The 30,000‑Troop Vietnam Operation That Wiped Out An Entire Enemy Division

There are nights in war when soldiers pray the enemy doesn’t find them. March 5th, 1966 was not one of those nights. In a rubber plantation north of Saigon, Robert J. Hibbs and 15 men were lying in the dirt, waiting for an attack they had deliberately set out to provoke. They believed they were ready.

They had no idea what was waiting for them in the darkness. Hibbs was a first lieutenant in the first infantry division. His patrol was small on purpose. It had been sent out after dark, past the wire to sit in the black under the rubber trees and wait for something to walk into it. 15 men deep in enemy territory, alone in the darkness of night.

And something did walk into it. Two Vietkong companies, several hundred men moving toward the American position. and they intended to hit before dawn. What happened next was over quickly. Hibbs and his men opened fire from close range into a column that did not know they were there. The ambush tore the enemy formation apart, but the fight did not end cleanly because fights never do. Americans were hit.

One of his soldiers was down and could not move himself. An enemy machine gun had begun to fire. Hibbs went at the machine gun alone so that the men behind him could pull the wounded soldier out. He was killed doing it. He was 23 years old. He would become the first man in the first infantry division to receive the Medal of Honor in Vietnam.

Now, hold that picture because it raises a question that this whole story is built on. Why was a lieutenant with 15 men sitting in the dark deliberately trying to get himself attacked? The division behind him was one of the most heavily armed formations on Earth. It had howitzers. It had tanks. It had helicopter gunships and jet fighter bombers on call.

It could put more explosive on one acre of ground in 10 minutes than most armies in history could manage in a week. And none of that mattered unless the enemy stood still long enough to be hit. That was the problem the Big Red One carried ashore in 1965. It could not be solved with more firepower because firepower was never the shortage.

What the division lacked was a target that would stay. So, it began building targets. First with 15 men in the dark, then with a company, then with an armored column strung out along a jungle road as live bait, and finally in the spring of 1967 with 30,000 men and an entire enemy division on the wrong end of the trap. This is the story of how that idea grew and what it cost the men who carried it out.

Before we go further, if someone you loved served in this era, these stories may carry a piece of their memory. Help us keep their memory alive. Like the video and subscribe. The men who landed in Vietnam in 1965 belonged to a unit with a longer memory than the country it served. The oldest piece of the division goes back to the Revolutionary War.

Battery D of the Fifth Field Artillery traces its service to a gun crew commanded by a young captain named Alexander Hamilton. It holds the longest record of continuous service of any unit in the United States Army. When that battery fired in Vietnam, it was firing in the same unbroken line of service that began before there was a United States.

The division itself was organized in World War I. It was the first American division into France and at Cantoni in the spring of 1918. It won what the army has always counted as the first American victory of that war. Then came Swason, S Mihiel, and the Muse are gone. The long grinding battles that helped break the German army and end the fighting.

25 years later, the division did it again and lived up to its name while doing it. It went in with the first waves in North Africa, then Sicily. Then on the morning of June 6th, 1944, Omaha Beach. It fought across France and Belgium. It was the first American division to enter Germany.

It held its ground in the Battle of the Bulge and pushed on into the heart of the Reich. That was the inheritance. And it created an expectation. In every one of those wars, the enemy had been a regular army. It wore uniforms. It held lines. It defended cities and river crossings and road junctions. It could be found because it had to hold ground to matter.

And once you found an army like that, American firepower and American industry could grind it down. Vietnam broke that pattern completely. There was something else, too. And it was more immediate than doctrine. The division had never fought in a place like this. Not once in more than 150 years.

It had fought in the frozen Ardans. It had fought in the North African desert and Sicilian hills and Norman hedge. It had never fought in wet tropical heat that never let up, day or night. It had never fought in grass taller than a man. It had never fought in thicket so dense that a soldier could pass within 10 ft of an enemy bunker and see nothing at all.

It had never fought in rivers, in swamps, in mud that pulled the boots off men’s feet. So when the first infantry division arrived in Vietnam in July 1965 as the first full US Army division sent to meet the fighting in the south, it faced two problems at once. It had to learn the ground and it had to find an enemy who had spent 20 years learning how not to be found. The arrival was quiet.

There were no bands and no headlines. The first troops came in through Camran Bay in July 1965, were moved off the beach quickly and went inland to base camps in the Saigon area. The first weeks were not fighting. They were housekeeping. Men cleared ground. They filled sandbags. They strung wire and dug positions and worked out fields of fire.

