The Battle of Tam Quan (A Memorial Day Tribute) by Tom Kjos, 3rd Platoon, Company D, 1/12th Cavalry

May 24, 2009

Here at Peninsula Pen, Memorial Day will always have a special place. Previously, I’ve written about Memorial Days past, about heroes I’ve known, and about some I’ve never met.

Saturday, I published a link to an audio essay. Though the soldier “on the other side of the Wall” was a poignant image, it was the part before – the “P38, claymore mine, C ration cans in a sock” – that captured my attention.

Combat is slogging, back-breaking, sweat-running-into-eyes kind of work. It’s been said to be “long stretches of boredom punctuated by terror,” and so it is. Years later, you remember both, or rather, snippets of both. Now over forty years later, I’ve begun to revisit those days. The reasons are complex, but they certainly include a US Army Major – my daughter – teaching military history at West Point, and Jeannie, whose passing has forced me to confront my own mortality, and to cherish memories of my days – good and bad. Now, remembering that long-ago war is easier than the constant and much more recent memories of great love and companionship. So maybe this is why old soldiers start remembering.

I’ve made contact with a buried past. There have been the “thank you for your service,” mostly sincere, I think, but often from those who cannot understand, and are not really interested. There’s no reason they should be, of course.

A few weeks ago I ran across a document amongst my papers, a copy of a recommendation for award of the Medal of Honor that I prepared (or rather completed) on behalf of Sp4 Allan J. Lynch for action on December 15, 1967. The Battle of Tam Quan, fought on the Bong Son Plain in December, 1967 between the 1st Cavalry Division and the 22nd Regiment (NVA); the contact on the 15th near My An (2) was the last major engagement of the battle, which had begun on December 6, with the sighting from the air of a radio antenna.

Other units had carried the early December battles with the 22nd and its 8th and 9th Battalions, which had then, after a big scrap with the 8th Cavalry on December 10th, dropped from sight except for sporadic contacts with small elements. Radio intercepts identified the regiment’s headquarters on the 14th, and the officers of Company D, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry were called from an outdoor showing of One Million Years B.C. to our LZ English orderly rooms. I never have seen the rest of the campy Raquel Welch classic.

Colonel French, the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry’s commander, had insisted that since the battalion had now been called upon, Company C of the 1/12th, would lead the attack. There was a reason for that. Charlie Company – and the battalion – had a bone to pick with the 22nd Regiment that had attacked in the dark of night during the previous year’s Christmas truce. That battle is recounted in S.L.A Marshall’s Bird: The Christmastide Battle. Three platoons of the Cavalry Company along with two under-strength artillery batteries – a total of 150 men – hung on at LZ Bird in the Kim Son Valley against the onslaught of some 800 North Vietnamese Regulars. Staff Sergeant Delbert O. Jennings (now deceased) was a Medal of Honor winner that night. Now, a year later, we’d leave a well-earned firebase break to join C Company in taking down the 22nd once and for all.

Contemporaneous records provide the background. This part of the battle of Tam Quan was fought at My An (2), Binh Dinh Province, Republic of Vietnam, on 15 December, 1967. The terrain was a large village surrounded by rice paddies and small, numerous, heavily grown hedgerows considerably restricting visibility. Enemy force exceeds a battalion in size. He is well equipped with recoilless rifles, light and heavy machineguns, and well supplied with ammunition. His position is carefully chosen and well fortified. Enemy morale is high. Company D’s morale is high after brief stand down (on LZ English), but the company is extremely under strength; just 85 infantryman are flown into battle on UH1B “Hueys” on that early morning in December.

I’d been in country for less than a month and met newly-assigned 2nd Platoon Leader, Lt. Roy Southerland. at that officer’s call that night on English; he’d be dead before then next day’s sunset. Donald Orsini, a brave and talented OCS officer who had enlisted in 1956, was our Captain when we flew in a brace of Hueys in the morning to a blocking position, then at midday were sent on a march to an attack position we never reached, contact with the 22nd occurring first. In a square formation – two platoons abreast, two in trail – Lt. Southerland’s 2nd Platoon was left-front and took the brunt of the initial contact with the enemy. My 3rd Platoon was right-rear and unscathed; on order, we pulled back a bit to establish a perimeter for medivac, supply, and support.

After the initial contact, 1Lt. Southerland and Sp4 Lynch moved forward, toward the platoon’s point element, which had gone down in the initial fusillade. As they did so, Lt Southerland was killed by enemy fire (posthumously awarded the Silver Star), but still Lynch continued, dashing over fifty meters of open, fire-swept ground, to the aid three of our wounded, who he moved to safety in the enemy’s trench line, which he then cleared and defended from repeated attack.

Over the next three hours the company made repeated attempts to reach Sp4 Lynch and his comrades, without success, even when finally assisted by the arrival of armored personnel carriers of the 1st Battalion, 50th Mechanized Infantry. On one of these last attempts, Captain Orsini, who had personally directed the battle from the front, including the numerous attempts to reach Lynch’s position, was wounded.

