.
You know, somebody's wounded somewhere he's
gonna go help them.
And he was so brave and for me to see him laying there,
you know gasping for air and dying right there,
it was just unbearable.
I wrote a letter to his mom and dad and told them
what a wonderful guy he was.
NARRATOR: Forrest Ramos was engaged to the cousin
of Richard Rubio.
RICHARD RUBIO: He says, "Well I asked her to marry me
and she said yes."
So I wrote Patricia and she goes,
"Yeah, we're gonna get married as soon as he gets
back from Vietnam."
NARRATOR: Ramos was on the second medevac shot down
by the Viet Cong.
RICHARD RUBIO: I couldn't write to her.
She found out that Ramos died through the paper.
NARRATOR: Kenny Frakes died during the initial
burst of enemy fire.
Timmy Johnson was shot by a sniper during the night;
the last man to be killed.
Both grew up with Larry Lilley,
and went to the same high school before
being drafted together.
LARRY LILLEY: My mom took us all three down to
the induction centre to go.
You talk about, "When we get back to the world we're gonna
do this, we're gonna do that" and I can't do it with them now.
I miss Kenny and I miss Timmy today.
I think of them often.
NARRATOR: Including the nearly 40 wounded,
Charlie Company suffered almost 30% casualties on
June 19th, making it their highest single day of losses
for the entire war.
But the toll is even greater for their
sister company, Alpha.
HERB LIND: Our A company came down through here and
got caught in this ambush with machine guns here, here,
and here which is a classic thing that we dreaded in
Vietnam, an L-shaped ambush.
When those people got in here this machine-gun swept them,
this machine-gun was sweeping them and this machine-gun was
sweeping them and the kill zone is tremendous.
The reports were that A Company took
about 80% casualties.
NARRATOR: With Alpha Company too decimated to take care of
their own casualties, Charlie Company is ordered
to recover the bodies.
GARY MAIBACH: When we broke through the tree line
we came on what was left of A Company.
[Exhales].
Well, there was just nothing left.
They were dead where they had been hit;
they were literally yards from Charlie when
he opened up.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: One of the things that struck me the
most is that I would find a body and their helmet would
be off their head and it would be laying beside them
and there would be a picture of their girlfriend or their
wife or their family inside their helmets.
And that stuck me because in my mind I was picking up
a soldier, but then when I saw the helmet with the
pictures inside I was picking up a family member,
a father, or a brother, or a son.
LARRY LILLEY: That day was body bags and bodies.
It was just the ugliest day of my life.
BILL REYNOLDS: Several days later,
one of the guys got in the mail the front page of the
L.A. Times where it reported that an entire company was
wiped out by the Viet Cong.
Not once did they mention we had killed 250 VC.
Not once did it say at the end of the battle we
were there and they were gone or dead.
And, you know, I think that was kind of like an
eye opener that America is not with us.
ROLLIN POST: This was the day Women for Peace chose to make
their annual visit to protest the war in Vietnam.
EDWIN NEWMAN: Public opinion polls indicate that the
dissenters are in the minority but their number is
growing and they are starting to take more positive action.
HERB LIND: People read what the news media fed them and
people believed news media, and news media concentrated
at that time on what was sensational.
If you were a newspaper man and you wanted to make a name
for yourself, you concentrate on getting those hot flashes
of the bad situations, or the negative situations,
to the degree that to me it seemed they left out the
parts that explained why or what really did happen.
FRANK McGEE: Right or wrong, for better or for worse,
never have so many Americans had so many doubts,
and never have we been less united.
This attitude is not lost on the men who fight in Vietnam.
But for them, as for all men who fight in all wars,
there is only one meaningful reality, life or death.
WILLIE McTEAR: It was all about us doing for each other
what we couldn't do alone for ourselves.
We were trying to keep each other safe and
come back home alive.
RICHARD RUBIO: Hello, Sandy, it's me again.
I guess it's about time I got around to
sending another tape.
It's been kind of bad around here,
the atmosphere and everything cause we've been
getting hit kinda hard lately.
Watching all these guys, these friends of mine,
get killed and wounded, they're all so close to me
and everything, they're just like brothers
and it really hurts a lot.
