In 1968, The Viet Cong Attacked Firebase Burt. It Was A HUGE Mistake.

It was supposed to be a ceasefire. Pope Paul the VI had  personally brokered a 24-hour truce for New Year’s Day and the Viet Cong had agreed to 36 hours of peace. Inside Fire Base Burt, a four-day-old clearing hacked out of triple canopy jungle 7 miles from the Cambodian border, >>  >> American soldiers had spent the day opening Christmas packages from home.

Then the mortars started  falling. 200 rounds in 15 minutes. And behind those mortars came 2,500 Viet Cong soldiers charging straight into the worst killing ground of their entire war. To understand what happened that night, you need to understand what Fire Base Burt actually was and  what it was designed to do.

In late December 1967, the US 25th Infantry Division, the Tropic Lightning, was running Operation Yellowstone. The mission was simple in concept but brutal in practice.  Sweep through War Zone C, the dense jungle corridor along the Cambodian border that the Viet Cong used as a highway to funnel troops and weapons toward Saigon.

On December 29th, 1967, engineers and infantry carved Fire Base Burt out of raw jungle near the village of Suoi Cut in northern Tay Ninh province. The base measured roughly 1 km east to west by 500 m north to south, bisected by a road,  ringed with 40 freshly built sandbagged bunkers and razor wire.

But here is the thing about Fire Base Burt that made it different from other fire support bases in Vietnam.  It was bait. Historian Eric Bergerud called it a tethered goat. The Americans had deliberately placed a fortified position right on top of known enemy infiltration routes. The whole point was to draw a major Viet Cong attack and then destroy it with overwhelming firepower.

And the goat had  teeth. Inside the wire sat roughly 1,000 American soldiers  from two infantry battalions of the 22nd Infantry Regiment. The Third Battalion, the Regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Harold, held the eastern bunker line. >>  >> The Second Battalion, Mechanized, the Triple Deuce, under Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Norris, held the western side with  M113 armored personnel carriers dug in hull down.

But the real firepower sat along the southern line. 11 M102 105 mm howitzers from the Second Battalion, 77th Artillery. Five 155 mm self-propelled guns from the Third Battalion, 13th Artillery. Twin 40 mm Duster anti-aircraft guns repurposed for  ground combat. Quad .50 caliber machine gun mounts. And critically, the 105 mm crews were loaded with something called beehive rounds.

Each beehive shell contained approximately 8,000 inch-long steel darts called flechettes. Fired at close range, a single round turned a 105 mm howitzer into a shotgun the size of a car. The Viet Cong had no idea what was waiting for them. But they were about to find out. On the evening of December 31st, 1967, the day before the attack, an Alpha Company listening post outside the  wire detected movement in the tree line.

They detonated their Claymore mines and pulled back. At dawn on January 1st, a sweep patrol went out to investigate. They found two enemy dead and one wounded. One of the dead  men carried something that changed everything. A Russian pistol, 82 mm mortar firing tables, and documents identifying the 271st and 272nd regiments of the 9th Viet Cong Division.

This was no ordinary soldier. >>  >> This was a forward reconnaissance officer who had been killed before he could finish scouting the base  for the coming assault. The Americans now had roughly 12 hours warning that a regimental scale attack was headed straight  for them. And these weren’t unknown units.

The 271st and 272nd regiments were the same Viet Cong main force formations that the Third Brigade had already shattered at the Battle of Suoi Tre just 9 months earlier. They were coming back for another try. The enemy plan called for four battalions in the  assault with two held in reserve.

Around 2,500 fighters total, they would attack from the north and sweep south down both sides of the road with sapper teams targeting the southern wire to knock out the artillery. It was a solid plan,  classic Viet Cong doctrine. Mass your forces, hit the perimeter at multiple points, overwhelm the defenders before air support can arrive.

But there was a problem they didn’t know about. The tethered  goat had read their playbook. And the goat had loaded its guns with 8,000 steel darts per shell. >>  >> The first 60 mm mortar rounds hit Fire Base Burt at 23:30 hours on New  Year’s Day. Roughly 200 rounds slammed into the perimeter in 15 minutes. Bunkers shook.

Sandbags burst. Men scrambled for weapons in the dark. At 1 minute past midnight, the ground assault began. Ambush patrols outside the wire reported enemy troops moving past their positions in numbers too overwhelming to engage. They could hear them, feel them, smell them. Hundreds of fighters flowing through the jungle in the dark.