It was unglamorous labor in brutal heat. And it mattered more than it looked because a base camp that could not defend itself would become a target instead of a base. Then came the patrols. Those early patrols had two purposes. The obvious one was to push the enemy back from the wire so that mortar crews could not set up within range of the camps.

The less obvious purpose was to harden the men. Heat like that does not just make a soldier uncomfortable. It empties him out. It ruins feet. It causes men to drop from heat stroke on a march that would have been nothing in Kansas. The only cure is time, and the division had to spend that time carefully. The men were also introduced to something new, the airmobile patrol.

Helicopters lifted infantry over the jungle and set them down where a foot march would have taken 2 days. It was the beginning of a relationship that would eventually define the division’s whole way of fighting. In those first months, it was mostly practice. There was contact with the enemy in that period, but it was small.

A burst of fire from a treeine, a mine, a sniper, a booby trap on a trail. Men were hurt and men were killed. And the division learned in the hardest possible way how the Vietkong actually fought. He did not attack with strength. He attacked weakness, and only briefly. He hit a column at its most stretched point, fired for two or three minutes, and left.

He fought from bunkers he had built months in advance, and could not be seen from 20 yards away. He mined the roads at night and farmed the fields by day. He knew every trail, every stream crossing, every place a helicopter could and could not land because he or his family had lived there all his life. Now, put the American problem plainly.

An American battalion commander could put artillery on a target in minutes. He could have jets overhead not long after. He could move a rifle company 30 m by air in half an hour. But all of that needed one thing first. A known enemy in a known place, staying there. The Vietkong’s entire method was built to deny exactly that.

A firefight that lasted 3 minutes was a firefight the artillery could not reach in time. A base camp that could be abandoned in 20 minutes was a base camp air strikes would only crater. All that American power was real. It just kept arriving 5 minutes late at a place the enemy had already left. By November 1965, there were more than 14,000 Big Red One soldiers in Vietnam.

Their area of responsibility was enormous. A great block of central South Vietnam running from the Cambodian border in the west all the way east to the South China Sea. Division headquarters was set up north of Saigon at Dion under Major General Jonathan O. Seaman, the first of five generals who would command the division in this war.

Seaman had firepower, mobility, and 14,000 men. What he needed was a fight. In November 1965, he got one and not on his own initiative. Highway 13 ran north out of Saigon, past the division’s positions toward Lay and eventually toward the Cambodian border. It was a supply road, which made it a target, which made it a place where American units had to keep moving whether they wanted to or not.

Units of the first division were on a sweep along Highway 13 near a small village called App Bao Bang when they were hit by a reinforced Vietkong regiment. This was not a three-minute ambush. This was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American force on the road in the open using numbers. And that decision, the enemy’s decision, was the first crack in the whole problem.

The first assault came in against American small arms and automatic weapons and was thrown back. So the Vietkong came again, thrown back again. A third assault went in and was stopped. Then came the fourth and it was the heaviest. It was stopped by the 105 mm howitzers. That sentence deserves unpacking because it sounds routine and it was not.

A 105mm howitzer is an indirect fire weapon. Normally it sits miles behind the infantry, drops shells in a high arc onto coordinates it cannot see and is corrected by radio. That is how artillery works and how artillery men prefer it. At Opa Bang, the guns were firing at close range over open sights.

At men the crews could see with their own eyes. For the gunners, that meant the enemy was inside their position. There was no safe distance left. But it also meant something else. And this is the part that mattered for the next 5 years. A howitzer shell fired flat into a mass of attacking infantry at short range does not just kill. It stops an assault dead in seconds in a way that rifles cannot.

The enemy attack broke apart. As the weakened Vietkong pulled back, the Air Force was called in to hammer their escape. When it was over, the division counted 198 enemy dead on the ground. There were American casualties, too, and the division’s own accounts from the period are the source for these figures, as they are for most numbers in this story.

But the number was not the real result. The real result was in the heads of the men who had just spent a day being attacked by a regiment in a place none of them had ever heard of. They had held in jungle country on ground the enemy chose against an enemy who outnumbered them in their first serious engagement.

They had held and then won. And a pattern had shown itself. The enemy avoided American strength except when he thought he saw an isolated American force on a road. Then he came out. A few days later, on November 20th, near a place recorded as Trung Lloy, another road convoy was set up for ambush. This time, the Americans reacted almost before the enemy had finished springing the trap.

