(For a detailed map of hill country around Firebase Ripcord, see page 242.)
Firebase Ripcord was originally established by the 2d of the 506th, a line infantry battalion commanded by Lt. Col. Andre C. Lucas, to support an offensive into an enemy base area overlooking the A Shau Valley of Thua Thien Province, Republic of Vietnam. Occupying the denuded crest of a ridge, the firebase was a whitish brown hump amid jungle-covered mountains. East of the firebase, the mountains descend to foothills, also jungled, beyond which, barely visible from Ripcord, sandy plains meet the South China Sea. To the west, the green peaks push successively skyward; along the far horizon stretch the great mountain ranges that originate in central China and dominate the entire frontier between Vietnam and Laos.
Dependent on helicopters for logistical support, Ripcord was less than twenty-five kilometers, a fifteen-minute flight, southwest of Camp Evans, the rear area of Lucas’s battalion and its parent command, the 3d Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile). Ripcord was nevertheless deep enough in the mountains, closer to Laos than its own support base, that the heavier of the two howitzer batteries on site could fire southwest into the enemy-controlled A Shau Valley. More to the point, both batteries could range on the supply installations on Co Pung Mountain, a major terrain feature immediately northeast of the valley and nine kilometers south of Ripcord. Those supply installations and the two North Vietnamese regiments that protected them were the objective of the planned offensive. Fighter-bombers utilized a navigational beacon positioned on the firebase to further soften up the area with air strikes, as did—flying too high to be seen or heard—B-52 Stratofortresses of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command.
No more than a bare hilltop when first established, Ripcord was two and a half months later a heavily bunkered bastion standing ready to provide artillery coverage for the opening of three firebases directly in the objective area. It was at that time, on the eve of the allied offensive, that the enemy struck at the intruders in their mountains. Mortar crews began shelling Ripcord early one morning, and small teams of enemy infantry engaged those units that choppered in to silence the mortars. Resupply helicopters came under heavy antiaircraft fire; two were downed. In a terrible finale to that first day of surprises, a sapper force penetrated the perimeter of a company bivouacked for the night on a strategic peak two and a half kilometers southwest of Ripcord and demolished the unit from the inside out. The sappers themselves also suffered heavy losses.
Thus began the battle for Firebase Ripcord. Colonel Benjamin L. Harrison, the brigade commander, was given operational control of the division reserve, a full battalion, but it was not enough. The enemy had prepared the battlefield too well. Moving down trails hidden under the canopy, several North Vietnamese battalions—the exact number remains unclear—had slipped bit by bit into the hills around Ripcord during the quiet days before the storm. Advance parties had prepared extensive bunker complexes for them, all superbly camouflaged, and laid in supplies. They had also dug firing pits for 60mm and 82mm mortars, as well as enough .51-caliber machine-gun positions to ensure that helicopters approaching the firebase could be tracked from any direction.
Despite constant patrolling by Lucas’s battalion to cut the infiltration routes to the heavily populated lowlands, the buildup had gone mostly unnoticed, there being too few troops and too much ground to be covered. Most significantly, the North Vietnamese had been able to fortify a dominant hill only a kilometer west of Ripcord. Once the battle was joined, the enemy shelled Ripcord from that vantage point, their log-reinforced bunkers withstanding the artillery fire and air strikes called down in return. Lucas pushed a reconnaissance team, then one company, then two, up the blasted hillside. The bunkers, almost impossible to see amid the debris of bomb-smashed trees, were connected by tunnels, allowing the enemy to reinforce those that were knocked out, and none of the assaults made much progress. Those mortar crews on the hill were forced to take cover, but the shelling continued unabated from the numerous other positions around Ripcord.
The enemy matched each escalation of the action. Colonel Harrison had deployed the reserve battalion, Lt. Col. Otis W. Livingston’s 2-501st Infantry, on a ridgeline running southeast from the peak that had been overrun by the sappers. By day seven, the reserve battalion had accumulated so many casualties that Livingston was ordered to march out of the area to clear the way for the B-52s.
