Word: hilled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Communist forces from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos to the coastal cities of northern I Corps. It is a mountain much like any other in that part of the Highlands, green, triple-canopied and spiked with thick stands of bamboo. On military maps it is listed as Hill 937, the number representing its height in meters. Last week it acquired another name: Hamburger Hill. It was a grisly but all too appropriate description, for the battle in and around Ap Bia took the lives of 84 G.I.s and wounded 480 more. Such engagements were familiar enough in Viet...
Assaults Repulsed. The battle for Hill 937 began uneventfully enough. On May 10, nine battalions of American and Vietnamese troops were helilifted into landing zones between the A Shau Valley and the Laotian border to disrupt possible North Vietnamese attacks toward the coast and to cut off Communist escape routes. There was little contact at first, but the next day, conditions changed for Lieut. Colonel Weldon F. Honeycutt's 3rd Battalion, 187th Regiment, of the 101st Airborne Division. Wheeling away from the border and eastward toward Hill 937, Honeycutt's troops surprised a North Vietnamese trail-watching squad...
...days later, on May 20, after more than 20,000 artillery rounds and 155 air strikes had virtually denuded the top of 937, the assault force finally took the hill. The U.S. command claimed that 622 North Vietnamese had been killed, though only 182 weapons were found, indicating that the dead might actually be considerably fewer. Specialist Speers, who had begun the battle as a squad leader, came down as a platoon commander-such were the U.S. casualties...
...Orders. The reaction in Washington came quickly. Mindful of similar assaults in the past-when hills were taken at high cost and then quickly abandoned-Senator Edward Kennedy charged that it was "both senseless and irresponsible to continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to this conflict." After initial hesitation, the Army fought back, describing the battle as a "tremendous, gallant victory." Major General Melvin Zais, commander of the 101st, observed that "the only significance of Hill 937 was the fact that there were North Vietnamese...
...that mattered little on Hill 937. When the battle was over-while helicopters flew out stacks of holed American helmets and bloody flak jackets-TIME Correspondent John Wilhelm found a piece of cardboard and a black 101st neckerchief pinned by a G.I. knife to a blackened tree trunk. "Hamburger Hill," a soldier had scrawled on the cardboard, and someone else had added the words, "Was it worth...