Charlie Company, Third  Battalion, 22nd Infantry, holding the eastern bunker line, took the worst  of it. Wave after wave of Viet Cong fighters hit their section of the perimeter. Around 0100, the enemy blew  open a center bunker on the eastern line and poured through the breach. Captain Elliott  “Gus” Fishburn, the Charlie Company commander, grabbed his radio.

His transmission  was frantic. The VC were on the roof of his command post firing down through the sandbags. They were trying to come in through the back entrance. Then the radio went silent. >>  >> The situation was desperate. The enemy was inside the wire. The eastern perimeter was collapsing. If the Viet Cong could reach the artillery positions along the southern line, Fire Base Burt was finished.

And that is when someone made the decision that turned the entire battle. The artillerymen of the Second Battalion, 77th Artillery, were ordered to lower their 105 mm  howitzer tubes to horizontal and fire beehive rounds directly across the friendly perimeter. Think about what that  means.

They were firing anti-personnel shotgun shells across  a position where their own men were fighting at point-blank range. Into the breach that the Viet  Cong had torn open. First Lieutenant Dennis Adkins, a platoon leader with Charlie Company, lay wounded outside his collapsed bunker. Enemy soldiers were literally using his body for cover, crouching behind him as they fired.

>>  >> Then a beehive round detonated 10 feet away. The flechettes killed the Viet Cong soldiers on top of him, but Adkins survived. Their bodies  had shielded him from the steel darts. He later described the moment in a letter to fellow veterans  writing that the foliage had transformed into a moving wall of humanity before the beehive  round turned everything into silence.

Adkins’ platoon  went into that fight with 29 men. By morning, six  were dead and 16 were wounded. Seven soldiers  walked out of it without a scratch. An entire platoon reduced to a fire team in a single night.  And Adkins wasn’t the only one fighting for survival in the dark. Staff Sergeant Mark Ridley of Charlie Company, 222 Mechanized, had been in country for just  2 weeks.

He’d been ordered to lead a counter-mortar ambush patrol 400 m beyond the wire before the attack started.  When the ground assault hit, Ridley’s six men were trapped in a bomb crater outside the perimeter.  They spent the entire battle pinned down, killed seven Viet Cong fighters  at close range, and walked back through the wire at dawn.

Above the Fire Base, an AC-47 Spooky gunship circled  in its trademark pylon turn, its three mini guns pouring thousands of rounds per minute into the tree line. Soldiers on  the ground described the tracer streams as looking like blood pouring from the sky. Fast movers from the Air Force ran napalm and cluster bomb passes within 150 m of the wire.

So close that defenders could feel the heat from the napalm on their faces. >>  >> At 02:30, enemy sappers breached the southern razor wire heading straight for the howitzers. The 277th Artillery crews met them with point-blank  beehive fire. Helicopter pilot Chief Warrant Officer Wayne Crash Co from the 187th Assault Helicopter Company, flew a Huey slick  directly into the burning firebase under fire, carrying a load of fresh beehive ammunition and a doctor.

That single resupply flight may have decided the battle. By 0500, the enemy was withdrawing. By 0630, only scattered sniper fire remained. The sun came up  over firebase Burt on the morning of January 2nd, 1968, and what the soldiers saw in the daylight was something none of them would ever forget. The official US Army count, published in the Tropic Lightning News on January 22nd, 1968,  recorded 382 enemy killed.

Unit histories from the 22nd  Infantry Regiment placed the number at 401. 87 individual weapons  and 29 crew-served weapons were recovered from the battlefield. American losses were 23 killed and  153 wounded, a casualty ratio of roughly  17:1 in a battle the enemy had chosen, planned, and outnumbered the defenders more than 2:1.

Bulldozers  dug mass graves for the enemy dead that morning. A pilot  from the 187th Assault Helicopter Company, surveying the perimeter from the air, reported  seeing enemy soldiers pinned to trees by beehive flechettes. >>  >> The attack failed for layered reasons. The captured reconnaissance officer’s  documents had eliminated tactical surprise.

