500 Enemy Soldiers Died In 16 Days In Vietnam, Here’s How It Started
500 Enemy Soldiers Died In 16 Days In Vietnam, Here’s How It Started
At a quarter 2 in the morning on the 7th of June 1966, the men holding a small artillery position in a valley in Konum Province, South Vietnam, discovered that the enemy was already inside the wire. The position sat in a low pocket of ground west of a mountain outpost called Tumarang. It was not a fort.
It was six howitzers, a rifle company, and a handful of combat engineers dug in on soft red earth in the middle of the monsoon season. The guns belong to battery B of the second howitzer battalion, 320th artillery. The infantry came from a company, second battalion, 5002nd infantry. The engineers came from a company of the 326th Engineer Battalion.
Nobody there outranked a captain. They had spent the previous days doing exactly what artillery is supposed to do. They had fired over the ridges at an enemy they never saw, to protect men they had never met. Now that enemy had come to shut them up. The attack was made by what American officers later judged to be a full North Vietnamese battalion.
It came in the dark in the rain season close in. The first rush was thrown back. Two more followed. At some point in the night, the enemy got through the perimeter and the artillery men did something artillery men are never supposed to have to do. They dropped their howitzer barrels flat and fired straight into the ranks of men running at them.
The fighting went on until 9:00 in the morning. A young artillery captain tried to explain it afterward to an American reporter, and what he kept coming back to was not the courage or the noise. It was strange. You could see the enemy. He said, “They saw us and we saw them.” That is a peculiar thing for a soldier to marvel at.
It only makes sense when you understand what the last 11 months have been like for these men. Because for almost a year, the paratroopers of the First Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, had been chasing an enemy they could almost never see. They had marched through valleys he had just left. They had bombed hills he had just walked off of.
They had built a reputation as one of the hardest working brigades in Vietnam. And they had a nagging private frustration that no press release ever mentioned. They could find the enemy, but they could not make him fight. When dawn came up over that gun position, the men counted 86 enemy dead around them. 13 of the bodies were inside the artillery perimeter.
The enemy had finally come to them. The question that runs through everything that follows is simple to ask and is very hard to answer. In a war where one side chooses when to fight and when to vanish, how does the other side ever force a decision? For the men of the first brigade, the 16 days of hard combat that began that night were the answer they had spent a year building.
It cost them more than they expected, and it taught them something about the war that took years for the rest of the country to learn. If you value these military histories told the way it actually happened, consider subscribing. It genuinely helps these documentaries get made. Now, back to 1965. On the 29th of July 1965, the first roughly 4,000 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division came ashore at Cam Ran Bay.
They were the advanced guard of something enormous. The American buildup had begun. ahead of them. Army aviation companies had already arrived by sea that spring and had spent about 90 days building the helicopter bases from which American infantry would be flown into battle. That was the new idea of the war and it would define how this brigade fought.
The brigade commander was Colonel James S. Timothy. Two men met him on the shore and both of them mattered. One was General William West Morland who commanded all American forces in Vietnam. The other was Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and for the men in the ranks Taylor was not a diplomat. He was the general who had commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the Second World War.
He had jumped into Normandy with them. The division’s reputation had been made in December 1944 at a Belgian crossroads town called Baston. surrounded, outnumbered, low on almost everything, the 101st had been formally invited by the Germans to surrender or be destroyed. The acting commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, sent back a one-word answer.
Nuts, the division held. That story was still doing work 21 years later in the heat at Cam Ran Bay. There was a small family moment in the ceremony, too. Ambassador Taylor’s son, Captain Thomas Taylor, was serving in the brigade. He had asked to go to Vietnam and had been made to wait until his father’s tour as ambassador was finished.
His first job was brigade intelligence officer, partly because he had special forces training and his commander thought that would be useful against gerillas. Then some of the paratroopers put on a demonstration jump for the ambassador and the general. It was a fine thing to watch. It was also almost meaningless.
That jump and one or two others like it were nearly the only parachute jumps these men would make in Vietnam. The 101st was an airborne division that would spend the war riding helicopters. That was not a small detail. It was the whole shape of the coming fight. A parachute drop puts a mass of men on the ground once. A helicopter puts a small number of men on the ground.
then comes back and comes back again. It meant the brigade could reach almost anywhere. It also meant the brigade would usually arrive in small pieces. The enemy would learn to count those pieces. 2 weeks after landing, before the brigade had even built itself a home, it was sent north. The mission was not glamorous, but it was urgent.
The first cavalry division, the army’s brand new airmobile division was sailing from the United States. It needed a base camp. The place chosen was an in the central highlands on Highway 19, the road that ran inland from the coast at Queen Yon. That road was in trouble. Earlier in 1965, communist forces had attacked stretches of it and cut bridges. Supplies stopped moving.
Towns in the interior could be reached only by air. Before a division could arrive, somebody had to take the road back and hold the ground. That job was called Operation Highland, and it began on the 22nd of August, 1965. The paratroopers went in expecting the fight of their lives. Word had it that a main force enemy battalion was in the area.
These men had trained for months at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They landed on the airirstrip at an cleared the highway with air and artillery support and they braced for contact. It did not come for the men. That was the antilimax of their lives and it was their first real lesson in Vietnam. There would be no big battle when a big battle was expected.
Instead, there was a slow, grinding war of ambushes and snipers and booby traps, of small units in the trees, of ground taken and then quietly given back at night. The enemy showed himself in strength only when he had decided the odds were good. Over roughly 6 weeks, the brigade ran 23 company-sized or larger operations along that highway.
Eight of them helicopter assaults, 23 attacks, and apart from one violent exception, resistance was light. Now think about what that meant for a commander. His men were fit, aggressive, well-trained, and generously supported by artillery and aircraft, and the enemy had simply declined the invitation. Firepower is worthless if it cannot be brought down on anybody.
