May 8th, 1967. Hill 158, Quang Tri province, 2 mi south of the demilitarized zone. 300 rounds of mortar and artillery hit the position in the first 20 minutes. By 0400, two battalions of the 812th North Vietnamese Regiment were moving through gaps blown in the wire with Bangalore torpedoes.
They carried flamethrowers, which had not been used against American Marines in the war. By 0900, the attack was over. 197 North Vietnamese soldiers lay dead inside the perimeter and just outside it. Eight had surrendered. The Marines holding the hill counted 44 of their own dead and 110 wounded. The 812th Regiment had rehearsed the assault for weeks.
Its plan had been built around the assumption that the position was held by South Vietnamese troops and a small civilian irregular platoon. Five days earlier, Alpha and Delta companies of the First Battalion, Fourth Marines, had quietly replaced the ARVN unit. The North Vietnamese never knew. The position the Marines were holding existed because of an idea.
In 1966, a Harvard Law School Professor named Roger Fisher convinced Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that a conventional barrier of wire, mines, and electronic sensors, backed by mobile reserves, could shut down North Vietnamese infiltration across the demilitarized zone. McNamara took the idea to General William Westmoreland.
Westmoreland handed it to Lieutenant General Lewis Walt, commanding the Third Marine Amphibious Force. The Marine response was uniform. Walt’s cover letter to Westmoreland in early 1967 stated that the plan was submitted in response to a directive and that in third MAF’s opinion, the barrier was not going to be worth the time and effort it would require.
Commandant Wallace Greene testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Preparedness in August 1967 that he had been opposed to the project from the start. Lieutenant General Robert Cushman, who took third MAF on June 1, later called the barrier concept stupid in a single word. One Marine officer summarized the consensus in plainer language.
“With these bastards,” he said, “you would have to build the zone all the way to India and it would take the whole Marine Corps and half the army to guard it. Even then, they would probably burrow under it.” The Marines built it anyway. By the 2nd of May 1967, the 11th Engineer Battalion had cleared a 200-m strip of red dirt between Con Thien and the Marine base at Gio Linh, 7 mi to the east.
The cleared zone was called the trace. The men who built it called it the firebreak. The men who walked across it called it the death strip. The whole project carried two Pentagon designations, Practice Nine and later Dye Marker. Everyone in the field used a third name, the McNamara Line. Con Thien was the northwest anchor of it.
The hill itself was barren and red, bulldozed to 158 m at the summit. Three small knolls running together into a single position. From the top, line of sight reached north into North Vietnam and back south to the logistical complex at Dong Ha, 10 mi down the coastal plain. Colonel Richard Smith of the 9th Marines put the position in one sentence.
If the enemy occupied it, he said, he would be looking down our throats. The North Vietnamese understood that. North of the Ben Hai River, 35,000 NVA troops were massed within artillery range of the hill. Their 13-mm and 152-mm guns sat in caves dug into the north face of the demilitarized zone, fired in volleys, and were rolled back under cover before American counterbattery fire could find them.
American policy forbade ground attack across the DMZ. The North Vietnamese gunners could shell Con Thien from sanctuary, and they did. Through April 1967, Hanoi planned the assault that would put the hill in their hands and let those guns be moved south. The 812th Regiment of the 324B Division would lead.
Its fourth and sixth battalions would breach the eastern and northeastern perimeter. Sapper teams with Bangalore torpedoes would clear the wire. Flamethrower squads would move first through the gaps. The date chosen for the attack was 1 day past the 13th anniversary of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, a thing the planners in Hanoi understood as a symbol, even if the riflemen on the ground did not.
The plan rested on a single assumption about who was on the hill. That assumption was correct in April. It was wrong by May 8th. The 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Willis, had moved on to Con Thien in late April. Alpha and Delta companies, an engineer detachment, a section of M48 tanks from the third tank battalion, and a small CID platoon were on the position the night of May 7th.
The engineers had finished the trace 6 days earlier and were clearing a 500-m strip around the perimeter. They were tired and dust-caked and unaware of what was being assembled in the woodline to the north. At 0255, a green parachute flare lit the sky south of the wire. North Vietnamese forward observers had fired it as a registration mark.
At 0300, the bombardment opened. 300 mortar and artillery rounds walked across the perimeter from the north and northeast. Sapper teams were already moving under it. They blew Bangalore torpedoes into the wire on the east face of the hill. Through the gaps, the lead companies of the fourth battalion came forward with flamethrowers and RPG-7 launchers.
They hit Delta Company’s right flank at 0400. The fight inside the perimeter lasted through the dark and into the gray edge of dawn. Marines and the engineer platoon, committed as infantry, fought the North Vietnamese hand-to-hand by silhouette against burning trucks and the muzzle flashes of the next man’s rifle.
