Ripley’s Raiders Vietnam Chronicles

About the Book

How familiar is this? You attend a reunion and inevitably several members recollecting a significant event begin arguing over when that event actually occurred. As you listen to them debating over the circumstances you realize that neither has a clue as to the facts or sequence of events.

Since 2003 I have attended Third Battalion Third Marines Viet Nam Era reunions and listened to my fellow warriors of Lima Company recollecting stories of our glory days. I noticed that every year the details of events became more and more obscure. Of course one could consult the official Command Chronologies, but not everyone has access to them. Even if you do have access to this information, it takes time to wade through all the data; a task that the average individual would find tedious. Some of the copies of the Command Chronologies are almost unreadable due to poor quality reproduction methods used. Wouldn’t it be helpful if all the information was assembled in one area and available for quick reference? This project was an answer to that problem.

I started with the Lima Company roster for the end of February 1967, which listed all the members of Company Lima that participated in the battles with the North Vietnamese Army during the first five days of March for which we acquired the tag of “Ripley’s Raiders”. I then determined the Marine who had been with the unit the longest and the Marine who had been there the least length of time. My goal for this project was to chronicle all the entries I could find on Lima Company during their tours of duty. This required compiling information for a period of twenty eight months: December 1966 thru March 1968. I included the names of all other members of Lima Company during this time frame to act as memory joggers for the reader.

I accessed the National Archives on line and in thirteen months transcribed everything I could find from the Command Chronologies into one chronological record of the events experienced by the members of Ripley’s Raiders.

About the Author

I was born in the isolated town of Fort Bragg and lived with three generations of relatives on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California. Unlike the majority of my relatives, I enlisted in the military at age seventeen to see what the world had to offer. By age twenty, I had been stationed in Japan before assignment to the Fleet Marine Force Vietnam as a combat corpsman with an infantry battalion. I lived, ate, fought, and slept in the mud and jungles on the DMZ with a remarkable company of Marines who became known as Ripley’s Raiders. During my entire time in the service, I corresponded regularly with my high school sweetheart. Those letters surfaced thirty-eight years later, and I used them as a framework to chronicle my memories.