Excellent Analysis of the Battle of Ông Thanh

Army,  Aug 2005  by Hymel, Kevin M

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Excellent Analysis of the Battle of Ông Thanh The Beast Was Out There: The 28th Infantry Black Lions and the Battle of Ông Thanh, Vietnam, October 1967. Brig. Gen. James E. Shelton, USA Ret. Cantigny First Division Foundation. 356 pages. Black & white photographs, maps; glossary; index; $25.

The Battle of Ông Thanh was a bloody defeat for the American Army in Vietnam. On October 17, 1967, the 1st Infantry Division's 28th Regiment (Black Lions) went looking for the enemy and found him. The Viet Cong's (VC) 271st Regiment ran into the Black Lions' 2nd Brigade (2-28) and mauled it, destroying one company and decimating another. Among the 57 American dead was Lt. Col. Terry Alien Jr., son of the famed Maj. Gen. Terry Alien, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in the early days of World War II.

How did this happen? How could an American unit, with so much fire-power backing it up, fall victim to the enemy it was looking for? That is what Brig. Gen. James E. Shelton decided to find out, resulting in this very readable analysis of a battle gone wrong. Along the way, he paints a picture of one of the U.S. Army's proudest divisions and its fighting tactics. Shelton is uniquely qualified to explain the battle. As the S-3 operations officer for the 2-28 for three weeks before the battle, he knew the players involved and listened in satisfaction, which turned to horror, as the battalion found the enemy and was cut down.

There are two parts to The Beast Was Out There. The first, a memoir by Shelton, introduces all the major characters in the battle to come. The second, an analysis of the battle itself, includes radio reports and firsthand accounts.

Shelton's memoir is a clear description of the nuts and bolts of combat in Vietnam. As the S-3 he was constantly on the move, leading men or gaining information from town elders and captured VC. He explains the mechanics of an air assault with all the prepatory fires, noise and confusion. During one assault, Shelton charged into the jungle, only to have a clod of dirt filled with fire ants fall on his neck, covering him with stinging insects. It turned out that the prep fire had thrown a number of ant hills into the air and they were falling out of the trees just as the soldiers were running under them.

The 1st Infantry came to Vietnam looking for a fight. Constant assaults, night ambushes and patrols were the order of action, but the enemy would not bite. When Shelton joined his unit, the whole division was in a state of flux. Maj. Gen. William E. DePuy who had made the division his own, had just departed and Maj. Gen. John H. Hay had taken over, but had not yet become fully integrated into the unit. Shelton does a great job of describing the division's uniqueness from the unit's pride to its tradition of chewing out subordinates for the smallest infractions.

Although the 1st Infantry Division was a first-class unit, it did suffer the occasional bad officer. The first commander Shelton served under at 2-28 was more concerned with keeping his position than effectively leading his men. Shelton continuously clashed with him either when the commander felt Shelton was threatening his authority or when he was undermining Shelton's. In one instance the commander (whom Shelton mercifully refuses to name) ordered ambush patrols sent out in a mine field. Shelton led the men out to their positions, tripping a flare in the process, a terrifying event. Things improved with the arrival of Alien, a more effective and level-headed leader.

The battle itself is not told as a narrative tale, but as a communications log (which is only two pages long) followed by analysis, first-person accounts and excerpts from other books, most notably Taking the Offensive by Lt. Col. George L. MacGarrigle. Shelton is less concerned with telling a story than with finding answers. This is an investigation, not a war story.

But the story comes out anyway. There are tales of heroism and sacrifice. A soldier with a wounded leg carries another soldier off the battlefield. A soldier with a sucking chest wound is saved when another soldier places a cigarette pack's cellophane over the hole. A wounded officer, propped up against a tree and falling in and out of consciousness, is grabbed by the enemy, only to be saved when another wounded soldier, who was facing him nearby, cuts down the VC with his M60. Incidentally, the officer never found out why the soldier was pointing his M60 at him until they met later in a Tokyo hospital. And of course there is Alien who never left his post at the front, constantly on the radio until he was killed.

One soldier, Lt. Harold (Pinky) Durham, earned the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. As a forward observer he called in artillery strikes despite being wounded twice and forced to hold down the buttons on his radio with a bloody stump where his hand used to be. He did not survive the battle.

Why was the 2-28 defeated? Shelton finds a number of reasons. The unit went into an area where it caught fire the day before; well-intentioned generals flying over the battlefield and demanding constant updates kept commanders from concentrating on the job at hand; the men were exhausted; and the enemy deployed its successful tactic of "hugging" the Americans in battle, a tactic which prevented supporting fires from stopping them, for fear of friendly casualties. Shelton also takes on the question of whether or not the 2-28 was ambushed and dismisses the notion, since the VC were out looking for the Americans and were not in set positions.