LV EXPLOSION, SIGN ON BOARD "DISNEY LAND FAR EAST" LV WATER TRUCKS ALONG ROAD, EXPLOSION IN B/G. The VC/PAVN attacked the position that night in a 6 hour long assault which was met initially by US mortar and artillery fire, then helicopter gunships and then napalm strikes. Company E engaged the PAVN/VC supported by artillery fire killing 47 PAVN/VC. Alpha Company, still licking its wounds from the January 23 fight, was left intact. SP4 Lawrence Korteum There, Charlie Company soldiers joined ARVN and U.S. MACV soldiers manning the walls. We could use our tracks as a base of fire or in a blocking position as the company maneuvered on foot. Dong Ha vietnam 1968 | Dong Ha ammo dump explosion from NVA artillery fire. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. At 4 a.m., Jones ordered us to pull in our ambushes and be prepared to move, and told Charlie Companys noncombatants to report to battalion headquarters. Despite the confusion and wounds, our troops returned fire. Forget that, he said. [2]:350, With the base returned to full operation, that afternoon C130s landed the 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment to help ARVN forces fighting the VC in Bin Ha city. I had learned no tactic at infantry school that fit the situation we were faced with, so we improvised. However the ammunition storage bunkers prevented a chain reaction and the lost munitions were easily replaced with no impact on supply. When it Under fire, Staff Sgt. PAVN/VC losses were 137 killed and 25 captured. When I pointed out that the 101st Battalion had more than 500 troops and I had only two line platoons and less than 90 troops, he said, Youre mechanized, youre very strong.. Shopping Cart | The only trouble was that Charlie Company tracks were sitting in the road right in front of their bunkers. I have . When I arrived at 9th Division in June, I was shocked to learn that I was going to a mechanized battalion. It dawned on us that the VC were throwing down their weapons, changing clothes and slipping away. Shoe of soldier on ground. I walked back to my track, thinking this was going to be a nightmare. 0.22 During Tet 1968, the 856th Radio . That was 90th Replacement Battalion, situated on the road to Saigon between the village of Bien Hoa and the huge base at Long Binh. This is the story of one rifle company, and what it faced on that decisive day. Kortuem! I was not sure what to do about the bunkers. Binh was a logistical mistake because the perimeter was so heavily armed The battalion made only sporadic contact and suffered few casualties. The combat around III Corps headquarters was intense. Come back up on the battalion freq. I had never been so happy in my life. Men at Long Binh ammunition dump. This article was written by John E. Gross and originally published in the February 2008 issue of Vietnam Magazine. remembered the 1SGT told him the first thing he was to get into I had inherited the job The explosions at Long Binh, 15 miles northeast of Sia gon rattled windows and shook doors here in the capital. Zabecki remembers taking his place on the wall with his M-79. These photos were taken from December 9, 1967 to February 1968. He replied that I would have to wait. him in. 939939. Realizing we were driving past our objective, I halted the company and called for the 2nd Platoon to find a place to turn around. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. Love was so startled, he didnt fire. Several soldiers gathered in front of the track to help the wounded, and Love climbed up to man the .50-caliber. The Commo track, C-007, nicknamed Abdula and the Rug Merchants, with then- Pfc (and current Vietnam editor) David Zabecki behind the .50-caliber, brought up the rear. I had been in Vietnam about nine months. Having been struck by mortars or rockets, the fuel tanks at the air base, as well as several buildings throughout Bien Hoa, were burning brightly. [2]:350, At approximately 16:45 F-100 Super Sabres of the 531st Tactical Fighter Squadron conducted a Napalm strike against a PAVN/VC company at the east end of the base runway. 3 Merge Long Binh Jail into Long Binh. We use cookies on this website. An MP full colonel, along with a deputy sheriff from Los Angeles (dressed in his deputy uniform) and two jeeploads of Vietnamese National Police, drove up to my track. When the Tet cease-fire period began on January 28, the battalion was called back to the vicinity of Bear Cat, and Charlie Company was ordered to a large open field across Highway 15 from the Long Tan airfield. Seems like the fighting went on Featured Collections | Jan. 31. (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2015. Riflemen staying close behind. Besides the actions of Charlie Company, under the leadership of the S3, Major Bill Jones, Alpha had conducted an assault on VC positions in a cemetery. GV EXPLOSIONS, AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN F/G. Many of the enlisted personnel with medical MOSs work two to three days