Asleep in a scramble tent at the south end of the 10,000-ft. Đà Nàng Air Base
runway, U.S. Air Force Major George V. Moore of McCook, Neb., was rudely
awakened at 1:25 a.m. "Suddenly there were explosions going off all around me,"
he said later. "I was knocked out of my bed and against the side of the tent."
Near by Pfc. Bruce Devert, 19, of Los Altos, Calif., one of 9,000 U.S.
Marines assigned to guard the Đà Nàng Air Base, which is the major staging center
for the U.S. aerial bombardment of North Vietnam, found himself "in a dark
vacuum with the whole world made up of flashing noises and explosions."
This was the start of a Viet Cong raid against Đà Nàng last week. Under
heavy-mortar-fire cover, the raiders stole out of a graveyard toward a sector of
the base perimeter patrolled by South Vietnamese troops. The guerrillas snipped
one barbed-wire fence, stepped through a dozen holes cut in another fence by
defensive troops to facilitate their own movements, and let go with a barrage of
grenades, satchel charges and recoilless rifle fire. The Reds ran into no outer
guards, were on Đà Nàng's runway before they met their first challenger. Carrying
coffee to a guard on duty down the line, a U.S. Air Force enlisted man spotted
the raiders, emptied his pistol at them — and was cut down by a burst of sub
machine gun fire. He was the only American killed.
Before they fled under a hail of Marine mortar and small-arms fire within
minutes after they had come, the raiders destroyed one Delta Dagger jet and two
four-engine C-130 Hercules transports and damaged two Delta Daggers and one
Hercules. Estimated total cost: $5,000,000. The Viet Cong left behind them
trails of blood indicating that several had been wounded. One was captured,
turned out to be a North Vietnamese soldier named Do Xuan Hien, 29, who under
questioning said that he had infiltrated into South Vietnam three months ago
with his entire battalion and had trained for the Đà Nàng raid for a month.
In the Đà Nàng raid, as in many other ways, that "ugly little war" in Vietnam
last week got uglier — and bigger.