Unlike the squad of Marines they so closely resembled, they were not professional fighting men but, rather, skilled tradesmen—carpenters, masons, an electrician, a steelworker. Yet, it was not as builders—but as fighters—that nine of their number would be lauded by the President of the United States as typifying “a new kind of fighting man . . . fighting with one hand and building with the other.”
In September 1964, soon after its return to Port Hueneme, California, from a long deployment on Okinawa, Naval Mobile Construction Battalion ELEVEN formed a new Seabee Team. The new 13-man team—1104—was the fourth such unit formed by the battalion since 1963, and was part of the Seabees’ continuing technical assistance program for the countries of Southeast Asia. Unlike the previous three, which had been formed for special assignments in rural Thailand, 1104 was slated for an assignment in Vietnam.*
Heading up the team was a young Civil Engineer Corps officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Frank A. Peterlin. His Assistant O-in-C was Chief Equipment Operator Johnny Ray McCully, a career Seabee from Oklahoma.
As usual, there was no shortage of highly qualified petty officer volunteers for the remaining 11 places on the team, for duty on a Seabee Team has always been a prized assignment.
Designed to provide a full range of construction skills in a small unit, a Seabee Team represents a cross section of all the Seabee ratings. Building trades skills are provided by two builders, skilled in carpentry as well as concrete construction arid masonry work; a steelworker; a construction electrician; and a utilitiesman. In addition to Chief Equipment Operator McCully, Seabee Team 1104 got two skilled equipment operator petty officers, and two construction mechanics to keep the team’s equipment allowance in good order. An engineering aide provided the team’s surveying and drafting skills.
One of the team’s most important members—and its only non-construction rating—was a hospital corpsman. In addition to looking after the health of their team, Seabee Team corpsmen almost invariably provide a program of medical care to the local population wherever the team is located.
Several of the petty officers selected for 1104 already had Seabee Team experience, gained during 1963-64 with earlier MCB-11 teams in Thailand. Every member of Seabee Team 1104 had behind him a background of solid experience in his rate and a record of superior military performance.
On 1 October 1964, Seabee Team 1104 commenced an intensive four-month training period aimed at developing a tightly-knit organization fully prepared for any of the eventualities a deployment to remote areas of Vietnam might bring. “Crossrate” training gave each man basic skills in several construction trades in addition to his own, providing the team with a high degree of versatility. Language familiarization and schooling in the history and customs of Vietnam helped prepare the team members for life in the Southeast Asian country. Rigorous physical conditioning, long hours of advanced weapons training, and a period of realistic field training in escape, evasion and survival techniques in the California mountains, prepared Seabee Team 1104 for the possibilities that faced them in a combat area. Finally, a rugged two-week field exercise on San Clemente Island, off the Southern California coast, tested the effectiveness with which the men of 1104 had learned their lessons.
Almost invariably, the demanding Seabee Team training process reveals a few men who are unable to measure up to the strength of character or physical fitness essential to the success of each team. Obviously, such men must be replaced. In Seabee Team 1104, there were none.
As ready, then, as training could make them, the men of Seabee Team 1104 deployed from Port Hueneme to Saigon early in February 1965 to relieve Seabee Team 1004, which had been engaged in the construction of Army Special Forces “A” Team camps in remote areas of Vietnam.
Encountering delays in assignment of their projects, 1104 spent several weeks in Saigon, overhauling and painting the heavy equipment they had taken over from Seabee Team 1004 and performing a few minor construction projects around the Seabee Team headquarters compound.
While still in Saigon, the men of Seabee Team 1104 had their first brush with the Viet Cong. In March, a female terrorist tossed a loaf of bread containing a hand grenade into the back end of a truck in which team members were riding through Saigon. Quick-thinking Richard “Soupy” Supczak, the team’s construction electrician, tossed the grenade back out before it detonated. Supczak and Equipment Operator John Klepfer were both later awarded the Purple Heart for minor fragment wounds received in the incident, and Supczak was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his action, which undoubtedly saved the lives of several team members.
Soon afterward, Seabee Team 1104 left Saigon on its first assignment—the construction of a Special Forces camp at Ben Soi, a jungle village not far from the Cambodian border, some 60 miles northwest of Saigon. By the end of May, the Ben Soi camp, which included barracks, a dispensary, mess halls, ammunition bunkers, defensive positions, a helicopter pad, and other installations, had been completed, and Seabee Team 1104 began preparations for a move to another site.
Seabee Team 1104’s new project was to be the construction of a Special Forces “A” Team camp at Dong Xoai, a small district capital on Route 14 north of Saigon. Although only some 55 miles from Saigon, Dong Xoai was in the heart of a notorious Viet Cong-infested area of dense jungle known as “D Zone.” Although the town itself had never been taken by the Viet Cong, ambushes and attacks in the area had been taking a heavy toll of government troops and equipment for several years.
