A little piece of hell

Con Thien showed US Marines at their best and American political, military leaders at their worst

It was known to local missionaries as “the Hill of Angels,” but to the occupying Marines, Con Thien was a little piece of hell. Just two miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, it was a barren, bulldozed plateau of red dirt 525 feet high and ringed with barbed wire, studded with artillery revetments and crisscrossed with trenches and sand bag-covered bunkers. To the east stretched the “McNamara Line,” the 2,000-foot-wide “barrier” ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, which the Marines had cleared and sowed with seismic and acoustic sensors and minefields.

The Marines at Con Thien were the human