Guarding the gateway: the 716th MP Battalion at Tan Son Nhut
The 716th Military Police Battalion holds a distinctive place in the operational history of the Vietnam War, having served as the principal law enforcement and security formation at Tan Son Nhut, the sprawling air base that anchored Allied air power just outside Saigon. Activated in the United States in 1966, the unit inherited responsibilities from earlier detachments and quickly grew into a multinational blend of military police, infantry support, and aviation assets. Its task was unglamorous but vital: keep the base running, the perimeter intact, and the personnel safe in a theatre where rocket attacks and sapper raids were an ever-present threat.
For Australian readers tracing the arc of Allied involvement, Tan Son Nhut occupies a familiar position in the geography of the war. RAAF transport aircraft operated from the base, Australian embassy staff transited through its gates, and Australian servicemen rotated in and out of Saigon via the same dusty corridors the 716th MP Battalion patrolled. The story of how a single battalion kept one of the busiest airfields in South Vietnam functioning, through the chaos of the 1968 Tet Offensive and beyond, reveals the unglamorous labour that held the whole American effort together.
Formation and arrival in Vietnam
The 716th Military Police Battalion was constituted on 23 December 1965 and formally activated on 1 October 1966 at Fort Gordon, Georgia, drawing personnel from across the United States. Unlike combat infantry battalions raised in expectation of contact with the enemy, MP battalions were organised for order, traffic management, and the protection of installations. The battalion's structure included a headquarters company, three line MP companies, and a support company equipped with military working dogs and the organic vehicles required for base security.
After several months of intensive training at Fort Gordon and additional preparation at Oakland Army Terminal in California, the battalion deployed to South Vietnam in December 1966. Its arrival at Tan Son Nhut marked a transition point for the base, which had previously relied on smaller MP detachments and the 3rd MP Company for routine policing. Within weeks the 716th had absorbed its predecessor's tasks and expanded into roles that the smaller unit could not have sustained: securing the perimeter, managing the base's enormous motor pool, controlling traffic on the main boulevards that cut through the facility, and escorting prisoners and detainees.
The commanding officer at activation was Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Kirkpatrick, a veteran military policeman whose experience shaped the battalion's early procedures. Under his leadership and those of his successors, including Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. Bralley during the critical Tet period, the unit refined standing operating procedures that emphasised rapid reaction, tight coordination with the Air Force's security forces, and aggressive patrolling of the outer fence lines. The battalion's motto, in keeping with the disciplined culture of military policing, stressed vigilance as a daily practice rather than a heroic act.
Anatomy of the Tan Son Nhut perimeter
Tan Son Nhut was not simply an airfield; it was a small city built around two parallel runways that handled tactical fighters, strategic bombers, transport aircraft, and helicopters. By the time the 716th MP Battalion arrived, the base also housed the headquarters complex of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the 7th Air Force, the Australian Mission, and numerous support activities. The perimeter stretched for roughly twelve kilometres, enclosing hangars, fuel farms, ammunition storage areas, barracks, dependents' quarters, and a sprawling transient billeting area.
Defending this perimeter required more than just sentries along the fence. The 716th operated in coordination with the 82nd Security Police Squadron of the US Air Force, which guarded the flight line and hardened facilities, and with elements of the Army's 25th Infantry Division, which provided reaction forces stationed on the base. The battalion's own contribution included fixed posts at the gates, observation posts along the most vulnerable stretches of wire, and mobile patrols using jeep-mounted teams and military working dog teams that swept the perimeter nightly. The Australian reader might recognise a familiar rhythm here: just as diggers at Nui Dat ran similar patterns around their fire support bases, the 716th treated the wire as a living entity that had to be walked, prodded, and watched.
Inside the wire, the battalion ran the base's traffic control centre, a busy dispatch operation that responded to roughly a hundred incidents on a typical day. Accidents, drunkenness, absent-without-leave cases, and the occasional serious crime all fell within the unit's remit. The traffic problem alone was daunting: at peak strength the base housed more than twenty thousand personnel and thousands of vehicles, including convoys moving to and from Saigon.
The table below summarises the principal units that shared responsibility for Tan Son Nhut's security during the 716th MP Battalion's tenure.
| Unit | Component | Primary role at Tan Son Nhut |
|---|---|---|
| 716th Military Police Battalion | US Army | Perimeter defence, law enforcement, traffic control, convoy escort, custodial operations |
| 82nd Security Police Squadron | US Air Force | Flight line security, hardened facility protection, weapons storage, internal base policing |
| Detachment, 377th MP Company | US Army | Detainee escort, confinement operations, area patrol |
| 25th Infantry Division (Reaction Force) | US Army | Quick-reaction force, perimeter reinforcement, ground defence during major attacks |
| RAAF Transport Element | Royal Australian Air Force | Strategic airlift, personnel transit, liaison with Australian Mission |
The Tet Offensive of 1968
When the Tet Offensive broke in the early hours of 31 January 1968, Tan Son Nhut became one of the most contested pieces of ground in the country. At approximately 0300, sappers from the VC C10 Battalion breached the northern perimeter near the golf course, while simultaneous rocket attacks slammed into the base from multiple directions. The 716th MP Battalion, already on a heightened alert posture, found itself fighting for its own installation.
