On January 30, 1968, John Ligato and about 150 fellow Marines from Alpha Company experienced hell on Earth. They were awakened in the middle of the night by their company commander and sent to nearby Hue City in Vietnam to help the troops of an overrun compound. When they finally arrived, they were greeted with cheers. The troops of the MACV Compound had just repelled an enemy surge within their walls.
“They had been through hell, and they thought we were there to save the day, but little did we know the numerical numbers of NVA there,” Ligato said in the video below.
Ligato and his ill-equipped company were walking into a deathtrap against nine battalions of highly-trained North Vietamese soldiers, outnumbering each man by a few hundred.
“Most of us thought we’d never get out,” Ligato said.
The odds were against them, but miraculously, they pulled through. John Ligato sums up the company’s success with this quote:
Americans Adapt. We Improvise. The most ferocious fighting machine the world has ever seen is a 19-year-old pissed off Marine. Because you’ll take that kid from Detroit or Mississippi and you’ll train him in Marine Corps boot camp, and you’ll put him in a situation that’s foreign to him, and he will adapt and improvise and become that situation and deal with it.
Watch John Ligato tell his harrowing experience in this 3-minute American Heroes Channel video:
American Heroes Channel, YouTube