Photo courtesy of Maisey family collection The three Maiseys, left to right: Lt. Terry Maisey, Lt. Reginald V. Maisey Jr. and Chief Warrant Officer 4 Reginald V. Maisey Sr., circa mid-1960s. This photo was enlarged and is on display at the Air Force Security Forces Museum at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas.

A few concerned individuals, including the son of one Captain Maisey's former troops, weren't content to let this warrior's memory fade into obscurity. Thanks to their efforts, a rededication ceremony was held in the Maisey Building's Arnold Auditorium Jan. 31 at 10 a.m. – exactly 40 years to the day since the Sonoma, Calif., native gave his life in the defense of Bien Hoa and the freedom of the South Vietnamese people, earning the Air Force Cross and Purple Heart posthumously, as well as the Bronze Star for his earlier distinguished service in Vietnam. Soon, those who visit and work in the Maisey Building will find it much easier to learn the story of its namesake, and why the memory of his heroic actions at Bien Hoa merits their consideration.

The Tet Offensive was the largest campaign yet launched by either side in the war, a massive, three-phase operation carried out between Jan. 30 and Sept. 30, 1968 by 84,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces against more 20 air bases and 100 towns and cities in the South. Tet's ultimate aim was to win the war in a single, massive blow by demoralizing the population of the Republic of Vietnam and weaken the resolve of their American allies by igniting the flames of the growing peace movement in the United States. Though Tet was a severe military setback for the North, which suffered 45,000 dead compared to a few thousand U.S. and South Vietnamese casualties, it was the turning point in American popular support for the war.

Standing between the communists and one of their major objectives, the South's capital of Saigon, were two large U.S. air bases, Bien Hoa and Tan Son Nhut. The former was the busiest air facility in the world at the time, with more takeoffs and landings per day than Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Home to many hundreds of advanced aircraft of the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing and the 145th Combat Aviation Battalion, whose UH-1 “Huey“ and AH-1 “Cobra“ helicopters played lifesaving roles in the clash that came to be known as the Battle of Bunker Hill 10, Bien Hoa was not garrisoned by U.S. Army troops. The ground defense of the base was left to 300 members of the 3rd Security Forces Police Squadron, supplemented by an additional 100 augmentees, with no crew-served weapons or artillery, at a time when “the Air Force was completely unprepared for any ground combat,“ according to retired Lt. Col. Kent Miller, then commanding officer of 3rd SPS at Bien Hoa.

'They didn't come any better, any braver, or any more committed to the task'

Although a 36-hour cease-fire had been negotiated in observance of the Tet lunar new year, wary U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had been placed on high alert since noon of Jan. 30 in expectation of a surprise attack. In a phone interview from his home in The Woodlands, Texas, Colonel Miller, 79, said he and Captain Maisey, his operations officer and second in command, had reviewed the defense plan for Bien Hoa and its 10-mile perimeter, largely developed by the captain.

When the attack on Bien Hoa began, “I knew Captain Maisey would have everything under control,“ Colonel Miller recalled. “At 3 a.m. on the morning of the 31st, 45 122 mm, 6-foot rockets were fired on the base, in addition to an untold number of mortar rounds and recoilless rifle rounds. Obviously it was a cover for a ground attack. And when the ground fire started. I turned to Reggie and said, 'How about going out to Bunker Hill 10 and letting us know what's going on,' because at that point we didn't know if there was two or 2,000 (enemy troops). One of the canine handlers who was on the perimeter (Airman 1st Class Edward G. Muse) radioed in that his dog had a big-time alert, he was instructed to fire a flare, and when the flare went off, he said something like, 'My God, they're everywhere.' The enemy had a machine gun set up at the end of the runway, so we couldn't get any of our aircraft off. But fortunately there was an Army helicopter battalion stationed on the base and Captain Maisey had made arrangements with them, and he went out to Bunker Hill 10 and took over.“

Bunker Hill 10, a reinforced concrete bunker built by the French 20 years previously, was situated near the east end of the base's main runway. The bunker was the only obstacle between the enemy and hundreds of million dollars' worth of F-100 “Super Sabres“ and other U.S. aircraft, but at the outset of the attack it was manned by only two security policemen, sergeants Neal Tuggle and Marshall Gott, and Airman 1st Class Neil Behnke, an augmentee. Of several published accounts chronicling the events surrounding the defense of Bunker Hill 10, Air Force Chaplain (Capt.) Donald J. Sheehan's report, as presented on the Vietnam Security Police Association's Web site, may have best captured Captain Maisey's remarkable acts of valor:

When the enemy attack started, Captain Maisey was at the western end of the base. He immediately sped in his jeep to the Central Security Command Post. Realizing how critical holding Bunker Hill 10 was, Captain Maisey volunteered to go there to direct the defense of that area. Shortly thereafter, he arrived at the bunker and took charge of the small band of men from the 3rd SPS in the vicinity of Bunker Hill 10.

