12

JUDGMENT DAY

Early Morning, FSB Illingworth, April 1, 1970

Two of Illingworth’s first visitors on the morning of April 1 were Lt. Col. Tom Fitzgerald and Maj. Bart Furey, from the 2nd Battalion, 19th Field Artillery. Both men had been instrumental in directing thousands of protective artillery rounds from other fire bases at Illingworth during the previous night. They arrived by Loach, anxious to see what condition the base was in and to find their friends, many of who were scattered among the artillery assets aboard Illingworth.

Furey was most anxious to find Major Magness. A couple of redlegs told Furey they thought Magness was dead. He wasn’t, but not by much. Furey discovered Magness, still languishing on his bloodied cot, in a half-buried culvert. A medic was working furiously to stabilize Magness’s serious wounds. The loss of blood was appalling, but the medic had finally gotten some morphine into him to dull the pain.

Magness was able to tell his friend Furey a few bits of information, including the tale of the tremendous blast that had nearly wiped out the base. Magness also related that shortly thereafter he had heard several voices just outside his culvert. They had been speaking Vietnamese, a language he knew well. Magness pulled out his .45 and got off a shot before the gun slipped from his blood-soaked grip. He didn’t know if he had hit anyone, and he didn’t know why the Vietnamese hadn’t simply finished him off—but he knew, without question, that the enemy had been just a few feet away. That was significant to Furey because it meant, unless his friend was already delirious, the NVA had made it inside the base.

*   *   *

Stretcher bearers scooped up Major Magness and raced him to the next dust-off. Furey and Fitzgerald turned their attentions to the other artillery survivors, the equipment that could be salvaged, and the wreckage. They could see that the quad .50 gun truck was utterly destroyed, along with the searchlight jeep. One of the big 8-inch howitzers was covered in dirt and debris. It was hard to tell if it was irreparably damaged or just a mess from the explosion. The ammo carriers, one blown on its side, could probably be salvaged. All but one of the 105 mm howitzers had survived, as had all of the 155s.

Slowly but steadily the surviving redlegs began to pull themselves together. Fitzgerald and Furey went about getting the men to reorganize their ammunition supplies, replace their aiming stakes, reset their batteries, and police up their areas. One squad was organized to recover the dead and body parts.

Capt. Arnold Laidig, B Battery of the 1/77, had expended tremendous effort during the previous night to keep his batteries working and on task. By dawn, however, he was spent. There were murmurs among his men, who were just beginning to get to know their new CO, that he should be designated the hero of the moment—worthy of at least a Silver Star if not a DSC.

Unfortunately for Laidig, another visitor flew in: Col. Morris Brady, the notoriously tough CO of the division’s artillery. Brady was a brilliant artillerist but a harsh taskmaster. He was rough on his men, and not many of his subordinates liked him, but, as Brady believed, command was not a popularity contest. He was an SOB for a reason: this was war, and there were no “do-overs.” Brady was ambitious (he would later become, as he had always wished, a general officer), and he was quick to weed out those who worked for him if they did not meet his exacting standards.

Moments after Brady landed at Illingworth he was “kicking ass and taking names.” Many of the men still standing thought it was overly cruel and unnecessary, but Brady felt otherwise. He believed that the only way to get these men functioning again was to make them mad and get them moving. Brady knew that many of the survivors needed to focus on something other than what they had just been through. If that meant thinking that he, Brady, was the meanest bastard in their valley, that was OK with him.

Brady spotted Captain Laidig, who was still shaking and barely able to speak. Hero or not, Brady relieved him of his command on the spot and got him on the next slick out of Illingworth.

*   *   *

Colonel Ochs flew in next. The first person Ochs wanted to see was Illingworth’s commanding officer. Mike Conrad walked up to Ochs covered in so much dust he looked like a ghostly apparition, which, during the previous night, Conrad had come very close to becoming. His throat was still raw from the dirt and sand he had inhaled, and his voice was barely audible after all the shouting he had done over the past few hours.

If anyone on Illingworth had the right to say, “See? I told you so!” it was Mike Conrad, but good soldier that he was, he simply stood there and delivered to Ochs as much of a sitrep as his larynx and his fatigue would allow. Ochs then gave Conrad the stunning and unwelcome news that he would have to stay on Illingworth one more night, after which he and his men would be rotated out, to Phuoc Vinh. Conrad could hardly believe what he was hearing, but after the battering he and his men had taken over the past few hours, he was too stunned to protest.