Within minutes of the initial penetration, MP reaction teams engaged the sappers in a sharp firefight that lasted nearly three hours. Two members of the battalion, Sergeant Donald W. Johnson and Specialist 4th Class William F. Henson, were killed in this action, while several others were wounded. Reinforced by the 716th's own quick-reaction force and elements of the 25th Infantry Division's reaction companies, the breach was sealed and the sapper team was destroyed or captured. By dawn the perimeter was restored, though sporadic rocket impacts continued for several days.
The offensive reshaped how the battalion approached its work. Where the perimeter had previously been treated as a barrier to be observed, it now became an active fighting position manned by reinforced squads equipped with machine guns, Claymore mines, and night-vision devices. The lessons of 31 January lived on in the battalion's training for the remainder of its tour. For veterans in Australia, including those who marched for recognition in the moratorium rallies of 1970 and 1971, the Tet experience at Tan Son Nhut became another chapter in a war whose turning points were felt far beyond Indochina. The two servicemen who fell that morning are remembered on the battalion's memorials and in the recollections of those who served alongside them.
Military Police duties beyond the wire
The 716th MP Battalion's responsibilities extended well beyond perimeter defence. Its companies routinely dispatched patrols into the surrounding districts of Gia Dinh Province, working alongside the Vietnamese National Police on investigations into black-market activity, currency fraud, and crimes involving American personnel. The battalion's criminal investigation detachment handled serious cases, and its custodial platoon operated a short-term confinement facility that processed soldiers awaiting trial or transfer to Long Binh's stockade.
Convoy security was another major task. The roads between Tan Son Nhut and central Saigon, including the congested stretch known as Phan Thanh Gian, were regularly traversed by American convoys carrying supplies, personnel, and detainees. The 716th provided escort elements that combined with line units from the 25th Infantry Division, and the battalion's training cycle included convoy drills rehearsing reactions to ambushes and improvised explosive devices. Australian service personnel rotating through the RAAF transport fleet would have ridden these roads and seen the MPs in action more than once.
Less visible but equally important were the battalion's ceremonial and welfare functions. The 716th provided honour guards for visiting dignitaries, including senior Australian officers passing through Saigon, and managed the base's reception and replacement detachment, which welcomed newly arrived personnel and processed outgoers. These duties required a different skillset from combat policing, but the battalion's leadership expected every soldier to perform them with the same precision given to a perimeter sweep. The unit's standing orders made clear that routine and ceremony were themselves forms of discipline that held the larger mission together.
Australian connections and the Tan Son Nhut corridor
Although the 1st Australian Task Force fought in Phuoc Tuy Province far from Saigon, Australian personnel regularly moved through Tan Son Nhut. RAAF Caribou and Hercules aircraft operated from the base during much of the war, ferrying supplies and personnel between Australia and South Vietnam. Australian liaison officers stationed in Saigon visited the base weekly, and Australian embassy staff relied on the airport's facilities for official travel. Members of the Australian Army's logistics elements also passed through on rest-and-recreation journeys to Vung Tau and back.
This traffic meant the 716th MP Battalion interacted with Australians more often than official unit histories might suggest. Australian soldiers on leave from Nui Dat, in particular, used Tan Son Nhut as a transit point, and the battalion's gate guards and reception detachment became familiar faces. In the more relaxed corners of Australian veteran culture, where blokes swap stories over a cold one at the local RSL, the names of long-vanished MPs who checked their paperwork at Tan Son Nhut still come up occasionally. The base also hosted a small Australian contingent at various times, and members of the Australian Federal Police later trained alongside their American counterparts in post-war reconstruction efforts.
For Australians reading this material in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, or Hobart, the war remains a thread that connects generations of families. Some three thousand Australians who served in Vietnam never returned home to the suburbs and towns they left behind, and many more carried wounds both visible and hidden. The work of the 716th MP Battalion, far from the main Australian operational areas, nonetheless intersected with Australian service in ways both mundane and memorable, and that shared infrastructure forms part of the wider story of the Australian experience in Vietnam.
Stand down, legacy and commemoration
The 716th Military Police Battalion continued its mission at Tan Son Nhut until early 1972, when the drawdown of American forces prompted its inactivation on 23 March 1972. Personnel were reassigned to other units or returned to civilian life, and the battalion's colours were eventually returned to the United States. The base itself was handed over to the Vietnamese military in 1973, and its runways continued in use under the renamed Tan Son Nhut Air Base of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force until the fall of Saigon in 1975.
The battalion's legacy lives on through its veterans' associations, reunions, and the modest memorials that mark its service at Tan Son Nhut and elsewhere. In the United States, the 716th MP Battalion Association keeps records and stories alive, including accounts of the Tet fighting that remain primary sources for historians of the base defence. In Australia, where veterans of all ranks gathered in Sydney in 1987 for the welcome-home parade and continue to mark the anniversary of the fall of Saigon each April, the work of the 716th is remembered as part of the broader effort that supported Australian operations and protected shared infrastructure.
For an Australian audience today, the 716th's story offers a window into the unglamorous machinery that made modern warfare function. MPs rarely appear in the iconic photographs of the war, yet their patrols, paperwork, and perimeter sweeps kept the great air base of Tan Son Nhut alive through the most dangerous hours of 1968 and the slow grind of the years that followed. Their labour was the kind that holds an entire war effort together, and it deserves to be remembered with the same respect given to those who carried rifles in the jungle.
