The Forgotten South Vietnamese Airborne

The Forgotten South Vietnamese Airborne

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/opinion/south

Excerpt: Four months into my tour with the airborne we were involved in a giant, bloody battle supporting American Marine units north of Dong Ha, near the coast in the northern part of South Vietnam. Two of our battalions were inserted by helicopter into the Demilitarized Zone to check a significant force of North Vietnam-ese moving south. It turned into three days of intense and bloody combat. My senior adviser was killed. Our incredibly courageous noncommissioned officer, Master Sgt. Rudy Ortiz, was riddled from head to foot. He asked me to load his M-16 and put it on his chest so that he could "die fighting" with the rest of us (luckily, he survived). We took hundreds of casualties and came very close to being overrun. But the South Vietnamese paratroopers fought tenacious-ly. At the critical moment, with supporting air and naval fire, we counterattacked. The executive officer of my Vietnamese battal-ion walked upright through heavy automatic weapon fire to my foxhole. "Lieutenant," he told me, "it is time to die now." It gives me chills to remember his words. In combat, the South Vietnamese refused to leave their own dead or wounded troopers on the field or abandon a weapon. In another battle one of my West Point classmates, Tommy Kerns, a huge Army football player, was badly wounded and stuck in a narrow trench as his airborne battalion tried to break contact with a large North Vietnamese force. The Vietnamese paratroopers with him, all much smaller than Tommy, couldn’t haul him out of the trench. Rather than withdraw and leave him, they held their ground and won a violent engagement over his giant wounded body. He survived because of their courage. (Here's one of the very rare times the NYTimes printed something even remotely positive about the war.  And it's about both the elite ARVN soldiers and the Americans who went to fight alongside them.  Bless them all. And let them not be forgotten.  (Gee, I wonder how Burns and Novick missed this story?) --Del)