LZ Margo and the DMZ (continued)
Aftermath
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Col. Barrow, our regimental commander for the operation, choppered onto LZ Margo the day after the battle.
A chopper touches down on Landing Zone Margo on September 15, 1968, the day before the battle. Photo courtesy of Eric Smith.
No stranger to battlefields himself, during World War II he was taught Chinese, infiltrated into China and led Chinese guerrillas fighting the occupying Japanese. Later, as a company commander in Korea, he had won the Navy Cross.
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He wanted to know what had happened to his battalion landing team and to assess its battle-readiness for himself.
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So he walked the hill with Major Lynch. And what he saw and heard from the Marines and corpsmen on Margo reassured him immensely, but surprised him not at all.
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Nobody's fighting spirit was extinguished. Nobody had had too much.
We mourned those we lost -- fifty years later we are still mourning -- but we went on to fight our way from Margo and then from two other bloody landing zones -- Susan and Duster -- across the DMZ until we were finally ordered back to the ships.