The bombing did not shake the enemy’s grip. Meanwhile, on the twelfth day of the battle, Colonel Harrison sent Livingston to reinforce the assaults on the fortified hill west of Ripcord. Whereas Lucas had attacked from the east and north, Livingston was to go up the western slope. The 2d of the 501st never reached its objective. Instead, the reserve battalion became bogged down in a bunker complex that sat hidden in the jungle, blocking the western approach to the hill. Division had committed major fire-support resources to the battle, but what was needed was another infantry brigade; as decisions were made about how next to proceed, the Co Pung offensive was reluctantly postponed. The enemy, therefore, was achieving his goal, denying the allies access to an important logistical site and an approach into the even more valuable A Shau Valley.
Even the best-laid plans tended to come to ruin in connection with the A Shau. It is a natural sanctuary. Running northwest-southeast between two mountain ranges at the western edge of Vietnam, the valley, some thirty-five kilometers long and a few hundred meters to four kilometers wide—the fifteen kilometers extending northwest like a fissure from the heart of the valley are the most narrow—could hardly have been farther removed from the allied bases along the coast. The valley is at certain points only three kilometers from Laos. Several branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the thousand-veined infiltration corridor from North to South Vietnam by way of Laos, snaked easily into the A Shau.
The area is isolated not only by geography but by the weather. For much of the year, fog and thunderstorms conceal the mile-high, wind-buffeted mountains to either side of the valley. The A Shau, a place from the beginning of time, was originally inhabited by Montagnard tribes, which hunted with crossbows and practiced slash-and-burn farming. These primitive hill peoples were victimized during the early years of the war by the Viet Cong (VC), who forced them to serve as porters and guides for guerrilla units carving out bases across the border with Laos—those who objected were summarily executed—and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which, fearing the Montagnards might succumb to communist indoctrination, proceeded to burn their villages and crops, slaughter their livestock, herd the people into squalid refugee camps, and treat the handful of souls who could not be torn from their ancestral lands as enemies to be shot on sight.
After the hill tribes were removed, the 5th Special Forces Group established a border surveillance camp midway up the A Shau Valley in March 1963. The camp occupied the site of an abandoned Montagnard village called Ta Bat. A month later a second camp was built at the southeast end where the village of A Shau, from which the valley draws its name, once stood. Each outpost, part of a chain all along the border, was home to a Special Forces A-team and several companies of troops, primarily Montagnards, who had been recruited into the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) by the Green Berets. The interdiction patrols they ran from the outpost chain rarely encountered VC, neither catching the guerrillas when they slipped into the mountains to attack government-controlled towns and villages in the lowlands nor when they returned to Laos.
It was better not to catch the enemy. Defeated routinely in engagements big and small, the CIDG troops and the unmotivated, poorly led ARVN had proven themselves no match for the Viet Cong. To complete what the VC had begun, Hanoi began infiltrating not only supplies and reinforcements but entire North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regiments down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The first such regiment crossed into the south in December 1964. To tip the scales back again, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Marines to land at Da Nang on March 8, 1965. More units soon followed, and when the buildup was complete, two Marine and seven army divisions, backed up by what was then the greatest concentration of firepower in the history of warfare, would be fighting in South Vietnam.
Commanded by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the confident and aggressive force did not know defeat. It found its spirit in the battle of the Ia Drang Valley—the first major clash between the U. S. Army and the North Vietnamese—which saw a battalion from the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) utterly destroy the NVA regiment that was attempting to destroy it during three savage days on the Cambodian border in November 1965.
