hist2004
06-26-2004, 11:06 AM
Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. Beckwith was an unforgettable character whose unconventional leadership style may well have helped to turn the tide for the 101st Airborne Division at Bien Hoa during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
by Garnett "Bill" Bell
As a young soldier I had the honor of serving under Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. "Chargin' Charlie" Beckwith on two tours in Vietnam. He was the type of memorable leader one never forgets. Some of Beckwith's exploits were widely known during the war, but he never did like being in the limelight, and there is at least one solid contribution he made to the war effort that some of his former comrades-in-arms are perhaps unaware of--his foresight prior to the Tet Offensive, and particularly the actions he took to keep the air base at Bien Hoa from being overrun.
After one tour of duty with Project Delta--a Special Forces unit that trained South Vietnamese and American troops in reconnaissance techniques--in Vietnam's Central Highlands, Beckwith was reassigned as the G-2 (intelligence officer) of the 101st Airborne Division "Screaming Eagles" at Fort Campbell, Ky. I had just returned from a tour in the same area of Vietnam and was assigned to Company C (nicknamed, ironically, "Chargin' Charlie") of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Regiment. Apparently Beckwith received advance word that the entire division was going to be deployed to Vietnam. Knowing that there was a shortage of Vietnamese linguists within the division, he had me reassigned to the 101st Military Intelligence Detachment, which was under his direction.
In the fall of 1967, the 101st Airborne Division, which had had one brigade in-country since 1965, moved from Fort Campbell to a base camp adjacent to Bien Hoa air base in III Corps. The unit's new camp had previously served as a base for the 173rd Airborne Bri-gade. Bien Hoa was a relatively small city situated on the east bank of the Dong Nai river about 30 kilometers from Saigon. Although Bien Hoa province contained many rubber plantations, much of the land in the northern portion of the province was covered in the triple-canopy jungle typical of War Zone D, which provided excellent concealment and staging areas for NVA troops infiltrating south into III Corps.
Shortly after arriving in Bien Hoa, Beckwith called all personnel involved in reconnaissance and intelligence to a meeting in a tent near the division's tactical operations center. After everyone was assembled and waiting, Beckwith burst through the flaps of the tent. He did not like long meetings and quickly delivered his prepared remarks: "Boys, I need some mother-f--in' POWs and documents! Get your asses out there and get them!" After reminding us that "we can't kill them if we can't find them," he spent a few moments shaking hands and reminiscing with some of the old-timers, then disappeared through the dusty tent flaps.
Most everyone who served under Beckwith had a great deal of respect for him, but some criticized him for placing too much emphasis on recovering MIAs. Some of the troops who had worked with him as part of Project Delta were still bitter that he had continued to send in more men to search for three members of a team lost to the NVA in the An Lao Valley of Binh Dinh province in II Corps during January 1966, when he directed Project Delta. They described the mission, in which two more men had been lost, as a senseless waste, caused only by Beckwith's ego. In Charlie Beckwith's view, however, it was a commander's responsibility to recover a man up to 72 hours after he was lost. After that, orders dictated that the mission be passed to the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, and the process could become quite administrative, with the U.S. Embassy and other entities involved. In the first 72 hours, however, Beckwith could handle the situation any way he saw fit.
After Chargin' Charlie's brief pep rally, all intelligence-gathering units within the division at Bien Hoa shifted into high gear. Patrolling activities were steadily increased--in part because Beckwith believed that a small, well-trained patrol could gather better intelligence than all the aerial photos and informant reports disseminated by "strap-hanger" intelligence units working in air-conditioned vans, and in part because reconnaissance had traditionally been emphasized by the 101st Airborne Division. In fact, Beckwith had once told me that he was in favor of one-man recon patrols. He had an especially high degree of confidence in personnel who had trained at the division's Recondo School, which at one time had been commanded by Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Lewis Millet.
The patrols soon began to yield results, and valuable documents started appearing on Beckwith's desk. A document pouch taken from the body of one NVA artillery major who had been killed north of Bien Hoa air base contained an overlay plan for a night firing mission by 122mm rockets, scheduled to be fired onto the flight line of the air base the same day the document was captured. We quickly analyzed the document, figured the range and reversed the azimuths on the overlay. A short time later a strike by an American fighter-bomber resulted in large secondary explosions at the enemy firing position across the river.
Another captured document was classified by the VC as "toi mat" ("absolutely secret") and listed the code designations for all key locations and terrain features throughout the 101st's area of operations (AO). As soon as I saw that the document had been typed on onionskin (so that it could be swallowed easily if the courier was captured), I knew it had to be important. Beckwith told me to take it down to the 265th Army Security Agency, the unit responsible for monitoring VC radio traffic in our AO. The VC had become more conscious of security by that time, so the codes contained in the document made the 265th's job a lot easier, enabling them to accurately pinpoint just when and where the enemy troops would be. Unfortunately, a few weeks later an overzealous public affairs officer at division headquarters decided to publish word of the captured document in the daily bulletin. Beckwith was livid. After he chewed out those responsible for the gaffe, public affairs agreed that any future references to such matters would be cleared through Beckwith's shop prior to publication.