Mobility is worthless if there is nothing at the other end of the flight. The brigade had all the advantages except one. It could not make the enemy stay. The one exception came in September and it very nearly turned into a catastrophe. At 7 in the morning on the 18th of September 1965, the second battalion 502nd infantry along with a company of South Vietnamese Rangers flew into a landing zone near a hamlet called Anin about 30 km east of An.
Intelligence suggested an enemy unit in the mountains nearby. Intelligence was right in a way nobody had planned for. The helicopters put the Americans down on top of a training base occupied by two Vietkong battalions. The enemy let the first lift land untouched. When the second lift came in, the landing zone erupted. Small arms, automatic weapons, mortars.
The commander on the ground, Lieutenant Colonel Wilfred KG Smith, had to wave off the rest of the helicopters before all of his men were down. So the fight opened with 224 Americans on the ground and no way to get more. Then the supporters failed one by one for reasons that had nothing to do with courage. The battalion had not brought mortars or recoilless rifles because nobody had expected to need them in mountain country.
Artillery could not reach them because recent rain had made a river crossing impassible and the heavy lift helicopters that could have flown guns forward were busy elsewhere. Ground attack aircraft had struck the landing zone before the assault, but then they went away because the fuel at the airfield supplying them had somehow become contaminated.
For nearly 2 hours, 224 men held a perimeter with rifles and machine guns and nothing else. Enemy fire that day damaged or brought down 26 helicopters. Just after 9:00, jets finally arrived. Around 50 air strikes followed as the day wore on. Smith called some of them within a 100 m of his own men and two of his soldiers were killed by American bombs.
That was the price and he paid it because air power was the only thing that could turn the fight. It did turn the fight. A relief force came in by helicopter late that afternoon, but darkness caught it before it could cover the last stretch of ground. It reached the perimeter the next morning. By then, the shooting was over. 13 Americans were dead.
28 were wounded. Two of the company commanders were casualties and Captain Thomas Taylor, the ambassador’s son, the brigade intelligence officer, came out of a staff job and took over B company of the second of the 502nd. American counts put enemy dead somewhere between 226 and 257. Most of them killed by aircraft.
And then the argument began, which is the most important part of the story. Colonel Timothy considered it a landmark. It was, he said, the first time an American Army element had beaten a Vietkong main force unit in Vietnam. General West Morland called the operation a spectacular success. Other men who were there disagreed sharply. Major David Hackworth, the brigade operations officer, wrote years later that it was most definitely not a great victory and that the Vietkong had saved the day by walking away.
Major Charles Dyke, operations officer of another battalion, called it a disaster and blamed a poor plan. In particular, too few helicopters, which meant American strength built up slowly at the exact moment speed was everything. Both sides of that argument were pointing at the same fact from different ends. The Americans had proved they could destroy an enemy force once it was fixed in place.
They had also proved that their method of arrival, a few helicopter loads at a time, handed the enemy the first hour of every battle. And the enemy had proved something about himself. He would inflict what damage he could and then he would leave. Because leaving was not defeat in his arithmetic. It was survival and survival was how he intended to win.
At the end of September, the first cavalry division took over the defense of An. The paratroopers were finally released to build a home of their own and moved south. Through October, they worked and by late in the year, the brigade had a permanent base at Fan Rang on the coast. General West Morland came to see them on Thanksgiving Day 1965 and told them they had done well.
They had, but the central problem was untouched. The brigade still had no reliable way to make the enemy stand and fight. Within weeks, it would be handed a mission where that failure would have a price you could weigh in tons. In the middle of January 1966, the brigade moved about a 100 miles north to Fu Yan Province and to a broad flat green valley around the town of Tuihua.
Men called it the rice bowl. It was the richest rice growing country in central Vietnam, and the food that came out of that valley fed a large part of the region. The year before, communist forces had taken much of the harvest for themselves and taxed the farmers who grew it. American headquarters was determined that it would not happen again in 1966.
The operation was named Van Buren, and the orders were plain. Find the enemy in the Tuiha sector and destroy him. Understand what this changed. Up to now, the brigade had been chasing an enemy who could go anywhere. Now the brigade had something to guard. Rice cannot run. Rice has to be harvested on a schedule in a fixed place by frightened civilians.
For the first time, the Americans were tied to ground the enemy actually wanted. That should have been the answer. In a way, it was, but not before it went badly wrong. The second battalion of the 5002nd flew into Tuihua airfield. On the 15th of January, the second battalion of the 327th came in by landing ship.
3 days later, a brigade of South Korean marines worked the southern side of the Durang River. The enemy in these mountains was believed to be the 95th regiment of the North Vietnamese fifth division. not local guerillas, but regulars. On the last day of January, the enemy struck the South Koreans hard enough that they took heavy losses and had to be pulled out and replaced.
Then on the 6th of February, a platoon from B company of the second of the five Hoder second took fire near a hamlet about 20 km southwest of Tui Hua. This was the pattern the Americans wanted, contact. The company commander pushed platoon around the hamlet to seal it. His men attacked, met heavy fire, and pulled back to let 13 air strikes work the position.
Overnight, they tightened the ring for a fresh attack at first light. In the morning, the hamlet was empty. The enemy had gone in the dark, leaving 39 bodies and papers identifying them as part of the 95th regiment. That was Vietnam in one small event. The Americans had done everything right, and the enemy had still left on his own terms.
The next day it happened again, and this time it cost them dearly. On the 7th of February, sea company of the 2nd of the 5002nd, approached another hamlet, Myan, 2 km to the south. The fire that met them came from prepared hidden bunkers that supported each other, covered by machine guns and mortars. The company was pinned down and stayed pinned down for hours.