By the 9th of June, nine members of Seabee Team 1104 had arrived at Dong Xoai and commenced preliminary work for their construction projects at the camp. Sharing the camp with them were 11 men of Special Forces “A” Detachment 342, of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), and Vietnamese forces which included some 400 troops in three companies of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, (CIDG), to which the Special Forces men were advisors, a regional military company of 100 men, a scout car platoon equipped with six armored cars, and a battery of two 105-mm howitzers. Two Seabees, equipment operators John Klepfer and Jack Allen, were still at Ben Soi, where they were preparing the team’s heavy equipment for the difficult task of movement to Dong Xoai by convoy. Two other team members, Supczak and Engineering Aide Joseph Alexander, were away on a short leave in Bangkok.
For several days, the little garrison at Dong Xoai had received sporadic reports of Viet Cong sightings in the area, and on several occasions, light mortar fire—probably registration fire—had been received in the camp. But at Dong Xoai, this was routine.
A few minutes before midnight on the 9th, the stillness of the jungle night was abruptly shattered by the clap of incoming mortar rounds and recoilless rifle fire. A carefully planned, massive assault on the camp by a Viet Cong force of regimental strength had begun.
At the start of the attack, the 20-man American contingent was divided between billets in the north and west ends of the L-shaped camp. As the first rounds of the Viet Cong barrage slammed into the camp, the American and Vietnamese defenders—outnumbered on the order of five to one—ran to take up their assigned defensive positions on the protective earth berm surrounding the camp. Some of the first Viet Cong mortar rounds hit buildings housing the camp’s communication equipment and medical aid station, and barracks in which the Americans were sleeping. For the remainder of the battle, a battery-powered field radio, jury-rigged by a staff sergeant of the Special Forces, provided the camp’s only communication with the outside. Except for two small medical bags that Seabee Team corpsman James M. Keenan kept with him, the camp’s entire stock of medical supplies was destroyed in the first moments of the attack.
The north end of the camp, known as the Ranger compound, was hardest hit in the early moments of the attack. Two Special Forces sergeants were killed in the first moments of the attack. Two of the Seabees, Steelworker Second Class William C. Hoover and Construction Mechanic Third Class Marvin Shields, were wounded by shrapnel when the command post building where they were located received a direct hit from a mortar round. Both, however, joined the surviving Special Forces men and three other Seabees located in the Ranger compound—Utilitiesman Second Class Lawrence W. Eyman, Chief McCully, and Lieutenant Peterlin—in manning defensive positions on the west berm of the compound.
Among those in the Ranger compound was the senior American at Dong Xoai, Captain William M. Stokes, III, the Special Forces detachment commander. Although seriously wounded in both legs and his right arm and shoulder by mortar bursts soon after the start of the attack, Captain Stokes was carried to a defensive position on the west berm, where he manned a grenade launcher.
Despite the shrapnel head wounds suffered when the command post was hit at the start of the attack, Marvin Shields moved from position to position, returning the Viet Cong fire and encouraging the others. Although a steady rain of mortar, recoilless rifle, and small arms fire was falling into the camp area, Shields made several trips back into the compound to bring up mortar and small arms ammunition. At one point he retrieved some 800 rounds from a burning Seabee trailer.
For three hours, the attackers continued to rake the camp with intense fire from mortars, recoilless rifles, machine guns, and small arms. Some help for the besieged garrison came about 0100, when flare aircraft, summoned by the camp’s lone radio, arrived overhead and commenced periodic flare drops, followed about 45 minutes later by armed helicopters which began bombing and strafing the Viet Cong-held areas north and west of the camp.
Fighting along the north and West berms of the Ranger compound was violent and continuous. As one of the survivors described it, “They came up out of nowhere, numbering about 150 men attacking in groups of 6 to 10 men.” Members of each of the attack groups were distinguished by the wearing of a distinctive garment of some sort, or the wearing of some part of their clothing in a special way. In one case, for example, each member of a breaching team that attacked the northwest corner of the compound wore a checkered cloth around his waist.
Shortly after 0200, a bugle call from high ground east of the camp signalled the start of a mass assault by the Viet Cong on the west berm of the Ranger compound, supported by heavy mortar, recoilless rifle, machine gun, and small arms fire, and using hand grenades and flame throwers.
Unable to maintain their positions in the face of the assault, the defenders in the north area of the camp began a withdrawal. Captain Stokes, his right leg broken in two places and his left ankle broken, was unable to walk. Shields, who by this time had been wounded a second time by a bullet in the face, together with Special Forces Staff Sergeant Taylor carried the badly wounded captain through heavy fire to the west area of the camp, where they joined the other group of Americans in a District Headquarters building. Utilitiesman Larry Eyman, who had also been wounded, was the only other Seabee able to withdraw from the Ranger compound to the District Headquarters. One wounded Special Forces man, Private First Class Hand, also reached the Headquarters building with the assistance of two CIDG troops.
