The Battle for Hamburger Hill

At 08:01 A.M. on the morning of May 10th, 1969, the first helicopter-lift of soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of the U.S. 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment set down into a small Landing Zone (LZ) along a ridgeline near the Laotian border.  The ridge ran southeast towards the summit of a hill marked on the American maps as “Dong Ap Bia.”  Ap Bia mountain.  The local Montagnard tribes in the area called it “The Mountain of the Crouching Beast.”  The Americans from the famous 101st Airborne Division had landed in the middle of the base area for the 29th North Vietnamese Army (NVA) Regiment - one of the best in the NVA - known as “The Pride of Ho Chi Minh.”  It was the beginning of an operation to clear the northern A-Shau valley of the NVA and their supply base - Operation Apache Snow.

Meanwhile, the 1/506th - another Airborne battalion from the 101st - had landed about 4 kilometers south at another LZ.  Over the next 11 days, two more allied battalions and hundreds of reinforcements from NVA camps across the border in Laos would join the battle for a mountain that would come to be known as “Hamburger Hill” - so named for high losses of the soldiers involved.

The battle for the summit of hill 937 (the mountain’s height in meters - also noted on the American maps) would be the one of the best-known and most costly of the Vietnam War.  In the end, the Americans captured the hill and inflicted high losses on the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers they faced.  The NVA also claimed victory - they had held the hill through 10 days of infantry assaults, an incredible volume of air and artillery strikes, and inflicted punishing losses on the Americans.