But I've been trying not to think about it so
I won't go out of my head.
[Inaudible chatter]
LARRY LILLEY: It was as much a mental war as
it was a physical war.
Hours of non-contact, and then 10 minutes of
intense fire fight and it's over with.
They wounded half a dozen of us and pulled out and gone.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: People don't understand what happens
to someone that is in that kind of conflict
day in and day out.
People's minds have to shut out a lot of bad things.
I have lots of stories to tell but not a lot of
them are bad things, you know,
it's just incidents that happened.
I don't know if I do that because I don't want
to remember those things, or those other things were
nicer to remember.
LARRY LILLEY: John was the comedian of the
whole damn company.
He was always doing something like a stunt,
which brought our spirits up, our camaraderie up.
I love John.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: You wanna hear a funny story?
I'll tell you a funny story.
We had this crotchety old sergeant that was with us.
He always used to say, when we'd go out in the field,
"You guys don't camouflage, you don't, you know,
"You're not doing a good job"
and the normal sayings, you know,
"You guys are too close together, one hand grenade
would getcha all"
and all that stuff.
Well, we started going out to this field,
and all of a sudden one of the guys hits me and he goes,
"Do you see where we are?"
We were in this humongous field of marijuana!
Guys are grabbing it, sticking it in their hats and
sticking it in their shirts and putting it
in their backpacks,
and their putting it in; they had it hanging
out of their pockets and everything like that and this
old sergeant walks over and sees us and he goes,
"That's what I like, you guys finally got into camouflage!"
LARRY LILLEY: When we cut up,
it's our way of getting rid of some pressure.
We all decompressed as best we could.
BILL REYNOLDS: And sometimes the USO would come
out to entertain us.
And we would laugh and carry on.
Whether it was good music or not, you know,
we were having a blast.
You had to love every day.
Cause you didn't know how long you were going to
make it through the year.
My first patrol out after that June 19th affair was
July 11th and, you know,
another search and destroy mission.
JACK BENEDICK: July 11th was another standard operation
and we were in the same area that we were in
for the 19th of June.
BILL REYNOLDS: My squad had just gone on a recon and
got into the tree line and Jack Benedick sent
another squad out,
Smitty's squad out, for the next recon.
RICHARD RUBIO: Sergeant Kenney,
who went to Canoga High with me,
he was my squad leader at the time.
We were walking across this dry rice paddy and
he turns to me says, "Richard you get behind me."
So he takes one step in front of me and gets
shot through the heart.
BILL REYNOLDS: And man, all hell broke loose again.
So we're scrambling around trying to get cover
and the call came in from Benedick,
you gotta get out to Smitty's squad.
You lift your head up to see where Smitty's squad is
and you barely look up and the bullets are flying past you.
And you get to the point where there's nothing to hide
behind to get out to those guys and we were just
completely stuck and of course the enemy wasn't
going to let up.
They were glad we were stuck and they were
shooting like crazy.
And Jack made the decision at the end of that day
that we need to pull back to the tree line.
TERRY McBRIDE: Sergeant says,
"We'll get Kenney in the morning."
And I said, "No, we ain't leaving him out there."
I said, "Lets at least try to get him."
And Sergeant said,
"You guys get your asses back in this perimeter.
I don't care what happens you guys stay with the unit."
JACK BENEDICK: You got guys out there, probably are shot,
could be killed, but you still had more with you.
You had to safeguard those guys as much as possible.
BILL REYNOLDS: And it was a tough pill to swallow,
to leave them there, not knowing what happened to them,
but back into the trees we went.
And we sat there in those trees all night long,
looking across that open rice paddy,
wondering what happened to Smitty's squad.
And in the middle of the night we could see a red
light moving around out there, a map light,
and we wanted to shoot, but we knew we couldn't
because our guys were out there.
And you think, wow, what's going on?
The next morning, barely daylight,
and here come Frank Schwan and Henry Hubbard,
back to us from Smitty's squad.
Frank had a bullet hole in his chest and Hubbard
was carrying him back mostly.
And that's when we found out those guys,
the other guys were dead.
TERRY McBRIDE: I guess the VC had taken off and
we got up and moved up to where
Sergeant Kenney was laying.