*   *   *

A herd of slicks, dust-offs, and command helicopters kept coming and going from Illingworth all morning. Totally unnoticed in all the frantic activity was that one lonely replacement flew into Illingworth shortly after 0800. He had hopped aboard the first Huey headed out of Tay Ninh, a flight destined for Illingworth to pick up a load of dead or wounded.

SP4 Dave Nicholson was his name, and he figured that he had missed being in the battle at Illingworth by two or three minutes, tops. On the previous day, March 31, he had spent many frustrating hours in an effort to get back to his unit, Charlie Company, 2/8.

For the better part of the last three weeks Nicholson had been convalescing, mostly at the massive field hospital in Cam Ranh Bay. On March 8, he had been in a big firefight near Tay Ninh, and during the action an NVA mortar had missed taking off his right arm by an inch or so. As it was, he had been banged up pretty good, and the medics spent several days sewing up his back and portions of his right bicep and picking shards of metal out of his neck and side. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the “million-dollar wound”—the one that got you a free pass back stateside and out of the war. It did generate an award for a Purple Heart, however.1

Right after the doctors released him as “fit for duty,” Nicholson began tracking down his old unit. He stuffed his orders into a fatigue pocket, but it was anyone’s guess how he would comply with them; no one had a clear Idea of where Charlie Company was at that moment. He decided to backtrack, using the bits of info and rumors he was able to gather. He started by hopping on a bus from the hospital to the airfield. To the best of his knowledge, his unit was still out in the boonies somewhere near Tay Ninh. He found a flight to Bien Hoa, the 1st Cav’s big staging area. He figured that would be a good place to start or at least get him close.

Nicholson wasn’t all that gung ho to get back. At one point, this college-educated former soccer player from Vermont had been very keen to sign up and go to Vietnam. He had, in fact, beaten back an army classification as “finance clerk” to change his designator to “rifleman.” He had, at one idealistic point in his young life, declared that the burden for the war was falling disproportionately on “the Negros” and he wanted to show the world “white boys can fight, too.” Being in Vietnam for several months had opened his eyes to the realities of life in the field; still, the pull of loyalty was strong. A little more whining, a bit more conniving, a tad more deceit might have gotten him on a plane home, or at least a softer assignment in the rear. He couldn’t do it. He had left good friends on the field of battle, some of them forever, and he still had friends in Charlie Company. As he later wrote:

I had learned a great deal about Vietnam, the Army, the NVA, and myself. I had learned that western Tay Ninh Province was a good place to get killed and that’s where I was heading back to. It didn’t really bother me, though. I’m not sure why. It seemed as though I hadn’t quite gotten the Field out of my system. I still owed Uncle Sam 119 days—so the Dog’s Head would be a good place to go, if I were still trying to uncover Vietnam’s secrets, which I guess I was. I also didn’t think I’d be making those 119 days. But Tay Ninh was where my comrades were, so it was going to be a homecoming of sorts.

Nicholson landed at Bien Hoa and quickly found another transport flight to Tay Ninh. At Tay Ninh, he got the discouraging news that it was no longer the 1st Cav’s rear. It belonged, at that moment, to the 4th Infantry Division. The 1st Cav had moved their rear to Phuoc Vinh. Another grunt, who had just come out of the field, told Nicholson that Charlie Company was actually at a fire base called Illingworth. The safe choice would have been to head to Phuoc Vinh and let the REMFs sort it out, because that’s what his orders allowed. The emotional choice, however, was to get back to his pals.

A sympathetic jeep driver took him all the way across the base to the heliport. Nicholson soon found the NCO in charge of the helipads and said he needed to get the next chopper out to Illingworth.

The grizzled old sergeant squinted at Nicholson and grunted, pointing skyward, “See that Huey?”

Nicholson looked up and saw a helicopter rapidly ascending. It was already about 500 feet in the air. “Yup.”

“Well, that’s the last bird headed out to Illingworth today,” the sergeant chortled.

Nicholson had missed the flight by two or three minutes—no more. They were the few minutes that most probably saved his life.