The Viet Cong had rehearsed against  indirect artillery fire, and apparently never anticipated howitzers firing flechettes  horizontally at point-blank range. The combined arms density inside Burt, quad .50s, Dusters, M113 machine guns, two artillery battalions in direct fire, spooky gunship, helicopter support, >>  >> and tactical air concentrated catastrophic firepower into the narrow assault corridor the enemy had chosen, and the same regiments had attempted the same kind of mass frontal assault

against  the same American Brigade at Suoi Tre 9 months earlier with the same result. The tethered goat tactic  worked exactly as it was designed to. Firebase Burt happened 29 days before the Tet Offensive. That timing was not a coincidence.  The 9th Viet Cong Division was the principal main force formation assigned to strike Saigon’s western approaches during Tet.

Their job was to hit the capital from the west while other units attacked from the north and east. But their losses at Burt forced a partial  reconstitution. The surviving regiments went into the Tet Offensive understrength and out of sequence. >> [snorts] >> When the 271st and 272nd regiments did appear during Tet,  they failed to cut the roads around Cu Chi.

A sister regiment lost 343 killed  at An My. The division’s assault on Tan Son Nhut Air Base cost another 669 dead. Operation Yellowstone  as a whole, of which Burt was the centerpiece, recorded 1,254 enemy killed against 81 Americans by the time it ended on February 24th, 1968. But here is the strange part. Despite all of that, the battle at firebase Burt almost completely disappeared from American memory.

Tet, beginning a month later, consumed every headline. The press never covered Burt. No major newspaper ran a story. No television crew filmed the aftermath. A battle that killed 400 enemy fighters and crippled an entire division before the biggest offensive of the war just vanished from the record, and the men who fought there carried it alone for years.

One of the soldiers inside that perimeter on New Year’s night was a 21-year-old private from New York named Oliver Stone. He was assigned to Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry. He would later write in his memoir, Chasing the Light, that he barely fired a shot himself,  that the entire night felt surreal, and that he returned home doubting his own memory of it until 25th Division veterans confirmed the battle at a reunion years later.

In Oliver Stone’s movie, the constant strain of living under the threat of a brutal death pushes the entire platoon over the edge, resulting in one of the film’s most controversial scenes. If there’s any Vietnam veteran, combat veteran, that tells you something like that never happened, he’s lying. Stone’s graphic depiction of the conflict gained critical acclaim, but for some, the scenes of abuse and murder of innocent villagers were a step too far.

Platitude and this  more tender side, which he preserves. The closing battle of Platoon, the one where bulldozers shove enemy bodies into trenches at dawn, is Oliver Stone’s direct dramatization of what he saw at firebase  Burt on the morning of January 2nd, 1968. The movie won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

It made $138 million at the box office,  and it became the definitive Vietnam War film for an entire generation. But almost nobody who watched it knew the real battle behind it. Another soldier at Burt that night, Larry Heinemann, went home and wrote a National Book Award-winning novel called Paco’s Story >>  >> and a memoir called Black Virgin Mountain.

Peter Holt, who would later become chairman and CEO of the San Antonio Spurs, was also there. He would later say about Stone’s film that he thought Stone got it pretty right. Lieutenant Adkins’ Platoon went into that night with 29 men. By dawn, six were dead, 16 were wounded, and seven were left standing.

A Catholic chaplain named Captain Jim Tobin gave communion to the survivors on the firebase floor and held Adkins while he wept. The Viet Cong’s mistake at firebase Burt wasn’t the decision to attack. Their pre-Tet plan required them to fix and degrade American units far from Saigon. The mistake was assuming that massed infantry could close with American combined arms firepower in a prepared killing ground when the defenders knew they were coming.

They walked into a shotgun loaded with 8,000 steel darts per trigger pull, and they paid for it. The 9th Viet Cong Division did not just lose 400 men in one night. They hardened the very American units they most needed to weaken before  Tet. As historian Eric Bergerud wrote, “Whatever brittleness  existed between artillery, infantry, and aviators inside the brigade evaporated immediately after Burt,  establishing what he called the bond of brotherhood.

” A four-day-old jungle clearing, a captured mortar table, howitzers leveled  to fire shotgun shells at point-blank range, a future filmmaker burying the dead at dawn and forgetting it had happened. And a division  that walked into War Zone C to break the Americans before Tet and broke itself instead.  23 Americans were killed at firebase Burt. Their names are on the wall.

If this  story was new to you, subscribe. We cover the battles,  the missions, and the people that the history books forgot.

