It was known to local missionaries as “the Hill of Angels,” but to the occupying Marines, Con Thien was a little piece of hell. Just two miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, it was a barren, bulldozed plateau of red dirt 525 feet high and ringed with barbed wire, studded with artillery revetments and crisscrossed with trenches and sand bag-covered bunkers. To the east stretched the “McNamara Line,” the 2,000-foot-wide “barrier” ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, which the Marines had cleared and sowed with seismic and acoustic sensors and minefields.
The Marines at Con Thien were the human equivalent of a tripwire, there to block North Vietnamese ground incursions. In reality, the men became a sitting target for scores of North Vietnamese artillery pieces, which rained down shells on their positions 24 hours a day. Between February 1967, when they arrived, and their departure two years later, 1,419 men were killed and another 9,265 wounded; more than 7,500 North Vietnamese were killed and an unknown number wounded.
