In 1968, The NVA Attacked An Isolated LRRP Team. It Was Their BIGGEST Mistake.

[00:00:00]Picture hovering 100 ft over the jungle on a mountain so high the air is too thin for your helicopter to hold steady.

[00:00:07]You can't land, so you jump for a rope, slide down into trees you can't see the bottom of, and start [music] blasting a hole in the forest with explosives.

[00:00:18]And the second you start making noise, you realize something. You are not alone up here.

[00:00:24]The North Vietnamese Army had a sanctuary in this valley they'd held for 2 years.

[00:00:30]When 30 American long-range recon soldiers dropped onto the peak above them, the NVA climbed up to wipe them out.

[00:00:38]What the NVA didn't understand was what that mountain was actually for.

[00:00:44]And securing it would help unleash 3 weeks of air strikes on the entire valley below.

[00:00:50]This is the story of Signal Hill, a radio antenna on a mountaintop, the men who bled to hold it, and why the real story is very different from the one you've probably heard.

[00:01:03]The A Shau Valley, early 1968.

[00:01:07]A 25-mi corridor running along the Laotian border right next to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

[00:01:14]For the North Vietnamese, this place was gold.

[00:01:18]It was a supply highway and a fortress combined, and they had turned it into the most heavily defended enemy sanctuary in South Vietnam.

[00:01:27]We're talking radar-directed anti-aircraft cannons, heavy machine guns, even light tanks.

[00:01:34]American aircraft flying into that valley were flying [music] into a wall of fire.

[00:01:39]After Tet and the relief of the Marines at Khe San, the US command sent the 1st Cavalry Division to hit that sanctuary head-on.

[00:01:48]The operation was called Delaware.

[00:01:51]Two brigades, around 11,000 men, roughly 300 helicopters.

[00:01:57]But there was a problem nobody could shoot their way out of.

[00:02:01]Those brigades would be fighting deep inside the valley, hidden behind a wall of mountains 5,000 ft tall, and radios in 1968 worked by line of sight.

[00:02:11]Satellites weren't an option yet. So, if you stood behind a mountain, your signal hit rock and died.

[00:02:18]Which meant the men doing the fighting couldn't reliably reach headquarters at Camp Evans near the coast, and they couldn't reliably talk to the aircraft trying to support them.

[00:02:29]Pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything that's about to happen.

[00:02:35]Midway up the valley's eastern side stood a 4,878-ft peak called Dong Ray Lao Mountain. Put a radio relay on top of that, and suddenly the whole valley could talk to the coast and to the planes overhead.

[00:02:50]Headquarters gave it a code name, Signal Hill.

[00:02:54]Holding that peak wasn't a job for a regular infantry company. You couldn't land helicopters on it. You'd have to rappel in, blow a landing zone out of the forest with explosives, and then hold ground far beyond the range of friendly artillery, completely on your own.

[00:03:10]There was exactly one kind of unit built for that, the division's long-range reconnaissance patrol soldiers.

[00:03:17]The LRRPs, or as everyone called them, the LURPs.

[00:03:22]Normally these were tiny teams, five or six men who slipped deep into enemy territory to watch and report, not to fight. Staying invisible was the whole point. Now, [music] they were being asked to do the opposite. Land loud, dig in, and dare the enemy to come.

[00:03:43]The unit was Company E, 52nd Infantry Long Range Patrol, attached to the 1st Cavalry Division.

[00:03:51]The same lineage that would later become one of the most decorated Ranger units of the entire war.

[00:03:56]I mean, think about that for a second.

[00:03:59]The plan was to take recon specialists, men trained to never be seen, and drop them onto a mountain top surrounded by an enemy who owned the high ground below them.

[00:04:10]The assignment seemed straightforward on a map.

[00:04:14]It wasn't.

[00:04:15]So, on the morning of Friday, April 19th, 1968, about 30 LURPs gathered at Camp Evans with a handful of engineers and signalmen.

[00:04:26]19 miles away, their mountain was waiting. They could hear the slicks coming in.

[00:04:31]Five Hueys from the 227th Assault Helicopter Battalion, marked with yellow lightning bolts on the side.

[00:04:38]The flight up was the easy part. The mountain was the problem. There was no landing zone. There was no clearing at all.

[00:04:46]Just unbroken forest on a peak nearly 5,000 ft up, where the thin mountain air robbed the helicopters of lift. So, the first men went out on ropes, sliding down through the trees while the pilots fought to hold a hover. And then it went wrong.

