The 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry began storming Hill 937 in the Ashau Valley, defended by entrenched North Vietnamese regulars. Ten frontal assaults up steep, muddy slopes under heavy fire produced 72 American deaths and over 370 wounded before the hill fell on May 20, only for U.S. forces to abandon it weeks later. The battle's heavy cost for seemingly little strategic gain fueled growing American public disillusionment with the war.
Hill 937, known to the Vietnamese as Dong Ap Bia, sat near the Laotian border in the remote Ashau Valley, a region so thick with jungle and leeches that soldiers called it hell's half-acre. American commanders wanted it cleared to disrupt North Vietnamese infiltration routes, unaware that a heavily bunkered enemy regiment awaited them on the ridge.
Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division attacked repeatedly up slopes so steep that soldiers sometimes had to grab roots and vines to climb, all while under mortar and machine-gun fire from concealed bunkers. Monsoon rains turned the hillside to mud, and several assaults were beaten back by friendly artillery and airstrikes landing dangerously close to American positions. Soldiers began calling it Hamburger Hill because, as one put it, anyone who went up it came back ground into hamburger.
The hill finally fell on the eleventh day, only for the Army to abandon it entirely by mid-June, having deemed it strategically worthless. News photos of exhausted, bloodied soldiers reached American living rooms just as Senator Edward Kennedy publicly condemned the battle as senseless and irresponsible. Hamburger Hill became a symbol of the war's grinding, purposeless attrition and hardened the resolve of the American antiwar movement.