*   *   *

Relief at not being in the previous night’s battle should have been the dominant emotion in Nicholson’s brain as he surveyed the incredible devastation of Illingworth the next morning; instead, utter despair had him in its grip. Where was his company? His platoon? His friends? None of them were in sight. Instead, he watched in horror as grunts filled body bag after body bag while other men tossed the bodies of the dead NVA into a gigantic pit.

The next feeling to swamp him was regret. Why couldn’t he have made it back in time to save his friends? Could he have saved his friends? Would he have made any difference? Perhaps not, but at least he could have tried. Nicholson had no way of knowing it at the time, but he was suffering the universal shock and angst of soldiers, who, against all the normal logic of self-preservation, always seem to say, “Why not me? Why wasn’t I the one?”

*   *   *

Brigadier General Casey arrived. He conferred with Ochs, then Conrad. Casey’s demeanor was grim, as Conrad remembers. The general was a realist, and he knew this was war, but Casey had the reputation of caring deeply about his men. He seemed to feel the death of each of his troopers personally, and lurking in the back of his mind, very likely, was the thought that his eldest son and namesake was about to graduate from Georgetown University. George junior was a member of ROTC and would be commissioned a second lieutenant on graduation. Orders to Vietnam would likely follow. Would he end up at a hellhole like Illingworth, too?

As he continued to survey the destruction, Casey was solicitous but not apologetic. He couldn’t be. This was part of the strategy he had worked hard to advance. The death toll and the woundings were horrible, regrettable, maybe even excessive, but “acceptable” if the action had destroyed the enemy’s capability to conduct operations in this sector. Had it? That was the question for which Casey desperately sought an answer.

*   *   *

Sometimes the right man comes along at the right moment to make the difference. That was certainly the case with Mike Conrad and FSB Illingworth. Captain Ahearn, one of the many capable eyewitnesses to Conrad’s leadership, had a chance to see the total man up close, how he handled tough situations, and how he related to his troops. In all instances, according to Ahearn, Mike Conrad more than measured up: He was liked by his men, viewed as tough but fair, smart, and very capable. Conrad had graduated from West Point, Class of ’56 (the same class as future generals H. Norman Schwarzkopf and John C. “Doc” Bahnsen Jr.) and, in fact, still serves as his class president today. He had had one previous tour in Vietnam in 1963–64 as adviser to an ARVN battalion. He completed an MS in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965.

Commanding officer of the 2/8 was Conrad’s second Vietnam tour, and it would be a very eventful one. He was in the circle of General Casey’s favorite officers and was very instrumental in implementing Casey’s successful strategy of base-hopping with the fire support installations. Conrad was a faithful subordinate, but he was not afraid to say what he thought if something did not look right to him. We know he fought hard to move FSB Illingworth when it became obvious that the base had been in place too long and the NVA were dialed in on his dispositions. He worked diligently to keep the base effective and properly fortified. He did not win the arguments to relocate the base or to get rid of the unwanted ammunition, but he did everything else in his power to make sure the pending attack was not going to overwhelm his men. His preparations, tactics, and the decisions during the course of the fight were, without question, responsible for the survival of his outpost. Mike Conrad received a Silver Star for his efforts on April 1, 1970, which is a high honor, indeed, but in the view of some, perhaps less than he deserved (the Distinguished Service Cross is the award a number of veterans mentioned as being more appropriate). The politics of the aftermath may have had something to do with this, but there is no blame to place on Mike Conrad for what happened at FSB Illingworth and only praise to give that he led such a successful defense.

*   *   *

SP4 Rick Hokenson has no clear memory of the huge blast that nearly swept away all of his comrades. One moment, after the NVA bombardment had stopped, he was looking over the berm at the onrushing NVA, and the next moment he was standing in the middle of a shattered compound and it was midmorning.

“I have absolutely no idea what happened to me, what I did or where I was from the time of the blast—which I learned about later—to like, maybe, nine or ten in the morning. That was when I ‘woke up,’” Hokenson related. “All I remember was that when I regained consciousness I was on my feet, in the middle of the base, and I was watching some combat photographers taking pictures of the destruction. Then I felt something. I looked at my right hand and it had gotten all torn up by shrapnel. My right ear was also bleeding, and blood was leaking down into my collar.”

