The Dangerous Weapons Only Seabees Where Allowed To Carry In Vietnam

The Dangerous Weapons Only Seabees Where Allowed To Carry In Vietnam

There is a story that goes around about the Navy CBS in Vietnam. It says they were handed weapons nobody else was cleared to touch. Special authorizations, restricted hardware, a construction unit with an arsenal the infantry was never trusted with. At least that is the story that keeps circulating. The Navy’s own published record says something almost embarrassingly plain.

CB weapons were, and this is the quote, generally identical to those employed by Marine Corps units, identical, not restricted, not exclusive, not special in any way at all. Same rifles and same machine guns, drawn from the same supply chain as the Marines they worked beside. And there was a very deliberate reason for that which we will come back to.

 So the popular version is wrong. But the real answer is stranger and it is not about rifles at all because the most destructive thing a CB carried in Vietnam was never issued to him as a weapon. It was issued to him as a tool. And the man who proved what those men were actually capable of died in 14 hours of fighting at a place called Dong Joai, holding a weapon he had almost certainly never expected to fire.

 Wake Island, December 1941. Hundreds of American civilian construction workers were on that atal building runways and fortifications for the Navy. They were not soldiers. They were carpenters, equipment operators, steel workers, hired on contract. When the Japanese came, those men were in an impossible position.

 Under international law, as it stood, a civilian who picked up a rifle and resisted a military attack was not a lawful combatant. He was a gorilla, and a captured gorilla could be executed on the spot without trial. 98 of the civilian workers captured on wake were later killed. On the 5th of January 1942, the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks was authorized to fix that problem permanently, not by keeping construction workers out of combat zones by making them soldiers.

 They recruited experienced tradesmen, put them in uniform, gave them infantry training, and issued them weapons. armed military construction personnel, lawful combatants who could build a runway and then defend it. And note what that meant for who filled the ranks. The Navy was not looking for 18year-olds. It wanted men who already knew how to run a crane, weld a beam, or survey a road, which meant CB units skewed noticeably older and more experienced than the infantry units they served alongside.

That stayed true into Vietnam. That is where the name comes from. Construction battalion shortened to CB which becomes CB and the motto they picked was never subtle about the arrangement. So by the time Vietnam arrived the question of whether CBS should be armed had been settled for more than 20 years.

 The only question left was what to arm them with. On the 7th of May 1965, Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 10 came ashore at Chuli in an amphibious landing alongside roughly 3,500 Marines of the fourth Marine regimental landing team. Around 600 CBS landed with them. It was the first large-scale wartime CB deployment since the Second World War.

 Their job was to build a jet capable expeditionary airfield out of aluminium matting that had never been tested under combat conditions. 23 days after they landed, eight A4 Skyhawks put down on it. The finished 8,000 ft runway was done by the 3rd of July. That was not a one-off. A detachment of 30 CBS laid a 3,700 and 20 ft aluminium runway at Dong Ha in 6 days.

 Another put down roughly 3,900 ft at a place you will have heard of, Kesan, in five. Now, what were those men carrying while they did it? A mobile construction battalion was not organized like a construction company. It was organized like a marine infantry battalion. Five companies, squads, fire teams, weapons teams, all structured to match Marine Corps organization exactly.

 The rifle platoon carried the M14 7.6 2mm, wooden stock, heavy, accurate, and by 1965 already on its way out of the American inventory. It was being replaced by the M16. And here is a detail worth pausing on because it gets misreported constantly. CBS did hold on to their M14s longer than a lot of Army units did, but not because of any special permission.

They swapped over in step with the Marine Corps. Because CBS in first corps drew their ammunition and their logistics through Marine Channels. The Marines were slow to give up the M14. So the CBS were slow to give it up too. Every squad had one M79 grenade launcher, 40 mm breakaction, the weapon everyone called the blooper.

 The weapons platoon carried the M60 machine gun and the 3.5 in rocket launcher, the super bazooka, shoulder fired, designed to kill armor and bunkers. That is the complete authorized list. M14 or M16, M79, M60 3.5 in rocket launcher. If you see a video claiming CBS were standard issued recoilless rifles or mortars, that is not in the record.

