Battle of Hamburger Hill military significance aside from the presence of the PAVN on it, Major General John M. Wright who replaced MG Zais as commander of the 101st Airborne in May abandoned the hill on 5 June as the operations in the valley wrapped up. The debate over Hamburger Hill reached the United States Congress, with particularly severe criticism of military leadership by Senators Edward Kennedy, George McGovern, and Stephen M. Young. In its 27 June issue, Life Magazine published the photographs of 241 Americans killed in one week in Vietnam; this is now considered a watershed event of negative public opinion toward
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