The old war of advisors and indigenous troops continued on the border with Laos. In May 1965, a third border surveillance camp was established five kilometers northwest of Ta Bat at another abandoned village, A Luoi, where the A Shau Valley narrows to a fissure. After quietly surrounding Ta Bat and A Luoi, the enemy hit both outposts with mortar and ground attacks in December 1965. Both were evacuated, leaving the stronger Camp A Shau to stand alone in the valley. The enemy made the triangle-shaped outpost their next objective, and on March 10, 1966, after two days of mortar bombardments and human-wave attacks, they took it. The communists paid a real butcher’s bill, piling up bodies in the barbed wire as the Green Berets kept up the fire of their CIDG troops and called in air strikes almost on top of themselves. The enemy victory was nevertheless so complete that the A Shau became the stuff of legend; stories were told, all true, of the enemy swarming in over their dead, of CIDG troops joining the communists once the perimeter had been breached, of other CIDG troops trampling the wounded and fighting among themselves for places on the evacuation helicopters, forcing those advisors who were still alive to open fire on the hysterical mob. After that, no other combat zone in the country chilled the blood quite like the A Shau Valley.
No new border camps were built in the valley, and it wasn’t until April 1967 that Project Delta reconnaissance teams slipped back into the A Shau; they reported that enemy infiltration, unchecked as it was, had increased dramatically. There was little to be done about it, however, as the U. S. Marines, who had responsibility for all of I Corps—the five northern-most provinces of South Vietnam, including Thua Thien— were more than fully occupied combating the guerrillas in the coastal villages and blocking conventional NVA thrusts across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam.
The allies basically ignored the A Shau for two years, and in that time, subjected only to infrequent bombing and long-range artillery fire, the enemy transformed the area into a giant logistical base. Thousands of engineer troops, equipped with some few Soviet bulldozers but mostly laboring like coolies, widened the existing network of Montagnard footpaths to accommodate bicycles and supply carts, and the main trails were upgraded to handle trucks. Night reconnaissance flights sometimes spotted enemy convoys, headlights glowing, as they rolled down roads not yet concealed by tying together the tops of the trees along either side. Mountain caves were used to store the material being transported across the border. To safeguard the supply depots, the enemy expanded and interconnected the fighting positions on the high ground. The place became an invisible fortress, the most elaborate and well-defended enemy staging and supply area in all of South Vietnam.
General Westmoreland was not oblivious to what was happening in the A Shau Valley. The theater commander, believing that the populated areas around Saigon and along the coast had been pacified by his search-and-destroy operations, was, in fact, preparing to end the war by pushing into border strong-holds such as the A Shau when the communist Tet Offensive broke across the length and breadth of South Vietnam three hours before dawn on January 31, 1968.
The enemy hit every major town and city that morning. The heaviest fighting took place in Hue, capital of Thua Thien Province, which was seized by a division’s worth of VC and NVA. The retaking of Hue by three Marine battalions and most of the 1st ARVN Infantry Division bogged down in a house-to-house battle that left major portions of the old and beautiful city in a shambles before the communist flag was finally hauled down on February 24.
The occupation of Hue had been a reign of terror. Aided by local sympathizers, political cadres rounded up whoever they could find with any connection to the government—students, teachers, bureaucrats, businessmen, foreign missionaries—and marched them into the countryside, where they were murdered and buried in mass graves. The communists thus disposed of three thousand potential enemies in what was the single worst atrocity of the Vietnam War.
The enemy units that took Hue had bivouacked in the A Shau, and five fresh NVA battalions had been able to slip in during the battle on the infiltration routes running northeast the thirty-five kilometers from the valley to Hue. Elements of the 1st Cavalry and 101st Airborne Divisions had to be deployed between Hue and the A Shau to cut the enemy supply lines. Heavy contact in the rural hamlets of the area continued into the first week of March 1968.
