For the Americans it was the day after Valentine’s Day, 1967; for the Vietnamese it was the end of the Lunar New Year holiday known as Tet, in the Year of the Goat.
The minesweeping boat MSB-51 backed away from her nest at Nha Be, her diesel-driven twin screws churning up a chocolate foam in the muddy Long Tau River, then turned and headed out for another patrol. Commanded by a first-class petty officer, she was all of 57 feet long and drew four feet. She was a warship nonetheless, with two .30-caliber machine guns on her forecastle and a .50-caliber machine gun in an elevated tub aft. But her “main battery” was an array of chains and angled blades that could be deployed to sweep mines from the vital waterway leading from the open sea to the capital city of Saigon.
Minesweeping is never an easy mission, but the MSBs of Detachment Alfa of Mine Squadron Eleven had to contend with additional dangers because of the maze-like meanderings of the Long Tau as it snaked its way through the treacherous “Rung Sat Special Zone,” also known as the “Forest of Assassins.” Nature had configured this waterway to favor the insurgent Viet Cong, its twists and turns making surveillance difficult, facilitating the planting of mines and providing countless opportunities for enemy ambushes.
As the MSB-51 headed into the main channel, she was joined by the MSB-49, and the two vessels headed downriver, laterally fanning out as their crews began deploying their sweeping arrays.
As the two sweeps steered their way around the first great bend in the channel, a barrage of recoilless-rifle rounds and machine-gun fire, coming from well-fortified positions on both sides of the river, shattered the morning calm. Three well-aimed recoilless rounds ripped into the 49’s port side and exploded, one of them finding the fuel tanks and setting the hapless craft ablaze. Her captain soon realized he had no choice but to ground her to keep from going down in the channel.
Despite the heavy enemy fire, the 51’s captain maneuvered his craft in close to the burning 49. Recoilless rounds whooshed close aboard, and machine-gun bullets chewed at her wooden hull as the 51’s sailors evacuated the wounded and stripped the armament off the dying 49.
Two fiberglass-hulled river patrol boats (PBRs) patrolling nearby streaked into the fray and were joined by a pair of Navy Seawolf helicopters, which were hit five times but never brought down. A fixed-wing air strike eventually silenced the enemy fire, which had been coming from a half-mile stretch along both banks. The enemy withdrew, leaving two dead behind. Miraculously, no Americans were killed in the melee. The 49 was towed back to Nha Be, and the 51 resumed her patrol with a new partner, the MSB-32.
Farther downriver, the MSB-45 had not been so fortunate. Striking a command-detonated mine, she went down after a violent explosion. Four of her seven-man crew were seriously wounded, and two were killed.
Later that same day the MSB-51 again came under fire, taking two direct hits, one to her stack and the other to her sweep winch. Heading back upriver, she was attacked a third time, resulting in what one sailor described as “a hell of a shootout” as four PBRs, a Seawolf, and another fixed-wing airstrike settled the matter.
The MSB-51 returned to Nha Be for repairs. She and her diminutive sisters would continue keeping the channel to Saigon open until they handed over their important mission to the Vietnamese Navy more than three years later.
Lieutenant Commander Cutler is the author of several Naval Institute Press books, including A Sailor’s History of the U.S. Navy and The Battle of Leyte Gulf.