Air and artillery hit the position and barely dented it. Reinforcements came in by helicopter B company and a small elite reconnaissance unit of the first battalion. 327th infantry known as Tiger Force. Major David Hackworth arrived and took charge on the ground. His plan was a hammer and anvil. Tiger Force to the north, B company to the south, and the enemy caught between them.
The plan died on the ground itself. As Tiger Force moved to its attack position, the cover thinned out, and the men were caught in the open. Seven were killed. Hackworth then sent B Company in and B Company was caught the same way in the same open ground and lost 19 killed. Tiger Force was ordered to attack again.
Its leader was First Lieutenant James A. Gardner from Tennessee. It was his 23rd birthday. Gardner went to the bunkers himself. He crossed open rice patty under fire and destroyed the first bunker with a grenade, then the second the same way. He crawled along a patty dyke to a third, and before he could arm his grenade, the enemy gunner rose up and fired at him.
Gardner shot him from about 6 ft away. After the main position was taken, he reorganized his platoon and pushed on. And when a machine gun in another bunker stopped them, he collected grenades and charged it alone. He was hit just before he reached the last position, he destroyed it anyway and died on the rim of it. He was postumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
His platoon, according to the citation, was so moved by what he did that it resumed the attack and drove the enemy out. Hackworth was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for that same day for crossing open fields and a machine gunned bridge alone to reach the pinned down company, then leading the attack and directing it under fire for roughly 6 hours.
And in the morning, my can was empty. The enemy had slipped away overnight, leaving 63 bodies and 60 weapons. Operation Van Buren ended on the 25th of February. American losses were 55 killed. Korean losses were 45. Claimed enemy dead were 346 with 33 captured. Now the brigade had a problem it could no longer explain away. Two hamlets, two days, two identical endings.
The enemy would fight from strong ground when it suited him. Hurt the Americans badly and then leave in the dark. Air strikes could not stop it. Encirclement by daylight could not stop it. Courage, and there had been no shortage of courage, could not stop it. Something in the American method had to change.
In January 1966, the brigade got a new commander, and he had a theory. Brigadier General Willard Pearson was born in West Elizabeth, Pennsylvania on the 4th of July, 1915, and had graduated from George Washington University. He had been a soldier since 1938 and had fought in the Second World War. Pearson looked at the same problem everyone else was looking at and drew an uncomfortable conclusion.
If the enemy would not come to a battle on American terms, then Americans would have to go to him on his terms. He wanted small units, patrols, reconnaissance teams pushed as deep into the enemy country as they could go. Their job was to make contact. Once contact was made and the enemy was fixed in place, helicopters would bring in the weight and then the artillery and the aircraft would do what they were designed to do.
Stated plainly, and it sounds cold because it was. The plan required using small groups of men as bait. You can only do that with soldiers who will fight when they are badly outnumbered and stay on the radio while it is happening. Pearson had them. These were volunteer paratroopers who had chosen the airborne for the pay and the pride, and their reputation was the ammunition his theory ran on.
The instrument already existed. In November 1965, Hackworth had formed Tiger Force, a platoon-sized unit built to do long range reconnaissance, and in his phrase, to outgorilla the gorillas. It carried the patrols nobody else could carry, and it paid for them in casualties. There were three names that shaped the brigade’s fighting reputation in this period.
Pearson the architect, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Emerson, a battalion commander his men called the gunfighter, and Hackworth. The reporter Ward just who spent time with all three, drew a sharp distinction between them. Emerson and Hackworth, he wrote, were quite simply admired as men and as soldiers. Pearson, the strategist who wanted to carry the war to the enemy on the enemy’s terms, was regarded just words with a mixture of respect and astonishment.
That is a careful sentence and worth reading twice. Respect because the idea worked. Astonishment because of what it asked. The brigade also began doing something simpler and stranger, moving and attacking at night. The enemy owned the night. Pearson intended to take a share of it. The first clear proof came in March and it started with a farmer.
Operation Harrison opened on the 26th of February 1966. Two battalions were landed by helicopter northwest and southeast of Twiwa. They found nothing at all. That was normal now. Then on the 4th of March, a villager walked into the command post of the first of the 327th, which was guarding the rice harvest about 16 km southwest of Twiwa City.
He had seen North Vietnamese troops with mortars moving toward a village 3 km away. This was the part of the war no aircraft could do. A man who lived there decided to tell an American where the enemy was. Two rifle companies moved out. As B company passed a hamlet called My Fu, the enemy opened fire. A company attacked the hamlet across two dry rice patties and was cut up doing it.
Hackworth arrived in the late afternoon and took command. The two companies pushed, made poor progress, and by nightfall the fighting broke off. And here is where the brigade did something different. Hackworth tried to build a cordon around the hamlet for the night to hold the enemy in place until morning.
He did not have enough men to close the ring, an honest, ordinary, dangerous shortage. So he positioned Tiger Force to the south, and then he filled the gaps in the cordon with artillery fire. Think about what that means. Where he had no soldiers, he put shellfire on the ground the enemy would have to cross. It was not perfect. The enemy did get away in the dark as he always did.
But in the morning, the Americans counted 109 enemy dead around that hamlet. 19 Americans had been killed. That was the largest single engagement of the operation, and it was the shape of things to come. The night was no longer a free gift to the other side. Something could be done in the dark besides waiting. Then the enemy responded, and his response was the smartest thing he could have done.
Prisoners taken later revealed that the 95th regiment had broken itself into small units and scattered west into the mountains. Look at what that did to the American plan. The brigade had finally built a method for pinning a regiment. So, the regiment stopped being a regiment. On the 13th of March, a battalion made an unusual night helicopter assault to follow up a B-52 strike and found nothing.