In terms of casualty ratios, Tet was an indisputable allied victory. It nonetheless exposed the extent to which the American people had been misled by officials who were themselves terribly disconnected from reality. Westmoreland’s war of attrition had failed. The communists, rarely forced into battles from which they could not withdraw, were able always to replace their losses. It was the enemy, not Westmoreland, who controlled the rate of attrition on both sides. They had been able to strike everywhere during Tet, even downtown Saigon. Though the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had been unable to hold what they grabbed for more than a few hours or days in the face of U. S. firepower—Hue was the tragic exception—the ferocity of their assaults turned the American public’s perception of the war on its head. The enemy had not been pushed back to the borders. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. There was only the prospect of war without end against an enemy willing to sacrifice its young men by the hundreds of thousands—year after year, for as long as it took—until, like the French, the Americans were wearied unto death of the Vietnam War.
General Westmoreland, still confident, went on the offensive after Tet, focusing with a vengeance on the A Shau. The mission to destroy the key logistical base went to the 1st Cavalry Division, then headquartered at Camp Evans. The 1st Cav was widely regarded as the best division in Vietnam. It had performed magnificently from the Ia Drang to Bong Son to the An Lao, and after Hue it had conducted the relief of the besieged Marine garrison at Khe Sanh, in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam, with a fluid and graceful precision fully in keeping with its reputation. Following five solid days of air strikes and the devastating B-52 missions known as Arc Lights, the 1st Cav’s lead two assault battalions landed in the northwest end of the valley on April 19, 1968. The offensive was code-named Operation Delaware. The first wave was unopposed, but subsequent lifts coming in through the low clouds, including CH-47 Chinooks with sling-loaded artillery pieces suspended underneath, were subjected to heavy .51-caliber and 37mm fire from the mountains. Ten helicopters were shot down, another twenty-three damaged. No previous operation had experienced such heavy antiaircraft fire, and Westmoreland hastily imposed a news blackout on Operation Delaware.
The enemy offered only token resistance once the cav started scouring the valley floor with two brigades and an attached regiment from the 1st ARVN Infantry Division; more ARVN and a brigade from the 101st were screening the mountains to the east. The raid, terminated after twenty-eight days, was declared a major success. In some regards it was. Pushing through ambushes and artillery fire from Laos, the 1st Cav discovered truck parks full of abandoned vehicles, captured mortars, flak guns, and tons of ammunition. In the only sustained engagement of the operation, the 1st Cav even knocked out a Soviet-made PT-76 tank while driving an enemy force from an area known as the Punchbowl, through which ran a sunken corduroy road. Under the area’s canopy were a hospital, supply bunkers, and a regiment-sized headquarters from the 559th NVA Transportation Group.
For all that, the allies never really took control of the valley. The enemy’s antiaircraft fire was too effective, the weather too bad. Combat engineers reopened the airstrip at A Luoi for supply planes, but it was washed out quickly. An air force C-130 cargo plane was shot down while parachuting supplies in, and even routine helicopter resupply missions became unnerving ordeals as pilots tried to find holes in the cloud cover without flying into the sides of mountains. One cav battalion that was weathered in on a ridge could neither be supplied nor evacuated and was finally forced to move on foot to a more tenable site. It took four days to move six kilometers. It was obvious at the end of the operation that more had been missed than found, and that the enemy would shortly be emerging from caves or slipping back in from Laos to reclaim the A Shau Valley.
The 1st Cav was soon thereafter dispatched to other hot spots, leaving the 101st—the Screaming Eagle division of Normandy and Bastogne fame—to shield Hue and pacify Thua Thien Province. The 101st established its base camps along Highway 1, which follows the coast all the way from Saigon to Hue to Hanoi and on into China. Camp Eagle, site of the division headquarters, was ten kilometers southeast of Hue, with the 1st Brigade in the adjacent Phu Bai Combat Base. The 2d Brigade was at Landing Zone (LZ) Sally, ten kilometers northwest of Hue. Another ten kilometers up the road, the 3d Brigade took over Camp Evans, which was nestled between the highway and the first ripple of foothills off the South China Sea.
