Constable: 50 years later, brothers finish mission to take Vietnam hill
The first time that Carl Robbins vowed to get to the top of Hill 875, he watched his best friend get killed and then got severely wounded himself short of the peak, before getting airlifted out of Vietnam for good in 1967. Fifty years later, the 70-year-old Army veteran and his brother, Scott Robbins of Carpentersville, faced different challenges taking on that infamous hill.
"The whole day turned into an adventure for us," Carl Robbins says Monday, on his first full day back home, chuckling at the modern obstacles.
"Two days before we got to the hill, our guide said, 'You can't do it,'" says Scott Robbins, 60, who immediately began making calls to cut through the red tape surrounding that hill near Dak To in the Southern Highlands of Vietnam, not far from the Cambodian border. "We had to get clearance from the State Department and the Vietnamese military commander."
Scott Robbins says he expected his brother to cry on that hill, but he didn't. In their hotel room before they left for the hill, Carl Robbins was a bit "choked up," his brother says, adding, "That was the first time I ever heard him pray."
Not sure they'd get permission to climb, the brothers arrived at the bottom of that hill on Nov. 19, 50 years to the day that Carl Robbins and the other members of his 173rd Airborne Brigade began their battle to reach the top. Instead of 2,000 heavily armed enemy soldiers, the brothers faced one military commander.
"He was checking us out and then he gave us the OK to go," Scott Robbins says. "It was muddy. It was raining. We had to abandon the truck, which got stuck, and walk 5 or 6 kilometers to get to the top. We had a guide with a machete clearing the elephant grass."
While November generally is dry in those highlands, Carl Robbins said the light rain was a fitting reminder of all those wet months he spent making his way across Vietnam during the summer of 1967.
"God said, 'Carl, you want to be a soldier again for one day? Well, this is it,'" Robbins says. "It soaked me clear to the bone."
Wet and muddy, the brothers hiked nearly two hours before reaching the top, where the government has planted a lone plum tree. Their Vietnamese guide had somehow obtained a flag from the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The beers the brothers planned to drink were forgotten in the stuck truck, but they posed for a photo with the flag.
"I felt excited. I felt good. I felt happy that I made it," Carl Robbins says.
During their hike down, the heavens opened up and the brothers and their guides sought refuge in an abandoned shack. "These kids on minibikes came to rescue us," Carl Robbins says, explaining how he and his brother made the final leg of the trip on two noisy bikes with chains on the wheels to give them traction in the mud.
Hill 875 haunted Carl Robbins for 50 years. He had been fighting for two days on Nov. 21, 1967, when a mortar rocketed into the foxhole of his best friend, killing 20-year-old Robert William Lindgren from Minneapolis. "I crawled over to his foxhole and reached in and got nothing. I couldn't get him out," Robbins related during an earlier interview about why he wanted to go back to Vietnam. "His head turned and his eyes looked at mine and I could just see his soul leaving his body."
The next afternoon, sniper bullets hit Robbins in his upper left chest and in his lower right abdomen. During last week's trip to Vietnam, Carl Robbins, awarded two Bronze Stars for his bravery and two Purple Hearts for his wounds, came across an enemy trench from that era.
"Everything else that I remember is gone," he says.
The trip, organized and presented as a gift by Scott and Mary Robbins, marked the most time the brothers had spent together since childhood. Carl Robbins, father to a 22-year-old daughter, Sara, and a 24-year-old son, Robert, named in memory of his dead friend, lives in Lewisville, Indiana, has a longtime girlfriend and works as a corrections officer running the prison's sanitation shop at the New Castle Correctional Facility.
Scott Robbins works as director of human resources for Central State Funds, a health care and pension fund in Rosemont.
"He made peace with it, but a part of him will always be there. It's a big part of who he is," Scott Robbins says of his brother.
Carl Robbins says his second trip to Vietnam provided healing.
"The rain washed all the hurt and pain away. Can you imagine that?" Carl Robbins says. "I didn't bring it home this time."