Melton Dunscombe
Local Man Fought in Last Battle in Vietnam
Posted: Thursday, November 8, 2012 10:41 am
Melton “Bo”
Dunscombe of Patterson was involved in the Mayaguez Mission, the
last U.S. military operation in the Vietnam War on May 15, 1975, two
weeks after Siagon fell. This mission was classified for many years
and many are unfamiliar with this battle. The information is now
public.
The crisis began on the afternoon of May 12, 1975, as
the American container ship SS Mayaguez passed near Poulo Wai Island
en route to Sattahip, Thailand, in recognized international sea
lanes claimed as territorial waters by Cambodia. At 2:18 p.m., a
Khmer Rouge naval boat was sighted approaching the United States
ship. The Khmer Rouge fired across the bow of the Mayaguez. When
Captain Charles T. Miller ordered the engine room to slow down to
maneuvering speed to avoid the machine-gun fire, the Khmer Rouge
then fired a rocket-propelled grenade across the bow of the ship.
Captain Miller ordered the transmission of an SOS and then stopped
the ship. Seven Khmer Rouge soldiers boarded the Mayaguez and their
leader, Battalion Commander Sa Mean, pointed at a map indicating
that the ship should proceed to the east of Poulo Wai. One of the
crew members broadcast a Mayday which was picked up by an Australian
vessel. The Mayaguez arrived off Poulo Wai at approximately 4 p.m.
and 20 more Khmer Rouge soldiers boarded the vessel. Sa Mean
indicated that the Mayaguez should proceed to Ream on the Cambodian
mainland, but Captain Miller showed that the ship’s radar was not
working and pantomimed the ship hitting rocks and sinking. Sa Mean
radioed his superiors and was apparently instructed to stay at Poulo
Wai, dropping anchor at 4:55 p.m.
P-3 Orion aircraft
stationed at Naval Air Station Cubi Point in the Philippines and at
U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield in Thailand took off to locate the
Mayaguez. The aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea, then en route to
Australia, was ordered into the area. The destroyer escort Harold E.
Holt and the guided missile destroyer Henry B. Wilson were both
ordered to proceed at high speed from the Philippine Sea toward the
Mayaguez’s last known location.
An alert order was sent to
1st Battalion 4th Marines (1/4 Marines) at Subic Bay and to the 9th
Marine Regiment on Okinawa. A reinforced company from 1/4 Marines
was ordered to assemble at Naval Air Station Cubi Point for airlift
to Thailand, while an 1100-man Battalion Landing Team (BLT)
assembled in Okinawa.
Dunscombe Was Recommended for
Promotion
Dunscombe, who is a disabled veteran, was
a private while serving in Vietnam in the Marine Corps. PFC Duncombe
was one of the three Marine communicators assigned to the
provisional Naval Gunfire Spot Team at Utapao AFB in Thailand. The
team was heli-lifted to Koh Tang Island.
He was put into a
reserve platoon that consisted of a “rather motley platoon of 16 men
consisting of stragglers, walking wounded and miscellaneous
personnel,” said H.T. Williams, who was in charge of the group. “I
organized it into two squads, selecting PFC Dunscombe as one of the
squad leaders because he previously impressed me with his common
sense, enthusiasm, and motivation.”
The senior Marine in the
platoon, a corporal, later proved incapable of leadership, according
to Williams. Dunscombe was appointed acting platoon sergeant because
he was “obviously the most capable and motivated man present,”
Williams said. “My appointment proved correct as PFC Dunscombe
pursued his duties with vigor and enthusiasm, aggressively insuring
that my directions were carried out and that the men prepared
fighting holes.”
“The actual evacuation of the reserve
platoon took place entirely under PFC Dunscombe’s leadership, as I
was at the Battalion CP when the helicopters arrived. Despite
confusion and enemy small-arms fire, he insured that the entire
platoon was evacuated only after the wounded had been taken aboard.
Continuing to follow the instructions I had given him earlier
because I was to remain on the island to provide naval gunfire spot
capability, he held a muster upon arrival on board the U.S.S. Coral
Seal and waited until my arrival several hours later to report
accomplishment of his assignment. Although only a PFC at a time,
Dunscombe displayed the leadership, courage and aggressiveness
expected of a Marine NCO. His performance in a time of confusion and
danger was noteworthy and certainly warrants consideration for
accelerated promotion.”
Highly Decorated Soldier
Dunscombe is a highly decorated soldier. He has been inducted
into the Marine Corps Hall of Fame.
