In 1967, 2,500 VC Soldiers Charged Firebase Gold, It Was Terrifying

[00:00:00]Just after 6:00 in the morning on March 21st, 1967, roughly 450 American soldiers were dug in around a ring of howitzers in a jungle clearing northwest of Saigon.

[00:00:13]They called it fire support base gold.

[00:00:17]Then at 6:31, the treeine exploded. An estimated 650 mortar rounds [music] came down in the space of a few minutes. And behind the barrage, by the US Army's own count, roughly 2,500 Vietkong soldiers stood up and walked out of the jungle.

[00:00:37]More [music] than five attackers for every defender, and the guns at the center of that clearing were about to fight in a way American artillery had barely fought since the Civil War. War Zone C. February 1967.

[00:00:53]The United States had just launched Operation Junction City, the largest operation of the war up to that point.

[00:01:02]Somewhere between 25 and 30,000 American and South Vietnamese troops pushed into the jungle along the Cambodian border, hunting two things. The 9inth Vietkong Division and COSVN, the communist headquarters running the war in the south. For three weeks, the enemy mostly refused to fight. Base camps were found empty. Supply caches were destroyed. The 9inth Division kept sliding away into the jungle. And the Americans kept pushing deeper into territory the Vietkong had owned for years. On March 19th, the plan called for a new artillery position in the middle of that territory.

[00:01:45]The third battalion, 22nd [music] Infantry, and the guns of the second battalion, 77th artillery, would fly by helicopter into a clearing near an abandoned village called Sway Trey. The first wave of helicopters landed without a shot, fired. The second and third waves set off command detonated charges buried across the landing zone. 15 men were killed and 28 wounded before the base even existed according to the army's official history. Three Hueies were destroyed and three more badly damaged. Pay attention to that detail because it explains everything about what came next.

[00:02:29]Those charges were command detonated.

[00:02:33]Someone had been lying in the treeine with his thumb on a firing device, watching Americans descend into a clearing he had already prepared. The Americans hadn't picked this ground.

[00:02:44]They'd been offered it. For the next 2 days, things actually seemed fine. The infantry dug in around a rough oval perimeter. Three artillery batteries set up in the center. 18 howitzers in a ring of dirt and sandbags.

[00:03:01]On March 20th, the other battalions of the brigade moved out. The second of the 12th Infantry swept west. The mechanized infantry and the tanks worked the far side of the Soy Samontat River to the south. That didn't last. That same day, the brigade commander, Colonel Marshall Gar, spotted 30 to 40 Vietkong moving in the open barely 2 km from the base and radioed a warning to the men at Gold. In a war where the enemy lived or died by staying invisible, they were letting themselves be seen. Here's what the men at Gold couldn't know. After the Ayad Drang Battles of 1965, communist commanders had drawn a hard lesson about American firepower. You couldn't stand off and trade fire with it. [music] You had to hug the belt, get in so close that artillery and air strikes couldn't be used and kill the guns themselves. The Army's infantry magazine study of this battle argues that an isolated artillery base was exactly the target that doctrine called for. So the 9inth division masked the 272nd main force regiment, reinforced it to six battalions, and backed it with the U80 artillery regiment. An estimated 2,500 men by the count American intelligence later assembled.

[00:04:27]On the night of March 20th, they moved into the jungle around the clearing. The clock had started ticking. The Americans just couldn't hear it yet.

[00:04:38]4:30 in the morning, an ambush patrol from Bravo Company lying outside the wire reported movement in the dark. For 2 hours, nothing. Then, right around 6:30, the patrol spotted two Vietkong soldiers walking straight at their position and opened fire. They had just pulled the trigger on the entire battle.

[00:05:02]At 6:31, mortar rounds started landing inside the perimeter. Not a harassing barrage. An estimated 650 rounds of 60 and 82 mm walking across gunpits and command posts. And under the barrage, the assault came out of the jungle from three directions at once, heaviest against the northeast and southeast.