One day some troops from the 101st Aviation Company brought in a female suspect who they said had been acting suspiciously. It seems that one of the Americans had seen her walking on the flight line where the Bell UH-1 Huey helicopters were parked, and he thought she might have been measuring distances with her paces. She was employed at the base as a maid, and when we examined her documents they confirmed that she was a bona fide worker. But we also found a scrap of grease-smeared paper, which apparently had come from the mess hall, that revealed a sketch of the flight line, complete with measurements in meters. One of the troops from the aviation unit also turned in a leather glove that contained an M-26 fragmentation grenade with the pin pulled. He said he believed it had been placed on the flight line by the same woman.
The maid at first said that she had found the paper on the ground and knew nothing about the grenade, but she ultimately revealed that she had long ago decided to "follow the revolution." She told us that her first husband had gone to North Vietnam with the Communists when the country was partitioned in 1954. Since then she had been married twice to South Vietnamese officers, both of whom were unit commanders. The officers, along with many members of their units, had been killed in VC ambushes. When asked how she managed to get such free access to the flight line, the woman admitted that, per instructions, she had gradually established an intimate relationship with the aviation unit commander so that she could go virtually wherever she wished on the base. Beckwith handled the matter quietly, and we were never informed what disciplinary actions had been taken. Knowing Beckwith, however, whoever did the dancing paid the fiddler in the end.
As Tet, the celebration of the lunar New Year, approached in 1968, we heard vague rumors of an impending attack in our AO. Then on January 3, 1968, 101st Airborne troops recovered another important document during an ambush in the Tan Uyen district north of Bien Hoa. The document had been found on the body of VC Major Ut Hiep, commander of the Dong Nai Battalion, which operated as the dedicated reconnaissance element of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN). COSVN was the southern arm of the Communists in Hanoi, and it maintained political and military control over the area of South Vietnam from Cam Ranh Bay down to the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula. According to the document, Ut Hiep had been returning from a meeting at COSVN headquarters, where he had been given the mission of conducting a point reconnaissance at "San Bay B H" ("B H Air Base") and "Xa Binh My" ("Binh My Village") between January 7 and 14, 1968. The major had orders to report back to COSVN immediately after completing his mission.
Although the document was handwritten in Vietnamese and difficult to read, what could be translated seemed to me to indicate that COSVN was planning a major attack in our AO. Considering the locations mentioned, enemy mortars would probably be positioned in Binh My village, just north of the flight line, in order to prevent tactical aircraft at Bien Hoa from taking off on missions in support of U.S. units in III Corps, including the 101st Airborne.
I wrote up my opinion for Beckwith. Two weeks later I was informed by the Order of Battle (OB) shop in 101st Division Intelligence that experts of the Combined Documents Exploitation Center (CDEC) in Saigon disagreed with my opinion. Per instructions from Beckwith, I went down to Saigon and talked to the experts, who insisted that the document was not associated with Bien Hoa air base. The Americans at the CDEC deferred to their leading expert, a Vietnamese civilian assigned to the center. I returned to Bien Hoa angry and frustrated. A few days later Captain Joe Bolton, the division OB officer, and G-2 Sgt. lst Class Pershka came by to discuss the document with me. We looked it over, referring to the appropriate maps and charts. They were noncommittal, saying the next step would be Beckwith's call.
In late January Beckwith told me his people were receiving numerous reports of enemy troop movements in the division AO, and he wanted to know what I thought about the Saigon experts' opinion. I told Charlie that, as far as I was concerned, "San Bay B H" and "Xa Binh My" referred to Bien Hoa air base and nearby Binh My village. I also pointed out that the village was within mortar range of the runway and flight line, and I reminded him that VC cadre from our AO didn't get called back to COSVN HQ every day. Beckwith professed to have confidence in me, but he also cautioned me not to "put his ass out on a limb."
On the day before Tet began, Beckwith called me in. He wanted me to go up to Binh Duong province, northwest of Bien Hoa, to talk to a Communist defector. I hopped in a chopper and landed at Phuoc Vinh that same afternoon. The defector was a young VC soldier, sick with malaria and very weak. At first he claimed he had just joined the VC and did not know anything about his unit. But the manner in which he substituted his N's for L's in the northern dialect led me to believe he was hiding something. Based on his accent, I thought he was most likely an NVA from the area between Thai Binh and Haiphong. I came to believe he was not a genuine defector but instead a straggler who was so sick he had decided to "rally" in exchange for three hot meals per day and a cot, plus free medicine. After talking to him at length, I determined that he was an NVA Regular, not a VC, and that his unit was moving at such a fast clip that he had simply been unable to maintain the pace in his weak state.