The convoy went straight into a defensive perimeter and returned fire. A helicopter gunship came over and drove the ambushers out of cover. And once they were in the open, ground fire, especially from the mortar platoon, took them apart. The ambush became a killing ground for the men it was aimed at.

Early in December came the largest battle of the year northwest of the third brigade headquarters at Lay. A task force was working through the countryside, doing the slow, ugly work of base destruction, finding Vietkong camps, blowing bunkers, wrecking the underground workshops where the enemy built mines and repaired weapons. Then it walked headlong into a fortified base camp held by four enemy battalions.

The firefight began instantly and at close range. The radio call went out and this time the answer came fast. concentrated howitzer fire and repeated tactical air strikes worked in tight around men who were already in contact. After 2 hours, an infantry assault went in and cleared the position. The division took losses.

And here another piece of the machine appeared, one that would matter to thousands of men over the next 5 years. The medical evacuation helicopter coming into a landing zone while the shooting was still going on to lift the wounded out. Nothing in Vietnam changed a wounded man’s chances more than that. A soldier hid in the jungle in 1965 could be on an operating table in a proper hospital within the hour.

In the world of the two earlier wars this division had fought, that was unthinkable. Three fights, three victories, and in all three, the same shape. The enemy chose to attack an American force he thought was vulnerable and lost. By the end of 1965, the division was beginning to see the outline of an answer.

If the enemy would not stay put to be found, perhaps he could be persuaded to come to a place already chosen for him. The new year opened with the division far more active and far more confident. Operation Crimp came first, then Rolling Stone, and Armor took on a larger role in both. This was not the tank warfare of 1944. In Vietnam, armor’s value was less about killing enemy tanks.

There weren’t any to fight in this area, and more about two other things: carrying enormous firepower into places infantry could only reach on foot, and being extremely hard to kill. A tank or an armored personnel carrier sitting in a treeine could absorb the opening minutes of an ambush that would have destroyed a truck convoy.

That single fact would soon become the foundation of the division’s best tactic. There were also hard close fights in this period at places like Tan and Lok where the division began to prove it had learned the enemy’s own specialty. The Vietkong had built his reputation on the jungle ambush. Now American patrols were setting ambushes of their own and springing them with the same patience.

Lo is where we began this story. It is where Robert Hibbs took 15 men into the dark and broke up two enemy companies and where he was killed going after a machine gun so his men could pull a wounded soldier to safety. The division’s first Medal of Honor in Vietnam. Look closely at what Hibbs actually did though because it is the whole strategy in one small package.

He did not go out to find the enemy. He went out to a place the enemy was likely to pass. made himself quiet and invisible and let the enemy come to him. He gave up the initiative of movement to gain the initiative of the first shot. In March, the division got a new commander, Major General William E. Deoui.

Under Deooi, the division came at the enemy from two directions at once. Ground drives that pushed into base areas and air assaults that dropped infantry behind and around him. The campaigns ran without pause through the spring, summer, and autumn of 1966 in the humid jungle on dusty roads down in the vast swamp country of the Rung Sat zone below Saigon where the fighting was done in water and mangrove and the ground itself was an enemy and the methods sharpened.

Sudden fast probes caught Vietkong units before they could dissolve. Search and clear teams worked through sanctuaries and hiding places systematically instead of once and never again. Armored road marches were pushed out deliberately to invite ambush and then turned on the ambushers. Base camp after base camp was overrun.

Enormous quantities of weapons, ammunition, food, and medical supplies were captured. That last part is worth pausing on. A rifle taken from a cash is one rifle. But a captured rice store or a wrecked underground workshop is a whole village of enemy labor destroyed. And a unit that cannot be fed cannot fight next month, no matter how brave it is.

Enemy losses climbed through the year. Operation Attalboroough in the autumn, a large multi-division effort in which the Big Red One took part, accounted for more than a thousand North Vietnamese and Vietkong killed by the American count and did something harder to measure but more important. It broke up the enemy’s own plans for going on the offensive.

That is the first genuine turning point in this story. Until 1966, the enemy decided when there would be a battle. By the end of 1966, the Americans were beginning to take that choice away from him. By then, the men of the division were experts in airmobile operations that could put infantry on the ground faster than any army had ever managed.

Division gunners were setting records for the speed, volume, and accuracy of their supporting fire. Coordination with gunships firing rockets and with jet fighter bombers had become a practiced art rather than a hopeful one. All the pieces existed. What the division needed now was a battle designed from the beginning to use all of them at once.

