On Friday, November 8, 1965 the 1/503 Airborne Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade moved into War Zone D as part of Operation Hump. The mission: search and destroy.
What they found instead was a reinforced regiment of the Viet Cong main force, entrenched on a jungle-covered ridge the Americans would come to call Hill 65. By nightfall, 49 young soldiers would not walk out of that jungle. The battle — brutal, chaotic, and ultimately inconclusive — would become the first major engagement between U.S. ground forces and the enemy in the Vietnam War.
For more than fifty years, the full story has remained scattered: in classified documents, in letters sent home that were never answered, in the memories of aging veterans who could not bring themselves to speak of it, and in the silence of the families left behind.
This is their story.
It is also the story of one man's search — the nephew of PFC Dennis David Rutowski, who fell on Hill 65, and who has spent decades gathering testimony, documents, and memories so that those men might finally be given a voice.
“The ghosts of Hill 65 deserve to be heard. Not as statistics. Not as casualties. As men who were there — who lived and breathed and were afraid and were brave — and who gave everything.”
— Paul Rutowski