Now that he was cooperating, I took him up in the chopper with me, and we eventually identified the trail on which he had been moving south. We observed other Communist troops running south along the same trail, just north of the banks of the Song Be. As soon as they realized they had been spotted, the soldiers stepped off the trail, kneeled down and flipped woven rattan camouflage racks over their heads, making them virtually invisible. I reported the sightings to Beckwith, who was excited by the fact that Regular NVA troops were in his AO and moving quickly toward Bien Hoa.
With most of the division's tactical units in Binh Duong and Phuoc Long, the pe-rimeter at Bien Hoa air base was stretched thin. Infantry units had been moved to where the main attack was expected. Beckwith had a problem: If he recommended pulling troops down from Phuoc Vinh, that location might bear the brunt of an attack. I believe the captured document describing the COSVN reconnaissance mission and the report that NVA troops were moving past Phuoc Vinh at a fast pace convinced Beckwith that Bien Hoa was in serious danger of being overrun. Just prior to the onset of the Tet holiday he made what was perhaps one of the most important decisions of the war, convincing the division commander, Maj. Gen. Olinto Barsanti, to move a battalion of the 326th Engineers down from Phuoc Vinh onto the air base perimeter. Engineers, unlike infantrymen, could be moved without severely affecting the larger unit's mission. The battalion of engineers that arrived at Bien Hoa took over security of the base perimeter.
Strengthening the perimeter proved to be a prudent adjustment. Documents later recovered from dead VC supply personnel on missions in the area revealed that tea, cigarettes, dried fish, rice and other items were being procured in mid-January so that VC forces in the area could celebrate Tet three days prior to the cease-fire period agreed to by both sides--indicating they had had other plans for the actual holiday.
On the evening before Tet began, a delegation of young Vietnamese women visited the local forces guard post just off the end of the Bien Hoa runway. The women told the guards that they had brought them gifts in appreciation of their dedicated service throughout the previous year--traditional Tet offerings of liquor and candy. The women sang songs and wished the grateful guards a happy New Year. But the celebration was short-lived. Soon after they consumed the liquor, the entire guard force was passed out on the floor of their critical post--they had been drugged.
At about the same time, lead elements of the crack 274th and 275th NVA regiments were emerging from the shadows of War Zone D to follow the railroad tracks west to Bien Hoa air base; the ARVN III Corps Headquarters compound; Camp Frenzel Jones, the base camp of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, on the outskirts of Bien Hoa; and Long Binh post, the primary MACV logistical base in Vietnam.
Although one brigade of the 101st had previously been engaged in several fierce encounters with Communist forces, this was to be the first large-scale battle for the two brigades of the 101st that had arrived in the fall of 1967. Beckwith and I had both gained experience in NVA tactics dur-ing previous tours up in Pleiku, Kontum, Darlac and other provinces of the Central Highlands, but most of the men who had arrived the previous fall were about to be baptized by fire.
Sometime around 3 a.m. on January 31, with the local guard force incapacitated, VC sappers--wearing only undershorts and with wire-cutters suspended around their necks on nylon laces--began to infiltrate the wire a****s of the minefield at the end of the runway, with the intention of blowing up the base's tactical aircraft. As the sappers probed for mines, a 101st Airborne soldier who was manning an M-60 machine gun saw something moving out there and began to fire. Moments later, gunfire opened up along the entire perimeter. I never found out who the lone gunner was on the M-60, but I promised myself that if I ever met him, I would make sure I shook his hand. The sappers never made it through the wire.
The main thrust of the attack was blunted thanks to early discovery, and the enemy did not breach the perimeter, thanks to the engineers of the 326th. Because the sappers had been stopped, we were able to get the fighters based at Bien Hoa back in the air quickly once the brunt of the fighting was over. But VC and NVA troops continued to pour deadly automatic-weapons fire into the base from outside the perimeter throughout the first day of Tet. During the ensuing sweep around the perimeter, the firing was so pervasive that the commanding general's secretary was killed while typing at his desk. The vulnerable buildings outside the perimeter were hit hard by the VC and NVA, many of them completely destroyed.
When the attack petered out, the bodies of killed and wounded VC and NVA were scattered in the brush and tall grass around the perimeter. We determined that some of the VC had apparently been special action unit personnel, since inside their packs we found starched and pressed VNAF uniforms. Had they managed to get inside the air base and assume their disguises, they could have created considerable confusion between the American and South Vietnamese personnel, even after first light.