[00:05:28]Within minutes, Bravo Company's southeast corner was fighting handto hand. By 7-Eleven, its first platoon was overrun. Survivors fell back position by position while the men around them dropped. Grenade after grenade into the assault waves. Overhead, a forward air controller and a tiny bird dog spotter plane arrived to direct air strikes and was shot out of the sky by ground fire.

[00:05:56]Both men on board were killed. Minutes later, Phantoms came in anyway and put Napal directly on the eastern tree line, close enough that the defenders felt the heat roll over their own positions. That was only round one. On the northeast corner sat one of the base's quad 50s, 450 caliber machine guns on a single mount, the kind of weapon that can saw a treeine in half. The attackers hit it with rocket propelled grenades, killed the crew, and took the position. Think about that for a second. The most casualty-roucing weapon on the perimeter was now sitting in enemy hands, about to be turned around on the men it had been defending. A Howitzer crew 75 m away solved the problem the only way left.

[00:06:43]They put a 105 mm shell directly into their own Quad 50 and blew it apart before it could fire. By 8:15, the base was bending everywhere at once.

[00:06:56]One American ambush patrol that had been trapped outside the wire all morning actually fought its way back in through the assault intact. If you're wondering how bad it takes to get before a fall back is ordered, this is what it looks like.

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[00:07:21]At 8:40, the eastern defenders pulled back to a secondary perimeter, a tighter ring wrapped directly around the howitzers. On paper, that sounds like the beginning of the end. In practice, it did something the attackers didn't expect. It cleared the field of fire because the guns of the second of the 77th artillery were about to stop being artillery. The battalion's commander was Lieutenant Colonel John Vessie, and he was days into the job. His predecessor had been called home on emergency leave and Vessie had taken over the guns almost on arrival. Now his crews cranked the tubes down to zero elevation, level with the ground and loaded a round most of the world had never heard of. The M546, nicknamed the Beehive, a single 105 millimeter shell packed with roughly 8,000 finned steel darts. Each one like a nail with wings fired flat into an assault. One round turns a howitzer into the largest shotgun ever pointed at infantry. And before the myth writes itself, no, soy trey was not the beehive's combat debut. The Army's own artillery history records the first combat firing in November 1966, 4 months earlier, and its first famous mass use at landing zone Bird that December. What happened at Gold wasn't a premiere. It was the weapon meeting the exact battle it had been built for. The official afteraction figures say the crews fired 40 beehive rounds that morning. Veteran accounts say 41. Either way, they ran out. So, they kept firing high explosive shells instead. Point blank. Fuses set so short the rounds detonated almost at the muzzle into human waves that were sometimes less than 50 m from the gunshields.

[00:09:17]Decades later, the man who gave those orders described that morning himself.

[00:09:22]This is General John Vessie, who ended his career as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It started here behind those guns.

[00:09:31]>> Cannons were fired direct fire, but we wound up again firing cannons uh direct fire at very close range uh during that battle, >> which for an air force guy means you pulled them down to the ground and fired them direct directly into the enemy.

[00:09:47]>> Uh indeed. And by that time we we had a munition that that helped us do that. It was called the Beehive munition and it was a munition designed exactly for that experience. And it actually turned the the howitzer shell into a a mini shotgun shell. It was loaded with fchettes and had an extra explosive charge in the in the shell itself to propel the fletchettes. They were like a about like a 10 penny nail with fins on them to stabilize them and they'd scatter out and and of course uh one one shell would cover uh considerable area. While the guns were holding the center, the rest of the brigade was tearing through the jungle to reach them. At 655, less than half an hour into the battle, Colonel Gar had ordered everything he had toward gold.

[00:10:48]The second of the 12th Infantry came on foot from the west, hacking through 1,500 m of bamboo, so thick the lead men had to be rotated like drill bits. There was a perfectly good trail nearby that ran straight to the clearing. Their commander chose the bamboo instead. That decision seemed small at the time. It wasn't. Circling overhead, G spotted a Vietkong platoon lying in weight along that exact trail, set to ambush any relief column that used it and put an air strike on it while his infantry stayed in the green. South of the base, the mechanized infantry and the tanks of the second of the 34th armor hit a different wall, the Soy Samat River.

