When the Year Was Still New….

Walter Nicklin
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read
From the movie “Platoon”

The poppoppop they hear is not celebratory fireworks.

As night falls on the first day of the New Year in Vietnam and morning breaks in Eastern Time Zone of the United States (11 hours behind), the Viet Cong and North Vietnams regulars begin their assault. Their target is the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam’s Tay Ninh Province. Among the American troops is an enlisted man and Yale dropout named Oliver Stone (2nd Platoon, B Company, 3rd Battalion).

Poppoppop….

Adding to the bursts of automatic rifle fire are flares, rockets, mortars, grenades. Visually a beautiful spectacle to behold, just like a fireworks display, were it not for the screams and fear cutting through and permeating the hot, humid, heavy air. The American position, near the Ho Chi Minh Trail, is itself in one of Vietnam’s most eerily beautiful places: centered around the prominent, mystical landmark known as Nui Ba Den (Black Virgin Mountain). It’s sheer, solid granite rises abruptly 3,000 feet above rubber plantations, rice fields, and endless jungle.

Foreshadowing the Tet Offensive later in the month, the attack comes six hours before the end of a mutually agreed upon truce proposed by Pope Paul VI. The First of January should be, in the Pope’s words, a symbolic “day of peace.”

Fanatical if not suicidal, wave after wave of the enemy — whose total strength is estimated at several thousand — hurl themselves against the U.S. infantrymen’s foxholes. In some places, sappers break the defensive lines and, armed with explosives, then blow themselves up, as well as all the Americans nearby.

The battle lasts several hours, with enemy units finally withdrawing around 5 a.m. the next day, January 2. Without intense air and artillery support, the battle’s outcome could have easily have been a U.S. defeat. As it is, the American dead and dying — almost 200 — liter the battlefield.

The fighting’s intensity provides the inspiration for the final battle scene in Stone’s film “Platoon,” the first Hollywood movie written and directed by a Vietnam veteran. Stone is also inspired — in a reactive way — by John Wayne’s gung-ho-war movie “Green Berets,” released later in 1968 when Stone returns home. In 1986, “Platoon” would win Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.

Also serving in the 25th Infantry and similarly inspired is future National Book Award winner Larry Heinermann, whose 2005 Vietnam memoir would be called “Black Virgin Mountain.”

The year to come, the 1968 just now beginning, will also shape — if not inspire — Stone and Heinermann’s generational cohort, the Baby Boomers, for the rest of their lives. Not to mention generations yet unborn, whose understanding of the world they’ve inherited often circles back, inexorably and sometimes inexplicably, to this climactic year of the Sixties.

News of the New Year’s Day battle at Black Virgin Mountain goes largely unreported at the time, and few people have any reason to predict that 1968 will be especially memorable. Of course, it’s another U.S. Presidential election year, and attention must be paid to that; but quite separate from campaigning and political argument, happening are other things maybe even more important. Who knew?

1968: A Year Like No Other

Commentary and reflections on the 50th anniversary of that fractured year 1968. (Chicago Convention photo ©Dennis Brack.)

Walter Nicklin

Written by

We shall not cease from exploration & the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started & know the place for the first time.

1968: A Year Like No Other

Commentary and reflections on the 50th anniversary of that fractured year 1968. (Chicago Convention photo ©Dennis Brack.)

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