[The Reaper]

He dragged Bingham back to where Bill Queen lay, wounded. Only Rimondi wasn't yet hit and still fired furiously. Andersen put them in a back-to-back circle just off the hilltop where they would make their last stand. AK bullets had destroyed their team radio, another slug had shot Andersen's little survival radio out of his hand so Rimondi tossed him another survival radio, their last.

Now the NVA were streaming, rolling over the crest like a tidal wave, their rattling AKs blending together into one never-ending burst.

Andersen's men were firing not at NVA but at hands wielding AKs over parapets and around bunkers. There was no place left to fall back. Andersen was shooting NVA little further than the length of his CAR-15 muzzle, and the time it took to speed-change a magazine meant life or death.

From the air it looked like an ant mound, with moving figures everywhere. Cobra lead rolled in and sparkled 20mm cannon shells around the surviving SOG men, and at last fighters arrived, adding napalm and Vulcan cannons to the melee. Then at last the assault ebbed, turned,and the NVA fled for cover, just as the Hueys arrived.

Though wounded repeatedly, Andersen crawled out to fire his CAR-15 to cover the landing Hueys. With Rimondi's help, Andersen dragged as many teammates' bodies as he could to the first Huey, then helped the wounded Queen and others aboard the second. "3 months before RT Kansas fought the most one-sided fight in American history, the USAF already had plotted three enemy pipelines running out of North Vietnam but these extended into Laos. The most critical pipeline was secretly being laid across the DMZ into South Vietnam." (USAF)

"Lt. Loren Hagen (right, rear) and Bruce Berg pose with five indigenous teammates. Both Hagen and Berg would die on the small hilltop, along with six of their Montagnard soldiers." (Photo by Tony Andersen) A Terrible Toll In one hellacious half-hour, nine of Recon Team Kansas' fourteen men had been lost.

Lt. Hagen had died, along with Bingham, Berg was presumed dead, six Montagnards had died, Rimondi and Queen both suffered multiple frag wounds, Andersen had been struck by both smallarms fire and shrapnel, and their other two Montagnards, too, all had been wounded "It's amazing that any of us came through it with the amount of incoming that we were getting," Tony Andersen says today, 25 years later. He attributes their survival to his deceased team leader, Lt. Loren Hagen. "He epitomized what a Special Forces officer should be -- attentive to detail, a lot of rehearsals, followed through on things," he explains.

"We were ready. I think that was probably the only thing that kept us from being totally overrun. Everybody was alert and knew what was happening and was waiting."

As for Hagen's bravery, dashing into a wall of AK fire to try to save Bruce Berg, that didn't surprise Andersen, either. "Lt. Hagen was that kind of officer. He was a good man."

Against the lost of most of his teammates, Andersen learned, the USAF counted 185 NVA dead on that hill. Little RT Kansas had killed half a battalion and probably wounded twice that many NVA, but that gives Andersen sparse satisfaction compared to the loss of most of his team.

Perhaps Andersen's most difficult duty was carrying the bodies of his six Montagnard teammates -- his "family" he called them -- to their home village. "As soon as they saw us driving up in the truck, they knew. Wailing and moaning started, and all the grieving." The villagers gathered in a circle around the headman's stilted longhouse.

"Through one of the interpreters I tried to explain how proud we were of them, what good fighters they were, that they had died for a good cause."

That would be borne out a few months later when the intelligence generated by RT Kansas' spirited defense helped U.S. analysts read enemy intentions, enabling American airpower to counter the NVA's Easter Offensive.

And though details of this incredible fight would remain classified for decades, enough was disclosed that First Lieutenant Loren Hagen's family was presented the U.S. Army's final Vietnam War Medal of Honor; Tony Andersen, who held together what remained of RT Kansas through those final mass assaults, received the Distinguished Service Cross, while Queen, Rimondi, Berg and Bingham were awarded Silver Stars.

And now, today, with full disclosure, we can appreciate the significance of their fight:

At the Alamo, 188 Americans had stood against 3000 Mexicans, a ratio of 16-to-1; at Custer's Last Stand, 211 cavalrymen succumbed to 3,500 Sioux warriors, or 16.5-to-1; at the 1877 Battle of Rorke's Drift, the most heralded action in British military history resulting in -- 11 Victoria Crosses -- 140 British troops withstood assaults by 4000 Zulus, or 28-to-1.

Lt. Hagen's 14 men had held on despite being outnumbered 107-to-one, four times as disadvantagous as Rorke's Drift and seven times worse than the Alamo, one of the most remarkable feats of arms in American history.