In 1967, The NVA Attacked a South Korean Firebase. It Was A HUGE Mistake.

After February 15th, 1967, a captured Viet Cong directive surfaced ordering cadres to avoid military contact with the South Koreans unless victory was 100% certain. Not with the Americans, not with the Australians. With the Koreans, the allied contingent most Western audiences have never heard of. That directive was issued after 2,400 NVA and Viet Cong troops attacked a hilltop held by 294 Korean Marines armed with Korean War era rifles.

The attackers broke through the wire with Bangalore torpedoes and Soviet flamethrowers. What happened inside that perimeter over the next 4 hours involved bayonets, entrenching tools, and a sergeant with a grenade in each hand who is now worshipped as a god of war. In early 1967, the People’s Army of Vietnam had a problem shaped like a hilltop.

Tra Bong Dong, a 30-m rise on the outskirts of Tra Bong village, Tra Bong district, Quang Ngai province, sat directly astride the approach routes the PAVN 2nd Division needed to attack Quang Ngai city and the massive United States Marine airbase at Chu Lai. The hill was a cork in a bottle. On top of that cork sat 294 South Korean Marines.

 The 2nd Division, the Gold Star, had watched the Blue Dragons operate for 15 months. By early 1967, Viet Cong units in the Korean area of operations had already stopped trying to fight them head-on. They had shifted to mines and booby traps. But the Gold Star Division did not have the luxury of avoidance. They needed those approach routes.

 The hilltop had to go, so they moved 120 mortars into the lowlands on the backs of elephants. They used the Tet truce period to mass 2,400 men, two battalions from the 1st Regiment, and a Viet Cong local force battalion from Quang Ngai. Sappers infiltrated the area on the 14th of February disguised as refugees. Nobody caught them. What the Gold Star Division did not know was that a Viet Cong defector, a former training camp commander, had already walked into a Korean outpost and told them everything.

The warning reached Captain Jeong Kyung Jin, commanding the 11th Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Brigade. He had days, not weeks. What he did with them turned that hilltop into a killing ground. Jeong was a 1961 Naval Academy graduate. His radio call sign was Seoul. He was running a reinforced position, his own 11th Company, a platoon from 1st Company, a 4.

2-in mortar platoon, and an 81-mm mortar section. 294 men total. Among them were two Americans, Lance Corporals Jim Porta and Dave Long, subunit one, 1st ANGLICO, United States Marine Corps. The only non-Koreans inside the wire. They were there to call in American air and naval fires if the worst happened. Jeong built his defense around the defector’s intelligence.

 A heart-shaped perimeter, roughly 300 by 200 m, small enough that every weapon inside could cover every approach, large enough that the mortars had defilade. He wrapped it in double-line barbed wire with a five-strand outer fence, the kind of obstacle that slows a battalion just long enough for Claymores to do their work.

He seated 140 land mines, 63 Claymores, and 38 light mines along every avenue the defector said they would come. The weapons his men carried were Korean War vintage, M1 Garands, the same rifles their fathers had fired at the Chosin Reservoir. The Blue Dragons would not receive M16 rifles until after this battle.

Behind the wire, Jeong had 30-calibre and 50-calibre machine guns, 60-mm mortars, and the 4.2-in tubes. The brigade’s 105 and 155 batteries were on call. So were ANGLICO-controlled A-4 Skyhawks, UH-1E gunships, and an AC-47 Spooky. The firepower was there, but only if the weather cooperated.

 The ceiling over Tra Bong Dong was fog and rain pressed flat against the hills. The Koreans were dug in with 1950s weapons and doubled wire. Coming at them through the dark were RPG gunners, Soviet-made flamethrowers, and sappers carrying Bangalore torpedoes. The technological edge belonged to the attackers.

 Sergeant Lee Hak Kyun was in 3rd Platoon that night on the north face of the hill, the sector the NVA would hit hardest. What he did when they broke through is the reason the Republic of Korea Marine Corps calls him a god of war. That moment is 4 hours away. At 23:20 on the 14th of February, a platoon-strength probe came from the west.

 Jeong let them close to 5 m from the wire before he opened fire. Flares popped, fog lit white. One body in the obstacle. Silence. Jeong read it for exactly what it was, reconnaissance for a regimental assault. He redistributed ammunition, doubled his listening posts, waited. At 04:10 on the 15th, the hilltop erupted. Mortar and recoilless rifle fire slammed the perimeter.

 One NVA battalion hit the 1st Platoon from the southeast. Two minutes later, two battalions struck the 3rd Platoon from the north. 2,400 men came through the fog beating drums and blowing whistles shouting “Taehan radi radi”, which means “Come out, Koreans”. 12 minutes in, sappers blew Bangalore torpedoes through the wire in the 3rd Platoon sector.

 A fresh battalion poured through the breach behind RPG gunners and flamethrower teams. Staff Sergeant Bae Jang Chun, commanding the 1st Squad of the 3rd Platoon, took a round through the right shoulder. He refused to pull back. He ordered his squad to fix bayonets and prepare for hand-to-hand. Private First Class Kim Myung Deok killed 10 enemy at close range with an automatic rifle before he was overrun.

Inside the 4.2-in mortar pit, Korean gunners fought with knives and entrenching tools while a Soviet flamethrower sprayed liquid fire into the position. Private First Class Kim Bo Hyun and Private First Class Yang Sang Yul rushed the flamethrower team, killed them with grenades, and returned with a captured light machine gun.