I remember walking up to him and it's like,
I'm looking at him and the VC had went through
all his stuff.
They'd taken his helmet, and went through his wallet,
and took his marriage ring.
They cut a tattoo off of him that he had on his shoulder.
They cut that off of him and, uh,
[Sighs].
I was blown at that point.
BILL REYNOLDS: The Viet Cong came across that
open field with that red light, shining on our guys,
and taking everything they had their wedding rings,
weapons and their helmets, everything of any use at all,
they took it off of them, their boots and everything.
TERRY McBRIDE: Sergeant comes up to me and he says,
"McBride, a helicopter's coming in to pick up Kenney."
"They got a prisoner over here too."
He says, "I want you to take that prisoner and put him on the
helicopter with Kenny."
He turned around and walked away.
They walked over to me with the prisoner,
and I looked at him, he looked at me,
and I pulled my .45 out and blew his (bleep) head off
right in front of everybody.
You know, it's just like, you know what,
you ain't good enough to ride with my
partner going home.
And, uh, you know, I kinda feel bad about that in a way,
but at the same time, there's no way he rode back
on no helicopter with my friend.
HERB LIND: After these times when we had our big battles,
we would usually go to base camp at Dong Tam,
which often times is described as the
Mobile Riverine Force Base Camp.
We had a PX, we had a swimming pool.
And this was a place where the troops would go
when they were not on operations and on the ships.
They had a chance to do the things that would
relieve some of the stress.
JOHN YOUNG: While we were on Dong Tam,
I think all the infantry battalions in the
9th Division at one time or another ran
med-cap operations.
We would secure a perimeter around a village or
a couple of villages and then a medical team from the
division would go in there and deal with any kind of
immediate medical problems that the civilian
population might have.
HERB LIND: If they had a building,
like a school that needed something,
the troops would pitch in and help restore it or
fix it or paint it or whatever they could.
And I'm sure that it helped the troops and maybe relieved
some of their tensions of what they were doing in the
field and the fact that you were killing other people.
JOHN BRADFIELD: The children were just dirt poor.
I remember one of the baby sans walking up to me and he
has a sort of smoking item in his hand, some sort of leaf.
And he offered me something to eat.
And he opened up this leaf, and I thought it might have
been a baked potato but, no, it was a rat.
A rat!
Wrapped up in leaves.
And, I thought that was kind of nice,
but I had to decline the rat.
JOHN YOUNG: Even though they can't speak English and
we of course can't speak Vietnamese,
you develop a certain friendship with them
after a while.
And there was one little girl that took a particular
liking to one of the guys in my squad,
a guy named Benny Bridges.
If he was on the bunker that little girl was always
some place close by.
After we finished that stint at Dong Tam,
we went back actively involved in the
Riverine force again.
And one morning, we had been on an operation
southeast of Dong Tam, as I recall in an area we
had never been before.
And we knew the operation was over and we were going
to be picked up by aircraft and flown back to
the Riverine base.
JOHN SCLIMENTI: Beautiful day, sun was out,
wasn't real hot.
A couple of the other guys were getting some food or
drink or rest.
JOHN YOUNG: And Benny got the word over the radio
that the aircraft were inbound.
And he stood up and he called out to all of us in
the squad, "The choppers are on the way, saddle up."
JOHN SCLIMENTI: And then all of a sudden,
we heard a shot and I heard somebody yell that
Bridges was down.
JOHN YOUNG: Then suddenly all I could hear was Benny Bridges
choking, strangling on his own blood.
So I just held him there so that he didn't choke,
because I couldn't stand to hear him choking.
And in a couple of minutes the medics came back
and they carried Benny away.
They told me later that he died during the medevac
flight to Dong Tam.
Later on, we landed at Dong Tam and that little girl
from the village came looking around for Benny.
And I had to convey to her some how or other that her
good friend Benny was dead.
And the little girl took the news and then she just
walked off and I don't think I ever saw her again.
And the times that I've visited the Vietnam Memorial
in DC, I always go to find Benny's name first.
And it always, his name always gets to me because
there's just no real reason on earth that I'm standing on
the ground looking up at his name and
not the other way around.
