Why the Viet Cong Were Ordered NEVER to Engage Korean Marines — Unless Victory Was Certain

When people talk about the forces the Viet Cong feared in Vietnam, they usually talk about American firepower, B-52 Arc Light strikes, Cobra gunships, napalm at first light over a tree line, the industrial weight of the wealthiest military in history. And those were feared, but there was one unit in that war that Viet Cong field commanders specifically instructed their men to avoid unless they were certain of victory.

 That unit had nothing to do with American firepower. They were Korean Marines. And on the night of the 15th of February 1967, roughly 2,400 of the Viet Cong’s most experienced soldiers found out exactly why the order existed and what happened to a force that ignored it. For 3 hours on the night of the 14th to the 15th of February 1967 on a hilltop in Quang Ngai province called Tra Bong Dong, 294 Korean Marines faced those 2,400 attackers.

 15 Marines were dead and 246 enemy bodies lay inside and just outside their wire. This is the story of how that math was arrived at. Some of what happened on that hilltop is hard to describe, not because it is complicated, because of what men had to do when their weapons stopped working. The 2nd Rock Marine Brigade arrived in Vietnam in October 1965.

They called themselves the Blue Dragons. They were not there as part of a coalition goodwill gesture. They were infantrymen and they had been fighting since they got off the boats. Their first major operation in the mountains south of Nha Trang produced enough casualties on the opposing side that word traveled through the VC provincial network before the Marines had been in country 3 months.

 A captured Viet Cong document quoted in Time magazine on the 22nd of July 1966 said it plainly, contact with the Koreans was to be avoided at all costs unless a Viet Cong victory was 100% certain. The Blue Dragons had earned that reputation without modern weapons. The South Korean Marine Corps was not equipped like the American units fighting alongside them.

 The Blue Dragon riflemen carried M1 Garands, semi-automatic rifles designed in the 1930s, the same weapons their fathers had used in Korea. The men attacking them on the 15th of February, 1967, carried AK-47s. That gap mattered. It mattered from the first shot. By August 1960, the brigade had moved north to the Chu Lai area of Quang Ngai province and taken responsibility for a tactical zone inside the I Corps Tactical Zone.

General Chae Myung Shin, the ROC Forces Vietnam Commander, had a doctrine for how to hold it. He called it the company tactical base. Small, mutually supporting hilltop positions inside the range. Fan of artillery, American officers thought companies positioned alone on hilltops would be destroyed piecemeal.

 Chae had designed the system specifically for close-range defense, drawing on his Korean War experience. The hilltop at Tre Binh Dong was one of those bases. The hill itself was not impressive, roughly 30 m high, an oval perimeter about 300 by 200 m. Captain Chung Kyong Jin, the 11th Company Commander, had spent weeks making it as hard to kill as anything that size could be.

 Double-lined barbed wire and concertina, 140 landmines along the approach routes, 63 Claymores, the bunkers overhead covered, the trenches connected, mortar pits pre-registered on every likely approach. The company had done everything a company could do. What Captain Chung did not know, and what none of the Marines on that hill knew, was that the enemy had already been inside.

 In the weeks before the attack, two North Vietnamese operatives had entered the compound disguised as ARVN interpreters. They walked every trench, they noted every bunker, they mapped every fighting position. When the battle began, the regimental commander knew where each bunker sat before he gave the order to fire.

 The enemy force was the first regiment of the PAVN second division, the same division that had destroyed an ARVN task force at Bau Gia the previous year, and earned a reputation for offensive planning in the Highlands. The 40th and 60th battalions would carry the assault. The 90th would hold in reserve.

 US and ROC sources put the total at somewhere between 1,500 and 2,400 men, three to eight times the number defending the hill. The regiment had also moved 120-mm heavy mortars into position in the coastal lowlands. They had done it on elephant back. They did not want the Americans to hear trucks. The attack was not a secret.

 A VC defector, a former training camp commander, had told the brigade that the 11th company’s position was the target. The warning reached Captain John. He reinforced his listening posts and adjusted his fire plans. He waited. At 23:20 on the night of the 14th of February, a Marine at the outer listening post detected movement from the west.

 John placed the company on full alert. He waited until the probing force was 5 m from the wire, then gave the order to fire. Flares went up, one enemy body tangled in the wire, the rest withdrew to the tree line. John read it as a probe. The real attack was still coming. He shifted artillery onto the dry stream bed where he believed the enemy was assembling.

 The adjustment delayed what came next by roughly 4 hours. At 04:10 on the morning of the 15th of February, the 120-mm mortars opened. The barrage did not fall randomly. It fell on the specific coordinates the two men in ARVN uniforms had recorded. Every bunker on the regimental commander’s list took a round. The compound erupted simultaneously.