As it was, more then 500 VC were killed and 40 more captured in the Bien HoaLong Binh area. When the smoke cleared at the air base perimeter, 115 VC and NVA bodies were piled in the wire. The following day, the bodies were covered with lime and buried using a bulldozer in one common grave at the end of the runway.
Throughout the Tet attack, most of the Communists in the forefront of the fighting were natives of the local area who had moved to North Vietnam in 1954 and later reinfiltrated back into the South. Prior to the offensive, many of these troops were placed in frontal or guide positions. I later realized that the main purpose of the Tet Offensive was to enable the Communists to enter into negotiations with our government from a position of strength and to ensure leverage during the formation of the so-called Government of National Reconciliation and Concord. I also seriously considered the possibility that the Northern Communist hard-liners had taken advantage of the offensive to rid their ranks of Southern nationalists who might otherwise have caused political plurality problems in a subsequent government. Those former locals who died in the wire may well have been placed at the forefront of the attack for political reasons as well as because they were familiar with the terrain in the area.
As tense as our situation was at Bien Hoa during the Tet attack, the situation at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was probably worse. During the early morning hours of January 31, the infamous North Vietnamese commando known as Ba Den met with Ba Thang, the political commissar of the SaigonGia Dinh Special Action Unit, and Tu Chu, the unit commander, at the Pho Binh restaurant in Saigon. Shortly thereafter, the group launched a bloody attack on the embassy. When Beckwith heard reports of intense fighting in Saigon, he dispatched his deputy G-2, Major Schwartz, along with a heliborne platoon from the 101st, to land on the embassy roof and clear the building. Although he was a staff officer, Schwartz surprised skeptics by maintaining his composure while leading an assault that turned back the well-trained and determined Communist soldiers.
During the fighting in Saigon, Ba Den was wounded and captured, and most of his comrades were killed. The commando was taken to the Cho Quan Hospital for treatment and then on to the Combined Military Interrogation Center, the Military Security Service and, finally, the National Interrogation Center. Unlike many of his colleagues who were also captured during the Tet Offensive, Ba Den refused to cooperate with interrogators, remaining obstinately silent all the way to the NVA prison on Phu Quoc Island, off the coast of South Vietnam. After being exchanged during Operation Homecoming in 1973, he reinfiltrated back into South Vietnam in time for the final offensive in 1975 as a member of Special Action Unit 716. Following the collapse of the Saigon government in April 1975, Ba Den retired and moved to a small villa in Thu Duc, on the outskirts of present-day Ho Chi Minh City.
Apparently the intensity of the fighting during Tet rekindled a smoldering fire in Beckwith. After the offensive was over, he cleaned out his desk in the G-2 shop at Bien Hoa and headed for Hue. He eventually took command of one of my old units, the 2nd Battalion, 327th Regiment, in the A Shau Valley.
The best recon expert in our unit, Roger "Porky Pig" Brown, decided to follow Beckwith into the unforgiving A Shau. Years later I ran into Brown after he was reassigned to the Ranger Department at Fort Benning, Ga. Smiling, he told me that his dedication to
Staff Sergeant Garnett "Bill" Bell in Vietnam in 1968. That year, Bell believed a captured VC document indicated they would strike at Bien Hoa.
Beckwith had gotten him two things: "a sucking chest wound and a Silver Star, and in that order."
After Beckwith left for the A Shau, I was paired off with Dennis Marasco, who would later be charged as the alleged trigger man in a Green Beret murder case involving the death of a Vietnamese double agent. But the Army dropped the charges against Marasco. He and I worked together in the Quang TriHue area for a few months before he transferred to Special Forces and I moved on to Saigon for a tour of duty with the 525th Military Intelligence Group.
I didn't see Charlie Beckwith again until 1973, when we were both students in college. Shortly after graduation, the two of us received orders for the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, but that's another story. Beckwith never did find out what had happened to the five men he lost on Project Delta. I never had a chance to tell him, but in Sai-gon during 1993 I interviewed a veteran of the 3rd NVA Division who had made the initial contact with Beckwith's recon team and later helped to bury the troops who had been killed.
The men from all branches of service, as well as our allies, fought valiantly during Tet 1968. I lost some good friends during that battle, but I know the number of Americans killed in III Corps could have been far greater. Because Charlie Beckwith found a way to bypass the bureaucrats in Saigon and secure additional reinforcements at Bien Hoa, the base remained operational and the tactical fighters based there were able to get back in the air as quickly as possible.
When Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, I searched the U.S. Embassy compound for the Vietnamese expert who had managed to invalidate or suppress the information in the document captured by 101st troops just prior to Tet. I guess I was just curious to see whether he would show up for the final evacuation. I never saw him. Beckwith returned to the States around 1975 and died in June 1994, as a colonel. Every year when Tet rolls around I think about Chargin' Charlie and a lot of others who helped win one of history's most important battles. America's veterans can be proud of what they accomplished during Tet--and many other battles as well. *
Regards,
Hist2004
by Garnett "Bill" Bell
As a young soldier I had the honor of serving under Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. "Chargin' Charlie" Beckwith on two tours in Vietnam. He was the type of memorable leader one never forgets. Some of Beckwith's exploits were widely known during the war, but he never did like being in the limelight, and there is at least one solid contribution he made to the war effort that some of his former comrades-in-arms are perhaps unaware of--his foresight prior to the Tet Offensive, and particularly the actions he took to keep the air base at Bien Hoa from being overrun.
After one tour of duty with Project Delta--a Special Forces unit that trained South Vietnamese and American troops in reconnaissance techniques--in Vietnam's Central Highlands, Beckwith was reassigned as the G-2 (intelligence officer) of the 101st Airborne Division "Screaming Eagles" at Fort Campbell, Ky. I had just returned from a tour in the same area of Vietnam and was assigned to Company C (nicknamed, ironically, "Chargin' Charlie") of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Regiment. Apparently Beckwith received advance word that the entire division was going to be deployed to Vietnam. Knowing that there was a shortage of Vietnamese linguists within the division, he had me reassigned to the 101st Military Intelligence Detachment, which was under his direction.
In the fall of 1967, the 101st Airborne Division, which had had one brigade in-country since 1965, moved from Fort Campbell to a base camp adjacent to Bien Hoa air base in III Corps. The unit's new camp had previously served as a base for the 173rd Airborne Bri-gade. Bien Hoa was a relatively small city situated on the east bank of the Dong Nai river about 30 kilometers from Saigon. Although Bien Hoa province contained many rubber plantations, much of the land in the northern portion of the province was covered in the triple-canopy jungle typical of War Zone D, which provided excellent concealment and staging areas for NVA troops infiltrating south into III Corps.
Shortly after arriving in Bien Hoa, Beckwith called all personnel involved in reconnaissance and intelligence to a meeting in a tent near the division's tactical operations center. After everyone was assembled and waiting, Beckwith burst through the flaps of the tent. He did not like long meetings and quickly delivered his prepared remarks: "Boys, I need some mother-f--in' POWs and documents! Get your asses out there and get them!" After reminding us that "we can't kill them if we can't find them," he spent a few moments shaking hands and reminiscing with some of the old-timers, then disappeared through the dusty tent flaps.
Most everyone who served under Beckwith had a great deal of respect for him, but some criticized him for placing too much emphasis on recovering MIAs. Some of the troops who had worked with him as part of Project Delta were still bitter that he had continued to send in more men to search for three members of a team lost to the NVA in the An Lao Valley of Binh Dinh province in II Corps during January 1966, when he directed Project Delta. They described the mission, in which two more men had been lost, as a senseless waste, caused only by Beckwith's ego. In Charlie Beckwith's view, however, it was a commander's responsibility to recover a man up to 72 hours after he was lost. After that, orders dictated that the mission be passed to the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, and the process could become quite administrative, with the U.S. Embassy and other entities involved. In the first 72 hours, however, Beckwith could handle the situation any way he saw fit.
After Chargin' Charlie's brief pep rally, all intelligence-gathering units within the division at Bien Hoa shifted into high gear. Patrolling activities were steadily increased--in part because Beckwith believed that a small, well-trained patrol could gather better intelligence than all the aerial photos and informant reports disseminated by "strap-hanger" intelligence units working in air-conditioned vans, and in part because reconnaissance had traditionally been emphasized by the 101st Airborne Division. In fact, Beckwith had once told me that he was in favor of one-man recon patrols. He had an especially high degree of confidence in personnel who had trained at the division's Recondo School, which at one time had been commanded by Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Lewis Millet.
The patrols soon began to yield results, and valuable documents started appearing on Beckwith's desk. A document pouch taken from the body of one NVA artillery major who had been killed north of Bien Hoa air base contained an overlay plan for a night firing mission by 122mm rockets, scheduled to be fired onto the flight line of the air base the same day the document was captured. We quickly analyzed the document, figured the range and reversed the azimuths on the overlay. A short time later a strike by an American fighter-bomber resulted in large secondary explosions at the enemy firing position across the river.
Another captured document was classified by the VC as "toi mat" ("absolutely secret") and listed the code designations for all key locations and terrain features throughout the 101st's area of operations (AO). As soon as I saw that the document had been typed on onionskin (so that it could be swallowed easily if the courier was captured), I knew it had to be important. Beckwith told me to take it down to the 265th Army Security Agency, the unit responsible for monitoring VC radio traffic in our AO. The VC had become more conscious of security by that time, so the codes contained in the document made the 265th's job a lot easier, enabling them to accurately pinpoint just when and where the enemy troops would be. Unfortunately, a few weeks later an overzealous public affairs officer at division headquarters decided to publish word of the captured document in the daily bulletin. Beckwith was livid. After he chewed out those responsible for the gaffe, public affairs agreed that any future references to such matters would be cleared through Beckwith's shop prior to publication.