There's just no reason at all.
LARRY LILLEY: We only had, you know,
a couple what I'd call pretty good sized battles,
but it was those 15 minute contacts where they would
pick off one or two guys and next week it's
one or two more guys,
and the next week its another three guys or six guys.
And over a period of a year you realize, jeez.
I don't hardly know anyone here anymore.
NARRATOR: By September of '67,
nine months of combat is taking a visible toll
on Charlie Company.
Of the 160 men who left San Francisco in January
21 have been killed and more than 75 wounded.
Replacement soldiers now outnumber original
Charlie troopers.
JOHN YOUNG: As a rifle squad leader I don't have
a great deal of influence over, you know,
big decisions that are made.
But, within my own squad, I'm it,
I mean I'm the authority within my 8 or 10 guys.
I was very careful about who I selected to do some of the
dirty little dangerous jobs that never get any thanks and
seem unnecessarily risky.
Like when you have to send a three man team out to do a,
recon a tree line.
You send three men out there because you don't want to get
the whole unit caught out there so you send three men.
Well, when it was my squad's turn to send three men,
who was I going to send?
Am I going to send John Sclimenti and Ben Acevedo
and the veterans who've been with me for a
year and a half and fought and bled along side me?
Or am I gonna pick out a rookie,
a guy's whose name I don't even know, a replacement?
What's the right thing to do there?
What's the right thing to do?
I don't know the answer to that,
I do know that from that point forward, whenever I could,
I gave the replacements the short end of the stick.
And that's just tough, because I wasn't going to
risk one of my old timers if I didn't absolutely have to.
EDWIN NEWMAN: The war in Vietnam has become the central
issue here in the United States.
This week hundreds of people demonstrated against it,
tens of thousands marched to support it.
It's a political issue, a moral issue,
but most of all it has become a personal issue.
Each person must come to grips with it himself,
for it affects each one of us.
JOHN YOUNG: We're all accustomed to choosing
between right and wrong and good and evil,
that's an easy thing for people to do.
War is a terrible thing.
And it's terrible not only because people get killed,
it's terrible because you have to make some kind of
decision and there aren't any good options.
You can do something that's cruel and ugly,
or something that's crueler yet and uglier still.
There's no good option to take.
And I'd really rather not have anybody who hasn't been
through something like that pass judgement on me.
Don't be too sure about the decision you would have made.
And don't be smug about your morality until
you had it tested.
BILL REYNOLDS: You're scared at first.
And, uh, after, I don't know, 3 or 4 months,
you stop being scared.
You figure, you're not gonna make it.
And it was that way for a good deal of my tour of duty.
Just figured to hell with it, I'm doing my job,
I'm probably not going to make it.
And I ceased being scared, really scared.
And, uh, about three months to go,
I started getting scared again thinking that
I might make it.
NARRATOR: November 1967.
Charlie Company has just seven weeks
remaining in Vietnam.
At home, the nation they left behind is growing
increasingly tired of a war in which they see
little evidence of progress.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Our American people like when we
get in a contest of any kind they want it decided
and decided quickly and get in or get out.
That's not the kind of war we are fighting in Vietnam.
We don't march out and have a big battle each day
in a guerrilla war.
It's a new kind of war for us so it doesn't
move that fast.
We are making progress, we are pleased with the
results that we are getting.
HERB LIND: At times, we questioned what are we doing,
why are we here and we didn't have answers.
We thought we were there to do good and we believed
for the most part in the fact that we were there
for a purpose.
LARRY LILLEY: My impression when we went to Vietnam was
that the communists were trying to force their influence
on the South and we had seen what it had done in Europe
and we wanted to stop that.
STEVE HOPPER: I didn't care what the nation thought
or what some protester might have thought about
what we were doing.
I cared more about the purpose that I had been given
at that point in my life and that was to serve my country.
BILL REYNOLDS: I really believe that,
despite how the war ended up,
that the time that we were in Vietnam we did
a lot of good for the South Vietnamese people.
That the strategy for the Mekong Delta was sound.
Gosh, I'd like to believe that it was.
NARRATOR: In January of 1968,
the original members of Charlie Company reach the end
of their year long combat tour.