per week at the 93 rd Evacuation Hospital, then came back to the 24 th to work on the various construction projects. Toward dusk on January 30, Charlie Company soldiers stripped to the waist to dig bunkers next to their APCs. By the evening the 2/47th Infantry withdrew into the Long Binh perimeter. into the bunkers. He waved me off. All day civilians had been darting from their homes and running from the fighting. Several tracks were hit by RPGs and surrounded by the enemy. I assigned areas of operation to my two rifle platoons and positioned the weapons platoon inside the compound as a reserve and security force. At least 3,000 tons of ammu nition were reportedly de stroyed in the blasts, which be gan before dawn and continued until midmorning. We packed up all of our gear, rolled up our concertina wire and waited. mortar rounds and 90 122-mm. SAIGON, South Vietnam, June 1 (Reuters)Explosions ripped through a huge ammu nition dump near here today, killing one soldier and wound ing 13. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. (Note: According to Colonel Sonny Craven, then leader of a combat photo team on the scene, these combat sequences was filmed by soldiers of the 221st Signal Company [Pictorial]). As our medics treated the wounded, I reported to the American lieutenant colonel who was the III Corps G3 adviser. ], The Laotian representative said six members of the Meo special forces were also cap tured with the American on May 7 in Xieng Khouang Province near the North Vietnamese bor der. During the morning of January 30, the 2-47 Mech was notified that the Tet cease-fire was canceled, and the unit was deployed into a defensive line along the road that ran around the east side of the Long Binh base. A VC guerrilla hiding behind a parked ARVN jeep had fired the rocket. According to the VC 5th Division official history, the 3rd Battalion, 5th VC Regiment was supported by the Bien Hoa Sapper Company; its mission was to overrun the compound, which was defended by about 15 ARVN soldiers and a smattering of MACV advisers. With the explosion of the entire ammunition dump imminent, and in the midst of exploding shells, fire and debris, the men of COMPANY B, . 12. As the scouts escaped, the volume of enemy fire began to slacken, then died altogether. The two of them refused evacuation and neither reported his wound. 4 Joseph Sugar Bear Dames returned to the tracks for more grenades. It had been over two days and many of us had no sleep. [4], The 179th Military Intelligence Detachment of the 199th LIB had been gathering intelligence on a pending attack on Long Binh for several weeks before the attacks based on human intelligence and ground radar. The gun-jeeps were progressively replaced by M113s and XM-706 Commando armored cars. with no lights waiting for the attack to lift so we could get We topped off our fuel tanks, replenished our ammo and continued to move toward our assigned blocking position. My Account | Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. to contact the Commanding Officer(MAJ Guidroz). Service Battery that supplied ordnance to the big guns in our battalion. In the week preceding the attack these LRRP patrols engaged 2 PAVN/VC reconnaissance teams north of Long Binh. An eyewitness account of the battle for control of Bien Hoa and Long Binh on the first day of the 1968 Tet Offensive. The VC who had fired the RPG slipped away, but Pfc Jim Love, who was tossed into a sewage ditch by the explosion, remembers killing the jeep with his M-16. charred. Casper rose from the prone position and yelled for his troops to follow him. hightForP2 = 330 As we cleared the ambush, the column suddenly came to a halt because of some kind of block in the road; simultaneously, someone keyed the company net. My Lightboxes | In mid-September, when Ionoff moved to battalion to become the operations officer (S3), I assumed command of Charlie Company. A spokesman for the South Vietnamese command said that, according to unconfirmed re ports, satchel charges, of the type used by Vietcong sabotage squads were found near the dump. As the scouts escaped, the volume of enemy fire began to slacken, then died altogether. So, when I was offered a chance to go to II Field Force to help establish a new long-range reconnaissance patrol outfit, I actually turned it down to stay with the company. When I pointed out that the 101st Battalion had more than 500 troops and I had only two line platoons and fewer than 90 troops, he said, Youre mechanized, youre very strong., I told him we could not take the tracks off Highway 1 and into town because the streets and alleys were too narrow. Their 81mm mortars were useless, since we were told we could not put any indirect fire into the town. 11. [American sources in Vien tiane said, as quoted by The Associated Press, that the captured American was prob ably the pilot of a Continent al Air Service plane that was forced to land behind Pathet Lao lines after running out of fuel. Listening