Another attempt on the 15th found nothing. Operation Harrison ended on the 25th of March. Claimed enemy losses were 288 killed and 35 captured. American losses were 42 killed and two missing. Then came Operation Filillmore, another harvest security mission which lasted from late March until the 21st of July. It is remembered by almost nobody.
And that is exactly the point. One company caught an entrenched enemy company on the 7th of April and killed 28 defenders. Otherwise, the enemy had gone from the valley. The whole four-month operation cost eight Americans killed and claimed 134 enemy dead. Eight dead in 4 months. Sounds like a quiet war. It was not quiet.
It was walking in heat day after day into places where the enemy had been last week. The brigade’s own account of this stretch is worth quoting in spirit, if not in exact numbers. The film the army made about these operations says the paratroopers killed 516 hardcore Vietkong between February and April and that the rice crops were saved.
The official army histories counting operation by operation give lower figures, a few hundred across Harrison and Filillmore together. The gap between those two accounts is not a scandal. It is what happens when a battle is counted by different men in different jungles for different purposes. It is worth remembering every time a number appears in this story.
What is not in dispute is the harvest. The rice came in and the people who grew it kept it. In April, the brigade left the coast and went to the border. One battalion stayed behind to guard the harvest at Tuiwa. The rest moved out on a series of operations named Austin. First into an area near the boundary between the eye and three core zones, then northwest toward the Cambodian frontier into the monsoon soaked jungles of Kuang Duk and Fuak Long provinces.
The mission was to hit North Vietnamese concentrations along the border before the rains closed everything down. This is where the war became a matter of water and blisters. The brigade’s own history of the first of the 327th records the details that mattered to the men. Long, tiring patrols and so little drinkable water in the area that the troopers used water bags for the first time, which cut down how often helicopters had to resupply them. That is not a colorful detail.
That is the difference between a patrol that can stay out and a patrol that has to come home. On the 1st of May, two battalions were flown in. One near a border camp, one onto two infiltration routes coming out of Cambodia. For six days, then eight, they searched. They found nothing.
Then intelligence pointed to enemy activity near an abandoned special forces base at Bujia map and the brigade shifted. On the 10th of May, one of its companies captured a soldier from the North Vietnamese 141st Regiment. And that prisoner said something that changed the day. Four companies of his unit were waiting nearby in an ambush position.
Here, finally, the method worked exactly as designed. The next day, an American company and a cavalry troop encircled that ambush position and then called in air and artillery. American accounts credit the strikes with destroying most of a North Vietnamese battalion. That is the whole Pearson theory in one action. Find, fix, then bring the weight.
The same sweep produced a discovery of a different kind. On the 10th of May, troopers of the first of the 327th overran a large and elaborate Vietkong complex that included a provincial headquarters and a prisoner of war camp. Many valuable documents were captured. An American prisoner was not. The brigade’s history records flatly that the Vietkong had moved him 30 minutes before the troopers entered the enclosure. 30 minutes.
That is the war in this period compressed into a single fact. Operation Austin 4 ended on the 18th of May. American losses were nine killed. Claimed enemy losses were 101 killed by body count, 148 more estimated, and six captured. The army’s own film account describes hard fighting against the 141st regiment in the foothills near Non Cove from the 14th to the 20th of May with a battalion taking a number of casualties and more than 100 North Vietnamese dead.
The unit records placed the heavy contact with the 141st around Bouia map on the 11th with the battalions flying out to Nono on the 17th and 18th. Both accounts describe the same regiment and the same days. The sequence differs. The wounded from those fights were taken out by helicopter through ground fire by aviators flying medical evacuation missions.
That was the other half of Pearson’s plan that never gets discussed. Using small units as bait is only defensible if a badly hurt man has some chance of getting out. Those pilots were the reason the theory was not simply a way of losing people. The brigade then pulled back to a base at Cho Reo in low mosquito-ridden country where the rains turned the camp into mud and waited as a reserve force.
At the end of May, the orders came, move north. In the central highlands, June meant rain. And in June 1966, American intelligence believed the rain was cover for a major North Vietnamese offensive. The Highlands mattered for a plain reason. Supply routes ran through them, feeding communist forces further south. General West Morland intended to contest any move into that country.
There was also a theory in the air, and it is worth being honest about it. For two years, American headquarters had warned that North Vietnamese regulars intended to drive east from the Le Oceanian border to the sea and cut South Vietnam in half. Ward Just, who covered the campaign that followed, thought the theory was implausible.
The North Vietnamese did not have the men to hold a line across the country, he wrote, and did not have the weapons to keep American aircraft off it. He suspected the more plausible aim was simpler, to make the Highlands so dangerous that the Americans would be forced to concentrate large numbers of troops there.
But the theory made vivid newspaper copy and it worked in both directions. Just recalled the operative line from a West Morland briefing that year. They tried to cut the country in half, but we stopped them. Whatever Hanoi’s intention, the units were real. Intelligence identified the North Vietnamese 24th regiment in the area and the 88th regiment waiting across the border in Laos.
And in late May at a small outpost in northern Kum province called two morong or Tumarang, North Vietnamese troops surrounded a group of South Vietnamese regional forces and cut off their escape. The garrison was pinned down for days by mortar and sniper fire, but it was not overrun. That is the detail American commanders noticed.
A determined attacker who has surrounded a small outpost for days can usually finish it. This one did not. Captured intelligence soon suggested why. The attack on Tumarong was a distraction meant to draw attention while two regiments prepared something larger. If that larger attack had been launched, it would have been one of the first major North Vietnamese offensive operations since American combat troops arrived.
