In 1966, The NVA Surrounded An 18-Man Marine Patrol. It Was A Fatal Mistake.

On the morning of the 16th of June, 1966, a Marine relief company fought its way up hill 488 in Quang Tin province, expecting to recover bodies. What they found instead were 12 Marines still alive. Every one of them wounded, surrounded by 39 dead NVA soldiers and 18 enemy automatic weapons. The platoon had eight rounds of ammunition left combined across all survivors.

 They had been throwing rocks at a battalion for the last 3 hours of the fight because they were out of grenades, and it had worked. 18 men from first reconnaissance battalion against a reinforced NVA battalion drawn from the second NVA division. 12 hours. The enemy commander had expected it to last minutes. The 18-man platoon would receive one Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, and 13 Silver Stars.

 The most decorated small unit of the Vietnam War. In June 1966, the Que Son Valley in Quang Tin province was the most dangerous piece of real estate in First Corps. American intelligence had tracked the second NVA division, three full regiments, the third NVA, the 21st NVA, and the first Viet Cong moving through the valley floor. Brigadier General William A.

 Styles launched Operation Kansas on the 13th of June. Insert seven reconnaissance teams onto the ring of hills surrounding the valley. Find the division headquarters, then send in eight battalions of infantry to destroy it. The ARVN battalions never came. The Buddhist uprising at Hue pulled them off the board.

 The recon teams were now the only American eyes on an entire NVA division. Recon doctrine was explicit. Never occupy an observation post for more than 24 hours. Staff Sergeant Jimmy Howard’s 18-man platoon from first platoon, Charlie Company, first reconnaissance battalion, had been on Hill 488 for 2 days. The intelligence yield was extraordinary.

 On the 14th and 15th of June, they called in artillery on enemy patrols and torch-lit night columns crossing the valley below. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Sullivan and Captain Tim Garrity offered extraction. Howard declined. He had a good escape route to the east. One more day. Then, late afternoon on the 15th, 2 miles north, Army Special Forces Sergeant First Class Donald Reed and Specialist Five Hardy Drandy were leading a CIDG patrol when they spotted hundreds of NVA and VC moving toward Nui Vu.

The column was so large, Reed wanted to hit their rear, but the CIDG militia refused to attack. Reed’s radio was on Howard’s frequency. Howard heard every word, including the profanity when Reed realized his militia would not fight. A battalion was coming for his hill. Extraction helicopters could not reach him before dark. It was too late.

Jimmy Earl Howard was from Burlington, Iowa. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1950 and deployed to Korea in February 1952 as a forward observer with the 4.2-inch mortar company, First Marines, calling artillery onto Chinese positions from exposed ridge lines under direct fire. He earned a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

He arrived in Vietnam in April 1966, aged 36, married with six children. The hill he chose to die on, if it came to that, was a lopsided three-bladed propeller less than 75 ft across, almost barren. The only cover was a single boulder the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. The Marines called it the big rock. Howard made it his command post.

 16 Marines and two Navy Corpsman, roughly 3,000 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition for their M-14 rifles, and four fragmentation grenades per man. Enough for a quick scrape with a patrol. Not enough for what was coming. Their lifeline was a 105 mm howitzer battery at Tien Phuoc, 7 and 1/2 km south.

 Howard had been timing his artillery calls to coincide with overflying O-1 Bird Dog spotter planes, so the NVA would think the fire was being directed from the air, not from the hilltop. A reconnaissance team designed to see without being seen, the tactical equivalent of a burglar alarm. The alarm was about to become the target. On the afternoon of the 15th, at the base of that hill, a North Vietnamese platoon commander named Lieutenant Hoang Minh Tien received his orders.

Tien had spent 90 days walking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. His instructions were direct, give no quarter. Wash over the defenders like a wave from the sea. What happened to that confidence is the rest of this story. That night on the 14th, Howard had whispered coordinates into his handset while watching torch-lit formations cross the valley floor below.

Explosions walked through the columns. He was already fighting. He just did not know yet that the enemy had found him, too. At 2200 on the night of the 15th, Lance Corporal Ricardo Bins, a scout team leader from the Bronx, was watching the grass in front of his observation post when he noticed a bush that had not been there before.

Bins propped himself up on his elbows, set his rifle butt into his shoulder, and without saying a word, pointed the barrel at the bush and fired. The bush was an NVA scout. It dropped dead. The battle for Hill 488 had opened. Within minutes, the hilltop erupted. Grenades, 60-mm mortars, RPD machine guns, AK-47s, Chinese stick grenades, a coordinated assault from three directions.

Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Billy Don Holmes later said, “They were within 20 ft of us. Suddenly, there were grenades all over. Then people started hollering. It seemed everyone got hit at the same time.” Howard pulled the outpost back to the big rock. The entire perimeter was 20 yd across.