to the scouts desperate fight on the radio, Charlie Company attacked with renewed vigor as we tried to get to Barnes and his men. The three companies formed a line almost three kilometers long, facing east, with their backs to the Long Binh wire, based on the mistaken assumption that the VC would attack from the jungle. Summary - October 1966. The G3 adviser told me that they had received intelligence that Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commanding general, had his command post in a Catholic church about 1 kilometer east of III Corps. night on alert at the Birdcage, I was awakened (trying to sleep As I walked around the front of a track, the .50-caliber gunner accidentally hit the trigger and pumped five rounds into the ground about three feet in front of me. The platoons attacked by successive bounds through the village as the companys tracks, forming the base of the T on the highway, provided fire support from the .50s and resupplied the troops with ammunition. Then, for the last week in January, the 2-47 was sent south of the 9th Divisions base camp to patrol the jungles east of Highway 15, near the Binh Son rubber plantation. Bien Hoa Air Base was the largest air base in the country, home to over 500 United States Air Force (USAF) and Republic of Vietnam Air Force (RVNAF) aircraft, while Long Binh Post was the US Army's largest logistics base, headquarters of II Field Force, Vietnam, the 199th Light Infantry Brigade (199th LIB) and the 12th Aviation Group and home to over 20,000 US personnel. biggest ordnance storage areas in the country. 0.24 Unconfirmed reports reports said the blasts were . Get under! After what seemed like Meanwhile, Charlie Company was ordered back to III Corps. I dismounted the platoons and placed them on line on each side of the road: the second on the left, or north, and the first on the right, or south. This site was called Hill 63 because there was a hill nearby that had an elevation of 63 meters on the map. I sat behind the .50-caliber, munching and giving thanks for the fact that, incredibly, nobody in Charlie Company had been killed. Following that fight, the 2-47 was ordered south of the 9th Divisions base camp. 0.28 During December we made little enemy contact, probably because the Communists were lying low, preparing for Tet. When Lieutenant Casper jumped up, our legs became entangled and I tripped him, Ax remembers. Refine Your Search Long Binh Vietnam 1968 stock footage and images - Showing 1 to 6 of 5537 results Sort by: All All Search Results Decade 1890 - 1899 (3) 1900 - 1909 (18) 1910 - 1919 (136) 1920 - 1929 (83) more Location Aalen Germany (1) Aberdeen Proving Ground Maryland USA (1) Afghanistan (2) Africa (3) more Akron Ohio USA (3) Tower had called and told me Charlie Company was under the operational control of III Corps and I was to take my orders from them. I called battalion headquarters and was told to forget about them, which reinforced our sense that combat was imminent. I remember telling him that if the shooting persisted, or if they hit one of my troops, I wouldnt be responsible if my troops shot back. View of surrounding areas. door at the petroleum dump ruptured and fuel flowed down the ditch in We rolled through Long Binh and out the main gate, then turned left onto Highway 316. The armed helicopter teams had a field day shooting guerrillas who tried to escape to the nearby jungles. Just then a three-man VC RPG team calmly walked across the street right in front of the damaged APC. Rolling back through Bien Hoa, we were astounded to come upon the battalion S4, Captain Leroy Brown, in the middle of town with a 5,000-gallon fuel tanker and several ammunition trucks. Set. However, Charlie Company slammed into the VC before they could organize their attack. Updated 7/26/2015. I yelled at Lieutenant Casper and everybody looked around as the VC tore out running the last few yards to safety. I called III Corps to report that we had detained all of these people, and was told to wait for the Vietnamese National Police to take charge. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. The attacks on Bin Ha, Bien Hoa Air Base and Long Binh Post, occurred during the early hours of 31 January 1968 and continued until 2 February 1968. Several soldiers gathered in front of the track to help the wounded, and Love climbed up to man the .50-caliber. The acting commander of the 199th LIB, Col. Frederic E. Davison, ordered three of his infantry companies operating north of Long Binh to attack the rocket launch site, while LG Weyand ordered the 9th Infantry Division to send the 1st Brigade from Bearcat Base. Dames killed them with a burst from his M-16 probably saving the lives of everyone on my track. opened his mouth but, SGT Cuffee, the supply SGT. During the meeting, a master sergeant adviser to a Vietnamese ranger battalion ran into the compound. Now commanded by a brand-new second lieutenant, the men of Alpha Company balked when they were told to