April 9, 1968, in the evening, Sergeant Doug Parkinson’s six-man long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP, or “Lurps”) team scrambled aboard a UH-1 Huey. They had just climbed Dong Tri Mountain outside the Marine combat base at Khe Sanh in search of the enemy. Although they never saw the enemy, a stray artillery shell nearly killed them all, and a Bengal tiger stalked them for several nights. Then, with B-52s set to bomb their position in preparation for a Marine sweep of the mountain, they almost fell 1,000 feet to their deaths as helicopters extracted them on long emergency ropes known as McGuire rigs. As Parkinson’s helicopter started up and its rotors began to spin, he glanced through the dust at dozens of other helicopters lifting off and said, “So much for Khe Sanh, lads. . . . I’d say we got off easy!”
At dawn, Friday, August 30, 1968, I woke inside my cockroach-infested hooch at LZ Betty, sixteen miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, to go on my twenty-second and last patrol. I was the sergeant and team leader of a five-man long-range reconnaissance patrol assigned to the First Cavalry Division’s First Brigade, whose area of operation was from Quang Tri City, near the coast of South Vietnam, to the heavily forested mountains out west, halfway to Laos.
As evening approached on April 9, 1968, Sergeant Doug Parkinson’s six-man long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP, pronounced “Lurp”) team scrambled aboard a UH-1 Huey. They had just climbed Dong Tri Mountain outside the Marine combat base at Khe Sanh in search of the enemy. Although they never saw the enemy, a stray artillery shell nearly killed them all, and a Bengal tiger stalked them for several nights. Then, with B-52s set to bomb their position in preparation for a Marine sweep of the mountain, they almost fell 1,000 feet to their deaths as helicopters hurriedly extracted them on long emergency ropes known as McGuire rigs.As Parkinson glanced through the dust at the dozens of helicopters lifting off, he said, “So much for Khe Sanh, lads....I’d say we got off easy!”