One day some troops from the 101st Aviation Company brought in a female suspect who they said had been acting suspiciously. It seems that one of the Americans had seen her walking on the flight line where the Bell UH-1 Huey helicopters were parked, and he thought she might have been measuring distances with her paces. She was employed at the base as a maid, and when we examined her documents they confirmed that she was a bona fide worker. But we also found a scrap of grease-smeared paper, which apparently had come from the mess hall, that revealed a sketch of the flight line, complete with measurements in meters. One of the troops from the aviation unit also turned in a leather glove that contained an M-26 fragmentation grenade with the pin pulled. He said he believed it had been placed on the flight line by the same woman.
The maid at first said that she had found the paper on the ground and knew nothing about the grenade, but she ultimately revealed that she had long ago decided to "follow the revolution." She told us that her first husband had gone to North Vietnam with the Communists when the country was partitioned in 1954. Since then she had been married twice to South Vietnamese officers, both of whom were unit commanders. The officers, along with many members of their units, had been killed in VC ambushes. When asked how she managed to get such free access to the flight line, the woman admitted that, per instructions, she had gradually established an intimate relationship with the aviation unit commander so that she could go virtually wherever she wished on the base. Beckwith handled the matter quietly, and we were never informed what disciplinary actions had been taken. Knowing Beckwith, however, whoever did the dancing paid the fiddler in the end.
As Tet, the celebration of the lunar New Year, approached in 1968, we heard vague rumors of an impending attack in our AO. Then on January 3, 1968, 101st Airborne troops recovered another important document during an ambush in the Tan Uyen district north of Bien Hoa. The document had been found on the body of VC Major Ut Hiep, commander of the Dong Nai Battalion, which operated as the dedicated reconnaissance element of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN). COSVN was the southern arm of the Communists in Hanoi, and it maintained political and military control over the area of South Vietnam from Cam Ranh Bay down to the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula. According to the document, Ut Hiep had been returning from a meeting at COSVN headquarters, where he had been given the mission of conducting a point reconnaissance at "San Bay B H" ("B H Air Base") and "Xa Binh My" ("Binh My Village") between January 7 and 14, 1968. The major had orders to report back to COSVN immediately after completing his mission.
Although the document was handwritten in Vietnamese and difficult to read, what could be translated seemed to me to indicate that COSVN was planning a major attack in our AO. Considering the locations mentioned, enemy mortars would probably be positioned in Binh My village, just north of the flight line, in order to prevent tactical aircraft at Bien Hoa from taking off on missions in support of U.S. units in III Corps, including the 101st Airborne.
I wrote up my opinion for Beckwith. Two weeks later I was informed by the Order of Battle (OB) shop in 101st Division Intelligence that experts of the Combined Documents Exploitation Center (CDEC) in Saigon disagreed with my opinion. Per instructions from Beckwith, I went down to Saigon and talked to the experts, who insisted that the document was not associated with Bien Hoa air base. The Americans at the CDEC deferred to their leading expert, a Vietnamese civilian assigned to the center. I returned to Bien Hoa angry and frustrated. A few days later Captain Joe Bolton, the division OB officer, and G-2 Sgt. lst Class Pershka came by to discuss the document with me. We looked it over, referring to the appropriate maps and charts. They were noncommittal, saying the next step would be Beckwith's call.
In late January Beckwith told me his people were receiving numerous reports of enemy troop movements in the division AO, and he wanted to know what I thought about the Saigon experts' opinion. I told Charlie that, as far as I was concerned, "San Bay B H" and "Xa Binh My" referred to Bien Hoa air base and nearby Binh My village. I also pointed out that the village was within mortar range of the runway and flight line, and I reminded him that VC cadre from our AO didn't get called back to COSVN HQ every day. Beckwith professed to have confidence in me, but he also cautioned me not to "put his ass out on a limb."
On the day before Tet began, Beckwith called me in. He wanted me to go up to Binh Duong province, northwest of Bien Hoa, to talk to a Communist defector. I hopped in a chopper and landed at Phuoc Vinh that same afternoon. The defector was a young VC soldier, sick with malaria and very weak. At first he claimed he had just joined the VC and did not know anything about his unit. But the manner in which he substituted his N's for L's in the northern dialect led me to believe he was hiding something. Based on his accent, I thought he was most likely an NVA from the area between Thai Binh and Haiphong. I came to believe he was not a genuine defector but instead a straggler who was so sick he had decided to "rally" in exchange for three hot meals per day and a cot, plus free medicine. After talking to him at length, I determined that he was an NVA Regular, not a VC, and that his unit was moving at such a fast clip that he had simply been unable to maintain the pace in his weak state.