The brigade was moved to DAC 2 for the relief mission. It began deploying from Cha Reo by C130 on the 29th of May and closed into DAC 2 on the 3rd of June. 201 aircraft sorties were needed. One battalion came up from PLU by air and road. Operation Hawthorne began on the 2nd of June 1966. The first phase was a three-pronged converging attack.
South Vietnamese forces, the 42nd regiment and the 21st Ranger Battalion moved with the first battalion of the 327th to break through to the surrounded men. Elements of the 42nd regiment moved north by road from DAC 2 on the 3rd while the American battalion was flown into blocking positions north and east of the outpost. It worked quickly.
The garrison at Tumarang was reached and pulled out. Sources differ slightly on the exact day giving the 5th or the 6th of June. And at that moment the mission the brigade had been given was over. The surrounding men were safe. The sensible thing was to go home. Pearson did not go home.
American commanders decided to see whether they could find the North Vietnamese before they left the region. The intelligence in hand suggested a drive aimed first at Tumarong on the high ground, then Dakto, then the provincial capital at Kum itself. If that was true, then the enemy regiment was still out there in the mountains, and it was worth trying to fix it in place.
So the operation changed character completely. Phase one had been a rescue. Phase two would be a hunt, a double envelopment of the ridges northeast of Tumarong by two American airborne battalions with more forces fed in to close the circle. A rifle company and an artillery battery were left in the valley near Tumarong to support the operation.
Which brings us back to a quarter 2 in the morning on the 7th of June. The enemy came for the artillery because the artillery was the problem. Every time the American guns fired, the attacking forces had to pull back out of the shellfire. When the shelling lifted, they regrouped and tried again. Week-long air strikes had not made them withdraw, but the artillery directed by the men who could see the ground was doing real damage.
So, a North Vietnamese battalion of the 24th regiment came down into the valley to silence the guns. You already know how it ended. Three assaults, a penetration of the perimeter. Howitzers firing point blank at men in the open, fighting until 9 in the morning when air and artillery support finally broke the attack.
86 enemy dead counted at dawn, 13 of them inside the artillery position. The North Vietnamese, following their normal practice, carried away most of their dead. Only two bodies were left at one part of the position. The artillery men were certain the true number was far higher, and nobody could say what it was.
Ward Just, who walked that ground within hours, described dark streaks of blood where men had been carried off in the night, and part of a torso lying just beyond the security perimeter. That was the opening round of the campaign for the central highlands and it changed the whole logic of the operation. Up to now the Americans had spent a year trying to make the enemy stand and fight.
On this night the enemy had chosen to stand and fight and it had cost him a battalion’s worth of casualties in a few hours. For the first time the initiative was not entirely his. That same morning, the remainder of the second battalion of the 5002nd was released from reserve and flown into a landing zone northwest of the battle area to swing around the enemy’s northern flank.
At 1:00 in the afternoon, one of its companies ran into a North Vietnamese unit, and that grew into a pitched battle that lasted until nightfall. Enemy dead for the day were counted at 77. Meanwhile, the first of the 327th pushed north after the withdrawing enemy and killed 31 on the 8th of June. American losses that day were five killed and 17 wounded.
It was working. Both American battalions were now pressing into ridges where the enemy had been dug in for a long time with heavy machine guns and automatic weapons set in bunkers along the fingers and draws of the mountainside. The next stage of the battle would not be about firepower.
It would be about a few dozen men on two hills on the same afternoon. On the afternoon of the 9th of June, Hackworth stood in the wreckage of the artillery firebase and sent his reconnaissance platoon into the mountains to find the enemy’s base camp. Tiger Force numbered 42 men that day. Its commander was Captain Lewis Higinbotham, a slim, bonyfaced career soldier from Texas in his middle 20s who had spent more than two years in Vietnam as an adviser in the Delta.
This was his first mission with the Tigers. Ward just went with them, and because he did, we have an unusually honest record of what Pearson’s theory looked like from the bottom. They were dropped at 4:00 in the afternoon into high elephant grass and thick jungle where the trees blotted out the sun.
Almost immediately they began finding what they had come to find. A twoman fighting position cut into a bush, then a hut, then another, then a small base camp for a dozen men. All of it was deserted. All of it a warning. Then at the rear of the column, three bursts of machine gun fire. One enemy soldier died and one of their own hits. Private first class Richard Garcia had been shot through the lung by an American bullet.
It is nearly impossible to see in that jungle. A frightened man fires in bursts and not accurately. The medic worked on him. Garcia stood up, looked at the medic and said he could not breathe, that he was going home, that he was going to be all right. Then he died. The dead enemy soldier lying 50 yards away had a bandaged head and a bandaged leg and a battered rifle beside him.
Higenbotham judged he had been walking back to a base camp for medical treatment, probably one of the men wounded attacking the artillery position two nights before. They spent the night in a star-shaped defensive position. Three men to a group, one awake at all times. No talking, no smoking, radio off.
The next day, the patrol’s luck ran out in the quietest possible way. At first light, three armed North Vietnamese soldiers wandered into the camp, saw the Americans, and ran. A few rounds went after them and missed. Higenbotham shook his head and said they had probably spent the night nearby, thinking the Americans were their own people.
A long range reconnaissance patrol cannot operate once the enemy knows it is there. Twice the Tigers had been forced to fire. Now three men had seen them and gotten away and were certainly headed for their headquarters. Nothing could have prevented it. Nothing could be done about it. The mission continued because the whole point was to be found.
They climbed all day through cool, wet jungle, crossing small streams, past base camp after base camp. By 1:00 in the afternoon, Higen Botham had concluded that his 42 men had walked into a staging area big enough for a regiment, a thousand men. At about half 2, the first grenade came down the ridge line.