The 81-mm mortar section ran out of illumination rounds in the first hour. The supporting artillery at G Linh could not reach Con Thien with illumination. The 175-mm guns had no illumination round to fire. An Air Force AC-47 gunship reached the perimeter at the worst hour of the night.
The Marines called it the Puff the Magic Dragon. It dropped flares and held them suspended over the wire until daylight. A relief column from Alpha Company started toward Delta with an Army M42 Duster, two LVTH6 tracked howitzers, and two quarter-ton trucks carrying ammunition. None of the vehicles got there. The M42 leading the column was hit head-on by an RPG-7 and burned.
A satchel charge thrown by an NVA sapper opened the next LVTH6 from underneath. The trailing LVTH6, trying to push around the burning vehicle, caught its left rear sprocket on coiled wire and stopped. The Marines who walked the rest of the way to Delta’s position carried the ammunition by hand. By daylight, the North Vietnamese inside the perimeter were dead or they’d been pulled out of the rubble alive.
The 4th and 6th battalions of the 812th Regiment had committed roughly six rifle companies to the assault. They had hit the strongest sector of the defense, the eastern perimeter, held by a reinforced rifle company with armor because the plan said to hit it. They had kept pressing the attack on that sector when the resistance was clearly heavier than expected.
The Marine Corps after-action report stated the lesson in one phrase. The North Vietnamese, it said, displayed an inability to adapt. Retreating, the 812th had to cross the 500-m strip the engineers had finished clearing only days before. There was no cover on it. Tanks were waiting, and the LVTH6s were firing beehive rounds, anti-personnel canisters packed with thousands of finned steel flechettes.
Major Alfred Gray’s composite artillery battalion at Gio Linh, blind through the night, had observers and grid coordinates by sunrise. Gray’s guns walked north across the open ground. Gray, who would command the entire Marine Corps two decades later, kept firing on the retreating regiment until it was no longer a coherent unit.
72 weapons were collected from the bodies. 19 anti-tank launchers, three light machine guns, three flamethrowers. The flamethrowers were the part the after-action report dwelt on. It was the first time the North Vietnamese army had used them against American Marines in the war. The Marine engineers dug a single mass grave outside the perimeter and put the North Vietnamese dead into it.
May 8th was not the end of Con Thien. It was the announcement. Hanoi had committed to taking the hill and the May attack had been the first attempt. The lopsided result on the ground did not change the strategy. It changed the method. After May, the North Vietnamese stopped trying to overrun Con Thien on foot.
They began trying to grind it apart with artillery. In July, they tested it once more on the ground. Operation Buffalo opened on the 2nd of that month with Alpha and Bravo companies of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines pushing north along Highway 561 into an area called the marketplace. The 90th Regiment of the same 324B Division was waiting for them on three sides.
The North Vietnamese set the hedgerows along the road on fire with flamethrowers and the Marines were pushed into the open. Out of roughly 400 men in the two companies, 84 were killed, 190 wounded, and nine missing in a single day. It was the worst one-day loss the Marine Corps took in Vietnam. The 1st Battalion, 9th Marines would close out the war with the highest casualty rate of any Marine battalion in the war.
The men who served in it called it the walking dead. By September, the artillery method was at full tempo. On the 25th of that month, 1,200 rounds fell on Con Thien in a single day. From September 19th to September 27th, more than 3,000 rounds hit the base. Marine artillery answered with 12,577 rounds. Naval gunfire added 6,148 more.
Air Force and Marine Corps sorties exceeded 5,200. CBS aired the footage of the bombardment on the 11th of September. Mike Wallace anchored a special broadcast called The Ordeal of Con Thien on the 1st of October. The photographer, David Douglas Duncan, who had covered the Pacific in 1945 and Korea in 1950, spent his days on the hill in September and published the images in Life magazine on October 27th under the title War Without Heroes.
Time magazine put Con Thien on the cover of its October 6th issue under the headline Thunder from a distant hill and reported that 158 Marines had died around the base in the first 24 days of September alone. The Marines on the hill called their 30-day rotations our turn in the barrel. Hanoi never took Con Thien.
Hanoi never had to. The siege held two Marine divisions on a hill 3 km south of the demilitarized zone through the second half of 1967, drew Westmoreland’s attention northward, and shaped his read of where the main effort would come in 1968. When it came at the end of January, the main effort was Tet, fought in cities Westmoreland had not been watching.
In May 1968, 3 weeks past the anniversary of the May 8th attack, an L-shaped ambush east of Con Thien killed 17 Marines of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines. One of the dead was 1st Lieutenant David Westfall, who led the 1st Platoon. His parents used the proceeds of his life insurance policy to build a chapel for him in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.
It was dedicated on May 22nd, 1971, the third anniversary of his death. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington would not be built for another 11 years. The first one was already standing 8,000 miles from the hill it remembered.