 

 

 

In 1968, The Viet Cong Attacked Firebase Burt. It Was A HUGE Mistake.

 

>> It was supposed to be a ceasefire. Pope Paul the VI had  personally brokered a 24-hour truce for New Year’s Day and the Viet Cong had agreed to 36 hours of peace. Inside Fire Base Burt, a four-day-old clearing hacked out of triple canopy jungle 7 miles from the Cambodian border, >>  >> American soldiers had spent the day opening Christmas packages from home.

Then the mortars started  falling. 200 rounds in 15 minutes. And behind those mortars came 2,500 Viet Cong soldiers charging straight into the worst killing ground of their entire war. To understand what happened that night, you need to understand what Fire Base Burt actually was and  what it was designed to do.

In late December 1967, the US 25th Infantry Division, the Tropic Lightning, was running Operation Yellowstone. The mission was simple in concept but brutal in practice.  Sweep through War Zone C, the dense jungle corridor along the Cambodian border that the Viet Cong used as a highway to funnel troops and weapons toward Saigon.

On December 29th, 1967, engineers and infantry carved Fire Base Burt out of raw jungle near the village of Suoi Cut in northern Tay Ninh province. The base measured roughly 1 km east to west by 500 m north to south, bisected by a road,  ringed with 40 freshly built sandbagged bunkers and razor wire.

But here is the thing about Fire Base Burt that made it different from other fire support bases in Vietnam.  It was bait. Historian Eric Bergerud called it a tethered goat. The Americans had deliberately placed a fortified position right on top of known enemy infiltration routes. The whole point was to draw a major Viet Cong attack and then destroy it with overwhelming firepower.

And the goat had  teeth. Inside the wire sat roughly 1,000 American soldiers  from two infantry battalions of the 22nd Infantry Regiment. The Third Battalion, the Regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Harold, held the eastern bunker line. >>  >> The Second Battalion, Mechanized, the Triple Deuce, under Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Norris, held the western side with  M113 armored personnel carriers dug in hull down.

But the real firepower sat along the southern line. 11 M102 105 mm howitzers from the Second Battalion, 77th Artillery. Five 155 mm self-propelled guns from the Third Battalion, 13th Artillery. Twin 40 mm Duster anti-aircraft guns repurposed for  ground combat. Quad .50 caliber machine gun mounts. And critically, the 105 mm crews were loaded with something called beehive rounds.

Each beehive shell contained approximately 8,000 inch-long steel darts called flechettes. Fired at close range, a single round turned a 105 mm howitzer into a shotgun the size of a car. The Viet Cong had no idea what was waiting for them. But they were about to find out. On the evening of December 31st, 1967, the day before the attack, an Alpha Company listening post outside the  wire detected movement in the tree line.

They detonated their Claymore mines and pulled back. At dawn on January 1st, a sweep patrol went out to investigate. They found two enemy dead and one wounded. One of the dead  men carried something that changed everything. A Russian pistol, 82 mm mortar firing tables, and documents identifying the 271st and 272nd regiments of the 9th Viet Cong Division.

This was no ordinary soldier. >>  >> This was a forward reconnaissance officer who had been killed before he could finish scouting the base  for the coming assault. The Americans now had roughly 12 hours warning that a regimental scale attack was headed straight  for them. And these weren’t unknown units.

The 271st and 272nd regiments were the same Viet Cong main force formations that the Third Brigade had already shattered at the Battle of Suoi Tre just 9 months earlier. They were coming back for another try. The enemy plan called for four battalions in the  assault with two held in reserve.

Around 2,500 fighters total, they would attack from the north and sweep south down both sides of the road with sapper teams targeting the southern wire to knock out the artillery. It was a solid plan,  classic Viet Cong doctrine. Mass your forces, hit the perimeter at multiple points, overwhelm the defenders before air support can arrive.

But there was a problem they didn’t know about. The tethered  goat had read their playbook. And the goat had loaded its guns with 8,000 steel darts per shell. >>  >> The first 60 mm mortar rounds hit Fire Base Burt at 23:30 hours on New  Year’s Day. Roughly 200 rounds slammed into the perimeter in 15 minutes. Bunkers shook.

Sandbags burst. Men scrambled for weapons in the dark. At 1 minute past midnight, the ground assault began. Ambush patrols outside the wire reported enemy troops moving past their positions in numbers too overwhelming to engage. They could hear them, feel them, smell them. Hundreds of fighters flowing through the jungle in the dark.