The American Legion
recently published an article about the mission Dunscombe
participated in. That article follows:
14-Hour
Firefight
The deadly 14-hour firefight on a tiny
island off the coast of Cambodia officially ended U.S. military
operations in the Vietnam War on May 15, 1975. The SS Mayaguez
rescue mission condensed over a decade’s worth of frustration,
turmoil and heroism into one final, tragic act in a war theater
whose curtain may never fully close for members of the Koh Tang
Beach Club,.
The Mayaguez mission pressed young Marines still
in training into combat on Koh Tang Island after the war was
considered over.
The Khmer Rouge had hijacked Mayaguez, a
cargo ship en route from Hong Kong to Sattahip, Thailand, on May 12.
The revolutionary communist militia, which had overthrown the
government in Phnom Penh about a month earlier, was believed to be
holding the American crew hostage on the island, which lies about 27
miles off the coast of the border of Cambodia and Vietnam. Like many
Americans sent to fight in Vietnam, the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines
had never heard of the place that would forever change their lives,
and etch into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall its last 41 names.
“We were a bunch of young kids, mostly right out of school, who
had no idea what was coming or why,” says Dan Hoffman of Columbia,
S.C., a newly minted second lieutenant at the time of the mission
and now president of the Koh Tang Beach Club, an organization of
veterans involved in the operation. “They told us we were going up
against 15 or 20 militia/fishermen who might have automatic weapons.
Instead, we got a reinforced battalion with heavy machine guns,
mortars and anti-tank guns.”
Estimates vary about how many
Khmer Rouge soldiers, in their signature black pajamas, were on the
island at the time – somewhere between 300 and 700. Troops flown
onto the island quickly realized that they were badly outnumbered.
Miscalculation of enemy strength was not the only similarity
between the Mayaguez operation and the broader war. Intelligence
reports were wrong. Communications broke down. Delayed
decision-making from Washington spoiled the element of surprise.
Public opinion and politics were considered in the process.
Soldiers Say They Owe Lives to Chopper Pilots
There would also be American KIAs, MIAs and, possibly, POWs.
Like thousands of troops who survived the Vietnam battlefields,
Mayaguez veterans would later say they owe their lives to
death-defying chopper pilots. And many who made it off the island
alive would spend years confused and desperate for answers, often
tortured by post-traumatic stress disorder. Much of what went wrong
during and after the Vietnam War was encapsulated in its final
battle.
Little is more important to the Koh Tang Beach Club
than the fates of Lance Cpl. Joseph N. Hargrove, Pfc. Gary C. Hall
and Pvt. Danny G. Marshall, members of a gun team who, when last
seen, were alive and shooting. One theory suggests they were taken
as POWs and died in mainland Cambodia. Another claims they were
executed on the island. The gunners could have lost their lives
trying to hold a defense line together so that others could get away
on the night of May 15. All the Mayaguez veterans really know is
that the three were not there at the end of the ordeal.
“We
will die with unfinished business,” says Larry Barnett of Frisco,
Texas, a founding member of the club.
“We left three guys on
the island,” says Fred Morris of Waterloo, Iowa, a private first
class in May 1975. “That haunts all of us.”
“There’s no worse
way to die than to think that everyone left you,” adds Tom Noble, a
former swift boat captain and Navy petty officer in 1975, who had
been rescuing South Vietnamese refugees prior to the Mayaguez
hijacking.
Soldiers Suffered Over the Years
“We all suffered over the years. We have thought about the 41.
We lost more on Koh Tang than we did the first day on Okinawa. And
people have never heard of Koh Tang.”
No one is sure why the
Khmer Rouge seized the 500-foot U.S.-flagged merchant ship in
international waters and kidnapped its crew of 40. “There was no
official government in Cambodia at that time,” Hoffman explains.
“The general feeling was that some commander on his own decided to
attack the ship. It was just a civilian merchant ship, a normal
ship, with container cargo.”
President Ford Described
the Attack as an Act of Piracy
President Gerald Ford
and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described it as an act of
piracy. Reconnaissance planes were dispatched to search for the ship
and crew, and three CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters took off from
northeastern Thailand to the coast while U.S. officials tried
unsuccessfully to persuade China to negotiate a release. One of the
CH-53s – code-named Knife 13 – disappeared from radar and crashed en
route. All 23 onboard were killed, the first casualties of the
operation. By the time U.S. military assets were in place, and Ford,
the National Security Council and Congress authorized military
action, precious time had been lost. The complicated mission would
involve elements of every branch of service: Marines, Navy, Air
Force, Merchant Marines, one Coast Guard officer and an Army
linguist who spoke Cambodian. Two Navy destroyers, Henry B. Wilson
and Harold E. Holt – along with an aircraft carrier, Coral Sea –
steamed into the region to provide support.
