"He didn't have to go on the patrol, but once committed, he had a premonition that he would get killed".

War stories, as the adage goes, are all true and all false. The survivors of one patrol had been telling a mostly false version of this story for 31 years—not deliberately, but because each man's personal survival strategy had repressed large parts of the traumatic memory. One thing that helped unlock those memories was a celebrity's published account of the loss of his stepson, who had been one of their teammates (see end of story for a letter written by Jimmy Stewart about the loss of his son).

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When America first landed on the moon in July 1969, the world knew about it. But the previous month in Vietnam, when a U.S. Marine Corps ­reconnaissance patrol code-named "American Beauty" fought for its life, nobody knew the whole story of the Marines' ­bravery. And none of the survivors could tell it themselves.

On June 8, 1969, those Marines were trapped in an ambush that claimed the life of actor Jimmy Stewart's stepson, Marine 1st Lt. Ron McLean. The remaining five were pinned down for 24 hours by a dug-in NVA platoon. The resulting onslaught of automatic-weapons fire, grenades and 12 hours of close air support should have killed the team many times over.

"We all expected to die on the hill," said Bob Lake of Aitkin, Minn., who at 19 had been the assistant patrol leader. "We were in no man's land, unknowingly dropped into a [1,200-member] enemy battalion, and [helicopter extraction from] the hilltop was the only way out."

The Marine Corps' record of that patrol consists of a 29-line entry found in a July 10, 1969, command chronology. Although that history relates an account of the patrol by Major Charles W. Cobb Jr., the American Beauty survivors could not recognize their experience in his narrative. For the military, perhaps it was just another patrol that went bad. Recon, with a 40 percent casualty rate, is dangerous business.

In January 1998, I tracked down Bob Lake, a Minnesota high school teacher, who had been one of the recon team members who walked out of the DMZ with me 29 years earlier. Lake provided the names of Roger See, Joe "Doc"  Sheriff, Jimmy Sessums and Bunn, the Vietnamese Montagnard scout. The patrol leader, See, was the most difficult to locate, as he was living a nearly under­ground existence.

According to Sheriff, of Booneville, Ky., who had been the patrol corpsman: "Roger's cool and even-headedness kept us alive. This was my first patrol. I thought, 'God! If this is what it's like out here, what are my chances of surviving?'" Sheriff went on to do 14 more recon patrols, with no casualties.

Lieutenant McLean had had infantry experience but had only been in recon a couple of weeks before he was killed. Officers seldom went on recon patrols, and this would be McLean's first. Navy Lieutenant Martin Glasser was the battalion surgeon for the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion in June 1969. He said that because he and Lieutenant McLean, 24, were both from California, they quickly became friends.

Glasser, now a medical director with a managed-care organization in Phoenix, Ariz., remembered that an order had come down from division headquarters to have recon teams inserted into the DMZ to confirm enemy presence there. He also recalled that a priority for the mission was to bring back a POW. He said it was already known that there was an NVA battalion there, and the recon commander, a lieutenant colonel, refused the order, realizing that to drop lightly armed teams in the middle of it would be suicidal. That battalion commander, according to Glasser, was replaced by another who carried out the order.

Glasser said that McLean had heard the same intelligence briefings and was well aware that DMZ ­patrolling would be highly risky. He wasn't going to ask his men to do something he wouldn't do himself. "He didn't have to go on the patrol," Glasser said, "but once committed, he had a premonition that he would get killed."

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