Phu Yen province stretches between the South China Sea and the Annamite Mountains — a coastal strip that narrows in places to a few kilometers before the hills take over. The 95th Regiment's traditional base area, the Hub, was a labyrinth of ridges, caves, and base camps some forty kilometers northwest of the provincial capital at Tuy Hoa. American forces had swept through the same area in November 1966 during Operation Geronimo, disrupting the regiment temporarily. By the following summer, the 95th had rested, refitted, and was moving again. Lieutenant General Chae Myung Shin, commander of South Korean forces in Vietnam, spent crucial days weighing his options. He ultimately held roughly sixty percent of his men on the coastal plains to maintain security for the population while committing the remainder to an inland thrust.

The operation began on 9 July 1967. Four battalions of the Capital Division deployed south of Dong Tre and drove southeast; three battalions of the 9th Division staged at Cung Son and pushed northeast. Moving no more than one or two kilometers each day, the Korean battalions compressed the enemy methodically rather than racing ahead and losing contact. B-52 Arclight strikes blanket-bombed the target area as the ground troops moved. Two South Vietnamese Army battalions — from the 47th Regiment, 22nd Division — blocked escape routes to the east along the populated coastal fringe, sealing the pocket. The two-pronged approach was deliberate and attritional: the Koreans had learned in their own war, only fourteen years earlier, what happened when infantry outran its logistics in difficult terrain.

In the first days the Koreans met only scattered resistance. Then the pressure mounted. By 25 July, the operation had claimed over 500 North Vietnamese soldiers dead, most killed not by direct infantry fire but by the heavy artillery and aerial bombardment that preceded every advance. Enemy companies were trapped in small base camps and cave complexes, unable to mass for a breakout. The seven battalions then swept east through the Hub, meeting strong resistance in the first phase before the opposition collapsed almost entirely over the two weeks that followed. The operation officially ended with the final elimination of bypassed pockets. South Korea's official count stood at 638 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters killed, with 98 crew-served weapons and 359 individual weapons recovered — a claimed kill ratio of 24 to 1.

Operations of this kind generated competing narratives almost immediately. South Korea declared a major success, and by its own accounting the outcome was decisive: seven battalions sustained minimal losses while inflicting severe casualties on a division-strength force. American military assessors, reviewing significant events in August 1967, largely concurred. What the tallies could not capture were the people who lived in Phu Yen when the bombs fell — the Vietnamese farmers and fishing families whose homes and fields occupied the same landscape as the Hub's base camps. War histories are built from weapons counts and kill ratios; the quieter damage to the civilians caught in the operation's footprint is harder to find in any official record. The 95th Regiment, for its part, survived and fought on.

South Korea deployed more than 300,000 soldiers to Vietnam between 1964 and 1973 — the largest allied contingent after the United States. Their involvement remains largely unexamined in Western histories of the conflict, and within Korea itself it carries complicated weight: a source of military pride for some, a source of moral reckoning for others. Operation Hong Kil Dong was the largest single South Korean operation of the war, its scale a measure of how fully the Republic of Korea had committed to an American alliance that defined East Asian security for a generation. The folk hero whose name the operation carried was a trickster who changed forms, who slipped through every trap. The soldiers who fought here did not have that luxury.