Operation Union
Part of the Vietnam War
Operation Union was a search and destroy mission in the Que Son Valley carried out by the 1st Marine Regiment from 21 April to 16 May 1967. The object of the operation was to engage the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) 2nd Division.
Background
The Quế Sơn Valley is located along the border of Quảng Nam and Quảng Tín Provinces. During the Vietnam War it lay in the southern part of South Vietnam's I Corps. Populous and rice-rich, the valley was viewed as one of the keys to controlling South Vietnam's five northern provinces by the communists and by early 1967 at least two regiments of the PAVN 2nd Division had been infiltrated into the area.
The 5th Marine Regiment minus its 2nd Battalion, an experienced force that had fought in Vietnam since their arrival in mid-1966, was assigned to the valley in 1967 to support the outnumbered Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces in the area, the 6th ARVN Regiment and the 1st Ranger Group.
Since mid-January 1967 Company F, a reinforced company of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, had manned an outpost atop Nui Loc Son (Loc Son Mountain), which dominated the southern Que Son Valley. Although the PAVN and Vietcong (VC) forces operating in the valley did not initially take much notice of the Marines, on April 15, 1967, the Company F commander advised Colonel Emil Radics, the commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, that PAVN/VC units appeared to be preparing for an all-out assault on the outpost.
Radics developed a plan for a multi-battalion assault and sweep aimed at clearing PAVN units from the vicinity of the mountain. The plan was approved as Operation Union by Major General Herman Nickerson Jr., the commanding general of the 1st Marine Division on April 20 and was put into action the following morning.
“Operation Union” enters the record as part of the Vietnam War. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Operation, Union and Part can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7097678. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Operation Union” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.