Hokenson looked around and saw a number of men, none of whom he recognized, doing “the Thorazine shuffle.”2 A few others were trying to clean or reload weapons. Nobody from his squad or Charlie Company was anywhere in sight. He decided to find a slick and get the hell off this nightmare of a base. He did, and was treated for his wounds in the rear at Tay Ninh. Six days later he was drinking wine on the beach in California. The little voice in his brain, the one teasing him about whether he would make it out alive, was finally quiet—or at least totally inebriated.

*   *   *

As General Casey surveyed what was left of FSB Illingworth, he sought out the commander of the tank company that had rolled up and surrounded the base. He had two tasks for Captain Hensley. Noticing that one of his Pattons was equipped with a dozer blade, he ordered Hensley to have a pit dug immediately so that the dead NVA could be tossed into a mass grave. After that, Casey wanted Hensley to take his tanks and make a run out to the Cambodian border and chase the NVA up and down, for 20 miles in each direction, trying to kill as many of them as he could.

Hensley, the former sergeant and career soldier said, “Yes, sir, I can do that, but I have no fuel with me and no supplies. We tried to get here as quickly as we could.”

“I’ll get some blivets out to you, and we’ll log you from wherever you tell us,”3 Casey responded.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir, but what you’re asking me to do will take about two weeks.”

Not pausing for a second, Casey came right back and said: “Well, I guess we’ll see you in about two weeks, then.”

When the soon-to-be commanding general of your division gives you a direct order, there is no argument to be made. Hensley rounded up his men and machines for a second time that morning and stormed off into the jungle to chase the bad guys.

*   *   *

Last but not least, in came General Roberts. Roberts had actually been aloft in his command helicopter for the past hour, monitoring the last moments of the battle and all the comms. By the time Roberts alit at Illingworth, several of the officers had scraped together a handful of survivors who could still stand erect and form a small honor guard. The group was gathered near the remnants of the TOC and told by a beaming General Roberts what a fantastic job they had done. Roberts then asked Captain Hobson, who was standing nearby with Sergeant Beauchamp, which of these men had done exceptional work. Hobson pointed out several. They were asked to step forward. Roberts’s aide then produced, from somewhere aboard the general’s helicopter, a box with a stash of Silver Stars. Roberts went down the line, pinning a medal to the fatigue pocket of each man, as the division combat photographers snapped away. Moments later, the general was back aboard his chopper and gone, leaving the devastated remnants of his Illingworth defenders to carry on as best they could. Roberts did, however, promise the men that hot chow would be on the way “soon.” It arrived just before nightfall.

*   *   *

Dave Nicholson eventually located the spot along the berm that had been defended by his platoon. The March battles had already whittled Lonely Platoon down dramatically but after the April 1 debacle, there were only six men left—just three of whom Nicholson knew. Six total: two comrades, one good buddy, three total strangers, zero officers, zero noncoms.

Nicholson stared at the blackened landscape all around him, the destroyed bunkers, the blasted culverts, the dark red stains in the sand. He slumped to the ground in a funk. He wrote down the following years later:

I sat there staring at the destroyed bunkers thinking I do not know what. Men were walking past me but I could neither see nor hear them. My body was there but I was numb and could neither think nor move. [Enemy] Bodies were still being thrown into the pit only 75 feet away, helicopters were taking off nearby, and smoke was still rising all around me, but I was aware of none of it. After a while, I once again became aware of the activity around me. I looked down at the ground and saw a helmet lying there, just about brand new, the cloth still bright green, with hardly any of the writings GIs loved to mark on them. Not even an FTA [“Fuck the Army”]. Whose helmet had this been? I didn’t know, but now I needed it, and evidently he would not any longer. I stuck it on my head and it fit just right. It was only a couple of more minutes of looking around before I had an M-16, a bandolier full of clips, web belt, and canteen. I needed to gear up, because, after all, the NVA had staged an all-out attack that ended only about three and one-half hours earlier. Who could say what they were planning next?

Eventually, the shattered platoon began to function. No one told the men what to do, but no one needed to. They all knew what was required. They scrounged claymores, extra ammo, frags, better weapons, canteens, replacement gear. Interestingly, no one thought about food very much. Eventually, about dusk, General Roberts’s promised “breakfast” finally arrived by chopper. The powdered eggs, chipped mystery meat, coffee, milk, and hot bread and butter all went down easily, but the men were focusing on the hours ahead. Everyone believed the NVA would be back to finish them off.

