The Vietnam Battle A Veteran Says He’ll Never Forget The Day Or The Time JJ

Around midday on the 8th of February 1968, a rifle company of the United States Army was walking south across an open rice field about 4 miles from the runways of Daang. The rice was too short to hide a man. Two platoon were spread on a skirmish line about 200 m wide. A third followed behind in reserve.

 Ahead of them was a tree line and inside the treeine was a hamlet called Lo Jang. Their commander, Captain Francis the Chenth Brennan, had already put mortar fire into the edge of that village. He had already called for artillery. He knew somebody was in there. What he did not know was that an enemy company had crawled out of the treeine before he arrived and was lying flat behind a rice patty dyke about 18 in high, roughly the height of a curb.

 The Americans came on 10 m. Then the dyke stood up. rifles, machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, all of it at a distance where you could see a man’s face. Mortar rounds began dropping behind them, cutting off the way they had come. And on both flanks, another enemy company each, moving to link up behind the Americans and closed the circle.

 One of the men in that fight was a 24year-old from Jersey City named Ron Melon. He had been drafted. He had never wanted to come. He had spent most of the previous year being teased for being the old man of the squad. The kids called him Pops. Years later, asked what the fighting was like once the enemy got inside their line, he did not reach for a dramatic word.

 He said, “Hand to hand or whatever you use to fight with, we were doing it.” And then he said something else. He said he would never forget the day and he would never forget the time. That is a strange thing for a man to hold on to for 50 years. Not the year, not the battle’s name, the time. This is the story of why. It is not really a story about one battle.

 It is a story about what a single morning did to a group of ordinary American men and about the harder question underneath it. Because these men won, they won clearly and they won at a place that mattered. and almost nobody outside that rice field ever heard about it. If you value this kind of history, the kind told from inside the experience of the men who were there, consider subscribing.

 It genuinely helps this work continue. Now, let’s go back and understand how these men ended up standing in that open field in the first place. To understand what happened at Lo Jang, you first have to understand something unusual about the unit that fought there. It was new. On the 10th of May 1967, the Department of Defense announced that another infantry brigade, about 5,600 men, would be sent to Vietnam.

 The unit was designated the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, and it was assembled at Fort Hood, Texas, largely out of personnel drawn from the First and Second Armored Divisions. Read that again. Armored divisions, tank country. These were men being reorganized into light infantry. The kind of soldier who walks, carries what he needs on his back and fights on foot in rice patties and mountains.

 Ron Melon went through basic training at Fort Hood and advanced training at Fort Hood. He could have tried for a posting closer to New Jersey the way a lot of men did. He didn’t. He stayed with the Texans and he joked later that it was probably because he liked country music. He was not an obvious soldier. He came in heavy and had to work extra to get into shape.

 He was 24 in a squad where most of the others were 18 and 19. The younger man decided he must know something about life that they didn’t, and the nickname stuck. But something happened in those months at Fort Hood that mattered more than any of the training schedules. They trained together. They stayed together.

They learned each other’s habits. Melon described it in the plainest language available, closer than brothers. He said that when he was over there, that squad was his family, not the one back in the States. That one was somewhere else, a long way off and not much used to him in a rice patty.

 That may sound like sentiment. It was not. It was the loadbearing wall of everything that came later. When a unit deploys as a unit, the men in it already know which man will hold and which man will move. Individual replacements flown in one at a time have to earn that from scratch in combat at the worst possible moment. The 198th had it before it ever left Texas.

In October 1967, the brigade sailed from Oakland, California aboard Military Sea Transportation Service ships. The first battalion, sixth infantry, went aboard the Yusen’s upure. 11,000 tons, 543 feet long, with birthing stacked so close that a man sitting up quickly would crack his head on the bunk above him.

The voyage took the better part of 3 weeks. Melon remembered it as the worst stretch of the entire year. He was seasick the whole way. He vomited over the side every day. He stopped eating entirely. He said it was the only time in his life he ever actually lost weight without trying. Below him in the same hold were young men who had been told they were going to war.

 They talked about it at night in the heat. They had all seen the war movies. They expected to storm a beach. What happened instead is one of the strangest moments in this whole story. On the 22nd and 23rd of October 1967, the 198th Light Infantry Brigade came ashore at Chui on the coast of South Vietnam by landing craft.

