The TERRIFYING 23 Days the NVA Surrounded the 101st Airborne In Vietnam

You are standing on a mountaintop in South Vietnam, and every hill around you is taller than the one you hold. The enemy owns those hills. From them, the mortars come down on a schedule you learn to hate. It is July 1970, and the only way off is a helicopter that has to fly straight through the fire landing on you. For twenty-three days, that is the entire world. This is Firebase Ripcord, Hill 927, the battle the Army kept quiet a year after Hamburger Hill. How the 101st Airborne went back into the mountains above the A Shau Valley, how the North Vietnamese 324th Division closed the ring, the Chinooks and Hueys flying resupply through the gauntlet, Bob Kalsu of the Buffalo Bills killed by a mortar round two days before his son was born, Lt. Col. Andre Lucas and the Medal of Honor, and the fighting evacuation of 23 July. 75 Americans killed, hundreds wounded, on a hill abandoned the day the fighting stopped. Every claim sourced. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📕 THE BOOKS FROM TRUE VIETNAM DOCS First-time readers get a lower price, applied automatically at checkout ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ BOOK ONE · The Documented History of MACV-SOG in Vietnam ($7.99) The book mentioned in the video. Ripcord existed to choke the supply lines coming out of the A Shau. MACV-SOG hunted those same trails on the other side of the border, in Laos and Cambodia, on missions that officially never happened. The missions, the arsenal, the men and the myths, in six chapters. 👉 https://www.truevietnamdocs.com/sog BOOK TWO · The Documented History of the Gear of the Vietnam War ($8.99) Twenty-three days where everything came in by helicopter. This is what was in those loads: the rifle, the ruck, the radio, the rations, the armor and the boots, and the paper trail behind every one of them. Nine chapters, 193 pages. 👉 https://www.truevietnamdocs.com/gear Buying for a father or grandfather who was over there? It is the most common reason people do. The Large Print Edition exists exactly for him. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚖️ MYTH VS. RECORD MYTH: The whole 101st Airborne was surrounded. RECORD: it was a battalion at the center of it, a few hundred men on the hill plus companies in the jungle, not the division's 16,000. MYTH: Ripcord was overrun. RECORD: 23 July was a planned fighting evacuation by air, with the wounded and most of the equipment brought out. 🎙 INTERVIEW CLIP Fred Behrens, UH-1 Huey pilot, Kingsmen, 101st Aviation Battalion, courtesy of the Witness to War Foundation: https://www.witnesstowar.org/combat_stories/Vietnam/11948 📚 FULL SOURCE LIST • U.S. Army After Action Report, Firebase Ripcord, 23 July 1970: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/After_action_report:_Firebase_Ripcord,_23_July_1970 • Medal of Honor citation, Lt. Col. Andre C. Lucas: https://www.cmohs.org/recipients/andre-c-lucas • U.S. Army, 101st Airborne veteran recalls Ripcord (Denny Kirkham): https://www.army.mil/article/80071/ • Firebase Ripcord Association, unit history, day by day: https://ripcordassociation.com/101st-unit-history/ • GVSU Veterans History Project, Ripcord interviews: https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/collections/show/30 • Keith W. Nolan, Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, Vietnam 1970 • James R. Smither, The End of the Rope (Casemate) • Christopher J. Brady, Remembering Firebase Ripcord • William Nack, A Name on the Wall, Sports Illustrated (Bob Kalsu): https://www.si.com/nfl/2014/09/04/name-wall-si-60-william-nack-bob-kalsu Archival footage: National Archives, Texas Tech Vietnam Center and Archive, Wikimedia Commons. 🔔 Subscribe for more of the war told straight, sources shown, myths corrected. Independent work of history, not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense or any veterans' organization. #VietnamWar #FirebaseRipcord #101stAirborne #AShauValley #MilitaryHistory #VietnamVeterans #Documentary