The communists attacked the bunker with a vengeance. They knew it was the key to overrunning the east end of the field and the maintenance hangers, and other vital areas of the Air Base. The enemy hit Bunker Hill 10 with everything they had. About 12 direct rocket hits at point-blank range were recorded by the enemy. On top of the bunker, one rocket put Sergeant Tuggle's machine gun out of action. Sergeant Tuggle went below, grabbed another weapon, and continued to fight from within the bunker. Sgt. Gott remained on top of the bunker, and continued to fire his M-16 at the enemy enveloping the bunker. Captain Maisey seemed to be everywhere. To direct and concentrate the fire power of the 30 or so Security Policemen in the general area on the enemy that was within 200 feet of the bunker, he constantly exposed himself to danger. To communicate by radio with the Security Command Post, Captain Maisey had to leave the relative security of the bunker and expose himself to enemy fire. He did this throughout the battle. Above the noise of the battle, he yelled orders and directions to the men around him. His voice instilled confidence and bolstered the moral of the beleaguered defenders of the bunker.

At a time when bravery was common, Captain Maisey's bravery under fire was uncommon and contagious. Though the small band of men did not know it, their position at times was surrounded by VC. Captain Maisey and the other men continued firing. They kept the enemy pinned down not too far from their original point of penetration. No one knows how many enemy were killed by the men defending Bunker Hill 10. After the battle, over 60 dead VC were found nearby.

“They didn't come any better, any braver or any more committed to the task,“ said Colonel Miller, who knew Captain Maisey for about six months. “He was out on the perimeter probably five or six nights a week from 10 o'clock to 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. ... He was very brave about the whole thing.“ Chaplain Sheehan, who accompanied the captain on his night rounds a few weeks before the battle, echoed those remarks. The captain had asked the chaplain if he would come along with him one night, telling him, “The men are a bit jumpy. They'll appreciate seeing a chaplain.“ But after his tour with the captain, “The men were much more reassured by seeing Captain Maisey than by seeing an unarmed chaplain,“ Chaplain Sheehan wrote. “I now know why.“

Staff Sgt. William “Pete“ Piazza: Silver Star recipient

As the chaplain observed, Captain Maisey's bravery was “uncommon and contagious,“ and other figures were also instrumental in the victory, perhaps none more than Staff Sgt. William “Pete“ Piazza, who earned a Silver Star for his gallantry under fire. In a phone interview from Oklahoma City, Piazza, 64, a retired senior master sergeant and secretary of the Oklahoma Heartland Chapter of the Air Force Security Police Association, recalled that night with clarity, providing details that shed more light on Captain Maisey's final moments.

As the noncommissioned officer in charge of four resupply teams, Sergeant Piazza was on the perimeter road in his truck when the first rocket attack began at 3 a.m. When it momentarily ceased after about 10 minutes, he heard on his radio that Def 6, a resupply team sent to Bunker Hill 10, was pinned down by sniper fire at the MP checkpoint and unable to advance. Speeding to the checkpoint, Sergeant Piazza stopped to pick up Sgt. James Lee, the Def 6 leader, left his three augmentees with an Airman 1st Class Simmons, took a case of flares from Lee's truck and headed for Bunker Hill 10.

“As we started down the road a K-9 unit stopped us and told us that Capt. Maisey did not want anymore vehicles up at B. H. 10, so Sgt. Lee and I started toward B. H. 10 on foot with a case of flares and our M-16s,“ Sergeant Piazza wrote in his after-action statement a few days later. “After we got there I informed Capt. Maisey that we had a truck full of ammo and other equipment, this was about 0323 hours. About three or four minutes later, I started back toward the truck which was about 200 yards behind B. H. 10 and drove it to a point just behind B. H. 10.“

Sergeant Piazza's report was a mundane portrayal of the heroism that earned him the nation's third highest award for valor. His inherent modesty and professionalism must have prevented him from saying more than he felt necessary about the chaos and death surrounding him and the small band of 3rd SPS defenders at Bunker Hill 10.