 The ramps dropped, the men went out and there was a band playing. There was a formation. There were colors. General William West Morland, the commander of all American forces in Vietnam, was there along with Brigadier General Samuel Coer, who would take command of the newly reactivated American Division.

 Days later, the soldiers of the First Battalion, Sixth Infantry, stood in files behind the brigade colors while photographs were taken. Melian’s reaction was the reaction of every man around him. They looked at each other and thought, “Where’s the war?” He remembered laughing about it. He remembered thinking the whole year might turn out to be a cakewalk.

 That first impression was reinforced by everything that came next. The new arrivals were put through one to two weeks of incountry orientation. They were told about the country. They were told about the people. They were told to show respect that they were guests of the government of South Vietnam. Melian’s private response to that was flat and honest.

 He didn’t want to be a guest. He hadn’t asked to be invited. Then the brigade was moved down to the duck foe area where battleh hardardened soldiers of the third brigade, fourth infantry division, ran them through combat orientation. By late November, the training was finished and the battalion moved up to Chulai where the 198th took over responsibility for defending the enormous base complex and its airirstrip.

 And for weeks, essentially nothing happened. There were operations. There were sweeps. There was sporadic contact. Melon remembered it as quiet. Quiet enough that he told himself the year would simply go by and that would be that. He was wrong. And the reason he was wrong is the central military fact of the Vietnam War.

 The Americans did not get to choose when there was a battle. An American rifle company could walk for 3 weeks and find nothing. Not because the enemy wasn’t there, but because the enemy had looked at that company, counted it, and decided this was not the day. The initiative belonged almost entirely to the other side. They fought when the ground favored them, when the range favored them, and when they had already dug the holes, which meant the war for an American infantryman was mostly not a battle at all. It was weight and water and

waiting. Melian was a radio operator for part of his tour, an RTO. The job was assigned to him back in the States essentially because of his size. He was big, he was solid, he could carry it. So on top of his own ammunition and water and rations and extra belts for the machine gun, he carried the radio.

 That radio is worth pausing on because it is the single most important object in this entire story. A rifle company in contact could not call artillery without it. Could not call gunships, could not call medical evacuation, could not tell battalion headquarters that it existed. A company with a working radio was connected to every gun and every aircraft in range.

 A company whose radios were destroyed was for practical purposes alone in a field. Remember that. Then came the monsoon. Melon was a cold weather man from New Jersey who had gone from hot Texas to somewhere hotter and wetter and he never made peace with it. The rain came day and night. You could pull a poncho over yourself if you were trying to sleep and it made very little difference.

 You were simply wet all the time walking through water ankle deep, knee deep, sometimes to the waist and eventually it stopped being an event and became the texture of life. And in that wet dark, they began running night ambushes. The ambush patrol was a small thing. A squad, maybe eight or 10 men, moved out at last light to a position near a trail where they would lie still and stay awake and wait.

 The logic was brutally simple. Americans did not move on those trails at night. So, anything that came down the trail in the dark was not friendly. Melian described those nights with unusual precision. And what comes through is not excitement. It is a strain. Total darkness. Nothing to see but bushes.

 And then after enough hours of staring into it, the bushes start to move. He remembered one night when they were certain, absolutely certain. They hit the panic button and there was nothing there. Nobody came down the trail at all. An entire night of terror spent on an empty path. This is what wore men out, not the fighting, the false alarms.

 Then there was the digging. Nobody liked digging a foxhole. It was work at the end of a day that had already been nothing but work. But Melian said something revealing about it. When the word came to dig in, he would dig. And then he would dig a little deeper. He called the hole his security blanket. He also remembered a night when they dug so deep out of pure fear of what was coming that they couldn’t see over the edge and had to build it back up.

 And they were young and young men believe they cannot be killed. So they did things that look almost unbearable in hindsight. Sitting on a bunk back in the states, they had flipped playing cards over to decide who was going to be wounded and who was going to be killed. A game. Melian said some of those cards turned out the wrong way for some of the guys.

 In his words, over there it was the real deal because in November, he believed it was November, the battalion lost its first man killed. One death. In a battalion of roughly 550 infantrymen in a war that would eventually count its dead in the tens of thousands, one death is a statistic so small it disappears. It did not disappear inside that unit.