Charlie Company, Third  Battalion, 22nd Infantry, holding the eastern bunker line, took the worst  of it. Wave after wave of Viet Cong fighters hit their section of the perimeter. Around 0100, the enemy blew  open a center bunker on the eastern line and poured through the breach. Captain Elliott  “Gus” Fishburn, the Charlie Company commander, grabbed his radio.

His transmission  was frantic. The VC were on the roof of his command post firing down through the sandbags. They were trying to come in through the back entrance. Then the radio went silent. >>  >> The situation was desperate. The enemy was inside the wire. The eastern perimeter was collapsing. If the Viet Cong could reach the artillery positions along the southern line, Fire Base Burt was finished.

And that is when someone made the decision that turned the entire battle. The artillerymen of the Second Battalion, 77th Artillery, were ordered to lower their 105 mm  howitzer tubes to horizontal and fire beehive rounds directly across the friendly perimeter. Think about what that  means.

They were firing anti-personnel shotgun shells across  a position where their own men were fighting at point-blank range. Into the breach that the Viet  Cong had torn open. First Lieutenant Dennis Adkins, a platoon leader with Charlie Company, lay wounded outside his collapsed bunker. Enemy soldiers were literally using his body for cover, crouching behind him as they fired.

>>  >> Then a beehive round detonated 10 feet away. The flechettes killed the Viet Cong soldiers on top of him, but Adkins survived. Their bodies  had shielded him from the steel darts. He later described the moment in a letter to fellow veterans  writing that the foliage had transformed into a moving wall of humanity before the beehive  round turned everything into silence.

Adkins’ platoon  went into that fight with 29 men. By morning, six  were dead and 16 were wounded. Seven soldiers  walked out of it without a scratch. An entire platoon reduced to a fire team in a single night.  And Adkins wasn’t the only one fighting for survival in the dark. Staff Sergeant Mark Ridley of Charlie Company, 222 Mechanized, had been in country for just  2 weeks.

He’d been ordered to lead a counter-mortar ambush patrol 400 m beyond the wire before the attack started.  When the ground assault hit, Ridley’s six men were trapped in a bomb crater outside the perimeter.  They spent the entire battle pinned down, killed seven Viet Cong fighters  at close range, and walked back through the wire at dawn.

Above the Fire Base, an AC-47 Spooky gunship circled  in its trademark pylon turn, its three mini guns pouring thousands of rounds per minute into the tree line. Soldiers on  the ground described the tracer streams as looking like blood pouring from the sky. Fast movers from the Air Force ran napalm and cluster bomb passes within 150 m of the wire.

So close that defenders could feel the heat from the napalm on their faces. >>  >> At 02:30, enemy sappers breached the southern razor wire heading straight for the howitzers. The 277th Artillery crews met them with point-blank  beehive fire. Helicopter pilot Chief Warrant Officer Wayne Crash Co from the 187th Assault Helicopter Company, flew a Huey slick  directly into the burning firebase under fire, carrying a load of fresh beehive ammunition and a doctor.

That single resupply flight may have decided the battle. By 0500, the enemy was withdrawing. By 0630, only scattered sniper fire remained. The sun came up  over firebase Burt on the morning of January 2nd, 1968, and what the soldiers saw in the daylight was something none of them would ever forget. The official US Army count, published in the Tropic Lightning News on January 22nd, 1968,  recorded 382 enemy killed.

Unit histories from the 22nd  Infantry Regiment placed the number at 401. 87 individual weapons  and 29 crew-served weapons were recovered from the battlefield. American losses were 23 killed and  153 wounded, a casualty ratio of roughly  17:1 in a battle the enemy had chosen, planned, and outnumbered the defenders more than 2:1.

Bulldozers  dug mass graves for the enemy dead that morning. A pilot  from the 187th Assault Helicopter Company, surveying the perimeter from the air, reported  seeing enemy soldiers pinned to trees by beehive flechettes. >>  >> The attack failed for layered reasons. The captured reconnaissance officer’s  documents had eliminated tactical surprise.