[00:11:33]Gar's order over the radio has become part of the battle's legend, and this part is true. He told them that if they couldn't find [music] a crossing, they were to drive an armored personnel carrier into the river, sink it, and drive the rest of the column over the top of it. What the retellings usually skip is the ending. Minutes later, they found a ford, and the order never had to be carried out. No APC was sacrificed that morning. The story survived anyway because it tells you exactly how far the brigade was willing to go. At 9:01, the infantry broke out of the bamboo and charged into the base under covering fire from the defenders. 11 minutes later, at 912, the tracks and tanks burst from the southwest treeine with every machine gun firing and the tank guns loaded with canister.

[00:12:28]Up to that moment, the attackers had been pressing a collapsing perimeter.

[00:12:33]Now, the field flipped in seconds.

[00:12:36]Caught in the open between pointlank artillery and an armored charge, the assault disintegrated.

[00:12:42]By 9:28, the original perimeter was back in American hands. G stopped the pursuit at the treeine. One enemy battalion was still unaccounted for, and he wasn't about to feed his relief force into a second ambush. By 10:45, the wounded were out, and the ammunition was replenished.

[00:13:03]General West Morland flew into the clearing that same day to congratulate the survivors. Then came the counting.

[00:13:11]And this is where this channel slows down because the numbers are where the myths live. The official American body count was 647 enemy dead on the field with commanders estimating around 200 more dragged away. At the time, the Army called it the largest single day enemy loss of the war. But that figure is an American body count. And body counts in Vietnam were a currency every headquarters had reason to inflate. 647 is what the army recorded. Treat it as their number. The Vietnamese official history tells a very different story, claiming their forces inflicted 1,200 American casualties and destroyed 72 armored vehicles at Soy Tree. American records don't support anything close to those figures, but you deserve to know both versions exist. The American cost depends on which official report you read. The brigade's own citation paperwork says 31 killed and 187 wounded on March 21st.

[00:14:18]The MACV daily communicate said 31 killed and 109 wounded. Later histories say 36 and 190 somewhere in that range and every one of those men was real. Add the 15 killed taking the landing zone 2 days earlier and the three days around soy trey cost around 50 American lives.

[00:14:42]The defenders and their relief force received the presidential unit citation signed by President Johnson in September 1968.

[00:14:51]Vessie received the Distinguished [music] Service Cross and so did Sergeant Firstclass Raymond Childress of the Artillery who fought his gun through the worst of the assault. And somehow this story gets one more turn. Nearly three decades later, Vessie was in Hanoi negotiating the recovery of missing Americans when a Vietnamese vice minister of defense leaned over at lunch and told him, "You don't know me, but I know you. You were the American commander at Sway Tree. I commanded the ninth division. And then as Vessie recalled it, the man said, "You killed a lot of my men that day." Vessie answered, "You killed a lot of my men that day." And the two of them agreed the war was over. So Trey was the second of three mass attacks the 9inth Division threw at Junction City positions in 13 days. AP Bao Bang two days before.

[00:15:46]app goo 10 days after. All three were broken the same way by firepower that massed infantry in the open simply could not survive. General Rogers in the army's official study concluded the campaign forced the enemy to fall back on smaller guerilla actions and on sanctuaries across the Cambodian border.

[00:16:08]But the operation's actual [music] target, COVID, the headquarters itself, was never caught. It had already moved into Cambodia. So, the Americans won the battles, took the field, counted the dead, and the war went on for eight more years. The men who held gold didn't decide the war that morning. They decided the morning. At dawn on March 21st, 1967, the treeine at Soy Tree was the most dangerous thing 450 Americans had ever looked at. By 9:30 that morning, it was where a main force regiment had been destroyed. The army spent years pointing at Firebase Gold as proof that a massed daylight assault could not be dug in firepower. N months later on New Year's night, two full regiments came out of the dark to test that proof again at a place called Firebase Bert. That stories on screen