Fred Rohrbach returned to Lz Xray in conjunction with a trip to Vietnam, marking the 50th Anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
He commented:
I was in Vietnam recently, as I left on the last day, April 29, 1975, by chopper to join the Seventh Fleet.
They had a huge parade to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and you wouldn’t recognize the place now, as many changes have occurred.
I drove up to Khe Sanh and then crossed into Laos, making a side trip to LZ X-Ray.
From Pleiku, it’s about an hour and a half drive, mostly on good blacktop roads, and there’s even a narrow blacktop road going through X-Ray called Route 14C.
About the monument:
To my knowledge at this time, there are no further monuments in the Chú prong mountains west of Xray.
The dead bodies of the NVA were buried hastily in various places and along areas from what I’ve heard along route 19 past the French tea plantation toward Cambodia. These bodies were exhumed and returned to the north around 1992 and prior.
It’s possible that on the one trip I took back to where we stopped, and I was told to remain in the truck while some of the officers took maps, walked into a cathedral-like place in the forest, that there could have been an NVA cemetery there.
