Ex-chaplain haunted by Vietnam War siege
Sunday marked 50th anniversary of 77-day struggle for a rain-swept plateau in central Vietnam
Retired Navy chaplain Ray W. Stubbe leaned over his diary and ran his finger to the entry for Feb. 23, 1968, the 34th day of the Vietnam War’s siege of Khe Sanh and the day the bunker was hit.
The small, sandbag fortress was on the perimeter. He had spent the night there three weeks before, as a half-dozen nervous young Marines sat under a single lightbulb, making coffee in a ration tin and playing a recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” over and over.
Now the bunker had been smashed with some of those Marines inside, and Stubbe, then 29, a bespectacled Lutheran minister, rushed from a nearby medical shelter to help.
What he found would haunt him for years. The Marines inside were in pieces. One was headless. Stubbe carried what was left of another to a military ambulance. “A hand, an arm, a stringy piece of flesh intertwined with cloth and caked with mud,” he recorded.
“I knew them all,” he wrote. They were barely out of their teens. One had been an altar boy. Another had a death wish since he had accidentally killed several buddies in a friendly fire incident during an earlier tour of Vietnam. “I took this very hard,” Stubbe wrote. Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the war’s most famous siege, a 77-day struggle for a rain-swept plateau in central Vietnam that riveted the U.S. in 1968, and opened a year of often-bloody social upheaval that resonates today.
The siege was front-page news for almost three months. President Lyndon Johnson pored over a scale model of Khe Sanh in the White House. He vowed that the base would never become another Dien Bien Phu, where a besieged French garrison surrendered to the North Vietnamese communists in 1954.
Hundreds of Marines were killed and thousands were wounded at Khe Sanh, as the enemy rained as many as 1,300 shells, rockets and mortars on the base a day. The Americans burrowed into the reddish earth, and shared a muddy, subterranean world with the well-fed local rats.
The prospect of death was ever present, and oblivion could come to anyone in a flash. (A Catholic chaplain, Father Robert Brett, was killed in a rocket attack the day before the bunker was hit.)
Stubbe developed a fast, 10-minute service focused on the Bible story of Jesus calming the stormy sea. He once conducted 13 services around the sprawling base in one day.
Fifty years later, Stubbe sat down at the kitchen table in his brick home in this Milwaukee suburb one gray day earlier this month and began his story. He is 79 and lives alone. He never married, has no close family, doesn’t use the internet and doesn’t like to travel out of the area — a legacy, he believes, of Khe Sanh. He said psychologists call this a “sense of foreshortened future.”
“Part of it was the siege,” he said. He and others developed the mentality that every day might be their last. “We could never count on another day.”
He was affected by other things at Khe Sanh, and suffered so much from PTSD after the war that he had to be hospitalized twice.
He had nightmares and crying jags, and relived scenes like that in the bunker over and over, as if on a record with a skip in it, he said.
Stubbe said he often had a dream where he was in a bunker under attack and was the only one left. He gradually realized that his recovery from the trauma of Khe Sanh would be helped if he chronicled the details of the siege. As an historian of the battle, he could step outside his experiences, he said.
After he got home, he immediately transcribed his diary. “I just had to get this out of me,” he said. He retired from the Navy in 1985 and established a ministry in a Milwaukee church visiting shutins.
All the while he researched Khe Sanh, exchanged letters with veterans and their families, and gathered memorabilia and artifacts. He wrote books, essays and sermons, and his work is often cited by historians. He founded the group, Khe Sanh Veterans Inc., in 1983.
When Stubbe donated much of his material to the Wisconsin veterans museum in 2005, he said it took two trucks to carry it all away.
And still, an upstairs room is filled with mementos, photographs, maps, plaques, news clippings and boxes.
One famous photograph, which appeared in Life magazine, shows Stubbe conducting a service at Khe Sanh. He stands with head bowed, hands clasping a piece of paper, as a group of Marines sit around him in prayer.
Stubbe said he realized later that nobody was wearing a helmet, a potentially catastrophic mistake at Khe Sanh.