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The U.S. Marines

At 0600 on March 8, 1965, Rear Admiral Don W. Wulzen, commander of U.S. Navy Task Force 76, barked out an order from the bridge of the USS Mt. McKinley that would have been familiar to any Marine of World War II or Korean War vintage: "Land the Landing Force!" The Leathernecks aboard the four ships of the task force formed the vanguard of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) under Brigadier General Frederick Karch. They were four thousand yards off the coast of Red Beach, Da Nang, a prominent port city of the southeast Asian peninsula known as Indochina. It was drizzling, and an eight-knot breeze from the northwest roiled the seas so much that the Marines had to abandon the plan to come ashore in their amphibious tractors in favor of larger, World War II-era landing craft. Just after 0920, the first assault wave reached the shore.

It was an uneventful landing. Not a single shot was fired by the guerrilla forces that regularly harassed the big Da Nang air base, which was used by the American and South Vietnamese air forces. Young Vietnamese girls greeted the infantrymen, placing yellow and gold leis around the necks of the newcomers as they made their way to the trucks that would carry them to the air base. There, other Marines in helicopter squadrons and Hawk antiaircraft missile batteries awaited them.

The first Marine support units had arrived in 1962, and the Corps had had a small presence in Vietnam since then. The generals and colonels at HQMC in Washington did not realize at the time that the Corps was about to begin its second major war since the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific.

Operation Starlite was typical of hundreds of offensive sweeps run by the Marines between 1965 and 1968 against the VC guerrillas. Superior mobility and firepower were put to work effectively only when intelligence had a firm fix on the enemy's location. Blocking forces were put in place, and then a powerful ground assault would sweep across the enemy's position, driving them toward the blocking force. Like a great many of the operations in the war's first three years, Starlight involved the simultaneous deployment of an amphibious landing force and an assault force brought to the battle by transport helicopters, with close air and artillery support on call. Most of the combat engagements fought by Marine infantry against the Vietcong took place at the company, platoon, or squad level rather than at battalion or regimental level. The actions tended to be brief, intensely violent firefights with small arms. These fights were often the result of an ambush, or were caused by the unexpected collision of small groups of soldiers at fairly close range. The Vietcong preferred hit and run tactics because they lacked the supporting arms and tactical mobility to bring a conclusive amount of firepower to bear on their adversaries.

Infantry fighting in a modern war zone is never a picnic, but in Vietnam it was an exceptionally grueling business, both terrifying and exhausting. The emphasis on population control meant that Marine line companies faced endless patrolling in search of an elusive enemy, often on the same ground week after week. The VC guerrillas' ethnicity and appearance was identical to that of the general civilian population. The guerrillas knew the local trails and terrain features; they often seemed able to melt into thin air. They could vanish into a nearby village and quickly hide weapons, or hide in tunnel networks that contained kitchens, dispensaries, weapons-repair rooms, and sleeping quarters. Many of the tunnel complexes proved to be hard to destroy. Even when Marines made substantial efforts to blow them up with gasoline or C-4 explosives, the end result was typically only limited damage to a small section of a network. The Vietcong were masters of homemade booby traps, most of which were designed to wound rather than kill, on the sound theory that a wound caused a greater diminution in enemy combat strength than death (since they required care). It was the Vietcong, not the Marines, who chose the time and place of most small-unit combat in I Corps in the first three years of the American ground war. Vietnam was a conflict without fronts. Once a particular area had been cleared of regular Communist units, the Marines would depart. A few months later, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army would have a new or reconstructed regiment back in precisely the same area. As the thirteen months of the typical Marine's tour moved toward completion, the war took on the aura of a Sisyphian task.

As 1965 came to a close, III MAF and MACV were cautiously optimistic about the Marine war and the American war in general. U.S. intervention had taken the pressure off the South Vietnamese army. Starlite and other large operations had shown that the Marines were able to defeat main-force VC units in combat. Generals Walt and Krulak had reason to be pleased with the pacification techniques and programs aimed at decimating the enemy's infrastructure.

All of this activity led General Walt to initiate Operation Hastings, the first major encounter between sizable Marine and North Vietnamese army units in Quang Tri. Hastings initially involved four maneuver battalions, organized as Task Force Delta, under Brigadier General Lowell English. Hastings got off to a rough start. The scheme of maneuver called for the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines to set up blocking positions at the southwest end of the Ngan Valley, while three miles to the northwest 2/4 would helo assault into the valley's mouth, then sweep southwest, driving the enemy forces in the valley toward the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. Both battalions landed against light resistance, but two CH-46 transport helos collided and crashed as they approached one LZ. Another hit a tree and crashed. Then the PAVN shot down a fourth Sea Knight, killing thirteen Marines. So it was that the Ngan Valley was christened "Helicopter Valley."

The 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines advanced at a snail's pace toward 3/4. The terrain was worse than the enemy, for the vegetation was so thick that the Marines couldn't see beyond a couple of feet, and had to rely on compass readings. It was a steaming day, with no breeze and close to 100 percent humidity. The 3rd Battalion ran into a numerically superior enemy force and fought an intense battle for three full hours in defense before the PAVN broke off. One Marine died and five were evacuated with wounds. Another thirty or so sustained minor wounds and stayed with the battalion. The PAVN lost the engagement; seventy- nine of their troops were killed.

