Corps’ ‘Walking Dead’ March Into History : Marines: Vietnam veterans are honored as battered unit is deactivated.

As aging survivors of the unit known as the “Walking Dead” stood at attention, the Marine Corps deactivated 1st Battalion 9th Regiment in an emotional ceremony Friday.

The hard-luck battalion, which many considered a jinxed unit during the Vietnam War, earned an unenviable reputation for sustaining high casualties and for near-constant engagement in heavy combat.

The “One Nine,” as the unit is known in the corps, fought in the bloody hill battles in 1967 along the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. It often skirmished along the coastal highway near Hue that soldiers called the “Street Without Joy.”

And the battalion was at Khe Sanh in 1968 during a 77-day siege by the North Vietnamese army that many feared would become America’s Dien Bien Phu.

“We weren’t jinxed, and there was no vendetta against us. It was just that we were in constant combat,” said Dave (Beetle) Bailey, an Anaheim engineer who served in the One Nine in 1966 and 1967.

Bailey, 50, was wounded for the second time April 5, 1967, on the Street Without Joy when a reinforced North Vietnamese army company overran his understrength company of 60 men. Of those, 52 were either killed or wounded.

Friday’s ceremony attracted dozens of former Marines and Navy personnel who had served in the battalion and who came from all over Southern California to watch the final folding of the battalion’s colors, emblazoned with Presidential Unit Citations earned in World War II and Vietnam.

Present-day Marines who were assigned to the One Nine were absorbed into the 2nd Battalion 1st Marine Regiment, which paraded before the Vietnam veterans.

A Marine spokesman said the battalion’s deactivation was made necessary by Pentagon cutbacks dictated by the Cold War’s end.

Dozens of veterans, once inured to the pains of war, had a difficult time holding back the tears during the ceremony.

“They were really teen-age soldiers. The mystique of One Nine will grow . . . over the years,” said Orange County Superior Court Judge David Carter, who was wounded three times at Khe Sanh on April 16, 1968. “You had a brief moment in your lifetime to walk beside true heroes. And they are the kids whose names are on the Vietnam (Memorial) wall.”

The battalion fought in the island campaigns of World War II, including the assault on Iwo Jima, still the Marine Corps’ most costly battle in terms of fatalities.

During the One Nine’s four-year stint in Vietnam, from June, 1965, to July, 1969, casualties of 50% or more during engagements were not uncommon.

The unit’s reputation was such that Marines and Navy personnel resisted being transferred to the battalion, and some wondered whether North Vietnamese soldiers had a special vendetta against it, veterans recall.

All told, 620 Marines and Navy personnel from the One Nine died in Vietnam. Carter, who was a platoon commander in Company C, said that 38 of his “kids went up the hill” on the day he was wounded, “and only eight came down.”

Although the battalion shed most of its blood in 1967 and 1968 when the North Vietnamese launched aggressive and well-planned campaigns along the demilitarized zone in Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces, it began to earn its reputation almost as soon as it arrived in Vietnam 1965.

Jose Franco, 49, of Chino was the sole survivor of a five-man fire team that was hit June 10, 1966. Franco’s C Company was sweeping west of Danang, near Hill 37, when they were attacked. An enemy mortar round exploded in the midst of his fire team, wounding Franco in the head and killing the others.

“I was unconscious for many days, and then spent a year in the hospital in San Diego. The doctors put a steel plate in my head and I was returned to duty, but not to Vietnam,” Franco said.

During the Vietnam War, the unit’s casualties could occasionally be blamed on the Marines’ tactics rather than heroism or the enemy’s cunning. Critics used to say that the Marine infantry manual consisted of a single page, on which there was but a single printed line: “Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.”

However, the courage of individual Marines, who often fought under the most trying conditions, was never questioned.

In the early years of the war, most fights were small-unit engagements. But all that changed in 1967 in the hill battles along the demilitarized zone, said Al Slater, former commander of A Company.

“The world changed overnight. The (North Vietnamese army) came down with bigger guns and more people. We were outnumbered and outgunned. Many Marines died at Con Thien, Dong Ha, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll and the Rockpile,” said Slater, 53, a juvenile probation officer in San Diego.

The hill battles where One Nine distinguished itself were fierce. There was no quarter given by either side, and it was understood that if you were wounded and left behind on the battlefield, you were not likely to be taken prisoner.

“We came across many Marines who were wounded and then shot in the head. There was a lot of bitterness and anger. We hated the (North Vietnamese army) but we also respected them,” Slater said. “There were times when my Marines killed enemy prisoners before I could stop them. You don’t condone things like that, but you understand why it happens.”

Bailey said he has his own indelible image of the “Walking Dead.”

As his company walked across a field the night he was wounded, an illumination round burst overhead. Instinctively, the men froze as the eerie shadows cast by the artificial light rippled across the ground.

“Just for a second I looked to each side of me and saw a line of gray figures, but I couldn’t see their faces. ‘These are the ‘Walking Dead,’ I said to myself,” Bailey recalled.

Moments later, the enemy began firing, catching the Marines in a deadly cross-fire before flanking and overrunning the company.