 The command post, the mortar pits, the fighting positions on the northern slope, as if the hill itself were being sorted and filed. The assault followed immediately. One battalion hit the first platoon from the southeast, coming through the darkness with whistles and drums. “Come out, Koreans!” They shouted it in Vietnamese as they advanced.

 Two more battalions hit the third platoon from the north. Red enemy tracers and green Korean tracers crossed each other over the wire in a pattern no one at Chulai had seen before. The Marines were outgunned on the rifle, AK-47 against M1 Garand, magazine against en bloc clip. They knew it. What they had was position, pre-registered fire, and the claymores which they detonated in sequence as the first wave oppressed the wire.

At 04:22, the sappers reached the concertina. Bangalore torpedoes went off in two places simultaneously. The wire came down in sections. The wave behind the sappers did not slow. They crossed the wire by walking over the bodies of the men in front of them, stepping on the backs of their own dead, piled on the concertina to reach the trench on the other side.

Sergeant Lee Hak Kun, born the 15th of December 1945 in South Chungcheong Province, was a rifleman in third platoon’s first squad. He was 22 years old. When the breach opened, his squad was in the path of what came through. An enemy round hit his right ankle. He handed his rifle to the Marine beside him, Private Do Sang Ryong.

 He said what he needed to say. Then he moved toward the men coming through the breach, and he detonated his grenades. The citation records it. The Korean Marine Corps records it. The American account by James Duran in the Marine Corps Gazette records it. “Sergeant Lee Hak Won detonated two hand grenades as the enemy approached his position, killing himself and four NVA soldiers.

” He received the Eulji Medal posthumously in 1968. The War Memorial of Korea named him Patriot of the Month in February 2006. A hall in the Marine Corps Education and Training Command bears his portrait. Then squad, all 13 men was destroyed in the minutes around that breach. One Marine survived it.

 Private First Class Lee Young-bok dropped into a covered position and threw grenades as the enemy moved past him into the trench. He was the only one left. Meanwhile, Captain Jeong was moving the perimeter. Jeong was wearing a running shirt under his flak jacket that night. It was how he felt his way through the base in the dark, light enough to move fast, close enough to his men to see their faces.

 He repositioned squads by hand, plugged holes as they opened, kept his radio connection to Brigade Headquarters, and to his forward observer, First Lieutenant Kim Se-chang. Artillery from the 105-mm and 155-mm batteries was the one advantage that could not be taken away. As long as Kim could reach the fire direction center, the Blue Dragons had something the attackers could not match.

 By 05:30, the NVA held approximately 1/3 of the outpost. The mortar tubes had been firing at nearly vertical elevation for 80 minutes. A mortar tube is designed to fire and rest and cool and fire again. At 05:30, at least one tube was glowing faint cherry red in the darkness. The barrel had warped. It would not fire again.

 At least one M60 machine gun barrel had fused to its bipod. The rifles, M1 Garands with eight rounds to a clip, had cycled through their last. Brigade Headquarters, receiving garbled radio traffic from the hill, believed the company had been overrun. They weighed whether to fire on the position. Captain Jeong, unable to call in air support through the fog that had grounded every fixed-wing aircraft and gunship since midnight, considered requesting napalm on his own perimeter.

The fog made it impossible. There was no air. There was no spooky. There was no cavalry. What happened next is what Thomas Petri, a US Marine officer who was on that hill, recorded in his scholarly account in 2019. Not an estimate, an inventory. Unable to reload their weapons fast enough, Petri wrote, the fighting devolved to clubs, entrenching tools, fists, boots, bayonets, and teeth in an all-out brawl for survival.

You are in the trench of third platoon. Your rifle has been empty for 11 minutes. The man to your left went down somewhere in the last few minutes. You do not know the exact moment because you stopped counting at some point and began moving. You can hear movement in the section of trench to your right.

 It is not your men. You reach for your entrenching tool. Staff Sergeant Bae Jang-choon had already been shot through the shoulder. His own rifle was empty. Petri recorded what he did. Staff Sergeant Bae straddled the parapet and defiantly brandished an entrenching tool as he faced the oncoming attackers. He stood on the wall of the trench, bleeding, and held the position.

 Private First Class Kim Young-deok killed 10 enemy soldiers at point-blank range before grenades brought him down. Sergeant Bae picked up Kim’s rifle and killed a dozen more. Then, he returned to the entrenching tool. Private First Class Lee Ki-an, cut off from his own weapon, reached the 60-mm mortar position and found two enemy soldiers taking it.

 He killed them both with the butt of his .45 caliber pistol, recovered the mortar, and finished them with a grenade. Second Lieutenant Shin Won-bae, commanding First Platoon, received a report that three enemy mortar tubes had been moved to a rock formation inside their artillery fan. He assembled a fire team.

