A few nights later we got hit again at Con Thien. We walked our mortars in front of our lines using the adjustment card that came with each ammo box. It was good to get our men firing the mortar again after the accident. Sometimes I had to interpolate distances. ‘Touchdown,’ now a squad leader, complimented us on how we did our job. I remembered how Touchdown got his name as a snuffie new guy. He ran back into the lines from a listening post one night shouting the password, ‘Touchdown! Touchdown!’ Now he was in charge.

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I wrote to one of the men at Christmastime from the USO at Camp Lejeune and never got a reply. Years later I read that the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, went to Khe Sanh on January 22, and that on February 8, 1st Platoon from Alpha Company was partially overrun at Hill 64 near a rock quarry. Captain Henry J.M. ‘Mack’ Radcliffe, my fourth and final CO, led a charge across open terrain to rescue the 25 survivors. He received the Silver Star for his bravery.

This article was written by Tom Evans and originally published in the April 1997 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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