. >> typically, the rounds were coming from a place called corock. the marine gets on the horn and start sending arty, arty, arty corock. and everybody went into a first hole they could find. >> my troops used the tease me all the time. they used to kid me about being uniform always dirty. red clay all over the front of the uniform. i could go from vertical to prone in a millisecond. >> life on the base lived under cover. >> no safe place at khe sahn. we all knew this by the time the siege started. there could be craters to stand in aad your head below the surface of the grrund. >> i had a bunker covered in aircraft aluminum and sandbags on top and probably could have taken a direct hit. >> the troops spent hours and hours digging in deeper and deeper. some bunkers 18 feet deep. >> we had a 106 rifle built on the edge of a 2,000 bomb crater and just sat up there like a sore thumb and the night we got overrun on the 21st there, 20th, one of the first soldiers that survived the wire ran into that gun position, probably with dynamite on the back and ble

the guns far away on sheer stone cliffs on a mountain in laos called corock. it even survived blistering aerial bombardment. the guns were wheeled in caves when they being used to. >> if he could turn off aerial resupply, he could eventually achieve what he did. >> the base commander refused to let that happen. >> tony was the t gent. >> he was out and about the area. not in a bunker. eveey day of the siege. visiting troops. visiting marines. being exposed. showing himself as a true leader. david lownes was a great marine. >> getting in food, medicine and ammunition to keep the 6,000 men alive. and so the marines had to find a way to get supplies without landing the planes. >> they developed a system of low altitude parachute extraction where the supplies would be palletized and placed inside a 130 aircraft. >> a thing where the planes would come low and extract a load on palettes with a parachute attached to slow it up. >> the air filled the canopy and yank the supplies out of the bag end of the aircraft. >> drag the palette of whatever supplies off the rolle