Viet Cong guerrillas struck a US military advisory compound in Bien Hoa, South Vietnam, during a movie screening, killing Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand. They are traditionally listed as the first American military deaths of the Vietnam War, a conflict that would eventually claim over 58,000 American lives before ending in 1975.
The attackers struck at night, spraying gunfire into a mess hall where American advisers were watching a film, 'The Tattered Dress.' Buis and Ovnand died almost instantly; several other Americans were wounded. At the time, the United States maintained only a small Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam, training South Vietnamese forces rather than fighting directly — a limited role that would balloon over the following decade into a war involving over 500,000 American troops at its peak.
Both men's names are inscribed first, at the very top of the western wall, on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. — panel 1E, line 1 — a placement that makes their names a starting point for the more than 58,000 that follow chronologically across the black granite.
At the time, the killings drew little American public attention; Vietnam was a distant, minor commitment, and few Americans could have located Bien Hoa on a map. It would be another six years before the United States committed ground combat troops in large numbers, following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. Buis and Ovnand's deaths, largely unnoticed in 1959, are now remembered as history's grim preview.