The Battle That Proved The Viet Cong Could Be Stopped

In the summer of 1965, one Viet Cong regiment had chewed up South Vietnamese battalion after battalion and started calling itself the Ba Gia Regiment. Then a seventeen-year-old deserter walked out of its ranks and told the Americans exactly where it was: twelve miles from the Marine base at Chu Lai. This is Operation Starlite, Van Tuong peninsula, 18 to 24 August 1965, the first time an American regiment met a Viet Cong main force regiment in open battle. The landing at Green Beach, helicopters dropping straight into an enemy battalion's perimeter at Landing Zone Blue, Robert O'Malley and Milo Plank in the trench at An Cuong Two, Joe Paul stepping off a medevac to shield five wounded men, and Supply Column 21 lost in the hedgerows overnight. Then the count both sides argued over, and what Starlite actually proved. Every claim sourced. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📕 THE BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO First-time readers: the first-reader price applies itself at checkout ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ BOOK ONE · The Documented History of MACV-SOG in Vietnam One month after Starlite, Washington approved Shining Brass: small recon teams slipping across the border into Laos, in a war nobody was supposed to report on at all. That hidden war is this book. The missions, the arsenal, the men and the myths, in six chapters. 👉 First-reader price, $4.99 instead of $7.99: https://buy.stripe.com/3cI14q7PY8su0Pg3vu6kg00?prefilled_promo_code=FIRSTREAD2 Look inside first: https://www.truevietnamdocs.com/sog BOOK TWO · The Documented History of the Gear of the Vietnam War The M14, the M60, the amtracs and flame tanks, and everything else the Marines carried onto that peninsula, plus the paper trail behind it. Nine chapters, 193 pages. 👉 First-reader price, $5.99 instead of $8.99: https://buy.stripe.com/bJe14q0nweQScxY6HG6kg01?prefilled_promo_code=FIRSTREAD2 Look inside first: https://www.truevietnamdocs.com/gear ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ▶ WATCH NEXT A year and a half later, another Viet Cong regiment tried a massed attack on Firebase Gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYu2ItJrlV0 📚 FULL SOURCE LIST • Col. Rod Andrew Jr., The First Fight: U.S. Marines in Operation Starlite (USMC History Division, 2015): https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/The_First_Fight_Starlite.pdf • Shulimson and Johnson, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Landing and the Buildup, 1965 (USMC, 1978) • Regimental Landing Team 7, After Action Report, Operation Starlite (31 August 1965) • FRUS 1964 to 1968, Vol. II, Doc. 337, Westmoreland to the JCS (7 June 1965) • FRUS 1964 to 1968, Vol. XXVIII, Shining Brass • Medal of Honor citations: Robert E. O'Malley, Joe C. Paul, Frank S. Reasoner (CMOHS) • Navy Cross citations: Robert F. Cochran Jr., James E. Mulloy Jr. • DoD Vietnam War Commemoration, Operation STARLITE: https://vietnamwar50th.com/1965_stemming_the_tide/Operation-STARLITE • Quang Ngai Provincial Government, Van Tuong (Hanoi's claims, presented as claims) • John Walker, Both Sides Claimed Victory. Who Actually Won?, HistoryNet (2023) Archival footage: USMC History Division, NARA, Internet Archive. Some combat footage is representative of 1965 operations and is not from Starlite itself. 🔔 Subscribe for more fully sourced Vietnam War documentaries. Independent work of history, not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense or any veterans' organization. #VietnamWar #OperationStarlite #USMC #ChuLai #MedalOfHonor #MilitaryHistory #Documentary