Six weeks later, Bennett wrote: If I am called to Nam, I will go. Out of obligation to a country I love I will go and possibly die for a cause I vehemently disagree with. Apparently feeling some need to explain his position, he added, It is my obligation to give service to my country. That’s why I’m here — to help provide freedom for dissenting voices….I believe in America. I believe that our process of government can respond to the people’s needs — if we each will assume our responsibility.

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Despite Bennett’s repeated assurances to his parents that his chances of actually going to Vietnam were slim, when assignment orders were read two weeks before his medic trainee class graduation, that all changed. His whole class was going to Nam.

Back home on leave during the Christmas holidays, Bennett tried his best to remain cheerful. He visited friends and relatives, surprisingly proud of his uniform. He bought presents and exchanged holiday cheer with his fellow church members. But the looming trip halfway across the world played heavily on his mind. One night he broke down at the dinner table. I just can’t do it, he suddenly sobbed. I can’t go over there. Mother, I’m too young to die.

His parents consoled him, and Bennett soon regained his composure. On January 5, 1969, Tom Bennett said goodbye to his family. Five days later he was in Long Binh, South Vietnam, awaiting further assignment. On January 12 he learned he was going to the 4th Infantry Division in the Central Highlands. Ten days later he joined Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry, at FSB Charmayne, deep in the thick jungles of the Central Highlands.

Bennett was impressed with Bravo and its commanding officer, Captain Carrett Cowsert. Under his skilled leadership Bravo had suffered no serious casualties and no KIAs in seven months. Though the GIs constantly patrolled the rugged mountains, the NVA had made themselves scarce.

But things changed about the same time Bennett arrived. Enemy soldiers had been spotted on nearby Chu Pa Mountain. Bravo was choppered into an LZ on the mountain’s west side, where two other companies from the battalion joined them. The hump up the 1,400-meter peak was, in Bennett’s words, …unbelievable. Several times we were climbing almost straight up. My shoulders were full of pain. He had learned the hard way why infantrymen in South Vietnam had sardonically nicknamed themselves grunts. With all the gear he carried, nearly every step he took brought a grunt or groan of protest from his parched lips.

After a week of intense patrolling on Chu Pa’s west face failed to find any evidence of the enemy, Captain Cowsert decided to continue the patrol down the mountain’s east side. He didn’t expect the trek to be much easier going downhill, either. The entire mountain was blanketed with dense, triple-canopy jungle and splintered by countless jagged ravines and fingers.

Bennett used a brief respite in Bravo’s movement on February 5 to tape record a message to his parents. It would be his last. In it, he tried to assure his mother he was not facing much danger: When you start adding up figures and taking percentages and stuff, over here there are very few places that I can be safer than with the U.S. Army.

He may have felt confident he’d return to Morgantown, but he still waxed philosophical about not making it. I feel that they can’t hurt me in any way, he said. I have had and am having such a rich, full, good exciting life that, well, nobody can take that away from me. There’s very little chance that anything’s gonna happen. And if it does, so what? I’ve had my 21 good years….

On February 9, the fourth day of inching downhill, Bravo Company suddenly halted when an intense blast of AK-47 fire echoed through the jungle. A sister company, Delta, moving on Bravo’s left flank, had walked into an ambush. Bennett’s platoon was ordered to attack toward Delta, a maneuver designed to hit the enemy from the rear.

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