The only two airmobile divisions in the war zone, the 1st Cav and the Screaming Eagles, were comparable in terms of unit pride and professionalism. Trained as an airborne shock force, the 101st was more hard-nosed, however, more willing to take casualties, which it proved as it pursued the enemy to the point of extinction through the rice paddies, sand dunes, and villages of the coastal plains. By the end of the year, the resident VC were a shadow of their former selves, and the NVA had been pushed back into the mountains, far from Hue.
For the 101st, the next step was to take the A Shau. The division had been there not once but twice before. In August 1968, Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, having replaced Westmoreland the month before as commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), had ordered the 101st to conduct a follow-up raid into the valley to catch the NVA as they returned to it in the wake of Operation Delaware. The raid was another ordeal of bad weather, heavy aircraft losses, and inconclusive firefights with a phantom foe, but no major caches were discovered as compensation.
What was needed to secure the valley was a permanent force. Given the hazards of aerial resupply, what was needed to sustain such a force was an all-weather road running into the A Shau from Camp Eagle. Such a road was built into the foothills. Before the engineers could push on into the mountains, the enemy had to be pushed out. Accordingly, the 2d Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, went into the A Shau on March 12, 1969. This time, the NVA stood and fought, but after pitched battle at places such as Bloody Ridge, the battered enemy quit the valley and withdrew to their Laotian sanctuaries. Having seriously disrupted enemy control of the area, the 2d Brigade, a little bruised itself, was lifted out on May 8.
To keep the pressure on, the 3d Brigade went in two days later, executing a massive air assault, Operation Apache Snow, to cut off the retreat of those enemy still in the valley. Instead of mopping up a demoralized foe, one battalion found that the 29th NVA Regiment had bunkered itself in on a jungled summit amid the mountains on the western side of the A Shau. The peak, marked as Hill 937 on topographical maps, its height indicated in meters above sea level, was known to the Vietnamese as Dong Ap Bia.
The troops who had to go through the meat grinder to take the position would rename it Hamburger Hill. Seven assaults, six of them unsuccessful, were launched up Dong Ap Bia from May 11 through 20, 1969, resulting in 56 U. S. dead and more than 400 wounded, against an official NVA body count of 630. The political fallout from such heavy casualties would reshape the conduct of the entire ground war in Vietnam and profoundly influence the way in which the 101st Airborne responded to the action at Ripcord.
The military was made to understand after Dong Ap Bia that minimizing American casualties was more important than closing with the enemy if President Richard M. Nixon was to maintain public support long enough to implement Vietnamization, the policy by which U. S. units were to be gradually withdrawn and replaced by a better-trained, better-equipped ARVN. Ironically, like Tet, the other psychological disaster of the war, Hamburger Hill had been a tactical victory. That is not to say the battle had not been a mess. Helicopter gunships—sleek, murderous AH-1G Cobras—repeatedly strafed the battalion assaulting the hill. A sudden, blinding rainstorm turned the denuded slope to mud and halted one attack just as the troops were about to gain the crest. Worse, by the time the division appreciated the strength of the enemy defenses and committed the three additional battalions needed to take Hamburger Hill, the battalion that had started the fight—and, at the insistence of its hard-driving commander, would participate in the final assault—had been rendered combat ineffective.
Most battles, however, are messes, and on Dong Ap Bia the enemy had been found, fixed, and destroyed, however clumsily, however painfully. By the old rules, that would have been enough. There had been numerous battles before Hamburger Hill—battles not denounced on the floor of the U. S. Senate— in which units were badly hurt while seizing remote villages and mountains that were without value except that they were occupied by the NVA. Like Hamburger Hill, those objectives were also abandoned once taken, the premise of the attrition strategy being not to hold terrain but to kill the enemy whenever and wherever he was found until Hanoi had neither the manpower nor the will to replace its losses.
