In 1968, The Viet Cong Ambushed A 6-Man Navy SEAL Squad. It Was A Fatal Mistake.

3,000 nautical miles of rivers, canals, and streams. Nipa palm so thick it swallowed sound. Mangrove swamp where the mud at low tide reached a man’s chest and held him there. The Mekong Delta produced 75% of South Vietnam’s food and the Viet Cong owned it after dark. The Rung Sat Special Zone alone covered 400 square miles of swamp southeast of Saigon.

 Its name translated simply forest of assassins. Conventional forces couldn’t crack it. The Mobile Riverine Force ran armored sweeps with the 9th Infantry Division 2nd Brigade. Columns of men and machinery loud enough to hear a kilometer out. Operation Coronado 9, November 1967. The MRF killed 178 VC in one phase, but lost 26 Americans doing it with long stretches of zero contact between sweeps.

The Viet Cong chose when to fight and when to disappear into the canals. The SEALs had arrived a year earlier and the Delta was already teaching them the price of admission. 19th of August, 1966. A squad from Golf Platoon, SEAL Team 1, led by Lieutenant Junior Grade Tom Truxel, moved along a river in the Rung Sat hunting enemy sampans.

 Radar man second class Billy Wayne Maupin, 27 from Gilmer, Texas, walked point. The VC headlined both banks, a textbook kill zone waiting for someone to walk into it. Maupin saw it first. He dropped into the mud and opened fire alone, drawing every round in the ambush onto himself so the six men behind him could break contact.

They extracted. Machen did not. He became the first Navy SEAL killed in combat in Vietnam. His Silver Star citation reads like a blueprint for everything the SEALs would become in the Delta. One man absorbing the kill zone, so six could survive. His death proved two things. The Delta would kill SEALs. And the only advantage SEALs had was being smaller, quieter, and more violent per man than anything the Viet Cong expected to encounter.

The Navy’s answer was to make that advantage overwhelming. SEAL Teams 1 and 2 had stood up on the 1st of January, 1962, drawn from the underwater demolition teams. The first direct action combat deployment hit the Delta in February, 1966. SEAL Team 1, Nha Be Base, edge of the Rung Sat. One officer, six enlisted. Seven men.

But those seven men carried something no infantry squad on Earth could match. Four Stoner 63A belt-fed light machine guns. Eugene Stoner’s modular creation. 13 lb, designed to be carried like a rifle and fired like a crew-served weapon. 700 to 1,000 rounds per minute each. Two M60 general-purpose machine guns.

Grenade launchers. Ithaca 37 shotguns for the point man. A conventional infantry company of 150 men produced roughly the same volume of automatic weapons fire as two SEAL squads. 14 men total. The Viet who ambushed a SEAL patrol expecting a soft target were engaging the firepower equivalent of a force 10 times what they saw.

SEALs evaluated the Stoner across 1,345 combat missions and judged it significantly superior to the M60. A SEAL Team One commanding officer stated that his detachments actively developed firefight tactics around the weapon. The Stoner didn’t just arm them, it changed how they fought. And they didn’t look like any military unit the VC had ever seen.

Levi’s 501’s, coral boots, green and black face paint under boonie hats or tiger stripe tops. Veteran Roger Hayden put it plainly, “You could pick out a SEAL in a heartbeat.” The Viet Cong would come to know exactly what that face paint meant. They would call them the men with green faces and put bounties on their heads payable to anyone who could kill one.

That story is coming, but first the SEALs had to prove the concept worked. 18th of May, 1967. Iloilo Haun, Mekong Delta. Lieutenant Richard Marcinko led Second Platoon, SEAL Team Two, in an assault the Navy itself would later designate the most successful SEAL operation of the entire Vietnam War. Marcinko’s Platoon killed numerous Viet Cong and destroyed six sampans used to ferry weapons and rice up and down the Mekong.

The North Vietnamese Army responded by putting a bounty on Marcinko personally. It was never collected. By mid-1968, the SEALs weren’t just raiding. They were the sharp end of the Phoenix program’s targeting apparatus, the intelligence machine that turned the VC’s own network against them. Provincial reconnaissance units, CIA-led indigenous strike forces over 5,000 strong, were almost entirely advised by SEAL personnel in the Fourth Corps Delta.

Naval intelligence liaison officers fused signals and human intelligence. Chieu Hoi defectors and Kit Carson Scouts, former VC who had switched sides, walked point on SEAL patrols. This is what a SEAL night in 1968 looked like. Sliding off a PBR into chest-deep canal water in total darkness. Kit Carson Scout 10 m ahead, Stoner muzzle just above the waterline, moving toward a hooch where a Viet Cong infrastructure province-level cadre was sleeping.

