“If I was going to die there in Vietnam, I was going to die fighting,” said Capers, a retired major whose 22 years in the Corps would earn him fame as a revered and innovative fighter and one of the Marines’ first black special operators. “That was just the way we fought. You go out fighting. You kill as many enemy as you could — and that would mean that they could not further fight your guys or other American troops.”
It was April 1967, after three days of patrolling behind enemy lines in search of a reported North Vietnamese encampment near the village of Phu Loc just north of Hue city, when Capers’ nine-man Third Force Recon Team — known as Team Broadminded — found itself in the crosshairs of an entire NVA regiment.
The fighting was as intense as any he had seen in nearly a year in Vietnam spent conducting dozens of commando raids in northern South Vietnam, Capers recalled.
With two broken legs and peppered with shrapnel from the blast of a Claymore mine, Capers battled a mental haze brought on by massive blood loss and a shot of morphine as he fought to free his men from the assault.
With his entire team wounded and their loyal service dog, King, killed in action, Capers ordered his Marines to evacuate on a small H-34 chopper. He continued the fight — calling in strikes on “danger close” enemy positions as he fended off the attackers with his M-16. But the extraction helicopter was overloaded, and his men needed critical medical attention. Capers made the impossible decision — let the chopper take his men and King’s body away from danger while he stayed behind to face certain death.
“I figured it’s better to lose one man than to lose the whole team,” Capers, 80, told Stars and Stripes in a recent telephone interview from his home near Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C. “Any commander worth his salt would care for his men before his self.”
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