The Most Pointless Battle America Ever Fought

For 10 days, American paratroopers climbed the same mountain over and over again. 11 assaults. Each time they were cut down by machine gun fire so accurate that one soldier said it felt like being inside a meat grinder. By the time they captured that hill, somewhere between 56 and 72 Americans were dead.

 More than 370 were wounded. The slopes were so soaked with blood and churned by artillery that soldiers couldn’t climb without sliding back down. And then 16 days after they finally took it, the US Army walked away. The enemy reoccupied it within weeks. A trooper had pinned a cardboard sign to a burned tree at the summit.

 It read Hamburger Hill. Below it, someone wrote, “Was it worth it?” This is the battle that changed the Vietnam War. The local Montenard tribesmen called it [music] Dong Abbeia, the mountain of the crouching beast. The US military called it Hill 937, a designation based on its elevation of 937 m, just over 3,000 ft above sea level.

 It sat in the northern Asa Valley of South Vietnam just 1.2 mi from the Le Oceanian border. The valley itself was a 45 km corridor that the North Vietnamese used as a critical supply route from the Ho Chi Min Trail. American forces had tried to clear it multiple times before. Operations Delaware, Dwey Canyon, Massachusetts Striker.

Each one inflicted casualties on the enemy, but none of them dislodged the North Vietnamese army from the valley. The terrain was punishing. Dong Abia was covered in double and triple canopy jungle, dense bamboo thicket, and waist high elephant grass. The slopes reached angles of nearly 40°. Narrow trails funneled attacking companies into squad-sized fronts where the NVA could concentrate their fire, and the enemy was waiting.

The seventh and eighth battalions of the 29th NVA regiment, nicknamed the pride of Hochi Min had turned the mountain into a fortress. They had dug concentric rings of bunkers with overhead cover strong enough to survive. Bombardment. Spider holes covered every trail. Snipers were tied into trees with ropes around their waists.

 But the Americans didn’t know any of this. Not yet. At 6:00 a.m. on May 10th, 1969, a 74-minute preparatory bombardment hit 30 potential landing zones throughout the valley. The goal was to confuse the enemy about where the Americans would actually land. At 0710 hours, 64 Huey helicopters inserted the third battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, into landing zone 2.

 roughly 1,800 meters northwest of Hill 937. The landing was unopposed. The battalion was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Weldon Tiger Honeyut, a self-made soldier from Depression era North Carolina. Honeyut had enlisted at 16 as a sixth grade dropout and risen from private to captain in just 5 years during career. His radio call sign was Blackjack.

 He was a protetéé of General William Westmand. As the Rakasans fanned out from their landing zone, they found enemy huts and bunkers, signs of an active NVA base area. Captured documents confirmed the 29th NVA regiment was somewhere in the valley. Honeyut initially believed he faced a reinforced platoon, maybe a company.

 That assessment would prove catastrophically wrong. Near dusk on day one, Bravo Company’s lead element ran into a sharp firefight. RPGs, AK47s, machine guns. The NVA wasn’t running. [music] They were dug in and ready to fight. >> I went to the first sergeant. I says, “You can’t put me in the 101st Airborne Division.

” Said, “I never jumped out of an airplane or jump qualified.” He says, “I don’t give a that’s where you’re going. [laughter] They don’t care.” I was only with my company a month when they sent us into the Ashawa Valley, >> the Ashawa Valley. When Hamburger Hill came around, battalion commander Honeyut, he got it in his head that he was going to take that mountain come hell or high water.

 Terrifically mountainous terrain. They, the Vietnamese, who had a hell of a base camp coming into the back side of that, they’re actually driving trucks and tanks [music] into that base camp up there. and he decides he’s going to come up the front side and take it away from him. >> On day two, Bravo and Charlie companies began climbing toward the summit.

 Near late afternoon, they made heavy contact within a kilometer of the top. Then came disaster. Honeyut called in Cobra Gunships for support. But in the dense jungle, the pilots made a fatal mistake. They mistook the three 187th battalion command post for an enemy position and attacked with rockets.

 Two Americans were killed. 35 were wounded, including Honeyut himself, who took shrapnel in the back. Then NVA 120 mm mortars from across the Le Oceanian border shelled the command post, [music] hitting some of the wounded soldiers a second time. Day three revealed the true scale of what they were facing.