In July 1966 on a road near Minton, the division built exactly that. The target was chosen first, the 272nd regiment of the 9inth Vietkong Division. The 9inth was the enemy’s best formation in the region. Well-trained, well-armed, and confident, and its regiments had a habit. They ambushed road columns. So, the division offered them a road column.

A powerful armored column from the first brigade was sent out on what was described as a road reconnaissance. On the surface, it looked like a routine movement. Underneath, everything about it had been planned in advance. The route, the timing, the artillery already registered on likely ambush ground, the air support standing by, and most importantly, the infantry battalions waiting to be lifted in by helicopter the moment the enemy committed himself.

The column was the bait. The trap was everything else. The Vietkong took it. Three battalions attacked at once, spread along the entire 1,200 meter length of the column. That is a frontage of well over half a mile. It was a serious wellorganized assault by a large force that believed it had caught an American unit strung out and vulnerable on a jungle road, and the column, heavily armed and expecting it, opened fire with everything it had.

Here the design showed its logic. The armor did not maneuver. It held its blocking positions on the road and by holding it pinned the enemy in place. That was its whole job to be the anvil to fix three enemy battalions in one location and keep them there. Then the hammer arrived. Helicopterborn infantry came in and attacked the Vietkong flanks.

Artillery poured in on an enemy who now outnumbered the Americans on the ground, but could no longer move freely. forward air controllers overhead called in strike after strike. 96 sorties in all before the day was done. Consider what that meant for the men underneath it. 96 times a jet came in low over the same patch of jungle.

There was no shelter to reach because the bunkers they had prepared were somewhere else. There was no way to break contact because armor sat across their front and infantry had come in behind them. The sustained fire was more than the Vietkong could take. The regiment broke and ran with heavy losses. The Battle of the Minton Road did not simply add another win to a list.

It proved a formula, and the formula was written down and used again for the rest of the division’s war. Offer the enemy a target he cannot resist. Use armor to hold him once he commits. Use helicopters to put infantry on his flanks and rear before he can withdraw. use artillery and air to finish it. The enemy’s greatest strength had always been that he chose the time and place.

On the Minton road, he chose both, and the Americans had chosen them for him first. Success created the next problem, as success usually does. Continuous campaigning through 1966 had given the division something it did not have in 1965. Knowledge of its own ground. Commanders now knew the trails, the streams, the rubber plantations, the tall grass, the places helicopters could land.

Lines of communication were staying open. Enemy efforts to seize the initiative kept being disrupted before they could start. But there was a limit built into all of it. And by the end of 1966, that limit was obvious. The enemy could go home. Not home to a city, but home to a sanctuary. large areas of jungle he had spent years fortifying where he stored weapons, treated his wounded, trained replacements, and planned operations.

In those places, he was not a gorilla hiding in a village. He was a garrison with tunnels, bunkers, hospitals, and workshops. The most important of them sat almost on Saigon’s doorstep. The Iron Triangle, a dense stretch of jungle that served as the enemy’s foremost operational base for attacks on the capital.

You could beat his regiments in the field all year. As long as the Iron Triangle existed, he would rebuild them and come back. So in January 1967, the division stopped waiting to be ambushed and went into the sanctuary itself, Operation Cedar Falls. The design was encircled. Five infantry battalions, plus two more from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, were airlifted into blocking positions around the objective.

Armor moved in to seal the escape routes. Only then did the main attack force strike deep inside. The jungle fought back before the enemy did. In places it was so thick that helicopters could not land at all, and the men had to go down rope ladders into the canopy, one at a time, carrying weapons and gear, completely exposed for the length of the descent.

Then it was work on foot, pushing through thickets and vines, waiting streams, searching village hideouts and underground bunkers, one hole at a time, never knowing which one was empty and which one had a man in it. There was resistance. The Vietkong tried to slow the advance and buy time. But he was now doing the one thing he had always avoided, and he was doing it inside a ring.

30 artillery batteries laid in fire. He invariably got the worst of it. Then came the part that made Cedar Falls different from every operation before it. Engineer bulldozers came in and leveled broad stretches of jungle. Not to kill anyone, to remove the hiding place permanently. That was a genuinely new idea and it went to the root of the problem.

Bullets kill soldiers and soldiers can be replaced. Terrain cannot. If the jungle that made the iron triangle usable was simply gone, then the base was gone with it. There was one more result from Cedar Falls, and it may be the most revealing of all. During the operation, 576 Vietkong surrendered under the Chu Hoy program.