[00:05:02]Seconds after Sergeant Larry Curtis and his teammate jumped for the skids, one of the Hueys lost its lift. It dropped into the canopy and crashed through the trees onto the peak.

[00:05:13]Curtis was knocked unconscious and pinned under a skid while the engine screamed and fuel leaked [music] around him.

[00:05:20]His teammates dug him out by hand and dragged him clear.

[00:05:24]Day one was barely an hour old, and they already had a destroyed aircraft on the summit.

[00:05:30]So, yeah, >> [music] >> not the start anyone wanted. The LURPs set a perimeter and got to work on the only thing that mattered [music] now.

[00:05:37]Carving a landing zone out of solid jungle so the rest of the force and any medevac could actually reach them.

[00:05:44]Chainsaws, [music] machetes, Bangalore torpedoes blowing the trees flat.

[00:05:49]>> [music] >> It was loud, it was slow, and it was the most exposed work [music] imaginable.

[00:05:56]And all that noise told the North Vietnamese exactly where the Americans were.

[00:06:01]The NVA started climbing up from the valley floor.

[00:06:05]The LURPs couldn't hear them coming over the saws.

[00:06:08]That was a warning sign nobody could afford to miss, >> [music] >> and the noise of their own work buried it.

[00:06:14]This is where the story [music] takes a turn nobody expected.

[00:06:19]By the next day, the enemy was on the crest, and this is the part that made Signal Hill so brutal.

[00:06:26]The LURPs could rarely see who was shooting at them.

[00:06:30]The NVA fought as snipers, scattered through the foliage and the blast debris, firing into the perimeter while the Americans [music] were still trying to finish the landing zone.

[00:06:40]You can't shoot back at what you can't see.

[00:06:43]So, the LURPs threw grenades down the slope and fired at every [music] position that might be hiding a man.

[00:06:49]They turned a bomb crater into a casualty collection point. Morphine, [music] chest seals, plasma, and then came the part that cost the most.

[00:06:58]They called for medevac, and it didn't come.

[00:07:02]Every helicopter in the division was committed to the assault going on in the [music] valley below, flying into that wall of anti-aircraft fire.

[00:07:10]On the first day of Operation Delaware alone, the division lost 10 helicopters destroyed and 23 [music] more damaged.

[00:07:18]You'd think someone could spare one bird for the wounded on the mountain.

[00:07:22]For hours, nobody could. And so, men died on that peak waiting.

[00:07:28]Corporal Richard [music] Turbett, Private First Class Robert Noto, Sergeant William Lambert, who by some accounts was just about at the end of his tour.

[00:07:38]He lived around 6 hours after he he hit.

[00:07:41]And Private First Class James McManus, one of the combat engineers, [music] the platoon leader, Lieutenant Joe Dilger, was shot through the chest and [music] nearly died.

[00:07:51]Sergeant Curtis, already concussed from the crash, would later lose an eye.

[00:07:56]Counting the killed and the seriously wounded, the small force on that peak [music] was gutted. If stories like this one, the ones that usually get reduced to a single line in a history book, are why you're here, subscribing genuinely helps [music] us keep digging them up. That's it.

[00:08:15]Back to the mountain.

[00:08:17]By Sunday, April 21st, reinforcement teams were reaching [music] the peak.

[00:08:22]One of them was led by Sergeant Doug Parkinson, a Lurp who days earlier had nearly been killed by friendly artillery and stalked by a tiger on a different mountain near Khe San.

[00:08:33]There were still snipers around the summit.

[00:08:36]So, the company commander, Captain Michael Gooding, ordered Parkinson to take his team and clear a patrol around the peak.

[00:08:43]In the fog on the western slope, a lone NVA soldier mistook Parkinson's [music] Montagnard point scout for one of his own and called out to him. It was the last mistake he made.

[00:08:54]With the peak finally secured, the radio relay went live and the Americans airlifted an artillery battery up to the summit.

[00:09:02]Signal Hill stopped being just a fight and became what it was always meant to be, the nerve center of the entire valley campaign.

[00:09:11]From that dugout, Lurps [music] with spotting scopes directed artillery onto enemy trucks moving on Route 548 in the valley below.

[00:09:19]They called in tactical [music] air strikes. They helped coordinate the B-52 Arc Light strikes that pounded the sanctuary.

[00:09:27]For roughly [music] 3 weeks, this single mountain top is what let the whole operation function.

[00:09:33]But, here's [music] the detail that everyone missed at the time and that most retellings still get wrong today.

