Without Rodger “Chip” Collins, the FSB Ripcord Association would not exist. Without the Association, the men of Ripcord might never have found each other. Without the men finding each other, Keith Nolan’s landmark book Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, Vietnam 1970 might never have been written. And without that book, the last major ground battle of the Vietnam War might have remained lost to history.
Chip was 19 years old and green when he arrived in Vietnam in early 1970. He was on Bravo Company’s position when they were nailed to the hillside under mortar attack on April 1, 1970 — April Fool’s Day, the day the battle for Ripcord truly began. He chronicled it later in an essay called “The April Fools,” one of the earliest firsthand accounts ever written about the battle.
As a squad leader filling the perimeter defense positions each night, he understood the reality on the hill that commanders sometimes chose not to face.
“I know the NVA could come through the wire if they wanted to.”
He watched from Ripcord as an undermanned unit on Hill 805 was reduced from a company to a platoon, night after night, because reinforcements were not sent. On the 18th day of the siege he was among those who watched the NVA shoot down a Chinook supply helicopter that crashed into the ammunition dump and blew the top off much of the hill. When Ripcord was finally evacuated on July 23rd, Chip was not finished — he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad rather than wait out his remaining months in the rear. He left Vietnam in February 1971.
Around 1983 — thirteen years after the battle — Chip Collins began searching for other survivors of Ripcord. He was convinced they were out there in the Southwest Virginia hills and small towns across the country, wrestling alone with their memories, not knowing the Association existed. By 1986 he and others had located hundreds of veterans, and Chip founded the Fire Support Base Ripcord Association and became the first editor of its newsletter, The Ripcord Report.
He geared the newsletter toward brotherhood — forging emotional bonds between men who had shared something no one else could fully understand. The first reunion in 1986 drew 16 or 19 men. He kept searching, kept writing, kept reaching out. He was one of the primary sources for Keith Nolan’s book, published in 2000.
“I always knew that getting the facts out, talking about it, is the key to getting better.”
Chip was honest about what Vietnam had cost him. He suffered from a particular form of PTSD — a fear of open spaces, of being exposed without a hiding place. Three decades after the war, he still could not stand in an open field without the sensation of being watched by snipers. The habits of a single year in combat never fully left him.
After earning a degree in social work at Clinch Valley College, he worked in child welfare for ten years in Norton, Virginia, then nine years as a patient rights advocate at a mental hospital in Marion. He worked at factories, mined coal, bounced between jobs when the PTSD made steady work difficult. He had hurt people he loved. His daughters, who did not live with him, did not want to hear about the war.
But he never stopped reaching out to fellow survivors. He believed in it. He lived it.
“Last week, America lost another patriot who took up arms for love of his country. The most disturbing part is that he wasn’t battling the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. I fear that Chip Collins was killed by a battle he fought almost 32 years ago.”
Jeff Lester, who spent three hours with Chip in September 2000 and photographed him on the ridgelines near Birchleaf, Virginia, wrote those words after seeing Chip’s obituary on April 11, 2002. He described the steep green hills near Chip’s home in Dickenson County — hills that looked much like the jungled mountains of Vietnam he had hiked for nearly a year, three decades before.
“Chip would have scoffed, even become angry, if somebody called him a war hero. He would have said the same thing I have heard veterans of several wars tell me again and again: ‘I was just doing my job.’ That’s what heroes do in battle. When gunpowder smoke takes away their sight, when the roar of explosions and the screams of the dying fill their ears, they swallow their fear. They stand up and do their jobs.”
Rodger “Chip” Collins died on April 9, 2002, in Clinchco, Virginia. He was 51 years old. He is survived by two daughters. He is the reason this Association exists. He is the reason the men of Firebase Ripcord found each other. He is the reason you are reading this.