Open arms, which offered enemy soldiers a way to come over to the government side. 576 men. That is the strength of a battalion walking involuntarily. It suggested that for the men in those bunkers, something had changed. When the sanctuary stopped being safe, the war stopped looking winnable from inside it. For a while, the iron triangle was untenable.

For a while, that was the honest limit of it, and everyone involved understood it. The jungle grows back. The division had made the enemy’s front porch unusable. It had not touched his house. The house was believed to be north of the city of Tain in a region called war zone C, close to the Cambodian border. Intelligence suggested the insurgent headquarters itself was located there.

That made it the most important piece of ground in the division’s area and the hardest. Early in February 1967, the division received its third commander of the war, Major General John H. Hi. Under Hay, the division began painstaking preparation for the largest operation it had yet attempted, Operation Junction City. Everything about it was bigger than Cedar Falls.

It lasted longer, February through April. It used units from all three of the divisions brigades. It was reinforced by troops from other American divisions and separate brigades and by Rangers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Altogether 30,000 Allied troops went into war zone C. And here is the fact that tells you what kind of place war zone C was.

Even with 30,000 men, there were many engagements in which units of the first division found themselves outnumbered. That is worth sitting with for a moment. 30,000 troops and American companies were still being hit by larger enemy forces. This was not a sweep through empty jungle. This was an assault into an area where the enemy lived in strength and intended to stay.

So the division fought it the way it had learned to fight everything since the Mint Tan road, not by hunting, by offering. Aggressive patrols went out to lure the enemy into attacking. That was their function. When a patrol made contact, it did not withdraw, and it did not wait. It called for help. And the help came in a way no army had ever been able to deliver before.

Additional troops arrived by air, moving with stunning speed to reinforce the defenders on the ground. Supporting fire came in from the ground and from the air and blasted the attackers. The helicopter is what made it possible. And in Junction City, it did four completely different jobs, sometimes in the same hour.

It was aerial artillery, gunships putting rockets into an enemy already in contact, delivered from an angle no ground weapon could match. It was a troop carrier deploying whole battalions at distances and speeds that constantly took the enemy by surprise. Not 50 men, battalions arriving in the wrong place, from the wrong direction far too soon.

It was an ambulance taking wounded men from the battlefield to a hospital. sometimes in minutes. And it was a supply ship, dropping ammunition and artillery rounds directly into the hands of soldiers who were using them. That last one is easy to overlook and impossible to fight without. A rifleman in a firefight has perhaps 20 minutes of ammunition.

A gun battery firing hard can empty its ready rounds in an afternoon. Being resupplied where you stand without breaking contact is the difference between holding and running. Add the artillery moved forward by air into fire bases so that no Vietkong position, no matter how remote, was beyond the reach of the big guns, and the shape of the thing became clear.

The enemy was welcome to choose when to attack. The moment he did, he was inside a system that could reinforce faster than he could concentrate, fire faster than he could dig, and evacuate faster than he could bleed the Americans down. He kept choosing to attack through February, through March into April. By the end of Operation Junction City, the enemy had suffered the heaviest losses he had yet taken in this war.

More than 1,800 dead by American count. and the veteran 9inth Vietkong division was completely shattered. That is the sentence this whole story has been walking toward and it deserves to be said plainly. The 9inth was the same formation whose 272nd regiment had been broken on the Mintan road 9 months earlier.

It was the enemy’s most experienced, most respected division in the region. The one built to fight Americans and beat them. as a fighting formation. It was destroyed, not surrounded and captured in the manner of the two earlier wars this division had fought. There was no surrender ceremony and no line of prisoners stretching to the horizon.

It was destroyed the way units are destroyed in a war like this one. Its trained men killed, its cadre gone, its caches emptied, its base areas turned over, and its ability to mount a coordinated offensive taken away. The unit designation survived and would be rebuilt. The division that had walked into war zone C in February did not walk out, and it had been beaten by the same tactic that killed Robert Hibbs in a rubber plantation a year earlier.

Make yourself the target. Let him commit. Close the trap. Only now the patrol was 30,000 men. The division hardly paused. Operations Manhattan and Billings pushed task forces into enemy strongholds in the Michelin plantation area, the trapezoid, and into war zone D through the rest of the spring and summer. But something else was happening inside the division at the same time, and it was more dangerous to its future than anything in war zone C.

Its veterans were going home. The army’s rotation system sent men to Vietnam for a one-year tour. That policy had a purpose and a certain fairness to it. But for a unit, the arithmetic was cruel. Every month, some of the most experienced soldiers and small unit leaders in the division, the men who had learned at App Bao Bang and on the Minton Road and in the Iron Triangle, packed up and left.