In a story headlined, “Bien Hoa Defense Likened to Famed Fight at Alamo“ in the March 30, 1968, edition of the New York Daily News, Capt. Marty E. Strones, who also earned a Silver Star for his heroics at Bien Hoa, said, “The bunker would have started running out of ammunition, but one of our ammunition drivers, S.Sgt. William Piazza ... heard they were in trouble and drove through enemy positions to supply the beleaguered bunker. This made it possible for them to hold out.“ Captain Stones' depiction of Sgt. Piazza's bravery may have been suitable for the U.S. Office of Information release that found its way into the New York Daily News, but it would be Chaplain Sheehan, in his VPSA article cited earlier, who brought Sergeant Piazza's bare-bones version of events to life, and captured the determination of Sergeants Piazza and Lee as they ran a deadly gauntlet to complete their mission and resupply Bunker Hill 10.

“The bravery of the men in Bunker Hill 10 was matched by the incredible valor of other men of the 3rd SPS,“ Chaplain Sheehan wrote. “Sergeants William Piazza and James Lee did the impossible. Through a withering field of enemy fire, they drove a truck ... across what would seem an impassable field--a field alive with VC. The men dauntlessly drove right up to the besieged Bunker Hill 10, and under constant enemy fire resupplied the defenders of the bunker with enough ammunition to enable them to continue the fight. When one knows the terrain these men passed through, and remembers the confusion at the time, and the danger of their cargo, he stands in awe at their courageous feat. It seems impossible. But brave men made the impossible possible.“

Piazza, looking back on his perilous run through the swarming VC, joked about his close brush with death, noting that he always kept his vehicles well stocked and battle-ready. “All my resupply teams' trucks were loaded with ammo for the M-60s, M-16s, 40 mm, slap flares and hand grenades,“ he wrote in an e-mail. “If we ever got hit we would be with the angels real soon.“

After arriving safely at his destination with the critical cache of ammunition, Sergeant Piazza's problems had just begun. “At 0330 hours, the VC and NVA hit Bunker Hill 10 with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) 2 and 7 plus small arms fire from the east and south and some from the north,“ he wrote in his report. “As I began to fire, a Lieutenant from the Army that was with Capt. Maisey said he did not know how to fire a 40 mm (grenade launcher), so I gave him my M-16 and started to fire the 40 mm at the enemy. For a while I was the only man outside the bunker and could see the enemy all around us.“ In a phone interview, Mr. Piazza compared that exchange to a scene from the western classic “High Noon,“ and said his “final, 10th round hit Charlie (the enemy), and we heard a large explosion. I looked out and I could see three bodies flying up in the air, so I must have hit the ammo that was there and blew it up with that last round.“

As the battle raged through the dead of night, Huey and Cobra helicopters, as well as a C-47 “Spooky“ gunship from “somewhere off base,“ according to Colonel Miller, illuminated the landscape with flares and sprayed covering fire from above. “You need to give some credit to the145th Combat Aviation Battalion, because they came and provided our air cover,“ he said. “They were tremendous. There were three or four Hueys and Cobras. They were firing maybe 30 yards outside the bunker, and at times some of our troops had to run inside the bunker. They did a great job.“ Later, when the helicopters began running out of flares, Sergeant Piazza left the bunker and “started popping the rest of the hand-flares that we had and also kept on talking on the radio to CSC (central security control), plus trying to direct the fire power around Bunker Hill 1.“

Though the bunker was besieged from nearly all directions, one area in particular concerned Sergeant Piazza, who took command after realizing Captain Maisey had been killed. On their left flank lay a meadow of the thick elephant grass indigenous to Southeast Asia, offering excellent cover their enemy tried to exploit. “It's very thick, very high and you can hardly see anything,“ Piazza recalled. “But you can move through it very quietly. That's where Charlie was moving through.

“Our guys got most of them, the guys behind us,“ he continued. “Captain Stones had set up a defensive line along the area from Bunker Hill 9 to the runway, so that anybody that tried to come across the parking ramp from the run-up pad toward the aircraft that were parked there, they would have been shot because there's no cover or protection. They got most of them in a little drop-off area behind it, and that's where most of the bodies were found except for those we got out of the elephant grass area.“

Two different enemy body-count totals have been published--139 and 153, with 25 taken prisoner--but other than Captain Maisey, Airman Muse, the K-9 dog handler who was caught out in the open in the first moments of the assault, was the sole U.S. fatality. Fourteen Americans were injured in the Battle of Bunker Hill 10.

(Read the second part of this article in next week’s Bolling Aviator.)