Bloody Bong Son: The Battle of Tam Quan

Chapter 1 

6 December 1967

          December on the central coast of the Republic of Vietnam is not the wettest nor is it the coolest month, but it’s close to being both. December humidity is a bit more than the normal eighty percent, and half the days of the month will be mostly rain, over eight inches during the month soaking the American, Korean, and Vietnamese soldiers to whom, like soldiers everywhere, it’s just “the way it is,” not often requiring comment or complaint.

          Bong Son is a town that sits astride Song Gia Long (River Gia Long) near its mouth on the South China Sea, where it is crossed by QL1, National Highway 1, which runs from the Mekong Delta to -- at one time, and now again -- Hanoi in the north. The plain that stretches back from the beaches in this area is called the Bong Son Plain, or just Bong Son. For the Americans, the river has also taken on that name, so that to soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division, whose 1st Brigade is responsible for this area in 1967 as its second year in Vietnam draws to a close, “Bong Son” is a plain, a river, and a town. Bong Son is most of all a place the enemy has controlled for decades, coming from his bases in the thickly forested ridges, deep river valleys, and mountains into which this plain rises to the west. This is the “rice bowl” for the North Vietnamese Army’s 3rd “Sao Vang” (Gold Star) Division, and with allied local force Viet Cong units, the enemy is determined that it remain in his control.

          Beyond, adjoining the border with Cambodia, lie the Central Highlands, to which the Cavalry was first committed in 1965 and fought the already famous battles in the Ia Drang Valley before turning the mountains of Kontum Province around the city of Plieku over to the 4th Infantry Division the following year. The Cav had built its Division base at An Khe, about halfway between Laos and and the sea, so was able to easily deploy its highly mobile brigades across the breadth of the country and the length of the II Corps Tactical Zone, stretching from Binh Dinh Province in the north to the city of Phan Thiet in the south, and as history later established, much further than that. The Division wasn’t responsible for all that, but the world’s first airmobile division could relatively quickly be sent off in a new direction and to a new mission. So, in 1966, the Cav faced east, back toward the coast, penetrating the An Lao, Sui Ca, and Kim Son valleys that were the bases of the NVA’s 3rd “Sao Vang” Division(1), then conducting cordon and search(2) operations, raids, and search and destroy(3) sweeps, on the coastal plain to deny its use as the enemy’s “rice bowl.” Throughout 1966 and 1967, the NVA’s 22nd Regiment, which along with the 18th NVA and the 2nd Vietcong Main Force Regiment, made up the 3rd Division, was a principal adversary of the American Division and its Korean and Vietnamese allies. In January, 1966, the Cav’s 3rd Brigade fought a major battle with the 22nd at Cu Nghi, a few miles northwest of Bong Son. The 22nd attacked and overran LZ Bird(4) in the Kim Son Valley(5) at Christmas of the same year, and in July of 1967, the 22nd and the Cav’s 1st Brigade clashed near Tam Quan west of LZ Tom, base of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s (ARVN) 22nd Division.

          So it was no surprise, then, that the early morning of December 6, 1967 was shrouded in fog, and that the Cav’s 1st Brigade was out looking for the 22nd Regiment of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Morning fog occasionally obscured the plain and the low ridges that rose to the west of it. Bong Son’s checkerboard of rice paddies are mostly flooded in December, bounded by dikes rising 1-3 feet above the paddy floor. Sometimes, particularly near villages, and where paddies had for some time lain fallow, these dikes would be topped by thick hedge-like foliage, and always there were the “islands” among the paddies where villages dotted the otherwise flat expanse of the plain, recalling the bocage(6) of Normandy. And like the bocage, this maze-like terrain lent itself to fortification by a defender and was hellishly difficult and confusing for attacking infantry.

