His two daughters, Ly's mother and her sister, are disabled. Dames killed them with a burst from his M-16 probably saving the lives of everyone on my track. After commanding 180 paratroopers, taking on four APCs and 40 troops seemed like a dreamexcept that now I was responsible for troops in combat, not training. [2]:347[3]:236 The rocket/mortar attack was the signal to start the ground assaults on Bien Hoa AB and Long Binh. Over the two month recovery and clearing operation, tens of thousands of these hazardous munitions were recoverd by hand, one at a time. The G3 adviser told me that they had received intelligence that Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commanding general (the enemy equivalent of General William Westmoreland), had his command post in a Catholic church about a kilometer east of III Corps. As enemy resistance stiffened, we realized we had bottled at least a company of the VC 275th Regiment in the village. The 2nd Platoon, under Lieutenant Fred Casper, led the way, followed by my track, then Lieutenant Howard Jones 1st Platoon and, finally, the weapons platoon under Lieutenant Don Muir. 14. The only trouble was that Charlie Company tracks were sitting in the road right in front of their bunkers. An eyewitness account of the battle for control of Bien Hoa and Long Binh on the first day of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Company E engaged the PAVN/VC supported by artillery fire killing 47 PAVN/VC. The battle was significant, since Alphas leadership was seriously depleted during the days immediately prior to Tet. Long Binh Ammo Dump - '67 & '68 | Facebook 8. Several tracks were hit by RPGs and surrounded by the enemy. PDF Scanned Document - United States Army Few areas of the world have been as hotly contested as the India-Pakistan border. He manned the .50 and, with a Charlie Company driver, started off down Highway 1. At about 0600, Lt. Col. John Tower, the new battalion commander, called with orders. We fired all we had into the buildings lining the roadway and took several wounded while getting to the church. Around midnight on October 29th, 1966, the Viet Cong mortared or rocketed the Long Binh Ammo Dump. Sappers had placed satchel charges on pallets of artillery ammunition, and the resulting mushroom cloud caused all its witnesses to think the VC had employed a tactical nuclear weapon. When I pointed out that the 101st Battalion had more than 500 troops and I had only two line platoons and fewer than 90 troops, he said, Youre mechanized, youre very strong., I told him we could not take the tracks off Highway 1 and into town because the streets and alleys were too narrow. GV AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN F/G. He assigned one to the airborne battalion and the other to Charlie Company. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army used the base as a logistics and command center. Bucks County Pennsylvania United States USA, Del Rio Texas Laughlin Air Force Base USA, Roxborough Pennsylvania United States USA, U-Tapao Royal Thai Air Force Base Thailand. and the perimeter was still intact. We charged southeast down Highway 316 to the Highway 15 intersection, situated on a small hill overlooking the 90th Replacement Company. According to him, I told him that any fool could see that the VC did not have M-113s, and that we had 22 .50-calibers and a 106mm recoilless rifle and they, for sure, did not want us to return fire. As enemy resistance stiffened, we realized we had bottled at least a company of the VC 275th Regiment in the village. Aerial view of (USARV) United States Army Republic of Vietnam Headquarters Complex at Long Binh, Vietnam. As the C-23 track Stormy, which was in the lead, turned into a side street, an RPG slammed into its front, smashing the radiator and wounding several soldiers. Explosion at Long Binh ammunition storage facility. A burst of VC machine gun fire erupted nearby, causing the colonel, the deputy and their Vietnamese escorts to pile into their vehicles and roar off in the direction from whence they had come. 6. 