The Viet Cong had rehearsed against  indirect artillery fire, and apparently never anticipated howitzers firing flechettes  horizontally at point-blank range. The combined arms density inside Burt, quad .50s, Dusters, M113 machine guns, two artillery battalions in direct fire, spooky gunship, helicopter support, >>  >> and tactical air concentrated catastrophic firepower into the narrow assault corridor the enemy had chosen, and the same regiments had attempted the same kind of mass frontal assault

against  the same American Brigade at Suoi Tre 9 months earlier with the same result. The tethered goat tactic  worked exactly as it was designed to. Firebase Burt happened 29 days before the Tet Offensive. That timing was not a coincidence.  The 9th Viet Cong Division was the principal main force formation assigned to strike Saigon’s western approaches during Tet.

Their job was to hit the capital from the west while other units attacked from the north and east. But their losses at Burt forced a partial  reconstitution. The surviving regiments went into the Tet Offensive understrength and out of sequence. >> [snorts] >> When the 271st and 272nd regiments did appear during Tet,  they failed to cut the roads around Cu Chi.

A sister regiment lost 343 killed  at An My. The division’s assault on Tan Son Nhut Air Base cost another 669 dead. Operation Yellowstone  as a whole, of which Burt was the centerpiece, recorded 1,254 enemy killed against 81 Americans by the time it ended on February 24th, 1968. But here is the strange part. Despite all of that, the battle at firebase Burt almost completely disappeared from American memory.

Tet, beginning a month later, consumed every headline. The press never covered Burt. No major newspaper ran a story. No television crew filmed the aftermath. A battle that killed 400 enemy fighters and crippled an entire division before the biggest offensive of the war just vanished from the record, and the men who fought there carried it alone for years.

One of the soldiers inside that perimeter on New Year’s night was a 21-year-old private from New York named Oliver Stone. He was assigned to Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry. He would later write in his memoir, Chasing the Light, that he barely fired a shot himself,  that the entire night felt surreal, and that he returned home doubting his own memory of it until 25th Division veterans confirmed the battle at a reunion years later.

In Oliver Stone’s movie, the constant strain of living under the threat of a brutal death pushes the entire platoon over the edge, resulting in one of the film’s most controversial scenes. If there’s any Vietnam veteran, combat veteran, that tells you something like that never happened, he’s lying. Stone’s graphic depiction of the conflict gained critical acclaim, but for some, the scenes of abuse and murder of innocent villagers were a step too far.

Platitude and this  more tender side, which he preserves. The closing battle of Platoon, the one where bulldozers shove enemy bodies into trenches at dawn, is Oliver Stone’s direct dramatization of what he saw at firebase  Burt on the morning of January 2nd, 1968. The movie won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

It made $138 million at the box office,  and it became the definitive Vietnam War film for an entire generation. But almost nobody who watched it knew the real battle behind it. Another soldier at Burt that night, Larry Heinemann, went home and wrote a National Book Award-winning novel called Paco’s Story >>  >> and a memoir called Black Virgin Mountain.

Peter Holt, who would later become chairman and CEO of the San Antonio Spurs, was also there. He would later say about Stone’s film that he thought Stone got it pretty right. Lieutenant Adkins’ Platoon went into that night with 29 men. By dawn, six were dead, 16 were wounded, and seven were left standing.

A Catholic chaplain named Captain Jim Tobin gave communion to the survivors on the firebase floor and held Adkins while he wept. The Viet Cong’s mistake at firebase Burt wasn’t the decision to attack. Their pre-Tet plan required them to fix and degrade American units far from Saigon. The mistake was assuming that massed infantry could close with American combined arms firepower in a prepared killing ground when the defenders knew they were coming.

They walked into a shotgun loaded with 8,000 steel darts per trigger pull, and they paid for it. The 9th Viet Cong Division did not just lose 400 men in one night. They hardened the very American units they most needed to weaken before  Tet. As historian Eric Bergerud wrote, “Whatever brittleness  existed between artillery, infantry, and aviators inside the brigade evaporated immediately after Burt,  establishing what he called the bond of brotherhood.

” A four-day-old jungle clearing, a captured mortar table, howitzers leveled  to fire shotgun shells at point-blank range, a future filmmaker burying the dead at dawn and forgetting it had happened. And a division  that walked into War Zone C to break the Americans before Tet and broke itself instead.  23 Americans were killed at firebase Burt. Their names are on the wall.

If this  story was new to you, subscribe. We cover the battles,  the missions, and the people that the history books forgot.