Co-written by Robert Maras and Charles Sasser, Blood in the Hills: The Story of Khe Sanh: The Most Savage Fight of the Vietnam War (Lyons Press, 288 pp. $26.95, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle) is a memoir of Maras’ Marine Corps service before, after, and primarily during his experiences when he took part in the April-May 1967 hill fights around Khe Sanh.
The book is organized into forty-six chapters; each is a stand-alone story. The reader gets immersed in virtually non-stop, down-and-dirty, grunt fighting directed at killing the enemy—and surviving long enough to go home.
Combat often has been called interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror. The Khe Sanh hill fights were more like interminable terror punctuated by moments of boredom.
Maras produces some great thoughts and gallows humor in the midst of this interminable terror. To wit:
- “When the shells exploded, they seemed to blast a hole in the universe through which you caught a glimpse of eternity.”
- “For those who fight for life, it has a special flavor the protected shall never know.”
- “It was shooting and killing for breakfast, shooting and killing for lunch, shooting and killing for dinner.”
- “Golf’s Corpsmen had more guts than a gut wagon in a slaughterhouse”
Maras knew that back in the World, higher-up strategists were moving colored pins around maps. As they did, Maras’s commander would move his troops to mirror the pins. Maras asked himself: “I wonder if God has a map of the universe with colored pins.”
The Khe Sanh hill fights concentrated around Hills 861, 881N and 881S.
The malfunctioning M-16 is covered at great length throughout this book. Despite their desperation and anger, and knowing the M-16 was defective and unreliable, Maras and his fellow stalwart Marines followed orders and without hesitation assaulted the enemy as if they themselves were kings of the hills—which, in the end, they proved to be.
Blood in the Hills is a must-read.
—Bob Wartman
Books in Review II 