 Melian marked it as the moment things became serious. The card game stopped being funny. And then before Tet came the night that showed them what they were actually dealing with. They were moving down a trail, a platoon on the move with a second element on a parallel trail alongside. At the front was a sergeant Melian remembered as a quiet man who simply knew his business.

 a man whose calm was itself unnerving because it suggested he had already accepted whatever was going to happen. Melian remembered him as Sergeant Bartlett. The sergeant stopped the column with a hand signal. Everyone froze. Nothing. They started again. He stopped them again. Nothing. He was listening to the other sound in the dark.

 The sound of the parallel column. And what he had worked out was this. When he stopped, the other movement kept going. When he moved, it stopped. That was not an echo. That was somebody else on that trail moving at night, matching them. He turned his men to the right and opened fire. Melon’s conclusion was the one that mattered.

They knew this was going to be a big thing because Americans didn’t move at night. The enemy did freely in organized formations inside what the Americans considered their own area. Within weeks, that fact would come very close to costing the United States the second largest city in South Vietnam. On the 27th of January 1968, the communists announced a 7-day ceasefire for Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year.

 On the 30th, they launched the largest offensive of the war at Daang. It began at 2 in the morning when sappers hit the three Marine Amphibious Force compound. About an hour later, enemy forces attacked the first core headquarters complex at Hua Vang. A commando squad got inside the Daang air base itself, and another squad blew up a combat operation center barely a kilometer from its headquarters.

 Then over the following days, something more dangerous than a raid began to develop. The attacks around Daang shifted and probed against Korean Marines to the south, against Marine positions closer in, against a South Vietnamese compound only a few kilometers from the city. Marine and South Vietnamese units fought them off and on the 30th caught a large group of Vietkong trying to escape back across the Cowo River.

 Over a hundred were killed in that one action, many of them in the water, but the pressure kept building. On the 5th of February, the ground attacks began at Kessan. On the 7th, North Vietnamese forces overran the special forces camp at Langve using PT76 light tanks, the first time most Americans in Vietnam had seen enemy armor.

 And on the 7th of February, the commander of the first marine division, Major General Don Robertson, reported something alarming to his superiors. The North Vietnamese second division had slipped past South Vietnamese and Korean positions south of Daang. It was now close enough to threaten Marine battalions sitting directly below the air base.

 That afternoon, there was a meeting in Daang. West Morland was there. So was Lieutenant General Robert Kushman of IIM. MF and Robertson and Coer of the American Division. It did not go smoothly. According to the official Marine Corps history, the discussion got tangled in an argument about Langvey, whether relief forces should have been sent from Kessan.

 West Morland thought they should have. Kushman thought sending them into a likely ambush was not the thing to do. Then West Morland turned to the defense of Daang. And the marine history uses the phrase in exasperation. He sent the two major generals out of the room. They were not to come back, he told them, until they had a workable plan for closely coordinated offensive action against the enemy threatening the airfield.

 What they came back with was this. The American Division would give the Marines two infantry battalions. Those battalions would go under the operational control of the First Marine Division, and they would sweep the ground south of the Cowo River. The two battalions chosen were the first battalion sixth infantry from the 198th brigade, Melian’s battalion, and the second battalion first infantry from the 196th brigade.

 Together they were named Task Force Miracle. At a quarter 3 that afternoon, the order came down. Alpha Company of the first of the sixth was the battalion’s 60-minute alert company, the ready reaction force. By 4:30 they were staged. By 5:35 in the evening, 131 men under Captain Brennan were on the ground at landing zone 410, a marine position about 6 km south of the air base.

 Their arrival came as a complete surprise to the Marine commander there. He had received no warning that Army reinforcements were coming at all. That is not a small administrative detail. It is the first crack in a pattern that would run through the next two days and cost lives. Melian remembered the helicopters coming in late in the day. He remembered moving that night across rice patties to set up.

 And he remembered taking fire from a friendly unit from the Marine command they had just been placed under because somebody had not passed the word that Army troops were moving into position. The afteraction record supports the substance of it. Around 2:00 in the morning on the 8th, friendly forces who did not know two army companies were on the move fired parachute flares that lit them up in the open.

 Lieutenant Colonel William Baxley, commanding the first of the sixth, pushed his two available companies down to positions just south of the river near the Camla Bridge, the crossing that carried Highway 1 into Daang. If the North Vietnamese took that bridge, the road into the city and to the air base was open.

 Alpha Company was in position by about 2 in the morning. Charlie Company, 128 men under Captain Max Bradley, closed on its own position about 20 minutes later. Neither company knew that two enemy battalions, one North Vietnamese regular, one Vietkong main force that was 60 to 70% North Vietnamese personnel had already infiltrated into the area around them.