 He told them what they were going to do. Then, he led them 100 m through their own artillery barrage, rounds landing as they ran, to reach the position. Grenade and rush, 20 enemy killed, the tubes taken. The word for what the Marines were using that night, entrenching tools and pickaxes and bayonets and rifle butts and boots and the handles of things not designed to kill anyone, is medieval.

There is no better word. The most advanced military in the world had come to this hill with flamethrowers, AK-47s, RPG-2 launchers, and 120-mm artillery, and in the trenches of Tra Bong Dong on the morning of the 15th of February, 1967, it ended with two men who had run out of everything else swinging whatever was in their hands at whoever was still standing.

 The Vietnamese account, preserved in provincial records and confirmed by the opposing commander’s own order, “Only advance, no retreat.” Corroborates the hand-to-hand phase directly. The Vietnamese provincial record puts it plainly, “Both sides began fighting with bayonets and hand-to-hand combat along each stretch of trench.

” At approximately 06:30, something changed on the hill. First Lieutenant Kim Se-Chang, the forward observer, had been shot in the head at roughly 0600. The bullet entered his helmet and stopped in the liner. It did not exit. He was still conscious. He was still on the radio. With first light beginning to push through the fog, Kim located the enemy regimental command post.

 The tent and radio equipment that Nguyen Chon, the deputy regimental commander who had ordered this assault, was operating from. Kim gave the coordinates to the 105-mm battery. The battery fired. The command post was destroyed. Isolated from their commander, the NVA attack began to falter. At 06:50, Captain Chung assembled a squad from first and second platoons.

 First Lieutenant Kim Ki-Hong volunteered to lead. LCPL Jim Porta, one of two US Marine AN/GLC-4 spotters on the hill, joined the counterattack. Kim killed five enemy soldiers with his pistols as they broke through the position. And then the Marines, who had spent the night hearing “Come out, Koreans” out of the dark, began throwing the words back.

 The Koreans shouted it at the retreating enemy. “Come out, Koreans.” At 07:24, Captain Chung ordered third platoon to collapse its positions toward the observation post, drawing the remaining enemy into open ground. When they advanced to within 80 m, he called mast rifle and mortar fire. The surviving tubes that could still be used were used. At 07:30, the fog broke.

American A-4 Skyhawks from Chu Lai came in low over the retreating battalions. LCPL Dave Long, the second Anglico spotter, coordinated the strikes from the hill. 16 helicopters landed the Blue Dragon and sixth company at 0800 for clearing operations. What the first men off those helicopters found took time to walk through and longer to count.

 More than 100 enemy dead lay inside the compound perimeter. 140 more lay at the wire. Some of the bodies were wearing ROK Marine uniforms taken from the men killed in the paddy fight the previous month. Among the confirmed dead was the commander of the enemy’s 90th battalion. Two prisoners had been taken.

 One of them, a battalion commander, captured weapons included three Soviet flamethrowers. This appears to have been the first time Soviet flamethrowers were used in the Vietnam War. Three of them were on the hill. The Korean dead numbered 15. 33 were wounded. The New York Times ran the headline on 16 February 1967, Koreans killed 242 in Vietnam clash.

 The paper called it the South Koreans’ greatest victory in their 15 months in South Vietnam. Whether Viet Cong command ever put it in writing, no one has found the document. Korean sources describe the claim as unclear due to an unknown source. The legend says Ho Chi Minh personally instructed his commanders to leave the Korean Marines alone.

 The legend is not sourced. It should not be presented as fact. What is sourced is this. The second VC division’s planned assault on Chu Lai airfield and Quang Nai city was shelved after the 15th of February 1967. The operational plan that Tra Bong was supposed to open did not proceed, whether that was an order or a calculation or simply the result of one regiment losing hundreds of men in a single night.

 No one left a document explaining it. Park Chung Hee issued a decree on the 1st of March 1967. Every enlisted Marine of the 11th company, all 191 of them was promoted one rank. It was the first unit-wide promotion in the Republic of Korea’s military history since the Korean War. The name that attached to the 11th company afterward had existed before the battle, used in a 1965 film applied to earlier actions.

 But after Tra Bong Binh, it stuck. The myth-making Marines. The myth was not what they did with their weapons, it was what they did without them. That dawn on the 15th of February 1967, the tools the Blue Dragons had used when everything else ran out lay scattered across the trenches in the perimeter of Tra Bong Binh.

 Entrenching tools, pickaxes, bayonets, the butt of a .45 caliber pistol cracked from the use it had been put to. 294 men had held that hill through the night. 15 of them did not come down from it. The rest left those tools where they had used them because the fight had ended and the tools had done what the weapons could not finish.

 The weapons of the 20th century had run out. The men who survived had used what was left. That was enough. If your father or grandfather served with the Blue Dragon Brigade in Vietnam, leave his unit, his province, and his year in the comments. The men who held that hill deserve to be remembered by name.