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September of that same year.
One of the more noteworthy battles involving the Seabees actually took place a few years before the Tet Offensive,
in 1965, where the only Seabee to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor had served.
Construction Mechanic 3rd Class Marvin G. Shields was part of a nine-member Seabee team called Seabee Team 1104. They were stationed with 11 U.S. Army Special Forces team members, along with other U.S. military personnel and approximately 400 members of the South Vietnamese defense force at a defense camp they were upgrading near the village of Dong Xoai in South Vietnam.
On the night of June 9, 1965, a contingent of about 2,000 men from the Viet Cong 9th Division attacked their camp, hitting the American and South Vietnamese forces with heavy mortar, machine gun and small arms fire that killed and wounded many personnel. During the fighting, Viet Cong forces overran the north side of the camp, and the defending personnel withdrew to the District Headquarters area in the southeast portion of the camp to barricade themselves in and defend their position. U.S. and South Vietnamese aircraft struck at the attacking Viet Cong to try and repel them and provide an opportunity for helicopters to air-evacuate the remaining personnel.
A Viet Cong machine gun nest outside the camp perimeter
posed a major threat to the personnel holed up inside the District Headquarters. Special Forces Second Lieutenant Charles Q. Williams, who had been wounded earlier in the battle, took Shields with him so they could get close enough to destroy the enemy machine gun nest. Shields had loaded a rocket launcher for the lieutenant, and Williams took aim and destroyed the machine gun nest when the two of them were finally close enough to fire.
Shields, who had been fighting and was wounded earlier during the attack, suffered a mortal wound while he and the lieutenant made their way back to the District Headquarters, and he died while being air-evacuated from the camp on June 10.
For his actions during the Battle of Dong Xoai, Shields was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and to this day he is the only Seabee to have received this distinction.
American military participation in the Vietnam War formally drew to a conclusion in 1973, but since then the Seabees have still been active in various parts of Southeast Asia, and in many other parts of the world, continuing to build and fight wherever the U.S. Navy and the Department of Defense needs them.
Information for this article was compiled from the Naval History and Heritage Command, U.S. Navy Seabee Museum website: www.history.navy.mil/ content/history/museums/seabee/explore.html.
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