The Wolfhounds

The 27th Infantry Regiment — the Wolfhounds — has carried its name since 1918, when the regiment fought in the bitter cold of the Siberian intervention. It was there that their Russian adversaries gave them the name that stuck: the Wolfhounds, for the relentlessness with which they pursued. The regiment took the name as its own, along with the motto Nec Aspera Terrent — “No Fear on Earth.”

The Wolfhounds are among the most decorated infantry units in the United States Army, holding more than eleven Presidential Unit Citations. In the Second World War they fought across the Pacific with the 25th Infantry Division — “Tropic Lightning” — and they were among the first units committed in Korea.

Vietnam

In Vietnam the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry made its base camp at Cu Chi, in III Corps northwest of Saigon. From there the Wolfhounds operated along the Cambodian border, astride the infiltration routes that ran down the Ho Chi Minh Trail toward the capital — the Parrot’s Beak, the Renegade Woods, and the string of fire support bases the Army pushed up to the border to draw the enemy out. The “Diamond” fire support bases and battles like the ambush at the Renegade Woods on 2 April 1970 are remembered by the men who survived them as some of the hardest fighting of the war.

The battalion paid a heavy price. The 27th took some of the highest casualties of the 25th Division, and the men who came home carried their brothers with them. Decades later they found one another again — through reunions, through books, and through the simple promise that no Wolfhound would ever be forgotten.

Wolfhound veterans at a memorial ceremony with the regimental wreath.

Once a Wolfhound, always a Wolfhound.