West Dickens Avenue: A Marine at Khe Sanh

West Dickens Avenue: A Marine at Khe Sanh

by John Corbett
West Dickens Avenue: A Marine at Khe Sanh

West Dickens Avenue: A Marine at Khe Sanh

by John Corbett

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Overview

In January 1968, John Corbett and his fellow leathernecks of the 26th Marine Regiment fortified a remote outpost at a place in South Vietnam called Khe Sanh. Within days of their arrival, twenty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded the base. What followed over the next seventy-seven days became one of the deadliest fights of the Vietnam War—and one of the greatest battles in military history.

Private First Class Corbett made do with little or no sleep for days on end. The enemy bombarded the base incessantly. Extremes of heat, cold, and fog added to the misery, as did all manner of wounds and injuries too minor to justify evacuation from frontline positions. The emotional toll was tremendous as the Marines saw their friends suffer and die every day of the siege. Corbett relates these experiences through the eyes of a twenty-year-old but with the mind and maturity of a man now in his fifties. His story of life, death, and growing up on the front lines at Khe Sanh speaks for all of the Marines caught up in the epic siege of the Vietnam War.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307417718
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/18/2007
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 608,793
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

**AUTHOR PHOTO**
[credit:]

John Corbett returned home to Nyack, New York, following his service in Vietnam. He now lives in Key Largo, Florida. West Dickens Avenue is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

1: Enlistment
 
Nyack, New York, July 1967
 
I left school during my first year of college. I romanticized about joining the French foreign legion, knowing I didn’t even need to speak French. All I had to do was sign a five-year contract and they would teach me French. My youthful dreams of riding a camel across desert sand dunes, wearing a white kepi hat on my head, had faded. “Greetings,” said Uncle Sam’s draft notice that arrived in the mail. The United States wanted me for military service and undoubtedly would send me to Vietnam. I ripped up the draft notice in front of my mother and father at the dinner table. My act didn’t go over well with my law-abiding, conservative, Irish-Catholic parents.
 
I decided to go to Canada and be a draft dodger. Canada is much closer than Corsica, where the foreign legion was. I wanted some adventure, but not the adventure my government wanted to provide, such as sending me to Vietnam.
 
I hadn’t thought much about America’s involvement in Vietnam. World affairs were just that, a world away, in my mind. I was rebellious and determined not to let Uncle Sam tell me what to do. I could dream about traversing sand dunes with the French foreign legion but not about being a drafted government-issue GI Joe.
 
I prepared to leave for Canada; I was going to Montreal. Even my high school French books were packed.
 
O’Donoghue’s Tavern, 66 Main Street, Nyack, New York
 
The tavern was on lower Main Street, where the street slopes and terminates on the west shore of the Hudson River. The river is almost at its widest point here. The city of Tarrytown can be seen on the opposite shore, three miles across the river, night or day, except when fog enshrouds this section of the river valley. Nyack, my hometown, is twenty-five miles north of New York City. The river is not as clean as it was when Henry Hudson first discovered and explored it, sailing in his ship the Half Moon, but the river’s towering majestic palisades haven’t changed since Henry was here.
 
Sipping a beer, I glanced around at familiar surroundings. I wondered if I would ever see this place again. I wondered how I would do in Canada.
 
While pondering my future as a draft dodger, I saw a familiar face coming through the doorway of O’Donoghue’s. The man walked with a limp that I didn’t recall his having before. It was Tom Dunnigan, an old school chum. The last time I saw him, more than a year ago, he was leaving for Parris Island, South Carolina, the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp.
 
We had some beers together. He told me he had just been released from a naval hospital after months of convalescing from wounds suffered in Vietnam. His right side was partially paralyzed and he walked with a cane. He had a steel plate in his skull to close a hole inflicted by shrapnel. He was wounded in Vietnam by an enemy mortar shell. He had joined the Marines and was trained, shipped to Vietnam, and wounded, all within a year. Just months ago the parishioners at our local Catholic Church, Saint Ann’s, where Tom and I were once altar boys, held a prayer service for him, because he wasn’t expected to survive his wounds.
 
