His first assignment was Firebase Jack, a low hill in the flatlands east of the mountains. When Firebase Ripcord reopened in April 1970, B 2/319 moved to the hill. Floyd became RTO for FO Lieutenant Tom Brennon, attached to Alpha Company under Captain Burkert. By summer, Captain Hawkins had taken command and Lieutenant Steve Olson had replaced Brennon — but Floyd remained, and he and Olson grew as close as brothers. Floyd was to be Olson’s best man at his wedding planned for 1971.

Floyd describes his tour as mostly long days walking jungle with occasional NVA encounters. He was glad to be off the firebase, where sniper fire and mortar rounds were a constant threat.

On July 22, 1970, Floyd was standing next to Lieutenant Olson when rifle fire and explosions erupted from the front. Olson stood to assess the situation. Floyd grabbed him and tried to pull him down. At that moment Olson was struck by an RPG and killed instantly. Nearby, Sergeant Wagnon had a satchel charge explode in his face, blinding him. Floyd, standing between the two men, received only minor shrapnel wounds.

Floyd spotted five NVA soldiers by a tree up the hill. He emptied his magazine at them and saw them all go down. During the battle he watched medic Fry killed while treating a wounded soldier, and saw Sergeant Long, their Vietnamese interpreter, shot in both legs and bleed to death before anyone could reach him.

Believing Wagnon was dead, Floyd was about to leave when he heard him call out. Unwilling to leave him, Floyd lay down beside Wagnon and covered his head with his arm and chest. The two pretended to be dead as the battle raged for hours. NVA soldiers moved among the American dead, shooting them again — they came within yards of Alexander and Wagnon before being driven back.

As the battle wound down, Floyd crawled toward American lines, called “Currahee,” heard it returned, then went back and brought Wagnon in. Through the long night that followed, Floyd helped call in artillery fire for Captain Hawkins. “I remember being scared, praying, and just wanting to go home,” he said. On July 23rd, Delta 2/506 walked in and helped extract Alpha Company.

On May 14, 1970, Alpha Company made contact and Bob Lowe was killed on point. Sergeant Koger moved forward to retrieve Lowe’s body under fire. Tiny, already wounded in the arm, shoulder, and leg, kept his machine gun firing to cover Koger’s move and protect the platoon. His actions that day earned him the Silver Star.

Tiny served through the battle as the NVA pressure on Ripcord intensified through the summer of 1970. He was one of the men who held the line through the worst of it.

Chip grew up in Wise County, Virginia, in the coalfield mountains of Southwest Virginia. He arrived in Vietnam barely out of his teens and was immediately thrown into the fight. On April Fool’s Day, 1970, his unit was nailed to the hillside under mortar attack — the day the battle for Ripcord truly began. He later wrote about it in an essay called “The April Fools,” one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the battle ever committed to paper.

As a squad leader on Ripcord, Chip filled the perimeter defense positions each night. After weeks of relentless NVA bombardment, with his men exhausted, he knew the truth: “I know the NVA could come through the wire if they wanted to.” He watched from the firebase as an undermanned unit on nearby Hill 805 was mauled night after night, reduced from a company to a platoon. On the 18th day of the siege he watched the NVA shoot down a giant Chinook supply helicopter that crashed into an ammunition dump and blew the top off much of the hill.

When Ripcord was evacuated on July 23rd, Chip wasn’t done. Rather than wait out his remaining months in the safer rear areas, he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad. He left Vietnam in February 1971, having witnessed the buildup for the ill-fated Lam Son 719 operations into Laos.

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, in small towns across the country — wrestling alone with their memories, not knowing anyone else understood. 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 for brotherhood — for 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 also one of the primary sources for Keith Nolan’s landmark book Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, Vietnam 1970, published in 2000 — the first comprehensive account of the battle ever written.

Chip was honest about what the war had cost him. He suffered from a particular form of PTSD — fear of open spaces, of being exposed without a hiding place. Thirty years after Vietnam, he still could not stand in an open field without remembering the sensation of being watched by snipers. He had worked in child welfare, as a patient rights advocate, in coal mines, in factories, always moving, always carrying the weight of what he had seen.

But he never stopped reaching out. “I always knew that getting the facts out, talking about it, is the key to getting better,” he told a reporter from The Coalfield Progress in September 2000, just two years before he passed away.

Journalist Jeff Lester, who spent three hours with Chip in 2000, wrote after his death: “I fear that Chip Collins was killed by a battle he fought almost 32 years ago.”

Chip Collins passed away on April 9, 2002, in Clinchco, Virginia. He was 51 years old. He is survived by two daughters. Without him, the men of Firebase Ripcord might never have found each other. Without him, this website would not exist.

The crew dug out a larger hole, put up walls, and covered it with PSP (pierced steel planking) for a roof. The finished bunker served as both kitchen and serving line. The men walked in, got their food, and went back to their fighting positions to eat — there was no room for anything else.

Chris and his crew served three meals a day. Breakfast was cooked fresh in the morning. C rations were handed out for lunch. Supper was sent out from the rear for them to serve. At night, they kept coffee, soup, and Kool-Aid on the serving line so men could come in from their positions any time they needed it.

On July 6th, Chris left Ripcord for a resupply run to the rear PX and missed the last chopper back that evening. He was sitting on the pad on July 7th when he was told their bunker had been hit — that was when Sp4 DeFore was wounded leaving the kitchen. Chris returned one more time to collect his duffle bag and personal belongings. All the original cooks had by then returned to Camp Evans and been replaced by a new crew. Chris began clearing to go home. His time was over.

On July 21, 1970, Charlie Company boarded slicks from Firebase O’Reilly for a combat assault on Hill 805. Leigh walked the hot LZ in the dark — one of the most nerve-testing moments of his tour. During his time in Vietnam he lost his friend Willie Norris and witnessed things that never fully left him.

Leigh was hospitalized multiple times during his tour with severe cellulitis, an infection that kept sending him back to the rear against his will. Each time he recovered, he returned to his unit.