New men arrived to replace them. And the new men did not know any of it. An army can lose a battle and recover. Losing its experience every 12 months is harder because experience is the thing that keeps young soldiers alive in their first weeks. And it is exactly the thing rotation removes.

So the division ran an immense training program chiefly through mobile training teams made up of combat experienced personnel. Instead of sending new arrivals away to learn, the division sent the veterans to them, passing on what had been learned in blood before those veterans rotated home and took it with them. It worked. The 20,000 men of the division were at a peak of professionalism when they began one of their hardest campaigns, Operation Shenandoa 2, September into November 1967.

to many veterans, the most outstanding action in the division’s five years in Vietnam. Shannondoa II was not one battle, but a series of violent ones at far-flung points on both sides of Highway 13, from Li Kay north to the area around Lo Nin near the Cambodian border. The fighting ran through jungle, across rubber plantations, through wooded ground, tall grass, and streams.

It was often toeto toe. Night fighting was common. North Vietnamese and Vietkong troops threw themselves at the American night defensive positions. The NDPs, the perimeters the infantry dug in and wired every single evening wherever they happened to be when the light went. Understand what an NDP was and the campaign makes sense.

Every day the men marched and fought. Every evening tired, they dug holes, cleared fields of fire, strung wire, set out mines and trip flares, and registered artillery on the ground around them. Then they stood watch in turns. Then they got up and did it again. It was exhausting, unglamorous, endless labor. And it meant that when the enemy came in the dark, he came into prepared ground with highly mobile armored support nearby and heavy firepower always on call and with South Vietnamese army units fighting alongside. The result, campaign after

campaign, was the same. Enemy bases and fortifications destroyed, more than a thousand enemy dead. The survivors withdrew to their sanctuaries again and highway 13 left secure. Of the eight major battles in Shannondoa 2, one stands out. The fight for the air strip at Loch Nin. Arvin and special forces soldiers came in by air assault to drive the Vietkong out of a small sector of the town that they held.

They routed the enemy from bunkers and houses in fierce close attacks. The insurgents counteratt attacked again and again and were thrown back each time. The fighting raged for days as both sides fed in more forces. The high point came at the airirstrip where first division artillery had established a fire base.

The Vietkong attacked straight across the open air strip in three waves. They were stopped by howitzers firing at point blank range. Op ba bang two years on and the same terrible answer. Guns depressed to fire flat into attacking infantry with nothing in between. The gunners at that airirstrip were not supporting somebody else’s battle. They were in a battle.

There were many heroes in Shenondoa II enough that when the awards for valor were presented, it was the president of the United States who presented them. Then the year ended in an unlikely way and the men earned it. Bob Hope and his USO troop arrived to entertain the division at Christmas. A few hours of laughter for men who had spent September, October, and November fighting at night on Highway 13.

It was a respit. It was also very short. The Vietkong offensive that opened 1968 Tet did not take the big red one by surprise. Some kind of all-out enemy drive was expected. When the attack struck Saigon and the US embassy was assaulted, troops were rushed into the city. City fighting is a different war and a worse one.

Everything that made the division effective in the jungle. Dispersion, artillery, air power, room to maneuver becomes a problem in streets where civilians live. There was hard fighting. South Vietnamese soldiers did their share of it. There were casualties and there was destruction to buildings and homes and the people in them.

The insurgent force in the city was annihilated. That outcome was by then close to inevitable. But the phrase covers a good deal of damage on all sides. In March, the division got a new commander and a remarkable one. Major General Keith L. We wear had held the Medal of Honor since World War II. He was not a staff officer with a distinguished record.

He was a man who had personally led an attack in France in 1944 and been badly shot for it. He came to the division knowing precisely what he was asking of the men who would carry out his orders. Where launched two massive campaigns, one north of Saigon and one to the northwest in the Iron Triangle.

Their Vietnamese names told you the mood of that year. The first was operation quad thong, resolve to win. The second was operation toenthang, certain victory. Their object was not ground. It was the enemy’s ability to make war at all, kill his troops, destroy his base camps and supply dumps, cut his supply trails, and block the routes he used to infiltrate and to retreat.

By American count, more than 2,000 enemies were killed and vast quantities of arms and material were found in caches or taken in the fighting. But the most interesting thing where did in 1968 was not a battle. It was an idea about a bulldozer. The Rome plow was a standard tractor fitted with a special cutting edge for clearing jungle.

