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Informationen zum Autor John J. Culbertson Klappentext "Morning was always a welcome sight to us. It meant two things. The first was that we were still alive. . . ." In 1967, death was the constant companion of the Marines of Hotel Company, 2/5, as they patrolled the paddy dikes, mud, and mountains of the Arizona Territory southwest of Da Nang. But John Culbertson and most of the rest of Hotel Company were the same lean, fighting Marines who had survived the carnage of Operation Tuscaloosa. Hotel's grunts walked over the enemy, not around him. In graphic terms, John Culbertson describes the daily, dangerous life of a soldier fighting in a country where the enemy was frequently indistinguishable from the allies, fought tenaciously, and thought nothing of using civilians as a shield. Though he was one of the top marksmen in 1st Marine Division Sniper School in Da Nang in March 1967--a class of just eighteen, chosen from the division's twenty thousand Marines--Culbertson knew that against the VC and the NVA, good training and experience could carry you just so far. But his company's mission was to find and engage the enemy, whatever the price. This riveting, bloody first-person account offers a stark testimony to the stuff U.S. Marines are made of.Prologue In Operation Tuscaloosa: 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, at An Hoa, 1967, I described how Hotel Company had destroyed the R-20th Main Force Battalion of the regular Viet Cong forces on January 26, 1967, at the river crossing over the Thu Bon River and in assaults against the VC/NVA regulars in the hostile villages of La Bac 1 and 2. Two hundred twenty-one enemy soldiers had been killed or wounded (body count) by the Marines of Foxtrot and Hotel Companies. By January 28, 1967, when Operation Tuscaloosa had been officially secured, the Marines of the 2nd Battalion, based at An Hoa Combat Base, twenty-five miles southwest of Marine headquarters at Da Nang, had sent a clear message to the Viet Cong high command to the north near the Laotian border: the U.S. Marines would press ahead with clearing the hamlets of I Corps of the indigenous Viet Cong terrorists who targeted its peaceful peasant South Vietnamese. The peasants of South Vietnam themselves were the victims hardest hit by the violence sparked by the military dictatorship of Vo Nguyen Giap in North Vietnam’s “People’s Republic.” For this reason, the Marines had chosen the sensible tactic of fortifying local hamlets using U.S. Marine and South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) soldiers in civil action platoons (CAPs) to clear the countryside of the VC and NVA and to strengthen the local leaders so that they could maintain hegemony within their districts. Offensive strikes like Operation Tuscaloosa were designed to defeat large Communist military units and maintain U.S. superiority on the battlefield. However, victory in large-scale battles like Operation Starlight and Operation Prairie were simply not solely capable of stopping large-scale enemy infiltration into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail (particularly into the DMZ, the A Shau Valley, and the Arizona Territory, west of Da Nang). Operation Prairie I, which ended on January 31, 1967, had lasted 187 days and compiled some significant statistics: a buildup of Marines to over sixty thousand combat and support troops in I Corps; an expansion of U.S. Marine tactical area of responsibility from eight square miles in the beginning of 1966 to one thousand eight hundred square miles at the beginning of 1967; one hundred and fifty combat engagements with enemy forces of at least battalion or regimental strength; the destruction of several enemy battalions (as in Operation Tuscaloosa); the deaths of seven thousand three hundred (body count) enemy soldiers in major operations, with an additional four thousand enemy killed in action (KIA) as a result of over two hundred thousand Marine combat patrols. U.S. Marine losses duri...