 So on paper, nothing exceptional at all, which is exactly the point people miss. Look past the rifle rack and you find the answer. CBS ran rock quarries. That is not a footnote. That is core to the job. You cannot build roads, runways, and revetments in Vietnam without aggregate. And you cannot get aggregate without taking a mountain apart.

 So they blasted constantly. Quarry faces, road cuts, stumps, bunkers, tunnel systems, unexploded ordinance. The material was standard military demolition stock. C4 and one and a quarter pound blocks, TNT, cratering charges, detonating cord, blasting caps. Nothing about any single one of those items was restricted to the Navy.

 An Army combat engineer used the same catalog. The difference was volume, and it was not close. There is an old CB estimating rule that one pound of explosive yields roughly 1 cubic yard of rock. Now think about the scale of what these men were building. Six CB battalions upgraded routes 1 and 9. That effort involved 133 bridges across 138 m of road.

 Nearly a bridge for every mile. Or take the bridge that Mobile Construction Battalion 4 built across the Thubon River south of Da Nong in 1967. 240 ft of timber. The longest bridge of its kind, the CBS, ever built, carried on 800 piles driven 40 feet into the riverbed. I mean, sit with that for a second.

 Every one of those bridge abutments, every cubic yard of fill, every mile of road came out of a quarry that somebody had to blow apart first. That is the honest version of the story. A CB did not carry a secret weapon. He carried an ordinary rifle and an extraordinary quantity of high explosive. And he was trained at Port Huene, Gulfport and Davisville to use both.

 And that training, the demolition work, the infantry drills, the weapons familiarity seemed like ordinary job preparation right up until the night it wasn’t. CB team 1104 was nine men, one officer, eight enlisted. They arrived in Saigon on the 1st of February, 1965. Their work was building and improving camps for Army Special Forces. They finished a camp at Ben Soy on the 3rd of June.

 The next day, they moved to a new special forces camp about 55 miles from Saigon at a district town called Dong Shuai. One of them was Marvin Glenn Shields, construction mechanic. Third class, 25 years old, born in Port Townsend, Washington, enlisted in 1962. His team’s officer in charge, Frank Peterlin, described him years later as a man who kept a guitar at his side in the evenings and liked to sing and dance with the local troops, always upbeat.

Late on the 9th of June, the camp was attacked. Inside were nine CBS, 11 American special forces personnel, and roughly 400 Vietnamese and Montineyard defenders. Worth being clear about what the CBS were doing there. They were not an assault element. They were nine tradesmen improving the defenses and facilities of a camp for a civilian irregular defense group program.

Carpenters, equipment operators, a mechanic, a corman. Outside were elements of a Vietkong regiment. Estimates of its strength vary by source. The Naval History and Heritage Command puts it at approximately 2,000 men. The Naval Institute’s account gives a range of 1,500 to 2,000. The fighting lasted roughly 14 hours.

 Quick thing before we get to what Marvin Shields did next. If you want more history that actually checks its sources instead of recycling numbers off other videos, subscribing genuinely helps this channel keep doing the archive work. That is the whole ask. Back to Dong Soi. By the early hours of the 10th, the surviving defenders had been pushed back into the district headquarters building and surrounded.

 Shields had already been wounded. He kept carrying ammunition to the firing line. Anyway, he was wounded a second time. Rather than take cover, he insisted on moving a more seriously wounded man to safety. Then a Vietkong machine gun position pinned the entire camp. Nothing could move while it was firing.

 An Army special forces officer, Second Lieutenant Charles Q. Williams, decided to go out and destroy it. He needed a second man to carry and load the 3.5 in rocket launcher. Shields volunteered, wounded twice, weakened, and with no obligation whatsoever to be the man who did this. The two of them moved outside the perimeter in the open toward a machine gun position roughly 150 m away. They destroyed it.

 On the way back to the defensive position, Shields was hit again, mortally this time. Helicopters reached the camp later that morning. Marvin Shields died of his wounds during the evacuation flight. For two of his teammates, it was not over. Lieutenant Junior Grade, Frank Peterlin, and Chief Equipment Operator Johnny McCully had been separated from the group during the withdrawal and were still out there when the helicopters left.

 Dong Zoey was declared a free fire zone with both men inside it. They evaded through the rest of that day and through the night and were picked up by a rescue helicopter at around 7 the following morning. He was a construction mechanic. He fixed bulldozers. On the 13th of September 1966, President Lyndon Johnson presented the Medal of Honor to Shields widow Joan at the White House.