1.13 During Tet 1968, the 856th Radio . officer around. That night, no one slept, but instead scanned the jungles with Starlight scopes, seeing nothing. The II Field Force commander, Lt. Gen. Frederick C. Weyand, had correctly guessed that a major attack was going to come during Tet, and his anticipation of the attacks no doubt saved Long Binh and Saigon from being overrun. His action probably saved the lives of everyone on my track. As best I could, I explained that they were to take charge and that General Giap might be among the civilians. I had been in Vietnam about nine months. Advanced Search | But no one would be leaving the country that day. and the gunner replied "VC The VC attacks on Bien Hoa and the Long Binh complex were abject failures, due in part to the fact that on January 31, 1968, they had run into the Panthers of the 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry. PAVN/VC losses were 137 killed and 25 captured. Soon we could hear leaders moving up and down the bunker line yelling for the guards to stop firing. My The Commo track, C-007, nicknamed Abdula and the Rug Merchants, with Pfc (current Vietnam editor) David Zabecki behind the .50-caliber, brought up the rear. ], The Laotian representative said six members of the Meo special forces were also cap tured with the American on May 7 in Xieng Khouang Province near the North Vietnamese bor der. Come back up on the battalion freq.. When the Tet cease-fire period began on January 28, the battalion was called back to the vicinity of Bear Cat, and Charlie Company was ordered to a large open field across Highway 15 from the Long Tan airfield. SAIGON, South Vietnam, June 1 (Reuters)Explosions ripped through a huge ammu nition dump near here today, killing one soldier and wound ing 13. As we turned right onto Highway 15, an unbelievable spectacle stretched before us. Charlie Company had reported 38 VC killed, at the cost of only 11 U.S. wounded and three APCs damaged by RPGs. [3]:20, At 00:30 on 31 January, a patrol from Company E, 4th Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment detected a company-size PAVN/VC force approximately 10km north of Bien Hoa, moving in the direction of Bien Hoa AB. The attacks on Bin Ha, Bien Hoa Air Base and Long Binh Post, occurred during the early hours of 31 January 1968 and continued until 2 February 1968. Sugar Bear Dames, as he was called by his many friends, walked down a side alley toward the highway. [5], USAF losses were 4 killed in action with another dying of a heart attack, while 26 were wounded. U.S. air strikes in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Well, the piece of shrapnel He said I would have to wait. According to Jones, that assault went so perfectly that it could have served as a demonstration at the infantry school. I dismounted the platoons and placed them on line on each side of the road: the second on the left, or north, and the first on the right, or south. At dusk, airstrikes had to be called in to blast the VC from the hill. Charlie Company slammed into the VC before they could get their attack organized. I said again, "Who is there"? LV DITTO We closed within a few hundred meters of the scout platoon and watched as helicopter gunships destroyed a large yellow house from which the VC were pinning down Barnes troops. raffia 12th combat aviation group - sites.google.com The ammunition dump contained high explosives like: C-4, artillery rounds, mortar rounds, aerial flares, 50 caliber rounds, M-60 machine gun rounds, and aerial rockets for the Huey Cobra and gunships. After the roadblock was cleared and communications restored, Charlie Company continued toward its objective. Refusing evacuation, neither reported his wound. While I was in training, my motivation was to get these wings and I wear them today proudly, the airman recalled in 2015. him in. Besides the fireworks, ARVN soldiers had linked tracer bullets together and were stitching the darkness with weaving streams of machine gun fire. I sat behind the .50-caliber, munching and giving thanks for the fact that, incredibly, nobody in Charlie Company had been killed. As you know there were no officers At the meeting, I was joined by the S3 of a battalion from the 101st Airborne Division. In fact, VC effectiveness was so degraded that, after 1968, they were mainly replaced on the battlefield by North Vietnamese regulars, and were never a viable force after that. Sand bags near barbed wire fence. License Agreement | When the shooting started it I dismounted the platoons and placed them on line on each side of the road: the second on the left, or north, and the first on the right, or south. They all blew up! As the scouts escaped, the volume of enemy fire began to slacken, then died altogether. a noise! ". This fire was observed by the helicopter gunships that had been circling the area north of Long Binh and they quickly moved to attack the launch sites and were soon joined by an AC-47 Spooky gunship and their combined fire soon stopped the rocket/mortar fire. Forget that, he said. known as Widows Village. An MP full colonel, accompanied by a Los Angeles deputy sheriff (dressed in