The Tet Offensive, however, had demonstrated the futility of the attrition strategy as applied to Vietnam. It was the American people, not the communists, who grew demoralized. Sixteen months after Tet, they had no more stomach for the type of news footage coming from Hamburger Hill—the body bags and the grimacing, rain-lashed wounded—for it appeared to represent carnage without progress, sacrifice without meaning. It seemed that way to the troops, too, most of whom at that stage in the war were actually basic-issue draftees despite their assignment to an airborne division. Hamburger Hill could not have been taken without their raw courage, but during the battle they had talked to reporters about their senior commanders as if they considered them as much their enemy as the NVA. The same mood would prevail at Ripcord.
Except for sapper attacks on several firebases in the area, there was little further interference from the enemy after the battle on Dong Ap Bia as an all-weather airstrip was constructed and the road into the valley completed, allowing armored and self-propelled artillery units to drive in over the mountains. The permanent base that was to have dominated the valley floor was never built, however, because the 101st pulled out of the A Shau on August 12, 1969.
The military had run out of time. President Nixon’s promised withdrawal of U. S. units had begun in July. The Screaming Eagles were forced to expand their area of operations (AO) into Quang Tri Province, which faced the DMZ, as of August— thus the exit from the A Shau—to take over for the departing 3d Marine Division.
Shortly thereafter, the 101st Airborne and the well-led 1st ARVN Infantry Division, with which the Screaming Eagles were teamed as part of Vietnamization, drew back to a line of firebases that could be reached by road in the foothills between the coast and the mountains as the northern monsoon began in mid-October 1969.
The enemy used the cover of the rainy season to reestablish their supply bases and lines of communication. The buildup, monitored after a fashion by air-cavalry flights and daring six-man long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) teams, was most intensive around Co Pung Mountain, four kilometers northeast of the A Shau. Nicknamed the Warehouse Area for all the caches previously uncovered there, Co Pung was home to the quartermaster units supporting the 29th and 803d Regiments of the 324B NVA Division.
The weather dictated tactics. When the rains stopped, the enemy would begin moving into the lowlands. The 101st planned—perhaps too ambitiously, given the current political climate—to preempt the North Vietnamese by launching a major offensive with the 1st ARVN Infantry Division into the Warehouse Area. The attack, to begin after the monsoon, was code-named Operation Chicago Peak. To disrupt the enemy in the interim and establish the key firebase to support the offensive, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas’s 2-506th Infantry was tasked to seize the ridge on which Ripcord would be built. Two air assaults were turned back with heavy casualties. The site was finally secured by ground attack on April 11, 1970.
There were more tough actions as more fire-support bases were opened on the fringes of the Warehouse Area under the auspices of Operation Texas Star. When the monsoon petered out in mid-May, however, and the sky was again full of scout ships and gunships, the North Vietnamese seemed to vanish. That they had not, that they had instead been avoiding contact—not difficult in those mountains—as they encircled Ripcord, began to come into focus only after the shelling of the firebase began on July 1, 1970.
Having seized the initiative, the enemy retained the initiative. The problem was that whereas the communists were willing to absorb whatever losses were required to achieve their goals, the U. S. Army was trying to fight a war, or, more precisely, keep the enemy at bay until the ARVN could stand on its own, without taking the kind of casualties that would further exacerbate the political divisions in the United States. The 101st Airborne in particular could not afford another Hamburger Hill. Colonel Harrison, the brigade commander, instinctively desired to meet force with overwhelming counterforce, but division headquarters proved reluctant to be drawn into the kind of bloody slugging match that would have been required to push the enemy out of their entrenchments around Ripcord. When the division reserve, like Lucas’s battalion, became decisively engaged, no additional units were piled on, as would have been done without hesitation if the old rules had still applied.
The new rules made for a strange battle. When the attacks on the hill west of Ripcord failed, there was great hesitation about keeping them going, though that dominant terrain feature was vital to the security of Ripcord. Similarly, when a company from the reserve battalion did secure—on the twelfth day of the battle—another fortified hill that afforded the enemy a direct line of fire into Ripcord from the southeast, then suffered heavy casualties while repelling five successive night attacks, it was not replaced with a fresh company when lifted out to recuperate. The NVA reclaimed the hill even as the battered company moved toward its extraction LZ. Few troops see their sacrifices so quickly thrown away.
