Episode 31: Hamburger Hill

Military planners referred to the 3,000-foot tall highland in the rugged, jungle-shrouded A Sầu Valley as “Hill 937.” North Vietnamese Army fighters called it “The Mountain of the Crouching Beast.” American Soldiers would come to call it Hamburger Hill. For 10 days, from 10 to 20 May, 1969, the cursed piece of rock would torture, confound, and aggrieve a group of American Soldiers from the 187th Infantry Regiment, “Rakassans.” It was a meat-grinder of a fight, waged by a group of lightly armed GIs against fresh, trained North Vietnamese regulars, against almost impossible terrain, against brutal weather. At the end of the ten-day battle, which saw some of the hardest fighting of the war in the decades since, that fight has come to serve as a metaphor for the Vietnam War itself: a maddening fool’s errand in which Soldiers were sacrificed for a political ploy with no strategic value. We’re releasing this episode 52 years to the day that the Battle for Hamburger Hill ended. This is a longer episode, more than an hour and a half, and in it we describe the point of Hamburger Hill, the American strategy behind the fight for it, and the way that fight played it. In this episode, you’ll hear from some of the men who fought there, some of whom never truly left Hill 937. You’ll also hear from Dr. Erik Villard, a historian who’s studied the battle, the terrain, and the North Vietnamese defenders. This is truly an enlightening, gutting, and inspiring program, one that honors the Rakassans who fought and died there.