Phong Nga watched Ghe Tou Vinh slide from cover and crawl forward. [i]‘What does he know that I do not?’[/i] Assuming Ghe knew something Phong did not, he followed the sapper out of cover, trying to hide in the underbrush as much as possible. The group advanced about a hundred meters when the American built .30 caliber machine gun opened up on them. Phong Nga was not advancing any further. Whatever gains his Sapper brother made they would be lost on Private First Class Phong Nga from Nghệ An Province, a coastal fishing village where he learned to fish with his brothers on their father and uncle’s fishing boats.

A three-round burst struck the hapless rifleman. The first round struck the crown of his skull and penetrated deep into his throat. The second round struck the left side of the top of his skull and ripped the lower half of his mandible of as the projectile exited his head. The third round struck him in the shoulder and penetrated past through his lungs tearing through his bowels, ending its track in the meaty portion of his thigh.

Phong Nga would never get back to his boyhood sweetheart, Dung Mai. He would never fish the Tonkin Bay with his father, uncles and brothers. His body lay still in the heat of the jungle within an ever-widening pool of blood rapidly coagulating in the omnipresent sun baking the earth. It was the end of the Young man’s life. His head barely recognizeable from the spattering of bullets that ripped it apart.