We had attended the same schools, played ball, fished, and gotten into mischief as we grew up. Conversation flowed easily that night. Over the beers I listened to his stories, one by one, about ambushes, about hills whose names were numbers on a military map, and about villages and provinces with funny-sounding names. He told me about Vietnamese people I didn’t know. He said the Vietnamese had odd-sounding terms for their money: dong and piasters. I watched his eyes as he related his stories.
 
Tom’s beers had gotten to him and he was all storied out. I was glad, because I was tired of listening to his Vietnam and Marine stories. I was ready to go home. Thoughts of Canada were still on my mind. There was a long silence at our small round table. He looked at me and stared into my eyes. Suddenly he spoke. “Jack, you don’t have the balls to enlist in the Marines and go to Vietnam.”
 
“Wanna bet, Tom?”
 
The Recruiter
 
There is courage in alcohol. I am here this morning with Tom Dunnigan at the Marine Corps recruiting station, which is nothing more than a trailer in the corner of a large parking lot at the shopping mall on Route 59 in Nanuet, a town just west of Nyack.
 
I am walking slowly, not because of apprehension but because Tom can’t walk fast. He limps along slowly with his cane. We are an odd pair as we approach the trailer: a limping Vietnam veteran and me, sporting my 1960s-style long hair, a trademark of my rebellious generation.
 
This July 1967, the Marines are offering the option of enlisting for as little as two years of active duty. After two years, you are discharged. It’s kind of a Vietnam War special. But there’s a catch: If you enlist for only two years of active duty, you are sent to Vietnam with the infantry. A two-year enlistee receives no specialized training for a career when he becomes a civilian again. There would be no computer school, no air traffic control school, and no radar technician school. The two-year enlistee would be trained as infantry— learning about rifles, machine guns, grenades, flamethrowers, bayonets, killing—and sent to Vietnam.
 
I’m face-to-face with the Marine recruiter sitting at his desk inside the trailer. The recruiter has been to Vietnam and wears ribbons and medals on his chest. He forewarns me, before letting me sign the proper papers, that as a Marine in the jungles of Vietnam it will be no party. He is saying there’s a good chance I will be wounded or killed. To emphasize his point, he takes a long, hard look at Tom, who is sitting next to me at the desk. The recruiter is staring at the side of Tom’s head that holds the steel plate to keep his skull closed. That’s the wound he got in the country where I am going. The recruiter is trying to make sure I get the message before I sign. The message I am getting is this: Though the recruiter has an obligation to recruit, he is not in the meat business. The Vietnam War is escalating as I sit here. In Vietnam, more American soldiers are dying every day.
 
“Where do I sign?” The recruiter shakes his head in disbelief. I don’t think he wants me to enlist. I sign the papers and he half-heartedly takes them from me, one at a time. He tells me I will be hearing from him when the necessary arrangements are complete, then he suggests I get drunk, and stay drunk, until I hear from him. So I do.
 
Tom and I are drinking beer again, and he has a big grin on his face as he tells me that I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into, enlisting in the Marine Corps. He spends the afternoon trying to prepare me.
 
The Following Morning
 
Awakening at my parent’s home on Mill Street, I break the news of my enlistment. My mother is disbelieving, upset, and worried about the possibility of losing me in Vietnam. She says I should have joined the army. My dad is proud but worried. American soldiers are dying in Vietnam.
 
Whitehall Street
 
I report to Whitehall Street in New York City. The government building has worn stone steps, and as I climb them I wonder how many thousands of men before me have come up this staircase. Draftees and enlistees from adjacent counties report here to receive a physical examination. Inside, the Whitehall building is a zoo. Men crowd the hallways: conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War, divinity students who have come for a deferral, married men with children to support, and men from apple pie America who think they are doing the right thing going to this war. There are long-haired hippies wearing love beads and several men talking to themselves, feigning mental illness. Others complain of back pain, which they probably don’t have.
 
I have passed the physical, the hearing test, the sight test, and the grab-your-nuts-and-cough test. I have left barefoot prints in the powder in a black rubber tray on the floor. The impressions show that I am not flat footed. I can walk and march.
 
Destination Parris Island
 
Our bus from New York City crosses the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River, then carries us to Newark Airport in New Jersey. At the airport I board a propeller-driven commercial airliner that will take us to Charleston, South Carolina. This flight, my first ever, is bumpy.
 
It is scorching hot on the Charleston airport’s tarmac. The Marines are sending a bus from Parris Island to transport us to their boot camp.
 

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