My Air Force Combat Security unit was dispatched to Binh Thuy on March 7, 1969, to fortify a Vietnamese controlled airbase a few miles northwest of Can Tho City along the Bassac River. This was in Phong Dinh Province, about 100 miles southwest of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. I was the First Lieutenant in charge of this unit of nearly forty men. Tet 1969, though far less intense than the devastating Tet offensive of 1968, had been launched by the Viet Cong (VC) less than two weeks earlier, on February 23. Everybody was on edge. Two days later, on February 25, then Lieutenant and now ex-U.S.