All eyes were on
the irregularly shaped, 5-mile-long, 1-mile-wide island. The problem
was, explains Hoffman, “The crew were not on the island and never
had been. Intelligence was horrible.”
The same morning the
2/9 Marines and chopper pilots were flying into an all-out ambush by
the Khmer Rouge, Marines and Merchant Marines on Holt boarded the
U.S. cargo ship, finding it anchored and empty north of the island.
At 10 a.m., the crew, located on a Thai fishing boat, was turned
over to Wilson after U.S. planes from Coral Sea sank three Khmer
Rouge gunboats escorting them.
Rescue Operation Was
Delayed, Khmer Rouge Saw Soldiers Coming
The island
operation was supposed to have occurred just before dawn. Instead,
due to delays leading up to the insertion, nine Marine-loaded Knives
and Jolly Greens (HH-53s) arrived at Koh Tang Island in bright
morning sunshine. “They heard us coming,” Hoffman says. “They knew
we were coming. They saw us coming. And they were loaded for bear.
The first four helicopters were literally shot out of the sky.”
“As we are hovering, and the bird is turning, we’re hearing
snap-snap-snap-snap,” recalls Morris, who made it onto the island in
the first wave. “You don’t hear the gun report. But all of a sudden
there are these holes shooting through. We didn’t even expect
resistance. We were just going to go on, sweep the island, get the
crew from the ship and be home by noon. When these rounds started
going through the helicopter, we realized what it was ... it wasn’t
great.”
Those Who Hit Ground First Took Heavy Fire
Those who hit the ground that morning “took heavy fire,”
remembers Hoffman, who received the Bronze Star for his actions that
day. “The water and the ocean were to our backs. Big, thick, dense
jungle was in front of us. The only landing zones were the beaches –
a small moon-shaped beach on the east side of the island and another
on the west. It was a precarious position. I was supposed to land on
East Beach but landed on West Beach, so for the first hour or so,
with the water to my back, I assumed that north was south, and south
was north. Typical of the craziness that was going on. All of our
forward air controllers and air-support people had been shot down
and wounded. We were lucky to get into a perimeter and hold back.”
Morris had everything but luck. “We land in this elephant grass,
and it’s probably three feet high,” he explains. “We land right in
their command hooch, and they are shooting at us. I stand up and get
ready to shoot. I put it on full automatic and, Pop! Only one round
goes off. It didn’t have an extractor. I get to shoot one time, then
I have to break the weapon down to pry the shell out.”
Bailey
came in on Knife 21, the first bird to insert Marines that morning.
“The first person to step onto that island was Staff Sgt. (Seferino)
Bernal,” Bailey remembers. “He had his back (to) the enemy, looking
into the chopper, howling to his men, ‘Fire and shoot!’ He had his
.45 up in the air and total disregard for his own life. The only
thing he was concerned about was his men in that chopper, so an RPG
couldn’t come through and kill everyone. By that point, there were
at least 200, maybe 300, rounds through the chopper. It was like a
knife stabbing through tin.”
Two Khmer Rouge soldiers
immediately began firing at Bailey. “They couldn’t shoot,” he says.
“I hit one center mass, hit the other one in the right shoulder ...
the battle was on.”
Survivors Swam Out to Sea
As Bailey and 19 other Marines were firing on enemy positions
and trying to set up a perimeter, the badly damaged chopper that
brought them there lost power and crashed in the water a mile away.
They would be on the island alone for nearly an hour before another
group landed. Two other helicopters were shot down and lay crashed
on the beach. An RPG hit Knife 31 as it approached, destroying it
and killing 10 Marines, two Navy corpsmen and an Air Force co-pilot.
Survivors swam out to sea and were later rescued by Wilson. All
morning, Knives and Jolly Greens flew through a torrent of enemy
fire, trying to get men onto the island. A second wave, after
Mayaguez and its crew were rescued, was deployed at midday to keep
the first wave from being overrun.
Five Attempts Were
Made to Extract Men
Hoffman says no more than 200
Marines, airmen and Navy corpsmen had boots on the ground at the
height of the mission. Five attempts to extract men in the afternoon
were met with fierce ground fire and turned back, knocking two
HH-53s out of action. As evening fell, only three helicopters were
operational, and they had a big, dangerous job in front of them.
“The pilots are our heroes,” Hoffman says. “We owe them our lives.”
One was Bob Blough of Chattanooga, Tenn., who will never forget
flying Jolly 44 on instruments through darkness, low to the surface,
amid tracer fire, toward a sliver of sand to collect his first
group. “Once we started, we couldn’t stop,” he says. “Every time we
took a load of Marines, it would shrink their perimeter. We had to
finish the job.”