Until then, it had been used the obvious way to clear out large jungle areas the enemy used as sanctuaries, as at Cedar Falls. The trouble was scale. Clearing thousands of acres of triple canopy takes an enormous amount of time, machinery, and security. In Operation Giant Swath, land clearing teams use the plow differently.

Instead of trying to level a whole area, they cut a network of wide trails through 11,000 acres of jungle, dividing one huge block of enemy country into many small subdivisions. It sounds modest. It was quietly devastating. A Vietkong camp hidden in an unbroken sea of jungle is effectively invisible, and reaching it means a long approach march that the enemy will hear coming.

But a camp hidden in a small block of jungle surrounded by cut trails is a camp with an address. Reconnaissance in force could get to it. Helicopters could land near it. Air assaults could drop troops on top of it. The division had not removed the enemy’s cover. It had simply divided it and made every piece of it reachable. Where also stepped up night ambush patrols until almost every unit in the division was running them.

That deserves emphasis because it brings this story full circle. The enemy had always considered himself the master of the night. Infiltration and attack under cover of darkness were his specialty. The thing that let a lightly armed force move past a heavily armed one. Now on any given night, the ground between him and his objective was seated with American ambushes.

What Robert Hibbs and 15 men had done at Low K in 1966 as a bold experiment was by 1968 standard practice across an entire division. The effect on the enemy was devastating and it was psychological as much as physical. Darkness had stopped being his ally. Then on September 13th, 1968, the division suffered a heavy blow.

General Wear was flying over Lok Nin observing a successful counterattack against insurgent attempts to overrun the town. The fourth such attempt against that place. His command helicopter was hit by ground fire and shot down. All aboard were killed. He was the fourth American general to be killed in Vietnam. There is no way to make that sound like anything other than what it is.

A man who had survived the worst of 1944, who had been awarded his nation’s highest decoration for personal courage, died in a helicopter over a small border town because he insisted on seeing his soldiers fight with his own eyes. The assistant division commander, Major General Orwin C. Talbot, assumed command immediately, and the drive continued. That is not coldness.

It is how divisions work and where would have expected nothing else. Contact was frequent as strong forces pushed north in the second phase of operation to thang. Resistance was hard. The division conducted a series of spoiling actions, destroying camps and heavily built bunkers with fires supported by artillery.

And among the highlights of that drive were engagements against something new. troops of the First North Vietnamese Army Division immediately across the border from Cambodia’s Fish Hook area. Not guerillas, a regular army division of the North. The Big Red One had established several fire support patrol bases in that area placed deliberately a stride a main infiltration route the North Vietnamese were using.

That placement was the old idea matured into permanent architecture. The bases were not there to defend anything behind them. They were there because they sat on ground the enemy needed, which meant the enemy would have to come to them. He did. NVA troops hurled themselves at the fire bases in repeated night attacks and met devastating fire.

They were brave and the men who fought them said so. The results were always the same. Failure and many dead. Running underneath all of this from 1966 to the end was a different kind of campaign that produced no battle honors at all. The revolutionary development program was carried out jointly by Americans and Vietnamese with the goal of winning the confidence and goodwill of the Vietnamese people, especially in villages suspected of sheltering the Vietkong. The procedure was consistent.

A task force moved in unexpectedly and sealed off the village. Soldiers established security quickly, checking for mines and booby traps. Psychological warfare specialists put up signs and posters explaining what was happening and why. The village was searched thoroughly for evidence of Vietkong activity and suspects were taken into custody. Then the supplies came in.

The villagers were fed and clothed. Leaflets encouraged enemy soldiers to come over to the government side. Medcap medical teams treated a long list of ailments in people who had never in their lives seen a doctor and treated their animals, too, because a family’s water buffalo was its tractor, its bank account, and its future.

The stated aim was to help South Vietnamese villagers become economically self-sufficient, and to strengthen local government from the ground up. It is fair to note the tension built into that work. A program that begins by surrounding a village and detaining its residents and ends by feeding and treating them the same afternoon is asking a great deal of the people in the middle.

Some of that effort clearly did real good and the medical work in particular saved lives. Whether it achieved its larger political purpose is a question historians still argue about, and this story will not pretend to settle it. Through 1969, the division kept up its sweeps to keep the enemy off balance, sometimes from the sky in airmobile assaults, sometimes on the ground, shifting between the two so that no pattern could be read.

Armor supported the drives that broke up the communist winter spring offensive. Reconnaissance in force operations struck again and again into the Iron Triangle, the Michelin Trapezoid, War Zone C, and War Zone D. Battles by night, alternated with fighting by day. Vietkong and North Vietnamese soldiers resisted hard.

