Situated way up in the green, thickly jungled highlands 30 miles west of Chu Lai, Fire Base Mary Ann had long been a secure oasis for its defenders, the 1st Battalion of the Americal Division's 46th Regiment. Last week, after the base was ravaged by a handful of enemy sappers, TIME'S Saigon Bureau Chief Jonathan Larsen visited the blackened bunkers and cabled this account of the savage night:
CHARLIE COMPANY, back from patrol, was ready to relax. The men filed out of the mess hall and into their bunkers, stripped to their shorts and flopped down on their cots. Some thumbed through comic books, some talked, and some, according to various reports, smoked a few joints. The guards were somewhat more alert—but not much. As the night wore on, some apparently nodded off over their M16s.
In the 13 months since Mary Ann had been bulldozed out of a 4,000-ft. mountaintop, it had taken very few mortars and had never even been probed on the ground. On the night of the attack, SP/4 Dennis Schulte recalled, "It was quiet, as always. I had seen nothing and expected nothing. I went over to the TOC (Tactical Operations Center) and talked with some friends until about 2:30 a.m. We talked about going home—as usual."
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Ten minutes later, after Schulte had drifted back to his bunker, the base exploded. Hundreds of mortar shells arced down out of the moonless sky with uncanny accuracy. Hunkered down in their bunkers, the G.I.s never even saw the 50 or so North Vietnamese sappers who slipped through the perimeter wire, wearing nothing but shorts, black grease and strings of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). One group wiped out the 155-mm. howitzers, another tossed tear gas grenades and satchel charges into the TOC, killing or wounding virtually everyone inside. Methodically, the others went from bunker to bunker, blowing them with satchel charges, RPGs and, in some cases, homemade grenades fashioned from Coca-Cola cans. One G.I. stayed alive by playing dead; a sapper came up, removed the American's wristwatch, and then went on his way.
By 4:30, when the first gunships and Medevac helicopters arrived, the entire base was in flames. "You couldn't see because of the smoke," said Lieut. Mat Noonan, a Medevac pilot. "We had to circle three times just to see where the pad was." Noonan finally set down amidst "the worst carnage I have ever seen at an American installation. There were rows and rows of bodies—some burned to charcoal, others completely disemboweled. There were nine body bags full of bits and pieces of flesh."
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