In the west area of the camp, the situation had been steadily worsening since the start of the attack. Here the principal direction of the initial Viet Cong attack was from the Southwest, and the four Seabees living in this area of the camp—Builder First Class Dale B. Brakken, Builder Second Class Douglas M. Mattick, Construction Mechanic First Class James Wilson, and Corpsman James Keenan—had manned defensive positions in a bunker at the southwest corner of the earth berm together with four Special Forces men. The intensity and accuracy of Communist mortar, machine gun, and small arms fire had steadily increased, and shortly before the Ranger compound was overrun, the men had been forced to withdraw from their defensive positions on the berm into the District Headquarter building in the center of the compound. At about 0300, this area of the camp became the object of an intense Viet Cong attack.
Although every American had been wounded by this time, the small contingent in the Headquarters building successfully defended their position through the night. Accurate fire from the Headquarters building took a heavy toll of the Viet Cong, who were throwing hand grenades and firing into the building from positions on the earth berm on all sides of the compound.
Twice-wounded Marvin Shields was still giving good account of himself. As Petty Officer Dale Brakken noted in his account of the action, “Shields was popping in and out of the side door, throwing grenades back at the V.C.”
By daybreak, the situation in the District Headquarters was critical. Supplies of small arms ammunition were running low, and ammunition for the camp’s mortars, M-79 grenade launchers, and 105-mm. howitzers had been entirely expended. The only heavy weapon for which ammunition remained was a 3.5-inch rocket launcher.
Again and again during the early morning, the V.C. massed for attacks on the Headquarters building, only to be broken up by bombing, strafing, and napalm strikes delivered with deadly effectiveness by the U. S. and Vietnamese aircraft that had arrived over the camp at dawn.
An attempt to relieve the Dong Xoai garrison during the morning was unsuccessful. A Vietnamese infantry battalion, lifted into an assembly area near the town by helicopter, was cut to pieces by Communist fire. Early during the morning of the 10th, the V.C. succeeded in establishing a .30 caliber machine gun position in a school building just south of the compound. From this point they were able to fire directly into the District Headquarters building through the compound gate. Special Forces 2nd Lieutenant Charles Q. Williams, who had assumed command of the Americans in the camp after Captain Stokes was wounded, asked for assistance in manning a 3.5-inch rocket launcher in an attempt to knock out the machine gun position.
Marvin Shields promptly volunteered.
Carrying the rocket launcher and three extra rounds of ammunition, Shields and Lieutenant Williams moved under intense fire across an open area of some 100 meters to take up a position on the south berm of the camp. Successfully destroying the V.C. machine gun position with four well-placed rockets, the two men were returning to the Headquarters building when both were hit by fire from a second machine gun. Williams was shot in the arm, while Shields’ right leg was shattered by two bullets.
Seabee Dale Brakken and two Special Forces men—Private First Class Hand and Sergeant First Class Johnson—carried Shields back to the Headquarters building. Although his medical supplies had already been exhausted in treating the other wounded, Seabee Corpsman Keenan did all he could for Shields, administering morphine to ease the pain, and applying tourniquets and bandages made from bedding. Still conscious, although hemorrhaging badly and settling into deep shock, Shields talked and joked with his comrades as the battle continued through the morning.
Shortly after noon, with ammunition running low and the Viet Cong massing for still another assault, the remaining defenders withdrew from the Headquarters building to make a final stand from a nearby 105-mm. howitzer pit, where about 20 South Vietnamese troops were still holding out. Corpsman James Keenan carried Marvin Shields to the new position on his shoulders. Soon afterward, while aircraft saturated the entire surrounding area with machine gun fire, bombs, rockets, and napalm, three rescue helicopters swooped in through the heavy Viet Cong fire and successfully evacuated most of the survivors at about 1400.
The moment of rescue was almost one of anguishing disappointment for Seabee Douglas Mattick. Starting to enter the third helicopter, Mattick was waved off; the chopper was already loaded to capacity. Thinking another was coming in, Mattick stepped back to wait. Only as the three helicopters disappeared in the distance, did he realize that there were no more coming in. A frantic distress call over the still-functioning field radio soon brought another rescue craft, and Mattick, too, was safely lifted out of the battered camp.
Marvin Shields died aboard the rescue helicopter. “Shields was joking and cutting up to the end,” Corpsman James Keenan later recalled. “When he finally went under, it was very quiet—nothing dramatic—he just went to sleep. The last thing he did was to thank everyone who helped him.”
For Lieutenant Peterlin and Chief McCully, the ordeal of Dong Xoai was not yet over.
