What It Was Like For A NVA Soldier To Surround The 101st Airborne

It's the first of July, 1970, and you're dug into a jungle ridge west of Hue, staring at Firebase Ripcord, a hilltop held by the 101st Airborne. On the order, every mortar and recoilless rifle in these hills fires at once. You're not storming that hill, not yet. Every shell, meal and wounded man up there moves by helicopter, so your target is the sky. This is the siege of Ripcord told from the North Vietnamese ridges, the companion to our 23 Days video. The division that let the Americans take an empty hilltop, the commander who studied the flight paths, the 12.7mm gun crews firing two or three rounds at a time while men waved branches to hide the smoke, the Chinook that fell on the ammunition dump and took out the battery, the field telephone wire that revealed a whole division, and the last morning. Then both sides' books, side by side. Every claim sourced. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📕 THE BOOKS FROM TRUE VIETNAM DOCS First-time readers: the first-reader price applies itself at checkout ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ BOOK ONE · The Documented History of MACV-SOG in Vietnam The book mentioned in the video. The division ringing Ripcord ran its war out of Base Area 611 on the Laos border, the same ground MACV-SOG recon teams had been sent to watch a year earlier. The missions, the arsenal, the men and the myths, in six chapters. 👉 First-reader price, $4.99 instead of $7.99: https://buy.stripe.com/3cI14q7PY8su0Pg3vu6kg00?prefilled_promo_code=FIRSTREAD2 Look inside first: https://www.truevietnamdocs.com/sog BOOK TWO · The Documented History of the Gear of the Vietnam War The other side of the wire, and everything those men carried: the rifle, the ruck, the radio, the rations, the armor and the boots, plus the paper trail behind every one. Nine chapters, 193 pages. 👉 First-reader price, $5.99 instead of $8.99: https://buy.stripe.com/bJe14q0nweQScxY6HG6kg01?prefilled_promo_code=FIRSTREAD2 Look inside first: https://www.truevietnamdocs.com/gear ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ▶ WATCH NEXT The same 23 days from the hilltop: The TERRIFYING 23 Days the NVA Surrounded the 101st Airborne In Vietnam https://youtu.be/RRsnT9kF_qI 🎙 INTERVIEW CLIP Charles "Chuck" Holman, CH-47 crew chief aboard the Chinook shot down on 18 July 1970, courtesy GVSU Veterans History Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpj9cwFMg8o 📚 FULL SOURCE LIST • HQ, 101st Airborne Division, After Action Report: Firebase Ripcord (23 July 1970): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/After_action_report:_Firebase_Ripcord,_23_July_1970 • 101st Airborne, Operational Report, Lessons Learned, period ending 31 July 1970 (DTIC AD515469) • Firebase Ripcord Association, 2/506th Unit History, Day by Day reports (Lee Widjeskog), Casualty List: https://ripcordassociation.com/ • GVSU Veterans History Project interviews: Michael Mackey, J.P. Meyer, Dale Ireland • Terry A. Stanger, remembrance of SGT Michael Walker, The Virtual Wall • Charles Hawkins, Rendezvous at Ripcord, VFW Magazine (2010) • Warren Wilkins, How Did Vietnamese Forces Block U.S. Firepower? With a Hug, HistoryNet (2023) • Pham Huu Thu, series on the Battle of Hill 935, Hue (2022) • Dang Tho Truat, gunner's account of Co Pung (2020) 🔔 Subscribe for history from both sides of the wire. Independent work of history, not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense or any veterans' organization. #VietnamWar #FirebaseRipcord #101stAirborne #NVA #Chinook #MilitaryHistory #Documentary