The Most TERRIFYING Siege Of The Vietnam War You've Never Heard Of

The Most TERRIFYING Siege Of The Vietnam War You've Never Heard Of For about six weeks in the autumn of 1967, Con Thien was the most closely watched piece of ground in the Vietnam War. Time magazine put it on the cover. CBS built a half hour prime time special around it. Today, most people who know a great deal about the war cannot tell you what happened there. A few hundred Marines held a low red hill two miles below the demilitarized zone. They were shelled day after day by guns dug into cave positions north of the Ben Hai River, worked by crews they were politically barred from walking toward for most of that year. What broke men who had already survived hard fighting elsewhere was not the number of ground attacks. It was that for weeks on end, there was often nothing on that hill worth shooting back at. This one covers the 8 May attack that got inside the wire, the 2 July ambush at the Marketplace, the September bombardment and Operation Neutralize, and why the Dien Bien Phu comparison that nearly every reporter reached for was wrong. 📕 We put everything we had into this book, for the men and for the families who never got the story: The Documented History of MACV-SOG in Vietnam. Every claim sourced. $11.99: https://truevietnamdocs.com WHAT THIS VIDEO CORRECTS Con Thien was not overrun. The only penetration of the wire was the 8 May 1967 attack, and it failed. Con Thien was not abandoned and it was not lost. Con Thien was never fully encircled. The road up from Cam Lo was harassed constantly and a crossing washed out in early October, but it was reopened and aircraft kept flying in throughout. It was a heavily supported position under sustained bombardment, which is a different and far less cinematic thing. The round counts you will see quoted online, 150,000 shells and figures like it, do not appear in any official source I was able to check. Every North Vietnamese casualty number attached to this battle came out of the American body count system. At the Marketplace the counting was so difficult that men resorted to counting abandoned canteens, and Marines who fought there described figures swelling as they moved up the chain of command. That is why no enemy figure is quoted anywhere in this video's title, thumbnail or description. A NOTE ON THE AMERICAN CASUALTY FIGURES The total given in the video, more than 1,400 Americans killed and more than 9,000 wounded, is an aggregate across the full battle period from February 1967 onward. It is not a September figure. The 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines dropping from 952 men to around 300 across two months folds together the killed, the wounded, and the men evacuated because they could not do it any more. It is not a psychiatric casualty count. There is no reliable published figure for psychiatric casualties at Con Thien. SOURCES Col. Joseph C. Long, "Hill of Angels: US Marines and Con Thien," Marine Corps History Division, usmcu.edu (Cushman on the barrier concept, 2 July losses, the 7 July bunker hit, the September round counts) Telfer, Rogers and Fleming, "U.S. Marines in Vietnam: Fighting the North Vietnamese, 1967," Marine Corps History and Museums Division (8 May casualties p. 21, the artillery estimate north of the river p. 216, the September bombardment) William P. Head, "War from Above the Clouds," Air University Press (Operation Neutralize, B-52 sortie totals) Peter Brush, "The Big Guns of Camp Carroll," Vietnam magazine, August 1997 David Douglas Duncan, LIFE, 27 October 1967 ("We were Target Zero") "The War: The Bitterest Battlefield," TIME, 22 September 1967 CBS News, "The Ordeal of Con Thien," 1 October 1967, presented by Mike Wallace with field reporting by John Laurence Spencer C. Tucker's review of James P. Coan, "Con Thien: The Hill of Angels," HistoryNet (Westmoreland's framing, the 2/4 strength figures) Archival imagery: public domain USMC photography via Wikimedia Commons, NARA and DVIDS INTERVIEW CLIP Lance Corporal Buddy Mann, USMC, filmed at Con Thien in 1967, describing the shelling while it was still going on. Full clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7iReNtzKs If I have got something wrong, say so in the comments with a source and I will pin the correction. Primary sources first, myths corrected out loud. Subscribe if that is the kind of history you want more of. #VietnamWar #ConThien #USMC #Marines #MilitaryHistory #DMZ #1967