INTRODUCTION

“The Lieutenant and the Black Virgin”

Memoirs of a Soldier in the Vietnam War

There’s a mountain in Tay Ninh Province the Americans called Black Virgin Mountain. The Vietnamese called it Nui Ba Den. For six months in 1969, it was my whole world — a single peak rising out of the flatlands, held by us during the day and contested every night. I was a young 1st Lieutenant, and that mountain taught me things no officer training ever could.

This blog is not a history book. I’ll leave the maps, the troop movements, and the political analysis to the historians. What I have instead are the things I actually saw, felt, and carried — the memories that stayed with me long after the war ended, sharp in some places and blurred in others, the way memory works when you’re twenty-two years old and everything around you can kill you.

I arrived in Vietnam in January 1969 and was assigned to the French Fort in Tay Ninh East, serving as Signal Officer for the 25th Division Forward. The job left me with time on my hands. I was rooming with an intelligence team, and out of boredom I asked if they could use an extra set of hands. That’s how I ended up running classified documents to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, the 5th Special Forces, and Division intelligence — a job nobody in my battalion ever approved. I just started doing it. That ended the day the French Fort was blown up. I was reassigned to Nui Ba Den soon after, where I served two roles at once: Executive Officer for the Provisional Infantry Company defending the mountain’s perimeter, and Signal Officer for every unit operating on it.

Vietnam didn’t run on logic. It ran on chance — who got hit, who didn’t, who came home and who stayed there forever. I write these stories for the men I served beside, for the ones who didn’t make it back, and for the ones who came home and kept fighting the war quietly, for years, in their own minds. I write them for my family, and for anyone who wants to know what that mountain, and that year, actually felt like from the inside.

Scroll down and start wherever you like. Each story stands on its own.