          The 1st Cavalry’s Bong Son Area of Operations (AO), was held down by the 1st Brigade, minus the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry(7), which had been sent back into the Central Highlands on October 8th to reinforce the 173rd Airborne Brigade(8) and elements of the 4th Division responding to an enemy threat to the Dak To Special Forces Camp(9). Intelligence believed that the NVA had withdrawn units from the area around Pleiku, increasing its forces in western Kontum Province to division strength. Enemy forces were believed to include the 1st Division (PAVN), along with assigned or attached 66th, 32nd, 24th, and 174th Infantry Regiments, and the 40th Artillery Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army. The 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry had also been at the time transferred to the operational control (OPCON) of the 4th Infantry Division but had since returned to Bong Son and control of the Cav’s 1st Brigade. In the absence of those battalions, 1st Brigade Commander Donald V. (Snapper) Rattan(10) had the 1st Battalion, 50th Infantry(11) (Mechanized), and had developed over the summer and fall a good working relationship with Brigadier General Nguyễn Văn Hiếu, Commander of the ARVN’s 22nd Division(12), with which the Cav shared the Bong Son AO.

          The 1st of the 50th had only arrived in Vietnam that September, but was already an important part of the 1st Cavalry Division’s operations in Binh Dinh Provence. Major General John Tolson(13) commanded the division in 1967 and 68. “When I received the 1st Battalion, 50th Mechanized Infantry, I decided not to treat this battalion as an orphan child to be held in reserve for some particular contingency, but rather to totally integrate it into the 1st Cavalry Division and to train its troops completely in airmobile tactics,” he said. “We rounded out the battalion with a fourth rifle company from headquarters and supply units and placed their armored personnel carriers at a central position near landing zone UPLIFT. The companies would go out on airmobile operations just as other companies of the Division and if a mission appeared that needed a mechanized unit, we extracted the troops to landing zone UPLIFT and deployed them in their primary role. The 1st Battalion, 50th Mechanized Infantry proved to be a very valuable asset and, when we had lost our attached tanks (Company A, 1st Battalion, 69th Armor)(14) to their parent organization, we often employed the Armored Personnel Carriers with their .50 caliber guns in tank-like formations. In using the mechanized battalion in this manner, we felt we enjoyed the best of both worlds. We had the additional troops which were completely trained in air assault tactics and we had the mechanized capability when the terrain and situation demanded.(15)

          PFC Mike Price woke up the morning of the 6th at Camp Radcliff(16), the Division’s big base near An Khe in the eastern Central Highlands. Price had arrived in Vietnam on November 20, and after in-processing and training at The First Team Academy(17), been assigned to B Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry(18). The 1/8th like all 1st Cavalry battalions, kept an administrative area at Camp Radcliffe, while its tactical headquarters was on a firebase in its combat area of operations. In December of 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Christian Dubia’s(19) 1/8th Cavalry Battalion Tactical Operations Center (TOC)(20) was on LZ English(21), also the forward home of Colonel Rattan’s 1st Brigade. B Company was scheduled to return to English for a 24-hour stand down(22) that afternoon, and that presented an easy opportunity for Price and other replacements to join the company. “Arrived on English midday,” remembered Price, “sat around most of the day. Sat around the S4 (battalion supply)(23) area, there were a couple of trash cans, with cold beer and soda there, it sure looked inviting, I didn’t touch it. (I was) Definitely an FNG(24). I remember some guy, I assumed at the time it was the S4 sergeant, which nickname was Pineapple, I think it was him, but I asked the guy, hey, how do I get one of those sodas or something. And he told me, ‘You ain’t earned it yet.’ Ok, that’s it, so sat around for most of the afternoon, (before the) company came in.”

          Across Highway 1, A Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry(25), on LZ Dog(26), the brigade’s reconnaissance arm cranked up its helicopters as soon as the fog burned off enough to allow its H-13’s(27) to see anything. Then the little observation helicopters were off to find the enemy, and if successful to initiate the airmobile division’s highly successful “pile on” tactics. In classic military terms, the Squadron’s light observation helicopters (a White Team) would find the enemy, then develop the situation by inserting its organic infantry platoon (the Blue Team), supported by A Troop’s gunships (a Red Team). If the Blues had a bigger fish on the line than they could handle alone, one of the division’s airmobile infantry battalions would “fix” him in place by quickly flying a company into the fight. How much more “piling on” there would be depended on how big the fish was believed to be.