The Americans had without realizing it boxed them in. They had also without realizing it boxed themselves in with them. Melian’s memory of that night is almost domestic. They set up a perimeter. They tried to take it easy. They tried to get some rest for the morning. At 3:45 in the morning, mortar rounds began falling on a small compound near the hamlet of Lojiang.

 That compound was CAP Echo4, a combined action platoon. The Marines had built the program around an idea that was almost the opposite of the big unit war. Put a squad of Marines permanently into a village alongside a platoon of local Vietnamese popular forces militia, live there, and build a bond with the villagers strong enough to break their connection to the Vietkong.

 14 men held Echo 4 under Sergeant Keith Casi. By daylight, enemy ground forces had them surrounded. The defenders fought. They burned through most of their ammunition and then rearmed themselves from the weapons and magazines of the enemy dead lying outside their wire. Four of those dead were found carrying CS gas grenades, and a warning went out to every friendly unit in the area.

Meanwhile, an observation aircraft over Lo Jiang spotted something extraordinary. roughly 400 people on the ground. The pilot could not tell whether they were friendly or enemy before they vanished under the tree canopy. Large enemy forces moving in daylight like that were a rarity. It should have been an alarm bell heard across the entire Daang area.

 The information never reached the soldiers of the first of the sixth standing a short distance away. And here the sources differ on a detail worth being honest about. Some accounts have Alpha Company moving into position on foot during the night near the Camla Bridge and attacking from there. Others describe the company being lifted by helicopter at first light to Lo Jiang 5 about a kilometer northeast of the besieged compound.

 The afteraction report and the published histories are not perfectly aligned on this point. What all of them agree on is what happened to the men. At about 8:26 that morning, Alpha Company started taking small arms fire. They also watched large numbers of civilians streaming away to the northeast out of the village. And mixed in among them, enemy soldiers using the crowd.

 Melian’s memory of the start of that morning is one of the most human things in this entire account. Sniper fire came in a round or two and the reaction of the veterans of four months of quiet was to take it as background noise. He and another man kept low and rolled dice. Somebody else would handle it. Then it was more than one sniper, then three or four, then a squad’s worth, then heavier, and the whole company was ordered to move.

 There is a phrase Melian used to describe what happened next, and it is the most militarily precise thing a private soldier can say about an ambush. They suckered us in. At 11:32, the fire on Alpha Company became heavy automatic weapons fire. Brennan answered with his own mortars and got secondary explosions.

 Something in that village was blowing up. At 12:33, he made his decision. He would check out the village. He told his forward observer to lay artillery on it and he put his company online. Two rifle platoons forward covering about 200 m of frontage. The command group behind the center. The third platoon 100 m further back in reserve.

 The weapons platoon stayed behind in the cover of a Vietnamese graveyard. Firing mortars in support. They moved south across open ground toward the tree line. At about 110 meters from the trees, the mortars came down on them in the open. At the same moment, the dyke stood up 10 to 20 meters in front of them. The men of Alpha Company said afterward that they were astonished.

 That word appears in the record at how well concealed the enemy had been in that shallow rice and those low dikes. And the enemy did not stay behind the dyke. They charged. Brennan’s own description recorded on tape in February 1968. while he was recovering from his wounds is as clear as any historian could want. His company was flanked by at least an enemy company on each side while sustaining a frontal assault by a third.

 The enemy assault element came forward online, crouched, firing as they moved. The flanking elements were working to link up behind him and encircle the company. The enemy, he said, was attempting to intermingle with his troops, having cut off the route of withdrawal. Officers and men of Alpha Company noticed something else.

The enemy leaders were easy to pick out because they were moving behind groups of seven to 10 men, directing them with hand and arm signals. That is not a mob. That is a trained unit under control. Melon understood exactly what he was looking at, and it disturbed him more than the shooting did.

 Up to that point in his tour, the war had mostly been fire coming out of a tree line and fire going back into it. You very seldom saw a human being. And when you did see the enemy, you tended to see the picture Americans carried in their heads, black pajamas, a conicle hat, a local. Now there were men in army uniforms walking toward him across a rice field in daylight at a range where he could see their faces.

 His conclusion was almost respectful and completely without illusion. This wasn’t irregular. This man was trained, maybe not as well as he was, but trained the same way, for the same purpose. It was that soldier’s job to kill him. It was his job to kill that soldier. Then the fighting closed to arms length. Hundreds of separate isolated struggles swirling through the patty, handto hand.