 Muzzle flashes lit the tree line from three sides. The screams of wounded Marines mixed with the crack of incoming fire on bare rock. Around midnight, Howard keyed his radio to Captain Garrity. His call sign was carnival time. “You’ve got to get us out of here,” he said. “There are too many of them for my people.” At 0100, a C-47 flare ship arrived and dropped illumination.

 For the first time, the Marines could see what they were fighting. Lance Corporal Joe Cosiglo looked over the edge and said, “There were so many, it was just like an anthill ripped apart. They were all over the place.” Marine F-8 Crusaders, A-4 Skyhawks, and Air Force F-105 Thunderchief, and UH-1 Echo gunships from VMO-2 and VMO-6 began danger close runs.

 Napalm fell within 100 yd. Gunships descended to 20 ft on strafing passes. Howard guided them in with a red-filtered flashlight and his radio. Here is the tactical logic of why these 18 men survived. Staff Sergeant Howard had spent his career tour calling artillery from exposed hilltops. Directing fire onto positions surrounding him while rounds hit the dirt around his head was not a new experience.

 He had been doing it since 1952. The most dangerous hilltop in Vietnam happened to hold the one man trained to turn a hilltop into a fire direction center. NVA voices rose from the grass. “Marines, you die tonight.” And then, “Marines, you die in an hour.” Howard’s answer came back flat. “Sure, go ahead and yell anything you want.” Then he ordered every man on the hill to laugh, and they did.

 18 Marines, six of them already bleeding, laughed out loud at a battalion trying to kill them. By 0200, the grenades were gone. Rifle ammunition was running critical. Howard gave the order, “Throw rocks. They’ll think we still have grenades. Zero them when they jump out of the way.” It worked. NVA soldiers mistook the rocks for fragmentation grenades, leapt clear of cover, and were dropped with aimed semi-automatic M-14 fire.

The official Marine Corps monograph, written by Captain Francis J. West, recorded the night in a single line. “The enemy fired all automatic weapons. The Marines replied with single shots. The enemy hurled grenades. The Marines threw back rocks.” Corporal Gerald Thompson of Columbus, Ohio, was grabbed at the perimeter’s edge by an NVA soldier who dragged him over the side of the hill.

Thompson drove his K-Bar knife into the man’s back, scrambled back up, and was pulled away again by more attackers. He was killed. The only confirmed hand-to-hand combat of the night. At 0300, two UH-34 helicopters attempted extraction. Heavy automatic fire drove them off. Moments later, a ricochet struck Howard in the back. His legs went dead.

 He could not stand. He crawled, dragging himself across bare rock in the dark, past his own dead, through his own wounded, redistributing ammunition taken from the men who no longer needed it, still talking pilots onto targets, still directing the fight from his belly. Howard radioed Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan, “We’re getting low on ammo.

 I got good men out here. I’d like to get them out. Skipper, just in case, tell my wife I love her.” At 05:25, Howard’s voice came over the net. “Okay, you people, reveille goes in 35 minutes, at 0600. Reveille! Reveille!” Lieutenant Huang Min Tien, the man who had been ordered to wash over the hill like a wave, said this decades later, standing on that same hilltop with Ray Hildreth, one of the surviving Marines.

“We thought you must be insane. It was not normal. It made my men afraid.” The wave broke on 18 Marines throwing rocks. At least 39 NVA bodies were found on the hilltop. Total enemy losses, including air and artillery in the surrounding valley, are estimated at roughly 200. Tien lost 40% of his own platoon. A Vietnamese nurse, Nguyen Thi Lai, later confirmed an aid station in the valley overwhelmed with casualties and the collapse of confidence that came with daylight.

Tien’s parting words to Hildreth at their reunion in 2011. “We shot each other. Peace has now made us friends.” The honest truth is that the platoon broke its own doctrine. Recon teams do not sit on an exposed hilltop for 3 days. And they went in carrying reconnaissance loads. Four grenades per man and 3,000 rounds for 18 rifles is not what you bring to a siege.

The decision to leave them in place once a battalion was confirmed was a gamble that helicopters could extract them before dark. They could not. Howard recovered. The paralysis was temporary. He retired as a first sergeant in 1977, coached football at Point Loma High School in San Diego, and died of a heart attack at home on the 12th of November 1993.

He is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery overlooking the harbor. In 2001, the Navy commissioned the guided missile destroyer USS Howard DDG 83 home ported in San Diego. Every time the ship puts to sea, it passes Fort Rosecrans. The NVA expected the fight to last minutes. The man on the hill made it last all night and called reveille at dawn.

The ship still passes the cemetery. The staff sergeant from Iowa does not need to hear it.