 When first platoon advanced toward the summit, they found the NVA had turned a clearing into a killing zone. Bunkers lined the mountainside with interlocking fields of fire. Seven soldiers were wounded within minutes. Engineers tried to repel from a Huey to cut a landing zone. The NVA shot down the helicopter with machine guns.

 A second Huey was hit by an RPG and crash landed, wounding 10 before it exploded. On day four, as soldiers advanced, snipers tied into the trees opened fire from above. When the Americans sprayed the treetops with return fire, dead snipers dangled from their ropes. The enemy wasn’t leaving. They were reinforcing.

 On May 14th, Honeyut launched the first coordinated three company attack. All five supporting firebases fired howitzers throughout the night. Dawn brought air strikes. Bravo and Charlie attacked the western slopes. Delta moved from the north. Bravo’s flanking squads were cut down by NVA claymores. Three men killed in a single burst.

 Then the NVA counterattacked from two directions at once, catching Charlie Company in a devastating crossfire. By evening, Charlie Company had lost its first sergeant, two of three platoon leaders, its executive officer, and six squad leaders. More than 40 enlisted men were dead or wounded. Honeyut told the division commander, “My men can’t take it much longer.

” But he refused to stop. Word of the slaughter reached Saigon. A P reporter, J. Shut, arrived and walked among the wounded. He wrote dispatches describing young men with thousandy stairs and bandaged limbs asking why they were being sent up again. When a soldier told him it felt like being in a meat grinder, Shbet asked, “A meat grinder?” The trooper replied, “Yeah, Hamburger Hill.

” The name stuck. It spread through the battalion, then to the reporters, then to America. By May 18th, nine assaults had failed. morale was collapsing. >> Met him that morning and uh I told him about volunteering for the draft. He says, “Oh, Joel.” He says, “That’s a great idea.” He says, “If you do it, I’ll do it.

” So, I went down to the draft board and volunteered, came back, saw him, hour later, said, “Okay, I’m in. It’s your turn.” He said, “Oh, I’m not going to do that.” Oh, I thought you were kidding. Fast forward to 1968 >> and I’m basic training officer there and he’s in Tiger Land. He’s been drafted [laughter] and he’s going over to Vietnam.

>> Some men in Charlie Company simply refused to advance. Platoon leaders had to personally lead from the front just to get them moving. On the morning of May 20th, four full battalions began the final push. They’d pulverized Hill 937 with over 20,000 artillery rounds, 272 air sorties, more than a,000 tons of bombs, and 142 tons of napal.

 The mountain looked like the surface of the moon, a churned wasteland of craters [music] and splintered trees. At 1700 hours, soldiers from the third battalion finally reached the summit of Hill 937. They found dead NVA soldiers scattered among destroyed bunkers. Many had been killed by artillery, some by Napal, some by friendly fire.

 During the confusion, most of the enemy had withdrawn into Laos under the cover of darkness. The battle was over. The cost 56 to 72 Americans killed in action, more than 370 wounded. Five separate friendly fire incidents had killed seven and wounded 53. NVA dead were estimated at 630. The backlash was immediate. On May 20th, the same day the hill was captured, Senator Edward Kennedy stood on the Senate floor and called the battle senseless and irresponsible.

He demanded to know whether military commanders were sacrificing American lives for insignificant terrain. Life magazine published the faces of the dead in Vietnam. One week’s toll, showing 242 American service members killed in a single week, including men from Hamburger Hill. The photographs shocked a nation already weary of the war.

16 days after capture, the US Army abandoned Hill 937. It had never been the objective. The mission was to destroy enemy forces, not hold terrain. But to the American public, it looked like 70 men had died for nothing. By June 17th, the NVA had reoccupied the mountain. President Nixon ordered a new policy, Vietnamization.

 American troops would no longer lead assaults on fortified positions. Hamburger Hill was the last major frontal assault of the Vietnam War. Today, the names of those who died on Hill 937 are etched into panel 23W of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Survivors still gather for reunions, fewer each year. When asked if it was worth it, most give the same answer.

 The hill wasn’t worth it, but the men beside them were. Was it worth it?