 Some Americans were taken prisoner in the middle of it. Melian’s estimate of the opening minutes was that the company lost 15 to 18 men killed almost immediately with many more wounded. The official count for Alpha Company by late afternoon was 14 known dead and about 35 wounded with four men missing.

 By the time the names were all collected, 19 men of Alpha Company had died that day. Among the first killed was a 19-year-old Melian called Jimmy Lop, specialist for James L. Lop of Scales Mound, Illinois, an assistant machine gunner who was awarded the Silver Star. Melonian described him simply as a real nice kid and very young. That was the whole eulogy.

 It was enough. A platoon leader, Second Lieutenant Joseph B. Bowman of Rowanoke, Virginia, was wounded early in the ambush. He stayed on his feet. He moved among his men and got them into positions behind a Patty dyke. Then he began evacuating casualties while the enemy came forward in successive assaults.

 When the enemy finally broke into his lines, he led his men in hand-to-hand fighting and was killed doing it. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. At 3:00 in the afternoon, the thing every infantryman fears happened. Captain Brennan was wounded. So were both of his radio operators. Both radios were destroyed. Alpha company went silent.

 No artillery, no gunships, no medevac, no contact with the battalion. A rifle company cut up, surrounded on three sides, invisible to every friendly gun within 30 mi. What saved them was a man doing something very simple and almost impossibly hard. Private First Class Victor Gerling, an artillery radio man, bandaged one of the wounded operators, got hold of him, and low crawled 300 m back to the graveyard, dragging him 300 m on your belly in the open, pulling a man.

 At about 4:15 in the afternoon, Gerling got a radio working and reestablished contact with battalion headquarters, and the war came back on. What Melian remembered most vividly about the rest of that afternoon was not the enemy. It was an aircraft. The company had pulled back into the cemetery to regroup, the same graveyard where their mortars had been firing, and then gone back out to fight.

 Around 2:00 in the afternoon, on the other side of the village, the pinned platoon from Charlie Company popped smoke on both sides of its position, and eight sorties of tactical air support arrived from the first Marine Airwing. The bombs blunted the attack long enough for Charlie’s men to drag out their dead and wounded and low crawl back across the patties over Alpha Company.

 Gunships and fighter bombers came in one pass after another. Melian’s description of it is the best thing in his entire account because it holds two feelings at once that have no business fitting together. He said the aircraft looked 10 ft over his head. He knew rationally it might have been a hundred. He called it big and beautiful.

He said it seemed to be talking to him, telling him it was going to empty everything it had and then come back for another pass and another. And then he said, “You’re still scared.” Because that gun could miss its target and land on us. That is what close air support actually felt like.

 Not triumph, relief, and terror in the same second. The combination broke the assault. Gunships and jets from one side, artillery from a battery of the first battalion, 14th artillery that had been lifted up from Chulai by Chinuk that same day, and Alpha Company’s own riflemen and machine gunners holding the graveyard.

 There is one more group of men who deserve their names, said out loud. The battalion commander had no command and control helicopter available for most of that day. When one finally became available in mid-after afternoon, Warrant Officer Edward Fitz Simmons and First Lieutenant David Ewing of the 176th Assault Helicopter Company flew 21 sorties into that battlefield.

 They evacuated 31 wounded men and resupplied every company in the fight. The afteraction report puts it as plainly as an official document ever does. Without the courage and skill of those two pilots, it is doubtful all the wounded would have been evacuated before dark because getting them out was its own battle. Melon remembered the frustration of it, trying to collect the dead and the wounded and not being able to get helicopters in because the enemy was firing on them.

And he remembered one face he has never been able to put down. a young, good-looking soldier named Dawn Kaiser coming back with blood streaming down his face, white as a ghost. Melon got him to the rear, and what he said to him was not heroic and not military. It was the thing a 24year-old from Jersey City says when he has finally seen the whole thing clearly.

 We’ve got to get out of this place. We don’t belong here. By evening, it was over or nearly. The night that followed was in the record almost quiet. No significant enemy activity against the battalion’s positions. What there was in Melian’s memory was harassing fire and light. All night long, aircraft worked overhead, dropping illumination canisters that ignited and came down under small parachutes, swinging, throwing moving shadows across the patties.