In the first 15 minutes, three Americans were killed and six were wounded. Fire came from three sides. The North Vietnamese were maneuvering as they fired from concealed positions on ground. they had prepared themselves. Higinbotham got on the radio to Hackworth and asked for everything. Over the next 4 hours, he received about,00 rounds of 105 mm and 90 rounds of 155 mm artillery plus air strikes.
A fist-sized piece of shrapnel landed 2 ft from him, and he kept talking into the radio, locating the heaviest enemy fire. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows now, how many North Vietnamese were on that ridge. They had no mortars, so the unit was probably company-sized or smaller. It did not matter. They had grenades, automatic weapons, good cover, surprise, and knowledge of the ground.
By 4, after 2 hours, the Americans had been pushed back into an area about the size of a basketball court. Captain Chris Verumis, 27, from Oakland, California, a headquarters company commander in his first week in Vietnam on his first patrol who had come along because he wanted to come, was killed on the trail. Sergeant Pelum Bryant, the senior non-commissioned officer, ended up the only unounded man in his eight-man squad, holding the rear flank essentially alone from an enemy foxhole.
Hackworth told Higin Bothotham there was a company of infantry a mile away and he was ordering it to reinforce. Higin Bothotham’s answer over the radio was this. You’ve got to try it. And then for the first time, his voice broke. If you don’t get up here soon, we’re all going to die.
A moment later, quietly and precisely, as if reading from a piece of paper, he said, “Dear God, please help me save these men’s lives. it. The reinforcements got lost. The tigers held with grenades and rifle fire in a shrinking circle. The wounded gathering at the center around the radio. Ward just lying in that circle was hit by a grenade that landed a yard away and wounded in the head and back.
He watched a private named Sam Washburn keep firing with a hand that had been blown to pieces. The company of reinforcements finally arrived, crashing through the jungle with rifle fire and shouting. 19 men were wounded and about a dozen were dead. There was no landing zone. The helicopters had to hover a 100 ft above the trees, lower a bar on a cable, and lift the wounded out one at a time, lit up by strobe lights.
Some of the men had been lying on the jungle floor for 5 hours. The enemy was still on the ridge and shot at the wounded as they were winched up through the light. That was one hill two mi away on the same afternoon. C Company of the second battalion, 5002nd infantry maneuvering to help the heavily engaged first of the 327th ran into an estimated North Vietnamese battalion.
B Company moving to help C Company was engaged by another one. Sea Company was trapped in a bowl of ground with the enemy on three sides in close contact about to be overrun. Its commander was Captain William S. Carpenter Jr. 28 years old from Springfield, Pennsylvania. Americans of a certain age already knew his name. At West Point, he had been an all-American end and team captain, famous as the lonesome end.
The player kept out wide and out of the huddle to pull defenders away from the Army running game. His old coach called him the greatest end he ever coached there. Carpenter turned down professional football and stayed in the army. He had already been wounded and decorated in Vietnam in 1964 as an adviser.
There is something else about him that belongs in this story. His father, Private Firstclass William Carpenter Senior, had served as an ammunition bearer in the 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division and was killed in action in the RER pocket in 1945. He is buried in the Netherlands. Bill Carpenter grew up without him. When aircraft arrived overhead, Carpenter got on the radio and asked them to bomb his own position.
The exact words are recorded slightly differently in different sources. One version from an Air Force report on the operation has him saying, “Lay it right on top of us. They are overrunning us. We might as well take some of them, too.” Another has it shorter. We’re overrun. They’re right in among us. I need an air strike on my position.
Two F4C phantoms dropped Napal inside and outside his perimeter. Several of his own soldiers were wounded by that strike. It also broke the enemy assault and stopped his company from being surrounded and destroyed. Further air strikes were then called in outside the perimeter and sea company consolidated and eventually broke out. Relief came slowly through the dark.
One company engaged a North Vietnamese company at 10 minutes to 10 that night. A cavalry battalion linked up with B company at a/4 10 and formed a new defensive position. A company from the 52nd finally reached Carpenters’s men at 11. Carpenter was awarded the Silver Star, later upgraded to the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest decoration for valor.
The army also gave him a nickname he never asked for, Napal Bill. Two days later, in front of reporters at DAC 2, Pearson told him he had done a marvelous job. Ward just lying wounded understood something about the press that is worth repeating. The near destruction of Tiger Force went almost unnoticed in the American papers because on that same afternoon on a hill 2 mi away, a famous West Point football player had called Napal down on himself.
On the 10th of June, the American companies held their positions while another engaged an enemy platoon. 15 B-52 bombers dropped 270 tons of bombs on suspected positions. And then the North Vietnamese did something that took the Americans best weapon away from them. They closed in. On the 11th of June, the American units tried to break off contact because the enemy’s hugging tactics, staying so close that bombs and shells could not safely be dropped between them, had reduced the effectiveness of American air and artillery support. Read that
carefully because it is the enemy’s whole answer to the Pearson method. If the Americans planned to fix him in place and then bring in the weight, then the counter was to grab hold of the Americans so tightly that the weight could not be used at all. Disengaging turned out to be as dangerous as attacking.
As one company pulled back, it ran into an entrenched North Vietnamese battalion, and it was only able to break free with close air support and artillery fire. That afternoon, two companies were extracted back to DAC 2. By now the battle was a week old. The enemy was in a prepared defensive position in the Dac Tan Valley.
Tunnels, trench lines, bunkers, spider holes, some of the tunnels going as deep as 50 ft. And he was ready for a long fight. The one thing he wanted, according to the brigade’s own history, was rain. American artillery had pounded him. Air strikes had hit him constantly. Neither had moved him. So, the American commanders asked for the heaviest weapon available.