Now that he was cooperating, I took him up in the chopper with me, and we eventually identified the trail on which he had been moving south. We observed other Communist troops running south along the same trail, just north of the banks of the Song Be. As soon as they realized they had been spotted, the soldiers stepped off the trail, kneeled down and flipped woven rattan camouflage racks over their heads, making them virtually invisible. I reported the sightings to Beckwith, who was excited by the fact that Regular NVA troops were in his AO and moving quickly toward Bien Hoa.
With most of the division's tactical units in Binh Duong and Phuoc Long, the pe-rimeter at Bien Hoa air base was stretched thin. Infantry units had been moved to where the main attack was expected. Beckwith had a problem: If he recommended pulling troops down from Phuoc Vinh, that location might bear the brunt of an attack. I believe the captured document describing the COSVN reconnaissance mission and the report that NVA troops were moving past Phuoc Vinh at a fast pace convinced Beckwith that Bien Hoa was in serious danger of being overrun. Just prior to the onset of the Tet holiday he made what was perhaps one of the most important decisions of the war, convincing the division commander, Maj. Gen. Olinto Barsanti, to move a battalion of the 326th Engineers down from Phuoc Vinh onto the air base perimeter. Engineers, unlike infantrymen, could be moved without severely affecting the larger unit's mission. The battalion of engineers that arrived at Bien Hoa took over security of the base perimeter.
Strengthening the perimeter proved to be a prudent adjustment. Documents later recovered from dead VC supply personnel on missions in the area revealed that tea, cigarettes, dried fish, rice and other items were being procured in mid-January so that VC forces in the area could celebrate Tet three days prior to the cease-fire period agreed to by both sides--indicating they had had other plans for the actual holiday.
On the evening before Tet began, a delegation of young Vietnamese women visited the local forces guard post just off the end of the Bien Hoa runway. The women told the guards that they had brought them gifts in appreciation of their dedicated service throughout the previous year--traditional Tet offerings of liquor and candy. The women sang songs and wished the grateful guards a happy New Year. But the celebration was short-lived. Soon after they consumed the liquor, the entire guard force was passed out on the floor of their critical post--they had been drugged.
At about the same time, lead elements of the crack 274th and 275th NVA regiments were emerging from the shadows of War Zone D to follow the railroad tracks west to Bien Hoa air base; the ARVN III Corps Headquarters compound; Camp Frenzel Jones, the base camp of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, on the outskirts of Bien Hoa; and Long Binh post, the primary MACV logistical base in Vietnam.
Although one brigade of the 101st had previously been engaged in several fierce encounters with Communist forces, this was to be the first large-scale battle for the two brigades of the 101st that had arrived in the fall of 1967. Beckwith and I had both gained experience in NVA tactics dur-ing previous tours up in Pleiku, Kontum, Darlac and other provinces of the Central Highlands, but most of the men who had arrived the previous fall were about to be baptized by fire.
Sometime around 3 a.m. on January 31, with the local guard force incapacitated, VC sappers--wearing only undershorts and with wire-cutters suspended around their necks on nylon laces--began to infiltrate the wire a****s of the minefield at the end of the runway, with the intention of blowing up the base's tactical aircraft. As the sappers probed for mines, a 101st Airborne soldier who was manning an M-60 machine gun saw something moving out there and began to fire. Moments later, gunfire opened up along the entire perimeter. I never found out who the lone gunner was on the M-60, but I promised myself that if I ever met him, I would make sure I shook his hand. The sappers never made it through the wire.
The main thrust of the attack was blunted thanks to early discovery, and the enemy did not breach the perimeter, thanks to the engineers of the 326th. Because the sappers had been stopped, we were able to get the fighters based at Bien Hoa back in the air quickly once the brunt of the fighting was over. But VC and NVA troops continued to pour deadly automatic-weapons fire into the base from outside the perimeter throughout the first day of Tet. During the ensuing sweep around the perimeter, the firing was so pervasive that the commanding general's secretary was killed while typing at his desk. The vulnerable buildings outside the perimeter were hit hard by the VC and NVA, many of them completely destroyed.
When the attack petered out, the bodies of killed and wounded VC and NVA were scattered in the brush and tall grass around the perimeter. We determined that some of the VC had apparently been special action unit personnel, since inside their packs we found starched and pressed VNAF uniforms. Had they managed to get inside the air base and assume their disguises, they could have created considerable confusion between the American and South Vietnamese personnel, even after first light.
As it was, more then 500 VC were killed and 40 more captured in the Bien HoaLong Binh area. When the smoke cleared at the air base perimeter, 115 VC and NVA bodies were piled in the wire. The following day, the bodies were covered with lime and buried using a bulldozer in one common grave at the end of the runway.