Orsini was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and would retire as a Lieutenant Colonel, then pass away after a 14-year battle with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1998.  Captain Richard Kent, a West Point graduate who had been serving as the Battalion’s S4, took command when Orsini was evacuated. Kent – who joked that his only important experience at West Point was his membership in the Jewish Men’s Choir – one of our Company’s best and most popular commanders - was wounded south of Quang Tri on February 1st 1968, and retired as a Colonel. He was telling the truth about the Jewish Men’s Choir, I looked it up in the West Point Library in July 2008. Sergeants William E. Gorges and Rudoph H. Ford were also awarded the Silver Star for heroism that day.

Finally, with the company – and the other elements of the 1/12th – continuing to take casualties, Aerial Rocket Artillery (ARA) gunships were called in, firing scores of 2.75 inch rocket salvos to our front, culminating with strikes by Air Force F-100 Super Sabres. That remains one of the most vivid memories of that tour – laying on my back in that small defensive perimeter to watch a bombing run come in straight over the top of us, the pair of bombs released hundreds of meters behind us as the jet began his pull-up, the two black, finned projectiles seeming to float, silently on parallel paths toward, then over us, seemingly just clearing our heads, then that lazy silence rent by deafening thunder, the ground shaking and dirt thrown up and on us, one soldier screaming, restrained by his buddies. Then, for the first time, it was quiet.

Sp4 Lynch had remained in the enemy’s midst, protecting his charges, first from the counterattacks of the North Vietnamese infantry around him – he killed at least five – then as best he could to shelter them from our own artillery and air strikes. Five hours after the battle had begun, after the last of the air strikes, he made three trips to carry each of the wounded to cover seventy meters to the rear of the position in which he had defended them. Seeing to their comfort, he then returned to the company’s defensive perimeter and led a rescue party forward to finally extract three other wounded soldiers.

The Battle of Tam Quan officially ended at midnight December 20th after a final battle with the 2/8th Cavalry, and 1/50th Infantry (Mechanized) near An Nghiep. US casualties during the Battle of Tam Quan were 58 killed in action and 250 wounded in action. In the 1st Brigade After Action Report, estimated casualty figures for the 22nd NVA Regiment casualties are listed as 650 killed in action. According to the Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division, General Tolson, “the Battle of Tam Quan had a much greater significance than we realized at the time. In that area, it pre-empted the enemy's Tet offensive even though the full impact wasn't then realized. As a result, that part of Binh Dinh was the least affected of any part of South Vietnam during Tet.”

The battle on December 15, 1967 between the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry, and the 22nd Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army at An My (2) in Binh Dinh Province, cost the lives of these 21 American soldiers:

B Company
SGT Juan S. Ozuna, Wapato, WA Vietnam Memorial Faces From the Wall (scroll)
SP4 Willie French, Pittsboro, NC Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Ronald L. Klausing, San Diego, CA Vietnam Memorial

C Company
SFC Robert Levine, Jamaica, NY Vietnam Memorial
SFC James E. Lynn, Kenosha, WI Vietnam Memorial
SFC John D. Roche, Bay City, MI Vietnam Memorial
SSG David P. Jewell, Owensboro, KY Vietnam Memorial
SGT Richard J. Boeshart, Sioux City, IA Vietnam Memorial
CPL Steven Matarazzo, Montgomery, NY Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Wayne D. Ryza, Houston, TX Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
CPL Michael D. Sander, Oakland, CA Vietnam Memorial
PFC James J. Koprivnikar, Cheswick, PA Vietnam Memorial
D Company
1LT Roy E. Southerland, Morristown, TN Vietnam Memorial
SGT Robert L. Flores, Parker, AZ Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
SP4 Ramon Cortes-Rosa, Hialeah, FL Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Charles W. Hicks, Butner, NC Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Omar Lebron-Domenech, San Sebastian, PR Vietnam Memorial
CPL James Tierno, Jackson Heights, NY Vietnam Memorial
HQ Company
CPL Richard A. Choppa, Hubbard, OH Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
CPL Riley C. O'Neil, Kansas City, KS Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
PFC Richard M. Proscia, New Hyde Park, NY Vietnam Memorial

I located Allan Lynch in April of this year and sent him the copy of the award recommendation I had kept since preparing it in the fall of 1968.

In writing this today, I’ve found that official citations for awards substantially deviate from other descriptions of the battle, including those given in eyewitness statements attached to the recommendations for award. I’m not sure why that should be; perhaps the Division’s Awards & Decorations clerks had a word limit and lapsed into habitual phrasing?  Second, few of the soldiers who died at My An (2) in December, 1967 appear anywhere on the web except in lists of casualties. The Vietnam Memorial Wall records each of their names on Panels 31E and 32E. Each has an entry at the Memorial’s web site, each entry has three pages, one with basic personnel information (HOR, DOB, Marital Status, etc.), the second recording the details of the soldier’s death, and one to be used for personal comments and pictures. I’ve linked the second of those pages above. Where I found other information (Virtual Wall, Washington State’s Faces From the Wall) the link is also provided. Take a few minutes to visit their pages.