At 8:00 in the morning on the 13th of June, while mist was still rising off the valley, 24 B-52s struck the area where the fighting of the 9th and 10th had taken place. The bombs went in over a window of less than half an hour. Accounts of the tonnage differ. One Air Force report gives 432 tons and an Army historybased account gives nearly 650 tons.
30 minutes after the last bomb, a rifle company was landed by helicopter into the target area. What they found was not a heroic story. They found craters, tunnels, the dead, the dying, and men so stunned they could be walked up to and taken prisoner. 15 days North Vietnamese soldiers were captured by that one battalion.
Others fought on among the wreckage and had to be dug out one at a time. Enemy resistance crumbled. American, South Vietnamese, and Montineyard irregular forces pushed into the objective area by helicopter and on foot. There was one company-sized fight on the 15th of June, broken off by the enemy after air strikes.
After that, contact almost stopped. Operation Hawthorne ended on the 21st of June, 1966. Here is where the numbers in the title come from, and here is why they need care. 16 straight days of hard combat inside an operation that officially ran nearly 3 weeks. In the army’s own account of the campaign, the brigade enveloped the 24th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, and more than 500 communist soldiers were killed.
It was described as the largest single battle of the war so far for the men of the 101st. The official records give more than one figure and they do not agree. One set of figures records 479 enemy killed by body count, another 209 killed by aircraft, of which 52 were actually counted, plus an estimated further 56 killed and 21 prisoners taken.
Another summary of the same afteraction report gives 688 killed plus 56 estimated killed. The brigade’s own unit history and the presidential unit citation that President Johnson later signed both state that the 24th regiment suffered around 1,200 casualties by body count and estimate. The Army film says 22 North Vietnamese regulars were taken alive.
One battalion history speaks of 88 individuals captured across the operation. American losses are recorded consistently and are worth stating without decoration. 48 Americans killed and 239 wounded. South Vietnamese losses were 10 killed and 29 wounded. Ward just who was carried out of it recorded the claim as 1,200 enemy dead to 250 of their own.
What all versions agree on is the effect. Later estimates put the 24th regiment’s casualty rate at around 60%. It was judged ineffective as a fighting unit. Whatever offensive had been planned in the northern central highlands did not happen. American commanders called Hawthorne a success and by the standard set for it, it was won.
And then there is the sentence that every honest account of this battle has to include. By early 1967, the 24th North Vietnamese Army Regiment was back to fighting strength. That is the hard center of this whole story. The brigade had finally done the thing it had been trying to do for 11 months. It had found a North Vietnamese regiment, held it in place, and destroyed most of it.
And within about 6 months, the regiment existed again because the men to rebuild it kept coming down the trails. And because the American method could break a unit, but could not close the road it came down. Almost 11 months to the day after Hawthorne began, a battalion of another American airborne brigade was ambushed and badly mauled by North Vietnamese infantry a few miles north of DAC 2.
The operations officer that day was Lou Higinbotham, who by then had transferred out of the 101st. He asked a platoon leader over the radio how it was going. “Good, clean fun,” the lieutenant answered. “That was at 10:00 in the morning. At 20 10, the radio went dead. Every man in the platoon was killed or badly wounded.
Ward just wrote that there is no real epilogue to the reconnaissance patrol of the Tiger Force.” He was right and it applies to the whole campaign. Before the story moves on, the cost deserves to sit still for a moment. 48 Americans were killed, 239 wounded, many of them lifted out on cables through gunfire because there was nowhere for a helicopter to land.
Among them, Captain Chris Verumis, one week in the country. On his first patrol, Private First Class Richard Garcia killed by a rifle round from his own side in a jungle where no one could see. First Lieutenant James Gardner killed on his 23rd birthday 4 months earlier and 150 mi away. The men of battery B who had to fire howitzers as if they were rifles.
The soldiers of sea company, second of the 5002nd who were wounded by napal, dropped by their own aircraft on the order of their own commander and who survived because of it. One veteran of the first of the 327th later wrote that June at DAC 2 always brought back a flood of memories and named men who did not come back.
a sergeant named Ira Perkins, killed on the 7th of June, and a young soldier named Goodall, who could not be saved, whose eyes he said, still haunted him. He also wrote about a soldier who came through the brush to get him out when he had been left alone with a machine gun against orders and who saved his life.
That account is a veteran’s personal recollection rather than an official record, and it should be read as such. There were also men found alive who had nothing to do with any battle. The army’s own account of the brigade’s operations in Fu Yan records 11 Vietnamese civilians found in a Vietkong prison camp held for several months, apparently without medical care, suffering from open sores, skin infections, malnutrition, and deformities from broken bones that had never been set.
One of them, a former Vietkong who had gone over to the government side and been recaptured, could not describe what had happened to him. That is the part of the war that no operation name covers. Victory in war is supposed to buy something. In this case, you can point to it. After surveillance operations along the Le Oceanian and Cambodian borders, the brigade returned to Tuiwa on the 21st of July 1966 and began an operation named after a Revolutionary War naval hero, John Paul Jones.
The mission was unglamorous and for once entirely concrete. seize and hold the Vong Row Pass and the 16-mi stretch of National Highway 1 between Twiwa and Vongroe Bay on the coast and protect the engineers who would build a road from the highway down to the bay. The point of all that was logistics. If ships could unload at Vongro Bay, supplies for the whole Tuiwa area would no longer have to come the long way around.
Everything the brigade needed would arrive faster and cheaper. Infantry landed at the cliff guarded bay and met no resistance. Then moved inland to link up with the forces pushing down the highway. Supported by helicopter gunships and helicopter born assault troops, the brigade cleared the zone over about 6 weeks. Along the way, the operation grew.
