"They're coming." - "Now they're almost here." - "They're here, they're here." Then over the radio comes a strange, haunting laugh – a fatalistic, almost giddy sound that echoes with a resolved hopelessness. "Never mind now. Here I am… I'm captured."
These were the final words that Lieutenant Paul L. Twomey, piloting a helicopter over the death and destruction of the Binh Gia battlefield, would hear from Sergeant Harold G. Bennett, a US Army Ranger advisor, as he, his RTO, PFC Charles E. Crafts, and his unit – the 33rd Vietnamese Ranger Battalion – were being overrun by a numerically superior Viet Cong force.
The date was the 31st December 1964. It was the first time that a major VC force had stood its ground and literally annihilated several of the elite South Vietnamese military units sent against it.
The significant impact of this bloody defeat on the troops of the Vietnamese armed forces was barely noted at the time. But in the months that followed both the American and the South Vietnamese military would come to realize that this action was the first sign of a changing Indochina conflict; the enemy had taken head on the South Vietnamese government's finest troops and had bested them, and for the first time he had remained on the battlefield to hold the ground that he had taken.
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