his deputy uniform) and two jeeploads of National Police, drove up to my track. As the C-23 track in the lead, Stormy, turned into a side street, a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) slammed into its front, smashing the radiator and wounding several soldiers. Casper rose from a prone position and yelled for his troops to follow him. Ive just been told you work for me again. "I was the 1SGT of the When Lieutenant Casper jumped up, our legs became entangled and I tripped him, Ax remembers. the barracks hall just as he stepped out of his room going to In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. During the last week of January, the battalion patrolled the jungles east of Highway 15, near the Binh Son rubber plantation. Tom Allaback. Simultaneously, platoon leaders reported finding discarded AK-47s. I had inherited the job Privacy Policy | Links John Gross received the Silver Star for his actions in command of Charlie Company on the first day of the Tet Offensive. I realize now that the track was high enough that the rounds would have passed over the troops in front of the vehicle, Love recalls. Long Binh Ammo Dump October 29, 1966 . went off my first thought was that it was a nuclear explosion because of Script is copyright Reuters Limited. [2]:3523, General Weyand later noted that in their attacks on the Saigon area "Despite the large number of Communist troops committed, insufficient force was applied in any one area to take and hold the objectiveThe assault had been launched piecemeal and it was repulsed piecemeal in a series of relatively small battles. Just then a three-man VC RPG team calmly walked across the street right in front of the damaged APC. Bomb squads disarmed seven of the charges, but at 07:30 the remainder exploded with three igniting pallets of artillery shells and their Propellant bags causing a massive explosion, blast wave and mushroom cloud. The recon platoon was ordered to establish a blocking position south of Long Binh on Highway 15. Website Terms & Conditions | He said the first thing he could remember was the bodies across the road began to bloat into a grotesque scene. They tried to make us keep our heads down so we couldn't get them with our counter-mortar fire . [2]:347[3]:225, At 03:00, the PAVN 84A Artillery Regiment began a barrage of approximately 100 82-mm. The 2-47s scout platoon had just finished a brutal fight in Widows Village, and at 1600 hours, it was ordered to move to the junction of Highways 1 and 316, and to attack westward through the village of Ho Nai toward Charlie Company, in the hope of pinning the VC between us. charred. Meanwhile, Hueys reported VC running from the village. Alpha Company was ordered to the 199th LIB compound, which was under attack. While much has been written about Tet and the political firestorm that resulted, in the hundreds of surprise battles and skirmishes that unfolded, individual units found themselves thrust into intense danger, turmoil, chaos, confusion, contradictions and outright lunacy as they responded to Viet Cong (VC) attacks. This article was written by John E. Gross and originally published in the February 2008 issue of Vietnam Magazine. Ripped apart barbed wire. He We usually got mortared at night whenever Dong Tam was getting it from our district. Charlie Company was ordered to a large open field across Highway 15 from the Long Thanh airfield. 3. Company B, 2nd Battalion, 39th Infantry Regiment had arrived by helicopter from Bearcat and joined up with 2/47th Infantry to sweep the Widows Village. introduction into country when he first came to the 118th. ", "We mustered everyone we could However, Charlie Company slammed into the VC before they could organize their attack. maxhightForP2 = 13904; The VC/PAVN attacked the position that night in a 6 hour long assault which was met initially by US mortar and artillery fire, then helicopter gunships and then napalm strikes. Now commanded by a brand-new second lieutenant, the men of Alpha Company balked when they were told to move. (Note: According to Colonel Sonny Craven, then leader of a combat photo team on the scene, these combat sequences was filmed by soldiers of the 221st Signal Company [Pictorial]). After I got the coordinates of our objective, I yelled, Crank em up! into the radio handset. Binh was a logistical mistake because the perimeter was so heavily armed All night they scanned the jungles with Starlight scopes, seeing nothing. At the end of the previous day, Charlie Company had reported 38 VC killed, at the cost of only 11 U.S. wounded and three APCs damaged by RPGs. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. Love was so startled, he didnt fire. The combat around III Corps headquarters was intense. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. They bowed and looked confused. This was no surprise to us, since we could plainly hear the enemy rounds slamming into Long Binh. He assigned one to the airborne battalion and the other to Charlie Company. Dressed as travelers returning to ancestral homes for the Tet holiday, the guerrillas had quietly drifted into their urban assembly areas and put together their weapons. forever the big pieces stopped. We all knew that these moves were more than just precautionary. Incredibly, nobody in my company had been killed the day before. The platoons attacked by successive bounds through the village as the companys tracks, forming the base of the T on the highway, provided fire support from the .50s and resupplied the troops with ammunition. 15. Toward dark, airstrikes had to be called in to blast the VC from the hill. Its predominantly Catholic population was made up of many Vietnamese who fled North Vietnam in 1954 after the Viet Minh victory. door at the petroleum dump ruptured and fuel flowed down the ditch in 10. 200 pounds. the wrecker operator had to know how to weld. The first explosion was 2,400,000 pounds of 8 inch high explosive artillery projectiles. At 0300 hours I received a call from Major Bill Jones, who had recently taken Ionoffs place as S3, stating that Bien Hoa airbase, the Long Binh facility, the II Field Force headquarters and the 199th Light Infantry Brigade (LIB) base camp were under heavy mortar and rocket attack. We began detaining the well-dressed young men among the refugees. [3]:2204, On 1 February Company B, 2/3rd Infantry, Company C, 4/12th Infantry and elements of 2/47th Infantry swept Ho Nai finding only dead VC/PAVN and civilians who had been murdered by the VC or killed in the fighting in the town. night on alert at the Birdcage, I was awakened (trying to sleep The only trouble was that Charlie Company tracks were sitting in the road right in front of their bunkers. It then dawned on us that the VC were throwing down their weapons, changing clothes and slipping away. was a point where the Ho Chi Min Trail came close to the countrys West Some VC crossed Route 316 and took up firing positions in bush at the southern perimeter of the Plantation. Bringing that volatile convoy through the city, which had not been totally cleared and was still burning in many places, was a tremendously heroic act. Through sporadic fire, we continued northwest on Highway 15 to where it intersected Highway 1 on the western edge of Bien Hoa. I had been in command for five months and had been assured that I would be in command for one year, which suited me fine. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Construction on the 24 th. The 2-47 was one of several units he pulled in from the jungles to guard the Long Binh headquarters and logistical complex 15 miles northeast of Saigon. Burned out 105mm howitzer shells at ammunition dump in Bien Hoa Air Force Base, Bien Hoa in Vietnam. Those orders were for us to clear the VC from the houses surrounding the corps headquarters. There, Charlie Company soldiers joined ARVN and U.S. MACV soldiers manning the walls. ", "I then went to the CP and tried A VC commander captured later in the battle revealed that his orders were only to start the attack after several hundred rockets had hit the Plantation, but as the rocket sites had been neutralized before the rocket threshold was reached, the ground assault on the Plantation never began. M-113 APCs of the 9th Infantry Division storm VC positions 200 meters outside II Field Force headquarters at Long Binh on February 1, 1968. Widows Village made a perfect attack position, since it lay directly across Highway 316 from II Field Force headquarters. As we turned right onto Highway 15, an unbelievable spectacle stretched before us. 2023 CriticalPast LLC. Most of these photos were taken in an area a few miles north of Chu Lai and south of Hoi An. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. License Agreement | The 2nd Platoon took the one north of the road, the 1st Platoon attacked the other. As I remember this night, around 12 or 12:30 a.m. the sirens His battalion was in heavy contact and he had several wounded rangers he needed to evacuate. As a result long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs) from Company F, 51st Infantry Regiment were positioned north of Long Binh to detect PAVN/VC approaching the base.
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