The next day, General English shifted the direction of the sweep to the northeast. Company K was charged with destroying the downed helos in the valley. As his Marines did so, they sustained a multiwave enemy infantry assault preceded by a mortar barrage. Close to a thousand enemy troops swarmed into the Marines' line. A tough staff sergeant from Boston, John J. McGinty, recalled the intensity of the action: "We just couldn't kill them fast enough."' Captain Robert Modrzejewski made a Herculean effort to bring the fire of his other two platoons to bear on the attackers. Well-placed napalm from fighter-bombers killed twenty enemy soldiers in a matter of seconds. Then forty more were killed when another fiery bomb hit its mark. The fighting went on for four hours unabated, until Company L, 3/4 could position itself on the high ground and drive off the attacking enemy. Captain Modrzejewski won the Medal of Honor for his superb leadership that day. So did Staff

Sergeant McGinty.

Casualties from this fight were heavy. Company K lost fourteen dead and forty-nine wounded; McGinty's trapped platoon alone lost eight dead and fourteen wounded.

Hastings continued through August 3, with intense fighting-some

of it carried out under heavy artillery fire from the enemy's excellent Chinese howitzers, but the worst of it was over by July 26. Marine intelligence wasn't sure whether the North Vietnamese army's 324B Division had retreated back north or slipped into the remote jungle to the west. One thing was clear: the Marines faced, in effect, a new war for control of the DMZ. In Hastings, for the first time in Marine history, entire battalions had been moved in and out of battle exclusively by helicopter. And it also meant that new strategic conundrums existed. Documents on PAVN dead suggested that the ultimate objective of the 324B Division had been to penetrate corridors northeast and northwest of the Rockpile and then to invest several cities on the coast. Should the Marines reinforce their strongpoints at Dong Ha and Cam Lo and try to crush the PAVN ambitions in Quang Tri, or conduct defensive operations against those units while it focused on the pacification war along the coast? MACV in Saigon, for its part, put pressure on III MAF to build up strength in Quang Tri, as it had indications that two more full PAVN divisions were about to infiltrate.

The pressure from MACV resulted in the continuation of Hastings by a different name. Operation Prairie began on August 3 and continued unabated until January 31, 1967.

For all intents and purposes, the Marine ground war came to an end when the 1st Marine Regiment stood down in Da Nang on April 13, 1971, at which point the regimental headquarters company was already en route to Camp Pendleton. It was elements of the 1st Regiment that had first gone to war in Vietnam in 1965. One battalion from the regiment had landed at each of the Marines' three enclaves-Da Nang, Chu Lai, and Phu Bai. Over the next six years, the regiment fought in fifty major operations, including the battle for Hue and Operation Meade River in late 1969, one of the Marines' largest helicopter assaults in Vietnam, in which Marines captured three hundred enemy troops and left more than one thousand enemy dead. The last American combat units left Vietnam by the end of March 1973, in accordance with the Paris Peace Accords, which included a cease-fire and prisoner exchange. Its fatal weakness was that the North Vietnamese were allowed to stay wherever they controlled terrain within South Vietnam.

In the spring of 1975, reckoning correctly that there would be no American military response, the North Vietnamese launched the final offensive of the Vietnam War: a multipronged armored invasion of more than twenty divisions slammed into South Vietnam from the north. They poured through the Central Highlands and Quang Tri, led by Vo Nguyen Giap's protégé General Van Tien Dung. With the exception of a courageous two-week stand at Xuan Loc, the South Vietnamese army broke and ran in panic.

In the desperation and chaos that swirled around the conquest of South Vietnam, the U.S. Marines returned for their last act: the evacuation of Saigon. Operation Frequent Wind was the largest helicopter evacuation in history. A country was coming apart, and tens of thousands of desperate people were trying to escape death and imprisonment. They were in no mood for orderly queuing. An air of desperation and terror hung over the evacuation.

The Marines of Brigadier General Richard Carey's 9th Marine Brigade had rehearsed a number of evacuation scenarios throughout the spring. Nothing they had rehearsed much resembled the event that unfolded in the last hours of South Vietnam's life as a nation. The evacuation order was issued more than a day later than it should have been, and then the fixed-wing evacuation, planned to take place from Tan Son Nhut Air Base, fell apart when North Vietnamese rockets destroyed a C-130 transport at 1600 on April 29 and the base had to be closed to planes. Two Marines guarding the Defense Attaché's Office adjacent to the air base were killed by artillery fire. Corporal Charles McMahon of Woburn, Massachusetts, and Lance Corporal Darwin Judge of Marshalltown, Iowa, were the last Marines killed in the Vietnam War.

Just after noon on April 29, Colonel Al Gray of the 4th Marines presided over the complicated ballet of moving 2/4's Marines to their assigned ships for the flights into Tan Son Nhut. Twenty-three CH-53 Sea Stallions took part in the operation. Once the battalion had landed and fanned out to protect the perimeter, these choppers, along with smaller CH-46 Sea Knights, supported by Cobra gunships, evacuated 335 Americans and 4,435 Vietnamese in nine hours. Just an hour and a half into the operation, Gray and Carey received the unwelcome news that two thousand people were in need of rescue in the Saigon embassy compound. By 1415 that afternoon, one CH-53 and one CH-46 was landing every ten minutes. It was a mad rush to the ships of the Seventh Fleet off the coast. At 0558 on April 30, the few Americans left in the compound with hundreds of shocked and angry Vietnamese could sense doom. The Marines at the embassy had to barricade the door to the roof and beat away grasping hands trying to break through windows to gain access. Small-arms fire issued from the crowd.

At around 0750 on April 30, the last group of Marines struggled to fend off the panic-stricken Vietnamese as the CH-46 came into view. In a few minutes it was all over as the Marines dropped tear gas to keep the Vietnamese at bay. A few shots whined by the Sea Knight as it made its way toward the sea. As they departed the tear gas blew back up into their air space, blinding a number of the Marines temporarily.

For America, the Vietnam War was at last part of history. In a few hours, the North Vietnamese were rejoicing in the Presidential Palace in Saigon.

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