The 10-day battle inspired a movie and congressional hearings, symbolizing for some the incredible bravery of the American infantry and for others the futility and waste of the war.
A wounded U.S. paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division is helped through a blinding rainstorm by two medics after being evacuated from Dong Ap Bia during the 10-day battle for Hamburger Hill. By Paul Schemm Paul Schemm Overnight foreign editor based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Email Bio Follow May 10 at 7:00 AM DONG AP BIA, Vietnam — We climbed the worn stairs heading steeply up the mountain into the heavy jungle.
A view of the A Shau Valley from Hamburger Hill this year. The stairs were still pretty arduous, but my companion Jonas Thorsell and I had been living in the high altitudes of Ethiopia for the past few years and powered up the slope, leaving behind our guide, Van Vu, as he stopped to suck down local cigarettes.
For the past 20 years, veterans have been coming back to Vietnam to rediscover the places where they lived and fought so long ago. Our guide Vu has gained an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the many bases in this area between Hue and the Laotian border. For all his knowledge, though, Vu was also unfamiliar with the actual site of the fighting on the hill and followed our rough maps cobbled together from satellite images, veteran memories and after-action reports.
Most people stop at the memorial, but we kept going up to the summit, where the tall trees were replaced by six-foot-high, razor-sharp elephant grass and the temperature soared as the sun beat down on us without the protection of the tree canopy. In his granular recounting of the battle called “The Crouching Beast,” Lt. Frank Boccia, who commanded Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon, described how his company was just sent up the hill on a routine reconnaissance patrol with a vague mission to look for supply dumps and ran into an ambush in a clearing.
“Every assault was a somewhat different scene but had the same outcome, it just depended on where they wanted to hit us when we first came in the clearing or got past the clearing,” added Helms. “The noise level was also so unbearable.”Documents found on dead Vietnamese soldiers later revealed the U.S. troops had stumbled upon North Vietnam’s 1,000-man strong 29th Regiment, known as the “Pride of Ho Chi Minh.
U.S. paratroopers rest atop the denuded crest of Hamburger Hill during the 10-day battle. Then on the 18th, yet another assault was defeated, this time by a heavy rain. The U.S. troops didn’t stay long, and the hill was soon abandoned, an outcome that became the focus of congressional hearings featuring Sen. Ted Kennedy , who called the battle “senseless and irresponsible.”
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