Hamburger Hill is the American name for a mountain in central Vietnam near the Laotian border.
During the war, the mountain occupied a strategic position along an infiltration route which North Vietnamese soldiers used to enter South Vietnam.
North Vietnamese troops were entrenched there to protect this infiltration route.
In May 1969, 1,800 assault troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division were ordered to dislodge the North Vietnamese from the hill by frontal assault.
It took ten days of fighting in driving tropical rains, but our guys succeeded on their eleventh attempt.
Seventy-two American soldiers were killed in this effort.
Another 372 were wounded and seven were missing.
Two weeks after the battle ended, our guys were ordered to abandon the hill.
American war planners had decided the hill no longer had any strategic value.
There was a public outcry.
A leading voice was Senator Edward Kennedy’s.
He called the battle ‘senseless and irresponsible’ and the order for a frontal assault ‘madness.’
Then Life Magazine published the photos of 242 Americans killed in Vietnam in just one week.
The publication, in its simple, brutal honesty, coming on the heels of Hamburger Hill, shocked the public.
It brought home the heavy cost in young lives of a seemingly futile war.
For many Americans, a vague unease over the war gelled into hardened opposition.
A new course of action was demanded.
The people had had enough.
Within weeks, President Nixon changed American war policy to place more of the war-fighting burden on South Vietnamese forces.
And he began a draw-down of US forces deployed there.
The flow of history is marked with exclamation points like this.
Traumatic national events spark a rethinking of old notions.
We may be approaching such a point now.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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