Rising nearly 1500 feet above the jungles below, Hill 488 just 25 miles west of Chu Lai was the perfect place for a Marine Corps recon team but for one minor factor....it was deep in enemy controlled territory, surrounded by massive enemy buildups. Like David facing Goliath, the 16 Marines and 2 Navy Corpsmen alone on Hill 488 the night of June 15, 1966 were pitifully small in the face of overwhelming odds, reduced to fighting with rocks. Fortunately they had their own "David", one named:
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In June 1966, the 1st Marine Division became concerned with the presence of NVA units in the Que Son Valley of Vietnam. To assess the strength and disposition of these enemy forces, the 1st Marine Division Commander ordered an extensive reconnaissance campaign. One of these units was an 18-man reconnaissance team, lead by Staff Sergeant Jimmie Howard. They Landed on June 13, 1966 on the Nui Vu hill mass that dominates the terrain approximately 10 miles west of Tam Ky.
After their insertion on June 13th, Howard’s men found the 1,500-foot hill an excellent observation post. For the next two days, they were able to call artillery fire missions on enemy movements in their area. Unfortunately by June 15, 1966, the enemy had become wise to the patrol’s presence on Hill 488. On the night of June 15, an ARVN Special Forces Camp reported an enemy battalion moving toward the Marine’s position at Nui Vu. SSgt Howard got his team leaders together and looked for the best spot on the hill to defend. They found a spot 5 or 6 feet from the top of the hill where they could set up a 360 perimeter in the protection of boulders and bomb craters. The group of 16 Marines and 2 Navy Corpsman then waited in the darkness for the enemy. About 9:15 pm, the NVA attacked. Shrill whistle blasts and the clacking of bamboo sticks broke the calm of the night signaling the assault. Enemy soldiers probed the position trying to draw the Marine’s fire. SSgt Howard instructed his men to hold their fire until they had a clear target. He told them “We can’t afford to shoot at shadows”. Each man had a rifle and four fragmentation grenades. In addition, two of the men had grenade launchers. At 10 p.m., the NVA launched the first assault in force. They blasted away with automatic weapons, grenades, and 60-millimeter mortars. Jimmie Howard estimated they were only 30 meters away and approaching from all sides. Next, “They opened up with four .50 caliber machine guns, one on each side of the hill”, as Howard, described it. Nevertheless, the Marine held, and beat back the assault. Twenty to twenty-five minutes later, the Communists again rushed the Marine position. Huey helicopters were now hovering overhead, but couldn’t support the Marines because the pilots couldn’t tell who was who on the ground. All the pilots could see were muzzle flashes and explosions. The helicopters were followed by jet fighters, but the fighter pilots couldn’t tell the enemy from the friendlies. Finally a plane arrived equipped with flares. SSgt Howard got on the radio and told the crew of the flare ship where to drop the flares. With the night illuminated by flares, the Huey pilots could see the Marine position as well as the waves of enemy assaulting that position. Jimmie Howard describes that action that followed: “The choppers came in, strafing with their machine guns and rockets, and guiding the jets in. I told ‘em to drop those bombs as close to us as they could. They put ‘em right in our back pockets.” The bombs landed so close that the Marines could feel heat from their explosions. Despite the fact the aircraft fired 216 rockets, 23,000 M-60 machine gun rounds, 1,750 20-mm rounds, and dropped forty-four 250-pound bombs, the enemy attacks continued. Bullets and grenade shrapnel ricocheted off the boulder spewing rock fragments among the defenders. “We took a lot of wounds from the ricochets,” Howard said. The NVA tried to demoralize the defenders on the hill, shouting in plain English: “Marines you die in an hour.” Howard ordered his Marines to respond by laughing at the NVA. As the battle continued, the Marines ran out of grenades. SSgt Howard told them: “Just throw rocks.” The attackers couldn’t be sure the thump they heard as a rock hit the ground, came from a rock or a grenade. When the enemy soldiers moved to avoid the potential explosion of a grenade, the Marines could target them and make their shots count. One of Howard’s men was knocked out by concussion from a grenade and the Viet Cong started to carry the Marine off; but as SSgt Howard describes: “He came to and killed two of them with his combat knife before they killed him. When we found him in the morning, the two dead VC were lying next to him. My man still had his knife in his hand.” Another example of the tenaciousness of the defenders was the Marine who, after suffering wounds from mortar fragments and a grenade that bounced off his head and exploded, continued firing his rifle until he ran out of ammunition. Then there was the Navy corpsman, wounded several times himself, who continued treating the wounded and fired back at the enemy as the battled ensued. By morning, Howard had only seven men left who could still trigger a rifle. They gathered ammunition from the more seriously wounded and the dead, and redistributed it among themselves. At 5:25 am, to buck-up his men’s spirits, Jimmie Howard announced: “OK, you people reveille goes in 35 minutes.” Then he followed it up with “Reveille, Reveille” at 6am. At sunrise a Marine reactionary company was flown to Hill 488 to relieve the embattled defenders. It took the reaction force until noon to reach Howard’s perimeter on Hill 488. Five of the defenders were dead and a sixth died en route to the base camp at Chu Lai. By the time the rescue force reached SSgt Howard and his men, among the 12 survivors there remained only eight rounds of ammunition. Surrounding the hill lay 43 Viet Cong bodies; but intelligence estimated the total enemy casualties could be much higher.
Jimmie Howard suffered greatly from the attack. When operated on at Chu Lai, they removed a massive amount of shrapnel and they deep-sowed a 50-caliber bullet because of the difficulty to remove from such a delicate location. For his action on Hill 488, Gunny Howard was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. President Johnson presented the medal to him in Washington, D.C., with the Gunny’s wife and six children looking on. Also present at the ceremony were the other Marines, who survived that night on Hill 488. As a further honor, the Navy named a destroyer the USS Howard. Jimmie Howard, however, was never aware of this since the Navy made the decision approximately 5 years after his death in 1993.
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