There was a time when I burned through military history books by the gross. I read famous authors like Band of Brothers' Stephen Ambrose and not-so-famous guys like Keith William Nolan. My history book reading has fallen off lately and so I just learned Nolan died three years ago from cancer. His specialty was the Vietnam War and his works relied heavily on interviews with American veterans who fought there.
Ten years ago, I had vague plans of producing a film based on Nolan's book about Operation Buffalo, which centered around the ambush of a Marine company in 1967. As I was returning to Cambodia for a project with State Dept./USAID and Warner Bros.—a story in itself—I made plans to visit the battlefields in neighboring Vietnam.
And so I contacted Keith William Nolan and asked for an option to develop a project based around his 1991 book Operation Buffalo: USMC Fight for the DMZ. I mentioned I was a former Marine who had served during the Vietnam era.
He let me have the option free.
That is simply not done in these parts.
By email, I thanked him for his generosity.
I CORPS
In time, I toured the landscape of Operation Buffalo, a dangerous patch of ground still peppered with Viet Cong mines and booby traps as well as unexploded American and North Vietnamese artillery shells. I walked the narrow, red dirt lanes on which B Company was ambushed in an action that grew into the bloodiest day for the Marines in Vietnam.I drew a crowd of Vietnamese, hardly any who had lived there back in the day. (Most had been relocated in 1966, the year prior to the fight.) At one point, I was invited into a hut and asked to tell a few elders what I knew of the event. With kids and dogs yelling outside, I spoke in bursts of English which my interpreter translated into Vietnamese, explaining how a battalion of North Vietnamese lured an understrength Marine company into an trap that wiped out two platoons and shot to pieces a second company that came to help. Many of the Marine M-16 rifles malfunctioned, and men were cut down desperately trying to remove jammed rounds from their weapons. Some enemy troops infiltrated Marine positions dressed in captured American uniforms. Their assault was backed with flamethrowers and heavy artillery—based in nearby North Vietnam.
IN LEATHERNECK SQUARE
As the sky grew darker outside, we drank tea and smoked cigarettes. Reciting Nolan's book from memory as best I could, I told how the Marines returned the next day to retrieve the bodies of their dead and that turned into another fight. More reinforcements poured in on both sides, culminating in a massive North Vietnamese attack preceded by an artillery barrage. The Marines mowed down the charging troops, sealed off breaches in their lines and held. The enemy withdraw back to safety in North Vietnam. Marine patrols from the hill base at Con then set out once more to sweep the area, and the pattern of Operation Buffalo would be repeated in minor and major keys for the next several years.Outside the village kids gathered around as I reemerged from the hut. There was a huge freaking spider the size of a catcher's mitt hanging in a web attached to a nearby pole. I refused to look at the monster. I feared the kids would knock the hulking arachnid down with a stick and chase it toward me to see what the tall foreigner would do.
I came home and the option expired and my movie idea eventually migrated into a rather large folder of unfinished products. Nolan wrote ten books on the Vietnam War, but never made a pile of money. His publisher wanted him to write about "popular wars" because Vietnam didn't sell. But Nolan felt he had an obligation to veterans who were often treated quite shabbily, called "baby killers," and depicted in the media as drug addicts, psychos and losers. He felt someone had to tell their story.
He stayed true to that calling.
A non-smoker, 44-year-old Keith William Nolan died of lung cancer. He left behind a little girl.