In the 1st Platoon sector, a North Vietnamese Army mortar position 100 m outside the wire was dropping rounds directly on the command post. Second Lieutenant Shin Won Bae assembled a fire team with Gunnery Sergeant Kim Young Gil as his non-commissioned officer and Staff Sergeant Oh Sung Hwan supporting. They bounded forward under covering fire, grenaded the position at 20 m, killed about 20 North Vietnamese Army fighters, and returned carrying three captured mortar tubes.

 Shin would later charge two Soviet flamethrower teams directly and seize the weapons himself. That charge was not suicide, it was arithmetic. The mortar position was 100 m out and zeroed on the command post. Lose the command post, lose the battle. Shin did the math and ran forward. Two hours in, the North Vietnamese Army held perhaps a third of the perimeter.

 All three Korean platoons were engaged. The fog was too thick for Spooky or the Skyhawks. Captain Jeong considered calling napalm on his own position. The weather denied him even that option. This is when Sergeant Lee Hak Kyun earned his name. Wounded and surrounded in hand-to-hand fighting inside the 3rd Platoon’s trench line, Lee took a grenade in each hand.

He waited, let the enemy close around him, then he detonated both simultaneously killing himself and four North Vietnamese Army attackers. He is now venerated inside the Republic of Korea Marine Corps as Gunshin, god of war. The Blue Dragons commemorate him every February. The War Memorial of Korea featured him in its monthly hero program as recently as February 2025, the 58th anniversary of the night he decided how he would die.

At 06:30, First Lieutenant Kim Se Chang, the forward observer, located the NVA regimental command post and brought 105 fires directly on it. Staff Sergeant Kim Hyun Chul spotted the enemy mortar positions and walked artillery onto them. Command and indirect fires collapsed almost simultaneously. The NVA assault stumbled.

 At 06:52, First Lieutenant Kim Ki Hong, the weapons platoon commander, volunteered to lead a counterattack. He scraped a reinforced squad from the 1st and 2nd platoons and drove a double envelopment into the NVA still inside the wire. Kim killed five with his sidearm. Staff Sergeant Kim Sung Kwan rallied what was left of 3rd Platoon into the pincer.

Now it was the Koreans shouting “Radi radi” back at the enemy. At 07:24, Jeong played his last card. He ordered 3rd Platoon to destroy its bunkers and fall back as if broken. The remaining NVA saw what they wanted to see. They advanced beating gongs believing they had won. Jeong held fire until the attackers were 80 m away, then he opened with every mortar and machine gun on the hill. The fog burned off.

 Four US Marine A-4 Skyhawks screamed in and strafed the killing ground. Helicopter gunships cut the retreat. The ANGLICO AC-47 pilot who had circled uselessly above the fog all night told Marine Corps Gazette correspondent James Durand that it was the biggest fight I have ever seen. That trap was not luck.

 The NVA had been fighting for 3 hours in zero-visibility fog. Their regimental command post had just been destroyed by artillery. Their mortars were gone. A false route was the one thing they wanted to believe. Jeong read them perfectly. When the count was finished, 243 enemy dead lay on and around the hill, more than 100 inside the Korean perimeter itself, 140 strung along the wire.

Two prisoners were taken including one NVA battalion commander. The Koreans captured three flamethrowers, five RPG launchers, roughly 29 rifles, and over 6,000 rounds of ammunition. ROK losses were 15 killed and 33 wounded. A captured Viet Cong directive later surfaced ordering cadres to avoid military contact with the Koreans unless victory was 100% certain.

General James L. Jones, future commandant of the United States Marine Corps, independently confirmed that NVA and VC units routinely bypassed Korean areas of operation when they could. Be careful with that narrative though. The evidentiary base for the claim that the NVA feared the Koreans is thinner than its repetition suggests.

The often repeated claim that Ho Chi Minh personally ordered his forces to avoid the Blue Dragons is flagged by Korean language sources themselves as unclear due to an unknown source. The captured directive is real. The Ho Chi Minh order is myth. And the Blue Dragons’ reputation was not built only on battlefields.

The same brigade, the same province within 12 months. Bien Hoa, December 1966, a local memorial lists 430 civilians killed. Phong Nhi and Phong Nhut, February [music] 1968, 70 plus civilians were killed by first company, first battalion. The incidents were photographed by a US Marine Civil Action Team and investigated by MACV.

Ha My, February 1968, 135 dead, mostly women, children, and elderly. Tra Bong Dong was a legitimate pitched infantry fight against regular enemy formations won by extraordinary valor. It is not Phong Nhi, it should not be collapsed into it. But the hero and the perpetrator are the same brigade in the same year in the same province.

That is the tension the myth cannot resolve on its own. In February 2023, the Seoul Central District Court ordered the Korean government to pay Phong Nhi survivor Nguyen Thi Thanh 30 million won, the first judicial acknowledgement of Republic of Korea state liability. The government appealed. The appellate bench upheld the ruling in January 2025.

No Korean government has formally acknowledged the massacres. The Second Marine Brigade became the Second Marine Division in 1981. It guards Ganghwa Island and the Gimpo Peninsula against North Korea today. Second Lieutenant Shin Won Bae, the man who charged the mortar position at 20 m, rose to major general and commanded that division himself.

 From a spider hole outside the wire to the flag rank. General Jones cited what he had seen of Korean Marines and the Tra Bong Dong legend in particular as the direct inspiration for the Marine Corps martial arts program, which stood up in 2000. The battle that built MCMAP. Captain John Kyung Jin retired as a lieutenant colonel.

He died in 2015. No monument exists at the Vietnamese site. Hanoi has formally objected when Seoul commemorates Vietnam veterans. The hill is still there. The men who held it are mostly gone. What happened on it in 4 hours on a February morning in 1967 is still being argued over by the country that sent them, by the country they fought in, and by the corps that made them into legends.