move. That night, frightened bunker guards in the 199th compound shot into the darkness to their front. Copyright Screenocean 2022 | Powered byImagen. [3]:210 Instead at approximately 03:30 the VC began firing across the road at the Plantation Compound being met by return fire from the perimeter bunkers. He ignored me and proceeded to a nearby house where he and the deputy sheriff kicked in the front door. At 0700, as daylight was breaking, my track rolled past the ARVN III Corps compound gate. All of these placements were made with the wrongful assumption that the VC would attack from the jungles outside the base. He read a memorandum charging that 100 days after the signing of the Vientiane ceasefire accords, the seven men had been planning to take command of groups of saboteurs recently infiltrated into the area., See the article in its original context from. They ordered us to clear the VC from the houses surrounding the corps headquarters. Long Binh ammo dump was one of the They bowed and looked confused. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Now the fight was on. As the 2/47th Infantry approached the town a Vietnamese warned that it contained many VC and the VC then launched an ambush on the column knocking out 3 ACAVs with RPGs setting off a 4-hour battle as the US forces engaged the VC position and rescued the survivors in the damaged ACAVs. I realize now that the track was high enough that the rounds would have passed over the troops in front of the vehicle, Love recalls. Talk:Long Bnh, Bin Ha - Wikipedia Elements of B Company, 2/47th Infantry (Mechanized) and C Company, 4/39th Infantry, clearing North Vietnamese Army regulars from "Widows' Village" (a hamlet of housing provided by the government of the Republic of Vietnam for widows and children of fallen ARVN soldiers). FAQs - How to Order | At 08:00 the VC south of the Plantation withdrew into the Widows Village. After I got the coordinates of our objective, I yelled, Crank em up! into the radio handset. Early on January 30, we were told the Tet cease-fire was canceled, and our unit was deployed into a defensive line along the road that ran around the east side of the Long Binh base. STOCKPILES OF BOMBS AND ARTILLERY SHELLS AT THE U.S. ARMY AMMUNITION DUMP AT LONG BINH, IN SOUTH VIETNAM, ERUPTED YESTERDAY (SATURDAY) WHEN TIME CHARGES, PLACED BY VIET CONG RAIDERS, DETONATED AMID TONS OF HIGH EXPLOSIVES. Widows Village made a perfect attack position, since it lay directly across Highway 316 from II Field Force headquarters. Charlie Company reacted quickly to reinforce Alpha, and a daylong fight ensued. Not only would I not finish my command tour, I was being assigned to a leg division. Bravo Company (one member of which was Spc. Rocket Attack on Dong Tam - Brownwater Vietnam Veterans 0.54 HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. In fact, VC effectiveness was so degraded that, after 1968, they were mainly replaced on the battlefield by North Vietnamese regulars, and were never a viable force after that. While I was in training, my motivation was to get these wings and I wear them today proudly, the airman recalled in 2015. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. For additional reading, see: The Battle for Saigon, Tet 1968, by Keith Nolan; and History of the 5th Division, by Ho Son Dai and Nguyen Van Hung. Ly's grandfather was a soldier stationed in Quang Binh during the war. According to him, I told him that any fool could see that the VC did not have M-113s, and that we had 22 .50-calibers and a 106mm recoilless rifle and they, for sure, did not want us to return fire. 13. As the Hueys rockets smashed the VC strongpoint, the scouts fought their way out of the encirclement and evacuated their dead and wounded. recoil of my M14. When we arrived, we found the churchyard packed with thousands of civilians. I told him about the order to clear an area of operations equal in size to that assigned the airborne battalion.He said: Forget that. ordnance pad in the huge ammo dump. After the roadblock was cleared and communications restored, Charlie Company continued toward its objective. Other than temporarily disrupting operations at Bien Hoa AB for half a day and destroying ammunition at the Long Binh ammunition dump, the VC/PAVN inflicted minimal damage to the Bien Hoa-Long Binh complex. A few minutes later, a jeep drove up carrying two extremely frightened white-shirted policemen. