= new reply since forum marked as read
My brother was a personnel clerk at our Division HQ at Eagle and I was a plt ldr in the field. As the senior field plt ldr I was slated to take 25% of my company's field troops to the show.
But just before Christmas my bn CO pulled me to fill an XO slot in another company. The Catch-22 was that since I was no longer in the field, I was ineligible to go to the show.
When Christmas Day came, I couldn't feature being stuck in our basecamp at LZ Sally. So I persuaded our bn chaplain, who was choppering out to conduct services at each of our field units, to give me a ride and drop me off with a grunt platoon in the jungle for the day. That's how I ended up spending the day with plt ldr Joe Rufty and his D-2/501 Inf. "Delta Raiders" platoon on what the men dubbed 'Christmas Hill'.
After Christmas I persuaded the bn CO to send me back to the field as a plt ldr, and Joe Rufty and I arranged to have our platoons work together on the operations we were doing. Right up until he was KIA about a month after Christmas Hill.
It wasn't until 20 years later that I found Joe's family. And I finally was able to share with them my memories of Joe's last Christmas. We met, together with others we found who'd served with Joe, to lay a wreath at his panel at the Wall.
I'm happy for all of you who got to see Bob Hope in Vietnam. I know how much that meant in those circumstances. I'm happy my brother got to go--even if, many years later, he'd rub it in a bit when he'd tell me about what a great show I missed.
All in all, though, I'm happy about the way my Christmas went. I wouldn't trade that for anything--not even the Bob Hope show.
Thanks for the thread, brother. 