18th Engineer Brigade (United States) - History - Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The 18th Engineer Brigade was reactivated on 16 July 1965 at Fort Bragg, N.C. and prepared for deployment to Vietnam. The 18th Engineer Brigade entered Vietnam in September 1965 with the responsibility for overseeing all Army Engineering operations in Vietnam until the establishment of the U.S. Army Engineer Command, Vietnam, in late 1966.

Under the command of Colonel C. Craig Cannon, the Brigade prepared for deployment to Vietnam. The Advance Party of the 18th Engineer Brigade arrived at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Air Base on 3 September 1965. Three days later, Brigadier General Robert R. Ploger assumed command of the Brigade. Within two weeks, the Brigade Headquarters at Tan Son Nhut was fully operational. It had been preceded by the 35th Engineer Group, which built Cam Ranh Bay on a peninsula of sand and in a hostile environment. The brigade assumed responsibility for I Corps and II Corps in the northern part of South Vietnam. The 937th Engineer Group (Combat) at Qui Nhon was assigned to the Brigade in June 1966.

Its initial activities centered around rapid development of the port facilities, ammunition dumps, base camps and airfields necessary to support the build-up of US combat forces rapidly deploying to Vietnam. During its initial construction phases it also provided support for combat search and destroy missions and defensive operations with the 101st Airborne Division near Ninh Hoa and the 4th Infantry Division at Pleiku.

An ammunition storage area was completed at Cam Ranh Bay on 18 January 1969. It took two years for the Brigade to build this complex, which covered over 191,700 square feet (17,810 m2). English Airfield was completed on 21 March 1969 near Qui Nhon. The runway of this field was 3,600 feet (1,100 m) long, 60 feet (18 m) wide, and was complete with a 150—foot by 150—foot turn around area.

On 3 May 1969, Brigadier General John W. Morris assumed command of the Brigade. Soon afterwards, Brigade engineers finished construction of a cold storage warehouse at the Qui Nhon Support Command, the first of its kind in Vietnam. Construction of the Tandem Switch Building at Vung Chau Mountain was also completed about this time. This 4,000-square-foot (370 m2) building housed almost US$1 million dollars of communications equipment. During the summer months of 1969, Brigade engineers completed the 200,000-barrel (32,000 m3) capacity Air Force tank farm at Cam Ranh Bay, after laying over 12,000 feet (3,700 m) of pipe to complete the project.

The beginning of 1970 saw the initiation of the 18th Engineers Brigade’s Operation Last Chance, a program of command emphasis and organization for motivation and success of that year's engineer operations. The goals of the program were to maintain primary missions of the combat support as well as insure the completion of the many projects planned for the 1970 construction operations.

February 1970 saw the completion of a project begun in the summer of the previous year at Qui Nhon that replaced a temporary floating steel dock with a more permanent structure which could accommodate six ammo barges at once. The port of Qui Nhon became one of the few supply points where ammunition for the First and Second Military Regions could be handled in bulk quantities simultaneously. Prior to the completion of this new facility, the handling of ammunition there had to take place in other areas, near public housing and fuel storage depots.

On 3 May 1970, Brigadier General Henry C. Schrader assumed command of the 18th Engineer Brigade. Shortly after this, the most difficult stretch of the roadway that the Brigade had ever undertaken—the 27-kilometer stretch of National Highway QL-11 South in the central highlands region known as Tây Nguyên, commonly referred to as the "Good View Pass", was completed. This road had been carved out from a dangerous mountain pass to a national road in less than one year.

The Lines of Communication Program, which represents the most significant contribution that the 18th Engineer Brigade had made to the economic growth of Vietnam, consisted of about 1,500 kilometers of road upgrade from 1967 to 1972. After a slow start in the beginning of this work, the Brigade finished some 560 kilometers of highway reconstruction, and improvement in 1970 and another 450 kilometers were scheduled for completion in 1971 by Brigade units.

In conjunction with the Brigade efforts on the Lines of Communication Program, 18th Brigade engineers was involved in a program of affiliation with ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) engineers. In addition to continuous training programs which the Brigade established to train ARVN equipment operators, the engineers of the 18th provided technical assistance and logistical support to several projects undertaken by the Vietnamese Army, most notably in the construction of the 3,600-foot (1,100 m) bridge at Tuy Hoa. Upon its completion and opening on 13 February 1971, this bridge became the longest overpass of its type ever constructed in the Republic of Vietnam. It would be one of 77 such bridges that the Brigade would construct in the country.

In support of the XXIV Corps, the 18th Brigade mounted what was described as the "most ambitious engineering effort in Vietnam" at the end of January 1971. The Brigade engineers pushed a roadway across the rugged terrain of the northern Quang Tri Province to the Laotian border and constructed a 3,200-foot (980 m) by 60-foot (18 m) airfield in little more than a month at Khe Sanh. This construction effort was part of Operation Dewey Canyon II.

On 20 September 1971 the Brigade was inactivated. Over the six years that it served in Vietnam, the 18th Engineer Brigade was involved in 14 of 17 campaigns, earning four Meritorious Unit Commendations.