For some, Hill 488 was just another landmark in the jungles of Vietnam. For the eighteen men of Charlie Company, it was a last stand—this is the stirring combat memoir written by Ray Hildreth, one of the unit's survivors. On June 13, 1966, men of the 1st Recon Battalion, 1st Marine Division were stationed on Hill 488. Before the week was over, they would fight the battle that would make them the most highly decorated small unit in the entire history of the U.S. military, winning a Congressional Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, thirteen Silver Stars, and eighteen Purple Hearts—some of them posthumously. During the early evening of June 15, a battalion of hardened North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong—outnumbering the Americans 25-to-1—threw everything they had at the sixteen Marines and two Navy corpsmen for the rest of that terror-filled night. Every man who held the hill was either killed or wounded defending the ground with unbelievable courage and unflagging determination—even as reinforcements were on the way. All they had to do was make it until dawn... Charles W. Sasser has been a full-time freelance writer, journalist, and photographer since 1979. He is a veteran of both the U.S. Navy (journalist) and U.S. Army (Special Forces, the Green Berets), a combat veteran, and former combat correspondent wounded in action. He also served fourteen years as a police officer (in Miami, Florida, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a homicide detective). He is author, co-author, or contributing author of more than thirty books and novels, including One Shot-One Kill and Hill 488 . Sasser now lives on a ranch in Chouteau, Oklahoma, with his wife Donna. Chapter One My dad was fifty years old and working on his second wife when I was born. I had two brothers and a half-sister, but they were so much older that it was like I was an only child. Mom died when I was fifteen, which left Dad and me bacheloring it together in the rough neighborhoods of North Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was an old man by the time I reached high school. He hadn't the energy to ride herd on a rebellious teenager. I started running with a bad crowd at Rogers High School. Some might have said I was the bad crowd. Whichever, the cops picked me up for burglarizing a vending machine two months before graduation. That was in March 1965. A couple of other guys and I were popping Laundromat soap boxes and rifling the machines for coins. I was seventeen and therefore no longer a juvenile, according to Oklahoma law. I went to the big boy's jail at the County Courthouse downtown. Talk about a hollow feeling when that steel door clanged behind my punk ass. I shook all over. It reminded me that I wasn't that stud I thought I was. Dad left me behind bars for four days to think things over before he showed up to get me out. I did a lot of thinking too. Here I was four months from being out on my own, from being an independent adult, and I was already on my way to prison. "You're heading down a bad road, son," he said. "Yes, sir." "So what are you going to do about it?" "Go in the Marines -- if they'll still have me." Like I said, I had been doing a lot of thinking. I had wanted to be a Marine as far back as I could recall. My infatuation with the Marine Corps began after I watched an old Wallace Beery movie set during World War II. Marines were the fightingest, baddest warriors on land or sea anywhere in the world. It took a real man to wear the Marine Corps uniform. "What are you going to do when you get out of school?" friends asked. "Join the Marine Corps," I automatically responded. Well, it was time to put up or shut up. Dad nodded in that slow way of his. The Marines were honest and honorable, and they knew how to jerk the kink out of a bad boy's tail. "Dad?" Dad walked away. He left me in jail one more day just for good measure. My half-brother Homer, a retired Tulsa police detective, talked him into getting me out. By the time he made my bail, I could hardly wait to run down to the nearest recruiting station. I had embarrassed my dad and embarrassed myself, but surely I could redeem myself in the Marines. I received a deferred sentence and probation on the condition that I enlist in the Marines, if they would have me. I signed up on the delayed entry program along with a couple of high school buddies, Gary Montouri and Stephen Barnhart, which meant we were allowed to graduate from high school before shipping out to boot camp. That day I raised my hand and swore loyalty and obedience to God, country, and the Marine Corps, not necessarily in that order, and promised to rain fire and brimstone upon all enemies happened to be only two weeks after the buildup of troops began in Vietnam with the landing of the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Da Nang on 9 March 1965. Still, at that time, Vietnam was little more than a once-a-week footnote on NBC News. Vietnam was a long way off. Most people, including me, couldn't have p