DMZ Rats

Hard Lessons

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Landing Zone Margo was life-ending for many and life-changing for the survivors.

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Ordered by higher headquarters to pull our dispersed forces into a small area to allow B-52 bombers to pound the DMZ, the thousand Marines of BLT 2/26 were caught in an intense mortar attack. With hundreds of high-explosive, shrapnel-spewing rounds fired into our midst from the surrounding hills followed by assaulting infantry squads, there was literally no place to run, no place to hide.

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Still, the Marines fought back with everything we had and repulsed the enemy attacks. Our losses were grievous and we mourn our fallen brothers deeply and eternally.

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Fifty years on, our ranks are thinning. Indeed some of the stories and photos on this website were contributed by brothers who have fought their last battle.

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But it is important to record what we endured and what we accomplished. Too late for us, certain tactics of the Marine Corps were changed to prevent decisions like those that left us exposed on LZ Margo.

 

Hard lessons were learned.

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Better Men

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And it is important to remember for other reasons, as the short video below shows.

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It is impossible to reproduce the feeling of combat in Vietnam, or the feeling of the sharp moment when a brother Marine fell, but in this brief eulogy to those we lost forever there, we try.

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In doing so we unavoidably call upon images and explosive sounds that capture long-ago moments, but which may also be upsetting to some.

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But our remembrance also examines those moments from the perspective of older men, who walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death when they were young.

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And it says that those of us who survived became better men by witnessing the countless, selfless deeds of our fellow Marines, and by trying to become the kind of men they expected us to be.

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And that we have kept our promise to remember those who fell to rise no more.

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