First Battle of Saigon

The population of South Vietnam, both rural and urban, raised no alarms as communist battalions, regiments, and divisions organized in their midst. The silence spoke volumes about the regime in which the United States had devoted its treasury and the lives of its soldiers.

There had been many signs that the offensive was coming. Chief Warrant Officer 2 James W. Creamer, 179th Military Intelligence (MI) Detachment, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, became involved in one portentous incident in mid-November 1967 when a platoon from TroopD 17th Cavalry made contact in a hamlet some five kilometers west of Saigon. The platoon reported it had a VC pinned down in a bunker.

Intending to collect a prisoner for intelligence purposes Creamer hopped a helicopter out to the firefight. It was over before he got there, the cav having impatiently run a track over the bunker, crushing the diehard within. "They thought they had a VC unit in the village, so they surrounded it and started searching through it," remembered Creamer. "It was a pretty orderly little village and every house had a haystack beside it, and every haystack covered a pile of weapons or ammunition. It was staggering what was in that village. Mortar rounds , cases of small- arms ammunition, hand grenades galore, rocket-launchers, you name it."

It was too late in the day to lift all the supplies out by helicopter, and the cav platoon could not remain overnight in the village, should there be a large enemy unit in the area. The decision was made to burn all the haystacks in the dry rice paddies surrounding the hamlet.

Creamer went up in his Huey. "We'd chug by, and I'd drop a grenade into each haystack," he said. "We set all the haystacks on fire within five thousand meters of this village. It looked like pictures of Russia during World War II with all those columns of smoke going up."

When Tet hit, the haystack incident clicked into full focus for Creamer. The hamlet had been a step in the supply chain leading to Saigon. Brought across the Cambodian boarder, then ferried to the hamlet by sampan, a canal passed by to the west, and the enemy probably intended to smuggle the weapons and ammunition into a cemetery at the edge of Saigon due east of the hamlet.

"I suspect the VC placed two or three caches for every one they needed because they knew we were going to find a lot of them," said Creamer. "The most amazing thing about the whole story is that this was a village you could seen from a rooftop in Saigon. It had a population of some two thousand people and was in an area that was heavily patrolled by the U.S. and ARVN units. It was full of government officials, government police, and government schoolteachers. It was a safe pacified village, and nobody said anything. The enemy moved in so much stuff that every house was involved, but whether the people were sympathetic or not to the communist, nobody raised an alarm. We stumbled on it, and it was a real revelation to me about how the people felt about the government in Saigon."

On January 10, 1968, General Weyland spoke with General Westmoreland at MACV HQand laid out intelligence that indicated that even as U.S. operations began on the Cambodian border, the enemy's force was infiltrating into the populated heart of III Corps. General Weyland won the battle for Saigon at that meeting when he asked that the border offensive be postponed and certain units be returned to their positions in the populated areas.

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