 Marvin Shields remains the only CB ever awarded the Medal of Honor. A Navy frigot was named for him. He was not the only one decorated that night. Steel worker second class William C. Hoover was killed in the same action. The first CB killed in the Vietnam War and received a posthumous bronze star with combat V.

 Lieutenant Junior Grade Frank Peterlin and Chief Equipment Operator Johnny McCully received the Silver Star. The remaining five received the Bronze Star with Combat V. The whole team received the Navy unit commendation. Of the nine CBS present, two were killed. The Naval History and Heritage Command records six wounded.

 The Naval Institute and several other accounts say seven. We are showing you both because we do not know which is right. And one more correction because this one is repeated in almost every article about this battle. Charles Q. Williams, the officer who went out with shields, is frequently described as a Navy officer who received the Navy Cross. He was neither.

 Williams was United States Army fifth special forces group and he received the Medal of Honor. Dong Shoai produced two of them. You would think a detail like that would be easy to get right. It keeps getting printed wrong anyway. Dong Shoai was 1965. The CB presence only grew from there. The community went from around 9,400 men in mid 1965 to more than 26,000 at its peak with 12 battalions in country by 1968.

To grow that fast, the Navy went back to the 1942 playbook and recruited skilled civilian construction workers directly, bringing them in at advanced paygrades rather than starting them at the bottom. That program brought in more than 13,000 men, and they kept getting hit. In October 1965, a Vietkong attack tore through the site near Da Nong, where Mobile Construction Battalion 9 was building a hospital.

Eight Quanet huts were destroyed, two CBS were killed, and more than 90 men were wounded in a single night. They opened the 400 bed hospital in under 3 months. Anyway, at Quesan Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit, 301 kept the airstrip usable before, during, and after the siege. Repairing a runway while it is being shelled is not a metaphor for anything.

 It is just the job. You expect someday the CBS may have to come back here again and build this airiest strip all over? I expect to see the CBS anywhere they’re needed. And I don’t know if it’ll be here or where, but they’ll be there if they need it. I guess you left a lot of memories here. Yes, I had a lot when we laid down the air strip and patching it up and now taking it back up again.

 I have plenty of memories of this place. That was filmed after the base was abandoned. The men who built the runway came back to take it apart and carry it away piece by piece. So what did it cost them? 85 CBS are named on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A Veterans Memorial in North Tonowanda, New York, records 143 CBS killed in action between 1965 and 1971.

Both of those numbers are real. They count differently. We are not going to pretend there is a single settled figure because there isn’t one. Which brings us to the numbers you should refuse to accept. If a video tells you 42 CBS died in Vietnam, that figure is real, but it is being misused.

 It is the cumulative total for the Naval Construction Force and Civil Engineer Corps across every conflict since 1942. If a video tells you the CBS ran the Rome plows that cleared the jungle, that is the army story. Rome plow land clearing companies were United States Army Combat Engineer units and the famous armored gun trucks were built by Army Transportation Corps units for convoy defense.

 CBS did armor their own vehicles with improvised plating and one of their officers won a cash award for a truck hardening design in 1968. But the gun truck legend belongs to somebody else. Nobody is inventing these claims maliciously. They get copied from one video into the next until they harden into fact. So, back to where we started.

 There was no secret CB arsenal. Their rifles were the Marines rifles deliberately, so the ammunition would match. What set them apart was that they spent the war handling enough high explosive to take mountains apart and then when a camp got overrun picked up the same rifle every other American had and used it.

 That is a harder thing to make a thumbnail out of than a secret weapon. It is also true which the secret weapon version is not. The decision made in a Navy office in January 1942, that construction workers in a war zone should be soldiers rather than civilians, is the whole reason these men had any legal right to defend themselves at all.

 A construction mechanic who liked his guitar walked into open ground with a rocket launcher he had no business carrying, and he is still the only CB to receive the Medal of Honor. They never needed a special weapon. That was rather the point. If you want to see how the men on the other side of that perimeter were equipped, the video on Vietkong gear and tactics is linked on screen now.

 And if you would rather stay with American units, the MACVS loadout breakdown is there,