*   *   *

Sgt. Randall Richards could only stand there and sigh in bewilderment and sorrow. He was staring down at a long row of body bags awaiting dust-off. He wasn’t sure which bag it was, but he had been told that one of them belonged to Bobby Barker. As Richards had feared, Barker had gotten blown away at the FDC. Someone told him another grunt had riddled Barker with bullets as he came running into the bunker without the right password. Someone else told him Barker was caught at the doorway in the same rocket blast that had killed Lt. Cleaveland Bridgman and Sgt. Bobby Lane. Richards wanted to open Barker’s body bag to say one last good-bye—and to check Barker’s wounds, to prove one way or another how he had died. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, but he hoped that whatever had killed Barker didn’t screw up his face. It would have been a shame to mess up the new teeth Barker had been bragging about.

[Author’s note: There has been some controversy over the recording of Barker’s death. In the original army casualty count of KIAs at FSB Illingworth, the number killed by enemy action was listed as twenty-four. Barker was the twenty-fifth casualty and initially listed as “other.” On some occasions “other” was used to label friendly fire casualties. No one seems to know—today—why the clerk filling out Barker’s forms checked the box for “other.” It could have been a simple mistake, or it could be because someone told the clerk the death was “suspicious,” in which case the “other” box would be checked until someone further down the line made a final determination. Over the years there have been lingering doubts. One Illingworth veteran, reportedly, has harbored agonizing nightmares believing that, possibly, he mistakenly killed Barker as he rushed into the FDC without the proper password. Those uncertainties can now be put to rest.

I petitioned for a copy of what is called an IDPF, standing for “Individual Deceased Personnel File,” under a Freedom of Information Act request and received a copy of the complete file on Barker. The army pathologists (two doctors and a civilian mortuary specialist) who physically examined Barker’s remains and prepared his body for return to his family officially listed the cause of death as “fragmentation wounds (two) upper left chest.” The examiners who saw Barker’s injuries would, in all likelihood, have been able to readily distinguish between a death by shrapnel fragments and a demise by bullet wounds. They went even further, describing the damage to Barker’s body as “mutilations,” which is not typical of contemporary pathology descriptions of through-and-through gunshot damage. Apparently, either one or both of the shell fragments tore apart Barker’s heart, and he died instantly. The IDPF also clearly shows that Barker did, indeed, have that dental work he wanted.

On another note: If there had been any suspicion, even slight, that Barker’s death had been due to friendly fire, the army would have convened what is called an Article 32 investigation. There is nothing in the records to suggest that this was ever done. Colonel Conrad would have known about any Article 32 proceeding and he is very clear, even today, that none was initiated in regard to Barker’s death.

There is yet one more legend that needs to be put to bed about Barker’s death: the story has been told (and written) over the years that Barker, at the time of the Illingworth events, was a “short-timer” and had been sent to the rear a couple of days before the battle to see the dentist and then “go home.” The story continues that, illogically, Barker decided to return on the eve of the battle to show off his new teeth and to spend one more night in the field with his buddies before finally going back to “the world.” His tragic death, then, might have made a poignant coda to the total story of Illingworth, but the facts do not bear this out: It turns out that Bobby Barker’s “start tour” date in country was September 4, 1969. He would not have been eligible to return stateside until the beginning of September, 1970, at the earliest. On April 1, 1970, Barker’s rotation date was at least five months away. Even with an “early out,” which some men were receiving at the time, the best he could have hoped for was another three months in Vietnam. In the final analysis, Barker’s death may not have the storybook-legend patina that some would like to bestow, but neither do the facts of his death diminish Barker’s legacy as a true American hero who died bravely, fighting alongside his comrades.]

*   *   *

During the day on April 1, the survivors, amounting to fewer than half the number from twenty-four hours prior, spent considerable time picking up the pieces of those who had not made it. The NVA bodies were gathered and dumped in the hastily bulldozed pit. There was no ceremony or moment of silence. By nightfall, all the American casualties had been evacuated, but as the survivors went about getting ready for another evening in the jungle, they would occasionally stumble across a body part or a fragment that had been overlooked in the frenzy to get the wounded—and the dead—away from those who remained behind.