[00:09:39][music] >> When I went in, it was Echo Company 52nd LRP, and that was in December of '68.

[00:09:46]And once I became qualified as a LRP, and okay, cool, I'm a LRP. Then we got a a message that they're re-commissioning all of the LRP companies as Rangers.

[00:09:58]And it's like, well, what do you LRPs do? And they go, "Oh, we go out in the jungle in five- and six-man teams, and we mess with Charlie."

[00:10:06]And I go, "Oh, hell no."

[00:10:08]>> [laughter] >> Well, there were two of us at any given time, and we had to monitor our radios 24 hours a day.

[00:10:19]And um we had a lot of times our teams out in the bush would be in a situation where there was enemy nearby, and they they couldn't talk.

[00:10:31]So, they would contact using squelch breaks. We always left the squelch on on our radios.

[00:10:36]>> So, let's deal with the claim [music] in the title head-on.

[00:10:40]You'll see this battle described as a disaster for the [music] North Vietnamese, the time the NVA attacked a tiny LRP team and got slaughtered for it.

[00:10:49]The number you'll usually hear is around [music] 869 enemy dead.

[00:10:55]And that number is real.

[00:10:56]>> [music] >> But here's what gets left out.

[00:10:59]That's the casualty figure for the entire [music] Operation Delaware, a month-long campaign, two brigades, thousands of air strikes and artillery missions across the whole [music] valley.

[00:11:11]In plain terms, almost all of those enemy losses came from [music] bombs and shells hitting targets across 25 miles of valley over weeks, [music] not from a sniper duel on one peak over three days.

[00:11:25]On the hill itself, the heavier close-quarters losses were American.

[00:11:30]Four men [music] killed, several seriously wounded.

[00:11:34]There is no reliable count of how many North Vietnamese died [music] on that summit because the attackers fought as scattered snipers and no one tallied them.

[00:11:45]But the version you've heard, that's not the full picture because the title isn't entirely wrong, either. It's just pointing at the wrong battlefield.

[00:11:54]The deadly mistake wasn't the sniper fight.

[00:11:57]It was what the hill made possible.

[00:11:59]By taking and holding Signal Hill, the LURPs switched [music] on the eyes and the radio of the entire campaign.

[00:12:06]That relay and that observation post are what let the Americans rain [music] coordinated air power and artillery onto a sanctuary the NVA thought was untouchable.

[00:12:16]So, the deadly mistake wasn't climbing the hill to attack 30 [music] LURPs.

[00:12:20]The deadly mistake for the NVA was letting the Americans keep it.

[00:12:26]And one [music] more thing worth clearing up because people mix these two constantly.

[00:12:31]Signal Hill is not Hamburger [music] Hill.

[00:12:34]Hamburger Hill was a different fight a year later in May 1969 on the other side of the same valley.

[00:12:41]Different battle, different unit, different year.

[00:12:45]Operation Delaware ended on May 17th, 1968.

[00:12:50]The Americans had torn through enemy caches, destroyed trucks, captured weapons, and proven [music] they could strike the sanctuary at will.

[00:12:58]Then, they withdrew.

[00:13:00]And within weeks, the North Vietnamese moved back into the A Shau.

[00:13:05]A tactical win and a strategic shrug in the same valley was the A Shau.

[00:13:14]As for the men of Signal Hill, >> [music] >> Lieutenant Dilger survived his chest wound and went on to the Special Forces.

[00:13:22]Captain Gooding was promoted and sent to Special Warfare Command.

[00:13:26]Sergeant Parkinson made it home and became a fish and wildlife specialist.

[00:13:32]Sergeant Curtis lived with one eye.

[00:13:35]And a week after leaving the A Shau, Parkinson's assistant team leader, Bob Whitten, was killed in action somewhere else, the way this war so often [music] worked.

[00:13:46]The company that held the peak would soon be redesignated as part of the 75th Infantry [music] Rangers, carrying this fight into its lineage.

[00:13:54]30 men jumped onto a mountain they couldn't land on, lost a helicopter, and four of their own in the first hours, and held a radio antenna long enough to help bring an entire valley under fire.

[00:14:06]Most history books give that a single sentence, if they mention it at all.

[00:14:11]Today, the names of the men who didn't come off that peak are on a wall in Washington.

[00:14:17]If you want more of the small, almost forgotten actions that shaped this war, the ones that deserve more than a footnote, the next one's already on screen.

[00:14:27]Click it and we'll keep telling them.