The Troops Blue team didn’t have to depend on the Cav’s aviation battalions for its air transportation (“lift”) capability, since it had its own Bell UH1D “Iroquois” helicopters(28). Known as “Slicks” when referring to the configuration that lifted infantry into battle, or “Hueys” when referring to the UH-1 in general, regardless of purpose.

          Warrant Officer Jack Fischer, who served in A Troop in 1967 as both a gunship (also a UH-1 until the Cobra was introduced in 1968) and lift pilot, describes a typical day of combat assaults with A Troop, “I had been assigned to Alpha Troop, 1/9th Cav, and they hadn’t been back at base camp (Camp Radcliff at An Khe), since September 1966. I knew that the troop was a recon unit that was supposed to fly around and find the VC. They either took care of them themselves, or called on the Air Force if the enemy units were too big to handle.” (Actually, there were others they “called on,” including the Cav’s artillery, and airmobile infantry battalions.) "The troop’s missions were called search and destroy. If nothing else, this year was going to be different.

          “I was assigned to the lift platoon known as the “Headhunters” and began flying as a copilot on 20 March. One of my first flights was along the coast of the South China Sea. I was impressed by the beauty of the blue sea, the white sand and all the tiny sampans sailing in the ocean.

          “We spent the days flying out of LZ Dog. We would take the infantry team out into the boonies, set down at Dog, and wait to go back out and get them. Then we would take them somewhere else or bring them home. While we waited, there might be other missions, like administrative flights to other bases, or going out and picking up VC suspects the Blues had captured.

          “We would leave Dog and fly the helicopters to a different place many nights to disperse them in case the enemy attacked or mortared Dog. Most [of those] nights I ended up sleeping in the helicopter after we had set down somewhere. It was better than sleeping on the ground. We never seemed to get enough sleep. We often started flying early and ended the day late. At night there were alerts or additional responsibilities to keep you awake when you should have been sleeping.

          "On 6 December, 1967, I received a call from the Red Cross that my son had been born on 2 December. I told a friend if anything happened to me that day to please tell my wife know that I had received her letter, and how proud I was to be a father.

          "A short time later, our troop commander was flying up on the Bong Son plains, about four miles north of Dog, when the door gunner spotted a radio wire, running down from a palm tree into a well-constructed bunker. Shortly thereafter, he began to get shot at by automatic weapons."(29)

          A Troop had been given a mission to check out a suspected source of enemy radio traffic from the Radio Research Unit (RRU)(30) attached to the brigade. The location by triangulation of the source radio transmissions was developed in World War II, and used with limited success by the Allies to locate German U Boats in the North Atlantic, and by the Gestapo(31) in occupied Europe to track down spies from their radio reports to commanders in England. Now, in Vietnam, the allies were using the same techniques to find the enemy, whose larger units (often regiments, and only occasionally battalions) communicated via radio.

          Just as in WWII, radio location was anything but precise. As Major Gordon Stone, Commander of A Troop(32), describes it, “This battle that started on the 6th of December, and the reason we were in that area is we had what they called as “radio intercepts.” Some guy back at Division was playing with intercepting on the radio and sometimes we’d get missions to go out and just search around. Most of them wouldn’t turn up much of anything. This one didn’t turn up anything, although they took a lot of credit for it, because it put scouts into an area, probably 4-5 kilometers away from where the actual stuff was.”

          That afternoon Major Stone was returning from another mission when he joined his White Team, 1/9th Scouts that were working in the vicinity of Dia Dong, just east of Highway 1 a few kilometers south of LZ Tom. “What got me into the area was, I had been further south doing something and I was coming back up and I heard the scouts working and I always liked to sorta look over the shoulder of everybody, but stay out of their way best as I can.”