As the Communists had swarmed over the west berm to overrun the Ranger compound the preceding night, Lieutenant Peterlin shot at point-blank range a Viet Cong carrying a flame thrower. Then, cut off from the remainder of the defenders, Peterlin, Seabee William Hoover, and Special Forces Staff Sergeant D. C. Dedmon began a withdrawal through heavy fire to the east side of the camp. Both Hoover and Dedmon had previously been wounded, and at this time, Peterlin was knocked down by an explosion and shot through the right foot. As the three men attempted to crawl through barbed wire at the east side of the camp, Frank Peterlin was separated from Hoover and Dedmon. Both men were later found dead. Despite heavy fire, Lieutenant Peterlin was able to continue his escape, finally taking cover in an empty foxhole several hundred feet from the camp.
An even more remarkable escape from the north end of the camp was made by Chief Petty Officer McCully. Even though wounded by shrapnel and shot through the right shoulder by a .50-caliber bullet, Chief McCully had continued to fire a machine gun and recoilless rifle at the Viet Cong until the north end of the camp was overrun. Carrying a carbine and a machine gun with them, McCully and two Vietnamese soldiers withdrew across a road on the east side of the camp to Dong Xoai town.
Taking a position under a house, the three men continued to return the V.C. fire until their ammunition was exhausted. About this time, the house was set afire, and the three resumed their withdrawal, closely pursued by the Viet Cong. Using the escape and evasion tactics he had learned well during Seabee Team 1104’s training period, McCully successfully avoided capture by the Communist troops that were rapidly sweeping through the area.
Moving to the south of the town, McCully and a Vietnamese soldier were aided by a Vietnamese civilian, who hid the two men in a sawmill. During the following day, they took cover in a nearby wooded area, and then returned to the sawmill the following night.
Throughout the day on the 10th and the following night, Peterlin and McCully remained hidden from the Communists, who by this time controlled almost the entire area. Late on the afternoon of the 10th, a second relieving battalion of Vietnamese Rangers landed by helicopter near the camp compound, where a handful of Vietnamese survivors of the battle continued to hold out. Throughout the night, the intense battle continued. Finally, early on the morning of the 11th, the Communists withdrew from the area, and Peterlin and McCully were able to emerge from their hiding places and were lifted out by helicopter.
All seven of the Seabee survivors of Dong Xoai were wounded in the battle. Most of them were able to leave the Navy hospital at Saigon soon afterward. For Larry Eyman and Chief McCully, there were longer periods of hospitalization before they, too, were returned to duty. Lieutenant Peterlin, after a lengthy period of hospitalization, finally received a disability retirement. Several members of the team, their active duty period completed, returned to civilian life soon after their return home. But the remainder of Seabee Team 1104 returned to their duties in the Seabees. Less than a year after Dong Xoai, four of them—Brakken, Eyman Klepfer, and Keenan—were back in Vietnam with another Seabee Team.
For each member of Seabee Team 1104 there were appropriate military honors for his part in the battle of Dong Xoai. The entire team was awarded a Navy Unit Commendation. Both Lieutenant Peterlin and Chief Petty Officer McCully were decorated with the Silver Star Medal for their gallant conduct, and Bronze Star Medals were awarded to Petty Officers Brakken Mattick, Eyman, Wilson, Keenan, and, posthumously to Hoover. The Republic of Vietnam posthumously decorated both Shields and Hoover with the Order of Gallantry with Palm and the Military Merit Medal, and for Shields came an award of the Berlin Freedom Bell, an honor sponsored by the newspapers of West Berlin.
Finally, in a solemn White House ceremony on the morning of 13 September 1966, Marvin Shields became the first Navy man of the Vietnam War—and the first Seabee ever—to receive the Medal of Honor. President Lyndon Johnson presented Marvin Shields’ widow with the nation’s highest decoration. Her 25-year old husband had been the bravest of all the brave Seabees at Dong Xoai.
__________
A 1950 civil engineering graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Commander Middleton was Executive Officer of U. S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion ELEVEN at the time Seabee Team 1104 was formed and deployed on its mission to Vietnam which ended with the Dong Xoai battle described in his article. During the period, he served with the Battalion, MCB-11 deployed to construction sites on Okinawa and at DaNang, Vietnam. His naval service also includes public works and contract administration assignments at Port Lyautey, Morocco; the Navy Public Works Center, Norfolk, Virginia; and the Naval Air Stations at Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Barbers Point, Hawaii; and an assignment as civil engineering advisor to the Turkish Navy on the staff of the U. S. Military Mission in Turkey. He served as Executive Officer of the Navy Public Works Center, Newport, R.I., and is now Chief, Base Development Branch, Engineer Division, United Nations Command/U. S. Force Korea.
* See A. N. Olsen, “Teaming Up to Build a Nation,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1969, pp. 34-43.