ROGER H.C. DONLON

Officially, his country was not at war, but for Captain Roger H.C. Donlon that point was irrelevant. He was in harm’s way, and he knew it.

Leading Team A-726, a 12-man detachment from Company C, US Army Seventh Special Forces Group, Donlon was cooperating with 311 South Vietnamese troops, 60 anticommunist Chinese mercenaries called Nungs, Australian Warrant Officer Kevin Conway and Dr Gerald Hickey, an expert on peoples of the mountainous region of South Vietnam, at Camp Nam Dong, 15 miles from the frontier with neighbouring Laos. The Westerners were advisors, assisting the South Vietnamese in their struggle against the Viet Cong insurgency and the North Vietnamese Army intent on unifying Vietnam under communist rule.

“Our job was to train and assist the Vietnamese regulars,” he remembered. But inevitably the Americans would become embroiled in combat. Donlon and his command had been in Vietnam just over a month as he checked the inner perimeter at Nam Dong in the predawn