‘GOING WEIGHTLESS IN A TANK’
Late in the afternoon of Jan. 14, 1967, three tanks with the Ace of Spades painted on their hulls rolled into the command post for the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, near Cau Ha, about 15 miles southeast of Da Nang. The tanks comprised the heavy section of 2nd Lt. Jim Ray’s 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Tank Battalion. Ray was in Hawaii for rest and recuperation, leaving three M48A3 Patton tanks under the command of acting section leader and tank C-25 commander Sgt. John Bartusevics, a 12-month veteran of in-country combat.
The heavy section escorted Marine infantrymen into the field, an area that was mostly tree lines, rice paddies and sand dunes. Normally, the tanks rotated back to the 3rd Battalion Command post every three to five days to undergo repairs, rearm and refuel before taking another group of grunts into the field. That work never took longer than an hour or two, but the tanks were late getting in with a group from Lima Company, so Bartusevics decided to remain overnight at the Charlie Company command post, attached to the battalion command post, and head out at dawn.
In the field “most of the guys slept in the tanks,” Bartusevics recalled. “It was very uncomfortable. You couldn’t stretch your legs out. You either slept sitting up or propped your legs up.” Cpl. Ed Boyette, the loader on tank C-23, commanded by Cpl. Gary Soncrant, remembered, “It was going to be our first evening off in quite a while in a hooch with a real bunk.”
Just after midnight on Jan. 15, when the tank crews at the command post were sleeping “we started hearing mortars and artillery and crap like that,” recalled Lance Cpl. Rick Lewis, the gunner on C-23. The explosions were quickly followed by the faint sounds of gunfire.
he firing and explosions were coming from a platoon patrol base known as the Desert Position or Sand Dunes, a few miles southwest of Marble Mountain, near the hamlet of
