‘A very real battle for survival’

Loosely translated, Con Thien in South Vietnam means “The Hill of Angels.” However, U.S. Marines who were 200 meters outside the perimeter of their fire base there learned quickly “the devil lurked with those angels” when they were ambushed on Sept. 21, 1967 — 55 years ago today.

Thomas Payne, of Ellijay, was there in an area of fire bases near the DMZ (de-militarized zone) that Marines referred to as “Leatherneck Square.”

“Fox and Golf Companies ran into a battalion-sized ambush in a French plantation just outside of Con Thien,” said Payne, a member of the “2/4” (2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment).

“The initial burst of fire pinned us down, and cut down large banana trees. The bunkers and fighting positions were so close to the wounded Marines it denied us air support and supporting arms.”

Payne, who graduated Gilmer High School in the Class of 1966, noted his unit was familiar with the tactics of their enemy, the North Vietnamese Army. They experienced it up close even before Con Thien.

“I had joined the battalion on June 27, 1967,” he recalled. “We were first stationed at a small firebase called Camp Evans before going north to Con Thien. Most of the action in and around Camp Evans was small and short in nature, mainly consisting of Marines stepping on land mines laid by the local Viet Cong guerillas. We had a few fire fights, small in nature and lasting only a few minutes before they ran away.

“However, when we were sent north to Con Thien to patrol around the outside of the base, we were under daily mortar attacks and fire fights with the NVA soldiers.”

Payne, 74, said his unit — he was with 1st Platoon in Fox Company — “got in a bad situation” when they were ambushed, and found themselves fighting “a very real battle for survival” against a superior force.

“This is what usually happened — when you engaged with the enemy, they ambushed you or you’d run into them,” he said. “But we’d never got boxed in like that — it was an L-shaped ambush, and it was in an old plantation. There were rubber trees like our apple trees.

“There were so many rockets and stuff coming in there it just blowed what was left up. Where we was at it (headquarters) was pretty calm — booby traps, a few snipers — and all of a sudden two months later (at Con Thien) they got uniforms on, you got uniforms on, and they’ve got artillery and it was a crazy thing.

“Every time somebody moved, they got hit. There was bullets flying, and me and Gabby just happened to be in the right place, I guess.”

“Gabby” was Terry Garlby, his “A-gunner” or assistant on the machine gun.

“Lt. Col. Hammond gave the order that we would fight our way back to Con Thien,” he recalled. “By then it was 1930 hours (7:30 p.m.), and we had been there since morning. If we had not pulled back, I believe we would have all been killed. Gabby was praying — he’d gone to church, and I always went to church and I was praying. I don’t know how we got out of there, to be honest with you. Gabby said we shot around 5,400 rounds that day, it ruined our ears.”

There were casualties — 31 Marines were killed in action and 118 men were wounded, according to an after-action report dated Jan. 2, 1968. After a head count, 15 men were missing. Later that night, a “Puff the Magic Dragon” gunship strafed enemy positions, then B-52 bombers did their work. Combat engineers recovered 14 dead Marines except for one man, Lance Corporal Kenneth Plumadore, whose body was never recovered.

“There were countless examples of heroism and valor,” Payne pointed out. “Lance Corporal Jedh Colby Barker was a machine gunner who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions.”

The website defense.gov, on its Medal of Honor page, states: “Barker was one of the many who had been hit, but despite his injuries, he stayed out in the open to fire back at the enemy soldiers, who had his squad outnumbered. Realizing he was a threat to their position, the enemy then directed most of their fire toward Barker. This time, the young Marine was shot in the hand — an injury that cut off his ability to continue operating his machine gun. Before he could react to that, a grenade flew into view and landed among the Marines. Without hesitating, Barker jumped on top of it, absorbing the blast with his body.”

Corporal Tiago Reis, also a machine gunner, was awarded the Navy Cross posthumously, according to valor.militarytimes.com.

“These two men saved countless lives that day — and they both died that day as well,” Payne said.

There were also six Silver Star medals awarded in the wake of the battle, some of them posthumously. Payne had only turned 19 in late July. Because of the high casualty rate among Marines, he said he was promoted from private to corporal rather quickly.

Hit with an AK-47 round

months later on March 12, 1968, Payne was on patrol with his unit, trying to show a new machine gunner the ropes during an operation.

“You always sorta look after them,” he said. “We were just walking along, two platoons of us on patrol. All of a sudden they opened up on us, and we opened up on them. They didn’t get us hemmed in, but we stopped where we were at and backed up a little bit. They called artillery and two planes came and bombed them. We were going to chase them out and kill ‘em, but we had two guys get hit, and they told us to pull back to the creek — they were going to bring some napalm in. And it’s hot, you can feel it if you’re close by.”

Payne remembered there was already artillery hitting heavy around them, and about the time he and the new man got to the creek, “my legs just come out from under me.”

“Best I remember, it just burned like a (hot) poker went through you,” he said. “Of course, you’re scared to death in your mind the whole time, figuring you’re going to get killed. I wasn’t bleeding bad, but if I had been standing up instead of sliding down the creek bank, it could have went through my back and killed me. They set up an LZ (landing zone) for a med-evac, and I told a corpsman I wasn’t hurt that bad because I could crawl. But I looked down and thought it was bad, that it might have got me, well, you know where, but it didn’t.”

Payne said he and three other wounded men, and three dead Marines, were loaded onto a helicopter.

“They were shooting at us when we left,” he said of the NVA trying to bring down the chopper. “I remember leaving out and saying, ‘Thank you, Lord, I thought I never would get out of that place.’”

Payne stayed 40 days in Yokosuka Naval Hospital in Japan. He sustained nerve damage, and believes it was an AK-47 round because it tumbled and tore into muscle. However, the bullet narrowly missed his femoral artery and didn’t hit the bone. After returning to Ellijay, he pursued a career in construction as a concrete finisher. In his family of nine children, four brothers served in the Marines and one in the Navy; the brothers had two older sisters.

Payne was asked his thoughts as the 55th anniversary of the Battle of Con Thien approached.

“Every day that I live and that date comes near, I think about it,” he replied. “I never figured I’d live this long, and this year it slipped up on me. There were seven of us boys who joined the battalion in June 1967, all in the 1st Platoon of Fox Company. We became good buddies; all of us made it back home and stayed in touch all of these years.”

Payne later had an article published in Leatherneck magazine. It said, in part: “That single day (at Con Thien) represented many individual accounts of heroism, valor and devotion to duty, country and Corps. It was my privilege to share this moment of 2/4 history with these incredibly brave Marines who fought side by side in the face of certain death. It was their determined efforts that carried this battle to its conclusion and prevented the annihilation of the entire battalion.”

The warfarehistorynetwork.com said Con Thien “was subjected to some of the heaviest shelling of the war. Communist gunners would lob mortar and artillery rounds at the base, then quickly move their weapons before the Marines could locate them. Between Sept. 19-27, an incredible 3,077 shells battered the Marine positions.”

On the same website, PFC Jack Hartzel of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines, shared what he saw four days after Payne’s patrol was ambushed outside Con Thien: “The thing about Sept.r 25 that really sticks in my mind is a Marine sitting in a pool of blood, his legs blown off. He was numb from morphine and in shock from loss of blood. He was smoking a cigarette very calmly as if nothing had happened.”