Editor's note: This is an account reportedly of one soldier's experience in Vietnam alongside PFC Gary Everett. It has not been edited or clarified in any way.

Here is what one of the guys who was there (Stan Adams, St. Louis, MO) wrote about that night that he died:

On Dec 17 1968 our company Bravo (B) and Charlie (C), only two (2) companies were sent into an area close to the Cambodian border. Our Patrol Base (PB) was one of the first base camps built close to Cambodia.

It was situated between the Cambodian Border and the Dong River. The only exit from that area would have been by either air or by boat. The guys knew we were in for a bad time in this area.

After landing by helicopter we set up a perimeter and started filling sand-bags and digging a 4’ trench to each bunker, the base camp was round so from the air it looked like a big circle with a ditch around it.

The bunkers were built into the ground also. B company performed sweeps around the base camp in the mornings and C company did them in the afternoon.

I was in the Infantry so I was a "grunt", I carried a M- 16 rifle and 200-300 rounds of machine gun ammo.

After getting back inside the base camp after the sweeps we started working again on the base camp. We finally got close to finishing the building of the base camp on Dec. 21st.

Of course the night of the 21st was when we had the ground attack.The base camp was a Patrol Base (PB) starting out. We had only (2) companies of Infantry and a Unit of Engineers to help with the design and the building of the base camp, for a total of approx. 250 men.

Viet Nam was a very hot place to be in, probably 100+ degrees during the day and 90 at night.

So during the day while on operations it was extremely hot and at night it was impossible to sleep, you just went till you couldn't go anymore and fell asleep.

Also the mosquitoes were bad, so you had to put up with them by wetting a towel and wrapping it around your face to keep from getting bit.

After not showering for a few days the mosquitoes left you alone.

So normal routine would have been doing operations during the day and if your platoon had the duty of LP's (listening post) that means squad of men approx 6-8 guys would set up a listening post all night for the enemy in an area outside the base camp.

The night of the ground attack we had several LP's outside the base camp and had a hard time getting them back inside the wire, so much enemy movement was out there that when they came back inside the wire you couldn't see who it was until they were close.

They were very lucky they were not shot. The ground attack started at midnight and the small arms fire was horrendous.

S2, our intelligence group in our battalion estimated that we were hit by a Regimental size force (1,500) men.

Our base camp lost 22 men (kia) and (54) wounded out of a total of 250 men.The NVA lost approx 250-300 men that we counted, and for 2-3 weeks after, we dug up graves with bodies all over the area so how many they actually lost we don't know for sure.

Our camp got over-run on one part of out perimeter with the (NVA-North Vietnamese Army), they took over 4-5 of our bunkers so we not only had enemy in front of us but they were also behind us inside of our base camp.

That night after the NVA had got inside of our base camp we were fighting bunker to bunker and we knew we had US solders inside some of the bunkers but we assumed they were dead.

This is when Gary came into play, he volunteered with a guy named Bob Norton to go down the trench line to shoot a 90 mm recoilless rifle into the bunkers to destroy them.

This was a very brave act to do since we only had the one 90 mm gun.

It is a type of weapon were it takes 2 people to operate, one to load and one to shoot at the same time.

With enemy firing everywhere and the bunker being about 25’-30’ foot away you had to load the weapon and then kind of stand up to fire it.

I can say that Gary & Bob were a big part in saving our base camp that night.

Gary was killed instantly when he rose to fire the gun, he fell back onto Bob Norton and another person Luis Pagan from Puerto Rico was with them and he starting firing the weapon into the bunkers.

The first thought is if there are any live U.S. soldiers in the bunkers, but we had to stop them where they were at.

After awhile the Company Commander of Charlie Company (Capt. Ray Pulliam) had to call in artillery on the base camp to stop the NVA from over running the base camp.

It was a very brave thing that Gary did that night, I can't say enough about him. Such a fine young man to lose his life, he is a hero in every walk of life to the platoon he was in.

He will be remembered forever.