At 0345 hours on May 23, 1967, an explosion near the platoon command post ripped through the night and brought 21-year-old 1st Lieutenant James L. Williams to his feet. Thinking someone had mistakenly detonated a Claymore mine, he yelled for a cease-fire–then quickly changed his mind when a burst of automatic-weapons fire stitched the ground next to him. Williams yelled, ‘Take cover!’ and leaped for the PRC-25 radio as flashes pierced the blackness in front of bunker 3. Van Tuong 1–one of five hamlets composing the village of Van Tuong–was under attack.

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Lieutenant Williams and the 2nd Platoon, Company C, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry (4-31), 196th Light Infantry Brigade (196th LIB), had come to Van Tuong 1 six days earlier to defend the hamlet and install a village chief who was loyal to the South Vietnamese government. It was a big job. Van Tuong 1 was some 16 kilometers south of Chu Lai in Quang Ngai province, an area with a long history of Communist activity.

The Marine Combined Action Platoon (CAP) concept of placing 15 Marines and a platoon of Popular Force (PF) soldiers in a VC-controlled hamlet to wrest power from the Communists had enjoyed considerable success around Chu Lai. When the 196th LIB replaced the 7th Marines, who were deploying north, the Marine-style CAP teams were left in place and put under the operational control of the brigade. Lieutenant Colonel Charles R. Smith, who commanded the 4-31 in May 1967, later wrote: ‘I thought it [CAP philosophy] quite effective as the posts were constantly attacked by the VC who did not like losing people and villages to government control.’

Captain Mike Ruane, the commander of Company C, had come up with the idea of restoring the village chief in Van Tuong 1 a short time after the 196th LIB arrived there. Ruane later recalled that the plan to secure the hamlet was not part of a formal pacification program, but rather an effort to gain control of the area of operations (AO) from the VC. He presented the concept to Colonel Smith, who later described Van Tuong 1 as ‘a VC hotbed.’ It had been the scene of bloody fighting between the VC 1st Regiment and the U.S. Marines during Operation Starlite two years earlier. The VC 1st had left, but the well-armed VC 48th Local Forces (LF) Battalion was in the area in May 1967. Smith probably had the 48th in mind when he approved the plan and directed Ruane to commit a rifle platoon for the mission.

Ruane selected his 2nd Platoon and planned for its support in detail. He later said: ‘To relieve the platoon, if it were attacked, there was normally a Bushmaster [ambush] platoon operating within a l,500-meter radius of the 2nd Platoon.’ Fire support would come from Battery C, 3rd Battalion, 82nd Artillery (3-82), located at the base camp north of Van Tuong, and from the company’s organic 81mm mortar platoon. Gunships from the 71st Combat Aviation Company (’Firebirds’) based in Chu Lai were only minutes away. Unforeseen problems with the artillery, however, would later surface at a critical moment. Colonel Smith approved the plan. On May 17, Williams’ 2nd Platoon and a three-man 60mm mortar squad, about 26 men in total, clanked out of the base camp aboard armored personnel carriers (APCs) of Troop G, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The new village chief and a South Vietnamese national policeman would meet the platoon at Van Tuong 1.

Lieutenant Williams’ first order of business upon reaching the hamlet was to select and prepare a defensive position before dark. Much of the terrain around Van Tuong 1 was flat and overspread with rice paddies and bamboo hedges. A knoll west of the hamlet offered the most attractive defensive site. The 2nd Platoon, however, had come to protect the population, not to defend a hill. Williams therefore picked a 50-by-75-meter rectangular clearing in the northeastern section of the hamlet girdled by hedgerows and a ditch. Near its center was a thick-walled pagoda and schoolhouse, which Williams designated for his command post. He planned to use an open field to the west of the perimeter as an LZ.

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