The troops on the firebase were already living an underground existence because of the incoming fire when, on the seventeenth day, the enemy brought up powerful 120mm mortars to shell Ripcord. On the eighteenth day, a resupply Chinook took a burst of antiaircraft fire in its fuel tank while hovering over Ripcord with a sling load of artillery shells. The helicopter crashed straight down into the ammunition storage area of one of the howitzer batteries, and the cataclysmic explosions that followed literally blew the top off the hill, completely destroying the battery in the process.
Crisis piled upon crisis. On the twentieth day, a company attached to Lucas from the 1-506th Infantry was inserted on a ridge east of Ripcord. The company was immediately engaged in yet another hidden bunker complex. As if to confirm that the NVA were everywhere, one of Lucas’s own companies, commanded by Captain Hawkins, discovered that same afternoon a land line running along a trail in a narrow valley only two kilometers south of the firebase. Tapping into the line, the company interpreter found himself eavesdropping on conversations between an enemy division headquarters and one of its subordinate units.
On the twenty-first day, the 1-506th company—surrounded, under mortar fire and ground attack—was forced to leave its dead behind as it straggled to another hill for extraction. Hawkins’s company, meanwhile, was ambushing and killing numerous enemy soldiers who moved through the area of the wiretap with the confidence of an occupying army. An annotated map found on one of the bodies spoke to an upcoming assault on Ripcord. The best available intelligence indicated that there were at least six battalions massed around the firebase, mostly from the 6th and 803d NVA Regiments. The location of the 29th NVA Regiment was unknown.
Before Ripcord could become an American Dien Bien Phu, the 101st Airborne Division did what the U. S. Army did not do in Vietnam: It backed away from a major engagement, ordering the evacuation and destruction by air strikes of Firebase Ripcord.
The decision to withdraw was made on the twenty-second day. Hawkins’s company was hit by an NVA battalion while moving to an extraction site that afternoon. Fighting with the desperate courage of men who knew they had to save themselves or die, Hawkins and his badly outnumbered grunts somehow pushed the enemy back.
On the twenty-third day, an armada of gunships and fighterbombers attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress the enemy mortar and antiaircraft positions as Chinooks lifted the remaining howitzers off Ripcord. Next, in an amazing display of airmanship, UH-1 Hueys darted in between mortar salvos to evacuate the troops five at a time. Lucas, standing in the open as he coordinated the evacuation, became one of the last casualties of the battle when a 120mm mortar round landed at his feet. The final act was the extraction soon thereafter of Hawkins’s decimated company.
Evacuation had seemed the only realistic option, given the political situation. It was galling nonetheless to leave the enemy in possession of the battlefield. As if wishing Ripcord down the memory hole, the 101st—which had banned reporters from the base during the latter stages of the battle—had not a word to say in the magazine it published for its troops in Vietnam about a fight that had been more costly for the division than even Hamburger Hill.
There had been few reporters on hand to turn away. The big story that summer was not an obscure action in the hinterlands but the invasion of Cambodia. For its part, the command in Saigon had downplayed Ripcord, referring only to light action in the mountains west of Hue. After the evacuation, an event of obvious news value, the command prepared a memorandum for the press. It naturally emphasized enemy casualties, but instead of acknowledging that the NVA had simply made it too costly to maintain Ripcord, given the restrictions on U. S. casualties, it explained away the evacuation as a redeployment of forces to attack the rear areas of the very regiments that had encircled the firebase. The evacuation was accurately described in contemporary news accounts as a retreat, the memorandum an attempted cover-up. But, because the fighting was already over, it was basically a one-day story. There was no follow-up to see if the enemy bases were actually attacked as promised, no analysis or detailed description of what had been a remarkable victory for the North Vietnamese Army.