Of the 160 men who arrived in Vietnam together,
26 have been killed and 105 wounded.
TERRY McBRIDE: Seeing that freedom plane come by,
and knowing that we were getting on it,
and that we were gonna be leaving,
that was probably one of the better feelings that
I've had in my life.
BILL REYNOLDS: Man, it was a regular Pan Am
with stewardesses and it was just jubilation.
Jubilation throughout.
Everybody was screaming and hollering.
TERRY McBRIDE: I can remember the pilot saying,
"Well guys, we'll be up to about 200 miles an hour
here in about ten seconds,"
he says, "So you got 10 seconds
to die in this country and I think we're all
gonna make it."
And boy, he just powered that and hit the thrusters and
shove you back in the seat of that airplane and
we were on our way home.
STEVE HOPPER: We were all up yelling and hugging each
other and celebrating the fact that we made it through
our 12 months in Vietnam.
LARRY LILLEY: When we touched down,
I'd say 50% of us got to the bottom of the stairs
and kissed the ground.
And then continued on in the terminal.
STEVE HOPPER: And we walked down to the exit area
at the airport.
And there were some protesters there,
spitting at us, saying things to us.
LARRY LILLEY: Calling us names,
throwing garbage at us and spitting at us.
WILLIE McTEAR: I was so disappointed and hurt,
I went into the bathroom, took my uniform off and
stuffed it in my duffel bag and put on some civilians.
I didn't wanna be part of the Army any more.
STEVE HOPPER: You were so anxious to step out of this
situation you had been in.
You said goodbye to them.
BILL REYNOLDS: We didn't even stop and think that
this is it.
We've been together for 18 months I guess.
You're so young and all you can think about is get home,
and just pick up the life that you had before.
STEVE HOPPER: And you walked out and you got in a taxi
and all of a sudden you were all separated again.
JOHN YOUNG: When I left Vietnam,
my parents had known within a couple of days when
I was due home, but I hadn't been able to be
any more exact than that.
Once I landed, I didn't call them either,
I just continued on home to Minnesota.
When I got to Minneapolis, I got off the aircraft and
I took a taxi to my parents' house.
So, the first thing my parents knew was that a taxi
pulled into the driveway and then suddenly I was home.
JAMES NALL: I got to mom and dad's house,
they just celebrated.
They had the whole family, everybody come over.
It was like the prodigal son come home, you know.
GARY MAIBACH: Dad and mom came up and
yeah I,
I don't have the words.
STEVE HOPPER: I came home and, I remember flying,
landing at the airport, I walked into the terminal
and I heard a girl scream.
And it was Jen, my fiancée.
BILL REYNOLDS: After I returned back to
"The World" as we called it,
you know I went back to work and whenever I talked to
anybody about Vietnam, it was heavy on my mind,
no one was real interested in that.
You could tell, the body language,
that you're talking about stuff that they don't wanna
hear about and you stop talking about it.
And years roll by and you're busy moving forward
in your life; getting married,
having kids, responsibilities,
home mortgage and so forth,
and, so, you know, you lose contact with those guys.
STEVE HOPPER: Because of the protests and because
of the way the country felt about the Vietnam War,
many of us just kinda tucked it aside.
All of those experiences we had had and what we had
witnessed and seen and even the friendships.
We kind of hid all of those inside of us for many,
many, many years.
GARY MAIBACH: I didn't hear from the guys,
but maybe once or twice a year.
And then it got to the point where,
"Doc, what do you think of a reunion of some sort?"
It's just incredible for me to look out over this group
and I appreciate all who made the effort to come.
STEVE HOPPER: We finally get together 23 years later
and start reminiscing and sharing stories for the
first time and it was pretty amazing.
Pretty amazing.
Alright, John Young.
JOHN YOUNG: Oh, hello, meet my daughter Peggy.
We had our first reunion in 1989 and since that time
we've had, oh,
I think a dozen or more.
And we'll continue to have reunions.
JACK BENEDICK: It's good to see the guys after
all we went through.
That makes me feel proud.
JOHN YOUNG: Brothers is exactly the right term.
Those guys are everything, just everything to me.
It's as plain as that.