Dan Tyler was a Huey pilot assigned to the 1st Cav and flew many medevac and resupply missions among the fire support bases in War Zone C. He describes some of his experiences this way:

Some of the Fire Support Bases—Wood, Hannas, and Illingworth are the ones I remember—were hit really hard in night attacks. It was eerie watching such a fire fight from the flare ship or “Chuck-Chuck” (Command & Control). The red tracers going out from the inner concentric circle—the green tracers going in from the outer circle—the tracers from the Cobra’s miniguns looking like a bright red stream of water from a hose spraying onto the ground and splashing up. Invariably, before dawn, the bad guys would break off and retreat back into Cambodia.

At Hannas, they pushed the dead bad guys up into a pile with a bulldozer and poured diesel over them and burned them. At Illingworth, I was flying “hash & trash” the day after and wound up carrying “Line-One’s” (KIA’s) all day. When it looked like we wouldn’t get them all back to Tay Ninh before dark, we put the remainder into a cargo net and carried them on the sling.

They had so many dead, they ran out of body bags and had to cover them with poncho liners. I hovered my Huey up next to a pile of bodies and blew away most of the poncho liners. I stared at one poor kid—a red headed, freckled kid who looked barely eighteen—whose lifeless eyes were wide open and were rapidly filling with red dust moved by the rotor wash. I wanted to climb down from the cockpit and close them for him. I wanted to send a message back to Tay Ninh to say, “make sure you wash the dirt out of his eyes before you ship him home and his mother sees him.” I guess what I really wanted to do was cry, but I didn’t think officers were expected to do that. Nobody had cried in World War II—at least none of the characters in “Combat” or “Twelve O’Clock High” cried.

Everyone knew that Illingworth was finally going to be abandoned, but it could not happen soon enough as far as those who stayed behind were concerned. There was a significant amount of bitching about having to spend one more night in that hellhole, but at least they had the comfort of knowing the cavalry was nearby. The artillery, too, had been reset and the guns resupplied with enough ammunition to defend what was left. Thankfully, no more 8-inch powder and shells arrived.

*   *   *

A disheveled group of survivors gathered, toward sundown, near the middle of the base. Father Boyle was going to render a blessing—and give thanks for those that had survived. The actual text of what he said was not written down, but several men remembered his words and say that they were pretty close to the following:

“You men went through hell on earth today. You will never forget the events of last night, and you will never forget your brothers who lost their lives last night and the ones who were wounded. You will never live your lives in the same manner as you did before. You must now live your own lives and a piece of each life that was lost. You have been changed. Your appreciation of life has been elevated to a new plane because no man can appreciate life as much as he who has come close to losing his life. God bless you all!”

*   *   *

As night fell again on April 1, the soldiers who remained at Illingworth were once again in a state of high anxiety and sleeplessness. Most of the men anticipated that the NVA would somehow avoid the cavalry and sneak back to complete the job. It did not happen, however, and by daybreak on April 2, the men finally started to believe that the hell that Illingworth had come to represent might finally be over.

*   *   *

A week after the battle at FSB Illingworth, there was no more FSB Illingworth. Lt. Col. Mike Conrad’s shattered battalion was, indeed, able to stand down. The two companies that were not at FSB Illingworth, A and B, were pulled out of the jungle and reconstituted with the remnants of C, D, and E companies. It would be several weeks before the 2/8 was brought back up to strength, and that would be just in time for them to go plunging into Cambodia with most of the rest of the 1st Cav.

There wasn’t much left to salvage, from a logistics standpoint, in the sand piles that still formed a shadowy outline of the former fire support base. The usable artillery was lifted off or towed away to the next fire base down the road. Any equipment that had been damaged beyond repair, like the quad .50 gun truck, was hauled off to the rear to be cannibalized for spare parts. Alpha Troop’s busted Sheridans were finally repaired and driven away. The M-577 command track rejoined its unit, too. The engineers stacked any salvageable PSP, culverts, and planking, which was then airlifted out; the rest was left to the elements. Grunts from Division intel scoured the area for any classified materials that might have been scattered to the winds.

As the last soldiers departed, all they left behind was some shredded sandbags, busted ammo boxes, bits of twisted metal, crumpled beer cans, empty C-rats boxes, cigarette butts, shell casings by the thousands, and the ragged ends of the reefers that had been smoked as they waited for the NVA to come. Life moved on. Death stayed behind, as evidenced by one anonymous mound outside the former base containing what was left of the brave and nearly victorious soldiers of the 272nd NVA Regiment.