Throughout the Tet attack, most of the Communists in the forefront of the fighting were natives of the local area who had moved to North Vietnam in 1954 and later reinfiltrated back into the South. Prior to the offensive, many of these troops were placed in frontal or guide positions. I later realized that the main purpose of the Tet Offensive was to enable the Communists to enter into negotiations with our government from a position of strength and to ensure leverage during the formation of the so-called Government of National Reconciliation and Concord. I also seriously considered the possibility that the Northern Communist hard-liners had taken advantage of the offensive to rid their ranks of Southern nationalists who might otherwise have caused political plurality problems in a subsequent government. Those former locals who died in the wire may well have been placed at the forefront of the attack for political reasons as well as because they were familiar with the terrain in the area.
As tense as our situation was at Bien Hoa during the Tet attack, the situation at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was probably worse. During the early morning hours of January 31, the infamous North Vietnamese commando known as Ba Den met with Ba Thang, the political commissar of the SaigonGia Dinh Special Action Unit, and Tu Chu, the unit commander, at the Pho Binh restaurant in Saigon. Shortly thereafter, the group launched a bloody attack on the embassy. When Beckwith heard reports of intense fighting in Saigon, he dispatched his deputy G-2, Major Schwartz, along with a heliborne platoon from the 101st, to land on the embassy roof and clear the building. Although he was a staff officer, Schwartz surprised skeptics by maintaining his composure while leading an assault that turned back the well-trained and determined Communist soldiers.
During the fighting in Saigon, Ba Den was wounded and captured, and most of his comrades were killed. The commando was taken to the Cho Quan Hospital for treatment and then on to the Combined Military Interrogation Center, the Military Security Service and, finally, the National Interrogation Center. Unlike many of his colleagues who were also captured during the Tet Offensive, Ba Den refused to cooperate with interrogators, remaining obstinately silent all the way to the NVA prison on Phu Quoc Island, off the coast of South Vietnam. After being exchanged during Operation Homecoming in 1973, he reinfiltrated back into South Vietnam in time for the final offensive in 1975 as a member of Special Action Unit 716. Following the collapse of the Saigon government in April 1975, Ba Den retired and moved to a small villa in Thu Duc, on the outskirts of present-day Ho Chi Minh City.
Apparently the intensity of the fighting during Tet rekindled a smoldering fire in Beckwith. After the offensive was over, he cleaned out his desk in the G-2 shop at Bien Hoa and headed for Hue. He eventually took command of one of my old units, the 2nd Battalion, 327th Regiment, in the A Shau Valley.
The best recon expert in our unit, Roger "Porky Pig" Brown, decided to follow Beckwith into the unforgiving A Shau. Years later I ran into Brown after he was reassigned to the Ranger Department at Fort Benning, Ga. Smiling, he told me that his dedication to
Staff Sergeant Garnett "Bill" Bell in Vietnam in 1968. That year, Bell believed a captured VC document indicated they would strike at Bien Hoa.
Beckwith had gotten him two things: "a sucking chest wound and a Silver Star, and in that order."
After Beckwith left for the A Shau, I was paired off with Dennis Marasco, who would later be charged as the alleged trigger man in a Green Beret murder case involving the death of a Vietnamese double agent. But the Army dropped the charges against Marasco. He and I worked together in the Quang TriHue area for a few months before he transferred to Special Forces and I moved on to Saigon for a tour of duty with the 525th Military Intelligence Group.
I didn't see Charlie Beckwith again until 1973, when we were both students in college. Shortly after graduation, the two of us received orders for the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, but that's another story. Beckwith never did find out what had happened to the five men he lost on Project Delta. I never had a chance to tell him, but in Sai-gon during 1993 I interviewed a veteran of the 3rd NVA Division who had made the initial contact with Beckwith's recon team and later helped to bury the troops who had been killed.
The men from all branches of service, as well as our allies, fought valiantly during Tet 1968. I lost some good friends during that battle, but I know the number of Americans killed in III Corps could have been far greater. Because Charlie Beckwith found a way to bypass the bureaucrats in Saigon and secure additional reinforcements at Bien Hoa, the base remained operational and the tactical fighters based there were able to get back in the air as quickly as possible.
When Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, I searched the U.S. Embassy compound for the Vietnamese expert who had managed to invalidate or suppress the information in the document captured by 101st troops just prior to Tet. I guess I was just curious to see whether he would show up for the final evacuation. I never saw him. Beckwith returned to the States around 1975 and died in June 1994, as a colonel. Every year when Tet rolls around I think about Chargin' Charlie and a lot of others who helped win one of history's most important battles. America's veterans can be proud of what they accomplished during Tet--and many other battles as well. *
Regards,
Hist2004