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The S3 also told Charlie Companys noncombatants to report to battalion headquarters. As he fell, a burst of automatic weapons fire stitched the wall right where he would have been had he not fallen. (Casper, one of the bravest of the brave, died during the May offensive in Saigon, leading from the front.). convoy about two days before and were repairing anything that had failed The 2nd Platoon led the way under Lieutenant Fred Casper, followed by my track, then Lieutenant Howard Jones 1st Platoon and, finally, the weapons platoon under Lieutenant Don Muir. Bomb squads disarmed seven of the charges, but at 07:30 the remainder exploded with three igniting pallets of artillery shells and their Propellant bags causing a massive explosion, blast wave and mushroom cloud. Officer and soldiers examine barbed wire torn apart by Vietcong who infiltrated Long Binh ammunition dump. In addition we detained more than 20 probable VC fighters dressed in civilian clothes. The Vietnamese brigadier generalthe ranking man at III Corpsdrew circles on a map around two areas of downtown Bien Hoa. The North Vietnamese Army had circled History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. There we would be assigned a unit we would serve with in Vietnam. 1.04 This group is primarily for those Vietnam veterans who experienced the ammo dump attacks in Long Binh in 1966, '67, & '68. But their 81mm mortars were useless, since we were told we could not put any indirect fire into the town. Besides the fireworks, ARVN soldiers had linked tracer bullets together and were stitching the darkness with weaving streams of machine gun fire. 0.42 Long Binh Ammo Dump October 29, 1966 . It also contained tons of captured NVA ammo and guns from the A Shau Valley. probably one of the best deals I had been Used for because the I yelled at Lieutenant Casper, and everybody looked around as the VC tore out running the last few yards to safety. As 1st Lt. Brice Barnes led his scouts into Ho Nai, he ran full speed into a hornets nest. But no one would be leaving the country that day. They all blew up! from the petroleum dump immediately next to our position. Hoa. He As the sun sank over the Long Binh base, they tossed a football and ate cold C rations. As dawn broke on February 1, it was deathly quiet. all personnel to the flight line. As was our normal practice, each company had sent two ambush patrols into the jungle to our front. and completely out of sync. It in bunker) at first light to the sound of a M-60 chattering away. As darkness settled in, Charlie Company was ordered back to the junction of Highways 1 and 316, where we would form a screen in front of the 199th LIB base camp. From our positions we could see and hear the celebratory fireworks lighting the sky over Saigon to the west. Soldiers of the U.S. 2nd Battalion 47th Infantry (Mechanized) and 4th Battalion 39th Infantry clearing a hamlet during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. As time passed, I became a mechanized soldier. and no one was injured. Then I got a call from battalion commander Tower, asking how things were going. 9. [3]:2501, On the evening of 1 February 3 platoons from Company C, 4/12th Infantry and 2 platoons from Company D, 17th Cavalry Regiment were ordered 2km north of Ho Nai to establish an outer defense against any renewed VC/PAVN attack. Although initially surprised, U.S. forces had reacted quickly. At that time, I received a call on my company frequency from the battalion commander, Colonel Tower, asking how things were going. 2023 CriticalPast LLC. Then a report came in that a body had been found wearing a white shirt under a black pajama tunic. He said I would have to wait. ton wrecker weighing in at 22 thousand pounds. The 1st Platoon of Bravo Company was made the II Field Force reaction force and was placed in the PX parking lot at Long Binh. trooper was injured by a piece of shrapnel that had come down The Long Binh ammo dump had exploded. Long Binh Vietnam 1969 stock footage and images - Showing 1 to 6 of 5540 results Sort by: All Decade 1890 - 1899 Location (1) Norfolk Virginia USA (2) Normandy France (12) Norman Oklahoma USA (1) (1) (1) North Carolina United States USA (2) North Chicago Illinois USA (1) North Dakota United States USA (1) North Haven Maine USA (1) North Korea (1) Which date was it? - Most of these photos were taken in an area a few miles north of Chu Lai and south of Hoi An. Benny Toney, the 2nd Platoon sergeant, hooked a tow cable to Stormy. The first explosion was 2,400,000 pounds of 8 inch high explosive artillery projectiles. The churches were cleared in short order. secondary explosions. Sergeant John Ax, squad leader of 1st Squad, 2nd Platoon, recalls what the fighting near III Corps was like: An RPG hit Shocker, the C-21 track, in the side; but it must have been a glancing blow, because it did not explode. 2,400,000 pounds of 8 inch high explosive artillery projectiles. agreement was that the stockade prisoners would pitch our sandbags, help AIR V..FIRES On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Script is copyright Reuters Limited. Tet airstrike Long Binh Ammo Dump - YouTube Click Here. In mid-September, when Ionoff moved to battalion headquarters to become the operations officer (S3), I assumed command of Company C. In October, the 2-47 was tasked to secure engineers as they cleared Highway 1 from Xuan Loc to the II Corps boundary near Phan Thiet.
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