B-52 strikes were exploited by helicopter-born infantry. Prisoners were taken, including a captain from the North Vietnamese Fifth Division, who confirmed that his division headquarters and two regiments were operating in the province, and search operations ran between the Kylo Valley and the bay. But repeatedly, the sweeps that followed the intelligence found nothing at all.
The enemy had scattered again. By early September, Highway 1 was open and Vongroe Bay was secure. American losses were 23 killed and 132 wounded. Enemy losses were recorded as 209 killed by body count with a further 135 estimated though the brigade’s own afteraction report gives a combined estimate of 244. The engineers built the connecting road and a new seapport was born.
In the weeks that followed, the brigade went back to guarding farmers, and the army’s account of the harvest that came in under that protection puts it at some 17,000 metric tons of rice. That figure comes from the army’s own film account of the operations and has not been cross-cheed here against center of military history records, but the meaning of it holds up regardless of the exact tonnage.
A rifle company standing in a rice patty does not look like a strategic asset. It was one. Every ton harvested by farmers instead of taken by the Vietkong was a ton of food that did not go into an enemy supply system and a family that had one less reason to believe the government could not protect them.
Once again, the fighting in the Twiwa sector was heavy, and enemy losses there were counted at 239 killed and 42 captured. And once again, the enemy eventually became impossible to find. At the end of October 1966, the brigade tried something clever, and it failed for a reason worth understanding. Operation Geronimo was designed to hit the battle damaged North Vietnamese 18B regiment before the monsoon.
Intelligence placed it in a base area 50 km southwest of Twiwa. Pearson built a careful plan. Two American battalions would move at night to conceal their approach. One along a road paralleling the river and one landed by helicopter to the south. At dawn, South Vietnamese and South Korean units would block the roads north and east.
Then the Americans would sweep east through the base area. The American battalions would be operating beyond the reach of their own artillery. At first, Pearson accepted that risk and the risk of a night movement because the enemy was believed to be weak. The battalions deployed on the evening of the 31st of October without incident.
In the morning, they pushed east and found only scattered Vietkong. Captured documents explained why. The 18B regiment had left the area a month earlier. All that skill aimed at an empty box. That is what the enemy’s freedom to move actually meant. New intelligence then placed the 95th regiment in a jungle covered mountain base area northwest of Twiwa known as the hub. Pearson wrote a new plan.
Land the brigade northwest of it and sweep east against blocking positions. That phase began on the 6th of November. On the 10th, American forces found a base camp and fought the entrenched fifth battalion of the 95th regiment through the night and into the next day. And then a weapon appeared in this story that had not appeared before.
An army psychological warfare team talked to the men in that base camp and 35 North Vietnamese soldiers surrendered. The camp was overrun afterward. 35 men who walked out instead of dying in a bunker. In a war measured in body counts, that was a different kind of result entirely, and it came from a loudspeaker rather than a howitzer.
By the 24th of November, signals intelligence showed the 95th regiment had left to the west. Operation Girono ended on the 4th of December. Enemy losses were recorded at 150 killed and 76 captured. American losses were 16 killed. In December, the brigade went back to Konou Province and the move itself was the achievement.
The entire brigade was flown north by the air force in about 48 hours. And there before Christmas, the paratroopers did something they had barely done since the day they arrived. They jumped. It was the first parachute jump in many months for most of them out of C130s. Low men remember somewhere between about 500 and 800 ft onto rockh hard dry rice patties. It was windy.
Men landed among cattle in thorn bushes on patty dikes. At least one came down through the roof of a Vietnamese house while the family was eating breakfast. There were injuries. Sprained ankles, hurt shoulders. At least one man badly hurt by a partial parachute failure. At least two evacuated to Japan. Veterans still argue about the details.
Whether the battalions jumped in late December or in early January, how high, from which aircraft, on what date? The unit records mention refresher training in early January, and jumps on the 6th and 7th with a makeup jump on the 18th. Many veterans are certain their own battalion jumped in late December. Both may be right because the battalions jumped separately.
What they do not argue about is the ruling. The jumps were classified as training. No combat jump stars were awarded and some of the men have been annoyed about it for 60 years. One of them summed up what the jump was actually for. From the aircraft, they walked straight into an operation. The morale effect, the battalion history says, was considerable.
All personnel were proud to once again be airborne in every sense of the word. That operation was called Pickicket, a search and destroy operation in Konou province, fighting alongside South Vietnamese army and militia forces. They spent Christmas 1966 in Konou. Some of them camped around an old French fort.
The operation ran into late January 1967. On the 26th of January 1967, the last convoy rolled into the base camp at Fan Rang. The brigade had been away from its own home base for more than a year. It had gone north to Anay on landing ships in 1965 and now landing ships brought it back. Brigadier General Willard Pearson welcomed the men home.
It was one of his last acts as their commander. Two days later, he handed the first brigade over to Brigadier General Salv H. Mat, an officer his men would come to call the Iron Duke. In front of the formation, a senior officer pinned the Legion of Merit on Pearson’s uniform. Pearson left having led the brigade through 14 combat operations from the rice patties of the coast to the mountains of the border.
He went on to command fifth corps in Germany, retired as a lieutenant general in 1973, and spent 12 years as superintendent of Valley Forge Military Academy and College. He died in 1996. Hackworth became the youngest colonel in Vietnam and later one of the war’s most public critics.
In 1971, he went on national television, said the war could not be won, and called for withdrawal. It ended his career, which he seems to have expected. Bill Carpenter stayed in the army, took command of the newly activated 10th Mountain Division in 1984, and retired as a lieutenant general. Ward just recovered from his wounds, and became one of the most respected American novelists of his generation.
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