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Casualty Info
Home Town Alva
Last Address Alva
Casualty Date Mar 02, 1968
Cause KIA-Killed in Action
Reason Gun, Small Arms Fire
Location Gia Dinh (Vietnam)
Conflict Vietnam War
Location of Interment Fort Denaud Cemetery - Denaud, Florida
Vietnam War/Tet Counteroffensive Campaign (1968)/Ambush at Hoc Mon
From Month/Year
February / 1968
To Month/Year
February / 1968
Description At about 9AM 2 March, Company C began to cross the Hoc Mon Bridge and came under heavy fire from a large enemy force concealed in spider holes and bunkers on both sides of the bridge. The initial attack lasted less than 10 minutes. It was one of the worst attacks against American forces during the Vietnam War. One man, SP4 Nicholas J Cutinha was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
92 American soldiers of C Company, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 25th Division began a search-and-destroy mission near Saigon. They were looking for a Viet Cong force that had been firing rockets into their Tan Son Nhut Air Base. As they rushed along a road without flank security to catch up with their battalion, they ran into an ambush. Within eight minutes, 49 American soldiers were dead or dying, and 29 were wounded.
The ambush was reported in the US as follows:
48 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Ambush on Edge of Saigon
SAIGON, South Vietnam, Monday, March 4-Forty-eight Americans have been killed and 28 wounded in the ambush of a United States infantry company four miles north of Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. Twenty enemy soldiers were killed. Fewer than half of the company's 150 soldiers escaped unscathed, a United States military spokesman reported yesterday. The ambush, one of the worst in the war, occurred Saturday [March 2nd]. Most of the American casualties came in an eight-minute burst of fire from machine guns, automatic rifle, mortars and rocket launchers. Mines were also detonated. The ambush near Saigon occurred about 9:20 A.M. when troops of the Unites States' 25th Infantry Division marched through an old French rubber plantation. They took a road that runs between parallel canals several yards apart.
Well-informed military official say that the enemy unit - probably a reinforced company of perhaps 150 men - had hidden along the banks of these canals. In front of the advancing Americans another canal cut across the roads, but it was spanned by a bridge.
"Apparently when the lead elements of the company got to the bridge everything cut loose," the official said. "Then the VC broke contact, and that was it. It was all over in about eight minutes."
All of the units' officers - ordinarily there are six in a company - were either killed or wounded.
