Hill Of Angels

[thedrifter]

Hill Of Angels
By THOMAS P. EVANS
Published: May 28, 2006

We called him Lightning, and because I remembered only the nickname, I couldn't locate his real name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.

I watched two of my men get taken out by the same artillery round while defending the hill called Con Thien: Lightning and Capt. John Ryan. So I searched all the names near the captain's.

Finally I found him: James Ellis Canidate. PFC. Montgomery, Alabama. 12 October, 1967. Column 27E, Line 93.

Years after my tour, I read about Con Thien, where I was a newly promoted Marine sergeant in charge of a 15-man mortar section. "Fish in a barrel," "the meat grinder," "the thousand yard stare," "post traumatic stress disorder," "acceptable losses" - we never heard those phrases on the hill, which took some of the heaviest North Vietnamese shellings of the war.

Although the enemy guns were dug in on the other side of the demilitarized zone, far beyond the range of our mortars, we did our jobs as well as anybody.

We all knew we would win the war. We were in it together. While Newark and Detroit burned in racial strife - something Canidate knew about, growing up black in Montgomery in the '50s and '60s - we were a band of brothers, black and white.

On Saturday nights we sang Sam Cooke's tune, "Another Saturday night, and I ain't got nobody." While filling sandbags, we described the great food we would eat when we got home, the girls we would date, the cars we would own, the music we would listen to, the colleges we would attend and the businesses we would start that would make us rich.

Left unsaid was our wish to enjoy a simple freedom everybody back home enjoyed - not being on the alert for the enemy all the time.

"The weather has been nice here the past couple days," I wrote to my folks Oct. 11, 1967. "It's quite a relief from the rain we were having."

The average age of servicemen in the Vietnam War was 19. Forty years older, we understand the real tragedy of that Wall of 58,000-plus names.

If we haven't set the world on fire by now, we have at least left our footprints in the sand. Most of us have children. Some of us are grandparents. Most of us have worked at least half our lives at one job or another. Some of us have retired.

Who knows what James Ellis Canidate might have become? He was a teenager when he died. He never married, never raised children, never attended college, never voted, never held a job and never owned a home.

I didn't pound my fists on the Wall and cry when I found his name that day, and I haven't visited the Vietnam memorial since. But I think about him every so often, and about that Vietnamese hill he and so many others died on, Con Thien - which means "Hill of Angels."

The name seems to fit.

Thomas P. Evans is a Vietnam veteran from Shelton, Conn.

Ellie

[Parr]

I'll have to look for that book. Thanks .

[Dskrdlant]

Hey, I was in Echo 2/1, 3rd platoon, charlie squad., line company, on Con Thien in 67 and part 68. remember the shelling every day, patrols, did the point man for two man army sniper to some church, they missed him. Sgt Skrdlant.

[BigPhil]

Was their in April/May of 67, With Alpha 1/4. We were hit every day,at about 20/60 rounds per day. Were hit on May 8 by two reinforced NVA battalions, Alpha and Delta Co. lost 44 KIA and 110 wounded. It was a Hill of Angles.

[Preacher]

I was there in 1967 with 81 mortars, 1/4.

[cyberghostx13]

Well I was at A-3 mostly, maybe A-2. I remember the reinforced bunkers tho, best I was ever in. We used to thro our bayonets inside and stick 'em in the posts. Time was late spring-summer of 1968. With Foxtrot Co. 2/26.