Scout dogs, highly trained, sniffed out enemy positions that men would have walked into. Spotter planes searched from above. Enemy dead were left on the battlefields. captured weapons. The communistm made AK-47 above all were plentiful. None of it was easy. The terrain was rugged and the fighting was rugged with it.

There were casualties and Medevac was always there to take the wounded out. Sometimes the enemy attacked recklessly. Sometimes he went underground into tunnel systems dug over years and then he had to be blasted out or men had to go in after him. Those men were volunteers. They were called tunnel rats.

And no fighting men in Vietnam were more admired. Think about what that job actually required. A man crawled into a hole in the ground barely wider than his shoulders with a pistol and a flashlight into total darkness alone, knowing the tunnel might be booby trapped, might be mind, might turn a corner into an armed man waiting in the dark, and might collapse.

He did it because someone had to and because the alternative was to leave the enemy underneath a position his friends had to hold. And then there was the other reality of that war, the one that rarely appears in accounts of it. Sometimes contact was light and there was more monotony than action. Weeks of heat and waiting. Patrols that found nothing.

Sandbags and wire and rain. That was the actual texture of a great deal of the tour. And it was its own kind of grinding, which is why the appearance of a USO entertainer between patrols mattered more than it sounds like it should. Even if, as the men noted with some disappointment, she had brought her boyfriend along.

In June 1969, part of the division changed its element entirely. The division began using small fiberglass boats to patrol the river approaches to Saigon, working together with Navy patrol craft and shore-based infantry patrols. It was another answer to another gap. The Vietkong had been moving men and supplies by water through creeks and channels where no road went and no truck could be stopped.

These skimmer boats closed that door. Infiltration by water dropped sharply. By then the division was under its fifth and last commanding general in Vietnam, Major General Albert E. Mallaloy. Under Malloy, the division deployed its power with the precision of an organization that had been doing this for 4 and a half years and struck hard at Vietkong forces concentrating north of Saigon for an autumn offensive.

for the defeated enemy. It was one more lesson in the cost of challenging the first infantry division in a battle the division had prepared. Early in 1970, the war ended for the big red one. The division made its last sweep. Then the orders came in, stand down and prepare for redeployment. There is no drama in the language and there was not much in the process either.

Men and vehicles were withdrawn from the field. Much of the division’s equipment and many of its facilities were turned over to Arvin forces. This was Vietnamization, the program under which the South Vietnamese army would increasingly carry the burden of combat operations. And at that moment, it was judged to be working.

Large contingents of American troops had already gone home. Now it was the turn of the division that had come first. Early in April, the First Infantry Division left the last of its bases and returned to Fort Riley, Kansas, almost 5 years after it had gone to Vietnam. On April 15th, 1970, there was a ceremony at Fort Riley, watched by many thousands of family members, relatives, friends, and dignitaries, including the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Leair.

At that ceremony, the division was redesated. the first infantry division mechanized. It had a new commanding general, Major General Robert Lynville, and it had new troops. Its ranks were filled with men from another famous outfit, the 24th Infantry Division, which was deactivated at the same time.

As a mechanized division, it received additional armor, reflecting how far the firepower and mobility of an American infantry division had increased, and it received a new mission to support the United States commitment to NATO in the defense of Western Europe. New faces brought new strength and a new mission. For the men standing on that parade ground in Kansas, though, the important thing was probably simpler.

They were home and a great many of the men who had gone with them were not. So return to the question we started with. How do you destroy an enemy who refuses to stand and fight? Not with more firepower. The division had that from the first day and in those early months it kept arriving where the enemy had already been. The answer was to stop hunting him and start offering him something he could not walk away from. A road sweep at AP Bao Bang.

15 men in the dark at Low K. An armored column on the Mint Tan Road with infantry waiting in helicopters. Patrols in war zone C sent out to be attacked. The 9inth Vietkong Division was never cornered. It was invited into a battle it believed it had chosen that cost men. Lieutenant Robert Hibbs at 23 going after a machine gun so a wounded soldier could be carried out.

General Keith Wear shot down over Lo Nin watching a fight he had ordered. Thousands of others whose names appear in no account of these battles. The iron triangle is a jungle again. The airirst strip at Lok Nin is quiet. What remains is the lesson. An enemy who will not come to you can sometimes be persuaded to by men willing to serve as the bait themselves.

No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great. Duty first. If you value forgotten military history stories, consider subscribing.