 They did it because the battalion was in bad shape and needed to see. Under that light, the perimeter did the thing that perimeters do after a battle. It counted. Melon described the mood in one word. Somber. Words moved from hole to hole. This body. That body. Did you hear who got killed? No joking. No noise.

 Just names going around in the dark. And the understanding that tomorrow might bring the same thing again. That is the part of combat that almost never makes it into a war film, and it is the part the men remember. The next morning, they swept the ground they had fought over. They found blood trails and paths crushed through the rice where the enemy had dragged away their dead and wounded.

 They found piles of mixed American and North Vietnamese equipment 4 ft high and 12 ft across. Near a pagod, they found 43 more bodies with web gear and packs. They found their own two captured damaged PRC25 radios and they found the men who had been listed as missing. Some of the American dead were found with their hands tied behind them, shot in the head.

 There was one more discovery that morning a short distance west and it belongs to the Marines. When the fighting started at Echo 4, the Marine Combined Action Headquarters at Ha Vang had put together a relief force. 17 men under Captain Howard Joselane, riflemen, a coreman, artillery crewman, wiremen, truck drivers, whoever volunteered.

 One of them, Staff Sergeant Dennis Hammond, had less than 3 weeks left in the country. He went anyway. He said it was his last chance to accomplish something. They were trucked across the Camla Bridge, went east on a local road, and used an irrigation ditch for cover until they were a few meters from the tree line of Lojiang.

 Waiting in that tree line were somewhere between 2 and 300 North Vietnamese and Vietkong. Jose’s last radio transmissions were recorded by the man on the other end at Echo 2. We’re getting chewed up. We aren’t going to get out. There are too many. They’re all over us. No way out. Don’t send anyone else in here. Tell my wife I love her. 12 of those 17 Marines were killed.

 Some were bayonetted where they lay wounded. Three were captured. One later escaped and two died in captivity. One man evaded out of the ambush. One badly wounded Marine survived the entire night lying among the enemy playing dead while they searched and kicked him and lived in the end because of a young North Vietnamese radio operator who chose not to shoot him.

 That fight lasted minutes and accomplished nothing on a map, but it did do something. Those 17 men pulled the enemy’s attention away from the surrounded compound at Echo 4. And late that afternoon at 10 minutes to 4, helicopters came in under gunship and fixed wing cover and lifted the Echo four Marines and their popular forces comrades out.

 All 11 Marines were wounded. None of them were killed. So what did the American army get for the 8th of February? On paper, a great deal. Over the course of the 4 days of Task Force Miracle, the Army units reported 308 enemy killed and the Marines 411 along with dozens of crews served weapons and more than 100 individual weapons.

 The First Battalion, Sixth Infantry, was credited with 266 of the enemy dead. Alpha Company alone counted more than 150 in and around its position in that rice field and enough abandoned weapons lying in the patty to equip a company. The official history records over 286 enemy dead for the 2-day battle against 14 Marines and 18 army soldiers killed.

 Across the whole of Lojiang, counting the combined action marines and the second army battalion’s fight on the 9th, the American dead numbered in the 50s. And here, honesty requires caution. Body counts in Vietnam were estimates produced under fire by exhausted men, and they were pushed upward by a system that rewarded them.

 North Vietnamese accounts of Lo Jiang claim something quite different. That their first regiment eliminated nearly an entire American battalion. That claim does not match the American casualty records at all. Both sides had reasons to shape the numbers. What is not in dispute is the operational result. The North Vietnamese second division did not take Daang.

 It did not take the air base. On the 9th, Marine Intelligence reported the division pulling its headquarters back toward its usual ground to the south. On the 11th, General Kushman released Task Force Miracle back to the American Division. The two army battalions returned to Chuli on the 12th. The first battalion, Sixth Infantry, was awarded the Valeris unit award for the battle, extraordinary heroism, 7 to 11 February 1968.

The battalion’s own cost for those days was 22 men killed and 68 wounded. One veteran historian of the unit put that number in context in a way worth repeating. A battalion losing more than 30 men killed in a few hours is a loss comparable to what the third battalion 187th infantry suffered across 10 days at Hamburger Hill the following year.

 A battle whose name every American knows. Almost nobody knows the name Lo Jiang. Part of the reason is timing. Lo Jiang happened in the same week as Kan and Lve and the fighting in Hi and the shock of the Ted offensive arriving in American living rooms. Militarily, Tet was a catastrophe for the North.

