Surviving Hill 881: A Vietnam veteran’s harrowing experience

Published 12:07 am Sunday, November 10, 2024

(SHERWOOD) — Like many men who joined the military during the Vietnam War, Duane Walker was a mere 18 years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in October 1966.

He soon found himself in boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego for eight weeks before going to radio communications (radio/telegraph) school. Before long, he was in a staging battalion at Camp Pendleton and, after some short stays in California and Okinawa, Japan, Walker would find himself in Da Nang, Vietnam.

“Who knew what to expect, but it was a culture shock,” he said about arriving in-country in August 1967. “It was a third-world country, and I really didn’t expect it. There were houses set right next to railroad tracks, and the railroad didn’t run at that time.”

He would soon end up in Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Division, just outside Da Nang in a city called Hoi An, an ancient Vietnamese town that dates back to the 15th Century as a trading port.

After going on a couple of patrols there, he and other soldiers were flown to Dong Ha before walking to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that served as a battlefield, separating the communist North and anti-communist South during the war.

They stayed there for two months and patrolled an American base before returning to Dong Ha.

“We were in Dong Ha when the Tet Offensive hit,” Walker recalled about the coordinated 1968 attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against numerous targets in South Vietnam.

Walker served as a forward artillery observer during the offensive and had been promoted from a private to a corporal by that time.

“So I was actually not with my normal unit. I was detached for a while, and I was listed as missing in action,” said Walker, “because my unit didn’t know exactly where I was.”

He said he made it back to his unit shortly before the Department of Defense would have sent a notification to his parents telling them he was officially missing in action.

Walker said his unit eventually made its way to the city of Hue, where they were engaged in combat with the North Vietnamese for more than a month. U.S. soldiers retook the city on March 2, 1968.

They later moved to the coast at Khe Sanh, and for a month, Walker and fellow Marines were on Hill 881 South, the site of many intense battles during the Siege of Khe Sanh in 1967 and 1968.

“I was basically an artillery observer there. I called in artillery strikes on NVA (North Vietnamese Army) concentrations, and I was on the Hill for 44 days,” he said. “It was similar to World War I combat. We were all in trenches and dugouts into trenches (shelters dug into the side of a trench or in the ground) because we were under constant NVA observation. We got mortars and artillery rounds all the time.”

Being stuck on the hill meant no water (until helicopters delivered portable water bladders), no showers, and no shaving while they were there. They were pulled off the hill with the decommissioning of the Khe Sanh combat base.

“We basically tore it down and then left,” he said of Khe Sanh.

Walker would later leave Vietnam in late September 1968 after serving 13 months in-country. He ended up back at Camp Pendleton for a couple of months before he was shipped to Hawaii, where he was retrained to call in naval air strikes off a little island near Maui. The site had served as a bombing range since before World War II.

He said he learned a lot about life in the Marine Corps, where he saw a lot of death, and “learned a lot about how to live correctly. The Marine Corps taught a lot of stuff.”

His takeaway from Vietnam is that war is a sacrifice that “a lot of people in my generation didn’t understand Vietnam, and you couldn’t explain it to them.”

“We were trying to save people. After we left Vietnam, the North Vietnamese took over the whole country. More than six million people died in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.”

After the war, Walker returned to Long Beach, California, and graduated from California State University at Long Beach with a bachelor’s degree in finance. He and his family moved to the Sherwood area in 2016 and now reside near Chehalem Station Road.

Community: Sherwood

Service Branch: U.S. Marines

Rank: Sergeant

Years of Service: 1966-1970

“We were trying to save people. After we left Vietnam, the North Vietnamese took over the whole country. More than 6 million people died in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.” 

— Duane Walker

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