During the Tet Offensive, a 60-man PRU led by a SEAL officer killed 20 VC and captured 23. And SEAL-developed intelligence prevented a planned attack on Ben Tre, headquarters of the entire River Patrol Force. Then came the night the title of this video describes. 10th of October, 1968. Deep inside the Mekong Delta.

Yeoman Third Class Gary G. Gallagher, a Navy SEAL serving as advisor to a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, led a penetration mission to capture Viet Cong infrastructure leadership. The patrol acquired prisoners early. Standard procedure, split the element to advance on both sides of a narrow canal, cutting off escape routes.

Then, one of the captured prisoners made a sound. A warning call into the darkness. The VC were waiting. Heavy automatic weapons fire hit the separated half of Gallagher’s patrol from a numerically superior force dug into the tree line across the canal. Muzzle flash lit the napalm in strobing orange. The trapped element was pinned against water with no cover.

 Exactly the kill zone the ambushers had prepared. They had made a miscalculation. They had committed a force package sized to destroy a conventional patrol. They had not anticipated what a handful of men carrying Stoners could put back into the tree line. The volume of return fire from Gallagher’s element was not what a squad produces.

It was what a company produces. The Viet Cong had triggered their ambush on a force that fought like something 10 times its size. Gallagher held the separated element together through what his Navy Cross citation calls exemplary leadership and selfless courage against that numerically superior enemy force. The patrol fought through the encirclement. They extracted.

The ambushers did not get the result they had planned for. Two years later, same Delta, same doctrine, same result. 9th of April, 1970. Long Phu District, Ba Xuyen Province on the Bassac River. Chief Gunners Mate Barry W. Enoch, a plank owner of SEAL Team One on his last Vietnam tour, led a combined SEAL and Vietnamese LDNN patrol out of Foxtrot Platoon’s base at Long Phu.

The target, VCI leadership. Enoch the PRC-77 radio and a grenade launcher. His platoon was a heavy Stoner platoon. Six armed VC stepped into the open. Enoch rushed forward. Three of them were dead in the first exchange. Then, the rest of the force they belonged to closed in. B-40 rockets, automatic weapons from multiple positions, a deliberate encirclement by a force that outnumbered the SEAL element significantly.

Enoch’s radio took a hit. He called Seawolf gunships and fixed-wing airstrikes on a damaged set, directing ordnance within 20 m of his own position, close enough to feel the concussion flatten the air in his lungs. He repositioned his men constantly, found the gap in the encirclement, and led the patrol to the river and out.

Navy Cross. And the quote that Barry Enoch left behind carries more weight than any citation. Many a SEAL owes his life to the Seawolves. They were always there for us. When we were down in the mud and darkness, the night illuminated with red and green tracers, the VC behind every shadow. Gallagher. Enoch. Two ambushes, two years apart, the same miscalculation by the Viet Cong each time.

The men with green faces, “Nhung Quy Ma Sat Cong”, had earned their name. The VC placed bounties. The NVA specifically targeted Marcinko after 1967. Vietnam’s post-war foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, admitted the Phoenix effort wiped out many of our bases in South Vietnam. By 1970, VC units in some Delta areas had learned to recognize SEAL insertion patterns, firing on helicopters within minutes of landing.

 The SEALs adapted, dummy inserts, multiple helicopter passes, night water approaches. But the system was not invincible. December 1970 near Truc Giang, a squad from X-ray Platoon, SEAL Team One, the last SEAL Platoon to deploy to Vietnam, walked into a kill zone. The squad leader and another SEAL were killed. Their Kit Carson scout had led them straight into the ambush.

Lieutenant Commander Michael Walsh, wounded in the follow-on attack, called X-ray the most hard luck SEAL Platoon to serve in Vietnam. And the Stoner that made them lethal was unforgiving in return. Its gas system choked on Delta mud unless maintained with obsessive precision. The weapon that got them home could also fail them.

48 Navy SEALs killed in the entire Vietnam War, roughly 2,000 enemy dead. In a war where conventional battalions swept the same ground month after month and couldn’t find the enemy at all, a force that never exceeded a few hundred men in country earned three Medals of Honor, five Navy Crosses, and five Presidential Unit Citations.

The script opened with a point man in the Rung Sat. Radar Man Second Class Billy Wayne Machin, 27, dropping into chest-deep mud and firing alone so six men could live. There is a desert training facility at Niland, California, where Navy SEALs still train today. They named it Camp Billy Machin. They remember.