 Politically in the United States, it was the moment public confidence broke. The men who held the line south of Daang were fighting inside a victory that the country had already decided to read as a defeat. Melian’s own accounting of it is the most human version of this arithmetic anyone has offered. He said, “We did our job and we were proud of it.

” He said in the language of men who had just come out of a rice patty, “We kicked them. We lost 20 guys and killed two or 300 of them, whatever they dragged away. And then immediately he took it back. It wasn’t worth one man of ours. He said they had to find some justification in the numbers. He did not sound like a man who had found it. The most important consequence of the 8th of February was not on any map.

 It was in the men. Melon described two changes and they run in opposite directions. The first was a hardening he did not entirely welcome. Before Lo Jiang, he had joked with the Vietnamese. He had kitted around with the kids. Afterward, he backed away. The assumption underneath every encounter became, “This person may be here to kill me.

” He said that was what it became for a lot of the men after February 8th. That is the real human cost of an ambush like that one, not only the dead, the loss of the ability to see the people around you as people. The second change was the one the army would have called combat effectiveness and the men called something simpler.

 Melian said that after February 8th, the battles intensified, they seemed to be out constantly. Take this hill, leave it, come back a week later and take it again. Three and four weeks in the field without a standown. And instead of breaking them, it consolidated them. His words, “We are a group of men that we can handle.

 We can handle it even better now because of what we went through. Whatever I have to do, I’m going to do it. Three months later, that claim was tested on a ridge in Kuang Tin Province. On the 14th of May 1968, Company A, First Battalion, Sixth Infantry, was given the job of assaulting a reinforced company of North Vietnamese regulars dug into well-built bunkers on Hill 352 about 17 mi west of Tam Ki.

 It was part of the fighting around Operation Burlington Trail, the 198th Brigade’s long effort to open the road from Tam Kai to the special forces outpost at Tien Fu. As the company came up the slope and into the open, the enemy opened up with everything. Small arms, machine guns, rockets, 60 mm mortars, and pinned them down.

 Melon remembered it exactly that way. They had us pinned down, but good. What broke it was one man, Sergeant Firstclass Finnis D. McCclary, a Texan who was then 40 years old and leading the first platoon, stood up out of cover and went to the bunker complex alone. He crossed 60 m of open ground with rounds striking around him and grenades going off at his feet.

 At 30 m, he began firing from the hip and throwing grenades. He was hit by shrapnel and kept going. He killed the occupants of the key bunker, climbed on top of it in full view of the enemy, and shouted at his men to come on. They came. McClary then worked laterally down the bunker line, destroying them one after another, and was wounded a second time before the hill was taken.

 He received the Medal of Honor for it, presented at the White House by President Nixon on the 2nd of March, 1971. Melon remembered McCclary as the older guy who just moved up there. And he remembered somebody else moving right along with him. A funny southern boy, he called him Allen. That was Sergeant Allen W.

 Allen, a team leader in the same company. Allan was among the first men to breach the enemy perimeter that day. Once inside, he is credited with destroying five bunkers with grenades. He was awarded the Silver Star. Melonian said something about medals that deserves to be the last word on the subject. People say a man won the Medal of Honor.

 He said as though it were a contest. It isn’t. You are awarded it and a lot of men died doing exactly what these men did without anyone ever writing it down. He said it was a natural instinct that comes out of you in that moment and that a day or two later you look back and wonder whether you would do it again. Then he said the thing that shows what those months had built in him.

 I’ll always be proud that a man with us was awarded the Medal of Honor. It shows these guys were in a battle. These guys know a battle. Lo Jiang Hill 352. Those were his proofs. There is a last detail in Melian’s account that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with what it is like to be a man in a war. He was getting short, close to the end of his year, and with about a week to go, his unit was ordered out to a landing zone they had already been told would be hot.

They were going to take a lot of fire going in. He did the arithmetic every short-time does, and he understood that it had flipped on him. Early in a tour, he said, “A man could almost make peace with it. If I’m hit now, at least I don’t have to spend a year in this country. But once you have the year behind you, that trade is gone.

 This isn’t the time to die now. I made it. I want to go home. He went anyway. Somebody had to go. Ron Melon never needed history to look at it. He came home to New Jersey and he kept the one thing that mattered. He remembers the day. He remembers the time. He remembers standing in Young Rice, four miles from an American airfield, watching men in uniform walk toward him across open ground and understanding for the first and last time in his life exactly what was being asked of him.

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