Apache Archives

🗓️July 23, 1970: After 23 days under siege, the US Army gave up Firebase Ripcord, and getting off that mountain alive turned into a battle of its own.

The plan was to lift roughly 400 men off the hill by helicopter, since there was no road and never had been. Fourteen Chinooks came in to do it. At 7:40 in the morning, North Vietnamese anti aircraft fire caught one of the big helicopters and it crashed right onto the landing pad, wrecking it. So the whole evacuation had to be done the hard way, six men at a time in Hueys, each aircraft flying in through the guns, grabbing a handful of soldiers, and clawing back out while the enemy walked mortars and rockets across the base.

They pulled the artillery out first, then the men. Chinooks slinging howitzers, Hueys darting in and out, gunships and airstrikes hammering the ridgelines to keep the North Vietnamese heads down. And it very nearly worked clean. Then, with the extraction underway, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andre Lucas, landed on the hill to supervise the last of it. As he stood talking with his operations officer, Major Tanner, a 120mm mortar round came down on them. Tanner was killed instantly. Lucas was mortally wounded and died on the medevac lifting off the hill he had fought 23 days to hold. He received the Medal of Honor.

By 12:14 that afternoon, it was over. Ripcord was empty and abandoned, and the North Vietnamese owned the rubble. Seventy five Americans died in the siege, among them First Lieutenant Bob Kalsu, killed by mortar fire two days earlier, the only active NFL player to die in the Vietnam War. Ripcord was the last major battle the US Army fought in that war, and the country back home barely knew it happened.

American Marine shows how a captured Japanese turtle shield armour works with a Japanese rifle (1944)🇺🇸🇯🇵

🗓️ July 21, 1966. As Operation Hastings wound down, a company of Marines walked back into Helicopter Valley to do the one thing Marines never leave undone. They went back for their dead.

Three days earlier, on the 18th, Company K had fought off an entire North Vietnamese regiment as the rearguard, and in the chaos of pulling back, the 1st Platoon had been forced to leave eight dead Marines behind on the field. That is a wound that does not close. So on the 21st, Company H of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines went back to LZ Crow to bring them home.

What they found meant something. All eight bodies were lying exactly where they had fallen, unmolested, still with all their weapons and gear. The Marines gathered them up and carried them out.

The fighting was not finished. Over these same two days a lance corporal named Richard Kaler, out with a patrol, ran through heavy fire to carry back a fallen point man, then the next day charged a machine gun position that had his platoon pinned. He silenced it and was mortally wounded doing it, and saved a lot of his fellow Marines. He got the Navy Cross. That is what the tail end of an operation looked like, men still dying to recover the men who had already died.

July 21, 1944. American Marines wade ashore on Guam this morning, and for the men doing it this one is personal in a way the other island fights were not. Guam was American soil, and they were coming to take it back.

Guam had been a US territory for over forty years, its people American nationals, when the Japanese overran the small garrison there right after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. For two and a half years the Chamorro people of Guam lived under a brutal occupation, forced labor, beatings, massacres, and toward the end, concentration camps. So when the Marines and Army troops hit the beaches at Asan and Agat on the morning of the 21st, they were not liberating a stranger's island. They were retaking their own.

The Japanese had had years to dig in, and they made the Marines pay for every yard. The first waves of amphibious tractors crawled onto the beaches into a wall of fire from the high ground, mortars and artillery zeroed in on the sand, and the men were pinned down almost as soon as they landed. The ground rose steeply off the beach into ridges the defenders had turned into a fortress, and the fighting to get up and off those beaches was as ugly as anything in the Pacific.

It took until early August to secure the island, weeks of grinding through jungle and caves against an enemy that mostly would not surrender. But they took it. And Guam remembers. To this day, July 21 is Liberation Day on the island, the biggest holiday of the year, still marked more than eighty years later by the descendants of people who lived through that occupation and never forgot who came back for them.

July 20, 1972. For the third time in a week, the president of South Vietnam announced that his soldiers had raised the flag over the Citadel of Quang Tri. For the third time, the North Vietnamese tore it down.

The enemy had seized the province in their massive Easter Offensive that spring, and the South was fighting to take it back a block at a time under a ceiling of American airpower, thousands of strike sorties and B-52 raids pounding the North Vietnamese dug into the rubble. The old stone Citadel in the center of the city had become the whole prize, a symbol neither side would give up.

President Thieu wanted the win so badly he kept claiming it before it was real, on the 13th, the 15th, and now the 20th. Every time, the paratroopers were still stuck outside those walls and the flag came back down. The distance between what a president announces from a palace and what is actually true out where men are dying could not have been wider.

Quang Tri ran 81 days, the longest battle of the entire war, before the South finally took the shattered Citadel for good in September. By then the city was pounded so flat that almost nothing was left standing, and thousands on both sides were dead over a fortress reduced to broken brick.

July 20, 1944. At 12:42 in the afternoon a briefcase explodes under a map table in East Prussia, and for about twenty minutes a small group of German officers believe they have killed Adolf Hi**er and saved what is left of the world. They are wrong, and almost every one of them will be dead within a year.

The man who carried the bomb in was Claus von Stauffenberg, a colonel, a war hero who had lost an eye, a hand, and two fingers of the other hand in North Africa. He was not some anti war pacifist. He had believed in a strong Germany. But he had seen what the regime was doing in the east, the massacres, the murder of the Jews, the pointless bleeding of his own country, and he had come to a conclusion that took extraordinary nerve. The man had to die, and someone on the inside had to do it.

That day there was a briefing at the Wolf's Lair, Hi**er's headquarters. Stauffenberg armed the bomb in a side room, working the fuse with three fingers, got only one of his two charges set before he was rushed, and walked into the conference room. He slid the briefcase under the heavy oak table, a few feet from Hi**er, made an excuse about a phone call, and left.

Then luck, the wrong luck, took over. Someone found the briefcase in the way and moved it to the far side of a thick table support. When it went off it blew the room apart, killed four men, set Hi**er's hair and trousers on fire, burst his eardrums, but the oak leg had shielded him. He walked out, shaking, singed, but alive.

Stauffenberg saw the explosion from outside, saw bodies carried out, and was certain no one could have survived. He flew to Berlin and launched the coup, Operation Valkyrie, the plan to use the reserve army to seize the government. For a few hours it half worked. Troops moved. Officials were arrested. And then the news came through that Hi**er was alive, and he went on the radio himself that night, and the whole thing collapsed like wet paper.

They shot Stauffenberg in a courtyard that same night by the light of vehicle headlamps. He is supposed to have shouted long live sacred Germany as the rifles came up. Then came the vengeance. Hundreds arrested. Around 200 executed, many strangled slowly with wire, filmed so Hi**er could watch.

And remember the Rommel piece from a few days ago? This is the plot his name got caught up in. The Desert Fox knew something, and three months from now two generals will arrive at his door with a cyanide pill because of this exact day.

They failed. Hi**er lived another ten months and the war ground on to its worst year. But they knew, going in, that the odds were almost nothing. They did it anyway, because as one of them said, what mattered was not the success but that the German resistance had dared to make the throw, in the sight of the world and history. Say Stauffenberg's name today.

The body of a U.S. serviceman is airlifted from a clearing in South Vietnam, 1966.

British troops at a defensive position near El Alamein, Egypt, 17 July 1942