Blough, who spent seven years on active duty
after the war and 13 more in the Air Force Reserve, received the
Silver Star for rescuing 72 Marines that evening. Knowing time
wasn’t on his side, he asked to offload his first group of 35
Marines onto Holt, rather than Coral Sea, so he could get back
faster. Holt’s helipad, however, was not built to handle the big
Jolly. Blough had to hover in the dark above the bobbing destroyer,
ease two wheels onto separate corners of the helipad and release men
through a side door so they wouldn’t fall into the gulf. “It could
have been a big disaster if it hadn’t worked,” Blough says. “The
Holt’s captain gave us permission with the unspoken understanding
that if I screwed this up, I was going to pay for it.”
Quickly, he was gone for a second load – 37 this time, which he
would fly to Coral Sea. “I had never landed on a carrier before. The
Navy took real good care of us. They talked us right in.”
Three Helicopters Extract 196 Men From Island
The three helicopters extracted 196 men from Koh Tang Island
that evening, and the Mayaguez incident was over. “We had a lot of
young people who had never confronted a situation like this before
but nevertheless stepped up and did a fantastic job,” says Randall
Austin of Charlotte, N.C., a retired Marine Corps colonel who was
battalion commander at the time of the incident. “Joint operations
was just a fledgling concept back in 1975. We put our joint
operations together, literally, overnight. Today joint operations
are, correctly, so well-planned. Part of the heritage of our
operation is that it was part of the foundation for joint operations
that have occurred since then.”
In 2000, Larry Barnett
decided to start a website, to recognize the mission and attract
those who were a part of it. That led to the Koh Tang Beach Club.
“We felt that since we shared a special place in history that it was
really important there be defining differences between us and other
veterans organizations,” he says during a reunion in Branson, Mo.
“Most of these guys haven’t seen each other in more than 30 years.
What’s amazing is when you listen to these guys talk, it’s like
they’ve never missed a breath ... the same type of conversation they
were having in 1975.
Mayaguez Incident Such a
Traumatic Event
“The Mayaguez incident was such a
traumatic experience for the majority of these guys. You would be
hard-pressed to go anywhere and find people who actually know about
this operation. We want to change that. The more important thing is
that when we do these reunions, there is a lot of healing here. A
lot of these guys have kept these particular events bottled up for
30-plus years.”
“Was Koh Tang a planning fiasco?” asks Noble,
who drives a custom-painted GMC pickup that depicts all elements of
the operation and the names of the 41 who did not survive. “Yes,
planning was a fiasco. What put it all together was the people on
the ground. I don’t care how many friends you’ve got in your life –
those guys, you are stuck with. If they need me, I will be there.
They know. It’s a bond you cannot shake.”
Most
Details of the Mission Not Discussed for 30 Years
“Most of the details of the mission we didn’t hear about for 30
years,” Morris says. “It wasn’t something we wanted to rehash. We
had it in our hearts. We thought about it a lot. We just didn’t talk
about it. I’ve seen counselors, but if they have not been through it
... they can’t understand.”
Through their website, the annual
reunions and media attention – including seven books, three TV
documentaries and numerous articles – the Koh Tang Beach Club has
systematically defined itself. They build awareness of the battle.
Each year, they uncover new details about it. They honor their
fallen comrades and search for answers about the three who were left
behind. They help each other deal with the memories.
“I had
always felt, myself, that due to our lack of experience with Marine
assault operations, that we really let those guys down,” Blough
says. “I had a hard time with it for years. I happened to go to a
Jolly Green reunion. One of my old buddies saw me unloading my
luggage, and said, ‘Hey, Bob ... we’ve got a guy here from the
Mayaguez operation. He wants to say hi.’ It was one of the Marines I
put onto Holt. There were a couple of others.
“They told me
we did a hell of a job. That really helped. A year later, Dan
Hoffman and Larry Barnett showed up. Apparently, they had been
looking for me for 30 years. Dan made a great speech in front of my
heroes at this Jolly Green reunion, telling them what a great pilot
I was, and that he owed his life to me. That started my recovery.”
Vets Group Started in 2006
In 2006, the
club reunited in Washington and, of course, made their way to the
last panel of the Wall. “People just moved out of our way,” Hoffman
says. “We went down there and saw them. We touched the names. We
said a little prayer. We left one of our challenge coins. The guys
were all crying.”
Hoffman makes a point to share with
members information about VA benefits and PTSD treatment options,
including his own secret – registered Papillon show dogs, one of
whom is his beloved PTSD therapy dog named “Koh Tang Dan.”
Camaraderie among those who were part of that final battle is even
better medicine, Morris says. “There’s a lot of peace in that.”