          Major Stone meant what he said about “staying out of their way,” but he liked what he was doing, at least best you can in hot combat, “I’m also a scout by nature. I fly down at tree top, whatever it takes to go in as a single ship, not as a couple of ships. We try to keep two ships teams so they can support each other, (but as a single ship) I always had the option of picking up and leaving.” (An option a commander with widely dispersed resources and commitments, like the commander of A Troop, has to have.)

          With Major Stone in A Troop’s gunship(33) C&C (Command and Control Helicopter) that day was his usual crew. His pilot (Stone flew as Aircraft Commander (AC), of course), Warrant Officer Michael Bond, his enlisted helicopter crew chief flew as the left door gunner, and Lt. Al Tyree, served as right side door gunner and also the Artillery Forward Observer. “Better to be a door gunner than have him just sit there,” reasoned Stone, “because I didn’t need the extra weight; I had four loads of rockets and the mini guns and all that kind of stuff. We dropped that guy out (the right side door gunner) and just used Al as a forward observer and as a door gunner. He was a very, very good door gunner. He could flat take out something with a machine gun in a heartbeat.

          "I had an excellent crew that was good at what they did. And Al was very good at getting artillery…
‘Al, get me some artillery in there!’ I’d say on the intercom.
‘Let me kill this guy!’ back from Al.
‘Get me some damn artillery in there!’ I’d yell, with all the authority I could muster as the Troop Commander and a Major in the United States Army.
“We’d go on and on like that, and end up getting artillery.”

          Around 1530, while Major Stone was loitering “on the outer fringe, we were headed around the edge” of the area his scouts were working, B Company, 1st of the 8th was moving toward a pick-up zone (PZ) to be lifted into LZ English from hard days in the Bong Son AO. The company’s 2nd , 3rd and 4th platoons were in the air from BS 852092 near My Binh (2), 9 kilometers northwest of LZ English on two hooks(34) at 1612, followed by the 1st platoon and the company command group (CP, or Command Post), at 1615; the Company competed its transfer to English at 162234. A company on stand down wasn’t normally assigned other duties, so the guys were expecting to get a shower, clean clothes, a movie (outdoors, a kind of drive-in without cars), and a good night’s sleep. Perhaps some would sneak outside the base to take advantage of the thriving entertainment village that sprang up near all of these major U.S. Installations. Bars, girls, and rock music. Since no one could reasonably expect such enticements to be ignored by young men, still in or just out of their teens in a foreign land and just released from days and nights of the stress of combat, the Cavalry Division not only looked the other way, but policed these nearby environs.

          Captain Tom Brett(35), commander of private Price’s company, remembers, “We had been in the boonies for our 4 or 5 day normal stint and we were coming in for one night on English, where the headquarters of 1/8 was. We probably got in at about 1600, the thing was, when we got on the firebase, the guys would go take a shower, they’d go to the mess hall and eat, some of them would allegedly go out (looking for other ‘entertainment’). And so forth.”

          Regardless of being relieved of certain mundane duties, a company on stand down was usually designated as the Brigade’s Ready Reaction Force (RRF)(36), and one of its platoons as the Quick Reaction Force (QRF)36. The Battalion’s Daily Staff Journal notes at 1635:

“Bde: Info 1/9 Blues @ 897071 were inserted into 40th ARVN AO 1 of the CA birds received 1rd [round] the element was then put on grad [ground] it came under heavy SA’s [small arms] fire & grenades.” The entry continues, “B Co has been informed to be (16 QRF) on a stand-by basis for RRF.”(37)

          While Brett’s B Company was headed for the showers, Major Stone and his scouts were flying at tree-top level, poking around, looking for trouble. Stone continues, “So anyway, we were checking on that area where the scouts were, and I showed up to sort of provide overwatch and advisory. We were flying on the north edge of their search area, and that’s when , Al (Lieutenant Al Tyree) my right side door gunner (and FO) said,

          ‘Come right! I’ve got an antenna!’ And I swung right, and there was a long wire antenna, a wire tied off to insulators or something and attached up high; then in the middle of it is another wire that comes down and leads--in this case--to a bunker.

