Battle of Hamburger Hill "chewed up like a hamburger" in grim reference to the Battle of Pork Chop Hill during the Korean War. The battle on Hamburger Hill occurred in May 1969, during Operation Apache Snow, the second part of a three-phased campaign intended to destroy PAVN Base Areas in the remote A Sầu Valley. This campaign was a series of operations intended to do damage to the PAVN forces in the A Sầu Valley, which had been an infiltration route into South Vietnam prior to 1966, when the PAVN seized the Special Forces camp in the valley during the Battle of A Shau
Rudolf Hamburger route which involved a combination of buses and trains, but both Patra and Hamburger believed that this was unacceptably dangerous because of the war. The alternative route, approximately three times as long, involved travelling by ship to Hong Kong, from where it would be possible to take a flight to Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital between 1937 and 1946. Hamburger intended then to follow a land route from Chongqing Xi'an. Although he had a large amount of luggage to take, Patra still insisted that Hamburger should travel with a radio transmitter-receiver so that they might stay in touch. The device