Boot camp in the Army is a miserable experience, but Peter Lemon loved it. The brutal regimen of calisthenics, formation drills, hand to hand combat and weapon training, clicked for the young man, and Lemon embraced his new military life enthusiastically. He graduated basic training at the top of his class, and repeated his performance in Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Thus, when Lemon’s Boeing 707 departed the U.S. on July 24, 1969, he looked forward to his Vietnam deployment confidently, even eagerly; secure in the knowledge that he fought for a just and honorable cause.
The reality of the Vietnam War dashed Lemon’s patriotic idealism, and he described his twelve-month tour as “filled with incidents of callousness, desperation, unfriendliness, and escape through drugs.” Later in life, Lemon recalled several brutal experiences that shattered his faith in America’s fight. He witnessed an allied officer execute three enemy soldiers while they attempted to surrender. A fellow soldier killed a hated lieutenant by throwing a hand grenade into the officer’s outdoor toilet. The South Vietnamese America’s soldiers fought and died for, however, ground away at Lemon more than the horrors of war, and he began to agree with the locals who persisted in asking him, “What are you Americans doing here?”
Against the backdrop of this gruesome conflict, and the depressing questions it raised Lemon’s mind, it is unsurprising that he joined his fellow soldiers in relieving the tension through one of Vietnam’s most readily accessible entertainments, marijuana. Life in the military, even in a war zone, is often boring. Days go by when nothing happens, and Lemon frequently passed the time with his friends by partying and smoking pot. He later said, “All the guys were heads. We’d sit around smoking grass and getting stoned and talking about when we’d get to go home.” Thus, when Lemon and his platoon returned to Fire Support Base Illingworth after completing their reconnaissance patrol on the evening of March 31, 1970, he and his friends did what many disenchanted American soldiers did throughout their tour of Vietnam hell, and promptly got stoned before heading to their racks. They’d expected another uneventful night, but the massing soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had other ideas.
Located near the Ho Chi Minh Trail that threaded along the Cambodian border, Fire Support Base Illingworth was an isolated outpost that existed for one purpose: baiting the NVA. In theory, the base was a quickly built, and easily dismantled, lure designed to draw NVA forces out where American air power could annihilate them. Following the NVA’s destruction, the flimsy base was disassembled and rebuilt near other enemy supply routes where the tactic was repeated.
Unfortunately for Fire Support Base Illingworth, and one rather stoned Sgt. Lemon, when the NVA attacked at 2:17 AM on April 1st, 1970, the enemy’s nighttime assault negated America’s overwhelming advantage. Aircraft who attempted to bomb the enemy risked killing United States soldiers, and the 220 Americans stationed at Illingworth suddenly found themselves defending an indefensible base without air support as 400 NVA soldiers swarmed in to attack.
The NVA had not, however, anticipated Sgt. Peter Lemon… or the forty tons of eight-inch artillery shells mistakenly delivered to Illingworth the day before their assault.