          "Everybody says ‘hut (or ‘hooch’), but most of the time it was in a bunker. There were very few huts in that area, because it actually had been abandoned. In fact that day the Province Chief and his American adviser were up high out in that area, and we of course made that contact, I called him. And they said, ‘this area has been abandoned, there are no friendlies in there whatsoever’. That’s what got it started.”

          “We came around to investigate,” said Stone’s Pilot, Michael Bond, “and when Al dropped a hand grenade to recon by fire the hooch, we began receiving intense fire from the ground. We immediately returned fire and broke contact while climbing up from tree-top level. While Tyre called in an artillery fire mission, Maj. Stone called for our Blue platoon to be airlifted in to check out the contact.” Bond puts the time of Lt. Tyre’s sighting at about 1430, it appears it was more likely shortly after 1600 (4 PM). It appears that Maj. Stone’s gunship was the first to be fired on in the Battle of Tam Quan, at 1608 on 6 December, 1967(38)

          Only a regiment or battalion would likely deploy an antenna of that kind, but as powerful as the 1st Cav was, you still couldn’t go chasing everything with overwhelming force, so it wasn’t time to turn this over to an infantry battalion. Major Stone’s A Troop would develop this further, and if there was enough there to “pile on,” then he’d “call in the cavalry.” Of course, he was already the cavalry, so more cavalry.

          With an antenna, fire coming up at him from a bunker on the ground, and Lieutenant Tyre working up his call for artillery fire, Major Stone called for his own infantry platoon to check it out, which was in any case the next page in the Air Cavalry Troops tactical book.

End of excerpt; Chapter 1 to be continued; chapter end notes (not included here) numbered in parentheses and italic, to be superscript in final text.

The Battle of Tam Quan Project

What is it? 
My objective is to write a history of the Battle of Tam Quan, December 6-20, 1967. I need to tell the story – as accurately and completely as possible – of each unit that participated: 1st Battalion 50th Infantry; 1st and 2nd Battalions, 8th Cavalry; 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry; 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry; 227th Aviation; 2nd Battalion, 19th Artillery, and others.
Who am I?
Tom Kjos. At Tam Quan, an FNG 2nd Lieutenant in D Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry. Later commanded a company in the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division.
9817 W Mockingbird Dr., Sun City, AZ 85373; tomwkjos03@gmail.com; 480.352.2583
Why do I need your help?
We all know that the Vietnam War was a “small unit” war. Regardless of the battle, it was fought by small units in individual, and relatively (to other wars) independent actions. We were alone, one (usually), two or three (rarely) companies, engaging whatever we found. A history of a division, a corps, or an army doesn’t contribute much to understanding Vietnam. The real history is the sum of what each of you remembers, the stories of the privates, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains who served in Bong Son over those two weeks in December 1967.
What help do I need from you?
To interview you, alone or in a group of your fellow veterans. I’ll record and use the interviews, not necessarily in their entirety, when helpful to the narrative. Photos taken in Bong Son at any time, and especially during the battle are wanted.
How will this book be published?
By an established book publisher if possible; by me if necessary. Either way it will be published.
What has been done so far?
With the help of Jim Sheppard, Historian of the 1st Battalion, 50th Infantry (Mechanized), I’ve located many important documents, including Battalion S3 Daily Journals, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Interviews at the 1st Cavalry Division reunion in Portland and Chicago, at a reunion of 1/50th Infantry at Fort Benning, GA, at the 12th Cavalry reunions in Branson, MO, the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry reunion in Phoenix. AZ, and at the reunion of D Company, 1st Bn., 12th Cavalry. There have been other interviews, and written descriptions from a score of veterans.
What is still required?
Continuing interviews and research, including meeting with anyone interested at the Las Vegas 1st Cavalry Association reunion in June, 2016.