The enemy victory was total. With Ripcord evacuated, the keystone to the summer offensive had been removed. Instead of a big push, Operation Chicago Peak when finally launched was merely a quick ARVN raid with gunship support but no ground support from the 101st Airborne. Division was hesitant after losing so many troops at Ripcord to lose any more, and no Screaming Eagles ventured onto Co Pung Mountain. The logistical bases there went mostly undisturbed. Meanwhile, in early August, the enemy, including the missing 29th NVA Regiment, opened a new front against Firebase O’Reilly, an isolated position north of Ripcord from which U. S. forces had also withdrawn when they turned it over to the ARVN. Relying on lavish air support from the 101st and the U. S. Air Force, the South Vietnamese did battle with the NVA battalions around O’Reilly, which was being heavily shelled, until the approach of the monsoon threatened to cut off the mountaintop base from helicopter resupply. It was prudently abandoned on October 7, 1970, as the 101st Airborne and the 1st ARVN Infantry Divisions again retired to their cordon of firebases in the foothills.
Ripcord was the last big battle that the American infantry fought in Vietnam. It marked the end of an era. As the withdrawals continued, battalion commanders, acting upon the unspoken wishes of their superiors, crossed known enemy strong-holds off their maps, and the troops basically went through the motions on patrol, none wanting to be the last man killed in a war that was not going to be won. Contact was infrequent, with most casualties the result of accidents, booby traps, and small, quick enemy ambushes.
However unmotivated, the grunts were still good soldiers in comparison to the mass of support troops in the rear. Discipline, dry-rotting since around the middle of 1968—the big problems were drugs, racial tension, the hatred between draftees and lifers—had completely fallen apart in the rear by 1970–71. There was spawned the hideous fragging phenomenon in which unit leaders who tried to maintain order were killed or wounded with fragmentation grenades rolled into their quarters at night by their own troops.
Even as the war wound down, the Screaming Eagles struck one last time into the A Shau Valley. That final, uncontested raid was designed to keep the NVA from slipping into the lowlands while allied units massed in the Khe Sanh area for the infamous Laotian incursion of February–March 1971. Though the invasion was an ARVN show—advisors were not even permitted to accompany their counterparts across the border— elements of the 101st Airborne secured forward support bases to facilitate the push, and divisional aviation units were among those flying into Laos itself to provide lift, medevac, and gunship support to the South Vietnamese.
The enemy counterattacked with such ferocity that despite the able performance of some few units, most notably the 1st ARVN Infantry Division, the invasion ended in a rout with the dead and wounded abandoned and terrified ARVN soldiers clinging to the skids of evacuation helicopters. Vietnamization had failed.
The situation was hopeless. As unable as his predecessors to find a solution, Nixon wanted to at least push the communists back far enough—thus the invasions of Cambodia and Laos— to provide a face-saving interval between the final departure of U. S. combat units and the inevitable fall of Saigon. The last full division, the 101st, pulled out in March 1972; a battalion previously detached to a support command for base defense followed in July. The last two infantry battalions still in-country at that point, one from the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, the other the 1st Cav, stood down in August, officially ending the American ground war in Vietnam. Those aviation units still supporting the ARVN were withdrawn in March 1973 following the signing of peace accords in Paris, clearing the way for a conventional invasion of South Vietnam by the NVA. Saigon surrendered on April 30, 1975.
What happened at Ripcord bears recording to fill a gap in the historical record and, more fundamentally, to honor the soldiers who fought there. Unable to fathom why they were not being supported by the full weight of combat power available up the chain of command, the troops, responding to good leadership at the platoon and company level, nevertheless held their own against a tough and aggressive foe. There were moments of stunning courage, and as the men who did their best at Ripcord won a personal victory inside a larger defeat, the circumstances of that defeat—the indecision, the restraints, the limited effort against the enemy’s total commitment—make Ripcord something of a tragic metaphor for the entire Vietnam War.