Welcome

Introduction to DMZ Diary, A Combat Marine’s Vietnam Memoir by Jeff Kelly

I arrived in Vietnam on January 2nd, 1968 and was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines which was stationed on the ironically named Demilitarized Zone or DMZ separating North and South Vietnam. Within weeks Khe Sanh was under siege and the Tet Offensive was in full bloom, and I found myself in the heaviest fighting of the war.

Staging Battalion, the last bit of training before leaving California, taught me to look out for booby traps made of sharpened bamboo and the like. There was no mention of 152mm artillery shells raining on us from across the river in North Vietnam. I encountered no daytime farmers, nighttime fighters with old French rifles. The 6,000 Marines on the DMZ faced 30,000 hardened and professional soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam. We called them NVA, for North Vietnamese Army.

For my memoir I use the diary format not only to show the progression of the war in that pivotal year 1968, but also my transformation from a naive, idealistic volunteer only wanting to prove himself worthy of the title Marine. In the final chapters you will see what a hard bitten, disillusioned young man I’d become. Why didn’t I just stop fighting?  Stop the killing?  I couldn’t. I was trapped in a torrent of violence where the only way to stay alive was to destroy the enemy. I fought hard to save myself and to save my brother Marines.

On this website you can see photos of those men I served with. We are old now and no longer the hard bodies we once were. We reunite every two years and reestablish those bonds of friendship formed under the most extreme of conditions. Thank you for visiting.